Philip Ball in New Statesman:

Researchers are now becoming confident enough to claim that the information available from sequencing a person’s genome – the instructions encoded in our DNA that influence our physical and behavioural traits – can be used to make predictions about their potential to achieve academic success. “The speed of this research has surprised me,” says the psychologist Kathryn Asbury of the University of York, “and I think that it is probable that pretty soon someone – probably a commercial company – will start to try to sell it in some way.” Asbury believes “it is vital that we have regulations in place for the use of genetic information in education and that we prepare legal, social and ethical cases for how it could and should be used.” If that sounds frightening, however, it might be because of a wide misapprehension about what genes are and what they do.

It’s sometimes said that the whole notion that intelligence has a genetic component is anathema to the liberals and left-wingers who dominate education. Young reliably depicts the extreme version here, saying “liberal educationalists… reject the idea that intelligence has a genetic basis [and] prefer to think of man as a tabula rasa, forged by society rather than nature”. He’s not alone, though. The psychologist Jill Boucher of City, University of London has lambasted what she calls “the unthinkingly self-righteous, hypocritical and ultimately damaging political correctness of those who deny that genetic inheritance contributes to academic achievement and hence social status”. Teach First’s suppression of Young’s article contributed to that impression: it was a clumsy and poorly motivated move. (The organisation has since apologised to Young.)

Despite this rhetoric, however, you’d be hard pushed to find a teacher who would question that children arrive at school with differing intrinsic aptitudes and abilities. Some kids pick things up in a flash, others struggle with the basics. This doesn’t mean it’s all in their genes: no one researching genes and intelligence denies that a child’s environment can play a big role in educational attainment. Of course kids with supportive, stimulating families and motivated peers have an advantage, while in some extreme cases the effects of trauma or malnutrition can compromise brain development. But the idea of the child as tabula rasa seems to be something of a straw man.

More here.

Mohammad Fadel in Lapham’s Quarterly:

What is shariʿa? It is often translated as “Islamic law,” as if it represented the law in its entirety. It is also commonly thought to be a rigid set of practices and punishments inherited directly from early Islam that are meant to be applied in a single inflexible manner. But none of this is accurate.

Shariʿa is best understood as Islam’s specifically divine law, virtually synonymous with revelation. Muslims believe it to have been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad and principally transmitted through the Quran and his own teachings. But it was not itself the letter of the law followed by early Muslims. Acceding to the commands of revelation required further human interpretation, and this effort to use shariʿa toward the establishment of rules for a moral life has a different name: fiqh (literally “understanding”).

Muhammad died in 632, and shariʿa and fiqh developed in the following years, as his community needed to figure out how to proceed without his personal authority—especially as his successors, known as the caliphs, soon expanded his Islamic state beyond the Arabian Peninsula. They consolidated control over the Near East by driving out the Byzantine Empire from North Africa and the Levant and completely destroying the Sasanian Empire in Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia. Islam then spread through the region.

More here.

Mohammad Fadel in Lapham's Quarterly:

What is shariʿa? It is often translated as “Islamic law,” as if it represented the law in its entirety. It is also commonly thought to be a rigid set of practices and punishments inherited directly from early Islam that are meant to be applied in a single inflexible manner. But none of this is accurate.

Shariʿa is best understood as Islam’s specifically divine law, virtually synonymous with revelation. Muslims believe it to have been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad and principally transmitted through the Quran and his own teachings. But it was not itself the letter of the law followed by early Muslims. Acceding to the commands of revelation required further human interpretation, and this effort to use shariʿa toward the establishment of rules for a moral life has a different name: fiqh (literally “understanding”).

Muhammad died in 632, and shariʿa and fiqh developed in the following years, as his community needed to figure out how to proceed without his personal authority—especially as his successors, known as the caliphs, soon expanded his Islamic state beyond the Arabian Peninsula. They consolidated control over the Near East by driving out the Byzantine Empire from North Africa and the Levant and completely destroying the Sasanian Empire in Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia. Islam then spread through the region.

More here.

Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic:

Once upon a time, there was a city so dazzling and kaleidoscopic, so braided and water-rimmed, that it was often compared to a single living body. It clustered around a glimmering emerald spine, which astronauts could glimpse from orbit. It hid warm nooks and crannies, each a nursery for new life. It opened into radiant, iris-colored avenues, which tourists crossed oceans to see. The city was, the experts declared, the planet’s largest living structure.

Then, all at once, a kind of invisible wildfire overran the city. It consumed its avenues and neighborhoods, swallowed its canyons and branches. It expelled an uncountable number of dwellers from their homes. It was merciless: Even those who escaped the initial ravishment perished in the famine that followed.

