Natalie Angier in The New York Times:
In advance of Father’s Day, let’s take a moment to sort out the differences and similarities between “Dad jeans” and “Dad genes.” Dad jeans are articles of sex-specific leisure clothing, long mocked for being comfy, dumpy and elastic-waisted but lately reinvented as a fashion trend, suitable for male bodies of all shapes and ages. Dad genes are particles on the sex-specific Y chromosome, long mocked for being a stunted clump of mostly useless nucleic waste but lately revealed as man’s fastest friend, essential to the health of male bodies and brains no matter the age. Yes, dear fathers and others born with the appurtenances generally designated male. We live in exciting times, and that includes novel insights into the sole chromosomal distinction between you and the women now prowling the aisles at the hardware store. (“Didn’t he say he could use a new bow saw? Or some halogen light bulbs?”)
Researchers have discovered that, contrary to longstanding assumptions, the Y chromosome is not limited to a handful of masculine tasks, like specifying male body parts in a developing embryo or replenishing the sperm supply in an adult man. New evidence indicates that the Y chromosome participates in an array of essential, general-interest tasks in men, like stanching cancerous growth, keeping arteries clear and blocking the buildup of amyloid plaque in the brain. As a sizable percentage of men age, their blood and other body cells begin to spontaneously jettison copies of the Y chromosome, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. That unfortunate act of chromosomal decluttering appears to put the men at a heightened risk of Alzheimer’s disease, leukemia and other disorders. “I’m quite certain,” said Lars Forsberg, an associate professor of medical genetics at Uppsala University in Sweden, “that the loss of the Y chromosome with age explains a very large proportion of the increased mortality in men, compared to women.”
Other researchers are tracing the evolution of the Y chromosome and comparing the version found in modern men with those of our close relatives, both living and extinct.
More here.
“In receiving this award, I thank my parents, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Mr. T.”
Many Palestinians would disagree on political grounds with my decision to watch Fauda. In fact, some have called for a boycott of the show. “It is an anti-Arab, racist, Israeli propaganda tool that glorifies the Israeli military’s war crimes against the Palestinian people,” the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement 
This is the
I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The email cites the publisher’s ‘new company-wide goal’: for ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’ (Gotta love that shouty boldface.) ‘This means we want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.’ The email proudly proclaims that the company has removed ‘the need for a university degree from nearly all our jobs’ — which, if my manuscript were being copy-edited and proof-read by folks whose university-educated predecessors already exhibited horrifyingly weak grammar and punctuation, I would find alarming.
The young men and women blowing clouds of grape and mint-flavoured smoke at a Middle Eastern shisha cafe in Sydney could pass for any group of friends.
The chef, television host and author 
It was in the third of the essays I was writing on how we’d come to see the cities of the future as cities of the future (something to refocus our attention on, now that the cities of the future of the past, the structures in which we were all living, had been thoroughly codified and photographed and renovated, resold as more shimmering or more minimalist versions of themselves then rephotographed, and we were liking the reiterations on our Instagrams, enjoying this incredible proximity to architecture: I was an architect, writing about architecture in my poems), but it was hard to deny that we’d reached that time in our respective chronologies when cities of the future was something that had to be reenvisioned and discussed as you sat under studio lights in a narrow room of books in an office building and your talk was broadcast over the Internet (you were not of the technological elite, so you didn’t know that sitting hunched over would make you appear hunched over to anybody watching), but the idea of cities of the future came to everyone one night in our sleep and it was time to begin to think and talk about it, to try to envision what these would look like and who would occupy them and if they would have different names or exist on different planets (you had to be speculative but also had to weigh in on what was actually happening on your streets, in your bodies, and between bodies): it was in number three of the essays that I began to see color as that which would make our cities of the future cities of the future and this was thanks to Edie Fake, whose renditions of the architectures of our new cities performed like an architecture finally taking into account our clothes. I began writing the essays about the cities of the future, starting with weather and invisibility—cities of the future, their weather; then cities of the future, invisibility—and I began each never considering that the cities of the future had color, and not only color but very bright color that was not only very bright but patterned as well.
For all the talk of something disturbingly novel and unknown about a post-Trump world, with its crumbling trust in mainstream media and lack of faith in the institutions of democracy, there’s also something curiously retro about the whole thing. It’s not simply the US president himself, whose brash, greed-is-good confidence and private-jet-and-golden-tower personality were obnoxious enough the first time round, in the 1980s, nor his adoption of an outdated rhetoric of an America reawakened. It’s also in the rhetoric of his rivals, who have reached back to Cold War imagery of Soviet spy threats and reds under the bed when invoking the probable Russian interference in the 2016 US election. It’s not just collusion in Trump’s campaign they’re warning of. It’s also a return to that seemingly most Soviet of influences – Russian propaganda – finding its way into the innocent homes of the American people. Twitter bots, online trolls and “fake news” have all been described as modern propaganda, updated versions of the bold posters and misleading pamphlets of official Stalinist culture. Their role, it’s claimed, is nothing less than undermining truth and knowledge itself, the values on which democratic culture is built. How did propaganda get such a bad name?
It is easy to make anyone look moronic or sinister when you control the means of their representation. It is trivially easy to hang someone by their own words when you control where the sentences 
Start with Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, and a robot that loves you no matter what. Add a knighted British physicist, a renowned French neuroscientist, and a prominent Australian philosopher/occasional blues singer. Toss in a bunch of psychologists, mathematicians, anesthesiologists, artists, meditators, a computer programmer or two, and several busloads of amateur theorists waving self-published manuscripts and touting grand unified solutions. Send them all to a swanky resort in the desert for a week, supply them with lots of free coffee and beer, and ask them to unpack a riddle so confounding that it’s unclear how to make progress or where you’d even begin.
Peter Woit is
As the World Cup begins next week in Russia,