Sonya Lalli in The f Word:

Despite its optimistic title and bright, bold cover, Here Comes the Sun is not the classic beach read it might appear at first glance. The cheerful package stands in stark contrast to the novel’s sobering depictions of women struggling to forge their own paths in a Jamaican village. Born and raised in Jamaica, debut novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn writes with incredible authenticity – whether it’s capturing the local dialect, or illustrating the shocking disparities in wealth between tourists at the island’s lavish resorts, and the Jamaicans who live on its edges. In Here Comes the Sun, it’s the impoverished fishing village of River Bank, on the outskirts of Montego Bay. Dennis-Benn’s novel focuses on sisters Margot and Thandi, and their mother Delores. Although they’re not always likeable – or their choices relatable – the moral complexities and individual burdens of these characters have us invested from the get-go.

Thirty-year-old Margot has a much-coveted job working at the front desk of a luxury resort in Montego Bay. Ambitious to a fault, she also sells sex to wealthy guests, balancing this secret life with her affairs with the resort’s married owner, Alfonso, and Verdane, the River Bank woman she has loved since she was a girl. She struggles to keep her blossoming relationship with Verdane in the shadows, having been brought up in a society where homosexuality is not just frowned upon, but downright dangerous. It’s not unusual for Verdane, who was outed to her community as a young age, to face physical threats or find dead dogs on her doorstep.

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Derek Thompson in The Economist:

A friend who stumbled upon my Twitter account told me that my tweets made me sound like an unrecognisable jerk. “You’re much nicer than this in real life,” she said. This is a common refrain about social media: that they make people behave worse than they do in “real life”. On Twitter, I snark. On Facebook, I preen. On Instagram, I pose. On Snapchat, I goof. It is tempting to say, as my friend suggested, that these online identities are caricatures of the real me. It is certainly true that social media can unleash the cruellest side of human nature. For many women and minorities, the virtual world is a hellscape of bullying and taunting. But as face-to-face conversation becomes rarer it’s time to stop thinking that it is authentic and social media are artificial. Preener, snarker, poser, goof: they’re all real, and they’re all me.

The internet and social media don’t create new personalities; they allow people to express sides of themselves that social norms discourage in the “real world”. Some people want to lark around in the office but fear their boss will look dimly on their behaviour. Snapchat, however, provides them with an outlet for the natural impulse to caper without disturbing their colleagues. Facebook and Instagram encourage pride in one’s achievements that might appear unseemly in other circumstances. We may come to see face-to-face conversation as the social medium that most distorts our personalities. It requires us to speak even when we don’t know what to say and forces us to be pleasant or acquiescent when we would rather not.

But how does the internet manage to elicit such different sides of our personality? And why should social media reveal some aspect of our humanity that many centuries of chit-chat failed to unearth?

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From Vanity Fair:

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Reading quietly, in high grass, among loved ones (who are also quietly reading). Followed by a boozy lunch.

What is your greatest fear? Violent death. Death generally.

Which historical figure do you most identify with? Aspirationally speaking, Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston.

Which living person do you most admire? I feel almost certain I don't know them. It would be one of these types who dedicate their lives to the welfare of others, whereas the people I tend to know are people making stories out of the dramas of themselves.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Narcissism, solipsism.

What is the trait you most deplore in others? The same.

What is your favorite journey? Any walk through Rome.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Patriotism. Ideological consistency.

More here. [Thanks to Amitava Kumar.]

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Octopuses have three hearts, parrot-like beaks, venomous bites, and eight semi-autonomous arms that can taste the world. They squirt ink, contort through the tiniest of spaces, and melt into the world by changing both color and texture. They are incredibly intelligent, capable of wielding tools, solving problems, and sabotaging equipment. As Sy Montgomery once wrote, “no sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange” as an octopus. But their disarming otherness doesn’t end with their bodies. Their genes are also really weird.

A team of scientists led by Joshua Rosenthal at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Eli Eisenberg at Tel Aviv University have shown that octopuses and their relatives—the cephalopods—practice a type of genetic alteration called RNA editing that’s very rare in the rest of the animal kingdom. They use it to fine-tune the information encoded by their genes without altering the genes themselves. And they do so extensively, to a far greater degree than any other animal group.

“They presented this work at a recent conference, and it was a big surprise to everyone,” says Kazuko Nishikura from the Wistar Institute. “I study RNA editing in mice and humans, where it’s very restricted. The situation is very different here. I wonder if it has to do with their extremely developed brains.”

It certainly seems that way. Rosenthal and Eisenberg found that RNA editing is especially rife in the neurons of cephalopods.

More here.

