Samuel Matlack at The New Atlantis:

The question of whether and how physics can be rendered in ordinary speech is nowhere more important than in our assessment of writers who try to present a vision of the world that is wholly other than what our everyday experience would have us believe, a world that, many think, is more real. This is the spirit of the recent book Reality Is Not What It Seems by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, which promises to be a “magic journey out of our commonsense view of things, far from complete.”

There is something deeply paradoxical about this project. On the one hand, it is motivated by a desire to dispel everyday illusions about the physical world that contribute to our human-centeredness. “We are obsessed with ourselves,” writes Rovelli. “We study our history, our psychology, our philosophy, our gods. Much of our knowledge revolves around ourselves, as if we were the most important thing in the universe.” Physics, he thinks, can teach us better.

On the other hand, the only way to take a popular audience on this “journey out of our commonsense view of things” in writing is in commonsense language, which is intricately tied to our everyday experience of the world. Writers therefore try to make physics intelligible to the general reader by translating esoteric mathematical theories into plain terms, while at the same time trying to show how conventional descriptions of the world as it appears to us do not match up with physicists’ descriptions of actual reality. This is a vexing task.

more here.

Steven Knepper at Commonweal:

Rowan Williams argues that the “tragic imagination” is a moral imagination. Tragic drama teaches us that calamity can be narrated, that it can be drawn, at least to some degree, back into shared experience. There is a spare hope in this. It shows that “we have not been silenced forever by loss.” Furthermore, tragedy requires us to attend to the sufferings of others on stage. It presents us with “different kinds of witnessing to pain” and teaches us that “suffering calls out [for] recognition.” This is not a matter of straightforward empathy, which risks deluding us about our ability to identify with sufferers. Tragedy teaches us instead that “the suffering of others is not to be absorbed into our own feelings. But we also find that the suffering of others is already shared in human communication, recognized and named as loss or catastrophe.” Tragedy helps us recognize the limits of our own self-knowledge and the fragility of our condition.

Still, tragedy does not just dramatize individual fragility. Its representations of strife and cyclical violence, as in the paradigmatic Oresteia, dramatize the fragility of the political community as well. Indeed, in his opening chapter Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, claims that Athenian tragedy was a liturgical event.

more here.

Michael Burleigh at Literary Review:

Relations with Japan deteriorated when the Chinese discovered the possibilities of mobilising anti-Japanese sentiment, which became easier as Japanese nationalists began to baulk at the ‘cultural’ restraints the USA had placed upon them. It does not help that Japanese politics is frequently dynastic, so that the sons and grandsons of wartime figures have rotated through conservative cabinets. Some of these instantly forgettable figures have felt emboldened enough to pay their respects at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to those who have died for their emperor. In 1978 the chief priest enshrined fourteen Class-A war criminals there, adding them to the 2.46 million already commemorated at the site. Emperor Akihito has, as his father did, always given the shrine a wide berth, but not so some of Japan’s conservative politicians, notably Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzō Abe, the former and current prime ministers, who have stoked up nationalist feelings among Japanese incensed at how left-wing teachers’ unions have ensured that a masochistic version of the country’s history is fed to schoolchildren. Tempers worsened when Japanese academics began quibbling about the death toll in the Nanjing Massacre in 1937, the worst mass atrocity of the Sino-Japanese War. The fact that the Taiwanese tend to be nostalgic about the Japanese occupation (they still use Japanese administrative buildings, in contrast to the South Koreans, who tore them down in Seoul) adds to Chinese grievances.

more here.

From Lapham's Quarterly (St. Ogg's c. 1840):

Perhaps it was because teaching came naturally to Mr. Stelling that he set about it with that uniformity of method and independence of circumstances which distinguish the actions of animals understood to be under the immediate teaching of nature. With such unerring instinct, Mr. Stelling set to work at his natural method of instilling the Eton Grammar and Euclid into the mind of Tom Tulliver. This, he considered, was the only basis of solid instruction; all other means of education were mere charlatanism, and could produce nothing better than smatterers.

