Russell Shorto in The New Yorker:

From Phys.Org:

A sound night's sleep grows more elusive as people get older. But what some call insomnia may actually be an age-old survival mechanism, researchers report. A study of modern hunter-gatherers in Tanzania finds that, for people who live in groups, differences in sleep patterns commonly associated with age help ensure that at least one person is awake at all times. The research suggests that mismatched sleep schedules and restless nights may be an evolutionary leftover from a time many, many years ago, when a lion lurking in the shadows might try to eat you at 2 a.m.

Julia Felsenthal in Vogue:

“At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary,” Joan Didion once wrote. “My approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best.”

Her essay is called “On Keeping a Notebook,” and Didion, to be clear, kept one (perhaps still does)—a place to document not what happened to her, but “how it felt to be me,” scraps of experience, sometimes factual, sometimes embroidered. A recipe for sauerkraut evokes the coziness of a boozy, rainy day on Fire Island; the sense memory of cracked crab for lunch as a child makes her “see the afternoon all over again,” no matter that the crab was almost certainly fictitious. These are reminders not of life, but of Joan. “I think we are well advised,” Didion observed (cannily enough to be endlessly quoted), “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

In 2008, writer Rachel Khong began keeping a food log, a list of every meal she consumed. She was inspired in part by Robert Shields, keeper of the world’s longest diary, who recorded the goings-on of his life at five-minute intervals (to the tune of 37.5 million words). Khong hoped that by diligently tracking what she ate, she would open up a channel in her brain to remembering more: where she was; who she was with; how she was feeling. At the time she was reeling from a breakup, contending with the way a tanking relationship exposes a chasm between each partner’s memories of seemingly joint experiences. How can a person trapped in the morass of imperfect recall identify true north without signposts? “I’m terrified of forgetting,” Khong admitted in a 2014 essay that appeared in Lucky Peach, the food magazine where until recently she was an editor. “If I could remember everything, I thought, I’d be better equipped; I’d be better able to make proper, comprehensive assessments—informed decisions. But my memory had proved itself unreliable, and I needed something better. Writing down food was a way to turn my life into facts: If I had all the facts, I could keep them straight. So the next time this happened I’d know exactly why—I’d have all the data at hand.”

More here.

Matt Seybold in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Tired and slightly toasted after a long and draining dinner party, Virginia Woolf nevertheless kept a promise to her diary, recording her impression of the evening while it was still fresh. Fellow novelist Elizabeth Bowen arrived very late — “rayed like a zebra, silent and stuttering” — leaving Woolf the lone woman at a table ringed with notoriously self-assured men. This, combined with her fatigue, may explain why her account of their conversation was curt and occasionally cruel. T. S. Eliot, she wrote, was “like a great toad with jeweled eyes.” Her nephew, poet Julian Bell, was “trivial: like dogs in their lusts.” Even John Maynard Keynes, for whom she held an enduring affection, she portrayed on this occasion as bloviating and hypocritical. After mocking Christian rituals, Keynes, perhaps lightly lubricated himself, reminisced at length about a chapel ceremony held in his honor at King’s College. Woolf’s question — “Did this society, this coming together move [you?]” — is the elocutionary equivalent of an exasperated eye-roll. [1]

The dinner was held explicitly to discuss Eliot’s After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), which collected a series of lectures given the previous year at University of Virginia. Keynes, at the time among Britain’s most prominent public intellectuals, was preparing for his own trip to the United States, during which he would reassert himself as an “economic heretic” and preview his work-in-progress, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Eliot had recently conceded that they were living “in the age of the economist” when even poets were “compelled to think about economics,” so it was, perhaps, inevitable that the discussion would turn after dinner to what Woolf called “the economic question.” “This worst of all,” she wrote, “and founded on a silly mistake of old Mr. Ricardo’s which Maynard given time will put right. And then there will be no more economic stress, and then — ?”

It is hard to know how to read this lacuna in Woolf’s account. Is her faith that Keynes could eliminate “economic stress” sincere or sarcastic? Is she reflecting Keynes’s own ambivalence about utopian prognostications? In either case, her impression that Keynes was working on an audacious political economy designed to save the world from audacious political economy perfectly encapsulates a central paradox of Keynesianism, as elucidated by Geoff Mann’s In The Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (2017). Keynes expected The General Theoryto radically remake his profession, though not in the ways Mann demonstrates it has. In Mann’s account, Keynesianism ultimately helped sever economists from their own rich tradition of heretical political philosophy and reduced them to platitudinous apologists for plutocracy.