Anis Shivani in Salon:

Two weeks ago, Bob Dylan accepted the Nobel Prize in person; true to form, he did so not at the December ceremony (where Patti Smith performed in his stead), but during a previously scheduled tour of Stockholm. He has yet to deliver, on tape or in person, the acceptance speech that is a precondition for the prize money. When he won the prize it was just before the November election, and now we’re a few months into the unfolding disaster. Which makes you wonder: Does the Nobel Prize committee know more about us than we know about ourselves?

This may quite possibly be the best Nobel Prize choice ever for literature, right up there with the recognition of William Faulkner. It has been given to the right person at the right time, as the academy has made an urgent intervention into the vexing question of just what literature is, at a political moment when demagoguery is making a mockery of language.

Writers and critics know that nearly all the greatest writers of the past century — and we know who they are — failed to get the award. The Nobel for literature is most helpful when it brings someone deserving to the global audience’s attention. Such was the case with Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk; he was already at a young age a world-class author, but the award gave him millions of new readers. And though Dylan has been a songwriter’s songwriter, or musician’s musician, for 55 years, there couldn’t be a better time than now for his poetry of prophecy to soak through to everyone’s consciousness.

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Zaheer Kazmi in Prospect:

Recent moves by the Trump administration to ban entry to the US of citizens of several Muslim-majority states seem to be a striking departure from western counter-extremism policies. These strategies have focused until now on the proscription of specific individuals and terrorist groups rather than on blanket bans on whole countries.

Meanwhile, the administration’s parallel desire to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organisation is also gaining steam. This has revived perennial tensions in western policy circles over how to deal with the apparently non-violent Islamist “movement,” which has been notoriously difficult to define as a unitary entity.

But while they may appear to augur a new era, Trump’s actions have deeper roots, which reveal the coming together of two distinct but related policy developments since 9/11: attempts by western governments at proscribing non-violent Islamist groups; and the direction of travel in definitions of extremism. The pattern has been to target violence, then non-violent extremism and now, it seems, followers of a particular faith.

The growing intimacy between these trends has been most apparent in the evolution of the UK’s counter-extremism policy, especially since 2014 and the subsequent period of Conservative ascendancy following their election victory in 2015. The problems associated with these recent policy developments point to three underlying issues the Trump administration now also faces: the need for clarity in defining “extremism” and “political Islam”; the limits of policing transnational movements by unilateral domestic means; and the efficacy of using proscription as a policy tool.

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Adrian Nathan West at The Quarterly Conversation:

Two years before his death, Alfred Döblin, author of seventeen novels and a dozen volumes of stories, essays, and memoirs, complained, “Whenever they mentioned my name, they always followed it with Berlin Alexanderplatz.” That there are worse fates a writer could suffer is a fitting rejoinder in the German-speaking world, where his novel is ranked among the milestones of literary modernism and readers can relish its seediness, its bewildering structure, and its vertiginous language in the original. In translation, however, the book has been cut and bowdlerized, and its formal innovations tamed; and the slang and sudden shifts in linguistic register, which are among its signal pleasures, drift from dated to incomprehensible. A new version by Michael Hofmann, due out this year, will doubtless do much to address these lacunae, but in the meantime NYRB Classics has issued translations of two seminal works of Döblin’s: The Three Leaps of Wang Lun and Bright Magic: Stories, selected and translated by Damion Searls.

Bright Magic opens with the complete text of The Murder of a Buttercup, Döblin’s first collection of short fiction. He wrote these stories between 1903 and 1905, and in 1906 submitted them to the publisher Bruno Cassirer. There, they were read by the comic poet Christian Morgenstern, who turned them down, declaring that they gave him an “unsettling, morbid impression,” and intimating that their author was of unsound mind. They finally appeared in 1913 in a series of expressionist prose that included Gottfried Benn’s Brains and Georg Heym’s exquisite, neglected The Thief.

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Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

David Jones? To Stravinsky he was “a writer of genius,” and Kenneth Clark once called him the best modern painter. According to military historian Michael Howard, Jones’s “In Parenthesis,” might be “the most remarkable work of literature to emerge from either world war.” As for Jones’s other masterpiece, “The Anathemata,” W.H. Auden claimed it was “very probably the finest long poem written in English in this century.” I won’t even mention similar encomia from Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas, Henry Moore, Seamus Heaney and others.

So, if David Jones is this good, shouldn’t he be, like, famous?

Well, he is, actually, except to those who confuse temporary celebrity with lasting artistic achievement. Still, Jones’s overall reputation may be slightly blurred because — like Beatrix Potter or Mervyn Peake — he was equally accomplished as both a writer and a visual artist. Moreover, his work can be demanding, even off-puttingly recondite. A Catholic convert, he imbues his pictorial and verbal art with religious imagery, Arthurian myth and intricately layered, deeply felt symbolism. Fortunately, Thomas Dilworth’s new biography, “David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet,” provides an excellent introduction to this multitalented creator’s life and imagination.

