Susannah Gardiner in Smithsonian:

From a description of the print now, in 2017, it sounds perfectly traditional. A black-and-white etching on paper, an art form that has been around for 500 years. A portrait of a woman. In the background, probably some kind of domestic interior. A simple title, American Girl. But in 1974, when artist Emma Amos made American Girl, now in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the country was roiling with social protest movements—for women’s liberation, for Black Power, for LGBT rights, for Native American rights. Once-silenced groups demanded to be seen and heard. Artists supported these protests not just by marching and writing but through visual arts. Black artists discussed whether particular mediums or styles advanced racial justice.

Romare Bearden, for example, had worked for years in collage, partly as a way to give prominence to images of real black individuals. Debate simmered over whether it was acceptable to be an abstract painter, or whether black artists’ work “needed to be about the black experience in some way,” most likely by depicting black people, says Alex Mann, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings. Some artists at the time looked to Africa for inspiration and sought to create art for and about African people the world over. Others made work that was overtly political or radical, ranging from sculpture in the form of a Molotov cocktail aimed at Aunt Jemima to prints and posters calling for action.

More here.

Sam Haselby in Aeon:

Critiques of capitalism come in two varieties. First, there is the moral or spiritual critique. This critique rejects Homo economicus as the organising heuristic of human affairs. Human beings, it says, need more than material things to prosper. Calculating power is only a small part of what makes us who we are. Moral and spiritual relationships are first-order concerns. Material fixes such as a universal basic income will make no difference to societies in which the basic relationships are felt to be unjust.

Then there is the material critique of capitalism. The economists who lead discussions of inequality now are its leading exponents. Homo economicus is the right starting point for social thought. We are poor calculators and single-minded, failing to see our advantage in the rational distribution of prosperity across societies. Hence inequality, the wages of ungoverned growth. But we are calculators all the same, and what we need above all is material plenty, thus the focus on the redress of material inequality. From good material outcomes, the rest follows.

The first kind of argument for capitalism’s reform seems recessive now. The material critique predominates. Ideas emerge in numbers and figures. Talk of non-material values in political economy is muted. The Christians and Marxists who once made the moral critique of capitalism their own are marginal. Utilitarianism grows ubiquitous and compulsory.

But then there is Amartya Sen.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

It’s long been an insult to be called a Neanderthal. But the more these elusive, vanished people have been studied, the more respect they’ve gained among scientists.

On Thursday, a team of researchers offered compelling evidence that Neanderthals bore one of the chief hallmarks of mental sophistication: they could paint cave art. That talent suggests that Neanderthals could think in symbols and may have achieved other milestones not preserved in the fossil record.

“When you have symbols, then you have language,” said João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona and co-author of the new study.

When Neanderthal fossils first came to light in the mid-1800s, researchers were struck by the low, thick brow ridge on their skulls. Later discoveries showed Neanderthals to have brains as big as our own, but bodies that were shorter and stockier.

By the early 1900s, scientists were describing Neanderthals as gorilla-like beasts, an extinct branch of humanity that could not compete with slender, brilliant humans.

Yet evidence from both fossils and DNA indicates that Neanderthals and living humans descend from a common ancestor who lived about 600,000 years ago. Our own branch probably lived mostly in Africa.

More here.

Steven Pinker in Literary Hub:

Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bien-pensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class—the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.

An entire lexicon of abuse has grown up to express their scorn. If you think knowledge can help solve problems, then you have a “blind faith” and a “quasi-religious belief” in the “outmoded superstition” and “false promise” of the “myth” of the “onward march” of “inevitable progress.” You are a “cheerleader” for “vulgar American can-doism” with the “rah-rah” spirit of “boardroom ideology,” “Silicon Valley,” and the “Chamber of Commerce.” You are a practitioner of “Whig history,” a “naïve optimist,” a “Pollyanna,” and of course a “Pangloss,” a modern-day version of the philosopher in Voltaire’s Candidewho asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Professor Pangloss, as it happens, is what we would now call a pessimist. A modern optimist believes that the world can be much, much better than it is today. Voltaire was satirizing not the Enlightenment hope for progress but its opposite, the religious rationalization for suffering called theodicy, according to which God had no choice but to allow epidemics and massacres because a world without them is metaphysically impossible.

More here.

