Anilla Cherian in The Deccan Herald:

Flint’s declaration of financial emergency from 2010, and its demographic profile – which the New York Times editorialist Charles Blow referred to as “mostly black and disproportionately poor”- are indeed not coincidences- they are glaringly sad markers of the intersection between poverty and pollution.

The disproportionate double burden of poverty and pollution cuts across poor communities everywhere. But, what is happening in vastly poorer villages damaged as a result of their heavy dependence on polluting energy sources – where literally millions are being smothered by a toxic cauldron of indoor air pollution?

Where is the global urgency in resp-onding to the long-standing concern that household air pollution resulting from the burning of solid fuels (wood, crop wastes, charcoal, coal and dung) destroys the lives of poor women and children who spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of polluted hearths?

In 2014, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that 7 million people died – one in eight of total global deaths – as a result of indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure. This finding based on a 2012 data, more than doubles previous estimates, and confirms that air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk.

Indoor/household air pollution was linked to 4.3 million deaths in 2012, but the impacts of indoor air pollution were found to be staggeringly disproportionate: Low and middle income countries in South-East Asia and Western Pacific suffered the greatest burden of 3.3 million deaths linked to indoor air pollution; and 50 per cent of premature deaths among children under age five was due to pneumonia caused by particulate matter (soot) inhaled from household air pollution. In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke was found to be 100 times higher than acceptable levels for small soot particles- PM 2.5.

Measuring 2.5 micrometres or less, PM 2.5 has been directly linked with causing strokes, ischaemic heart disease; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer. Reducing PM 2.5 emissions is critically important from a human health perspective, but what is often not reflected is that one of the principal components of PM 2.5- black carbon –emitted as a result of the incomplete combustion of solid fuels is known to be a short -term climate pollutant.

What has largely not been addressed is that black carbon emissions are also directly linked to serious, adverse regional and in some cases, more localised climate change impacts including regional rainfall and weather patterns, and also most importantly in the loss of annual production levels of rice, wheat and maize. Curbing PM 2.5/black carbon emissions offers a win-win on two different fronts.

Reducing polluting energy in poor households happens to also offer short term climate change benefits. So, why has so little been done so far about a problem that affects so many? Clean energy measures such as the use of clean-burning biomass stoves, and use of clean energy cook-stoves using modern and renewable energy sources are two specific measures that have long been touted, but for equally long remain unmet.

More here.

Andy Martin in Prospect:

“Hold on a second!” says Dr Watson to Sherlock Holmes (or something like that). “How did you work that out?” Holmes has just come up with some astounding observation. He explains his reasoning. “Of course!” Watson responds, much to the annoyance of Holmes, “it’s obvious.” That is how good philosophy works. The reader—or, in the case of Socrates, the listener—should feel that everything that has been said is obvious, so obvious that no one bothered to say it before. Which is why philosophers often come across, in the words of Erasmus, as “foolosophers.” Michel Foucault said everything he wrote was tautological. And the closing line of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus suggests something similar: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Wittgenstein presumably had this line in mind when he claimed to have pulled off two great tricks: one was to have solved the problems of western philosophy; the other was to have demonstrated how little he had achieved in doing so.

Philosophers don’t have to be long-winded. Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Hell is other people” is a memorable one-liner; another is the opening line of Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: “Suicide is the only serious philosophical problem.” Of course philosophers can be teasingly elusive. Take Sartre’s lines about “a binary praxis of antagonistic reciprocity.” Any idea what he was going on about? Someone once told me: “That is a description of my marriage.” Sartre went on to argue that all the contradictions of capitalism are contained in that phrase—but he was, in fact, originally describing boxing. (He would probably never have made it as a sports commentator.) Here is Martin Heidegger hymning a pod of dolphins in the Mediterranean: “So too the birthplace of Occident and modernity, secure in its own island-like essence, remains in the recollective thinking of the sojourn.” Take that David Attenborough!

I am indebted for this last gem to Sarah Bakewell’s engaging and wide-ranging new book, At the Existentialist Café.