Fixed on this firm basis, a man might observe the display of various or special knowledge made by irregularly educated people with a pitying smile; all that sort of thing was very well, but it was impossible these people could form sound opinions. In holding this conviction, Mr. Stelling was not biased, as some tutors have been, by the excessive accuracy or extent of his own scholarship; and as to his views about Euclid, no opinion could have been freer from personal partiality. Mr. Stelling was very far from being led astray by enthusiasm, either religious or intellectual; on the other hand, he had no secret belief that everything was humbug. He thought religion was a very excellent thing, and Aristotle a great authority, and deaneries and prebends useful institutions, and Great Britain the providential bulwark of Protestantism, and faith in the unseen a great support to afflicted minds; he believed in all these things, as a Swiss hotel keeper believes in the beauty of the scenery around him, and in the pleasure it gives to artistic visitors. And in the same way, Mr. Stelling believed in his method of education; he had no doubt that he was doing the very best thing for Mr. Tulliver’s boy. Of course, when the miller talked of “mapping” and “summing” in a vague and diffident manner, Mr. Stel­ling had set his mind at rest by an assurance that he understood what was wanted; for how was it possible the good man could form any reasonable judgment about the matter? Mr. Stelling’s duty was to teach the lad in the only right way—indeed he knew no other; he had not wasted his time in the acquirement of anything abnormal.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

The genomes of plants and animals are littered with the remains of viruses that integrated themselves into their DNA hundreds of millions of years ago. Most of these viral remnants are inactive, but the latest research suggests that some evolved into genes that let cells communicate. A pair of papers^1,2 published in Cell on 11 January suggest that the protein encoded by one such gene uses its virus-like structure to shuttle information between cells: a new form of cellular communication that may be key to long-term memory formation and other neurological functions. Two research groups came across the phenomenon independently while studying extracellular vesicles — pieces of cell membranes that pinch off into bubbles and float away from the cells. These vesicles circulate throughout the body, but little is known about their function. The teams, led by neuroscientist Jason Shepherd at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and cell biologist Vivian Budnik at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, looked at mice and flies (Drosophila melanogaster), respectively.

Protective shells

The researchers found that many of the extracellular vesicles released by neurons contain a gene called Arc, which helps neurons to build connections with one another. Mice engineered to lack Arc have problems forming long-term memories, and several human neurological disorders are linked to this gene. When Shepherd and Budnik analysed the genetic sequences of mouse and fly versions of Arc, they found that they were similar to that of a viral gene called gag. Retroviruses such as HIV use the Gag protein to assemble protective shells called capsids that transport the virus’s genetic material between cells during infection. When the researchers looked at the Arc protein under a high-resolution microscope, they found that it formed a similar capsid and carried the genetic instructions, or messenger RNA (mRNA), that encode Arc. The capsid was then wrapped in a piece of the cell membrane and released as an extracellular vesicle. No other non-viral protein has been shown to form capsids and shuttle mRNA between cells. “It’s groundbreaking,” says Clive Bramham, a neuroscientist at the University of Bergen in Norway.

More here.

Jennifer Finney Boylan in Signature:

One suggestion I have for writers of memoir is that you should use the same rule to structure your scenes that you would use to decide when to arrive at, and when to leave, a cocktail party. That rule might be summarized: Come in late, and get out early.

Let’s say you’re invited to a party that begins at 9PM. What time do you arrive? Some folks might say ten o’clock, others closer to midnight, but almost no one would say to arrive exactly at 9PM. I admit that I’ve had a few friends who can be regularly depended upon to do just this, but let’s be honest: their exactitude is embarrassing. It makes me like them less.

Plus, being the first person at a party is mortifying. You stand around, watching your host take cheese out of the refrigerator. As Jimmy Durante use to say, “It’s mortifyin’.”

And in just this way, you don’t want to start your first scene — or any scene, for that matter — from square one. Don’t write the narrative equivalent of people who arrive at a nine o’clock party at nine o’clock. Arrive late—not so late that your reader (or your host) is overly confused. Arrive precisely late enough to be interesting.

Example: What’s the most commonly used opening sentence in stories written by student writers? I can assure you it’s something like, “Ring! Ring! Ring! said the alarm clock.”

More here.

Kristin Houser in Futurism:

A pair of researchers have uncovered a potential bridge between general relativityand quantum mechanics — the two preeminent physics theories — and it could force physicists to rethink the very nature of space and time.

Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity describes gravity as a geometric property of space and time. The more massive an object, the greater its distortion of spacetime, and that distortion is felt as gravity.

