Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

In 2015, Martin Edwards brought out “The Golden Age of Murder,” a history of Britain’s Detection Club that went on to sweep nearly all of crime writing’s nonfiction awards. Little wonder. It is an irresistible book, packed with insider anecdotes about a secretive association boasting such celebrated members as G.K. Chesterton and R. Austin Freeman (creators of Father Brown and Dr. Thorndyke); the crime queens Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie; that master of the locked-room puzzle, John Dickson Carr; and, not least, co-founder A.B. Cox, equally accomplished whether writing as the witty Anthony Berkeley (“The Poisoned Chocolates Case”) or the bone-chilling Francis Iles ­(“Before the Fact”).

Since “The Golden Age of Murder” appeared, Edwards — himself a gifted and prolific writer of mysteries, as well as a scholar of the field — has emerged as a driving force behind the republication of older detective fiction, contributing introductions to many of the titles in the series British Library Crime Classics. All that reading lies behind his new work of critical appreciation and rediscovery, “The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books.”

more here.

Miriam Darlington at The Guardian:

There is a venerable tradition of literature about the lines humans have created in the British landscape. Alfred Watkins’s The Old Straight Track, Francis Hitching’s Earth Magic, Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways and a plethora of natural histories and hedgerow-seeking illuminations – recently John Wright’s The Natural History of the Hedgerow. All are fascinated with fragmentation and connection, and infused with the joys and conundrums we layer on our land with our human footfall. In Linescapes, Hugh Warwick provides a good-humoured, even visionary, perspective on the fragile ecology of our hedges, roads, power lines and railways. Often opting for the hedgehog’s-eye view (his first book, A Prickly Affair, declared his passion for this important indicator species), he reveals how the man-made lines in our landscape present a paradox. They were originally put there to fragment, assert ownership or to restrain livestock, yet over time their edges and intricacies have provided opportunities for adaptable wildlife to flourish. Walls sympathetic to wildlife can contribute to its recovery, sometimes “very slowly, as lichens inch to the corners of the compass. Sometimes with the sneaky speed of a stoat on a mission.”

While we have lost 98% of our wildflower meadows and 50% of our ancient woodland in the last 100 years, Warwick asks us to shift our sightline away from ugliness and ruination towards the potential of new habitats. “Connection is what we need, and what nature needs if we are to tackle the global collapse of species,” he argues.

more here.

Jesse Barron in Bookforum:

JANET MALCOLM WROTE in 1989 that much American psychotherapy aims not to explore the unconscious but to transpose the genre of the patient’s life, usually from a tragedy to a domestic comedy. Marriage manuals for middle-class whites succeed to the extent that they provide either a romantic story readers can live with or passive acceptance of a not-romantic story that feels warm and comic, not bleak and absurd. They transport us from Happy Days the Beckett play to Happy Days the Fonzie show. As an aesthetic, hokeyness has a single great advantage. It sets relaxingly low stakes. How life-or-death can it be if we’re talking about piling into the van to play minigolf or fornicating with a ciabatta? But that is the paradox of the marriage-manual form, its special strangeness compared to other how-to guides. By transposing us into a low-stakes story, it forfeits the intensity that draws us to marriage in the first place, turning what was once a one-way ticket to happiness or misery into something that looks like an affair between very polite start-up founders.

Though marriage can be funny, I am not sure it is best understood as comic. The ending spoils it. Romantic comedies end with happy marriage; happy marriage, like tragedy, ends in death. And death is the ideal ending, preferably your own. I notice that I sometimes sublimate my fear of Sarah’s death into the comparatively trivial fear that I will give an inadequate eulogy: I’ll make an ass of myself saying what a beautiful stomach she had, or how she once did the dishes with laundry detergent. “Who will die first?” is another way of asking, “What is the plot here?” Marriage manuals ring false because they are tragedy minus time. By contrast, the most compelling books about monogamy are written after the fact by a surviving partner once the story has sorted itself out. If we want to learn about marriage, we turn here. Donald Hall’s accounts of life with Jane Kenyon before her illness, for example, provide a glimpse of the pleasures of the quotidian, walking around New Hampshire in the summer reading each other’s poems. They continued reading each other even as she was dying, when he recited a draft of his elegy for her. (She said, “You’ve got it.”)

More here.

