Martin Gayford at The Spectator:

Peter Paul Rubens thought highly of Charles I’s art collection. ‘When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-class masters,’ he wrote from London in 1629, ‘I have never seen such a large number in one place.’ In Charles I: King and Collector the Royal Academy has reassembled only a fraction of what the king once owned, yet even so this is a sumptuous feast of an exhibition. Some of what’s on show will be familiar to an assiduous British art-lover, since it comes from the Royal Collection and the National Gallery. But the sheer concentration of visual splendour is overwhelming and the installation spectacular.

The Renaissance, like spring, came late to northern Europe — and last of all to distant Britain. But in painting and architecture, it flowered briefly at the Stuart court. Charles persuaded two of the foremost living painters — Rubens and Van Dyck — to work for him and amassed the works of the great dead in enormous qualities: Raphaels, a small Michelangelo marble, Correggios, Veroneses, Tintorettos, Guido Renis and —above all — multitudes by Titian, the king’s favourite painter (and who can blame him).

more here.

Susan E. Haddox at Marginalia Review of Books:

What does it mean to be a man? It is not an easy question to answer. One of the contributions of the field of masculinity studies has been to observe that masculinity is not a stable quality, but one that must be contested and negotiated in different contexts and between different groups. The malleable nature of masculinity has particular relevance in examining biblical characters. The frequent characterization in the biblical texts of God as male creates difficulties for men, an idea that has been detailed by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. How does a person construct a relationship with the divine within social concepts of gender? Eilberg-Schwartz argues that the natural complementary partner for a male god would be a woman. To have a relationship with a male god, a male worshipper must assume the role of a woman. Because this relationship threatens normal standards of masculinity, women must be excluded from the cult entirely, in order to preserve a tenuous hold on maleness. Although Eilberg-Schwartz did not use this terminology, assuming a female identity in relation to God queers the male body. The male body is no longer exclusively male, but assumes an indeterminate gender identity, moving more toward the feminine. What does this do to the male psyche? What does this do to cultural concepts of women?

Rhiannon Graybill’s book Are We Not Men? takes an innovative approach to the issue. She explores the question of the queer bodies of men in relation to God, specifically the bodies of prophets, who have a direct and intimate connection to the divine.

more here.

Erin Blakemore at Poetry Magazine:

When Ramesses II died in 1213 BCE, the 96-year-old Egyptian pharaoh was so unusually old for ancient times that most of his subjects couldn’t imagine life without him. Some feared that his death meant the end of the world itself. After all, he had reigned for 66 years—long enough that many Egyptians lived and died without ever knowing another ruler. Several centuries later, and thousands of miles away, Ramesses II was resurrected: not in Egypt this time, but in Britain, where he was the subject of an impromptu literary competition that spawned “Ozymandias” one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most beloved works and a staple of poetry anthologies.

Two hundred years later, it’s hard to imagine literature without Shelley’s oft-quoted poem. That wasn’t always the case. Were it not for the tireless work of Mary Shelley, Percy’s second wife, collaborator, and posthumous editor, “Ozymandias” would probably be forgotten today. Likewise, Mary’s own work, including her most famous book, Frankenstein, might not exist in its current form without Percy’s encouragement. The potent brew of collaboration, competition, and chaos that fed the Shelleys’ shared literary lives was rare but not singular.

more here.

At the City Pound

I’m in charge of a cage. I know those that won’t.
I don’t mean can’t. Just won’t. There’s a roster
for Tuesdays, Fridays. Dogs to die.

The disconsolate, the abandoned, those with recurrent
symptoms, the incorrigible mutt — oh, a dozen
choices by way of reasons. Even so,

some won’t. Won’t play along once their number’s
up. The “rainbow bridge” in the offing
as the posher clinics put it, a pig’s ear

as a final treat, a venison chew, the profession
behaving beautifully at a time like this.
Still, those that won’t. Won’t go nicely, I mean,

with a gaze to melt, a last slobbed lick.
Those with a soul’s defiance, though embarrassment
in the lunchroom should you come at that one!

