Abigail Zuger in The New York Times:

We tend to think of good genes as the ones that make us thin, calm, cheerful and healthy. This logical assumption may not be completely accurate: Dr. Lee Goldman suggests that even better genes may be the ones that make us fat, anxious and candidates for the services of a cardiologist like himself. It’s all a matter of perspective, and Dr. Goldman takes the long, long view in “Too Much of a Good Thing,” arguing that many common modern ills result from the surpassingly excellent genes that allowed our species to endure over the millenniums. Only very recently did these survivor genes turn on us, creating the collection of overweight, hypertensive, jumpy and miserable individuals we are today.

Some of his argument will probably be familiar, at least when it comes to the question of why we have all become so fat. Less has been written about other areas of human physiology where our genetic programming seems to butt up against the circumstances of modern life. Dr. Goldman integrates it all into a complex narrative — a little tough sledding at points, but still thought-provoking. Human blood had to clot efficiently, too, or people would have bled to death from the continual accidents inherent in outdoor life and women would have died from the bloody process of childbirth. Finally, primitive humans had to be continually vigilant against attack, instinctively fighting some dangers and hiding from others, never lowering their guard for a second. All those genetic predispositions tend to be nothing but trouble in modern times.

More here.

Qadir Jhatial. Untitled Home.

More here and here.

Joseph Stiglitz in Project Syndicate:

France, for example, spends less than 12% of its GDP on medical care, compared to 17% in the US. Yet Americans can expect to live three full years less than the French.

For years, many Americans explained away this gap. The US is a more heterogeneous society, they argued, and the gap supposedly reflected the huge difference in average life expectancy between African Americans and white Americans.

The racial gap in health is, of course, all too real. According to a study published in 2014, life expectancy for African Americans is some four years lower for women and more than five years lower for men, relative to whites. This disparity, however, is hardly just an innocuous result of a more heterogeneous society. It is a symptom of America’s disgrace: pervasive discrimination against African Americans, reflected in median household income that is less than 60% that of white households. The effects of lower income are exacerbated by the fact that the US is the only advanced country not to recognize access to health care as a basic right.

Some white Americans, however, have attempted to shift the blame for dying younger to African Americans themselves, citing their “lifestyles.” It is perhaps true that unhealthy habits are more concentrated among poor Americans, a disproportionate number of whom are black. But these habits themselves are a consequence of economic conditions, not to mention the stresses of racism.

The Case-Deaton results show that such theories will no longer do. America is becoming a more divided society – divided not only between whites and African Americans, but also between the 1% and the rest, and between the highly educated and the less educated, regardless of race. And the gap can now be measured not just in wages, but also in early deaths. White Americans, too, are dying earlier as their incomes decline.

More here.

Monya Baker, Ewen Callaway, Davide Castelvecchi, Lauren Morello, Sara Reardon, Quirin Schiermeier and Alexandra Witze in Nature:

Rarely has a method roared onto the scene as quickly as the accurate, easy-to-use yet controversial CRISPR–Cas9 genome-editing system. In April, scientists in China reported use of the technique to edit non-viable human embryos, which spurred researchers and bioethicists to debate in editorials and meetings whether the technology should ever be used in human embryos, even for basic research. The debate culminated in the International Summit on Human Gene Editing in early December in Washington DC, which brought together nearly 500 ethicists, scientists and legal experts from more than 20 countries. The organizers wrapped up the event with a statement: the tools are not yet ready to be used to edit the genomes of human embryos intended for pregnancy. But they did not call for an outright ban of this work for basic research.

Over the past three years, CRISPR has become the tool of choice for scientists seeking to enhance animals and crops, and to cure human disease (see ‘CRISPR craze’). In October, researchers set a record by editing the genomes of pig embryos in 62 places at once — a move that could help to revitalize the field of xenotransplantation. The genetic tinkering could lower the risk of exposure to potentially dangerous pig viruses when people receive human-like organs grown in swine. Dogs, goats and sheep have also had their DNA modified with the low-cost technology.

Source: Scopus

CRISPR could target human diseases as well. With that aim in mind, in August, Google and other investors pumped US$120 million into the genome-editing start-up Editas Medicine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm plans to use CRISPR in clinical trials in 2017 to correct a genetic mutation in some people who are visually impaired.

Other, more mature genome-editing technologies are already entering the clinic. In November, researchers in the United Kingdom announced that they had used a different system — enzymes called TALENs — to edit human immune cells and transplant them into a one-year-old with leukaemia, possibly saving her life.

More here.

Sonal Shah in The Wire:

“Being a modern Indian is hard work,” a former king tells Qayanaat, the protagonist of Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmopolitans. If this is true for the King, the dispossessed monarch of fictional, small-town Simhal, it’s certainly so for Qayanaat, a 53-year-old single woman who lives in Bengaluru, subsisting on the diminishing material wealth of one man, her deceased father, while trying to manage her excess of emotions for another, the artist Baban.