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Michele Roberts in The Guardian:

In the past, women whose lives included selling sex were rarely the subjects of their own histories, but were glamorous, vicious or pitiable objects in others’ accounts. One particular alluring figure turns up in the Christian story of sin, redemption and resurrection recounted in the frescoes of medieval western art. Mary Magdalene, the former prostitute, recognisable by her rippling yellow hair and red cloak, kneels at the foot of the cross, weeping. A mythical figure conflated from three different characters in the Gospels, she also turns up in the Apocrypha. Renaissance painters loved her. Their images ostensibly defend Christian notions of chaste female sanctity, but simultaneously celebrate the seductiveness of beauty. They painted her costumed as a temptress in furs and jewels, with luscious breasts exposed, and also as a repentant sinner stripped of her finery, with an animal skin thrown over her, only partly hiding her luminous nakedness. Thirty years ago, similarly inspired, I wrote my novel The Wild Girl, claiming Mary Magdalene as a prophet, the author of a fifth Gospel.

In Measure for Measure Shakespeare underlined the virgin/whore dichotomy by juxtaposing the convent and the brothel, both institutions that contained and controlled women. The novice Isabella is vowed to sexual abstinence; Mistress Overdone, the bawd, to sexual availability. They cannot talk to one another: the official morality of the time fosters mutual distrust. Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, however, nudges the audience to link them in imagination. By the 19th century, in bourgeois culture, the rules had hardened. The individual gets crushed by the weight of the persona of the “fallen woman”. Novels act as etiquette books. In Jane Austen’s strictly ordered world, a young woman who bears an illegitimate child – such as Eliza in Sense and Sensibility – sinks further and vanishes. Euphemisms abound. And much as Dickens sympathised with young women forced into prostitution through poverty and tried to help them, he could not actually name Nancy’s occupation in Oliver Twist.

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Hugo Mercier in Quartz:

It’s an old trope that humans don’t like change—especially when it comes to their opinions. Ancient Greek philosophers complained about the masses refusing to heed their advice. Scholars spearheading the scientific revolution in the 17th century bemoaned their predecessors’ stubbornness. And today, everybody complains about their brother-in-law who won’t admit his political opinions are deeply misinformed.

Some findings in experimental psychology bolster this view of humans being pigheaded. In countless studies, psychologists have recorded people’s opinions on subjects from offal-eating to vaccination, exposed them to a message that critiqued their opinion, and then observed changes in their opinion. Some messages proved to be persuasive and others barely had an effect—but most surprisingly, some strong arguments backfired, with people moving their opinion away from the view advocated, rather than toward it.

This is a scary prospect. If being exposed to divergent political views ends up reinforcing entrenched opinions rather than altering them, there will be no end to the current increase in political polarization.

More here.

Elizabeth Gibney in Nature:

In the search for new physics, experiments based on high-energy collisions inside massive atom smashers are coming up empty-handed. So physicists are putting their faith in more-precise methods: less crash-and-grab and more watching-ways-of-wobbling. Next month, researchers in the United States will turn on one such experiment. It will make a super-accurate measurement of the way that muons, heavy cousins of electrons, behave in a magnetic field. And it could provide evidence of the existence of entirely new particles.

The particles hunted by the new experiment, at the Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, comprise part of the virtual soup that surrounds and interacts with all forms of matter. Quantum theory says that short-lived virtual particles constantly ‘blip’ in and out of existence. Physicists already account for the effects of known virtual particles, such as photons and quarks. But the virtual soup might have mysterious, and as yet unidentified, ingredients. And muons could be particularly sensitive to them.

The new Muon g−2 experiment will measure this sensitivity with unparalleled precision. And in doing so, it will reanalyse a muon anomaly that has puzzled physicists for more than a decade. If the experiment confirms that the anomaly is real, then the most likely explanation is that it is caused by virtual particles that do not appear in the existing physics playbook — the standard model.

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Brian Resnick in Vox:

Here’s a simple question: How many Americans don’t believe in God?

Pew and Gallup — two of the most reputable polling firms in America — both come to a similar figure. About 10 percent of Americans say they do not believe in God, and this figure has been slowly creeping up over the decades.

But maybe this isn’t the whole story. University of Kentucky psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle have long suspected that a lot of atheists aren’t showing up in these polls. The reason: Even in our increasingly secular society, there’s still a lot of stigma around not believing in God. So when a stranger conducting a poll calls and asks the question, it may be uncomfortable for many to answer truthfully.

Gervais and Najle recently conducted a new analysis on the prevalence of atheists in America. And they conclude the number of people who do not believe in God may be even double that counted by these polling firms.