Even after the bag is zipped, you feel it:
We’re real at the end as you are, buster. We sniff
the wind. What say if we say it together? Won’t.
.

by Vincent O'Sillivan
from Poetry (February 2018)

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

Two types of bacteria commonly found in the gut work together to fuel the growth of colon tumors, researchers reported on Thursday. Their study, published in the journal Science, describes what may be a hidden cause of colon cancer, the third most common cancer in the United States. The research also adds to growing evidence that gut bacteria modify the body’s immune system in unexpected and sometimes deadly ways. The findings suggest that certain preventive strategies may be effective in the future, like looking for the bacteria in the colons of people getting colonoscopies. If the microbes are present, the patients might warrant more frequent screening; eventually people at high risk for colon cancer may be vaccinated against at least one of the bacterial strains. “I can’t guarantee you these bacteria will be the holy grail of colon cancer, but they should be high on the list” of possible culprits, said Christian Jobin, a professor of medicine at the University of Florida who studies bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract.

An estimated 50,000 Americans are expected to die of colon cancer in 2018. The new study focused on the earliest stages of the disease.

Two types of bacteria, Bacteroides fragilis and a strain of E. coli, can pierce a mucus shield that lines the colon and normally blocks invaders from entering, the researchers found. Once past the protective layer, the bacteria grow into a long, thin film, covering the intestinal lining with colonies of the microbes. E. coli then releases a toxin that damages DNA of colon cells, while B. fragilis produces another poison that both damages DNA and inflames the cells. Together they enhance the growth of tumors. Not everyone carries the two types of bacteria in their colon. Those who do seem to pick up microbes in childhood, where they simply become part of the diverse mass of bacteria in the intestinal tract — the so-called microbiome. For most who carry them, it is not clear the bacteria would ever be a problem, said Dr. Eric Pamer, an infectious disease specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

More here.

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

Robin Dembroff in the New York Review of Books:

As California residents rang in 2018, they joined residents of Oregon and Washington, D.C., in having the option to revise their legal genders from either “male” or “female” to “nonbinary.” California’s enactment of the Gender Recognition Act, which was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown last October and starts to take effect later this year, is but one more sign of a slow but steady sea-change. Washington State has followed suit, and similar third-gender options are under consideration in New York and Vermont. Under California’s new law, legal gender is dramatically reframed. No longer is it based on which sex (male/female) one was assigned as birth. Instead, legal gender will be based on what California lawmakers deem “fundamentally personal”: gender identity.

A person’s gender identification encompasses identification with certain physical features as well as gender expressions, gender norms, and gendered language. This means that, regardless of one’s physical characteristics, a Californian who does not identify as a man or a woman may change their legal gender to “nonbinary.” The motivation for this shift is clear: according to California Senator Scott Wiener, the nonbinary option means that “transgender and non-binary people will now be able to identify themselves as they are, not as who society tells them they should be.” (California’s law goes further than other states’ measures, permitting citizens to opt for nonbinary on their birth certificates, as well as other official documents like driving licenses.)

California legislators, and progressive lawmakers in other states, may be acting from the best of motives, but this swath of new legislation rests on a dangerous mistake. I say this as a nonbinary person, one who identifies as genderqueer and uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them. I’m also a philosophy professor and spend much of my time thinking about the ways in which gender categories are constructed and enforced.

More here.

Nicole Yunger Halpern in Preposterous Universe:

I’ve been grateful for opportunities to interview senior scientists, over the past few months, from coast to coast. The opinions I collected varied. Several interviewees latched onto the question as though they pondered it daily. A couple of interviewees balked (I don’t know; that’s tricky…) but summoned up a sermon. All the responses fired me up: The more wisps of mist withdrew from the nature of extraordinary science, the more I burned to contribute.

I’ll distill, interpret, and embellish upon the opinions I received. Italics flag lines that I assembled to capture ideas that I heard, as well as imperfect memories of others’ words. Quotation marks surround lines that others constructed. Feel welcome to chime in, in the “comments” section.

One word surfaced in all, or nearly all, my conversations: “impact.” Extraordinary science changes how researchers across the world think. Extraordinary science reaches beyond one subdiscipline.