More here.

Dan Sperber in Cognition and Culture:

Your friend Olga is coming for a drink. You put two plates on the table, one with olives and the other with almonds. When both plates have been emptied, you ask Olga, “Do you want anything else?” “Yes, please!”, she answers, pointing to the plate where the almonds had been. What is she requesting? The empty plate? Of course not. She is requesting more almonds. To do so, she uses a gestural metonymy: pointing to a container to convey something about its (past) content.

Container-for-content metonymies are quite common in language use. Typical examples are: “I just had one glass” or “the school bus was singing.” Some of these gestural or verbal metonymies have become conventional but we can produce or understand novel ones without effort. What communicative abilities does it take to make use of metonymies? Could a 12-month-old child, who does not yet speak, spontaneously produce an appropriate gestural metonymy? For that matter, could an ape?

In his doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Manuel Bohn asked an even more basic question: can infants and apes refer to absent entities? (See also earlier work by Liszkowski et al 2009; Lyn et al 2014). The capacity to do so is generally linked to the possession of language, so showing that they can would be an interesting challenge.

In one study (Bohn et al 2015), Bohn presented apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) with two plates each containing three pieces of food: grapes (a higher quality food for apes) on one plate, and pieces of carrot (a lower quality food) on the other plate. The apes could point to one or the other plate and would be given a piece of food from it. As soon as a plate was emptied, the experimenter would take it out of the room and bring it back refilled.

In the critical test trials, however, the experimenter let the plates go empty without refilling them. Would the apes point to a now empty plate (as your friend Olga did)?

More here.

From Wired:

Hulu's adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian thriller in which a Christian theocracy overthrows the US government and forces fertile women to bear children for high-ranking government officials. It’s a premise that, reviewer Beth Elderkin notes, men find imaginative or improbable and women see as chillingly real.

“We’re afraid of our power being taken away,” Elderkin says in Episode 263 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxypodcast. “That’s something that’s happened over and over again for thousands of years—women’s power has been taken away, largely by men, who don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, what we’re capable of.”

Writer Sara Lynn Micheneragrees that the show hits close to home. She says that’s no coincidence, since Atwood based everything in the story on real historical events.

“It is not irrational for us to fear this, given that these are things that you can find in other cultures, or in our culture in different periods, or in our culture in the present,” she says.

Michener, who was raised by conservative Christians, wishes more people from that community would watch The Handmaid’s Tale, which she thinks might cause them to question some of their more extreme views.

“If anything can slip through it’s going to be the art,” she says. “Because the rhetoric is already so divisive the stories are the thing that really have the power to penetrate those ideologies.”

More here.

Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic:

Heidi Julavits in The New York Times:

We were taking an airplane, I told our children, to see what I dramatically billed as ‘‘the end of the world.’’

‘‘Can’t we go to a beach?’’ they asked. It was February. They were sick of the cold.

I promised them sand and plenty of water, but unless things went terribly wrong, we would probably not be swimming in it.

‘‘Where are we going?’’ they asked.

We were flying 2,000 miles to see more than 6,000 tons of black basalt rocks extending 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake in the shape of a counterclockwise vortex, designed by the most famous practitioner of ’70s land art, Robert Smithson.

‘‘It’s called the ‘Spiral Jetty,’ ’’ I told them.

I showed them pictures. I admitted that maybe ‘‘the end of the world’’ wasn’t the best way to advertise what I hoped we would experience, even though previous visitors had described the landscape as hauntingly spare, as resembling how our planet might appear following a nuclear holocaust. Smithson’s gallerist, Virginia Dwan, said the jetty ‘‘was something otherworldly, but I hesitate to say hell, because I don’t mean everybody being tortured and so forth, but the feeling of aloneness, and of it being in a place that was unsafe, and something devilish, something devilish there.’’

Adding to the excitement I presumed we now shared: The road conditions near the jetty were highly variable, which was to say not always roads. The lake’s water levels, too, needed to be below 4,195 feet for us to see it, and those levels were partly dependent on snowfall (this winter there was lots) and how much of that snow, by the time we arrived, had melted and sluiced down the mountains — water that also, en route to the lake, could turn the 16 miles of unpaved roads into impassable mush.

