Karen Wilkin at The Hudson Review:

Among the most notable of the past season’s exhibitions were revelations of studio practice in early twentieth-century Paris, the Dutch Golden Age, and seventeenth-century Spain. In London, for example, “Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement,” at the Courtauld Gallery, organized in collaboration with the Musée Rodin, Paris, surveyed the French master’s compelling late images of dancers. Made in the 1890s, when Auguste Rodin was in his 50s and 60s, these radically simplified drawings and sculptures bear witness to a private side of the celebrated artist. Exhibited with photographs that provided context, they docu­mented Rodin’s delight in vanguard dance, from a Cambodian troupe to Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller. Rodin attended perfor­mances and had dancers pose for him in the studio (one acrobatic model with an exceptionally flexible spine was a favorite), responding with rapid pencil drawings, many made, as was his frequent practice, without taking his eyes off the model to glance at the page. Some of these vigorous, pared-down images were embellished with watercolor, while others remained untouched—evidence of both Rodin’s methods and his ability to distill perception into economical, evocative shapes.

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Phyllis Korkkis in The New York Times:

The workplace, like almost all places where people interact, can be a petri dish of conflict. Offensive remarks, unrealistic demands, people taking credit for others’ work, bullying — the transgressions that occur can take many forms. They also have the potential to escalate out of control and permanently damage relationships. Gabrielle S. Adams, an assistant professor at the London Business School and a visiting fellow at Harvard University, has examined the role that empathy and forgiveness can play in resolving these conflicts. In recent studies, Professor Adams found that misunderstandings often exist between the victims of harm and the people who committed the harm. In many cases, the transgressors did not intend a negative effect, whereas the victims tended to think that the damage was intentional. In addition, transgressors frequently felt guilty and wanted to be forgiven much more than their victims realized.

When someone feels wronged, it can help to actively empathize with the person who is perceived as the wrongdoer, according to a study that Professor Adams conducted along with M. Ena Inesi, also of the London Business School. That can enable the victim to realize that the transgressor may well wish to be forgiven, their study found. They came to these conclusions, in part, by having people record diaries, over a five-day period, of situations in which they thought they had harmed or offended other people, or been harmed by or offended by others. From these diaries, wide “miscalibrations” of other people’s perceptions became apparent, Professor Adams said. “We ask victims to think about what it would be like to be the transgressor, and you reduce that miscalibration,” she said. She also conducted a lab experiment in which people could select from a set of assignments. One of the assignments — testing out various juice flavors — was much more enjoyable than a different one: going through a set of nonsense words and crossing out the letter E. If given first choice of an assignment, people would almost always choose the fun juice test, which meant that the other participant was forced to take the tedious letter E assignment. As a result, the second person tended to be resentful of the first person — but the first people indicated that they hadn’t intended the harm and felt guilty about it. This is typical of many workplace conflicts, Professor Adams said. Think of bullying. Many people can cite instances in which they think they have been bullied. But how many people would say that they have bullied someone themselves? In a conflict, the people involved almost always have a different interpretation of events, Professor Adams said. This is partly because we have a built-in tendency as humans to think that we are good people, and also that we are right. By making it a point to resolve conflicts by encouraging empathy and forgiveness, workers and managers can improve workplace conditions, Professor Adams said.

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Sara Reardon in Nature:

The anaesthetic ketamine — a hallucinogenic club drug also known as Special K — has tantalized researchers who are seeking new ways to treat depression. The drug can lift a person’s mood in hours, even when depression is severe. But several ‘ketamine-like’ medications have failed to alleviate depression in clinical trials over the past decade. Now, some researchers think they know why. Emerging evidence suggests that scientists have misunderstood how ketamine fights depression. So they might have attempted to mimic the wrong biological mechanism when designing drugs to improve mood while avoiding the disorienting ketamine high. On 20 May, researchers at a meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry in San Diego, California, will present results suggesting that some of ketamine’s power comes from its ability to affect brain cells called glia, which support neurons. Their finding adds to recent studies contradicting a long-held idea that the drug works mainly by blocking proteins called NMDA receptors, on the surface of brain cells, which transmit signals between those cells.

