Edward Delman at The Atlantic:

On Tuesday, the Danish parliament overwhelmingly passed a bill seemingly designed to solidify Denmark’s reputation as Western Europe’s least attractive country for refugees—a hard-earned title at a time when many of its neighbors are tightening border controls as people continue to flee conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere. The law empowers Danish authorities to seize any assets exceeding $1,450 from asylum-seekers in order to help pay for the migrants’ subsistence in the country (items of “sentimental value,” such as wedding rings, are exempt). It also extends, from one year to three, the period that those who are resettled must wait to apply for family members to join them in Denmark.

While Denmark has not traditionally been a magnet for immigration, it hasn’t necessarily been an unwelcome place for migrants either. Over the course of the 20th century, the country of nearly 6 million became home to refugees and immigrants from the Soviet bloc, the Balkans, the Middle East, and beyond. Today, immigrants and their descendants account for 10 percent of the total population. Denmark has also been a prominent advocate for refugees and asylum-seekers. It was one of the first countries to become a party to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, and the Danish Refugee Council—a humanitarian group partly funded by the Danish government and the Danish public—is actively involved in supporting refugees and internally displaced peoples around the world.

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Catriona Kelly at Prospect Magazine:

Where historians subside into embarrassed silence, novelists speak. In The Noise of Time, the different variants of the Lenin story are among many pointers to the fluidity of Shostakovich’s relations with his past: “These days, he no longer knew what version to trust. He lies like an eyewitness, as the story goes.” In an anecdote that frames the novel and is also repeated within it, three men drink a vodka toast on a wartime station platform: “one to hear, one to remember, and one to drink.” The Shostakovich of Barnes’s imagining includes all three: the barely surviving crippled alcoholic, limbless on his trolley, practising “a technique for survival”; the bespectacled listener who offers him vodka with egregious courtesy; and the anonymous witness, who disappears even from recollection after the desultory encounter.

Not that Barnes’s purpose is anything to do with allegory. But The Noise of Time, largely based on memoirs (those collected by Elizabeth Wilson as well as Solomon Volkov’s) is a book about Shostakovich’s memories, rather than a straightforward fictional account of his life. Complaining that the Leningrad symphony doesn’t figure, or that Barnes omits Shostakovich’s work as a teacher of composition, or as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet (and a conscientious one) would be obtuse. It would be equally otiose to point out that as well as agonising over his new version of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich negotiated hard over the 1966 film version and insisted only the Kiev production was used. The Noise of Time is a distillation of experience into insomniac self-questioning, or the vertiginous doubt, otkhodnyak, that succeeds the temporary confidence of a vodka high. The mode is interior monologue, but in the third person sometimes used about themselves by particularly sensitive individuals alienated, lifelong, from their own lives.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:

Here is the great challenge of liberal policy in America: We now know that for every dollar of wealth white families have, black families have a nickel. We know that being middle class does not immunize black families from exploitation in the way that it immunizes white families. We know that black families making $100,000 a year tend to live in the same kind of neighborhoods as white families making $30,000 a year. We know that in a city like Chicago, the wealthiest black neighborhood has an incarceration rate many times worse than the poorest white neighborhood. This is not a class divide, but a racist divide. Mainstream liberal policy proposes to address this divide without actually targeting it, to solve a problem through category error. That a mainstream Democrat like Hillary Clinton embraces mainstream liberal policy is unsurprising. Clinton has no interest in expanding the Overton window. She simply hopes to slide through it.

But I thought #FeelTheBern meant something more than this. I thought that Bernie Sanders, the candidate of single-payer health insurance, of the dissolution of big banks, of free higher education, was interested both in being elected and in advancing the debate beyond his own candidacy. I thought the importance of Sanders’s call for free tuition at public universities lay not just in telling citizens that which is actually workable, but in showing them that which we must struggle to make workable. I thought Sanders’s campaign might remind Americans that what is imminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same things, and while actualizing the former we can’t lose sight of the latter. A Democratic candidate who offers class-based remedies to address racist plunder because that is what is imminently doable, because all we have are bandages, is doing the best he can. A Democratic candidate who claims that such remedies are sufficient, who makes a virtue of bandaging, has forgotten the world that should, and must, be.

