Sophie Medlin in Popular Science:

On her Goop website, Gwyneth Paltrow claimed that charcoal lemonade was one of the “best juice cleansers”. That was in 2014. Today, charcoal products—from croissants to capsules—are everywhere. Even high street coffee chains have taken to selling charcoal “shots”.

Some vendors of these products claim that activated charcoal can boost your energy, brighten your skin and reduce wind and bloating. The main claim, though, is that these products can detoxify your body.

It’s easy to see where the claim that activated charcoal can detoxify the body comes from: it is used in emergency medicine to reduce the toxic load when someone has consumed poison or overdosed on medication. Charcoal binds to poison in the gastrointestinal tract and stops it from being absorbed into the bloodstream. The toxins are then passed out of the body in the stool.

However, this detoxifying action is another case of the non-scientific nutritionists seeing the medical use for something and misinterpreting its application.

More here.

Lee Drutman in the New York Times:

In the months leading up to Monday’s Supreme Court punt on the gerrymandering cases out of Wisconsin and Maryland, those hoping the court would rein in partisan gerrymanders had been cautiously optimistic. Justice Anthony Kennedy made it known that if a “workable standard” could be found to distinguish legitimate districting from partisan gerrymandering, he might sign onto it. Reformers thought they had found that standard in something called the “efficiency gap.”

But for now, with the court’s decision to not rule on the central questions the cases raise, we still lack a standard. The light is still green for state legislatures to draw maps as they please, and tempt their luck in the lower courts.

There is a deep unfairness here that increasingly undermines democratic legitimacy. Aggressive Republican gerrymandering after the 2010 census helped the party to win a majority of House seats in 2012 even though it got fewer votes across all congressional districts. There is a very real possibility of a repeat “plurality reversal” in 2018, with Democrats again getting more votes but not gaining control of the House. Today’s congressional map is more biased in favor of Republicans than it has been in over 100 years, in good part because of gerrymandering. (Geography also plays an important role: Democrats simply waste a lot of votes by concentrating in cities.)

Reformers could certainly try again next year, perhaps finding new approaches to avoid the shoals of standing. But a better approach would be to revamp the antiquated electoral institution that makes elaborate districting schemes both possible and so profitable in the first place — the single-member district. Increase the size of districts (and use ranked-choice voting to improve proportionality) and the predictability of results declines, making gerrymandering far less effective.

More here.

Jeet Heer at The New Republic:

It’s no insult to the late Stanley Cavell, whose death at age 91 was announced on Tuesday, that he was the rare philosopher who was read as much for his prose as for his ideas. Although Cavell had all the right academic credentials — he taught at Harvard for many years and was a distinguished advocate for the “ordinary language philosophy” of J.L. Austin — his books were written with an eccentric, sometimes maddening, elan. Cavell’s sentences were alive with allusions in hectic smart-alecky self-mocking prose that seem closer in spirit to a Marx Brothers movie than a philosophic tome.

Jonathan Rée at the TLS:

Back in the 1970s, Raymond Geuss was a young colleague of Richard Rorty in the mighty philosophy department at Princeton. In some ways they were very different: Rorty was a middle-class New Yorker with a talent for reckless generalization, whereas Geuss was a fastidious scholar-poet from working-class Pennsylvania. But they shared a commitment to left-wing politics, and both of them dissented from the mainstream view of philosophy as a unified discipline advancing majestically towards absolute knowledge. For a while, Rorty and Geuss could bond as the bad boys of Princeton.

The philosophical establishment denounced people like Rorty and Geuss as relativists, bent on destroying the sacred distinction between truth and falsehood. But they defended themselves by pointing out that even if there is such a thing as an almighty final truth, it looks different from diverse points of view, and gets expressed in different words in diverse times and places.

more here.

Nicholas Schmidle at The New Yorker:

Faced with the oncoming Iranian player, Vahid Amiri, Iniesta opened his hips, as if he were preparing to pass the ball to his teammate on the touchline. The pop star Shakira, who is married to Iniesta’s teammate, Gerard Piqué, famously said that hips don’t lie. But Iniesta’s do. His hips led Amiri one way; Iniesta went the other.