Henry Alford in The New York Times:

Say you were bold enough to gather together seven of the recent or upcoming books about boredom. To stack the deck, say you were to do this gathering during a week of intense, attention-imperiling humidity — a week when, purely coincidentally, you’d just reached page 508 of “Moby-Dick,” and thus had arrived at a kind of sweet spot in your appreciation of lengthy descriptions of rope. Would you crack a single one of the boredom brigade open? Or would you soon be found desiccated and near-dead in your apartment, eyeballs dangling from their sockets? Quietly asserting itself in books and personal essays since 2015, the “boredom boom” would seem to be a reaction to the short attention spans bred by our computers and smartphones. The words “boring” and “interesting” didn’t exist in English till the 1800s, a period when…

… Whoa, is that a candy-colored hula hoop on that book jacket?

I started with Mary Mann’s “Yawn: Adventures in Boredom” (164 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15) because it has a hula hoop on it, and because I am 12. This would prove to be one of the three books I would read in its entirety. Given that boredom is inextricably bound up with questions of taste, I am now compelled to specify the two commodities that I most cherish in nonfiction: 1) lots and lots of authorial voice and, 2) a modicum of surprise. You can keep your well-reasoned arguments and your ripped-from-the-headlines topicality, thank you. All I want is a distinct sense of — and an interest in — the person I’m listening to. And then I want to be slapped across the face with a haddock. Ms. Mann has both these qualities in spades. By trade a researcher (“like being a private detective, without the danger and the sex”), the delightful Ms. Mann comes off as a funny, very hip nerd. She lards her first-person exploration with facts I didn’t know: Cuban cigar factories pay people to read stories aloud to their workers, to relieve tedium. Most door-close buttons in elevators and request-to-walk buttons at crosswalks serve no purpose other than to give us something to fidget with. Thomas Cook, the father of tourism, thought travel was an antidote to alcoholism. Yes, please.

More here.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

Kolmogorov was private in his personal and political life, which might have had something to do with being gay, at a time and place when that was in no way widely accepted. From what I’ve read—for example, in Gessen’s biography of Perelman—Kolmogorov seems to have been generally a model of integrity and decency. He established schools for mathematically gifted children, which became jewels of the Soviet Union; one still reads about them with awe. And at a time when Soviet mathematics was convulsed by antisemitism—with students of Jewish descent excluded from the top math programs for made-up reasons, sent instead to remote trade schools—Kolmogorov quietly protected Jewish researchers.

OK, but all this leaves a question. Kolmogorov was a leading and admired Soviet scientist all through the era of Stalin’s purges, the Gulag, the KGB, the murders and disappearances and forced confessions, the show trials, the rewritings of history, the allies suddenly denounced as traitors, the tragicomedy of Lysenkoism. Anyone as intelligent, individualistic, and morally sensitive as Kolmogorov would obviously have seen through the lies of his government, and been horrified by its brutality. So then why did he utter nary a word in public against what was happening?

More here.

Video length: 53:02

Olivia Goldhill in Quartz:

Whether or not octopuses should be viewed as charming or terrifying very much depends on your personal perspective. But it’s hard to deny their intelligence.

Octopuses can squirt water at an annoyingly bright bulb until it short-circuits. They can tell humans apart (even those who are wearing the same uniform). And, according to Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosophy professor at University of Sydney and City University of New York, they are the closest creature to an alien here on earth.

That’s because octopuses are the most complex animal with the most distant common ancestor to humans. There’s some uncertainty about which precise ancestor was most recently shared by octopuses and humans, but, Godfrey-Smith says, “It was probably an animal about the size of a leech or flatworm with neurons numbering perhaps in the thousands, but not more than that.”

This means that octopuses have very little in common with humans, evolution-wise. They have developed eyes, limbs, and brains via a completely separate route, with very different ancestors, from humans. And they seem to have come by their impressive cognitive functioning—and likely consciousness—by different means.

“A real alien would be a sentient being with no common ancestry with us at all, arising completely independently,” says Godfrey-Smith, who published a book on consciousness and octopuses earlier this year. “We might never meet that—if we do, that would be great. If we don’t, the octopus is our best approximation because there’s a historical connection but it was a long time ago.”

More here.

David Wasserman in FiveThirtyEight:

When Democrats think about their party’s problems on the political map, they tend to think of President Trump’s ability to win the White House despite losing the popular vote and Republicans’ potent efforts to gerrymander congressional districts. But their problems extend beyond the Electoral College and the House: The Senate hasn’t had such a strong pro-GOP bias since the ratification of direct Senate elections in 1913.

Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats.