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From KurzweilAI:

The famous Fermi paradox raises the question: why haven’t we detected signs of alien life, despite high estimates of probability, such as observations of planets in the “habitable zone” around a Sun-like star by the Kepler telescope and calculations of hundreds of billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy that might support life. Now astrobiologists from Australian National University (ANU) Research School of Earth Sciences say they have the best answer: Because life on other planets would likely be brief and would become extinct very quickly from runaway heating or cooling. “The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” said Aditya Chopra, PhD., lead author on a paper published in Astrobiology. In fact, “early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive. Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable.”

The Gaian Bottleneck

For example, about four billion years ago Earth, Venus and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox, the authors explain. Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilize the rapidly changing environment, while life on Earth probably played a leading role in stabilizing the planet’s climate.

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David Epstein in ProPublica:

Two years ago, I wrote a book called “The Sports Gene” that examines the intersection of genetics and athleticism. I expected my mother to buy a dozen copies and invite me to her book club and that would be the end of it. (She did.) Instead, I was almost immediately bombarded with emails from people wanting to know if their kid has Serena Williams’ genes. One coach emailed, wondering how one would get athletes involved in genetic experimentation.

They were coming so quickly, and many were so unhinged, that I took a brief break from opening them.

And then I got one that had this subject heading: “Olympic medalist and muscular dystrophy patient with the same mutation.” Now that caught my attention. I wondered if it might point me to some article or paper in a genetics journal about an elite athlete I’d somehow missed.

Instead, it was a personal note from a 39-year-old Iowa mother named Jill Viles. She was the muscular dystrophy patient, and she had an elaborate theory linking the gene mutation that made her muscles wither to an Olympic sprinter named Priscilla Lopes-Schliep. She offered to send me more info if I was interested. Sure, I told her, send more.

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Kim Todd in Bay Nature:

Lobos Creek trailhead in the Presidio looks wild. Flushed orange monkey flower, sage, and coyote bush spill over re-created sand dunes. Nearby, the creek empties into the ocean. But close your eyes. A water truck pulls up to a stop sign with a mechanical whine. Car engines growl, foghorns moan, a distant airplane whirs. The noise, which never stops even though it’s barely 7 a.m., makes it clear you’re in the middle of the city.

In the parking lot, a white-crowned sparrow perches at the top of an evergreen tree next to a pickup truck and sings, launching a quick patter: whistle, buzz, two-part trill, and a scattering of notes. It’s music familiar to city dwellers, even if they couldn’t name it. The song is key to the white crown’s survival, helping him attract a mate and defend the territory around his nest, warning off other males with his vocal vigor. But the notes are almost drowned out as a bus sighs to a halt. Thanks to recent restoration efforts, the bird is surrounded by plants, such as lupine, that evolved here over centuries, along with the sparrow. But there is no restoring the silence, and the noise grows year by year. What will it take for white crowns like this one to survive in this new soundscape? What will it take to be heard?

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C.J. Polychroniou in TruthOut:

Europe is in turmoil. The migration and refugee crisis is threatening to unravel the entire European integration project. Unwilling to absorb the waves of people fleeing their homes in the Middle East and North Africa, many European Union (EU) member states have began imposing border controls.

But it is not only people from Syria and Iraq, as mainstream media narratives would suggest, who are trying to reach Europe these days. Refugees come from Pakistan and Afghanistan and from nations in sub-Saharan Africa. The numbers are staggering, and they seem to be growing with the passing of every month. In the meantime, anti-immigration sentiment is spreading like wildfire throughout Europe, giving rise to extremist voices that threaten the very foundation of the EU and its vision of an “open, democratic” society.

In light of these challenges, EU officials are pulling out all the stops in their effort to deal with the migration and refugee crisis, offering both technical and economic assistance to member states in hopes that they will do their part in averting the unraveling of the European integration project. Whether they will succeed or fail remains to be seen. What is beyond a doubt however is that Europe's migration and refugee crisis will intensify as more than 4 million more migrants and refugees are expected to reach Europe in the next two years.

