S.D. Sykes at Literary Hub:

When did this love for “crumbling Venice” begin, and why has it taken hold with such tenacity? By the time Victorian historian and art critic John Ruskin encountered the city in the 1840s, he thought Venice was so neglected that she might melt into the lagoon “like a lump of sugar in hot tea.” It’s true that Ruskin feared any further deterioration, but what appalled him to an even greater extent was any attempt to modernize the city. He wanted a Venice that was set in aspic, a time-capsule for posterity. And thus the movement to save La Serenissima was born—and what a successful movement this has been—for Venice is probably the finest preserved medieval and Renaissance city in Europe. Yet all this tender loving care has not been without consequence. It could be argued that she’s been stifled, moth-balled—even de-commissioned as a real city. For, while there is a great deal of industry and development about the rim of the Venetian lagoon, it is almost impossible to find a modern building in Venice herself. For the most part, she is the same city that Ruskin visited, kept safe in her watery refuge and forbidden from growing up.

But it’s not just crumbling Venice that we have come to love through art, film and literature. We’re equally, if not more attached to “decadent Venice”—shameless, lustful, dissipated Venice. We might blame Casanova and Lord Bryon and their epic sexual exploits for bestowing this reputation upon the place, but Venice’s status as a city of pleasure goes back much further in history. By the early 17th century, there were estimated to be as many as 20,000 prostitutes in a city that only numbered around 140,000 people. Even for those not seeking to pay for sex, there was plenty of the stuff on offer—adulterous affairs, secret assignations, riotous carnivals and masked balls. Even the city’s nuns sometimes took lovers. One needs only to look at the paintings of Titian, particularly the eroticism of his 1538 painting “Venus of Urbino” to appreciate that this was a society with a relaxed and permissive attitude to sex.

more here.

Jonathan Gibbs at the TLS:

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, originally published in the US in 2009 and only now appearing in the UK, thanks to Jonathan Cape, joins a small collection of books I seem to have acquired, without really trying, on the subject of the colour blue. Nelson’s book might best be described as an essay in the form of prose-poetic fragments; its tone is set from the first line, which runs: “Suppose I was to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color”. What follows are ruminations on Nelson’s relationship with the colour blue; more critical explorations of why this colour might have a power over us that red, for instance, or green don’t have; and brief back-slips into memoir that exhibit the same jagged candour as The Argonauts (2015).

The other books in my micro-collection are William Gass’s On Being Blue, Derek Jarman’s Blue, and Blue Mythologies by Carol Mavor. It may be chance that these particular books have come into my possession (I have no particular interest in the colour, myself) but it is surely not chance that all these books were written about blue, rather than any other colour. Nelson is well aware of the anomaly. “It does not really bother me that half the adults in the Western world also love blue”, she writes, “or that every dozen years or so someone feels compelled to write a book about it.”

more here.

Andrea Scrima at The Quarterly Conversation:

What do we expect from literature? Fiction offers writers the chance to formulate uncomfortable ideas, to place words in the mouths of characters that are distinct from the author’s point of view. Written six years after September 11, however, Falling Manstill did not address much of the madness that occurred in the aftermath of this epochal event: the self-censorship that characterized the time; the mindless patriotism; the trauma that was fixated exclusively on victimhood, as opposed to the devastating effects of United States policy abroad; the conspiracy theories—the latter being a particularly noteworthy omission, given that in his research for Libra, DeLillo immersed himself in the sea of speculation surrounding the JFK assassination, the last era-defining catastrophe before 9/11. Was it a cop-out to give the strongest critical voice to a foreigner, the vaguely dubious Martin with the socialist past? Oddly, his nationality is not precisely specified, as though Europe were some indistinguishable entity patently hostile to American values and virtues, and therefore decadent, discredited. DeLillo seems to be asking how much we actually want to know about ourselves, and it seems significant in this respect that Falling Man was one of his least loved books. A similar fate befell Susan Sontag, who famously issued an apology for the short essay she read out loud at the American Academy in Berlin on September 13, 2001 and published two days later in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Finally appearing in The New Yorker on September 24, nearly two weeks after the event, the piece made the comparatively mild and fairly accurate observation that America was attacked for its arrogance and its disastrous international interventions and heaped scorn on “the unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators.” Sontag stood alone in her audacity to state what should have been obvious to everyone, and she was vilified for it. When does it become the writer’s responsibility to put skin in the game, to come out of hiding and state an unequivocal point of view? Are DeLillo’s deflected statements the only way he saw to voice deeply uncomfortable and unpopular ideas, and is this a legitimate literary strategy?

more here.