At the upcoming meeting, a team led by neuroscientist Mark Rasenick of the University of Illinois at Chicago will report on tests of antidepressant drugs in cultured rat glial cells. All of the drugs that the researchers studied caused a cluster of proteins to shift position in the glial cells’ membranes, signalling to the cells to form new connections with their neighbours. But ketamine produced this effect in 15 minutes, as compared to 3 days for conventional antidepressants. Moreover, drugs that block NMDA receptors but are not antidepressants did not show the effect at all. This suggests that ketamine’s ability to bind to NMDA receptors might not be its primary weapon against depression. Rasenick’s team is not the first to suggest a different target for ketamine. A paper published in Nature in May 2016 concluded that one of ketamine’s breakdown products — not the drug itself — probably lifted depression in mice¹. And this compound affected cell proteins called AMPA receptors, instead of NMDA receptors.

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Review by Deborah Smith in The Guardian:

Ghachar Ghochar is the English-language debut of a writer already established as a leading figure in both the pan-Indian and Kannada-language literary scenes. Once again, reading beyond our tiny borders shows us what we’ve been missing, and proves the necessity of translation for a dynamic literary culture: Ghachar Ghochar is both fascinatingly different from much Indian writing in English, and provides a masterclass in crafting, particularly on the power of leaving things unsaid. In fewer than 28,000 words, Vivek Shanbhag weaves a web of suggestion and implication, to be read with a sense of mounting unease.

The opening chapter demonstrates how the short novel is the perfect form for Shanbhag’s particular talents: precise observations, accumulation of detail, narrative progression by way of oblique tangents. It opens in a Bangalore coffee shop, whose name hasn’t changed in a hundred years, andwhere the unnamed narrator unburdens himself to laconic waiter Vincent. The latter is splendidly outfitted in cummerbund and turban, and Coffee House’s tasteful oak-panelled walls are decorated with old photographs showing “just how beautiful this city was a century ago”. The narrator has no reason to be there, he confesses, “but who can admit to doing something for no reason in times like these, in a city as busy as this one?”

In a handful of deftly drawn strokes, we learn that Coffee House is his refuge from contemporary life, harking back as it does to a time before the bourgeois concerns of money-making had taken root.

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Bob Yirka in Phys.org:

A biologist with the University of Zurich has discovered a species of dragonfly whose females play dead to avoid copulating with other males once her eggs have already been fertilized. In his paper published in the journal Ecology, Rassim Khelifa recalls his first experience with a female mooreland hawker dragonfly playing dead, and what he found after further study of the species.

As Khelifa describes it, he was out collecting larvae in the Swiss Alps one day, when he happened to notice one dragonfly chasing another—suddenly, the one being chased simply stopped flying and crashed to the ground, belly up. The pursuer, he notes, paused for a moment, then moved on. As Khelifa approached the dragonfly on the ground he noted it was female and then was surprised when she suddenly awoke, turned over and flew away.

Intrigued, and suspecting the behavior was intentional, Khelifa initiated a study of the species in their native environment, watching 31 male/female pursuits over time. He reports that the females tried the fake death routine 27 times, and that it worked 21 times. He notes further that in each of the fake death attempts, the female had just left her eggs, or was on her way to tend to them again.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Melik Kaylan in Forbes:

So first the Dutch, and then the French have voted back into the center and rejected the populist-nationalist axis. A good deal of flack still pocks the scene but you can feel a general drift on the European air. Geert Wilders, the self-appointed anti-Islam Dutch firebrand, a brave man whatever you think of his policies, got left standing at the altar. And now Marine Le Pen. Certainly the mood might yet change in France before the run-off, with more Daesh-linked attacks or other spoilers. But they already had a terror attack timed to affect the vote and it didn't work. If anything, it seems to have consolidated the center. Many still doubt the trend. Here the New York Times idly suggests that the failed far-left French candidate, Melenchon, may yet tilt things towards Le Pen: he has refused to back the new front-runner Macron in the run-off. But it won't happen.