Noam Chomsky, one of the world's leading critical intellectuals, offered his insights to Truthout on Europe's migration and refugee crisis and other current European developments – including the ongoing financial crisis in Greece – in an exclusive interview with C.J. Polychroniou.

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Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

Kelly’s Minimalism, such as it is, isn’t doctrinaire, reasonable, on-message. Instead his huge shaped canvases cohere in more subjective space where the mind and eye play with forms, creating larger circles — systems that might not make sense — forming arcing edges or extended long slopping lines into exotic configurations that feel very much part of the world, almost architectural. Kelly’s work exists at some metaphysical-visual junction where we are in immediate contact with the medium of painting itself — its formal characteristics and uncertainties — morphologies of shape, overexposed light, mathematics, form and fragments, power, and the emancipatory openness of the eye. He gives permission to just love color, prettiness, the miracle of chromatic intensities — for themselves and the sensations that seem inherent, internal, part of form itself. It's hard to overstate just how radical this prettiness is when it comes to modernism and the ways it often comes with backstory, theory, rationale. Kelly makes us revel in something as simple as a large monochrome floating painting and see it not only as a crack into meaning, but also as something that has attained an almost inviolate foreverness. Not one of his works ever seems old to me. Instead I see enclosed Edens; cosmic geometry.

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Paula Findlen at The Nation:

On a cold, wet day in January 2008, Robert Batchelor decided to take a peek at a map in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, an old and venerable collection founded in 1602 and filled with arcane treasures. Anyone who has ever used the library may recall the oath that all readers are required to take (formerly in Latin, but nowadays in English, I think) not to remove, deface, or injure any of the library’s books, let alone bring in any fire or kindle one—a great temptation in a library originally devoid of any artificial heating source, especially for a generation that had just discovered the lure of Virginia tobacco. Batchelor, a historian of Britain and Asia, was about to fly back to the United States, where he teaches at Georgia Southern University, but this unusual item—“A very odd mapp of China. Very large, & taken from Mr. Selden’s”—beckoned. With the help of the Bodleian’s curator of Chinese collections, David Helliwell, he retrieved it from the bowels of the library. The map was in a fragile, indeed ruinous state, disintegrating on the stiff linen backing that had deformed it during a botched preservation job a century earlier. Helliwell would later recall that he had seen the map before, but without recognizing its full import. Batchelor was enchanted and enthralled. Here was a hand-painted map of East Asia and parts of Southeast Asia and India that raised a myriad of interesting questions.

Housed in the Bodleian since 1659, the map had previously belonged to an English lawyer named John Selden (1584–1654), who, in a codicil to his 1653 will, singled it out as a prized possession: “a Mapp of China made there fairly and done in colloure together with a Sea Compasse of their making and Devisione taken both by an englishe commander.” The 2008 rediscovery inspired a great deal of speculation about how the map had arrived at the Bodleian, and who had made it.

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Adam Kirsch at The New Yorker:

To get a sense of how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dominates German literature, we would have to imagine a Shakespeare known to the last inch—a Shakespeare squared or cubed. Goethe’s significance is only roughly indicated by the sheer scope of his collected works, which run to a hundred and forty-three volumes. Here is a writer who produced not only some of his language’s greatest plays but hundreds of major poems of all kinds—enough to keep generations of composers supplied with texts for their songs. Now consider that he also wrote three of the most influential novels in European literature, and a series of classic memoirs documenting his childhood and his travels, and essays on scientific subjects ranging from the theory of colors to the morphology of plants.

Then, there are several volumes of his recorded table talk, more than twenty thousand extant letters, and the reminiscences of the many visitors who met him throughout his sixty-year career as one of Europe’s most famous men. Finally, Goethe accomplished all this while simultaneously working as a senior civil servant in the duchy of Weimar, where he was responsible for everything from mining operations to casting actors in the court theatre. If he hadn’t lived from 1749 to 1832, safely into the modern era and the age of print, but had instead flourished when Shakespeare did, there would certainly be scholars today theorizing that the life and work of half a dozen men had been combined under Goethe’s name.