Many people had loved the city, but none of them could protect it. No firefighters, no chemicals, no intervention of any kind could stop the destruction. As the heat plundered the city of its wealth, the experts could only respond with careful, mournful observation.

All of this recently happened, more or less, off the east coast of Australia. The Great Barrier Reef—which, at 1,400 miles long, is the longest and largest coral reef in the world—was blanketed by dangerously hot water in the summer of 2016. This heat strangled and starved the corals, causing what has been called “an unprecedented bleaching event.”

Though that bleaching event was reported at the time, scientists are just starting to understand how catastrophically transformative it was.

More here.

Nora Caplan-Bricker in The Point:

Imagine a world without men. Imagine it occurred as a natural experiment. Imagine, for example, a valley cupped by high mountains, accessible by only a single, narrow pass. Imagine that, thousands of years ago, the people of this valley found themselves at war when an unlucky tremor from a distant volcano sealed the pass shut with a shower of rocks. Most of the people who’d stayed back from battle died fighting among themselves in the weeks after the cataclysm, leaving only a small group of women behind to despair that without men there’d be no children, and without children, no future. This is a fantastical premise requiring a fantastical twist. So say the women’s bodies adapted to the absence of mates. They became capable of asexual reproduction, previously the province of invertebrates and plants. From there, the society developed between the cliffs of its petri dish. That this could never happen is beside the point—the important question is: What would come next?

This is the setting for the 1915 novel Herland, by the first-wave feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and what comes next in her book is utopia: women solving humanity’s problems without men getting in the way. I loved this strange novel when I read it in college, though I couldn’t say why. It’s earnest, even dopey, and, inevitably, outdated. Yet I found myself thinking about it after the Harvey Weinstein revelations this fall, and during the reckoning that followed.

From the start, the #MeToo moment seemed to rest on a utopianism that no one had named. “Don’t harass” is a simple demand, but envisioning a world without sexual harassment—without its many tendrils invading every corner of our lives—is not a simple act of imagination.

More here.

George Dvorsky in Gizmodo:

Using computers and MRI scans, researchers have created the most detailed reconstruction of a Neanderthal brain to date, offering new insights into the social and cognitive abilities of these extinct humans. But as to whether these characteristics were responsible for their ultimate demise remains an open question.

New research published today in Scientific Reports suggests important differences in cognitive and neural function between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals led to differences in behavior that may have resulted in the conditions under which anatomically modern humans succeeded and Neanderthals failed some 45,000 years ago. To reach this conclusion—and in one of the first studies of its kind—scientists conducted a comparative analysis of Neanderthal and early modern human skulls to infer brain function. But because no other archaeological evidence was provided to bolster the case, and because the shape and size of brains cannot be definitively tied to cognitive capacity and behavior, the question of what caused Neanderthal extinction remains very much unsettled.

The story of the Neanderthals has puzzled archaeologists and anthropologists ever since the first skeleton of this species was uncovered in 1829. Despite years of research and speculation, we’re still not sure what went wrong for the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia for a whopping 200,000 years, much of it during the Ice Age. At the same time, scientists aren’t entirely sure what went right for Homo sapiens. So when it comes to explaining their failure and our success, it’s fair to ask: What were the differences that made the difference?

More here.

The Language Issue

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
from Pharao’s Daughter
Wake Forest University Press, 1988
translated from Irish by Medbh McGuckian

The Language Issue

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.
.

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
from Pharao's Daughter
Wake Forest University Press, 1988
translated from Irish by Medbh McGuckian

Peter Moskowitz at Poetry Magazine:

Britton’s single volume of poetry, Italy, was published by Little Caesar Press in 1981. The book probably wouldn’t have reached beyond Britton’s small coterie of friends were it not for support from a few devotees of gay poetry. As it was, his friends recall that Italy sold only about 750 copies and got a negative review in the Village Voice. In the early 2000s, the poet Reginald Shepherdbegan collecting Britton’s unpublished works, some of which existed as letters to friends. When Shepherd died in 2008, leaving the book unfinished, poet and editor Philip Clark took up the project. In 2016, he published a second volume of Britton’s work, In the Empire of the Air, which includes Italy and dozens of unpublished works. The book is slim, a little over 100 pages, and most of the poems in it are less than a page long.

Britton’s poems are tight and neat, as if edited with a scalpel. He told friends he wanted his work to be universal and to speak to anyone. In contrast to the sometimes flamboyant self-disclosure of many of his contemporaries, his poems offer little insight into his life, who he was, or what made him tick.

more here.