George Yancy and Noam Chomsky in the New York Times:

Over the past few months, as the disturbing prospect of a Trump administration became a disturbing reality, I decided to reach out to Noam Chomsky, the philosopher whose writing, speaking and activism has for more than 50 years provided unparalleled insight and challenges to the American and global political systems. Our conversation, as it appears here, took place as a series of email exchanges over the past two months. Although Professor Chomsky was extremely busy, because of our past intellectual exchange, he graciously provided time for this interview.

George Yancy: Given our “post-truth” political moment and the growing authoritarianism we are witnessing under President Trump, what public role do you think professional philosophy might play in critically addressing this situation?

Noam Chomsky: We have to be a little cautious about not trying to kill a gnat with an atom bomb. The performances are so utterly absurd regarding the “post-truth” moment that the proper response might best be ridicule. For example, Stephen Colbert’s recent comment is apropos: When the Republican legislature of North Carolina responded to a scientific study predicting a threatening rise in sea level by barring state and local agencies from developing regulations or planning documents to address the problem, Colbert responded: “This is a brilliant solution. If your science gives you a result that you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved.”

More here.

Kieran Shiach in The Guardian:

Katharine Walter in Nautilus:

Biologist Eric Verdin considers aging a disease. His research group famously discovered several enzymes, including sirtuins, that play an important role in how our mitochondria—the powerhouses of our cells—age. His studies in mice have shown that the stress caused by calorie restriction activates sirtuins, increasing mitochondrial activity and slowing aging. In other words, in the lab, calorie restriction in mice allows them to live longer. His work has inspired many mitochondrial hacks—diets, supplements, and episodic fasting plans—but there is not yet evidence that these findings translate to humans. Last year, Verdin was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, the largest independent research institute devoted to aging research. The Buck, founded in 1999 by Marin County philanthropists Leonard and Beryl Hamilton Buck, includes more than 250 researchers working across disciplines to slow aging. Verdin, originally trained as a physician in his native Belgium, is eager to translate findings from the lab work done over the past 20 years in worms and mice to humans. “Aging without illness is our overarching goal!” he wrote when he began at the Buck. In a recent Nautilus interview, Verdin was optimistic about the future. He thinks we’ll continue to live longer and age better. But to live better longer, he says, requires research but also rethinking doctors’ visits.

Can those incredible increases in lifespan continue? Is there an upper limit?

There currently is an upper limit, and the upper limit is probably around 115, 120. You have a very large number—100 billion people to choose the number of people that have ever lived—and you have only one who has made it through to 122, Jeanne Calment. The second oldest was 119. It does seem there is an upper limit. Some people have shown that in the last hundred years, even though we have progressively increased the average lifespan, the number of people who live above 115 has not increased. That has to tell you that we might be reaching sort of a limit. That’s already a pretty good limit. If we could all live to 110 healthy and a disease in the last five years of life, I think most people would sign for this.

More here.

From Edge:

We're now accumulating data at an incredible rate. I mentioned electron microscopy to study the ribosome—each experiment generates several terabytes of data, which is then massaged, analyzed, and reduced, and finally you get a structure. At least in this data analysis, we believe we know what's happening. We know what the programs are doing, we know what the algorithms are, we know how they come up with the result, and so we feel that intellectually we understand the result. What is now happening in a lot of fields is that you have machine learning, where computers are essentially taught to recognize patterns with deep neural networks. They're formulating rules based on patterns. There are are statistical algorithms that allow them to give weights to various things, and eventually they come up with conclusions. When they come up with these conclusions, we have no idea how; we just know the general process. If there's a relationship, we don't understand that relationship in the same way that we would if we came up with it ourselves or came up with it based on an intellectual algorithm. So we're in a situation where we're asking, how do we understand results that come from this analysis? This is going to happen more and more as datasets get bigger, as we have genome-wide studies, population studies, and all sorts of things.

There are so many large-scale problems dependent on large datasets that we're getting more divorced from the data. There's this intermediary doing the analysis for us. To me, that is a change in our way of understanding it. When someone asks how we know, we say that the system analyzed it and came up with these relationships—maybe it means this or maybe it means that. That is philosophically slightly different from the way we've been doing it. The other reason to worry is a cultural reason. The Internet and the World Wide Web have been a tremendous boon to scientists. It's made communication far easier among scientists. It's in many ways leveled the playing field.

