Coco Fusco at Hyperallergic:

The presence of blackness in a Whitney Biennial invariably stirs controversy — it’s deemed to be unfit or not enough, or too much. The current Whitney Biennial is no exception — the art press has been awash this past week with reports of a protest staged in front of a painting of a disfigured Emmett Till lying in his casket and a letter penned by an artist who called for the work to be removed and destroyed. The painter is Dana Schutz, a white American. The author of the letter is Hannah Black, a black-identified biracial artist who hails from England and resides in Berlin. The protestors are a youthful coalition of artists and scholars of color. The curators being called on the carpet are both Asian American. Debates about the painting and the letter rage on social media, to the exclusion of discussion of the many works by black artists in the show, most notably Henry Taylor’s rendering of Philando Castile dying in his car after being shot by police. This multicultural melodrama took a rather perverse turn on March 23, when an unknown party hacked Schutz’s email address and committed identity theft by submitting an apologia under her name to the Huffington Post and a number of other publications; it was printed and then retracted. Up to now, none of Schutz’s detractors have addressed whether they think it’s fine to punish the artist by putting words in her mouth.

more here.

Calvin Tomkins at The New Yorker:

I asked Schutz if she’d thought any more about the Emmett Till painting. “That one turned out,” she said, sounding surprised. She had put it in the Berlin show, where it caused no controversy. She found the image on her iPhone, and showed it to me. Based on a widely reproduced photograph of Till’s mutilated corpse in his coffin, the painting was dominated on one side by a mostly abstract, thickly painted head in shades of dark brown and black, and on the other side by his white dress shirt. Till’s mother had dressed him formally for his funeral, and she had insisted on leaving the casket open so that people could see what the killers had done to his face. “This is about a young boy, and it happened,” Schutz said. “It’s evidence of something that really happened. I wasn’t alive then, and it wasn’t taught in our history classes.” She was still uncertain about the painting. “I don’t know if it has the right emotionality,” she said. “I like it as a painting, but I might want to try it again.” All the Berlin pictures were sold (at prices ranging from ninety thousand dollars to four hundred thousand), but Schutz had kept two of them for herself: a painting of two men coping with oversized insects, and the Till painting, which was called “Open Casket.”

more here.

Robert Fulford in National Post:

Charles Darwin was confounded by an “odd state of mind” that he recognized in himself and many others.

Shyness.

Why did it exist? He could work out how lust, greed, love, etc. evolved as traits over many millennia. Each of them had a clear purpose in the creation and survival of humanity. But shyness? It was, so far as he could see, of no benefit to our species. And shyness could lead sometimes to blushing, another non-starter among human qualities. Darwin noted that it makes the blusher suffer and the beholder uncomfortable, “without being of the least service to either of them.”

Why?

The problem that Darwin never solved is the subject of a splendidly quirky book, Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness (Yale University Press), by Joe Moran, who teaches cultural history in Liverpool. Moran searches tirelessly through history, literature, folklore and a little medicine without concluding why so many millions of us are shy. It remains as mysterious as it is pervasive. Some shy people suffer from feelings of inadequacy that they don’t care to acknowledge. Some may have secrets. When people say “I can’t stand cocktail parties,” that usually means they feel misplaced and self-conscious when talking to large groups of people whom they only half know. When they say “I have no small talk,” what they mean is that they’ve never mastered easygoing conversation. Moran doesn’t know why he’s often shy himself but realizes he’s a chronic case. Before he makes a phone call, he writes out what he wants to say. He keeps a notebook full of topics to raise when he finds himself at a loss for words, which apparently happens often. I’m also painfully shy on occasion and recognize Moran as a fellow sufferer, but I have never developed such an organized strategy.

From his perch in England, Moran observes that this is a national characteristic of the English.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Databases worldwide are rapidly swelling with the sequences of thousands of cancer genomes. Now, some scientists are advocating that researchers shift their focus back in time: to study the DNA of tumours in their adolescence, before they commit to being cancerous. At the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting in Washington DC, researchers gathered on 2 April to discuss the growing call to sequence the genomes of pre-cancerous lesions — abnormal growths that sometimes progress into full-blown cancers. The results could help researchers to determine which tumours warrant treatment and could aid the development of therapies to block cancers on the path to malignancy. It is a project that is now near the top of the cancer research wish list, says oncologist Elizabeth Jaffee of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “This is something that has really taken off throughout the cancer community,” she says.

The idea could be one of the next 'big science' projects for cancer. The idea is to borrow some tactics — such as coordination among scientists and sequencing centres — from The Cancer Genome Atlas, one of the first and biggest cancer genome efforts, which characterized the genomes of 33 cancers using samples from more than 11,000 people. But the new 'Pre-Cancer' Genome Atlas would also study cancers over time. It would ideally include multiple snapshots of the same tumour as it developed, in the hope that researchers will be able to determine what changes pushed it across a tipping point to become cancerous.

More here.

Before it was published, censors approved Ahmed Naji's subversive novel 'Using Life' – so how did he end up in jail for what he wrote?