Kalefa Sanneh at The New Yorker:

Hopkins is now thirty-eight, and one of the most celebrated electronic musicians of his generation. He has a paradoxical ability to make obsessively engineered tracks that sound friendly and generous; his sensibility is openhearted and sometimes sentimental—an approach that can make him seem like an outlier in the world of electronic music. Hopkins is known for his collaborations and soundtracks and, above all, his own albums, which appear every five years or so and then reappear on innumerable best-of lists. Next month, he will release “Singularity,” ending a quiet but dramatic period in his life, during which he recovered from the rigors of touring by subjecting his body to other kinds of stress: desert treks, controlled breathing, freezing baths. Apparently, these exertions had an effect, because the new album is both the gentlest and the most epic of Hopkins’s career.

“Singularity” is an hour-long ode to spiritual transcendence that also resembles pleasant background noise—at least, it does at first. The album includes a handful of wispy, beatless tracks that might be considered ambient music, a genre that Eno invented. In the liner notes to “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” from 1978, Eno wrote that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Hopkins has been pleased to learn that his albums have generally failed to meet this exacting standard. “Someone will say, I went to do some cooking and put it on, and ended up sitting down and listening to the whole thing,” he says. “Obviously, that’s what you want—you’ve captured them.”

more here.

Julian Barnes at the LRB:

Now, with time and a shift of art-historical wind, we may see Cassatt a little more clearly, and a little more as herself. She is, largely, a painter of the great indoors, the here and now, and of women’s space within it. She does not do landscape or nature – the urban park and the boating lake are as far as that goes; nor does she give us action, history, myth, still life, houses, horses, sunsets or those forbidden parts of the Opéra. She does not do men much, though her double portrait of her brother Alexander with his son Robert, the boy sitting on the arm of his father’s armchair, their black suits blending into one and their button-black eyes popping in parallel towards some unknown object (a joint-television gaze from pre-television times) makes us wish she had portrayed the opposite sex more. She does mothers and babies with an acute eye for the weight and fall of an infant’s flesh, and an acute sense of the weight and fall of an infant’s mood. She made a series of colour prints whose limpidity, grace and line echo and learn from the Japanese without appearing in any way subservient (though it would be good to know what the Japanese thought, and think, about them). She did some rather weak pictures of the big-hatted daughters of friends. And she did several one-off paintings – like Little Girl in a Blue Armchair and In the Loge – whose power has never faded. It is an indicator of Cassatt’s return to wider fashion that Simon Schama included two of her ‘Japanese’ prints in an episode of the TV show Civilisations, while in a later one David Olusoga brought In the Loge to his argument.

more here.

Freeman Dyson in Nautilus:

All through a long life I had three main concerns, with a clear order of priority. Family came first, friends second, and work third.” So writes the pioneering theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in the introduction to his newly published collection of letters, Maker of Patterns. Spanning about four decades, the collection presents a first-person glimpse into a life that witnessed epochal changes both in world history and in physics. Here, we present short excerpts from nine of Dyson’s letters, with a focus on his relationship with the physicist Richard Feynman. Dyson and Feynman had both professional and personal bonds: Dyson helped interpret and draw attention to Feynman’s work—which went on to earn a Nobel Prize—and the two men traveled together and worked side by side. Taken together, these letters present a unique perspective of each man. Feynman’s effervescent energy comes through, as does Dyson’s modesty and deep admiration for his colleague. So too does the excitement each scientist felt for his role in uncovering some of the foundations of modern-day theoretical physics.

March 8, 1948

Yesterday I went for a long walk in the spring sunshine with Trudy Eyges and Richard Feynman. Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her, and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war.

More here.

Freeman Dyson in Nautilus:

All through a long life I had three main concerns, with a clear order of priority. Family came first, friends second, and work third.” So writes the pioneering theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in the introduction to his newly published collection of letters, Maker of Patterns. Spanning about four decades, the collection presents a first-person glimpse into a life that witnessed epochal changes both in world history and in physics. Here, we present short excerpts from nine of Dyson’s letters, with a focus on his relationship with the physicist Richard Feynman. Dyson and Feynman had both professional and personal bonds: Dyson helped interpret and draw attention to Feynman’s work—which went on to earn a Nobel Prize—and the two men traveled together and worked side by side. Taken together, these letters present a unique perspective of each man. Feynman’s effervescent energy comes through, as does Dyson’s modesty and deep admiration for his colleague. So too does the excitement each scientist felt for his role in uncovering some of the foundations of modern-day theoretical physics.

March 8, 1948

Yesterday I went for a long walk in the spring sunshine with Trudy Eyges and Richard Feynman. Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her, and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war.

More here.

The British-Libyan writer on an uncensored Arabian Nights, why Proust makes you feel smarter – and the diaries of a pianist that changed his life.

