Diksha Madhok in Quartz:

Indian taxpayers seem to be a self-righteous lot. Beneficiaries of subsidies, according to them, must display adequate gratitude and the right colour of patriotism. Else, they go for the jugular. These days, a vocal section of them wants India to stop funding Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of South Asia’s top-ranked institutions of higher learning. The reason for their outrage is an alleged anti-India protest that took place on the campus in Delhi on Tuesday (Feb. 09).

At the event, some students chanted divisive slogans and questioned the execution of Afzal Guru, who was hanged for the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament.

Since Tuesday, the police have raided university hostels and arrested the president of the students union, charging him with sedition—even though he did not raise any controversial slogans. This is the first time that a JNU president has been arrested since the Emergency of 1975-77.

But this grossly disproportionate and high-handed response by the state to an alleged offence caused by a tiny section of the university’s students has not stopped the taxpayers’ sanctimonious blustering and thundering on Twitter.

Even the voluble TV anchor Arnab Goswami upbraided a JNU student for not exhibiting proper patriotism, despite being a “beneficiary of a subsidized Indian education.”

“Parasite” is a word frequently thrown at JNU students over the last two days.

“It is an institution that has produced some of the most famous economists, lawyers and politicians in India, including the current commerce minister (Nirmala Sitharaman) and the Intelligence Bureau chief till recently (Syed Asif Ibrahim),” Dipankar Gupta, director, Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, told Quartz.

“Such vilification will only prove to be counter-productive,” Gupta, a sociologist, said.
The sheer hypocrisy

Such resentment, though, is not new. It surfaces every time students of liberal universities such as JNU or the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) go against what is perceived as mainstream opinion.
Yet, most Indians have no problems with the government funding the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), even though many of their graduates end up on greener foreign shores. These IIT-NRIs are often put on a pedestal and worshipped as real Indian role models.

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Sumantra Bose in Open the Magazine:

I have never written anything on or about Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, my grand-uncle. The reason is twofold. First, I have plenty of other interests and pursuits that keep me happily occupied. Second, I do not believe that being a ‘family member’ automatically entitles, or obligates, me to comment on him. In any case, born a quarter-century after Netaji’s martyrdom in 1945, I do not really regard him as a family member per se, but rather as a national leader and historical figure. I have an aversion to being tagged as ‘Netaji’s descendant’. I react to such labelling, almost always by well- meaning people unaware of my aversion, with weariness bordering on irritation—‘Oh no, not again, will I never escape this?’—and give curt, monosyllabic replies to excited questions. And I stay strictly aloof from public discussions and debates about him, including the national media scrum that has been ongoing since last year and, unusually for an Indian news story, drawing some attention in the international media too.

This does not mean that I am indifferent to Netaji’s significance to the making of contemporary India, or to the very special place he holds in Indian hearts. Far from it. In recent months, I have edited and arranged for the publication of the most authentic and illuminating account of Netaji and the Bose family during India’s freedom struggle. Titled Subhas and Sarat: An Intimate Memoir of India’s Bose Brothers, it was written by my late father, Dr Sisir Kumar Bose, prior to his death 15 years ago, based on a bestselling Bengali version he wrote in the 1980s. It narrates the dramatic struggles in the cause of India’s freedom of Subhas and his elder brother Sarat Chandra Bose (my grandfather), the eminent barrister and political leader who was Netaji’s lifelong confidant and most resolute supporter and with whom Netaji had a unique bond and partnership.

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Maggie Koerth-Baker in Aeon:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. On 19 December 1984, The New York Times ran a story about parents who feared the risks of routine vaccinations. The parent quoted in the article was a lawyer who blamed vaccines for the death of his daughter. The story was framed as a conflict between parents such as him and medical experts, who pointed out that serious side-effects of vaccines were extremely rare, and that the diseases vaccines prevented were far worse. We have to be careful, the scientists said, or these fears could result in fewer people getting vaccinated and more people getting sick.

On 27 April 1999, The New York Times ran a story about parents who feared the risks of routine vaccinations. The parent quoted in the article was college-educated, an author and professional activist, who blamed vaccines for her son’s brain damage. The story was framed as a conflict between parents such as her and medical experts, who worried that the internet was spreading false information and unwarranted fears. Parents today just haven’t seen the devastation vaccine-preventable diseases can cause, the scientists said.