Deepanjana Pal at The Atlantic:

When Sridevi rose to prominence in the Hindi film industry, Bollywood, in the 1980s, it was at its tawdriest. The auteurs had left the building and a new, intensely commercial Hindi cinema had taken root. Appealing to the lowest common denominator became the industry mantra as more theaters cropped up around India and films became more profitable. Heroines were mostly cast for their sex appeal and paid much less than male counterparts. Their contributions were usually limited to romantic song sequences and weeping piteously when grabbed by the villain. Actresses would regularly be slapped and raped onscreen and groped offscreen.

Out of this emerged Sridevi, shining brighter than the hundreds of rhinestones and diamantes on her (sometimes) terrible outfits. Against all odds, she became the first modern, female superstar Bollywood has known and would remain one of its favorite actors over five decades.

On February 24, at age 54, Sridevi was found dead in her Dubai hotel apartment bathtub. According to the forensic report, she drowned accidentally. This summer, her daughter’s debut film will be released.

more here.

Kevin Jackson at Literary Review:

For a book that is crammed with adulteries, alcoholism, betrayals, broken friendships, deportations, deprivation, drug addiction, executions, humiliation, illicit abortions, imprisonment, murder, Nazi atrocities, starvation, torture chambers (on the avenue Hoche, passers-by could hear the screams coming up from the cellars’ air vents), treason and worse, Agnès Poirier’s Left Bank is a remarkably exhilarating read.

Above all, it has a terrific cast, with, as leading players, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The novelist, jazz musician and pataphysician Boris Vian, Samuel Beckett and the resident aliens Picasso and Giacometti also feature, as do brilliant African-American musicians and writers such as Miles Davis, James Baldwin and Richard Wright, the vehemently anti-communist Hungarian writer and wife-beater Arthur Koestler and, among the occupiers, the sinister but fascinating German Ernst Jünger, aesthete, entomologist and polymath.

Left Bank is an enchanting account of how these exceptionally talented and original people not merely endured these harsh years but also found pleasure, and even a kind of joy, in creating small pockets of private utopia.

more here.

Lauren Michele Jackson at The Point:

Beyoncé sang “Resentment” the first time I ever saw her in concert. It was not the first time I ever heard the song, but it may have just as well been. She wore a white jumpsuit and a white headdress with a white veil and white stilettos and sat on a second stage separated by a matter of a hundred feet or so from the main stage upon which she’d stomped, jumped, grinded and sweated my life out for the last hour or maybe two or three (time became hard to track in her presence). She was very still now. My seat was not good enough to make out her expression without the assistance provided by the two Jumbotrons behind her on the main stage. I hated them as mediators of my spiritual experience much as I was thankful for a closer look. I could see her sway, see her hair and veil lift and fall with the wind or maybe a fan placed just out of sight. And I could hear. Boy, could I.

“Resentment” is slow but not patient, sentimental but resigned, demanding—vocally—but without the dramatics that turn ballads into karaoke hits. The narrative is straightforward and regular: the speaker, “I,” Bey, or Beyoncé in White, has been cheated on by her lover, “you.”

more here.

Unnamed

Once, there was no word
for blue. To aborigines,
the sea was green
like cypress, like so many
species of locust.
And the moon
was the face of a clock
set in a forest night.

So what is the word
for us? For the sky
when it opens itself up
to the gold flash
of a bird, to the black
silhouette of a palm
frond? For that moment,
after so many moons,
when two people are culled
from their far, dark
corners of woods
to a pinpoint
on this grid of earth?

What do I call it—
this place we inhabit?
After roaming that terrain
of root and smoke,
to arrive, our feet
caked in dirt, eyes
full of green—
to the flash of the gold bird,
that piece of flame
in a blue sky?

by Ja'net Danielo
from 2River View
Fall, 2016

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Researchers have combed through the genomes of more than 1,700 tumours, representing more than 20 different kinds of childhood cancer, to unearth potential drug targets and a better understanding of how cancer arises in the youngest patients. The work, published by two teams on 28 February in Nature^1,2, is part of a growing movement to harness genomics against childhood cancers. Around the world, researchers are banding together to share genomics data, techniques and cell lines that can be used to study these diseases. The efforts are generating a long list of genetic alterations that might be important in triggering cancer. But it will take considerable work to determine which of these genetic clues are pointing to the best drug targets. “It’s not just a matter of picking through genomics data,” says Susan Weiner, founder of the Children’s Cause for Cancer Advocacy in Washington DC. “There’s also the question of the validity of the targets.”