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George Johnson in The New York Times:

Epidemiologists have long been puzzled by a strange pattern in their data: People living at higher altitudes appear less likely to get lung cancer. Associations like these can be notoriously misleading. Slice and dice the profusion of data, and there is no end to the coincidences that can arise. There is, for instance, a strong correlation between per-capita cheese consumption and the number of people strangled accidentally by their bedsheets. Year by year, the number of letters making up the winning word for the Scripps National Spelling Bee closely tracks the number of people killed by venomous spiders. These are probably not important clues about the nature of reality. But the evidence for an inverse relationship between lung cancer and elevation has been much harder to dismiss.

A paper published last year in the journal PeerJ plumbed the question to new depths and arrived at an intriguing explanation. The higher you live, the thinner the air, so maybe oxygen is a cause of lung cancer. Oxygen cannot compete with cigarettes, of course, but the study suggests that if everyone in the United States moved to the alpine heights of San Juan County, Colo. (population: 700), there would be 65,496 fewer cases of lung cancer each year. This idea didn’t appear out of the blue. A connection between lung cancer and altitude was proposed as early as 1982. Five years later, other researchers suggested that oxygen might be the reason.

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Agnes Denes. Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan. 1982

“Two acres of wheat planted and harvested by the artist on the Battery Park landfill, Manhattan, Summer 1982. After months of preparations, in May 1982, a 2-acre wheat field was planted on a landfill in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty. Two hundred truckload of dirt were brought in and 285 furrows were dug by hand and cleared of rocks and garbage. The seeds were sown by hand adn the furrows covered with soil. the field was maintained for four months, cleared of wheat smut, weeded, fertilized and sprayed against mildew fungus, and an irrigation system set up. the crop was harvested on August 16 and yielded over 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat”

More here, here, and here.

Mohammed Hanif in the New York Times:

According to our security analysts, the massacre of students and teachers at Bacha Khan University in Charsadda on Wednesday proves that we are winning against terrorism.

A month before that, Pakistan marked the first anniversary of the Army Public School attacks in Peshawar, where more than 140 people, the vast majority of them students, were slaughtered by the Taliban. Most were in their early teens. Never again, we said then. Parliament gave the military all the powers it wanted, and Pakistanis vowed to eliminate the killers of our children.

We marked the anniversary by honoring the dead and giving memorial shields to their parents. We put lots of flowers and candles around the young students’ pictures. Newscasters on television dressed up in the school’s uniform to express solidarity. The Pakistani Army’s public relations department released a music video with students waving flags and raising fists. The singing students pledged not only to defeat the Taliban, but also to educate the enemy’s children in revenge.

The army, however, did not answer the one question the parents of the dead students have been asking for more than a year: Who is responsible for the security of the children in a school managed by the army itself? Instead it released slickly edited music videos.

This year was declared the year that terror will end. Safe havens have been bombed into oblivion. Terrorists have been hanged and the rest are waiting for their turn, we are told. Hours after the attack in Charsadda, the Pakistani Army’s spokesman told the nation that Operation Zarb-e-Azb, its sweeping antiterrorism campaign, has been a success and the “results are there for everyone to see.”

Security experts, a group likely to find a silver lining in hell, say that the Taliban are targeting schools because these are soft targets – and that this is proof the Taliban have been weakened and can no longer attack cantonments or airports. Apparently, we are supposed to take solace in the slaughter of our children because our cantonments and airports are safe.

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Ewen Callaway in Nature:

“Don't look at them directly,” Rie Henriksen whispers, “otherwise they get suspicious.” The neuroscientist is referring to a dozen or so chickens loitering just a few metres away in the car park of a scenic observation point for Opaekaa Falls on the island of Kauai, Hawaii.

The chickens have every reason to distrust Henriksen and her colleague, evolutionary geneticist Dominic Wright, who have travelled to the island from Linköping University in Sweden armed with traps, drones, thermal cameras and a mobile molecular-biology lab to study the birds.

As the two try to act casual by their rented car, a jet-black hen with splashes of iridescent green feathers pecks its way along a trail of bird feed up to a device called a goal trap. Wright tugs at a string looped around his big toe and a spring-loaded net snaps over the bird. After a moment of stunned silence, the hen erupts into squawking fury.