Past Amiri, Iniesta played the ball to a teammate, David Silva, who passed it straight back to Iniesta. Another Iranian defender, Saeid Ezatolahi, tried to intercept the pass, but Iniesta swivelled his hips slightly, took the ball with his left foot, and raced past him, neither rushed nor panicked. Then Iniesta looked up: three teammates to choose from, surrounded by seven Iranian players. Omid Ebrahimi, an Iranian midfielder, closed in on him from the left. Iniesta scanned his options and, leading with his hips, like a ballroom dancer, froze Ebrahimi an extra beat, just long enough to create a pocket of space through which he threaded the ball to Diego Costa’s feet. An Iranian defender blocked Costa’s shot, but the ball ricocheted off his leg and into the back of the net.

more here.

Against Surrealism

On the road to Luang Prabang an elephant in chains stands on the flat bed of a truck
shifting his weight at every bend over the river and under the trees where fox bats hang
that in the market you can buy skewered on sticks grilled and dipped in a sauce of chilies and
crushed limes next to river monitors living dragons their hind legs sewn together flicking blue
tongues toward a stall stacked with bamboo cages the size of fists each with a swallow inside a
gift for the New Year when you walk to the edge of the Mekong and make a wish opening the
little cage like opening your fist your hand suddenly bursting with song.

by Joseph Stroud
from  Of This World: New & Selected Poems, 1966–2006

Sarah Goudarzi in Scientific American:

The presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a statement Wednesday advocating for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to stop separating migrant families. The statement cites research that indicates endangerment of those involved. Last week the American Psychological Association released a letter opposing the Trump administration’s policy of taking immigrant children from their parents at the border. Under the zero-tolerance immigration policy, since May more than 2,300 immigrant children—some of them babies—have been forcibly separated from their parents attempting to enter the U.S. from Mexico. Also Wednesday, as the backlash and public outcry continue to grow, Pres. Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order to stop separating families at the order. It was unclear when children already separated might be reunited with their families. But even if reunited soon, medical experts say the effects of separation can potentially last a lifetime.

Scientific American spoke with Alan Shapiro, assistant clinical professor in pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, about the effects of separation trauma and other health and mental consequences of breaking up families. Shapiro is also senior medical director for Community Pediatric Programs (CPP), a collaboration between the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York City and the Children’s Health Fund, and medical director and co-founder of Terra Firma, a partnership that provides medical and legal services to immigrant children.

Are immigrant children especially susceptible to trauma? And if so, why?

These children have already been exposed to enormous amounts of stress and trauma. You need to look at what happened to them in their country of origin that triggered them to leave, and what happened on the journey. Almost across the board they have witnessed, or been victims of, sexual or physical abuse and gang and political violence.

More here.

CJ Polychroniou in Alternet:

Jim Zarroli at NPR:

Big banks are skirting the rules on the sale of the complex financial instruments that helped bring about the 2008 financial crisis, by exploiting a loophole in federal banking regulations, a new report says.

The loophole could leave Wall Street exposed to big losses, potentially requiring taxpayers to once again bail out the biggest banks, warns the report’s author, Michael Greenberger, former director of trading and markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

“We’ve seen this movie already,” he said at a news conference Tuesday.

The regulations cover credit default swaps, a kind of insurance contract taken out by investors to cover potential losses in assets. Such contracts were enormously popular all over the world during the housing boom and led to big losses when the mortgage market collapsed.

More here.

Sarah Rich in The Atlantic:

In hindsight, our son was gearing up to wear a dress to school for quite some time. For months, he wore dresses—or his purple-and-green mermaid costume—on weekends and after school. Then he began wearing them to sleep in lieu of pajamas, changing out of them after breakfast. Finally, one morning, I brought him his clean pants and shirt, and he looked at me and said, “I’m already dressed.”

He was seated on the couch in a gray cotton sundress covered in doe-eyed unicorns with rainbow manes. He’d slept in it, and in his dreaming hours, I imagine, stood at a podium giving inspirational speeches to an audience composed only of himself. When he’d woken up, he was ready.

He walked the half block to school with a bounce in his step, chest proud. “My friends are going to say dresses aren’t for boys,” he told me casually over his shoulder. “They might,” I agreed. “You can just tell them you are comfortable with yourself and that’s all that matters.” I thought of all the other things he could tell them. I began to list them, but he was off running across the blacktop.