More here.

Anna Nowogrodzki in Nature:

Aviv Regev likes to work at the edge of what is possible. In 2011, the computational biologist was collaborating with molecular geneticist Joshua Levin to test a handful of methods for sequencing RNA. The scientists were aiming to push the technologies to the brink of failure and see which performed the best. They processed samples with degraded RNA or vanishingly small amounts of the molecule. Eventually, Levin pointed out that they were sequencing less RNA than appears in a single cell. To Regev, that sounded like an opportunity. The cell is the basic unit of life and she had long been looking for ways to explore how complex networks of genes operate in individual cells, how those networks can differ and, ultimately, how diverse cell populations work together. The answers to such questions would reveal, in essence, how complex organisms such as humans are built. “So, we're like, 'OK, time to give it a try',” she says. Regev and Levin, who both work at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sequenced the RNA of 18 seemingly identical immune cells from mouse bone marrow, and found that some produced starkly different patterns of gene expression from the rest¹. They were acting like two different cell subtypes. That made Regev want to push even further: to use single-cell sequencing to understand how many different cell types there are in the human body, where they reside and what they do. Her lab has gone from looking at 18 cells at a time to sequencing RNA from hundreds of thousands — and combining single-cell analyses with genome editing to see what happens when key regulatory genes are shut down.

The results are already widening the spectrum of known cell types — identifying, for example, two new forms of retinal neuron² — and Regev is eager to find more. In late 2016, she helped to launch the International Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious effort to classify and map all of the estimated 37 trillion cells in the human body (see 'To build an atlas'). It is part of a growing interest in characterizing individual cells in many different ways, says Mathias Uhlén, a microbiologist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm: “I actually think it's one of the most important life-science projects in history, probably more important than the human genome.”

More here.

Adam Tooze over at his website:

As climate changes and temperatures rise, who will hurt? At least since the 1980s and Ulrich Beck’s pathbreaking work on Risk Society, the question of the social stratification of risks has been posed.

At a global level it has long been obvious that some of the poorest nations will suffer most from climate change and that the US is amongst the least impacted countries. But does this finding hold across the US? Remarkably, a new study by the Climate Impact Lab (UC Berkeley, Rutgers, University of Chicago, and Rhodium Group, along with their research partners at Princeton University and RMS.) is the first to attempt to assess the effects across the US at the county level.

The results were published in Science and were reported in both the FT and the NYT.

The results are pretty eye-opening. Assuming a business as usual emissions scenario and no major breakthroughs in mitigation, every 1°C increase in global temperatures, costs the US economy about 1.2 per cent of gross domestic product. But these costs are very unevenly distributed. The impact on the Southern parts of the US by 2100 is predicted to be very severe indeed.

With the impact concentrated in the South, this also means that the costs will fall disproportionately on the poorest counties of the US.

More here.

Jarret Middleton at the Quarterly Conversation:

While many at the time made calls to politicize academia, the Frankfurt School set out to academize politics, an abstract move when real political struggle was occurring all around them and rank-and-file unions and revolutionary parties were fighting in the streets of many countries around the world, struggles in which revolutionaries paid a heavy price, from surviving the repression of fascist regimes to facing torture, prison, and death, all for the ultimate cause of human freedom. The School’s relentless critique prompted criticism not only from adversaries but from perceived allies, ranging from German communists to Bertolt Brecht to Hungarian Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs, who coined the term “Grand Hotel Abyss” when referring to the School’s precarious position perched “on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity.” Lukacs conceived of the Frankfurt School’s project as a theory so devoid of practice that they were in danger of permanently isolating themselves and the fruits of their intellectual labor, so much so that their position could be perceived as anti-revolutionary, one of orthodox Marxism’s greatest sins.

Taking a closer look at their original mission, the scholars of the Frankfurt School concluded that the communist revolution failed among Germany’s working class because the country had retained a healthy amount of the conservative social mores that had been established with the rise of the petit-bourgeoisie, even as their economic prowess began to decline after World War I and the era of hyperinflation. The resulting devastation of Germany’s economy, and the humiliation of so much of the formerly middle- and working classes, created a brand of reactionary populism and nationalist fervor that fueled the rise of Nazism.

more here.

