Ori Weisberg at The Forward:

Indeed, today’s Zionists often view Israel not as a modern state, but as the rebirth of ancient sovereignty. And yet, this view is not absolutely historically accurate, either. While artifacts certainly substantiate the existence of a Jewish presence in ancient Israel, this view projects a modern nationalist movement onto a historical period that predates nationalism by four millennia.

And just as Abbas’s comments hurt the chances of negotiations, the Jewish narrative is also hurting both Israelis and Palestinians alike.

For it’s not as simple as saying that Jews lived in Israel in ancient times, therefore the land belongs to the modern Jewish state. Zionism successfully activated anticipatory claims embedded in Jewish tradition, yet it is nevertheless very much a modern nationalist movement.

This move is hardly unique to Zionism. Nationalist movements often stake their legitimacy on claims to antiquity; it’s a trope academic historians call “primordialism”.

more here.

Roger Kimball at The New Criterion:

At the heart of Trumpist populism, however—and I suspect of all populism—is a different yearning: for security, especially for those who feel forgotten and left behind. If Reaganite conservatism, at least in theory, has been deeply skeptical of the power of government to manage free markets and create prosperity, at the core of Trumpist populism—and maybe of all populism—is faith in governmental power, or at least a willingness born of desperation to use such power energetically to improve the lot of the people.

Donald Trump embodies this impulse. Painting a somber picture of American misery and corruption in his acceptance speech in 2016, he proclaimed: “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” It is a breathtaking divergence from the pro–free market, pro–limited government political and economic philosophy of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and other heroes of mainstream American conservatism.

Is the policy gap between Kempism and Trumpism unbridgeable? In the next few months, presumably, we will find out.

more here.

Daniel Zalkus at The Baffler:

You see, The New Criterion was founded in 1982 to be a kind of National Redoubt of High Culture, an earthwork against, as the editors subtly put it in the first issue, “the insidious assault on mind that was one of the most repulsive features of the radical movement of the sixties.” It was the brainchild of pianist Samuel Lipman and New York’s crankiest critic, Hilton Kramer, who for many years thundered from his New York Timesperch against the modish impostures of the art world.

Kramer often got it wrong. All critics do, and that can’t be held against him. No one bats 1000. But when Kramer struck out, he struck out big, like when he panned Philip Guston’s transition back to figurative work, widely recognized now as some of the most significant painting of the second half of the twentieth century, as the act of “A mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum.” He may have been wrong about Guston, but that line and the critical move it entails, calling out an act of reverse pretension, high acting low, is unforgettable. So it’s surprising that Kramer’s protégé, the man who succeeded him as editor after his death in 2012, forgot it.

A banner image on The New Criterion’s website, right above an enticement to subscribe, tells you who is in charge, in case you did not know: “The New Criterion—A monthly review edited by Roger Kimball.” (Emphasis theirs.)

more here.

William Thorndike Jr. in Harvard Magazine:

Two hundred and seventy years ago this month, aged 42 and weeks from the midpoint of his long life, Benjamin Franklin did something highly unusual. He retired. Specifically, he sat down at a perennially cluttered desk in his cramped Philadelphia print shop and signed an innovative “Co-Partnership” agreement with his foreman, David Hall. The document was a scant two pages in length, but it immediately changed the trajectory of Franklin’s life and career. Not coincidentally, later that year Franklin hired the distinguished Colonial artist Robert Feke to paint his portrait (now held in the Portrait Collection of the Harvard Art Museums) and record this pivotal moment for posterity.

Franklin’s retirement (memorialized in his best-selling autobiography) helped establish the modern concept of a multi-career life and ranks among his great inventions. The transaction gave 50 percent ownership of his firm to Hall. Franklin’s printing business was unlike any other in the Colonies: in the eighteenth century, printing was an inherently local trade focused on small business and government customers, and staple products like stationery, legal notices, currency, invoices, and invitations. Franklin cracked this parochial model open along two dimensions: as publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper and the wildly popular Poor Richard’s Almanac, he was a substantial owner of copyrights. He was also a sort of pioneering venture capitalist, providing custom-designed presses to aspiring printers in far-flung places (New York, Newport, Charleston, even Antigua) in return for a share in the profits.

Franklin was anxious to move on to other activities, but in the embryonic economy of mid-eighteenth century Philadelphia, the option of selling his firm did not exist. There were no investment bankers, no Googles or Amazons voraciously looking for acquisitions. The outline of the deal with Hall was based on the template created in his earlier printing investments and was designed to solve this problem by guaranteeing Franklin the next best thing to an outright sale: a long-term passive income.

More here.