Hisham Matar in The Guardian:

The book I am currently reading
I have been reading one poem from On Balance, Sinéad Morrissey’s excellent new collection, every night before falling asleep. I have only recently come across the work of the Moroccan essayist Abdelfattah Kilito. I am now on Thou Shall Not Speak My Language. He is marvellously intelligent and witty.

The book that changed my life
The uncensored version of The Arabian Nights, with all its sex and strangeness and horrible intrigue, was read to me when I was too young to understand much of it and so it bled into my consciousness, which is perhaps why I am as suspicious of it as I am trusting. I have since found its ghost lurking in Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and Jorge Louis Borges, among others.

The book I wish I’d written
I have studied with covetous admiration In Search of Lost Time, a book that has expanded my sense of the world and did so in ways that did not seem to bring me out of myself but rather deeper into it. One of Proust’s many gifts is to make you feel smarter, finer and capable of greater sensitivities than you perhaps ever assumed. For me, no novel contains as many ideas or as much pleasure and delight.

More here.

Michael Shellenberger in Forbes:

Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.

People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.

And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.

And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.

Electricity prices increased by:

51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;

24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;

over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.

What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity rise instead of decline?

More here.

Vali Nasr in The Atlantic:

Among the most strident critics of the nuclear deal with Iran are those who believe it furthers the survival of its leadership. By throwing Iran’s rulers an economic lifeline, they believe, the deal is an abject failure. America’s goal, they say, should never have been “denuclearization,” but regime change.

These days, those regime-change evangelists, having shrugged off the lessons of the Iraq War, are back at the helm of U.S. foreign policy. John Bolton, Donald Trump’s new national-security adviser, has long advocated regime change in Iran, and more recently has argued that the administration should openly embrace it as a foreign-policy goal. At the same time, Bolton and his ilk are pushing for a denuclearization deal with North Korea ahead of Trump’s planned summit with Kim Jong Un, the country’s leader. Preparations for the meeting will likely be in full swing by May 12, the next deadline for extending the Iran deal. The Trump administration, in other words, could find itself in the odd situation of tearing down the nuclear deal with Iran while pursuing a similar deal with North Korea.

With proponents of regime change ascendant, the temptation in the Trump administration to cast the deal aside in an effort to weaken Iran is great. Yet the immediate ripple effects of such a decision will breed dangerous consequences, both in Iran and across the Middle East—ones that the Kim regime will be watching carefully.

More here.

John Launer in Literary Hub:

Why do males exist? If you learned biology at school, your teachers will probably have told you it was because combining genes from different individuals—one male and one female—increases variation in a species, and it is variation that helps a species survive.

Unfortunately, most evolutionary experts stopped believing in this explanation over 30 years ago. From a reproductive point of view, no individual is interested in anything very much beyond donating genes to the next generation. As far as whole species are concerned, they are preserved or wiped out more or less at random, largely according to the whims of climate and geology. In addition, you don’t actually need sexes to produce variation: the vast majority of organisms like microbes happily mutate and vary withoutsex.

The great evolutionist John Maynard Smith regarded sex as more or less inexplicable. He talked of “the twofold cost of males.” First, it is incomprehensible that any female should want to throw away half her genes and take on someone else’s, when theoretically she could just produce clones of herself instead. Secondly, the males of many species are entirely useless at doing anything except sitting around, getting fat at the females’ expense, and—in the words of Richard Dawkins—duffing up other males. Among some animals, such as elephant seals, the vast majority of males die as wasteful, disappointed virgins.

Given this wastefulness, it is perhaps not surprising that there are at least 40 species where the female kills the male during or after sex.

More here.

Geoff Dyer at Literary Hub:

Already, by 1960, Garry Winogrand was taking pictures that didn’t make any sense. Even now, we struggle to get a handle on them, but back then, before the pictures had altered the grammar of photography sufficiently to enable us to get to grips with them . . .

The amount of information in the photograph below is considerable but the ordering of it so minimal—or discreet, at any rate—it’s difficult to know how to process it. How many lives are being actively lived in this picture? What is happening? What are we looking at? For one thing, we’re looking at a manifestation or projection of our own confusion in the form of the guy scratching his head, a gesture that might for him be purely mechanical (an itch?) but which here becomes imbued with psychological and existential weight because he is asking the question we are asking: What is going on here? So the person asking this question becomes the key to the riddle of which he is a central part.

This key turns out to be compositional even though, back in 1960, it seemed to many that Winogrand had given composition the elbow—in this instance, quite literally. The elbow is the element on which the whole picture hinges. The head-scratcher’s elbow links arms, as it were, with those of the other walkers—especially the woman in the white dress, behind him and to his left—which leads, in turn, to those of the woman in the black dress, the diagonal straps of which mirror the triangulation of upper and lower arm hinged at the elbow.

more here.