On 21 March 2008, The New York Times ran a story about parents who feared the risks of routine vaccinations. The article noted that parents who refused vaccines for their children were often ‘well-educated and financially stable’. The story was framed as a conflict between those parents and medical experts, who worried that geographical pockets of vaccine refusal could help spread preventable diseases, such as measles. Parents today just haven’t seen the devastation vaccine-preventable diseases can cause, the scientists said.

For more than 30 years now, we journalists have been telling the same story, with the same actors, playing the same roles, and speaking the same lines. The authors change, but the news doesn’t. It barely even counts as ‘new’.

There are two groups of people you can blame for this pattern of repetitive storytelling. Maybe it’s them: maybe the problem is parents whose anti-science proclivities have carried them so far away from the facts that journalists have no choice but to repeat ourselves ad nauseum. The story doesn’t change because the story hasn’t changed.

That could be true. But there’s also another option. Maybe it’s us: maybe journalists aren’t listening. The story never changes because we stopped looking for the other stories we could tell.

If that’s true, it’s a big deal. And not just for journalists. Vaccination is a deeply important part of public health. Whether to vaccinate or not isn’t simply a decision you make for yourself or your family, independent of the choices of everyone else. Vaccines work in two ways. They decrease your personal risk of contracting a disease, and they reduce the number of potential hosts and carriers in the population. That means the more vaccinated people there are, the harder it is for a disease to spread. Vaccines can stop an outbreak before it happens. This so-called ‘herd immunity’ protects children who are too young to get a vaccine, people who are too sick to get one, and anybody whose vaccination isn’t working as well as it should.

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Talal Asad in Immanent Frame:

In Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Saba Mahmood has produced a valuable account both of how the idea of separating religion from politics came to be central to the development of the “religiously neutral” state in Europe (beginning with the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century and culminating in the new nations after the First World War) and of how that idea became politically important in the postcolonial Middle East. In particular, she describes how in constituting religious identities, the state in modern Egypt creates unexpected opportunities for political power and social confrontation among those who seek to regulate, as well as those who claim to represent, religious minorities. Her detailed analysis of the rich historical and ethnographic material she has assembled reinforces the conclusion that instead of regarding the secular state as the solution to discrimination against religious minorities, it must itself be understood as part of the problem. So I offer a few reflections prompted by her excellent study, first on liberal ideals that are commonly said to promote equal treatment for minorities, and then about the secular anxiety that preceded the 2013 coup against the elected president Mohamed Morsi.

Secularism can, of course, exist in authoritarian states, but liberal democracies cannot exist without secularism because state neutrality is regarded as essential to the flourishing of liberal values (freedom, equality, tolerance, and dignity). One might, therefore, press the following question: In what way, precisely, does secularism express these values?

Thus Jürgen Habermas has argued, as a liberal, that the principle of equality should be extended to religious believers in their political discourse and behavior:

The understanding of tolerance in pluralistic societies with a liberal constitution demands that in their dealings with unbelievers and those of different faiths, believers should grasp that they must reasonably expect that the dissent they encounter will go on existing; at the same time, however, a liberal political culture expects that unbelievers, too, will grasp the same point in their dealings with believers.

But does it follow as a practical matter that the state treat citizens holding diverse beliefs equally because there can be no rational defeat of one proponent by another? Or is it simply a liberal sensibility that treats all citizens, regardless of religious beliefs, with equal concern and respect by other citizens, the government, the law, and the constitution?

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Paula Span in The New York Times:

Last year, when an oncologist advised that Betty Chin might benefit frompalliative care, her son Kevin balked. Mrs. Chin, a retired nurse’s aide who lives in Manhattan’s Chinatown, was undergoing treatment for a recurrence of colorectal cancer. Her family understood that radiation and chemotherapy wouldn’t cure her, but they hoped doctors could keep the cancer at bay, perhaps shrinking her tumor enough to allow surgery or simply buying her more time. Mrs. Chin, 84, was in pain, fatigued and depressed. The radiation had led to diarrhea, and she needed a urinary catheter; her chemotherapy drugs caused nausea, vomiting and appetite loss. Palliative care, which focuses on relieving the discomfort and distress of serious illness, might have helped. But Mr. Chin, 50, his mother’s primary caregiver, initially resisted the suggestion.