…A surprising number of childhood tumours showed signs of a possible defect in DNA repair, similar to the effects seen in adult cancers with mutations in the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. In adults, such cancers are increasingly being treated with a class of drugs called PARP inhibitors, which target cells with abnormal DNA repair. The latest studies suggest that it may worth exploring whether these drugs work for some children.

More here.

Julia Felsenthal in Vogue:

There’s a thing that happens when you look at certain paintings by the young portrait artist Jordan Casteel. You take note of her subject, usually a black man. You look again, closer this time, and only on second glance do you recognize that his skin tone doesn’t actually resemble skin at all, but is instead blue, or green, or pink, or orange, or chalky white. You may question why you didn’t notice at first. You may marvel at Casteel’s clever palette, her ability to rationalize figure against ground, to hide a person the color of, say, the Hulk, in plain sight. If you’re thinking the way she hopes you’re thinking, you may wonder why you were so quick to clock his race. Maybe you wonder what other judgments you jumped to in the process.

“Which I love!” Casteel says when I describe it as a sort of magic-eye trick. “That was very intentional.” The artist, 29, is lanky and long-limbed, with a boyish haircut and the easy, funky style—’80s jeans, white Nikes, colorful socks, oversize glasses—of a very cool fifth grader. We’re sitting side by side on a sofa on the lower level of the Casey Kaplan gallery, where this fall Casteel mounted a much buzzed-about exhibition of paintings, “Nights in Harlem.” “I was interested in the fact that people were going, ‘Oh, you’re painting black men.’ And then they would be like: ‘Oh, actually, he’s green.’ I loved witnessing the externalization of that internal process.”

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

So here’s something intriguing: an observational signature from the very first stars in the universe, which formed about 180 million years after the Big Bang (a little over one percent of the current age of the universe). This is exciting all by itself, and well worthy of our attention; getting data about the earliest generation of stars is notoriously difficult, and any morsel of information we can scrounge up is very helpful in putting together a picture of how the universe evolved from a relatively smooth plasma to the lumpy riot of stars and galaxies we see today. (Pop-level writeups at The Guardian and Science News, plus a helpful Twitter thread from Emma Chapman.)

But the intrigue gets kicked up a notch by an additional feature of the new results: the data imply that the cosmic gas surrounding these early stars is quite a bit cooler than we expected. What’s more, there’s a provocative explanation for why this might be the case: the gas might be cooled by interacting with dark matter. That’s quite a bit more speculative, of course, but sensible enough (and grounded in data) that it’s worth taking the possibility seriously.

Let’s think about the stars first. We’re not seeing them directly; what we’re actually looking at is the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

More here.

Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian:

Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. The march of human progress is strewn with dead animals. Even tens of thousands of years ago, our stone age ancestors were already responsible for a series of ecological disasters. When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet’s ecosystem. It was not the last.

About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story. The tragedy opens with a scene showing a rich and varied population of large animals, without any trace of Homo sapiens. In scene two, humans appear, evidenced by a fossilised bone, a spear point, or perhaps a campfire. Scene three quickly follows, in which men and women occupy centre-stage and most large animals, along with many smaller ones, have gone. Altogether, sapiens drove to extinction about 50% of all the large terrestrial mammals of the planet before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

The next major landmark in human-animal relations was the agricultural revolution: the process by which we turned from nomadic hunter-gatherers into farmers living in permanent settlements. It involved the appearance of a completely new life-form on Earth: domesticated animals. Initially, this development might seem to have been of minor importance, as humans only managed to domesticate fewer than 20 species of mammals and birds, compared with the countless thousands of species that remained “wild”. Yet, with the passing of the centuries, this novel life-form became the norm. Today, more than 90% of all large animals are domesticated (“large” denotes animals that weigh at least a few kilograms).

More here.

I'm Just a Thief

I am not a poet;
I am a bad tempered man
I quarrel with all those around me for the most trivial reasons
And am impelled to assault and accuse them wrongly
Amidst the guffaw of the foolish, recidivists and word suckers.
I show my ingratitude even to those to whom I owe everything
and look down on their favours.
I don’t know who led one like me to poetry,
I’ve been lying all this while using deaf words.
Poetry is a poor dumb thing,
It’s unable to get rid of bandits,
What can metaphors do
Against a flunky with stolen medals.
I am just a thief
I pillaged the heritage of the very best poets of the earth who worked so hard
To embrace the tree of life and say
“Good morning, O world”
To birds, flowers and memories that blossom at sunrise.
I bribed the Interpol police
And bargained with the associations of critics who wear thick glasses
I traded their postmodern deconstructive tools
With sale revenue from institutions for the disabled
And placed my potential enemies under house arrest.