Emily Matchar in Smithsonian:

Electric eels, which slither along the muddy bottoms of ponds and streams in the Amazon and Orinoco river basins of South America, can cause a shock powerful enough to knock a horse off its feet. Their power comes from cells called electrocytes that discharge when the eel is hunting or feels threatened. Now, researchers are taking inspiration from these eels (not technically eels, as a matter of fact, but a type of fish) to develop new power sources that could one day power electrical devices in the human body, such as pacemakers, sensors and prosthetic organs. Electric eels can synchronize the charging and discharging of thousands of cells in their bodies simultaneously, says Max Shtein, a chemical engineer at the University of Michigan who worked on the research. “If you think about doing that very quickly – [in a] mere fraction of a second – for thousands of cells simultaneously, that’s a rather clever wiring scheme,” he says. The electrocytes of an electric eel are large and flat, with hundreds stacked together horizontally. Because of the way they’re stacked, the cells’ tiny individual voltages add up to a significant kick. This is possible because the surrounding tissue insulates the electrocytes so the voltage flows forward to the water in front of the fish – stunning or killing prey or threats – then flows back to create a complete circuit.

Shtein and his team tried to copy the eel’s physiology by creating about 2,500 units made of sodium and chloride dissolved in water-based hydrogels. They printed out rows of tiny multicolored buttons of hydrogels on long sheets of plastic, alternating the salty hydrogels with ones made just with water.

More here.

If You Would Read the Bible

go to
some foreign place,
Juarez, say,
in Mexico,
and listen
to a large woman,
a powerful
laughing mother,
talk about
her children
crawling bare assed
on the dirt floor,
and about the way
roses grow
trellised on
an adobe wall,

and then
try to write it down
in a letter to a friend,
in English –
try to catch
the words
as she said them

until you recognize
there is no way
– no way at all –
to do it

except to take
your friend by the hand,
returning to Juarez,
and go to the woman,
the laughing woman,
and yes,
humbly,
listen
with awe.

by Arthur Powers
from EchotheoReview

Benjamin Ogden in the New York Times:

In a 2010 letter to his friend and fellow novelist Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee made a remark that would not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with his work: “I must say that I get impatient with fiction that doesn’t try something that hasn’t been tried before, preferably with the medium itself.” Coetzee has long believed that art is superior to sport because the artist gets to make up the rules of the game as he goes along, while the sportsman must stick to the rules agreed upon by others. The writer who reinvents the rules of the genre in which he writes is an outlaw — a dangerous, romantic, if marginalized figure of mysterious intentions — while a writer who writes as he is expected to is under the control of the artistic circumstances into which he was born. Coetzee has been an outlaw novelist since 1973, when “Dusklands,” a pair of genre-defying novellas that helped introduce elements of postmodernism to South African writing, was first published. His experiments with what can be done with the novel form have continued for more than 40 years, most eccentrically in “Foe,” “Elizabeth Costello” and “Diary of a Bad Year,” most ingeniously in “Life and Times of Michael K,” “Disgrace” and “The Childhood of Jesus.”

“Late Essays: 2006-2017” brings together most of the literary criticism Coetzee has written during the last 11 years. Of the 23 essays that make up the book, nine (most notably a brilliant discussion of Philip Roth’s “Nemesis”) first appeared in some version in The New York Review of Books. Nine others are introductions to books Coetzee has chosen for his Biblioteca Personal, or personal library, a collection of 12 books (one an anthology of world poetry) issued in Spanish translation by the Argentine press El Hilo de Ariadna. Coetzee has explained that he selected for this personal library works that “played a part, major or minor, in my own formation as a writer.”

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

When Jason Shepherd first saw the structures under a microscope, he thought they looked like viruses. The problem was: he wasn’t studying viruses.

Shepherd studies a gene called Arc which is active in neurons, and plays a vital role in the brain. A mouse that’s born without Arc can’t learn or form new long-term memories. If it finds some cheese in a maze, it will have completely forgotten the right route the next day. “They can’t seem to respond or adapt to changes in their environment,” says Shepherd, who works at the University of Utah, and has been studying Arc for years. “Arc is really key to transducing the information from those experiences into changes in the brain.”

Despite its importance, Arc has been a very difficult gene to study. Scientists often work out what unusual genes do by comparing them to familiar ones with similar features—but Arc is one-of-a-kind. Other mammals have their own versions of Arc, as do birds, reptiles, and amphibians. But in each animal, Arc seems utterly unique—there’s no other gene quite like it. And Shepherd learned why when his team isolated the proteins that are made by Arc, and looked at them under a powerful microscope.

He saw that these Arc proteins assemble into hollow, spherical shells that look uncannily like viruses. “When we looked at them, we thought: What are these things?” says Shepherd. They reminded him of textbook pictures of HIV, and when he showed the images to HIV experts, they confirmed his suspicions. That, to put it bluntly, was a huge surprise. “Here was a brain gene that makes something that looks like a virus,” Shepherd says.