The French, like the Dutch and Germans, are unlikely to merge the political poles, the far left and right, in the way that the anglo-saxon world has embraced. Here's why. Core Europeans have finally woken up to the extremity of the danger. By that I refer not to the inner beast of fascism or authoritarianism or whatever 'ism the bien pensant side discerns in the bud. Rather, Europeans have detected a more pressing danger – the forces from without working to push them off-balance: the Trump-Putin-Erdogan factor.

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Joe Halstead at Literary Hub:

Mount Lookout, West Virginia is a blip on the radar, little more than a collection of families, a few modest doublewide trailers, and a post office. To get to my parents’ house, you have to break off from US Route 19 and take East Mount Lookout Road, driving through a collection of trailers scattered through the hills, past big-ass trucks resting in driveways like content, fattened grizzly bears. That night, I sat in the living room with my mom and dad, watching the nation break down over Trump on live TV. My dad sat to my left, slightly in front of me, my new nephew, Joshua, bouncing on his knee. Every once in a while my dad turned around and looked at me, to make sure I was still there and that I was having a good time. He said he’d like to go kill a deer. I said I’d like that, too. Understand this about me: I’ve done this for most of my life. It’s simply part of who I am. It’s part of who you are, too. Pull back the curtain of civilization and what you see is the quasi-medieval zombie world, or a Lord of the Flies, in all of us. It’s just the modern world that keeps a lid on it. I’m tempted to indict it, but my complicity makes such a critique feel self-righteous and hypocritical.

On TV, they were debating whether Trump is a total climate-change denier or if he merely denies that human activity has contributed to climate change.

“Don’t ever be one of them environmentalists, Joey,” my dad said. His gaze turned elsewhere when he added, “First they take your job, then they take everything you got.”

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Jay Parini at Literary Review:

The problem with Fitzgerald has never been the work; it’s been the writing about him. The standard biography for some time has been Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, a 1981 study by Matthew J Bruccoli. It’s a reliable and boring compilation of facts, not as well written as the first major assessment of the life and work, The Far Side of Paradiseby Arthur Mizener (1951). Any number of lives of Fitzgerald have appeared over the decades, but I’ve not found them satisfying, in large part because they tend to portray the author as a spokesman for the so-called Jazz Age, a drunken playboy with unresolved aspirations who embodies the empty morality of the Lost Generation. One got more by reading memoirs of the period, such as Malcolm Cowley’s haunting Exile’s Return (1934), which recalls well-known American authors in Paris in the 1920s, a kind of golden age that continues to inspire young American writers to travel abroad to seek their imaginative fortunes. Fitzgerald was hardly celebrating the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Instead, he offered a rueful and remorseless critique of that world, however much he adored it.

Fitzgerald was a good Catholic boy by training, a young man who read the Gospels and understood (though he resisted the notion, almost successfully) that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter heaven. His wealth-bedazzled characters, including Jay Gatsby, Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise and Gordon Sterrett in ‘May Day’, that incomparable early masterpiece of short fiction, find little pleasure in their lives. They have swallowed a notion of the American Dream that has turned into a kaleidoscopic fantasy which tantalises but never quite resolves into a steady image. There is no fun in their yearning for something they can’t possess and that nobody can ever have.

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Ingrid D. Rowland at the New York Review of Books:

But most of all, the Caravaggio originals in London’s “Beyond Caravaggio” demonstrate why the painter exerted such an overwhelming influence on patrons and colleagues alike, and why he is so passionately loved today. He can paint beautifully most of the time. He produced marvelous compositions of light beaming forth from the darkness, covered his canvases with luminous whites, full-blooded reds, velvet blacks, but above all, especially later in his career, he painted with restraint, and taste, and a gigantic, compassionate heart.