In the 1970s, physicists Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein noted a link between the surface area of black holes and their microscopic quantum structure, which determines their entropy. This marked the first realization that a connection existed between Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Less than three decades later, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena observed another link between between gravity and the quantum world. That connection led to the creation of a model that proposes that spacetime can be created or destroyed by changing the amount of entanglement between different surface regions of an object.

In other words, this implies that spacetime itself, at least as it is defined in models, is a product of the entanglement between objects.

To further explore this line of thinking, ChunJun Cao and Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) set out to see if they could actually derive the dynamical properties of gravity (as familiar from general relativity) using the framework in which spacetime arises out of quantum entanglement.

More here.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

Two political scientists specializing in how democracies decay and die have compiled four warning signs to determine if a political leader is a dangerous authoritarian:

1. The leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules. 2. He or she denies the legitimacy of opponents. 3. He or she tolerates violence. 4. He or she shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media.

“A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors at Harvard, write in their important new book, “How Democracies Die,” which will be released next week.

“With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century,” they say, which sounds reassuring. Unfortunately, they have one update: “Donald Trump met them all.”

We tend to assume that the threat to democracies comes from coups or violent revolutions, but the authors say that in modern times, democracies are more likely to wither at the hands of insiders who gain power initially through elections. That’s what happened, to one degree or another, in Russia, the Philippines, Turkey, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Poland and Peru.

More here.

Nathan Vanderklippe in The Globe and Mail:

In late 2013, he was arrested and accused of "fabricating and spreading rumours." Late in 2016, a court found him guilty of defamation and ordered him to apologize on his social-media account, which at the time had 740,000 followers. If he was unwilling to do that, the court said, he could pay $115 to publish the verdict on an authorized website. Mr. Liu paid the money.

Then, he said, the judge raised the fee to $2,900.

But in the midst of Mr. Liu's attempt to seek legal redress early in 2017, he discovered that his life had abruptly changed: Without any notice, he had been caught up in the early reaches of a social-credit system that China is developing as a pervasive new tool for social control – one expected to one day tighten the state's grip on its citizens. Critics have called it an Orwellian creation – a new kind of "thought police."

What it meant for Mr. Liu is that when he tried to buy a plane ticket, the booking system refused his purchase, saying he was "not qualified." Other restrictions soon became apparent: He has been barred from buying property, taking out a loan or travelling on the country's top-tier trains.

"There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to," he said. "What's really scary is there's nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere."

More here.

William Corwin at artcritical:

Within the high walls of a cloistered garden, a young man falls in love with a rose, but seeking every possible avenue through which to attain his affection, it becomes increasingly clear he can never have it without destroying that aspect of it which he loves. With the general plot line of the original “Romance of the Rose” (1230 CE) in our minds, and its universal ramifications for all human relationships, we can follow the path that Anselm Kiefer weaves in his newest exhibition, “Transition from Cool to Warm,” rich with themes of sexuality, eroticism, femininity and longing. Though bookended with several massive paintings, the heart of the exhibition comprises watercolors and books. The exhibition has also been, to extend the metaphor, bookmarked by two events: an interview with Paul Holdengräber at The New York Public Library and an intimate demonstration of the plaster-soaked-cardboard books taken out of their vitrines at the gallery. These extra-curricular activities allowed the viewer into Kiefer’s thorny garden, and explicated a profound transition of the artist/author from his pulpit of philosopher and historian to a much more earthy place, looking up at the stars with the rest of us.

The exhibition has been laid out along the plan of a basilica, with a pair of rooms as aisles on either side of a main nave. The inner sanctum of the gallery contains a presentation of Kiefer’s newest one-off art books—hybrid objects that ensnare a dizzying number of references: to Wagner and Nordic mythology, Abrahamic traditions, Rodin, Picasso and the modern conception of data storage and presentation.

more here.

Tom Millay at Marginalia:

Kevin Hart is not one to boast. Nothing in this volume, which discusses religious poetry, would let one know that Hart is a major contemporary poet (as Harold Bloom amongst others has claimed), nor that some of his poems are religious. We do not find out that Hart is the one who has written the lines: “I want to live/Like a water spider over my own life/And touch again the month we fell in love/And feel its flesh,” nor that he has written “The Room,” which is said to have sustained a captured Chilean soldier who had memorized the poem through a period of intense mental and physical torture.