I'm just a thief,
A very dangerous thief and an accomplice of the Arab regimes
I am a threat to the security of the world. I disturb its sleep with the shouts of my apocalyptic allegations.
I feel no shame or regret for what I’ve done so far.
I don’t understand what morals and laws say throughout the day
In order for me to repent and stop giving the obscene finger;
For I have no conscience.
As soon as the dark starless night falls
My nails, abscesses, and my hair spread out
My garment also lengthens dragging my sins behind me.
Here I am a poet with ashen time hunger
Lost in nightmares
Thinking the sky a gas engine
Wherein burn nameless entities
while thousands of hoarse poems
And flocks of white sea-birds
Writhe under rusty spears.

I'm just a thief,
Just a cretinous and gloomy dictionary
Trying to get away with damned words
And the sorrow of the world.

by Abdellatif El Ouarari
from Poetry International, 2018
translation: Norddine Zouitni

Read more »

Parul Sehgal in The New York Times:

The world’s first transorbital lobotomy was performed in 1946 by Walter Freeman, in his Washington office. Using an ice pick from his own kitchen, he went through the eye sockets into the brain of his patient, a 29-year-old severely depressed housewife, and cut into her frontal lobes. Then he sent her home in a cab. The history of mental illness treatments reveals medicine at its most inventive, desperate and disturbing. There have been awe-inspiring discoveries — of the healing properties of lithium, for example, a soft, silvery metal produced in the first 20 minutes after the Big Bang. But remedies generally seem to have run a narrow gamut from the unpleasant (Cotton Mather’s prescription for depression: “living swallows, cut in two, and laid hot reeking unto the shaved Head”) to the outright sadistic. Aside from Freeman’s lobotomies, there is a long tradition of poisoning patients or inducing comas to “reset” the brain. In one notorious treatment, turpentine was injected into a patient’s abdominal wall in the hope of encouraging a fever high enough to burn away her hallucinations.

We’re lucky to live in more evidence-based, scientific times. Or do we? In “Blue Dreams,” a capacious and rigorous history of psychopharmacology, the psychologist and writer Lauren Slater looks at the fact that despite our ravenous appetite for psychotropic medications (about 20 percent of Americans take some psychotropic drug or other), doctors don’t really understand how they work or how to assess if a patient needs them. In the case of antidepressants, two-thirds of patients taking an S.S.R.I. (Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, etc.) would improve on a placebo alone.

More here.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Amitava Kumar in The New Yorker:

I am trying now to remember when it was that I stopped thinking of myself as a new immigrant.

Was it after three years? Five? Fifteen?

I have a narrative in my mind that is teleological—I think the word for this, from my graduate-student days, is “Hegelian”—and it culminates in my becoming a writer. A writer of immigritude. I cannot put a date to it, but I suspect that the rawness of always feeling out of place, of not belonging—that fighting sense I had of forever being on edge—diminished or even disappeared once I reached the understanding that I no longer had a home to which I could return. This went hand in hand (and this is part of the Hegelian schema I’m inhabiting here) with my finding a home in literature.

I arrived in the U.S., for graduate study, in literature, in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint, even though I had come to the U.S. intending to become a writer. I painted small canvases, abstract forms that sometimes had words, often in Hindi, written on them. Why did this happen? Maybe because one day, in the college bookstore, I had seen a coffee-table book that had the word “India” printed on it in large letters.

More here.

Julia Belluz in Vox:

Exactly 20 years ago this month, an esteemed medical journal published a small study that has become one of the most notorious and damaging pieces of research in medicine.

The study, led by the now discredited physician-researcher Andrew Wakefield, involved 12 children and suggested there’s a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine — which is administered to millions of children around the world each year — and autism.

The study was subsequently thoroughly debunked. The Lancet retracted the paper and Wakefield was stripped of his medical license. Autism researchers have shown decisively again and again that the developmental disorder is not caused by vaccines.

Still, public health experts say the false data and erroneous conclusions in that paper, while rejected in the scientific world, helped fuel a dangerous movement of vaccine skepticism and refusal around the world.

Since its publication, measles outbreaks have erupted in Europe, Australia, and the US in communities where people refuse or fear vaccines. Vaccine refusal has become such a problem that some countries in Europe are now cracking down, making vaccines mandatory for children and fining parents who reject them.

But there’s more to the story.

More here.