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Chad Orzel in Forbes:

The big physics story of the moment is, of course, last Thursday’s announcement that the LIGO experiment hasdetected gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes. This is generally framed as “confirming Einstein’s theory of relativity” (see, for example, Dennis Overbye in the New York Times and Ethan Siegel here), because Einstein maintains a stranglehold on the public conception of physics.

And, inevitably, there’s a bit of push-back, with Kirk Englehardt worrying that the news didn’t produce enough excitement in the general public because it’s too abstract, and professional grump John Horgan raising the issue of whether LIGO was “worth” the money spent on it. Ashutosh Jogalekar picks up on Horgan’s past work, and worries that LIGO might represent a kind of “end of physics”, that if confirming a 100-year-old theory is the most exciting development in recent physics, the discipline is in trouble.

Of course, the Jogalekar/Horgan thesis badly misunderstands why this is the most exciting development in recent physics– it’s nothing to do with Einstein. In fact, confirming General Relativity is just about the least interesting part of this news. The really important story is that LIGO works, and allows the unequivocal detection of colliding black holes, a system that physicists understand pretty well. And it continues to work, with additional gravitational-wave events being analyzed now. This means that when it starts detecting other things that we don’t immediately recognize, physicists can have some confidence that they’re real, and not just a weird quirk of the detector that we don’t understand yet.

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Lisa Randall in Prospect Magazine:

In the solar system, I would hold off colonising Mars. Not because I’m afraid of Martians protesting, but because it would be a good idea to address our problems on Earth first. Besides, Mars doesn’t seem very pleasant. I’m guessing that in the near future our resources can be more sensibly deployed on Earth.

I’m all for continued space exploration—just with a more realistic view of what’s achievable, which is actually pretty remarkable. I would also encourage a renewed ethic of responsibility that would apply to individuals, businesses and politics, in which everyone, including companies, would pay for rubbish disposal and any residual damage, such as environmental or economic crises that result from their actions. My economic team would be charged with devising growth measures that factor in such externalities.

We would also see a lot more scientists, or at least smart people (defined below) in positions of power. Angela Merkel, who studied physical chemistry, has done a pretty good job, despite her current trouble. I do see room for a more rational approach to governance. Clearly these examples show that science training alone is not enough. Scientists don’t know everything, and technologists don’t either. But there is something to be said for knowing what it means to address a problem, or even how to define it. And to know how to recognise the potential limitations of any proposed solution. Most big problems aren’t solved overnight, and scientists know that all too well. The breakthroughs that have changed our lives often derive from these slow-cooked, then flame-broiled discoveries.

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Alan Jenkins at the Times Literary Supplement:

Six years ago Jonathan Bate set out to write, with the co-operation of Ted Hughes’s widow Carol, a “literary Life” of the poet. Its emphasis would be “the development of the poetic voice”, with much detailed analysis of “multiple drafts” of poems in the archives at Emory University and the British Library. (The latter, open to researchers only since 2010 – and therefore not available to Elaine Feinstein, Hughes’s first biographer – contains, Bate tells us, thousands of pages of notes and journals: “an almost complete record of [Hughes’s] inner life”.) In early 2014 the TLS published an essay by Bate, based on his work-in-progress, that combined biographical and critical elements in a discussion of some of those drafts, written after the suicide of Hughes’s first wife Sylvia Plath. At around this time, the estate withdrew its co- operation, and permission to quote extensively from Hughes’s writings with it. So Bate’s approach shifted towards the biographical, his emphasis on to Life rather than Art.

Not much seems to have survived of Bate’s original project in Ted Hughes: The unauthorised Lifeexcept a chapter which expands on his TLS essay, about the writings that were the basis of Hughes’s final volume Birthday Letters (1998); and perhaps the argument that underpins the book. Post-Birthday Letters, elated by the sense of liberation it had brought him, Hughes looked back with regret that so much of his writing life had been spent on works that had, he wrote to Kathleen Raine, enabled him to evade his real subject, the subject of that book: his life with Plath and how it ended. To this reader, that regret seems misplaced, while for anyone contemplating the 1,200-plus pages of his Collected Poems (and that doesn’t include Gaudete), Hughes’s plaint that he had been “blocked ever since Sylvia’s death” will even more conspicuously fail to grip. Nevertheless, this is, broadly, the story Bate’s biography sticks to.