This is partly attributable to the nature of House districts: GOP gerrymandering and Democratic voters’ clustering in urban districts has moved the median House seat well to the right of the nation. Part of it is bad timing. Democrats have been cursed by a terrible Senate map in 2018: They must defend 25 of their 48 seats¹ while Republicans must defend just eight of their 52.

But there’s a larger, long-term trend at work too — one that should alarm Democrats preoccupied with the future of Congress and the Supreme Court.

More here.

Christina Cauterucci in Double X:

Men in Western nations produce about half as many sperm per milliliter of ejaculate as their peers did in the ‘70s, according to a new research review published in Human Reproductive Update. Between 1973 and 2011, researchers found, the sperm concentration of Western ejaculate fell more than 52 percent, while the total number of sperm per semen sample fell by almost 60 percent. “If we will not change the ways that we are living and the environment and the chemicals that we are exposed to, I am very worried about what will happen in the future,” co-author and epidemiologist Hagai Levine told the BBC. Those chemicals include phthalates, which recently had their 15 minutes of fame for being present in nearly all tested brands of macaroni and cheese mixes. Phthalates get into foods by way of plastics in packaging and processing equipment, and evidence strongly suggests that they disrupt testosterone production, leading to reduced sperm counts.

Previous studies of sperm count in men over time have been called into question over concerns such as known fertility problems among participants and changing sperm-measurement techniques, which may have overestimated sperm count in earlier studies. For this new study, researchers analyzed data from 185 studies that used the same sperm-count testing procedure on nearly 43,000 men, none of whom were selected for existing infertility issues or other conditions. After correcting for age and length of time since last ejaculation, the authors noted a decline in sperm concentration among Western men from 99 million sperm per milliliter in 1973 to 47.1 million sperm per milliliter in 2011. Researchers found a limited number of studies of non-Western men, but those that did exist did not indicate a similar decline sperm concentration.

More here.

Kevin Padhian in Nature:

Nevertheless, Improbable Destinies is deep, broad, brilliant and thought-provoking. Losos explores the meaning of terms such as fate, chance, convergence and contingency in evolution. Why do similar solutions — morphological, genetic and molecular — crop up again and again? He became intrigued by these questions when, as a student, he began to study the Caribbean Anolislizards, following groundbreaking work by ecologist Thomas Schoener. These lizards inhabit a great range of island sizes and habitats, and tend to evolve similar adaptations and roles in similar circumstances. However, species on different islands that resemble each other aren't each other's closest relatives. Why not?

The answer, we think, is that closely related lineages have similar genetic components, so under comparable ecological conditions they are likely to produce similar mutations that are then selected for. Many call this convergence; I prefer the term parallelism for closely related lineages. 'Convergence' is appropriate for reinvention in very different groups — the superficially similar wings of birds and pterosaurs, or the elongated grub-seeking fingers of the aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) and striped possum (Dactylopsila trivirgata). We can catalogue examples all day, but is there any real theory of convergence? We cannot assert that some lineages are 'fated' to converge on these features. Biological ideas of determinism went out with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the late eighteenth century. Evidence against determinism is the prevalence of creatures whose adaptations have never been duplicated: the kangaroo, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), the century plant (Agave americana, which blooms only once in its multidecade life) — and humans. Primates have the equipment apparently needed to evolve flight: arboreal habits, large brains, good coordination and active metabolisms. Yet no primate seems to have evolved gliding, let alone powered flight. No evolutionary duplication is inevitable.

More here.

Hirsh Sawhney at the TLS:

In recent decades, scholars such as Gyanendra Pandey and Yasmin Khan have helped to unravel the complex role the British played in encouraging the religious discord that still beleaguers South Asia today, and yet the tendency to downplay the role of the colonizer in Partition persists in many English-language texts. Even seemingly nuanced accounts can’t seem to shake off this habit. Take Nisid Hajari’s book Midnight’s Furies (2015), which received thunderous acclaim in the US, UK and India. It presents provocative evidence of British imperialists actively fanning the flames of communal discord by paying off Muslim clerics to preach against the Congress Party, and yet the author seems reluctant to rigorously scrutinize British actions and attitudes leading up to Partition. He often makes light of the role of imperial actors, such as Viceroy Mountbatten; he rehashes old tropes about the “deep roots” of divisions between Hindus and Muslims, mentioning age-old “frictions” stemming from the destruction of “flower-strewn temples” by “Muslim conquerors”. Various scholars, including Audrey Truschke and Romila Thapar, have demonstrated the tenuousness of such claims. Thapar, for example, has pointed out that alleged Hindu grievances about the eleventh-century destruction of the Somnath temple were first aired in Britain’s Parliament; only after this point do records begin to reference “the Hindu trauma”.