More here.

James Galbraith in New Geography:

Using our measure of pay inequality, which avoids any distortion associated with making a conversion to income inequality measures, the fourteen states with the largest increases in inequality after 1990 without exception voted for Hillary Clinton.¹ These fourteen included almost all of the large states that Clinton carried, including California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia and Illinois. The largest Clinton state below the top fourteen is Washington, and after that, Minnesota (which she carried by whisker); the others include Vermont and Delaware, small states embedded in regions (New England, the Mid-Atlantic) where the increase of inequality was much larger than it was in the states themselves. Vermont is not immune from economic change in New York or Massachusetts, nor is Delaware unaffected by events in New Jersey or Maryland.

Conversely, the seven states with the smallest increase in inequality, and ten of the lowest twelve, all voted for Donald Trump. These included Wyoming, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Utah, North Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Indiana, Nebraska and Kentucky, as well as the critical Obama-to-Trump states of Ohio and Michigan. In the middle range, we find a series of states that were (or, in the case of Georgia, might have been) competitive including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina.

The correspondence of inequality-change to the election outcome is almost uncanny.

A plausible explanation emerges with a moment's thought. Clinton-majority states are characterized by high-income enclaves of finance, technology, insurance and government contracts, which often exist alongside large low-income minority and immigrant communities, sufficiently separated by geography and political boundary lines to be almost autonomous from each other. Both of these communities vote Democratic, yet out of highly differing political and social interests; the former perhaps most of all for reasons of social liberalism and environmentalism; the latter out of economic interest and historical alliances on civil rights and immigration. Where they together predominate, Democrats prevail.

More here.

Ruth Graham in Slate:

Reading groups have long served as spaces for kindred spirits to gather and talk their way through weighty issues; they also skew female, older, and educated—a prime “resistance” cohort. It is hard to overstate how thoroughly the anti-Trump movement is driven by the energy of women in general. The Women’s March in January was the biggest single-day protest in American history, and women made up the majority of the crowds at the March for Science and the People’s Climate March in April. Women also seem to make up the vast majority of those calling their representatives: A recent poll by the popular service Daily Action, which sends texts to users nudging them to call their legislators, found 86 percent of active users were women, and fully half were aged 46 to 65. As a Slate headline put it in January, “The Trump Resistance Will Be Led by Angry Women.”

Some independent bookstores, progressive media outlets, and activist groups have launched new clubs to meet the moment. In Seattle there’s “Reading Through It: A Post-Election Book Club.” (First selection: J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of growing up in a poor white family in what is now Trump country.) Daily Action launched its own club in March, “drawing on America’s heritage of resistance.” (Latest up: Historian Timothy Snyder’s 21^st century–minded survey of 20^th-century Europe, On Tyranny.) “No longer can book club be the latest vampire YA novel (or at least, no longer can that be the ONLY book club we do),” the online magazine Argot wrote in announcing its Trump-era book club. “And for those of us who aren’t book club people, we can no longer read our radical texts, relevant novels and pertinent essays in silence.” Its first assignment: the Melville House collection What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump’s America.

More here.

Amir Giladi and Ido Amit in Nature:

For more than a century, scientists have tried to characterize the different functions of the 10 trillion to 50 trillion cells of the human body — from neurons, which can reach 1 metre in length, to red blood cells, which are around 8 micrometres wide. Such efforts have helped to identify important cell types and pathways that are involved in human physiology and pathology. But it has become apparent that the research tools of the past few decades fail to capture the full complexity of cell diversity and function. (These tools include fluorescent tags fused to antibodies that bind to specific proteins on the surfaces of cells, known as cell-surface markers, and sequencing in bulk of the RNA or DNA of thousands of seemingly identical cells.) This failure is partly because many cells with completely different functions have similar shapes or produce the same markers. Single-cell genomics is transforming the ability of biologists to characterize cells. The new techniques that have emerged aim to capture individual cells and determine the sequences of the molecules of RNA and DNA that they contain. The shift in approach is akin to the change in how cells and molecules could be viewed during the 1980s, following advances in microscopy and the tagging and sorting of cells.