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Jeff Fraiman at The Brooklyn Rail:

Yuskavage would no doubt recognize that her diptych is the distant spawn of a Renaissance master. A formative experience in her education was seeing Giovanni Bellini’s sacra conversazione altarpiece in the church of San Zaccaria, Venice. Her encounter with the painting, which positions saints from different historical periods in communion with the Virgin and Child in an impossible, atemporal meeting, helped the young artist consider the importance of the use of space. It is a short mental leap from Bellini’s religious works to what Yuskavage calls her “symbiotic” portraits, wherein multiple figures populate a painting without necessarily interacting, or even acting, in narratively cohesive ways.

Fireplace (2010) presents two women in a dimly lit interior. One bends forward and covers the other’s ears as if protecting her from an external, imminent danger. The latter figure sits in a 180-degree straddle, her pudendum on full display behind the mounds of fruit stacked in the painting’s lower corners. Her body appears cold, marmoreal even, impervious to the heat emanating from the titular fireplace. The room is illuminated from the right despite the lambent flames at the left; the standing brunette’s right knee, nearest to the fire, remains in shadow. The setup is an inversion of Pliny the Elder’s description of a painting of “a boy blowing a fire, which throws a light upon the features of the youth,” or the paintings of Gerrit van Honthorst, known as Gherardo delle Notti, a Utrecht follower of Caravaggio who introduced torches as an artificial source of light to the tenebristic scenes that proliferated in the early seicento. In Yuskavage’s surreal interior, the lack of internal logic between fire and figures corresponds to the uncanniness of the women themselves.

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Christine Smallwood at Bookforum:

A novel is not designed to be read in one sitting. A reader finds herself in different moods, and different chairs, over the course of a novel; its pages become saturated with meals and conversations and days good and bad. A short story is read all at once, and alone. It might get knitted into life if it is reread many times over the years, but it always arrives complete, a thing apart and sufficient unto itself, like an asteroid. It is at once smaller and more vulnerable than a novel, and stranger and stiffer, somehow more independent. It doesn’t ask for attachment. It asks only to be heard.

Three collections of American short stories have been recently published. They are New American Stories, edited by Ben Marcus; 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor; and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from the Paris Review, edited by Lorin Stein. Each is a victory lap and a thrown gauntlet. Their editorial sensibilities could be plotted across any number of axes: experimentalism vs. realism; global identity vs. bourgeois America; political fury vs. apathy; situation vs. character. The editors agree on one thing: The story’s prerogative has something to do with provoking feeling—with giving pleasure, making aghast or afraid, breaking hearts, entertaining. Or inflicting pain. “Each story here is a different weapon,” Marcus enthuses in the introduction to New American Stories. “Let’s get bloodied and killed in thirty-two different ways.” Moore compares the story’s business to “open[ing] up a little window or a door” in the mind, an image whose trepanating horror is only momentarily mitigated by that sunny “little.” Stein is less morbid. Rather than treat the story as hole saw, promising explosion or aeration or enlargement, he politely cites its compactness, “the intensity and perfection found only in small things.”

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Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

by Jack Gilbert
from Refusing Heaven
Alfred A. Knopf, 2005
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Ewen Callaway in Nature:

The discovery of yet another period of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals is adding to the growing sense that sexual encounters among different ancient human species were commonplace throughout their history. “As more early modern humans and archaic humans are found and sequenced, we’re going to see many more instances of interbreeding,” says Sergi Castellano, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His team discovered the latest example, which they believe occurred around 100,000 years ago, by analysing traces of Homo sapiens DNA in a Neanderthal genome extracted from a toe bone found in a cave in Siberia.

“There is this joke in the population genetics community — there’s always one more interbreeding event,” Castellano says. So before researchers discover the next one, here’s a rundown of the interbreeding episodes that they have already deduced from studies of ancient DNA.