Perhaps Hart wanted the volume, one of a number of important theoretical works he penned, to stand on its own, and it certainly does; however, it is worth mentioning that this theoretical account of religious poetry is written by someone who is a practicing religious poet. The book is essentially an apologia for religious poetry accomplished through a novel mode of argumentation: phenomenology. As far as I am aware, this is the first major treatment of religious poetry in the field of phenomenology, and the result is a stirring defense of religious poetry against two major detractors of the very idea.

more here.

The Carpet Merchant

Wary as an animal she sniffs the air
enters the color of wounds, shadows
of crushed aubergine, the cedar dark
where fretted shutters jigsaw the blazing light.

Outside the cries of saffron vendors
fade, the clatter of the bazaar
where fair-haired English teachers
flirt with traders for Turkish delight.

Elegant he sits her on soft cushions
nods to the olive boy to bring her cayi
and limpid apple tea, clicks his fingers
to conduct the symphony of rugs.

which unroll like prayers, The knots
are looped and dropped, he explains,
for perfection belongs to Allah.
He offers her weaves of indigo,

faded of cochineal, where trellises
of butterflies symbolize the transience
of love, and corrugated arcs a nomad's
thirst for waves. he tells her this was

his father's house. How as children
they jumped naked to the sea from the carved
balcony, as he pushes to the shutter,
brushing a cool hand against her white shoulder.
.

by Sue Hubbard
from Everything Begins with the Skin
Enitharmon Press, 1994

Charlotte Shane at Bookforum:

Anesthesia has been around for over 170 years, and in spite of its inherent drama it’s impressively nonlethal. Current estimates place the death toll at about one in two hundred thousand or even one in three hundred thousand, which means—according to the earnest nonprofit the National Safety Council—that you or I are more likely to die from insect stings, “excessive natural heat,” or “contact with sharp objects” than either of us is from being put under. Properly supervised anesthesia is not only exceedingly safe but also ubiquitous, and necessary for a slew of lifesaving and life-improving procedures. Yet in these heady days of organic, “toxin”-free lifestyle goals, wariness of medical convention abounds. People rush to point out that we (“we” meaning doctors, which “we” usually aren’t) don’t really know how anesthesia works, thereby implying that it’s fundamentally suspect. There are movements in opposition to advances like vaccines and hormonal birth control, so it makes sense that anesthesia, too, with its murky chemical magic, would be a source of unease.

Because anesthesia is unlikely to cause death outright, the case against it goes more or less as follows: It’s mysterious and it’s scary. The former is posited as the reason for the latter, but even if there were a flawless explanation for how anesthesia works, we’d still be disconcerted—it strips us of our awareness, movement, speech, and senses.

more here.

Kelly Servick in Science:

Drug-resistant bacteria are thwarting the world’s last-resort antibiotics, leading scientists to seek new compounds from poisonous frogs, backyard soil bacteria, and other wildlife. Now, scientists have found the makings of an exceptional microbe killer inside us: By tweaking a naturally occurring peptide—a short chain of amino acids—found in the human body, researchers have designed a drug that could wipe out obstinate microbes resistant to all available treatments. The candidate, now headed to human trials for skin infections, adds “an important piece … to the puzzle of creating a perfect antibiotic,” says Kim Lewis, a microbiologist at Northeastern University in Boston who was not involved in the work. When a small subset of bacteria survives antibiotic treatment, an infection can get out of control fast. As these resilient microbes thrive, they can group together on a surface—like a wound or a medical device—and encase themselves in a slimy protective layer known as a biofilm. Such colonies are hard for drugs to penetrate, and they harbor dormant cells called persisters that can quietly weather an antibiotic assault only to come roaring back later. Such infections “are the really nasty things for patients,” says immunologist Peter Nibbering at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

Nibbering and a team of Dutch collaborators are trying to combat these biofilm-associated infections by improving on a human peptide called LL-37, which helps regulate the body’s immune response. LL-37 already has some natural bacteria-killing abilities, and the researchers previously shortened the peptide to make a more powerful variant, consisting of 24 of the 37 original amino acids. In the new work, they optimized this peptide by making a series of random replacements to its building blocks without disrupting its overall structure. One variation, dubbed SAAP-148, proved a powerful little weapon, the team reports online today in Science Translational Medicine. Whereas most traditional antibiotics target specific groups of bacteria and kill by disrupting key mechanisms of those microbes, SAAP-148 is more of a generalist. It kills by damaging most any bacterium’s plasma membrane, causing it to spill its contents and deflate.

More here.