That’s not a coincidence. The team showed that Arc descends from an ancient group of genes called gypsy retrotransposons, which exist in the genomes of various animals, but can behave like their own independent entities.

More here.

Roger McNamee in Washington Monthly:

In early 2006, I got a call from Chris Kelly, then the chief privacy officer at Facebook, asking if I would be willing to meet with his boss, Mark Zuckerberg. I had been a technology investor for more than two decades, but the meeting was unlike any I had ever had. Mark was only twenty-two. He was facing a difficult decision, Chris said, and wanted advice from an experienced person with no stake in the outcome.

When we met, I began by letting Mark know the perspective I was coming from. Soon, I predicted, he would get a billion-dollar offer to buy Facebook from either Microsoft or Yahoo, and everyone, from the company’s board to the executive staff to Mark’s parents, would advise him to take it. I told Mark that he should turn down any acquisition offer. He had an opportunity to create a uniquely great company if he remained true to his vision. At two years old, Facebook was still years away from its first dollar of profit. It was still mostly limited to students and lacked most of the features we take for granted today. But I was convinced that Mark had created a game-changing platform that would eventually be bigger than Google was at the time. Facebook wasn’t the first social network, but it was the first to combine true identity with scalable technology. I told Mark the market was much bigger than just young people; the real value would come when busy adults, parents and grandparents, joined the network and used it to keep in touch with people they didn’t get to see often.

My little speech only took a few minutes. What ensued was the most painful silence of my professional career. It felt like an hour. Finally, Mark revealed why he had asked to meet with me: Yahoo had made that billion-dollar offer, and everyone was telling him to take it.

More here.

Algis Valiunas at The New Atlantis:

In Watson’s eyes, science is “the highest form of human achievement.” In his early adolescence, excited by his love of birdwatching, the thought of a career as a naturalist had inspired him. But to pursue such a course, he later came to understand, would be to dabble in trifles. For among the sciences, molecular biology is peerless: Creatures, or to call them by their less poetic name, organisms, become worthy of the most serious interest only when they’re taken apart to their elemental components.

Watson’s view of molecular biology describes an intellectual — and moral — adventure that is just getting underway. The potential of molecular biology for making human existence more agreeable and more complete — more fully human, one might say, not to say trans-human — seems nearly boundless.

Thus Watson eloquently promotes and prophesies. He is our most forceful spokesman for what René Descartes called “knowledge which is most useful in life,” which will “make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature,” conducing “principally [to] the preservation of health, which is undoubtedly the first good, and the foundation of all the other goods of this life.” Like Descartes, Watson feels a moral obligation to spread the word about the new beneficial possibilities of the everlasting truth put to good use.

more here.

What Happened Here Before

— 300,000,000—

First a sea: soft sands, muds, and marls

— loading, compressing, heating, crumpling,

crushing, recrystallizing, infiltrating,

several times lifted and submerged,

intruding molten granite magma

deep-cooled and speckling,

gold quartz fills the cracks—

— 80,000,000—

sea-bed strata raised and folded,

granite far below.

warm quiet centuries of rains

(make dark red tropic soils)

wear down two miles of surface,

lay bare the veins and tumble heavy gold

in streambeds

slate and schist rock-riffles catch it –

volcanic ash floats down and dams the streams,

piles up the gold and gravel—

— 3,000,000—

flowing north, two rivers joined,

to make a wide long lake.

and then it tilted and rivers fell apart

all running west

to cut the gorges of the Feather,

Bear, and Yuba.

Ponderosa pine, manzanita, black oak, mountain yew,

deer, coyote, bluejay, gray squirrel,

ground squirrel, fox, blacktail hare,

ringtail, bobcat, bear,

all came to live here.

Read more »

Andrew Motion at the Hudson Review:

“We see the world once, in childhood, the rest is memory.” So says Louise Glück, and her remark is full of wisdom. In Milosz’s case, the sheer eventfulness of his adult existence means that once his childhood was over, “the rest” of his life contained a great deal more than just memory. But there’s no question that the habits and insights of his maturity rest on the foundation of his earliest perceptions. He was born in 1911 to a Polish-speaking family in Szetejnie, Lithuania, which like the adjacent territories of Poland, Latvia and Estonia, was at the time a part of the Russian empire. His family, although not wealthy (his father was an engineer), occupied a somewhat patrician position within this mix of traditions, languages and cultures; despite (and because of) the turbulence produced by the outbreak of the First World War, which resulted in Milosz’s first experience of deracination, he inherited from both his parents a remarkable sense of centeredness. A feeling, that is, not just of why education and high culture mattered, particularly in times of jeopardy, but also of how such things were inextricably bound into the traditions of the Catholic church.