I scanned the entrance to see whether any parents noticed us as they came and went. I hadn’t expected my stomach to churn. I felt proud of him for his self-assuredness, for the way he’d prepared for this quietly and at his own pace, but I worried about what judgments and conclusions parents and teachers might make. And of course I worried somebody would shame him.

More here.

Daniel McCarthy in The National Interest:

Today, liberalism appears to be dying in much the same way that Soviet Communism did a generation ago. It is collapsing on its periphery, shedding its colonies and facing a crisis of faith at home. History has gone into reverse in the realm of the old Warsaw Pact, first with Russia, now Hungary, Poland and the former East Germany rejecting liberalism—just as they did Marxism three decades ago. The exotic American orchid of liberal democracy, having taken root in such unlikely climes as postwar Germany and Japan, has failed to flower where the Iron Curtain once cast its shadow.

The story is the same elsewhere: a new sort of decolonization is taking place from the Eastern Mediterranean to South Asia. States that until recently aspired to Western-style modernity on their own terms now find little need for the secular models of liberalism or socialism. They have taken up instead the old cause of faith and nation.

Bitter rivals though they may have been, liberalism and Communism sprang from a common nineteenth-century vision of human destiny: of a future that was secularizing, scientific, materially prosperous, progressive, universal and inevitable. This, for all its variations, was the vision of Vladimir Lenin and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, David Ben-Gurion and Jawaharlal Nehru, Woodrow Wilson and the architects of the European Union. The decline of liberalism is not a surprise twist to history, seen in this light. It is only a continuation of what destroyed the Soviet order—a long awakening from the utopian reverie of scientific truth wedded to power.

More here.  [Thanks to Omar Ali.]

Scotty Hendricks in Big Think:

Wealth inequality is one of the great moral issues of our time. In an era when the world has more money than ever before, billions still live on less than $3 a day. The disparity becomes more striking in the light of studies that show most income inequality comes down to luck, with people of average talent able to shoot to the top of the ladder by being in the right place at the right time.

Making the problem even more severe is the specter of automated unemployment, or the so-called AI revolution. As countless jobs have been lost to automation already and 30% of American jobs are at risk of being automated out of existence within the next thirteen years, it may not be long before mass unemployment caused by automation intensifies the difficulty and urgency of solving the inequality problem.

But there is hope.

More here.

James Hamilton at Literary Review:

He must have been a nightmarish visitor for museum staff to deal with because he had a constant urge to touch sculpture, to internalise the shape of an object by feeling it. At Meudon, an observer noted ‘how his fingers tremble when he touches these old stones.’ London was a haven for Rodin: ‘Your beautiful museums, with their marvellous collections, Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian, awaked in me a flood of sensations, which, if not new, had at any rate a rejuvenating influence; and those sensations caused me to follow Nature all the more closely in my studies.’

With Pheidias, that mysterious ancient genius, as their spirit guide, Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece and the accompanying exhibition have eroded the barriers between museum and art gallery. Actions speak loud. 

more here.

J.W. McCormack at The Baffler:

LOOK, THERE’S NO HARD-AND-FAST RULE that mandates books by world leaders need to be tree-murdering, anti-democratic power fantasies farmed out to struggling ghostwriters by self-obsessed corporate shills concerned with driving up the price of speaking engagements. Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli authored more than two-dozen romantic novels and biographical works. Jimmy Carter scribbled a bizarre Revolutionary War novel. And Winston Churchill won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature for his four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (which isn’t a recommendation so much as it is serviceable bar trivia). But former President Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s new thriller The President Is Missing is not a novel crafted by a benevolent liege or an ex-president in peaceable solitude. It isn’t really anything by anybody. Just as every truly beautiful novel elaborates the terms of its own composition, so too every piece-of-shit literary fart-fest proffers the petard with which to be hoisted for the convenience of critics.

more here.

Bill Morris interviews Dominique Morisseau at The Millions:

TM: All three of these plays spring from very specific moments in Detroit’s history. Detroit ’67, of course, was the bloody summer of 1967. Skeleton Crew was in 2008, when General Motors and the city were about to go bankrupt. And now Paradise Blue is set in 1949. When we talked before, you told me you’re not writing history, even though the city’s history is very much a part of your plays. What exactly are you writing?