Jonathan Guyer in Rolling Stone:

On a scorching Saturday morning in July, Ahmed Naji stood in the crowded cage of a Cairo courtroom. The 31-year-old author had been convicted six months earlier of "violating public morality" for publishing a piece of literature. In his novel, Using Life, an irreverent portrayal of youth culture on the cusp of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka. Censors had approved the book, which is also sometimes translated as The Use of Life, but when an excerpt appeared in Cairo's premier literary review, Akhbar Al-Adab, an absurd series of events eventually led Naji to prison. Though he was released in December thanks to a high-powered team of Egyptian lawyers and campaigns from international arts communities, he lives in fear that anything he says or writes could land him back in Egypt's most notorious prison. He described to Rolling Stone how self-censorship has entered into his considerations at the keyboard. "When you are writing, you are thinking… someone will read something or this could affect the case and so on," says Naji. "It's hard to move on and write."

Torn from the pages of Kafka, Naji's case sheds light on the risks of free speech in an authoritarian state. In Egypt, if a citizen experiences personal injury from an offensive piece of writing or television program, he or she can bring a case forward to the public prosecutor claiming the violation of public morals, a vague clause enshrined in the constitution and taken from the French legal system. There have only been few instances of such cases moving forward, but public prosecutors do often relish in the opportunity to serve as the moral police. "The accused disseminated written materials that exude sexual lust and fleeting pleasures, lending out his pen and his mind to violate the sanctity of public morals and good character," the prosecutor told a local news outlet last year. Naji's story shows literature's ambiguous power to agitate and the state of arts and letters in a country that experienced a widespread uprising just six years ago.

More here.

Shelley Fan in Singularity Hub:

Humans are exceptionally good at transferring old skills to new problems. Machines, despite all their recent wins against humans, aren’t. This is partly due to how they’re trained: artificial neural networks like Google’s DeepMind learn to master a singular task and call it quits. To learn a new task, it has to reset, wiping out previous memories and starting again from scratch.

This phenomenon, quite aptly dubbed “catastrophic forgetting,” condemns our AIs to be one-trick ponies.

Now, taking inspiration from the hippocampus, our brain’s memory storage system, researchers at DeepMind and Imperial College London developed an algorithm that allows a program to learn one task after another, using the knowledge it gained along the way.

When challenged with a slew of Atari games, the neural network flexibly adapted its strategy and mastered each game, while conventional, memory-less algorithms faltered.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Douglas T. Kenrick in Psychology Today:

Here’s a one-item test: “Who founded the science of psychology?”

One possible answer would be “William James,” who wrote the first psychology textbook, Principles of Psychology, in 1890.

You would get a few more points for answering “Wilhelm Wundt.” Indeed, Wundt started the first formal laboratory in 1879, at the University of Leipzig, and William James was initially inspired to study psychology when he read one of Wundt’s papers in 1868, whilst visiting Germany.

But Wundt himself had started his career as a lab assistant to the man I would nominate as psychology’s first true genius: Hermann Helmholtz.

Helmholtz made at least two great contributions to modern psychology…

More here.

Michael R. Bloomberg in the New York Times:

President Trump’s unfortunate and misguided rollback of environmental protections has led to a depressing and widespread belief that the United States can no longer meet its commitment under the Paris climate change agreement. But here’s the good news: It’s wrong.

No matter what roadblocks the White House and Congress throw up, the United States can — and I’m confident, will — meet the commitment it made in Paris in 2015 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. Let me explain why, and why correcting the false perception is so important.

Those who believe that the Trump administration will end American leadership on climate change are making the same mistake as those who believe that it will put coal miners back to work: overestimating Washington’s ability to influence energy markets, and underestimating the role that cities, states, businesses and consumers are playing in driving down emissions on their own.

Though few people realize it, more than 250 coal plants — almost half of the total number in this country — have announced in recent years that they will close or switch to cleaner fuels. Washington isn’t putting these plants out of business; the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan hasn’t even gone into effect yet.

More here.

Lewis H. Lapham in Lapham's Quarterly:

Humboldt was a Prussian aristocrat educated as a young man in Jena and Weimar by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who directed his reading and lines of laboratory experiment. At the age of twenty-nine in 1799, accomplished as a botanist and zoologist, equipped with a knowledge of geology, history, and astronomy, Humboldt set forth on a five-year exploration of the Americas. Armed with reference books and intent upon perceiving “the connections between the physical and the intellectual worlds,” he brought with him “precise instruments” (barometer, hydrometer, artificial horizon) to measure, among other things, the variable intensity of magnetic forces, “the periodical oscillations of the aerial oceans,” the blueness of the sky. In the jungles and mountains of New Granada and Peru, the investigation’s mules were burdened with “forty-two boxes containing an herbal of six thousand equinoctial plants, seeds, shells, and insects, and geological specimens” gathered from the banks of the Amazon and on the ascent of Chimborazo, the volcano then regarded as the highest mountain in the world.