It is true, as many critics have pointed out, that South Asian thinkers and politicians would do well to reckon with the culpability of their own leaders and citizens in carrying out Partition and perpetuating religious violence. As the legacy of twentieth-century imperialism continues to inform our current moment of global instability, it is similarly imperative for Anglo-American audiences to see through the simplicities epitomized by Google’s Partition commercial.

more here.

Will Stephenson at The Paris Review:

In 1919, a year after he’d startled America by vanishing a four-thousand-pound elephant named Jenny onstage at the New York Hippodrome, Harry Houdini arrived in Hollywood to make his first feature film. Already, the magician was roughly as famous as any American performer could be in his era. He’d spent years diving handcuffed into ice-cold rivers, locking himself in jail cells, maneuvering his body in and out of sealed crates and prison vans and (once) the belly of a beached whale. He was a living legend, and a world-class egotist: he named his pets after himself; printed his initials on his pajamas, his bathroom tiles, and his cuff links; and signed most of his trick blueprints “H. H., Champion of the World.”

Still, Houdini was always looking for new frontiers, and he believed that Hollywood was the next step. “I think the film profession is the greatest, and that the moving picture is the most wonderful thing in the world,” he told an interviewer. Like the movies themselves, Houdini had emerged from vaudeville, and he understood film’s appeal intuitively. Earlier in the year, to test the waters, he’d starred in a fifteen-part serial, The Master Mystery, featuring a robot with a human brain who could shoot lasers out of his fingertips. (Houdini claimed to have designed the villain himself.) The series was well-received. Billboard deemed it a “cracker-jack production” that “will thunder down the ages to perpetuate the fame of this remarkable genius.” Financially, though, it was a nonstarter; it took Houdini four years in court to recover his earnings.

more here.

Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

It seems a little incongruous that T. S. Eliot, a man who adopted all the attributes—political, religious, cultural, and sartorial—of a proper Englishman was actually a Midwesterner. But, of course, he grew up in St. Louis, and some of the landscapes that seem distinctly English to many readers in his poetry, like the “yellow fog” in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” were recollected from his childhood there.

The Eliots were originally from New England, though. Eliot’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, moved to Missouri as a young man and eventually founded Washington University, in St. Louis. Eliot’s father, Henry, who ran a company that manufactured bricks, took the family to Massachusetts every summer, and in 1896, the year Eliot turned eight, Henry built a big house on Cape Ann, in Gloucester, overlooking the outer harbor. Until Eliot went off to Europe, in 1914, he spent his summers there.

Eliot often talked about his nostalgia for the sea off the Eastern Point, where he used to sail, and for the granite, the tide pools, and the birdlife of Cape Ann, memories that gave rise to many images in his poetry:

The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.

more here.

The biologist and atheist, whose latest book was released this week, talks about the reliability of science, artificial intelligence, religion and the president.

John Horgan in Scientific American:

Richard Dawkins, the biologist and author, is complicated. I reached this conclusion in 2005 when I participated in a fellowship for journalists organized by the pro-religion Templeton Foundation. Ten of us spent several weeks at the University of Cambridge listening to 18 scientists and philosophers point out areas where science and religion converge. Alone among the speakers, Dawkins argued, in his usual uncompromising fashion, that science and religion are incompatible. But in his informal interactions with me and other fellows, Dawkins was open-minded and a good listener. Over drinks one evening, a Christian journalist described witnessing an episode of faith healing. Instead of dismissing the story outright, Dawkins pressed for details. He seemed to find the story fascinating. His curiosity, at least for a moment, trumped his skepticism.

I mention this episode because it is illustrative of the thinking on display in Dawkins’s newest book, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist. It consists of essays written over the last several decades on, among other things, altruism, group selection, extraterrestrials, punctuated equilibrium, animal suffering, eugenics, essentialism, tortoises, dinosaurs, 9/11, the problem of evil, the internet, his father and Christopher Hitchens. The book showcases Dawkins’s dual talents. He is a ferocious polemicist, a defender of reason and enemy of superstition. He is also an extraordinarily talented explicator and celebrator of biology. He makes complex concepts, like kin selection, pop into focus in a way that imparts a jolt of pleasure. His best writings are suffused with the wide-ranging curiosity that he revealed at the fellowship in Cambridge.