The restraint shows when we compare his work with that of his admirers. If the young Caravaggio painted several versions of a boy with fruit as a way of advertising his skill at both still life and the human figure, his pupil and follower Francesco Boneri (nicknamed Cecco del Caravaggio—“Caravaggio’s Frankie”) painted a red-haired musician surrounded by a bushel of fruit, cheese, bread, gourds, two glass flasks encased in nets, a hanging head of garlic, a glass vase full of water, and a violin—splendidly painted, like the sitter’s plume, shirt, and brocaded vest, but he could have proven his skill just as cogently with half as many objects. Caravaggio’s painting of Doubting Thomas showed the disciple sticking his index finger into the side wound of Jesus, a startling image already, but discreetly done compared with the way that Giovanni Antonio Galli, called Lo Spadarino (“Little Swordsman”), gives us Christ head-on, staring us down as he spreads the wound wider himself, daring us to play Saint Thomas with our eyes instead of our finger.

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Oset Babur in Harvard Magazine:

Imagine a business that creates a perfectly energy-efficient environment by adjusting ventilation rates in its workplace. On paper, the outcome would seem overwhelmingly positive: fewer greenhouse-gas emissions to the environment and lowered costs to the business. It’s an idyllic scenario, except for what Joseph Allen and his team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) describe as the potentially serious human cost: workers with chronic migraines, nausea, fatigue, and difficulty focusing. Fortunately, these side effects are avoidable.

“The truth is, we absolutely can have buildings that are both energy-efficient and healthy,” says Allen, assistant professor of exposure assessment science. In 2015, his team published a two-part study that quantified the cognitive benefits of improved environmental conditions for workers. The first phase took place in the Syracuse University Center for Excellence, where knowledge workers, such as architects and engineers, went about their regular workdays as Allen and his team manipulated environmental factors. “We weren’t looking to test an unattainable, dream-state workplace. We wanted to test scenarios and conditions that would be possible to replicate,” he explains. They adjusted ventilation rates, carbon dioxide levels, and the quantity of airborne VOCs (volatile organic chemical compounds that are emitted by common objects such as desk chairs and white boards). At the end of each day, the team asked workers to complete cognitive-function assessments in nine key areas, including crisis response, decisionmaking, and strategy. “We saw pretty dramatic effects,” he reports: workers in optimized environments scored 131 percent better in crisis-response questions, 299 percent better on information usage, and 288 percent higher in strategy.

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Laura Geggel in Live Science:

A wiggly, ravenous caterpillar — one that doesn't limit its diet to naturally grown objects — can biodegrade plastic bags, a material infamous for the amount of time it takes to decompose, a new study finds. The 1-inch-long (3 centimeters) wax worm, also known as the honey worm caterpillar (Galleria mellonella), is no stranger to unconventional meals. It's usually found in beehives, munching away on waxy, goo-drenched honeycombs, the researchers said. Now, through a serendipitous discovery, it's clear that G. mellonella can also decompose polyethylene, a thin but tough plastic that is used across various industries, including in shopping bags and food packaging. The discovery happened during a beekeeping experience, said the study's senior researcher, Federica Bertocchini, a research scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), who also works at the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria, in Santander, Spain. Bertocchini, who is also an amateur beekeeper, happened upon the wax caterpillars when she was cleaning out the panels from one of her beehives. (Beekeeping panels look like wooden picture frames that are filled with honeycomb.) "I removed the worms, and put them in a plastic bag while I cleaned the panels," Bertocchini said in a statement. "After finishing, I went back to the room where I had left the worms, and I found that they were everywhere. They had escaped from the bag, even though it had been closed."