The climb in 1802 was arduous and slow; at seventeen thousand feet above sea level, the air is thin and no birds sing. Humboldt finds it hard to breathe, and his feet begin to bleed; but when he recalls the predicament ten years later in his Personal Narrative, he doesn’t dwell on the “unbelievable difficulties…quite unknown in the wildest parts of Europe.” He is surprised instead by joy, by the beauty of the landscape, and by the pleasure he takes in seeing how the vegetation changes with the topography—palms and bamboo forests at lower elevations, above them conifers and oaks, higher up lichens like those seen within the Arctic Circle. Although careful to mark the dots (the shape of a leaf, the layering of a rock), what delights him are the dots going together across otherwise unbridged distances in space and time. He draws upon his ferocious memory and love of learning to see the botanical specimen in his hand in the Andes similar to the one seen in his hand at the same altitude in the Alps. The scrupulously repeated making of similar connections—between the here and now with the there and then—leads him to a notion of the planet bound up in intertwining chains of being as fragile as they are beautiful, mortal and therefore analogous to the life and story of man:

The discovery of a new genus seemed to me far less interesting than an observation on the geographical relations of plants, or the migration of social plants, and the heights that different plants reach on the peaks of the cordilleras.

At the instigation of metaphor, Humboldt discovers a new way of looking at the earth, and over the course of the next fifty years he publishes a Promethean abundance of further notes, books, maps, letters, directing the thought not only of Goethe but also that of Henry David Thoreau and Charles Darwin, who says that without Humboldt, he never would have boarded the Beagle or written On the Origin of Species.

More here.

Jenn Jackson in bitchmedia:

This Women’s History Month, I re-read Beloved, Toni Morrison’s 1987 national bestseller and 1988 Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction. Aside from being most beautifully written thing I have ever read, Beloved is a feat of liberatory work, a love letter to Black women, and a touchstone for the complexities of today’s Black freedom struggle. Morrison's iconic title character is the time torn spirit of a nameless Black baby murdered by her own mother.

…In January 2017 at the Women’s March on Washington, actress, singer, and activist Janelle Monáe (Moonlight and Hidden Figures) told the scores of supporters gathered there, “Whenever you feel in doubt, whenever you want to give up, you must always remember to choose freedom over fear,” hearkening back to the words of Simone. Like the Black women struggling with and toward freedom in Morrison’s Beloved, these young Black freedom fighters remind us that our struggle is interconnected. It is a matter for all of us, not some or a few. They prove that Black women always know. As Women’s History Month closes, I am heartened by this love story between Black women and freedom. Director Ava Duvernay (Selma and 13th) once described the process of being a Black woman who creates stories about Black women as “a reflection instead of an interpretation.” If Morrison’s Beloved is a reflection of us, then we too are its mirror image. We are the women who will save us. We are the Sethe, Denver, and even the Beloved who will secure our freedom. We are the chorus of women walking arm in arm, singing hymns and praying for our sister’s freedom.

If Morrison’s Beloved is a message to Black women, it’s that there is still much work to be done. But we are just the women to do it.

More here.

David Matthews in Time Higher Education:

Hungary's top-ranked university is fighting for its existence after the country’s increasingly authoritarian government tabled legislative changes that would make it impossible for the institution to remain in Budapest.

The Central European University, a graduate institution set up after the fall of communism to defend democracy in Eastern Europe, could be the first international institution to fall victim to ascendant illiberal governments in Europe and the US, according to observers.

It is believed that the government of prime minister Viktor Orbán has been emboldened by the election of Donald Trump as US president to move against pro-democracy organisations, particularly those funded by the multibillionaire George Soros, such as the CEU.

Legislative amendments tabled on 28 March would stop the institution from issuing US-accredited degrees; force the CEU to open a campus in New York; change its name; and end an agreement whereby non-EU staff do not need a work permit, the university has said, making it “impossible for the university to continue its operations as an institution of higher education in Budapest, the CEU’s home for 25 years”.

Speaking at a press conference in Budapest on 29 March, CEU president Michael Ignatieff called for the amendments to be withdrawn. “We plan to remain here,” he said. But he added that, by tabling them, the Hungarian government had eroded trust so completely that a new international agreement was now needed to make the CEU’s status in the country secure.

More here. If you feel so inclined to sign it, here is a petition to the Hungarian National Assembly, calling for a rejection of the proposed law.

Evelyn Lamb in Scientific American:

Sophie Germain, born on this day, April 1st, in 1776, was a French mathematician. Though it is impossible to know with 100 percent certainty, she was probably the first woman to make significant original contributions to mathematical research. But when I think of her, my admiration is mixed with a profound sense of loss.

Germain fell in love with mathematics when she was a teenager. The story goes that she had to stay indoors because of the French revolution. In her hours of reading, she found a biography of Archimedes in her father’s library. His dramatic (and probably embellished) death scene, in which he is killed by a Roman soldier because he would not stop working on a math problem, captured her imagination. She showed a natural inclination, and though her parents tried to discourage her, she persisted in teaching herself a great deal of math.

Women were not allowed at universities in France at the time, but Germain corresponded with professors at the newly-opened École Polytechnique using the name of Monsieur Antoine-August LeBlanc, a former student. When she eventually revealed her true identity to some of them, she was accepted more than she expected to be but never truly treated as a peer.

Throughout her life, Germain’s lack of a comprehensive formal education in math and isolation from mathematical and scientific society held her back.

More here.