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Douglas Fox in Nature:

In the modern world, it's easy to forget that complex animals are relative newcomers to Earth. Since life first emerged more than 3 billion years ago, single-celled organisms have dominated the planet for most of its history. Thriving in environments that lacked oxygen, they relied on compounds such as carbon dioxide, sulfur-containing molecules or iron minerals that act as oxidizing agents to break down food. Much of Earth's microbial biosphere still survives on these anaerobic pathways.

Animals, however, depend on oxygen — a much richer way to make a living. The process of metabolizing food in the presence of oxygen releases much more energy than most anaerobic pathways. Animals rely on this potent, controlled combustion to drive such energy-hungry innovations as muscles, nervous systems and the tools of defence and carnivory — mineralized shells, exoskeletons and teeth.

Given the importance of oxygen for animals, researchers suspected that a sudden increase in the gas to near-modern levels in the ocean could have spurred the Cambrian explosion. To test that idea, they have studied ancient ocean sediments laid down during the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods, which together ran from about 635 million to 485 million years ago.

In Namibia, China and other spots around the world, researchers have collected rocks that were once ancient seabeds, and analysed the amounts of iron, molybdenum and other metals in them. The metals' solubility depends strongly on the amount of oxygen present, so the amount and type of those metals in ancient sedimentary rocks reflect how much oxygen was in the water long ago, when the sediments formed.

These proxies seemed to indicate that oxygen concentrations in the oceans rose in several steps, approaching today's sea-surface concentrations at the start of the Cambrian, around 541 million years ago — just before more-modern animals suddenly appeared and diversified. This supported the idea of oxygen as a key trigger for the evolutionary explosion.

But last year, a major study¹ of ancient sea-floor sediments challenged that view. Erik Sperling, a palaeontologist at Stanford University in California, compiled a database of 4,700 iron measurements taken from rocks around the world, spanning the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods. He and his colleagues did not find a statistically significant increase in the proportion of oxic to anoxic water at the boundary between the Ediacaran and the Cambrian.

“Any oxygenation event must have been far, far smaller than what people normally considered,” concludes Sperling. Most people assume “that the oxygenation event essentially raised oxygen to essentially modern-day levels. And that probably wasn't the case”, he says.

More here.

Thomas Piketty in The Guardian:

How can we interpret the incredible success of the “socialist” candidate Bernie Sanders in the US primaries? The Vermont senator is now ahead of Hillary Clinton among Democratic-leaning voters below the age of 50, and it’s only thanks to the older generation that Clinton has managed to stay ahead in the polls.

Because he is facing the Clinton machine, as well as the conservatism of mainstream media, Sanders might not win the race. But it has now been demonstrated that another Sanders – possibly younger and less white – could one day soon win the US presidential elections and change the face of the country. In many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections.

Let’s glance back for an instant. From the 1930s until the 1970s, the US were at the forefront of an ambitious set of policies aiming to reduce social inequalities. Partly to avoid any resemblance with Old Europe, seen then as extremely unequal and contrary to the American democratic spirit, in the inter-war years the country invented a highly progressive income and estate tax and set up levels of fiscal progressiveness never used on our side of the Atlantic. From 1930 to 1980 – for half a century – the rate for the highest US income (over $1m per year) was on average 82%, with peaks of 91% from the 1940s to 1960s (from Roosevelt to Kennedy), and still as high as 70% during Reagan’s election in 1980.

This policy in no way affected the strong growth of the post-war American economy, doubtless because there is not much point in paying super-managers $10m when $1m will do.

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Alan Yuhas in The Guardian:

Scientists are claiming “extraordinary” success with engineering immune cells to target a specific type of blood cancer in their first clinical trials.

Among several dozen patients who would typically have only had months to live, early experimental trials that used the immune system’s T-cells to target cancers had “extraordinary results”.

In one study, 94% of participants with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) saw symptoms vanish completely. Patients with other blood cancers had response rates greater than 80%, and more than half experienced complete remission.

Speaking at the annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement for Science (AAAS), researcher Stanley Riddell said: “This is unprecedented in medicine, to be honest, to get response rates in this range in these very advanced patients.”