Nikil Saval at n+1:

The taxi system was and is an exploitative one, in which drivers were often classified as independent contractors. But ride-sharing is incalculably more exploitative. In regulated markets, taxi companies are at least required to maintain, acquire, and insure all the cars in a taxi fleet. Ride-sharing companies are not. This means for example, as Quartz reported recently, that Uber can force its drivers into “deep subprime” loans to acquire their vehicles, leaving them drowning in debt. In addition to undermining every possible regulation to screw their drivers more, Uber claimed as late as 2015 that drivers could earn $90,000 working for them. In a landmark piece for the Philadelphia City Paper, reporter Emily Guendelsberger worked as an UberX driver and discovered the truth. “If I worked 10 hours a day, six days a week with one week off, I’d net almost $30,000 a year before taxes,” she wrote. “But if I wanted to net that $90,000 a year figure that so many passengers asked about, I would only have to work, let’s see . . . 27 hours a day, 365 days a year.” The jobs created by ride-sharing are emblematically crappy, part-time, and contingent. In fact, according to the loophole in labor law that ride-sharing companies exploit, they’re not even “jobs” so much as gigs; the drivers are independent contractors who just happen to use the ride-sharing app.

But lying and rule-breaking to gain a monopoly are old news in liberal capitalism. What ride-sharing companies had to do, in the old spirit of Standard Oil, was secure a foothold in politics, and subject politics to the will of “the consumer.” In a telling example of our times, Uber hired former Obama campaign head David Plouffe to work the political angles. And Plouffe has succeeded wildly, since—as Washingtonians and New Yorkers are experiencing with their subways—municipal and state liberals are only nominally committed to the standards that regulate transport. Never mind that traffic is something that cities need to control, and that transportation should be a public good. Ride-sharing companies—which explode traffic and undermine public transportation—can trim the balance sheets of cities by privatizing both.

more here.

Tim Parks at the London Review of Books:

Histories of the Risorgimento find it difficult to present Garibaldi without a patina of condescension. The modern intellectual’s suspicion of the folk hero – pursued by drooling ladies of the British aristocracy, believed by Sicilian peasants to have been sent by God – is everywhere evident. In his otherwise excellent biography of 1958, Denis Mack Smith frequently referred to Garibaldi as ‘simplistic’ and ‘ingenuous’, made fun of his habit of wearing a poncho, and saw his decision to set up home on the barren island of Caprera as merely idiosyncratic. Pick takes a similar position. His Garibaldi has huge personal charisma and is a brilliant military adventurer (though almost no space is given to reminding the reader quite how brilliant), but he is also ingenuous, gullible when it comes to dealing with money and endearingly ignorant of the ways of the world. In short, he is the genius simpleton.

Pick continues a tradition that began with Garibaldi’s contemporaries and is still alive in Italy today, whereby he is to be exalted as a national hero and simultaneously never mentioned in serious public debate (Italian schoolchildren are kept well away from his incendiary, anti-clerical memoirs). So at one point, having noted Garibaldi’s lack of appetite for official honours and his tendency to live in a single, bare room even when a palace was at his disposal, Pick continues: ‘Yet he was an appealingly inconsistent ascetic, with his own touching foibles and predilections for the good things in life, and for display: thus he would occasionally don a rather gaudy embroidered cap.’

more here.

John Gray at the New Statesman:

The Second World War was not just another event – it changed everything.” Even more than the Great War of 1914-18, Keith Lowe argues, the Second World War altered human experience fundamentally. In one way or another it affected more human beings than any other violent conflict in history. Over a hundred million men and women were mobilised, and yet the number of civilians killed was greater than the number of soldiers by tens of millions. Four times as many people were killed as during the First World War. But the effects ranged far beyond the numbers of dead. For everyone who died, dozens of others found their lives changed irrevocably. Whether as refugees and exiles in the great displacement of people that followed the war, or else as factory workers, slave labourers or targets for the protagonists in the conflict, uncountable human beings were caught up in the devastation wreaked by this unprecedented upheaval.

Terrible as it was, the impact of the war was not entirely negative. In much of the world the postwar era was energised by an idea of freedom and a feeling of hope. The generation of leaders that emerged was old enough to remember the Great Depression, and determined that nothing like it would happen again. Ideas of social reconstruction through government planning were applied on a large scale, producing welfare states and managed economies in which living standards were improved for much of the population. The global scale of the conflict produced new international institutions, such as the United Nations, in which the nations of the world could co-operate on free and equal terms. In Africa and Asia, the end of the war gave anti-colonial movements increased ambition and vitality. Scientists were gripped by dreams of using the technologies that the war had spawned to enhance human life everywhere.

more here.

