Nadeem Aslam in The Guardian:

I am at my desk at midnight and I write until six or seven in the morning. I have been working this way for 25 years now. The quietness deepens at night and everything feels saturated with stillness. From 7am till midday, I read. It is often said human beings don’t come with an instruction manual; but I believe that books – libraries – are the instruction manuals for human beings. To read a great book is to realise that everything is already known. I also look at the newspapers. Many things in my books come from real life; but a novelist has to be careful in transporting a real event into the landscape of a novel. It is patient work, like moving a lake from one place to another with a teaspoon.

I go for a walk in the farmlands and orchards near my house. Insects and birds appear and disappear with the seasons. On the hilltop there are remains of a late bronze age fort. There is a wood full of bluebells in April. I climb down into the valley and enter the neighbourhood I grew up in, a cluster of mainly Muslim working-class streets, here in Yorkshire. It has produced dozens of doctors over the decades, as well as nurses and lawyers, dentists, teachers, drug smugglers, pimps, happy and bitterly unhappy arranged marriages, many of them between first cousins, and there are men and women I went to school with now under arrest for running sweatshops for migrant workers.

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Gregory Gorelik in Quillette:

Like all good husbands, I took my wife to see the latest instalment of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie series—Fifty Shades Darker­­—on Valentine’s Day weekend. Admittedly, this romantic gesture was not entirely altruistic. As it happens, I am currently doing research on the role of dominance and submission in human sexuality. Although neither of us is in the “scene,” we are nonetheless swept up in the current cultural fascination with consensual sadomasochism, albeit for different reasons.

My fascination stems from my general interest in human sexuality and its evolution. My field, evolutionary psychology, has been at the forefront of exploring human behavior through the evolutionary lens for more than two decades, and has made immense advances over the years. Although its greatest accomplishments are in the realm of sex differences and mating behavior, it is not confined to the sexual realm, as is evidenced by the increasing output of research on the evolution of morality,¹ religion,² and politics.³ Indeed, E. O. Wilson’s dream of a consilience of knowledge across the biological sciences and humanities is slowly inching its way toward fulfilment.⁴

Notwithstanding the ever-expanding reach of Darwinism away from sexuality, the exploration of the evolutionary roots of human sexual behavior is not yet complete. In addition to the continuing necessity of cross-cultural research on sex differences and variations in life history strategies (i.e., how interested individuals are in short-term versus long-term relationships), knowledge of actual human copulatory behavior is mostly untapped. Ironically, evolutionary scientists have made remarkable advances in the study of human reproduction without paying much attention to the reproductive act itself.⁵ I believe that it is time to get dirty—and the modern fascination with sadomasochism might lead the way.

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Josh Gidding in Agni:

I sometimes imagine my life from the point of view of a future biographer. For instance, concerning the months my parents and I were living in India in 1961, I imagine something like the following:

“From an early age he showed sensitivity towards the miserable and downtrodden. This was dramatically evident in an incident involving the ‘untouchable’ Natu, the household ‘sweeper.’ One morning the child, in front of Natu, took his mop and began to clean the floor with it. The intention was apparently to show solidarity with the sweeper. But Natu, appalled at this transgression of caste boundaries, or perhaps simply afraid that his job was being taken away from him, grabbed back the mop, and the seven-year-old burst into tears. He was often afraid of—and even, it seems, ashamed before—the beggars that were a common sight on the streets of New Delhi, hiding his eyes from them when they would approach the family’s car stopped at a light. But there could also be occasional shows of cruelty, as when he spent an entire afternoon decapitating ants in the driveway, or when he would pull on the restraining leash of ‘Tiger,’ the worm-ridden Alsatian that the family’s rental agent, Mr. Singh, had procured for him after endless entreaties to his parents….”

However, this is misleading, because when the “biographizing impulse” strikes me, it is never in full sentences—or any kind of sentences, for that matter. It comes as a momentary consciousness, the wish for a biographically-shaped pattern guiding the shapeless here-and-now of my daily experience. An awareness that this life—the rainy-day train ride into New York City, for lunch with an old girlfriend; the prolonged Instant Messenger flirtation with same, which went on for three years, which my wife found out about, and which caused her pain, anger and humiliation—a sense that my life, in its daily delinquencies and partial fulfillments, may have a larger meaning and unity, which remain elusive to me, but will not prove so to my future biographer.

I know what you are probably thinking, and yes, there is surely some grandiosity in all of this. But let us make a distinction here.