Upon closer inspection, she realized that the caterpillars had made holes in the bag before fleeing. "This project began there and then," Bertocchini said. When Bertocchini and her colleagues placed the caterpillars on polyethylene plastic bags, holes appeared in the bags within an hour, they found. Perhaps the caterpillars can degrade the plastic because it has chemical bonds that are similar to those found in beeswax, the researchers said. "We have carried out many experiments to test the efficacy of these worms in biodegrading polyethylene," Bertocchini said. "One hundred wax worms are capable of biodegrading 92 milligrams [0.003 ounces] of polyethylene in 12 hours, which really is very fast." The researchers found that the caterpillars chemically transformed the polyethylene into ethylene glycol. This compound is a colorless and odorless alcohol that has a sweet taste but is poisonous if ingested, according to PubChem, a database at the National Institutes of Health. Ethylene glycol is used as an antifreeze and coolant, PubChem reported.

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Gary Krist in the Washington Post:

Being one of the premier literary figures of your generation can be a lonely business. Just ask Ernest Hemingway. According to Hadley Richardson, the author’s first wife, Hemingway always had trouble finding friends he could connect with “on his level, and with the same interests.” But there was one notable exception: “John Dos Passos,” she once told an interviewer, “was one of the few people . . . whom Ernest could really talk to.”

Certainly the two writers had a few significant things in common. Both born in Chicago, they each served a formative stint as an ambulance driver in Europe during World War I, distilling the experience into war novels that helped shape the postwar American consciousness. And for several decades around the mid-1900s, both would have appeared on virtually any critic’s list of the greatest American novelists of the century.

But there the similarities ended. Dos Passos, who was born out of wedlock, grew up in a series of European hotel rooms and was educated at Choate and Harvard. Sickly and physically awkward, he wore thick eyeglasses, spoke with a stutter and was never much of a ladies’ man. Hemingway, the product of a much more stable and conventional Midwestern family, never went to college but always exuded an intellectual confidence and insouciant athleticism that made him a great favorite with the opposite sex. Dos Passos was a lifelong political activist, while Hemingway (with one or two exceptions) typically steered clear of movements and causes. Books by Dos Passos seldom sold well; books by Hemingway seldom didn’t. And yet, as James McGrath Morris illustrates in his trim and absorbing new book, somehow the two writers managed to maintain an intense, often competitive friendship over many years — until one major disagreement in the 1930s tore them apart, leaving behind a bitterness that lasted until Hemingway’s suicide in 1961.

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Gillian B. White in The Atlantic:

A lot of factors have contributed to American inequality: slavery, economic policy, technological change, the power of lobbying, globalization, and so on. In their wake, what’s left?

That’s the question at the heart of a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, by Peter Temin, an economist from MIT. Temin argues that, following decades of growing inequality, America is now left with what is more or less a two-class system: One small, predominantly white upper class that wields a disproportionate share of money, power, and political influence and a much larger, minority-heavy (but still mostly white) lower class that is all too frequently subject to the first group’s whims.

Temin identifies two types of workers in what he calls “the dual economy.” The first are skilled, tech-savvy workers and managers with college degrees and high salaries who are concentrated heavily in fields such as finance, technology, and electronics—hence his labeling it the “FTE sector.” They make up about 20 percent of the roughly 320 million people who live in America. The other group is the low-skilled workers, which he simply calls the “low-wage sector.”

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In the classical view of cancer, a cell picks up mutations until it shakes off the checks and balances that restrain its growth, allowing it to divide uncontrollably and turn into a tumor. This linear process is a macabre version of that famous image where a chimp walks to the right and gradually morphs into a human hunter. And both visuals are wrong. In reality, tumors quickly become seething masses of varied cells, all with their own mutations. One area might start growing faster; its neighbor might come to evade the immune system. Over time, the fittest lineages produce more descendants and rise to dominance—the essence of Darwinian natural selection. So forget the linear march. The better visual is that of a tree, with an initial trunk radiating into a web of branches. In 1837, Charles Darwin drew one such tree in one of his notebooks to represent how species evolve from a common ancestor. He could just as easily have been sketching the birth of a tumor.