Danny Heitman in the Weekly Standard:

In a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, Henry Louis Mencken became not only one of America’s most memorable prose stylists, but also one of its most prolific ones.

Mencken (1880-1956) led many literary lives, often several at once. He began newspapering in his native Baltimore in 1899, quickly rising from a reporter to an editor and columnist. His bombastic commentaries for the Baltimore Sun gained attention far beyond his hometown, and his work for the Smart Set and the American Mercury affirmed his national profile as the dominant social critic of the 1920s. Mencken wrote about politics, music, drama, and literature, collecting his best essays in Prejudices, a series of six volumes that rests at the heart of his oeuvre. But there was so much more: memoirs, books on theology, ethics, the state of the American woman, and a mammoth philological study called The American Language. The thousands of letters he wrote to everyone from Theodore Dreiser to Ezra Pound to F. Scott Fitzgerald are their own monument to industry.

Mencken once estimated that he had published some 10 to 15 million words in various venues—a stream of production cut short by a 1948 stroke that deprived him of the ability to write. He lingered another eight years, though he casually suggested to British journalist Alistair Cooke that he traced the real time of his death to the year his typewriter fell silent.

But Mencken was much too prodigious a talent to let a small inconvenience like mortality get in the way of his literary legacy. In the more than six decades since his passing, a steady stream of Mencken material has continued to appear for the first time in book form, most of it drawn from his journalism.

More here.

Kastalia Medrano in Newsweek:

A topical gel for the treatment of erectile dysfunction is delivering explosive results through a key ingredient—nitroglycerin, the same substance found in dynamite.

Researchers at the University College Hospital in London and various other United Kingdom medical centers tested the product on a total of 220 male participants, according to the International Business Times. They found that after applying a small amount of the gel (a blob roughly the size of a pea) nearly half of the male participants studied reported getting an erection within five minutes, and 70 percent within 10 minutes—making the gel 12 times faster than industry standard Viagra, according to the Deccan Chronicle.

Erectile dysfunction affects about 40 percent of American men over the age of 40, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Viagra and its impotence-relieving peers, such as Cialis and Levitra, are consumed in pill form and generally take around 30 minutes to an hour to produce any results. Even then, they remain ineffective for approximately 30 percent of men who try them, according to Channel News Asia.

When rubbed onto the skin, the gel releases nitric gases that relaxes muscles, expanding blood vessels and helping increase blood flow.

More here.

Moustafa Bayoumi in The Nation:

A lot of Trump’s politics runs on his own anti-Muslim guano. In 2015 alone, he endorsed the idea of registering Muslims in a national database, said he would “strongly consider” closing down mosques in the United States, and campaigned on barring all Syrian refugees. He promoted the batshit theory that a quarter of US Muslims believe that violence against Americans “is justified as a part of the global jihad.” (In fact, Muslim Americans reject violence against civilians at a substantially higher rate than the general US public, according to the Pew Research Center.) And he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Trump’s defenders insisted that this was all just “campaign-trail rhetoric,” as if exploiting bigotry were any different from bigotry itself. But by the end of 2015, hate crimes against Muslims in the United States had rocketed to what was then their highest point since 2001. Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the University of California, San Bernardino, told The New York Times that the anti-Muslim violence in this period seemed to escalate immediately following Trump’s flamethrowing comments.

And the situation did not ease after 2015; instead, it got substantially worse.

More here. [Thanks to Corey Robin and Najla Said.]

Gary Scharnhorst in The Paris Review:

Over a century and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Daily Dramatic Chronicle predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was “bound to have a biographer one of these days—may it be a hundred years hence!” Albert Bigelow Paine’s official biography of the author was published less than fifty years later. It is an indispensable source for the legend of Saint Mark. Paine portrayed his subject as “the zealous champion of justice and liberty” who was “never less than fearless and sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the underdog.” As recently as 2002, Robert E. Weir echoed the dubious claim: Sam “was an indefatigable foe of anything that stood in the way of human progress and individual potential,” as if to suggest that the world would be a better place if only everyone emulated him. Sam Clemens’s most honest comments about his life, or so he asserted, appear in his autobiography, most of which appeared posthumously. “A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way,” he explained in 1899. “In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or grandsons.” “I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for a good reason,” he declared. “I can speak thence freely.” In a March 1904 letter to his friend W. D. Howells, Sam described his autobiography as