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This is from three years ago but an interesting perspective from an interesting legal mind, Richard A. Posner, in The New Republic:

Judges like to say that all they do when they interpret a constitutional or statutory provision is apply, to the facts of the particular case, law that has been given to them. They do not make law: that is the job of legislators, and for the authors and ratifiers of constitutions. They are not Apollo; they are his oracle. They are passive interpreters. Their role is semantic.

The passive view of the judicial role is aggressively defended in a new book by Justice Antonin Scalia and the legal lexicographer Bryan Garner (Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, 2012). They advocate what is best described as textual originalism, because they want judges to “look for meaning in the governing text, ascribe to that text the meaning that it has borne from its inception, and reject judicial speculation about both the drafters’ extra-textually derived purposes and the desirability of the fair reading’s anticipated consequences.” This austere interpretive method leads to a heavy emphasis on dictionary meanings, in disregard of a wise warning issued by Judge Frank Easterbrook, who though himself a self-declared textualist advises that “the choice among meanings [of words in statutes] must have a footing more solid than a dictionary—which is a museum of words, an historical catalog rather than a means to decode the work of legislatures.”

Scalia and Garner reject (before they later accept) Easterbrook’s warning. Does an ordinance that says that “no person may bring a vehicle into the park” apply to an ambulance that enters the park to save a person’s life? For Scalia and Garner, the answer is yes.

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James Harkin at The Smithsonian:

The souk is within the walls of Aleppo’s historic city center, one of six locations in Syria listed as World Heritage Sites by Unesco. Before largely peaceful protests in 2011 against the autocratic Syrian president Bashar al-Assad were met with government violence and devolved into a devastating civil war, killing at least a quarter of a million people and displacing millions so far, the country was one of the most beautiful on earth. Much of its enchantment came from its plentiful antiquity, which wasn’t fenced off as in European capitals but lay unceremoniously around—part of the living, breathing texture of everyday life. The country, at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and Asia, boasts tens of thousands of sites of archaeological interest, from the ruins of our earliest civilizations to Crusader-era fortifications and wonders of Islamic worship and art.

Now these antiquities are under large-scale and imminent threat. Already some of the most valuable have been destroyed as collateral damage in the shelling and crossfire between government forces and various rebel factions; others have been sold off, bit by valuable bit, to buy guns or, just as likely, food or a way to escape the chaos. Satellite images of treasured historical sites show the soil so completely pocked by holes, the result of thousands of illicit excavations, that it resembles the surface of the moon—destruction and looting, as Unesco director general Irina Bokova put it last fall, on “an industrial scale.”

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Simon Tait at The London Magazine:

When Frank Auerbach first came to public notice – emerged rather than burst – in the 1950s he was noted as a “British Expressionist” in the white hot enthusiasm for the American abstract colourists Clement Greenberg (not to mention the American government) was punting around the world with spectacular success.

Maria Bustillos at The New Yorker:

It’s sometimes said, nowadays, that lifetime employment is a thing of the past, that rising through the ranks in a company is over, that publishing is a doomed enterprise, that the novel is dead (was it ever really alive?), and that poetry is deader still. By this reckoning, Barbara Epler’s career should not exist. But for more than thirty years, Epler, the president and publisher of the storied experimental publishing house New Directions, has been advancing the vision of James Laughlin, the poet, skier, and heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune who founded the company when he was twenty-two and ran it, for a time, from his aunt’s barn in Norfolk, Connecticut. His inaugural publication, in 1936, was an anthology featuring the work of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Henry Miller, among others: far-out stuff, back then. In time, New Directions would go on to become the first U.S. publisher of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Roberto Bolaño, Anne Carson, W. G. Sebald, and László Krasznahorkai—a staggering list.

Today’s visitor to New Directions’ elegantly shabby offices, in Chelsea, may stand on the nineteenth-floor balcony beside Epler, who is in her fifties and has a big, throaty laugh, under a pair of carved stone lions silently roaring high above, downtown and the Hudson River spread out beneath, and be forgiven for thinking that he has somehow stepped into a lovely and improbable alternate universe.

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