“There’s a lot of atheists in the closet,” Gervais says. “And … if they knew there are lots of people just like them out there, that could potentially promote more tolerance.”

More here.

Alec Ash in The Economist:

Chinese sci-fi is having a moment. Liu Cixin’s bestselling alien-invasion trilogy “The Three-Body Problem” has sold more than 4m copies. Since 2015 it has won international fans too, after becoming the first Chinese book to win the prestigious Hugo award for best science-fiction novel, and a major movie is due out this year. But whereas Liu, 53, writes about aliens, physics and man’s place among the stars – traditional science-fiction concerns – a new generation of Chinese writers is experimenting with the genre as a way to discuss the realities of 21st-century China. Hao Jingfang won international acclaim when one of her stories, “Folding Beijing”, won the novella category in the latest Hugo awards. In China the story was hotly discussed online, not just for its literary merits, but also for its social criticism. The story follows Lao Dao, a migrant sewage worker living in the underbelly of the capital who is saving up to pay kindergarten fees for his adopted daughter. Yet this Beijing is divided into three segments: an elite 5m live in “First Space”, 25m more occupy “Second Space” and a teaming underclass of 50m are in “Third Space”, where Lao Dao toils. As well as being separate socially, these strata are physically divorced. Every day at 6am the skyscrapers of one space fold in on themselves and pivot like “gigantic Rubik’s cubes” so that the earth literally turns over to reveal the next lot who have their turn at living above ground. Lao Dao rides the folding, morphing city up into Second and then First Space, smuggling a lover’s message and stumbling across an explanation of how the city came to be as it is.

As a commentary on inequality and those who are left behind by China’s breakneck urbanisation, Hao’s message is hard to miss. (Her inspiration for the story was a Beijing taxi-driver who complained to her about his daughter’s high kindergarten fees.)

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Radhika Jones in New York Times:

I don’t remember ever buying one. They just materialized in the house when I was 12, a row of well-thumbed paperbacks, in the bookcase under the basement stairs. I read them over and over, until the pages were soft as cotton. On a visit to Portland, Ore., in January, browsing the shelves of Powell’s Books, I felt the familiar pull. I walked out with “Ordeal by Innocence,” an Agatha Christie sleeper hit (no one I ask ever seems to know it), in which a young man, Jack Argyle, one of an adopted brood in postwar England, is found to be innocent of the murder of his mother, for which he’d been convicted. Terrific news, until it sinks in that someone else in the family must be guilty. Christie loved coincidence. (A stranger could have vouched for Jack, had the stranger not been knocked down by a lorry, then recovered consciousness and immediately left town for a two-year expedition to Antarctica.) She kept her crime scenes conveniently sealed. (Whoever hit Jack’s mother with a poker was already at the house; no random intruders allowed.) She’d lean hard on a tic or a recurring expression (a sister’s feline affect, a brother’s scowl). Her secretaries came in two varieties: young and pretty or old and frumpy.

And yet. In Christie’s expansive repertoire — more than 200 novels, stories and plays, from “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” (1920) to “Sleeping Murder” (1976) — she captures something elemental about mysteries: that motive and opportunity may suffice for a crime, but the satisfying part is the detective’s revelation of whodunit, how and why. I never tried to piece together the clues. I vastly preferred to hear it from Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple. Why spend time with such endearing, clever characters if you’re not going to let them do their job? And while their job was ostensibly solving crimes, really it was storytelling.

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Taney Roniger at The Brooklyn Rail:

Art as transformative encounter: in just about every field of art discourse, much is made of this exalted claim. And for good reason. For what is a genuine aesthetic experience if not an arousal from ordinary consciousness and a jolt into elsewhere—a mode of awareness more vivid, more perceptive, more intensely alive, resonating in a world suddenly laden with meaning? And yet, for all the talk of art and transcendence, how often do we really have this experience? How many times have we come away from a work of art having not just been moved but actuallyaltered, so that life afterward was, however subtly and indescribably, different from before?

If we’re honest, those occasions have likely been few—but perhaps through no fault of the works we engage. Their creators, after all, know nothing about us, and even if they did, has it ever been their job to speak to us personally? The inner life being a resolutely private affair, what moves one artist to make a painting may mean absolutely nothing to anyone else.

This perennial problem of the rift between artist and audience is what laid the seeds for Odyssey Works, both the title of this wonderfully original and deeply affecting book and the name of the interdisciplinary performance group whose work it presents. The group—made up of writers, painters, actors, dancers, and artists from a number of other disciplines—creates experimental performances with a most unusual premise. Its explicit goal is simple enough: to create works that will have the most powerful possible impact on the audience.

more here.