This realization goes some way to explaining why the war against cancer has been so entrenched and unexpectedly difficult. Clinicians often diagnose these diseases by taking a biopsy from a tumor, but a single sample could miss important mutations with very different prognostic implications just centimeters away. And when we hit tumors with drugs or radiation, we create a potent source of artificial selection, effectively breeding for hardier tumors. That’s why relapses occur.

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David Remnick in The New Yorker:

On April 29th, Donald Trump will have occupied the Oval Office for a hundred days. For most people, the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy is the luxury of not following politics with a nerve-racked constancy. Trump does not afford this. His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite. The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but it’s worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious, Trump has, in the same span, set fire to the integrity of his office.

Trump has never gone out of his way to conceal the essence of his relationship to the truth and how he chooses to navigate the world. In 1980, when he was about to announce plans to build Trump Tower, a fifty-eight-story edifice on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, he coached his architect before meeting with a group of reporters. “Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he said. “Tell them it’s going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.”

This is the brand that Trump has created for himself—that of an unprincipled, cocky, value-free con who will insult, stiff, or betray anyone to achieve his gaudiest purposes. “I am what I am,” he has said. But what was once a parochial amusement is now a national and global peril. Trump flouts truth and liberal values so brazenly that he undermines the country he has been elected to serve and the stability he is pledged to insure.

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Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New Yorker:

When my mother’s mother began to die of a mysterious, undiagnosable neurological illness, the first thing she lost was her sense of taste. For most families, perhaps, this would be a rather inconsequential loss, but this had severe repercussions for us. As the matriarch of our heaving, multi-generational family, she had always helmed the kitchen with an efficient, if somewhat despotic, hand. Because all the food in that household was cooked by her—years earlier, an attempted takeover by one of the uncle’s wives had been swiftly and tyrannically rebuffed—my grandmother was, in fact, the ultimate arbiter of taste. For decades, this had been a relatively stable and blissful arrangement: she was an acutely talented cook. But as her taste buds numbed, week by week, the food turned from mild to well-seasoned to intolerably spicy. It was, perhaps, a kind of neural compensation for her—the way people with early hearing loss often begin to speak more loudly—but the fish curry now went off on the palate like a thermonuclear bomb. The lentils exfoliated the tongue. The fried spinach was an incinerating terror; the okra, an endurance sport. When even the white rice, the final refuge of the Asian tongue, began to arrive at the table with halved Thai bird peppers on top, the seeds squinting above it, we squirmed in terror. But we steeled ourselves and kept eating: numbness begetting numbness.

I want to talk to you today about desensitization. In my other life, I am an oncologist. Numbness, you might say, is my occupational hazard. Over the past month or so, I have watched twelve of my patients die from or relapse with cancer. Yesterday, I heard that a friend who ran my favorite restaurant, the place I went for daily refuge while I was writing my last book, passed away from tongue cancer that had colonized her brain and bones. When interviewers ask me how I carry on carrying on, I speak about the startling successes with some of my patients, about hope and the future. But I do not—I cannot—tell them that a certain kind of numbness must be a part of it. I come home from the bone-marrow-transplant wards on a January morning and play with my dog, rearrange the furniture, and practice polynomial factorization with my daughter. I celebrate a recent laboratory paper with a glass of champagne. I return to the wards the next morning and look down a microscope to find a marrow choked up with leukemia cells after a heroic attempt at salvage chemotherapy. And this cycle repeats. You might say that I have an advanced degree in desensitization. But, of course, I am not here to describe the numbness that accompanies medical practice. There is a different form of desensitization that surrounds us today. When I was asked to give this talk to a roomful of aspiring writers, I had to confront the elephant-in-the-room question: How shall we continue to write in these numbing times?

More here.