Rowan Williams at Literary Review:

Pedeir Ceinc y Mabinogi is a set of four loosely connected prose tales preserved in a couple of late medieval Welsh manuscripts, though they must have reached their present form by about 1200. The conventional title translates as ‘The Four Branches of the Mabinogi’, mabinogi being a word meaning very roughly ‘youthful exploits’, or the early achievements of a hero. But this title tells us almost nothing about the stories. Instead of narratives about a hero’s youth, we find complex, grotesque, sometimes dreamlike stories about magical shape-shifting, curses and taboos, blood feuds, love, abuse, incest and betrayal. Some of the characters recur from story to story, though each of the ‘branches’ can be read more or less independently of the others. The stories move bewilderingly from realistic, even humorous, evocations of life in the small Welsh courts of the Middle Ages to moments of bizarre and extreme violence; they contain intense lyrical and elegiac emotion and incomprehensible survivals of what seems to be pre-Christian, pre-Roman mythical themes. The names of many of the leading figures tantalisingly echo names given to the gods in Irish and even Gallic paganism. These stories are an archaeological site in themselves, a many-layered mound of tradition, in the depths of which lie some of the most basic imaginative tools of Indo-European religion and storytelling.

But they are also completely compelling in their own right as stories. They are told with vivid visual detail, irony and wit, realistic dialogue and sheer energy. Since the 19th century, when they were translated by the aristocratic and erudite English wife of a Welsh ironmaster, there have been many good versions of the text; more recently – as Matthew Francis notes in a brief but insightful introduction – there has been a project involving the reworking of the stories as modern novellas by a group of distinguished Welsh writers. Francis has taken a quite different route and produced an extraordinary new rendering in the shape of four long poems that ruminate over the narrative detail, both compressing the stories and allowing their imagery to unfold and flower.

more here.

Josefina Alvarez in Plus Magazine:

[H]ow is this mathematical beauty similar to, or different from, the beauty we ascribe to a work of art? There are frequent references to mathematics as an art. In an article published in The Mathematical Intelligencer with the title “Mathematics: art and science”, the mathematician Armand Borel has this to say: "“… mathematics is an extremely complex creation which displays so many essential traits in common with art and experimental and theoretical sciences that it has to be regarded as all three at the same time, and thus must be differentiated from all three as well.”"

So, as to how and why mathematics is connected to art or to other endeavours, the answer is typically ambiguous. It seems that questions of this nature are destined to remain a part of the mathematical folklore. Still, perhaps unknown to most mathematicians, something has been happening somewhere else.

A brain revolution

As early as 1909, an anatomist, Korbinian Brodmann, divided the cortex of the human brain into 47 areas, now called Brodmann areas, according to the structure and organisation of the cells. Later, as researchers began to understand the functions of different cells in the cortex, they were astounded by the fairly close relation emerging between certain Brodmann areas and the location of specific cell functions. Today, much is known about a wide range of these functions, showing the prodigious complexity of our brain. For instance, there seem to be about three thousand interconnected neurons, controlling most of our breathing and involving about 65 types of neurons!

Besides what we might call the physical functions, researchers are understanding the locations of what we might call intellectual functions. For example, an articlepublished in 2011 in the journal NeuroImage, discussed the findings of a study locating the brain areas needed for numbers and calculations. Coincidentally, a study published the same year in the journal PLoS ONE, presented evidence towards a brain-based theory of beauty. Several studies had already shown how beauty, as related to visual, auditory and moral experience, was connected to activity observed in a specific region of what researchers call the emotional brain.

Based on all these findings, a team of two neurobiologists, Semir Zeki and John Paul Romaya, a physicist, Dionigi M. T. Benincasa, and the mathematician Michael F. Atiyah conjectured that the perception of mathematical beauty should excite the same parts of the emotional brain, roughly described by a collection of Brodmann areas. Their study, published in the journal Frontiers of human neuroscience in 2014, seems to confirm their conjecture, indeed placing mathematical beauty, as perceived by trained mathematicians, in the same areas previously identified with other manifestations of beauty.

More here.

Stephanie McCrummen in The Washington Post:

The doctor was getting ready. Must look respectable, he told himself. Must be calm. He changed into a dark suit, blue shirt and tie and came down the wooden staircase of the stately Victorian house at Seventh and Pine that had always been occupied by the town’s most prominent citizens.