This reach reminded me of answers to a question I’d asked senior scientists when in college: “What do you mean by ‘beautiful’?” Replies had varied, but a synopsis had crystallized: “Beautiful science enables us to explain a lot with a little.” Schrodinger’s equation, which describes how quantum systems evolve, fits on one line. But the equation describes electrons bound to atoms, particles trapped in boxes, nuclei in magnetic fields, and more. Beautiful science, which overlaps with extraordinary science, captures much of nature in a small net.

More here.

Brandon M. Terry in the Boston Review:

As we grasp for a proper accounting of King’s intellectual, ethical, and political bequest, commemoration may present a greater obstacle to an honest reckoning with his legacy than disfavor did in the case of Du Bois. There are costs to canonization.

The King now enshrined in popular sensibilities is not the King who spoke so powerfully and admiringly at Carnegie Hall about Du Bois. Instead, he is a mythic figure of consensus and conciliation, who sacrificed his life to defeat Jim Crow and place the United States on a path toward a “more perfect union.” In this familiar view, King and the civil rights movement are rendered—as Cass Sunstein approvingly put it—“backward looking and even conservative.” King deployed his rhetorical genius in the service of our country’s deepest ideals—the ostensible consensus at the heart of our civic culture—and dramatized how Jim Crow racism violated these commitments. Heroically, through both word and deed, he called us to be true to who we already are: “to live out the true meaning” of our founding creed. No surprise, then, that King is often draped in Christian symbolism redolent of these themes. He is a revered prophet of U.S. progress and redemption, Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, or a Christ who sacrificed his life to redeem our nation from its original sin.

Such poetic renderings lead our political and moral judgment astray.

More here.

I.R.L

In real life
you are aging at the rate of a short-lived sitcom

and the only kind of loneliness worth laughing about
is throwing out half a frozen meal for two

because leftovers
are never funnier the next day.

In real life
there is no such thing as a gritty reboot — it’s just

fucking gritty all the time, mate,
because your best-laid plans are always someone else’s

chance to crash a car into the crowd at a
men’s rights charity concert.

In real life
the nice guys pull out of the race

when their tires are slashed or they turn back
because they think they left the iron on

and no one adheres to sports film clichés anyway — 
we’re all selfish and we want that trophy.

In real life
you’ll never make it out of your homophobic small town

alive, so your left hand begs for water
while your right hand swings an ax

your left foot drags a church bell
while your right foot taps — S.O.S., S.O.S., S.O.S.

.
by Chris Tse
from Poetry (February 2018)

Anthony Roche at the Dublin Review of Books:

Some years ago, the Royal Irish Academy began a series of lavishly illustrated critical monographs on important figures in twentieth century Irish history. The first three published were on former taoisigh: Eamon de Valera, Seán Lemass and WT Cosgrave. This, on George Bernard Shaw, is the first on a literary figure. The RIA approached Fintan O’Toole to write the present volume. They must have been struck, as I am, by the parallels between author and subject. Shaw was recently described by Brad Kent as “easily the world’s most well-known Irish public intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century”. The same could be said of O’Toole in relation to the past thirty years, not just for his prominent position as our leading public intellectual but for the world stage he also commands. In 2017 alone, O’Toole was awarded the European Press Prize and the Orwell Prize for Journalism, and holds honorary doctorates from several Irish universities. Shaw was, until recently, the only person to hold both an Academy Award (for the screenplay of Pygmalion in 1938) and the Nobel Prize for Literature. (O’Toole points out that, since last year, Bob Dylan can now make a similar claim.) Both speak and write with unshakable confidence and authority on a wide range of social and political issues; but both are also particularly acute theatre critics. Indeed, both began as theatre critics (and Shaw on music also) before venturing more completely into public affairs; it could be argued that Shaw’s plays are the logical extensions of the pitiless criticism he directed at the lamentable state of late nineteenth century theatre in England. Shaw was a committed socialist all his life; O’Toole’s politics might best be described as left-leaning. There are other books on Shaw and there will be more; but none will be more Shavian than this one.

more here.