More here.

Video length: 39:00

Michael Muthukrishna in Evonomics:

There is nothing natural about democracy. There is nothing natural about living in communities with complete strangers. There is nothing natural about large-scale anonymous cooperation. Yet, this morning, I bought a coffee from Starbucks with no fear of being poisoned or cheated. I caught a train on London’s underground packed with people I’ve never met before and will probably never meet again. If we were commuting chimps in a space that small, it would have been a scene out of the latest Planet of the Apes by the time we reached Holborn station. We’ll return to this mystery in a moment.

There is something very natural about prioritizing your family over other people. There is something very natural about helping your friends and others in your social circle. And there is something very natural about returning favors given to you. These are all smaller scales of cooperation that we share with other animals and that are well described by the math of evolutionary biology. The trouble is that these smaller scales of cooperation can undermine the larger-scale cooperation of modern states. Although corruption is often thought of as a falling from grace, a challenge to the normal functioning state—it’s in the etymology of the word—it’s perhaps better understood as the flip side of cooperation. One scale of cooperation, typically the one that’s smaller and easier to sustain, undermines another.

More here.

Over at the Breach, Lindsay Beyerstein interviews Ankit Panda:

Lindsay: What kind of nuclear strategy is North Korea entertaining at this point?

Ankit: So this is the question of the hour. It's been something that I've been talking about with Vipin Narang who is a nuclear strategy expert up in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I actually recently had him on my own podcast to kind of talk this stuff in like really wonky detail. I'll try not to get into too much detail right now

Lindsay: It's wonderful everybody should go download that episode of The Diplomat, it's really good.

Ankit: Oh thank you. Thank you, Lindsay. But like to just very quickly wrap up what I think is going on in North Korea's nuclear strategy is that, they're essentially looking to use a first strike nuclear strategy. But they're planning to use a first strike within the theater. So the theater you can broadly think of everything kind of 2,000 to 3,000 miles out from North Korea. So, basically, what the North Koreans have been saying … they're actually pretty explicit about it this. This isn't something that kind of tell us in poetry and we have to kind of spend hours decoding. They have very explicitly released statements through their foreign ministry – actually, their deputy foreign minister had a great statement in April where he kind of laid this out. Basically, this is what they say: if North Korea ever gets the sense that The United States and South Korea are mobilizing to preemptively attack North Korea, or preemptively take out Kim Jong-un, or preemptively kind of take out North Korea nuclear launch sites, they will launch everything they have except their intercontinental range systems, right? So they will launch their short range systems, their medium range systems, their intermediate range systems first, with nuclear war heads and conventional explosive range warheads. They will launch them at pretty much every US asset in the region, right? So this includes the Port Of Pusan, Iwakuni air force base in Japan, Guam. And to kind of tell you that I'm not crazy and kind of envisioning this, when they release images of their recent nuclear tests — it's really interesting they kind of dangle these maps, right? So if you look at Kim Jongun's desk, for example, in February — or sorry in March — when they tested these four extended range scud missiles, there was this map on Kim Jun-un's desk. And I think this was the map that showed these missiles going to Iwakuni, right…

More here.

Stuart Klawans at The Nation:

What happened, exactly? Detroit gives you a highly credible reconstruction—not that the filmmakers will stop at mere plausibility. They’re content with nothing less than full immersion, playing out the incident at such length that the movie might more accurately have been titled Algiers. By means of excruciating exhaustiveness, they hit the first of their sweet spots: proving to their own satisfaction, and presumably yours, that their opening statement was correct. The white cops in the Algiers were unrelentingly racist and violent, and the black Detroiters devoid of options other than enduring their victimhood, collaborating with the cops, or rebelling.

Bigelow and Boal envision the purity of victimhood in the figures of Larry Reed (Algee Smith) and Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore), members of an aspiring vocal group who are holed up at the Algiers. They’re portrayed as achingly dewy and innocent—especially Larry, who might play at being a ladies’ man but mostly wants to lift his sweet tenor toward heaven. The self-torture of collaboration is represented by Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), a security guard who believes the best way to help his people is to align himself with the inescapable white authorities and demonstrate his rectitude to them at all times. Bigelow and Boal make him out to be the type of guy who would iron his boxer shorts. You know from the start that he’ll end up betrayed and disillusioned, just as any experienced moviegoer will understand that Larry and Fred will never get back to the stage of the Fox Theatre.

more here.