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John Wilson Foster at The Dublin Review of Books:

Beyond dispute are Maud Gonne’s energy, initiative, charisma, and height. At an eye-catching six feet or more (6’5” is the tallest hero-worshipping estimate I’ve read; Adrian Frazier gives us 6’2”), she was tall but not pointlessly tall, tall beyond utility as Martin Amis claimed of Nicholson Baker. Her height, once she got into her stride, usefully gave her a leg up in a pre-Pathé News, pre-TV era of street politics, of milling crowds, marches, riots and open-air platforms. She was always visible and early came to relish and exploit that visibility (a literal high profile). Adrian Frazier’s new book recreates for me, for the first time, and perhaps without that intention, the sheer physicality of the woman, endlessly on the move from house to house, office to office, country to country (and sometimes lover to lover), cutting a swathe, it seems like, through men shorter than herself and often under her feet, getting between her and the mirage of a free independent Irish republic. She seems to have turned up everywhere in turbulent Ireland from the Land League to the Emergency, a larger-than-life Zelig but far from content with a minor role, instead elbowing her way to centre stage even when she wasn’t invited (which she usually was).

Frazier’s portrait of Gonne in its essential commotion is very different from my previous impression of her as a figure whose actions, such as trying to hurl the little streets upon the great, nonetheless had the static quality of heraldry. For Yeats her beauty was a tightened bow and out of nature, unique for her own day. “She lived in storm and strife,” Yeats may write (“That the Night Come”, 1912), but her “high and solitary and most stern” beauty is the frozen image that prevails.

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Adam O'Fallon Price at The Millions:

John Cheever may be the most misunderstood and miscategorized important American author of the 20th century. On three separate recent occasions, and many more times over recent years, I have read articles/interviews that group him stylistically withRaymond Carver. This is mystifying: one would be hard-pressed to think of a body of work more antithetical to Carver’s spare, working-class realism than Cheever’s elegant, upper-class fabulism, where nymphs come to life and families vacation in Italian seaside villages. I can only guess this very bad comparison stems from people not actually having read Cheever, while knowing that 1) he and Carver were drinking buddies at Iowa, and 2) both of their names begin with C and end with VER.

He is often also (mis)paired with Richard Yates, a more understandable comparison. Both men served in the Second World War and chronicled the roiling fault lines beneath the tranquility of New York’s far suburbs. Both men were impeccable stylists, although Yates tended toward a rhetorical stylishness powered by limpid prose, while Cheever was, like John Updike, an extravagant sensualist, both in subject matter and descriptive tendency. Both men enjoyed their greatest success with novels, while exerting their greatest artistic mastery in the short story form.

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Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

“Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism,” at the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is a great show, which surprised me. Bazille was not—or was not yet—a great artist when he died, in 1870, at the age of twenty-eight, in the Franco-Prussian War. His some seventy-five works in the show, notably scenes of ordinary people in outdoor settings, tantalize like an orchestra tuning up for a concert that is abruptly cancelled. A yearningly ambitious provincial, from Languedoc, Bazille lucked into the big-bang commencement of Parisian modernism, signalled by the stunning novelty of Édouard Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,” in 1863. Bazille was friends with Monet and Renoir, sharing studios with them on the Left Bank and in Montmartre, and he knew everybody else in art worth knowing. You can feel the verve of the happy few in a sprightly painting by Bazille, dated 1869-70, which shows him and five of his colleagues socializing in a daylight-suffused studio. One of them, Manet, painted in the tall figure of Bazille. (At six feet two, Bazille towered in his milieu—and likely in enemy gun sights, when, on his first day of combat, he charged, and was shot dead, in the colorful uniform of a Zouave.) But to call him one of the proto-Impressionists doesn’t seem quite right. Rather, he reflected each of them, by turns, as his real but insecure talent veered back and forth, and this way and that, in their stronger gravitational fields.

What makes the show great is the point of view that it affords not only on the birth of Impressionism but also on the general dawning of modernist sentiments and sensibilities. Bazille serves as our stand-in throughout a crisply dramatic installation, by the National Gallery curator Kimberly A. Jones, which incorporates apposite paintings by, among others, Corot, Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Fantin-Latour, and Morisot. Bazille’s parallels and responses to those artists amount to a critical index of a moment when the course of art was feverishly contested and its future was trackless.

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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Bitchmedia:

How do you write a review of a book you've been waiting for for 17 years? I savored each page of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure, white queer and trans disabled writer Eli Clare's long-awaited first work since his breakout debut Exile and Pride introduced many to a new kind of radical queer disability politics. (I still have the copy I shoplifted.) In Brilliant Imperfection, Clare picks up where Exile and Pride left off, exploring the difficult concept of ‘cure.’ Clare has written a masterpiece that questions the very definitions of what cure, diagnosis, and what the “body trouble” of sickness and disability mean. As a sick and disabled queer and a survivor who loves disabled genius and has my own complex relationship to diagnosis, cure, and ideas of ‘perfection’ I appreciated it deeply.