DM: I think I’m writing about community, and about family, and about home. I would say maybe it’s taken me a while to embrace history, but that’s not what I started out to do. I was just interested in particular moments, but for me it wasn’t about trying to have a historical agenda. What I’m really writing about is people, and those people transcend the time period they’re in; they even transcend region. I’m writing about humanity, and that’s everybody’s entry point into the plays.

more here.

Virginia Morell in Science:

When an adult striped dolphin emerged from the Mediterranean Sea in 2016 pushing, nudging, and circling the carcass of its dead female companion for more than an hour, a nearby boat of scientists fell silent. Afterward, the students aboard said they were certain the dolphin was grieving. But was this grief or some other response? In a new study, researchers are attempting to get to the bottom of a mystery that has plagued behavioral biologists for 50 years.

Grief, in humans at least, is a reaction to the permanent severing of a strong social or family bond. Although chimpanzees, baboons, and elephants are thought to experience the complex emotion, scientists don’t yet know enough about it in other animals. There are dozens of photos and YouTube videos of grieflike behavior in dolphins: Some mothers have been seen carrying their dead infants in their mouths or on their backs for a week or longer, even as the body decomposes; a couple adult males have also been seen holding dead calves in their mouths.

In the new study, cetacean biologist Giovanni Bearzi of Dolphin Biology and Conservation in Pordenone, Italy, and his colleagues at other institutions analyzed 78 scientific reports from 1970 to 2016 of these kinds of displays—which they labeled “postmortem-attentive behavior.” They found that just 20 of 88 cetacean (dolphin and whale) species engage in them. Of those, most were dolphins from the Sousa and Tursiops genera. Just one was a baleen whale—a humpback.

More here.

Reality Demands

Reality demands
we also state the following:
life goes on.
It does so near Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

There is a gas station
in a small plaza in Jericho,
and freshly painted
benches near Bila Hora.
Letters travel
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a furniture truck passes
before the eyes of the lion of Cheronea,
and only an atmospheric front advances
towards the blossoming orchards near Verdun.

There is so much of Everything
that Nothing is quite well concealed.
Music flows
from yachts near Actium
and couples on board dance in the sunlight.

So much keeps happening,
that it must be happening everywhere.
Where stone is heaped on stone,
there is an ice cream truck
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been,
Hiroshima is again
manufacturing products
for everyday use.

Not without its charms is this terrible world,
not without its mornings
worth our waking.

In the fields of Maciejowice
the grass is green
and on the grass is — you know how grass is —
transparent dew.

Maybe there are no fields other than battlefields,
those still remembered,
and those long forgotten,
birch woods and cedar woods,
snows and sands, iridescent swamps,
and ravines of dark defeat
where today, in sudden need,
you squat behind a bush.

What moral flows from this? Maybe none.
But what really flows is quickly-drying blood,
and as always, some rivers and clouds.

On the tragic mountain passes
the wind blows hats off heads
and we cannot help–
but laugh.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from Poems New and Collected
Harcourt, 1998

Stanley Fish in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The humanities are taking it on the chin. If there were any doubts about this proposition, they have been dispelled by the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point’s proposal to eliminate 13 majors, including history, art, English, philosophy, sociology, political science, French, German, and Spanish. The administration cited large deficits, programs with a low enrollment, and a desire to play to its strengths — STEM subjects and training in technology. One professor of physics and astronomy (Ken Menningen) approved, declaring that the university was right to “pivot away from the liberal arts” and toward programs that students, concerned with career prospects, find attractive. That reasoning might make sense if Stevens Point were a trade school, but it is, at least by title and claim, a university, and there is an argument to be made that because the claim is now without support at Stevens Point, the title should be removed.

The philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott would have thought so. Here is his account of the university: “It is a place where [the student] … is not encouraged to confuse education with training for a profession, with learning the tricks of a trade, with preparation for future particular service in society, or with the acquisition of a kind of moral and intellectual outfit to see him through life.” Note that Oakeshott lists in rapid succession the most often invoked defenses and justifications of liberal education, and note too that he immediately dismisses them as barely worth thinking about: “Whenever an ulterior purpose of this sort makes its appearance, education … steals out of the back door with noiseless steps.”

More here.