Opaekaa Falls, like much of Kauai, is teeming with feral chickens — free-ranging fowl related both to the domestic breeds that lay eggs or produce meat for supermarket shelves and to a more ancestral lineage imported to Hawaii hundreds of years ago.

These modern hybrids inhabit almost every corner of the island, from rugged chasms to KFC car parks. They have clucked their way into local lore and culture and are both beloved and reviled by Kauai's human occupants. Biologists, however, see in the feral animals an improbable experiment in evolution: what happens when chickens go wild?

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Piers J. Sellers in the New York Times:

I’m a climate scientist who has just been told I have Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

This diagnosis puts me in an interesting position. I’ve spent much of my professional life thinking about the science of climate change, which is best viewed through a multidecadal lens. At some level I was sure that, even at my present age of 60, I would live to see the most critical part of the problem, and its possible solutions, play out in my lifetime. Now that my personal horizon has been steeply foreshortened, I was forced to decide how to spend my remaining time. Was continuing to think about climate change worth the bother?

After handling the immediate business associated with the medical news — informing family, friends, work; tidying up some finances; putting out stacks of unread New York Times Book Reviews to recycle; and throwing a large “Limited Edition” holiday party, complete with butlers, I had some time to sit at my kitchen table and draw up the bucket list.

Very quickly, I found out that I had no desire to jostle with wealthy tourists on Mount Everest, or fight for some yardage on a beautiful and exclusive beach, or all those other things one toys with on a boring January afternoon. Instead, I concluded that all I really wanted to do was spend more time with the people I know and love, and get back to my office as quickly as possible.

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Marcus Woo in Smithsonian:

Almost everyone succumbs to the ravages of time. Once quick and strong, both body and mind eventually break down as aging takes its toll. Except, it seems, for at least one species of ant. Pheidole dentata, a native of the southeastern U.S., isn't immortal. But scientists have found that it doesn't seem to show any signs of aging. Old worker ants can take care of infants, forage and attack prey just as well as the youngsters, and their brains appear just as sharp. “We really get a picture that these ants—throughout much of the lifespan that we measured, which is probably longer than the lifespan under natural conditions—really don't decline,” says Ysabel Giraldo, who studied the ants for her doctoral thesis at Boston University. Such age-defying feats are rare in the animal kingdom. Naked mole rats can live for almost 30 years and stay spry for nearly their entire lives. They can still reproduce even when old, and they never get cancer. But the vast majority of animals deteriorate with age just like people do.

Like the naked mole rat, ants are social creatures that usually live in highly organized colonies. It's this social complexity that makes P. dentata useful for studying aging in people, says Giraldo, now at the California Institute of Technology. Humans are also highly social, a trait that has been connected to healthier aging. By contrast, most animal studies of aging use mice, worms or fruit flies, which all lead much more isolated lives. “Maybe the social component could be important,” she says. “This could be a really exciting system to understand the neurobiology of aging.”

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Ken Roth at Human Rights Watch:

The warring parties in Syria are to resume talks in Geneva on January 25 with the aim of ending a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians and displaced millions. What will it take for the talks to succeed?

In October in Vienna, the main foreign actors in the war, including Russia, adopted guiding principles for the talks. They speak of the eventual defeat of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) “and other terrorist groups,” maintenance of Syria’s prewar borders, and the protection of minority groups and state institutions.

Yet major points of dispute remain, and the Vienna principles outline no plan to build the trust among the warring parties needed to facilitate difficult compromises. Diplomacy will not be enough if the warring parties continue the attacks on civilians and other atrocities that are driving Syrians apart.

The war has continued for so long in part because both the Syrian government and the armed groups aligned against it believed that they could prevail militarily. Russia’s entry into the war may have helped to dispel those illusions. Its airpower has been enough to bolster the Syrian government against collapse but not to make significant progress against the opposition. Meanwhile, the rise of ISIS and its demonstrated ability to attack in Europe, as well as the mass exodus of Syrian refugees, have led many external actors to renew their push for a political compromise. They hope to encourage their Syrian allies to fight ISIS and other extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra rather than each other.

More here.