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?”

By C.J. Polychroniou in Truthout:

Noam, are globalization and capitalism different?

Noam Chomsky: If by "globalization" we mean international integration, then it long pre-dates capitalism. The silk roads dating back to the pre-Christian era were an extensive form of globalization. The rise of industrial state capitalism has changed the scale and character of globalization, and there have been further changes along the way as the global economy has been reshaped by those whom Adam Smith called "the masters of mankind," pursuing their "vile maxim": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people."

There have been quite substantial changes during the recent period of neoliberal globalization, since the late 1970s, with Reagan and Thatcher the iconic figures — though the policies vary only slightly as administrations change. Transnational corporations are the driving force, and their political power largely shapes state policy in their interests.

During these years, supported by the policies of the states they largely dominate, transnational corporations have increasingly constructed global value chains (GVCs) in which the "lead firm" outsources production through intricate global networks that it establishes and controls. A standard illustration is Apple, the world's biggest company. Its iPhone is designed in the US. Parts from many suppliers in the US and East Asia are assembled mostly in China in factories owned by the huge Taiwanese firm Foxconn. Apple's profit is estimated to be about 10 times that of Foxconn, while value added and profit in China, where workers toil under miserable conditions, is slight. Apple then sets up an office in Ireland so as to evade US taxes — and has recently been fined $14 billion by the EU in back taxes.

More here.

Lisa Zyga in Phys.org:

Although there are many counterintuitive ideas in quantum theory, the idea that influences can travel backwards in time (from the future to the past) is generally not one of them. However, recently some physicists have been looking into this idea, called "retrocausality," because it can potentially resolve some long-standing puzzles in quantum physics. In particular, if retrocausality is allowed, then the famous Bell tests can be interpreted as evidence for retrocausality and not for action-at-a-distance—a result that Einstein and others skeptical of that "spooky" property may have appreciated.

In a new paper published in Proceedings of The Royal Society A, physicists Matthew S. Leifer at Chapman University and Matthew F. Pusey at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics have lent new theoretical support for the argument that, if certain reasonable-sounding assumptions are made, then quantum theory must be retrocausal.

First, to clarify what retrocausality is and isn't: It does not mean that signals can be communicated from the future to the past—such signaling would be forbidden even in a retrocausal theory due to thermodynamic reasons. Instead, retrocausality means that, when an experimenter chooses the measurement setting with which to measure a particle, that decision can influence the properties of that particle (or another particle) in the past, even before the experimenter made their choice. In other words, a decision made in the present can influence something in the past.

In the original Bell tests, physicists assumed that retrocausal influences could not happen. Consequently, in order to explain their observations that distant particles seem to immediately know what measurement is being made on the other, the only viable explanation was action-at-a-distance. That is, the particles are somehow influencing each other even when separated by large distances, in ways that cannot be explained by any known mechanism. But by allowing for the possibility that the measurement setting for one particle can retrocausally influence the behavior of the other particle, there is no need for action-at-a-distance—only retrocausal influence.

More here.

Adrianne Kalfapoulou at the Quarterly Conversation:

With “Losing our Milk Teeth,” the opening poem of Patricia Colleen Murphy’s award-winning collection, Hemming Flames, the author announces from the outset that we’re in for a thrilling ride—thrilling as in thriller as much as the acute pleasure of reading masterful poems. Hemming Flames is by turns terrifying, uncanny, and sometimes lunatic, in the ways lunacy charts (if it does chart anything) the unpredictable and uncanny. There is also a wry and blunt humor here, a consciousness latching onto what will carry it through the traumas of an imploding family.

These poems’ tonal registers, their pitch and directness, make for a “hard to put down” read more characteristic of novels than most poetry collections. In “Losing our Milk Teeth” the father will say, “pass the mother/fucking peas. And, could you//try not to murder yourself/ in front of the children.” Ritual matter-of-factness is turned into ritual high drama, as Murphy parodies a type of family-gathering etiquette meant to tame demons that can go wildly out of control. But there is so much more here as Murphy mines her family’s unraveling; she is also telling us something about the subversive and redemptive possibilities of language. Or as she puts it in “The Princess of Creeping,” “no one can say I did not live a long time/ in the danger theater, where the play begins/ with all the dolls behaving perfectly.”

more here.

Colm Tóibín at The Guardian:

In October 1899, James Joyce, aged 17, attended all three days of the trial in Dublin of Samuel Childs for the brutal murder of his brother. This allowed him later to stitch references to the case throughout his novel Ulysses, including a moment when his protagonist Leopold Bloom and others are on their way to Paddy Dignam’s funeral in Glasnevin cemetery and pass Bengal Terrace, where the murder occurred: “Gloomy gardens then went by: one by one: gloomy houses.” When one man says: “That is where Childs was murdered … The last house,” Simon Dedalus replies: “So it is … A gruesome case. Seymour Bushe got him off. Murdered his brother. Or so they said.”

This, as Adrian Hardiman writes in his fascinating, painstaking book on Joyce and the law, “is the first mention in Ulysses of the Childs murder case. In one way or another the case or its protagonists are referred to more than 20 times in the text, sometimes very plainly, at other times obscurely. The case thus emerges as just one of the numerous threads, often submerged but constantly recurring, that form the fabric of the novel.”

Hardiman takes us through a number of law cases that are referred to in this way in Ulysses with such clarity and vivid use of detail that it is easy to imagine how they preoccupied the characters as they wandered in Dublin on 16 June 1904.

more here.