Simon Callow at the NYRB:

When I was growing up in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, Paul Robeson was much in evidence, on records, on the radio, on television. His name was haloed with the sort of respect accorded to few performers. The astonishing voice that, like the Mississippi in the most famous number in his repertory, just kept rolling along, seemed to carry within it an inherent sense of truth. There was no artifice; there were no vocal tricks; nothing came between the listener and the song. It commanded effortless attention; perfectly focused, it came from a very deep place, not just in the larynx, but in the experience of what it is to be human. In this, Robeson resembled the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier: both seemed less trained musicians than natural phenomena.

The spirituals Robeson had been instrumental in discovering for a wider audience were not simply communal songs of love and life and death but the urgent cries of a captive people yearning for a better, a juster life.

more here.

John Lechte at the TLS:

Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) is not a philosopher in the formal sense. She was not educated in the discipline (although coming from communist Bulgaria, she did, albeit unsystematically, absorb the ideas of Hegel and Marx). Her work does not pertain exclusively to any of the commonly accepted domains of philosophical inquiry, although her projects continue to have an impact on them. Rather, she has frequently been called a linguist (even though her oeuvre includes studies in semiotics and literary theory), a psychoanalyst (her approach is of a very particular Freudian bent that includes a focus on the feminine and maternity), or a novelist (which is true, but the point to note is that there is a crossover between novelistic content and theoretical and analytical work).

In 2004, Kristeva was awarded the first Holberg International Memorial Prize for innovative work on issues, “at the intersection between linguistics, culture and literature”. And the chairperson of the Holberg selection panel noted that: “Julia Kristeva . . . demonstrates how advanced theoretical research can also play a decisive role in public social and cultural debate in general”.

more here.

Rachael Lallensack in Nature:

It took Timothy Farkas less than a week to catch and relocate 1,500 stick insects in the Santa Ynez mountains in southern California. His main tool was an actual stick. “It feels kind of brutish,” says Farkas. “You just pick a stick up off the ground and beat the crap out of a bush.” That low-tech approach dislodged hordes of stick insects that the team easily plucked off the dirt. On this hillside outside Santa Barbara, there are two kinds of bush that the stick insect (Timema cristinae) inhabits. The creature comes in two corresponding colorations: green and striped. Farkas and his fellow ecologists knew that the stick insects had evolved to blend in with their surroundings. But the researchers wanted to see whether they could turn this relationship around, so that an evolved trait — camouflage — would affect the organism’s ecology.

To find out, the team relocated mixtures of green and striped insects to different plants, so that some insects’ coloration clashed with their new home. Suddenly maladapted, these insects became targets for hungry birds, and that caused a domino effect¹. Birds drawn to bushes with mismatched stick insects stuck around to eat other residents, such as caterpillars and beetles, stripping some plants clean. “That this evolutionary force can cause local extinction is striking,” says Farkas, an ecologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “It affects the entire community.” All this happened because of an out-of-place evolutionary trait.

Ecologists have generally ignored evolution when studying their systems; they thought it was impossible to test whether such a slow process could change ecosystems on observable timescales. But they have come to realize that evolution can happen more quickly than they assumed, and a wave of studies has capitalized on this idea to observe evolution and ecology in unison. Such eco-evolutionary dynamics could be important for understanding how new populations emerge, or for predicting when one might go extinct. Experiments suggest that evolutionary changes alter some ecosystems just as much as shifts in more-conventional ecological elements, such as the amount of light reaching a habitat. “Eco-evolutionary dynamics is the dragon lots of people are chasing right now,” says Troy Simon, an ecologist at the University of Georgia in Athens. Rapid evolution can sometimes offset some of the detrimental effects of a warming climate and other known drivers of change; in other cases, it can worsen those effects. Even for the most common processes, such as changes in population size or food chains, ecologists must take evolution into consideration, researchers say. “Everybody realized rapid evolution was occurring everywhere,” says evolutionary ecologist Andrew Hendry of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

More here.

Nancy Averett in the website of the University of Chicago:

When Husain Sattar, MD, took a leave of absence from medical school to study Arabic and Islamic spirituality in Islamabad, Pakistan, he spent his days in a classroom that had walls made of clay and would heat up to 120 degrees in the summer. In the winter, the unheated classrooms were freezing — Islamabad sits at the foothills of the Himalayas — and Sattar, who was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, sat on the floor with the other students shivering and dreaming of summer.