And into the traditions of the countryside. In his entrancing autobiographical novel The Issa Valley, Milosz remembers the landscape around Szetejnie in terms that blend delight in everyday things with the same exalted sense of “something far more deeply interfused” that Wordsworth wrote about in “Tintern Abbey”: “Happy the child,” he says in one typical passage, “who wakes on a summer morning to the oriole’s song outside his window, to a chorus of quacks, cackling, and gaggling from the barnyard, to a steady stream of voices bathed in never-ending light, to appreciate the futility of such musical exertions.

more here.

Gabriel Bell in Salon:

Asked to draw parallels between his fictional narrative of a fascist, anti-Semitic uprising on American soil, Roth said, "Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency." He add that actual, real 2018 president Donald Trump is, by comparison, "a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac." It's about as good a summation of what our current commander in chief represents as you'll get.

Roth, when asked if he could have predicted today's political and cultural landscape responds that, "No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic H. L. Mencken, who famously described American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses”) could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon." He adds, "How naïve I was in 1960 to think that I was an American living in preposterous times! How quaint!"

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Working memory is a sort of "mental sketchpad" that allows you to accomplish everyday tasks such as calling in your hungry family's takeout order and finding the bathroom you were just told "will be the third door on the right after you walk straight down that hallway and make your first left." It also allows your mind to go from merely responding to your environment to consciously asserting your agenda. "Working memory allows you to choose what to pay attention to, choose what you hold in mind, and choose when to make decisions and take action," says Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor in MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. "It's all about wresting control from the environment to your own self. Once you have something like working memory, you go from being a simple creature that's buffeted by the environment to a creature that can control the environment."

For years Miller has been curious about how working memory—particularly the volitional control of it—actually works. In a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences led by Picower Institute postdoc Andre Bastos, Miller's lab shows that the underlying mechanism depends on different frequencies of brain rhythms synchronizing neurons in distinct layers of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the area of the brain associated with higher cognitive function. As animals performed a variety of working memory tasks, higher-frequency gamma rhythms in superficial layers of the PFC were regulated by lower-frequency alpha/beta frequency rhythms in deeper cortical layers. The findings suggest not only a general model of working memory, and the volition that makes it special, but also new ways that clinicians might investigate conditions such as schizophrenia where working memory function appears compromised.

More here.

Bari Weiss in the New York Times:

I am a proud feminist, and this is what I thought while reading Grace’s story:

If you are hanging out naked with a man, it’s safe to assume he is going to try to have sex with you.

If the inability to choose a pinot noir over a pinot grigio offends you, you can leave right then and there.

If you don’t like the way your date hustles through paying the check, you can say, “I’ve had a lovely evening and I’m going home now.”

If you go home with him and discover he’s a terrible kisser, say “I’m out.”

If you start to hook up and don’t like the way he smells or the way he talks (or doesn’t talk), end it.

If he pressures you to do something you don’t want to do, use a four-letter word, stand up on your two legs and walk out his door.

Aziz Ansari sounds like he was aggressive and selfish and obnoxious that night. Isn’t it heartbreaking and depressing that men — especially ones who present themselves publicly as feminists — so often act this way in private? Shouldn’t we try to change our broken sexual culture? And isn’t it enraging that women are socialized to be docile and accommodating and to put men’s desires before their own? Yes. Yes. Yes.

But the solution to these problems does not begin with women torching men for failing to understand their “nonverbal cues.” It is for women to be more verbal. It’s to say: “This is what turns me on.” It’s to say “I don’t want to do that.” And, yes, sometimes it means saying piss off.

The single most distressing thing to me about Grace’s story is that the only person with any agency in the story seems to be Aziz Ansari. Grace is merely acted upon.

More here.

Stephen McCloskey in The Wire:

Western governments have been fuelling the Yemeni crisis through lucrative weapon sales to Riyadh used in Saudi’s three year bombing campaign. Amnesty International has argued that:

“Countries such as the USA, UK and France, which continue to supply coalition members with arms, are allowing Saudi Arabia and its allies to flagrantly flout international law and risk being complicit in grave violations, including war crimes.”

Amnesty urges these countries to: “immediately halt the flow of arms and military assistance to members of the Saudi-led coalition for use in Yemen. This includes any equipment or logistical support being used to maintain this blockade.”

The UK has licensed $4.6 billion worth of arms sales to the Saudi regime, a relationship described as ‘shameful’ by Campaign Against Arms Trade, given Riyadh’s record as “one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes.”

France, too, has sold “9 billion Euros of weaponry to Saudi Arabia from 2010-2016, amounting to 15-20% of France’s annual arms exports.”

And the US has “designed and negotiated a package totalling approximately $110 billion” with Riyadh in 2017 following on from a total of $115 billion approved in arms sales by the Obama administration in 2009-2016.

More here.

Anuschka de Rohan in The Guardian:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish.

More here.