That was him: prominent citizen, town doctor, 42-year-old father of three, and as far as anyone knew, the first Muslim to ever live in Dawson, a farming town of 1,400 people in the rural western part of the state.

“Does this look okay?” Ayaz Virji asked his wife, Musarrat, 36.

In two hours, he was supposed to give his third lecture on Islam, and he was sure it would be his last. A local Lutheran pastor had talked him into giving the first one in Dawson three months before, when people had asked questions such as whether Muslims who kill in the name of the prophet Muhammad are rewarded in death with virgins, which had bothered him a bit. Two months later, he gave a second talk in a neighboring town, which had ended with several men calling him the antichrist.

Now a librarian had asked him to speak in Granite Falls, a town half an hour away, and he wasn’t sure at all what might happen. So many of the comforting certainties of his life had fallen away since the presidential election, when the people who had welcomed his family to Dawson had voted for Donald Trump, who had proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, toyed with the idea of a Muslim registry and said among other things, “Islam hates us.”

Trump had won Lac qui Parle County, where Dawson was the second-largest town, with nearly 60 percent of the vote. He had won neighboring Yellow Medicine County, where Granite Falls was the county seat, with 64 percent. Nearly all of Minnesota outside the Twin Cities had voted for Trump, a surprising turn in a state known for producing some of the Democratic Party’s most progressive leaders, including the nation’s first Muslim congressman.

Now Trump was in the White House, and Dawson’s first Muslim resident was sitting in his living room, strumming his fingers on the arm of a chair. The pastor had called to say two police officers would be there tonight, just in case.

More here.

James Duesterberg in The Point:

Like every virtual world, there is something seductive about the online realm of the new reactionary politics. Wading in, one finds oneself quickly immersed, and soon unmoored. All of the values that have guided the center-left, postwar consensus—the equal dignity of every individual, the guiding role of knowledge, government’s positive role in shaping civil society, a general sense that we’re moving towards a better world—are inverted. The moral landmarks by which we were accustomed to get our bearings aren’t gone: they’re on fire.

Trying to regain their footing, the mainstays of consensus thought have focused on domesticating the threat. Who are these Tea Partiers and internet recluses, these paleoconservatives and tech futurists, and what could they possibly want? The Atlantic mapped the coordinates of the “rebranded” white nationalism or the “internet’s anti-democracy movement” in the previously uncharted waters of 4chan and meme culture. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild peers over the “empathy wall” between her and her rural Louisiana Tea Party contacts, while in Hillbilly Elegy, Ohio-born lawyer J. D. Vance casts a melancholic look back—from the other side of the aisle, but, tellingly, from the same side of the wall—on the Appalachian culture he left behind for Yale Law and a career in Silicon Valley.

These efforts follow a line of center-left thought that begins with Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Its guiding assumption is that those who balk at its vision are fundamentally mistaken: victims of an unfortunate illusion, perpetuated by big businesses or small prejudices, lack of education or surplus of religion. But now the balance of power has shifted, radically. And as reactionary ideology has grown—seemingly overnight—from a vague and diffuse resistance to a concerted political force, the veneer of objective interest and pastoral concern has started to crack.

More here.

From Phys.org:

For the first time ever, astronomers at The University of New Mexico say they've been able to observe and measure the orbital motion between two supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of light years from Earth – a discovery more than a decade in the making.

UNM Department of Physics & Astronomy graduate student Karishma Bansal is the first-author on the paper, 'Constraining the Orbit of the Supermassive Black Hole Binary 0402+379', recently published in The Astrophysical Journal. She, along with UNM Professor Greg Taylor and colleagues at Stanford, the U.S. Naval Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, have been studying the interaction between these black holes for 12 years.

"For a long time, we've been looking into space to try and find a pair of these supermassive black holes orbiting as a result of two galaxies merging," said Taylor. "Even though we've theorized that this should be happening, nobody had ever seen it until now."

In early 2016, an international team of researchers, including a UNM alumnus, working on the LIGO project detected the existence of gravitational waves, confirming Albert Einstein's 100-year-old prediction and astonishing the scientific community. These gravitational waves were the result two stellar mass black holes (~30 solar mass) colliding in space within the Hubble time. Now, thanks to this latest research, scientists will be able to start to understand what leads up to the merger of supermassive black holes that creates ripples in the fabric of space-time and begin to learn more about the evolution of galaxies and the role these black holes play in it.

More here.