It was a far cry from the University of Chicago, where he earned his undergraduate and medical degrees and later did his internship, residency and fellowship. Besides the lack of creature comforts, his instructors did not have fancy diplomas from prestigious universities. But there was a Pakistani teacher who made an impression on Sattar — one that planted the seed for Sattar’s wildly successful textbook and video series on pathology known as Pathoma.

“This teacher always came to class without notes,” Sattar said, recalling the instructor with the gray beard who smiled often and dressed in the traditional Pakistani garb of loose pants and tunic-like shirt. “He would say, ‘If I can’t tell you about it from the top of my head, then I shouldn’t be telling you about it at all.’” The man lectured passionately, as if there were 3,000 people in the room instead of eight, but what the young American medical student found most impressive was his skill distilling colossal amounts of material. “He had this ability to take vast amounts of information and summarize it in the most eloquent, simple, principle-based method,” Sattar said.

More here. [Thanks to Azra Raza.]

Peter Reuell in the Harvard Gazette:

A picture is worth 1,000 words, the saying goes, but a group of Harvard-based scientists is hoping that it may also be worth the same number of equations.

Pictorial laws appear to unify ideas from disparate, interdisciplinary fields of knowledge, linking them beautifully like elements of a da Vinci painting. The group is working to expand the pictorial mathematical language first outlined last year by Arthur Jaffe, the Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science, and postdoctoral fellow Zhengwei Liu.

“There is one word you can take away from this: excitement,” Jaffe said. “And that’s because we’re not trying just to solve a problem here or there, but we are trying to develop a new way to think about mathematics, through developing and using different mathematical languages based on pictures in two, three, and more dimensions.”

Last year they created a 3-D language called quon, which they used to understand concepts related to quantum information theory. Now, new research has offered tantalizing hints that quon could offer insights into a host of other areas in mathematics, from algebra to Fourier analysis, as well as in theoretical physics, from statistical physics to string theory. The researchers describe their vision of the project in a paper that appeared Jan. 2 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There has been a great deal of evolution in this work over the past year, and we think this is the tip of the iceberg,” Jaffe said. “We’ve discovered that the ideas we used for quantum information are relevant to a much broader spectrum of subjects. We are very grateful to have received a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust that enabled us to assemble a team of researchers last summer to pursue this project further, including undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs, as well as senior collaborators at other institutions.”

More here.

Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic:

My first introduction to Jordan B. Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist, came by way of an interview that began trending on social media last week. Peterson was pressed by the British journalist Cathy Newman to explain several of his controversial views. But what struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method his interviewer employed. It was the most prominent, striking example I’ve seen yet of an unfortunate trend in modern communication.

First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and various Fox News hosts all feature and reward this rhetorical technique. And the Peterson interview has so many moments of this kind that each successive example calls attention to itself until the attentive viewer can’t help but wonder what drives the interviewer to keep inflating the nature of Peterson’s claims, instead of addressing what he actually said.

More here.

Rebecca Mead at The New Yorker:

When it was reported, last week, that the British government had appointed a “Minister for Loneliness,” the news was greeted by observers on the opposite side of the Atlantic with fascination and a certain amount of knowing humor. The title, Aimée Lutkin noted at Jezebel, might denote “a character from an alternate Harry Potter timeline where wizards battle ennui instead of snake magic.” Monty Python, which almost fifty years ago parodied Whitehall officialdom with its “Ministry of Silly Walks,” was invoked. Stephen Colbert, on his TV show, suggested that “Minister for Loneliness” sounded like “a Victorian euphemism for ‘gigolo.’ ” (Actually, the Victorian euphemism for gigolo was “Casanova,” but points for effort.) Colbert went on to riff upon the comedic implications of the appointment. “This is so British,” he said. “They’ve defined the most ineffable human problem and come up with the most cold, bureaucratic solution.”

While one might take issue with Colbert’s grasp of broad transatlantic national stereotypes—surely the nation best known for brisk bureaucratic compensations for the deficiencies of human nature is Germany—his performance of wonderment at Britain’s Minister of Loneliness is understandable.

more here.