“The word ‘palliative,’ I thought of it as synonymous with hospice,” he said, echoing a common misperception. “I didn’t want to face that possibility. I didn’t think it was time yet.” In the ensuing months, however, two more physicians recommended palliative care, so the Chins agreed to see the team at Mount Sinai Hospital. They have become converts. “It was quite a relief,” Mr. Chin said. “Our doctor listened to everything: the pain, the catheter, the vomiting, the tiredness. You can’t bring up issues like this with an oncologist.” Multiple prescriptions have made his mother more comfortable. A social worker helps the family grapple with home care schedules and insurance. Mr. Chin, who frequently translates for his Cantonese-speaking mother, can call nurses with questions at any hour. Challenges remain — Mrs. Chin still isn’t eating much — but her son now wishes the family had agreed to palliative care earlier.

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Sameer Rahim at Prospect Magazine:

Of all the places to set a social comedy in the style of Jane Austen, perhaps the last would be a disco in early 1980s New York. But 18 years ago, the American writer-director Whit Stillman did exactly that with his wonderfully funny and acute The Last Days of Disco. Stillman’s first film Metropolitan (1990) followed the tangled love lives of a group of intelligent and idealistic New Yorkers. Filmed on a shoe-string, it was nominated for an Oscar. His next film Barcelona (1994) transplanted similar members of the self-described UHBs (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie) to Europe. The Last Days of Disco is the third in his trilogy of these “comedies of mannerlessness,” as Stillman has called them. On Saturday there was a showing at the Barbican, followed by a Q&A with Stillman and actor/director Richard Ayoyade.

Stillman has been characterised as a Wasp Woody Allen. There are some similarities between the directors. Stillman’s films are talkative and witty, like Allen’s, and are usually set in a closed milieux the director knows well—in Stillman’s case the Harvard-educated upper classes. But the moral texture of his films are quite different. Allen embraces a liberal, humanistic worldview in which the sexual revolution is a joyful—though complex—achievement. By contrast, Stillman is sceptical of the sexual revolution, is impatient with liberal pieties, and retains a faith in the power of grace. One critic has even called him a “Great Conservative Filmmaker.” That’s going too far: he is too subtle a filmmaker to advocate a political ideology. Yet it is undeniable that for his characters concepts such as “moral virtue,” “character,” “gentlemanliness” and “self-restraint” are far from outdated ideals.

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Charles Simic at Literary Hub:

The Book of Blam is the first of three novels about the Holocaust in Yugoslavia written by the Serbian writer Aleksandar Tišma, the other two being The Use of Man and Kapo. It was published in 1972 in Belgrade and was well received, as were the two books that followed. Tišma’s work was translated into 17 languages and he became internationally known. Although a child of a Serbian father and Jewish mother, who lost relatives on his mother’s side in the Holocaust, Tišma came to the subject of the camps late: He attributed this new interest of his to a trip he took to Poland in the 1960s and a visit he made to Auschwitz that reminded him of the horrors he registered as a boy but had learned not to think about in order to keep his sanity. The trip to Poland made him realize that he had a history he could not run away from. As Tišma’s compatriot Danilo Kiš noted, “One doesn’t become a writer accidentally, one’s biography is the first and the greatest cause.” Tišma would have agreed. In one of his journals he describes himself as a bug who had survived the bug spray and whose role now is to convey to the descendants of the killers the atrocities their fathers and grandfathers perpetrated on their millions of victims.

Tišma was born in 1928 in Horgoš, a town on the border of Serbia and Hungary, where thousands of Syrian war refugees lately have massed while waiting to be allowed passage to Western Europe. His father came from Lika, an impoverished region in western Croatia inhabited by many Serbs.

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Ed Yong at The Atlantic:

Paragraph

Record breaking Thriller
dance attempt.

*

Wolfman Jack style
dj in the video game says,
“This is Wasteland Radio

and we’re here for you”

*

You are here

maintaining détente
between the voices
in your head.

Immediacy is retro,
says Lytle.

*

Nostalgic/futuristic
scene in which

we can read the code—

green
flowing algorithms.