In the past five years, several groups of biologists, including our own laboratory, have gone from measuring the expression of a few genes in a handful of cells to surveying thousands of genes in hundreds of thousands of cells from intact tissues. New cell types^{1, 2}, cellular states and pathways are being uncovered regularly as a result. Our lab was one of the first to study the immune system using single-cell genomics. The tools are particularly suited to this task because the heterogeneity and plasticity of cells are integral to how the immune system works — the nature of each agent that could attack the body being impossible to know ahead of time.

More here.

Tanisha C. Ford in The Feminist Wire:

Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Uncovering the experiences of African American spouses in plantation records, legal and court documents, and pension files, Tera W. Hunter reveals the myriad ways couples adopted, adapted, revised, and rejected white Christian ideas of marriage. Setting their own standards for conjugal relationships, enslaved husbands and wives were creative and, of necessity, practical in starting and supporting families under conditions of uncertainty and cruelty.

TWH: There is a long legacy of racial discrimination that originated during slavery, which hardened as slavery was codified in the law. The rigidity began during in the colonial era as it became increasingly imperative to define slavery as a permanent, inheritable condition, to lock in a self-reproducing workforce. Laws were passed that restricted the intimate relationships of free blacks and defined slaves’ status based on their mothers’ status (partus sequitur ventrem) to ensure that slave owners maintained control over the reproduction of the enslaved. Marriage rights normally granted free couples control over women’s sexuality and labor and parental rights over children. But in order to perpetuate the status of slaves as laboring bodies and further the expansion of capital fueling the global market, those rights had to be denied to slaves. The property rights of enslavers were given the greatest priority. But race, and not just slavery, established the basis for denigrating intimate bonds. African Americans, regardless of status—Northern or Southern, free or slave—faced harsh reprisals from racist ideas and practices that impinged on their intimate relationships. This was because of the growing bifurcation of freedom being associated with whiteness and blackness with servitude, especially during the antebellum decades.

TCF: The Civil War is such a critical turning point in the book, and you chronicle this history in important new ways.

TWH: Yes, the war provided the first context in which fugitive slaves could start to formalize their relationships and gain legal standing. Missionaries and Army officials began to marry slaves “under the flag”—under U.S. authority, to stabilize the growing fugitive population and to prepare them for citizenship. Hence, it was in the context of the war that African Americans were encouraged, and sometimes coerced, to create formal, monogamous, marriages with legal standing. African Americans always reinforced the importance of their families in their encounters with the outside agents. This became especially pronounced after black men were allowed to enlist in the Army. African Americans from the beginning of the war perceived the war to be, and treated it as, a war for their liberation. The federal government came to understand that in order to encourage more men to enlist, they had to offer them protection for their wives and children and the only way to do that was to free them, to give legal recognition to their marriages and all the privileges that accompanied those new rights.

More here.

Christopher Hooton in The Independent:

The Frenchman was a poet, artist and novelist by the age of 30 and also contributed The Hunchback of Notre-Dame to the literary canon, but he is remembered as a politician or even a saint as much as he is a man of words. He was a fierce human rights activist and, after being elected to France's National Assembly in 1848, dissented from conservatives and called for universal suffrage, free education for all children, and an end to poverty. He became such an icon and champion of the poor in France that on his 80th birthday on 27 June, 1881 paraders marched past his house, where he was sat at a window, for six hours. Avenue d'Eylau on which Hugo lived was the next day changed to Avenue Victor-Hugo, and the story goes that all future letters sent to the author were addressed: "To Mister Victor, In his avenue, Paris".

Hugo would only live four more years but was an activist to the end, requesting a pauper's funeral (though he was awarded a state funeral by decree of President Jules Grévy) and saying in his five-line will: "I leave 50,000 francs to the poor. I want to be buried in their hearse. I refuse [funeral] orations of all churches. I beg a prayer to all souls. I believe in God."

More here.

Simon Wren-Lewis over at his site Mainly Macro:

“The thing I keep returning to on the Senate bill is the contrast between the intense hardship it imposes and the triviality of the gains. Losing health insurance — especially if you're older, low-income, and unhealthy, which are precisely the people hit — is a nightmare. And more than 20 million would face that nightmare. Meanwhile, the top 1% gets a tax cut. That cut is a lot of money, but because the 1% are already rich, it raises their after-tax income only 2 percent — hardly life-changing. So vast suffering imposed to hand the rich a favor they'll barely even notice. How do we make sense of this, politically or morally?”