Written as a mosaic of many moments in crip time, Brilliant Imperfection argues what many crips have been saying (and what confuses the hell out of many able-bodied people when we say it)—that disability isn't a deficit, something we should want to get fixed by any means necessary. Clare believes, as I believe, that there are beautiful and important gifts disabled people have because of our disabilities—the “brilliant imperfection” of the titles—and that our lives are as worth living as they are. Disabled people, including Clare, have long argued that we would much rather have the billions of charity dollars raised annually towards cures for different disabilities to be spent on adaptive equipment and personal care attendants and nontoxic products and ASL interpretations—things that can actually increase our disabled and Deaf quality of life now. “At the center of cure lies eradication,” the eradication of disabled and Deaf people, Clare says, a belief that bleeds out into how ableism affects everyone. If we're better off cured and just like the abled, why fight for disabled folks' liberation now? Clare builds from this base in Brilliant Imperfection, diving deeper to look at the nuanced ways disabled folks relate to the supposedly neutral ideas of cure, diagnosis and treatment, examining how ableist colonialism has used cure and diagnosis as a weapon against disabled and temporarily abled people alike, and how many of us have a nuanced and complex relationship to the idea of cure. Rejecting simple answers, Clare says, “Cure rides on the back of normal and natural. Insidious and pervasive, it impacts most of us. In response, we need neither a wholehearted acceptance nor an outright rejection of cure, but rather a broad-based grappling.”

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Sara Reardon in Nature:

Evolutionary biologists have never known what to make of viruses, arguing over their origins for decades. But a newly discovered group of giant viruses, called Klosneuviruses, could be a 'missing link' that helps to settle the debate — or provoke even more discord. In 2003, researchers reported that they had found giant viruses, which they named Mimiviruses, with genes that suggested their ancestors could live outside of a host cell¹. The discovery split researchers into two camps. One group thinks viruses started out as self-sufficient organisms that became trapped inside other cells, eventually becoming parasitic and jettisoning genes they no longer needed. Another group views viruses as particles that snatched genetic material from host organisms over hundreds of millions of years. A study² published on 6 April in Science provides evidence for the latter idea, that viruses are made up of a patchwork of stolen parts. But it has already sparked controversy and is unlikely to settle the raucous debate.

After the Mimivirus discovery, some researchers developed a theory that put viruses near the root of the evolutionary tree. They proposed that viruses comprised a ‘fourth domain’ alongside bacteria, eukaryotes — organisms whose cells contain internal structures such as nuclei — and bacteria-sized organisms called archaea. Mimiviruses, which at 400 nanometres across are about half the width of an E. coli cell and can be seen under a microscope, were unique in that they contain DNA encoding the molecules that translate RNA messages into proteins. Normal viruses make their host cells produce proteins for them. The team that discovered Mimiviruses thought the virus' ability to make their own proteins suggested that these viral giants descended from ancient free-living cell type that may no longer exist². “They reinitiated the debate about the living nature of viruses, and of their relationship with the ‘cellular’ world,”

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Since Donald Trump’s approval rating now looks like something that got stuck to the bottom of my shoe, I joined the flood of journalists who went to Real America to gloat see how the Trump supporters are getting along.

Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post:

In the shadow of the old flag factory, Craig Slabornik sits whittling away on a rusty nail, his only hobby since the plant shut down. He is an American like millions of Americans, and he has no regrets about pulling the lever for Donald Trump in November — twice, in fact, which Craig says is just more evidence of the voter fraud plaguing the country. Craig is a contradiction, but he does not know it.

Each morning he arrives at the Blue Plate Diner and tries to make sense of it all. The regulars are already there. Lydia Borkle lives in an old shoe in the tiny town of Tempe Work Only, Ariz., where the factory has just rusted away into a pile of gears and dust. The jobs were replaced by robots, not shipped overseas, but try telling Lydia that. (I did, very slowly and patiently, I thought, but she still became quite brusque.) Her one lifeline was an Obama-era jobs training program, but she says that she does not regret her vote for Trump and likes what he says about business. She makes a point of telling me that she is not racist, but I think she probably is, a little.

Next to her sits Linda Blarnik. Like the rusty hubcaps hanging on the wall behind her, she was made in America 50 years ago, back when this town made things, a time she still remembers fondly. She says she has had just enough of the “coastal elitist media who keep showing up to write mean things about my town and my life, like that thing just now where you said I was like a hubcap, yes you, stop writing I can see over your shoulder.” Mournfully a whistle blows behind her, the whistle of a train that does not stop in this America any longer.