We can almost
slip right in.

by Rae Armantrout
from: Poetry, Vol. 196, No. 1, April
publisher: Poetry, Chicago, 2010
.
.

Norman Lewis. Pensive Woman. 1944.

Lithograph on New York Times.

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Elizabeth Drew in the New York Review of Books:

It would be helpful if there were another word for “infrastructure”: it’s such an earnest and passive word for the blood vessels of this country, the crucial conveyors and connections that get us from here to there (or not) and the ports that facilitate our trade (or don’t), as well as the carriers of information, in particular broadband (if one is connected to it), and other unreliable structures. The word “crisis” is also overused, applied to the unimportant as well as the crucial. But this country has an infrastructure crisis.

The near-total failure of our political institutions to invest for the future, eschewing what doesn’t yield the quick payoff, political and physical, has left us with hopelessly clogged traffic, at risk of being on a bridge that collapses, or on a train that flies off defective rails, or with rusted pipes carrying our drinking water. Broadband is our new interstate highway system, but not everyone has access to it—a division largely based on class. Depending on the measurement used, the United States ranks from fourteenth to thirtieth among all nations in its investments in infrastructure. The wealthiest nation on earth is nowhere near the top.

Congress’s approval last December of a five-year bill to spend $305 billion to improve the nation’s highway system occasioned much self-congratulation that the lawmakers actually got something done. But with an increase in the gasoline tax politically off-limits, the means for paying for it are dubious and uncertain.

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Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Many of our primate ancestors probably ended up in the bellies of big cats. How else to explain bite marks on the bones of ancient hominins, the apparent gnawing of leopards or other African felines?

Big cats still pose a threat to primates. In one study of chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast, for example, scientists estimated that each chimp ran a 30 percent risk of being attacked by a leopard every year.

A new study suggests that the big cats may be getting some tiny help on the hunt. A parasite infecting the brains of some primates, including perhaps our forebears, may make them less wary.

What does the parasite get out of it? A ride into its feline host.

The parasite is Toxoplasma gondii, a remarkably successful single-celled organism. An estimated 11 percent of Americans have dormant Toxoplasma cysts in their brains; in some countries, the rate is as high as 90 percent.

Infection with the parasite poses a serious threat to fetuses and to people with compromised immune systems. But the vast majority of those infected appear to suffer no serious symptoms. Their healthy immune systems keep the parasite in check.

More here.

Fiona MacDonald in Science Alert:

A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles – almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published – freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers.

For those of you who aren't already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it's sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn't afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it's since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court – a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

“Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,”Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.”

If it sounds like a modern day Robin Hood struggle, that's because it kinda is. But in this story, it's not just the poor who don't have access to scientific papers – journal subscriptions have become so expensive that leading universities such as Harvard and Cornell have admitted they can no longer afford them. Researchers have also taken a stand – with 15,000 scientists vowing to boycott publisher Elsevier in part for its excessive paywall fees.

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Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine:

The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a sad and tragic event for his loved ones, including 28 grandchildren and a large network of admirers. The political stakes for the country, its governing institutions, and, yes, the planet dwarf them in scale. The mortality of Supreme Court Justices is an element of wild randomness in the American political system. Enormous stakes rest upon the frail vulnerabilities of human flesh. Thurgood Marshall’s retirement 13 months before the 1992 presidential election, and two years before his death, paved the way for his replacement by Clarence Thomas. In today’s polarized era, no justice who had the physical ability to stay on would depart a Supreme Court seat under an opposing-party president. Whether and how the current system can handle these jolts of random chance is an open question.

The immediate and easily foreseeable impact is staggering. Last week, the Supreme Court issued a stay delaying the implementation of Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The stay indicated that a majority of the justices foresee a reasonably high likelihood that they would ultimately strike down Obama’s plan, which could jeopardize the Paris climate agreement and leave greenhouse gasses unchecked. Without Scalia on the Court, the odds of this drop to virtually zero. The challenge is set to be decided by a D.C. Circuit panel composed of a majority of Democratic appointees, which will almost certainly uphold the regulations. If the plan is upheld, it would require a majority of the Court to strike it down. With the Court now tied 4-4, such a ruling now seems nearly impossible.

Even if the Senate does not confirm any successor, then, Scalia’s absence alone reshapes the Court.

More here.