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Lisa Zyga in Phys.org:

Researchers have discovered that the solutions to a famous mathematical function called the Riemann zeta function correspond to the solutions of another, different kind of function that may make it easier to solve one of the biggest problems in mathematics: the Riemann hypothesis. If the results can be rigorously verified, then it would finally prove the Riemann hypothesis, which is worth a $1,000,000 Millennium Prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

While the Riemann hypothesis dates back to 1859, for the past 100 years or so mathematicians have been trying to find an operator function like the one discovered here, as it is considered a key step in the proof.

"To our knowledge, this is the first time that an explicit—and perhaps surprisingly relatively simple—operator has been identified whose eigenvalues ['solutions' in matrix terminology] correspond exactly to the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function," Dorje Brody, a mathematical physicist at Brunel University London and coauthor of the new study, told Phys.org.

What still remains to be proven is the second key step: that all of the eigenvalues are real numbers rather than imaginary ones. If future work can prove this, then it would finally prove the Riemann hypothesis.

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Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Just as birders can identify birds by their melodious calls, David George Haskell can distinguish trees by their sounds. The task is especially easy when it rains, as it so often does in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Depending on the shapes and sizes of their leaves, the different plants react to falling drops by producing “a splatter of metallic sparks” or “a low, clean, woody thump” or “a speed-typist’s clatter.” Every species has its own song. Train your ears (and abandon the distracting echoes of a plastic rain jacket) and you can carry out a botanical census through sound alone.

“I’ve taught ornithology to students for many years,” says Haskell, a natural history writer and professor of biology at Sewanee. “And I challenge my students: Okay, now that you’ve learned the songs of 100 birds, your task is to learn the sounds of 20 trees. Can you tell an oak from a maple by ear? I have them go out, pour their attention into their ears, and harvest sounds. It’s an almost meditative experience. And from that, you realize that trees sound different, and they have amazing sounds coming from them. Our unaided ears can hear how a maple tree changes its voice as a soft leaves of early spring change into the dying one of autumn.”

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Jennifer Senior in the New York Times:

Read enough stories about the madness whipping through college campuses right now, and you can’t help but wonder if our institutions of higher learning have put the “loco” in in loco parentis. There was once a time when America’s students and faculty were united in their desire to defend their free-speech prerogatives, but no longer: Universities are now hypervigilant about protecting students from ideas that might be considered offensive or traumatizing, and many students are hyper-assertive in their demands to be protected from them.

I do not want to reduce the turbulence on today’s college campuses to caricature. (Though last month’s flare-up at Middlebury, which turned a planned colloquy into a crime scene, makes for a pretty fat target.) Those who defend trigger warnings, safe spaces and “empathetic correctness” have reasons for doing so, and no one wants vulnerable young people to experience gratuitous suffering.

But it’s also hard to ignore the irony here: Universities are now terrible places to find political heterogeneity. Campus discourse has become the equivalent of the supermarket banana. Only one genetic variety remains.

Among the educators who recently found herself at the treacherous intersection of free speech and sensitivity politics is Laura Kipnis, a film professor, cultural critic and dedicated provocateur at Northwestern University. Responding to a new campus directive that prevented professors from dating undergraduates, she wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education in February of 2015 entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” Within days of publication, she was brought up on Title IX complaints for creating a “hostile environment.” She spent 72 days in the public stockade for it, until the university cleared her of any wrongdoing.

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From EurikAlert!

Communication studies Associate Professor Christina Yoshimura teaches courses in interpersonal communication, and her research focuses on how personal relationships intersect with larger systems, such as health care or the workplace. Yoshimura also volunteers as a clinical mental health counselor at UM's Curry Health Center Counseling Services in order to bring research out of academia and into the daily lives of students at UM.

…"In our culture there are so many things we give people specific teaching in, like how to calculate the circumference of a circle or how to drive a car," she said. "Yet even though we know from countless research studies that good relationships are essential to our health and well-being, and even though we know many communication behaviors that are correlated with healthy relationships, it is rare to find any of that taught to people outside of select university classes." For example, people often struggle to start a conversation with someone new, or handle conflict effectively. Yoshimura's practice-based counseling allows students to get an overview of productive relational communication skills and then practice them with one another. "This incorporates cognitive understanding of the skill with the repeated physical experience of using the skill," Yoshimura said. "Most people have room to improve their social functioning, and could experience less anxiety and more satisfying interpersonal interactions with even just a little practice." "I see communication as a powerful frame for understanding and improving our human experiences," she said. "Participating on the Department of Justice grant was deeply meaningful to me as a way of seeing, serving and respecting sexual assault survivors on campus. This is of the utmost importance here at UM, and it's also an issue of national importance. Providing an avenue for students to develop and refine their skills in building positive relationships is another way to serve the students on our campus. "Using the social science research in interpersonal communication to work directly in the lives of our students is an immense privilege," Yoshimura said, "and the obligation to do that well will continue to guide my choices here at the University and within our Missoula community."

More here.