Had Hasan chosen Baban—a character who recalls certain real Indian artists, such as Subodh Gupta—as her protagonist, The Cosmopolitans would likely have been India’s first Künstlerroman set in the contemporary art world. And Baban, triumphantly returning from New York to launch his large-scale conceptual work, ‘Nostalgia’, in Bengaluru, would have been a rich character for Hasan to use to pick apart the tensions she explores: between modernity and tradition, aesthetics and ethics, art and profit.

Instead, although The Cosmopolitans opens with the inauguration of ‘Nostalgia’, Hasan sets about painting a portrait of Qayanaat, a character on the periphery of the art world, but at the center of this ambitious, yet intimate, novel of ideas. Qayanaat neither makes art, nor collects it, and her place in the wider world is unclear as well. She is hopeless with money; her quietly bohemian lifestyle, surrounded by her garden and a few works of art, is only enabled by the house that her father left her. By conventional benchmarks, she is something of a failure. This makes her an appealing and important character in a country obsessed with success.

More here.

Julia Felsenthal in Vogue:

A long time ago, the words “Star Wars: Episode VII” would have sent me into paroxysms of joy. The percussive clatter that opens John Williams’s famous score could make me sweat with Pavlovian zeal. That was an era when, more often than not, the hip pocket of my jeans concealed a tiny dime-store replica of the Millennium Falcon, its back panel hand-painted with glow-in-the-dark nail polish that I stole from my older sister. At night, my crude plastic hunk of junk would radiate dimly as though half-heartedly engaging its hyperdrive. During the day it was a secret talisman, a close-at-hand porthole to a world within a world.

All this did not take place in a galaxy far, far away; it took place in Chicago, where I grew up. I loved Star Wars. I don’t remember when I first saw the films. I do know that by the time I reached junior high, in the mid-’90s, my simmering ardor had reached full, rolling boil.

As I write this, I am struck again by how not cool that sounds. I entered—and exited—middle school nearly 6-feet tall, weighing about 95 pounds, and fully androgynous, a look that may have played well in CK One ads but was not so popular on the bar mitzvah circuit in insular, private-school Chicagoland. I was ill-prepared for the light-speed jump of adolescence, the transformation from childhood to teenagerhood that so many of my friends seemed to be making overnight. The future felt even more terrifying than the present. Star Wars offered a wormhole between future and past, a galaxy that mashed up technology with mythology, the power of computing with the knights of the Round Table. Captivating stuff for someone who blew her bat mitzvah money on a cutting-edge IBM Aptiva PC so that I could better play a Sims-like role-playing game about the management of medieval castles and feudal estates.

More here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

Researchers have worked out how to make matter from pure light and are drawing up plans to demonstrate the feat within the next 12 months.

The theory underpinning the idea was first described 80 years ago by two physicists who later worked on the first atomic bomb. At the time they considered the conversion of light into matter impossible in a laboratory.

But in a report published on Sunday, physicists at Imperial College London claim to have cracked the problem using high-powered lasers and other equipment now available to scientists.

“We have shown in principle how you can make matter from light,” said Steven Rose at Imperial. “If you do this experiment, you will be taking light and turning it into matter.”

The scientists are not on the verge of a machine that can create everyday objects from a sudden blast of laser energy. The kind of matter they aim to make comes in the form of subatomic particles invisible to the naked eye.

The original idea was written down by two US physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler, in 1934. They worked out that – very rarely – two particles of light, or photons, could combine to produce an electron and its antimatter equivalent, a positron. Electrons are particles of matter that form the outer shells of atoms in the everyday objects around us.

More here.

And the world was Icarus
Which smelled of melting wax
…………. —Anonymous

Landscape With the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

by William Carlos Williams
from Collected Poems: 1939-1962, Volume II
New Directions Publishing Corp., 1962

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Melia Belli Bose in ArtAsiaPacific:

Bangladesh has undergone near constant political and cultural flux since its two independences: the first from Britain in 1947, after which it became East Pakistan, and then from Pakistan in 1971. Over the past four decades the nation has endured military dictatorships, natural and industrial disasters, rapid globalization and engagement with “Western” and developed Asian countries, primarily through nongovernmental organizations, businesses and factories established by multinational corporations. Concomitantly, there has been social, religious and economic engagement with the wider Islamic world as hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis travel to the Gulf and Saudi Arabia annually for employment, or to perform hajj and umrah pilgrimages to Mecca. These events and interactions contribute to constructions of national and personal identities, as well as relationships to the collective past and the world. Many Bangladeshis appear to subscribe to the late Palestinian-American activist and literary critic Edward Said’s notion of “many Islams,” comfortably marrying their Bengali identities with their Muslim ones. They wear sarīs, read the Koran in Bangla, celebrate Hindu holidays and perform namaaz (Muslim prayer). However, many other Bangladeshis feel compelled to conform to the version of the faith they encounter during their travels abroad.

Responding to this pronounced emergence of hybridity in their country, several contemporary Bangladeshi artists have been grappling with issues of national and personal identities, and with the impact of global interactions. Among their many peers, three women artists—Tayeba Begum Lipi (b. 1969), Dilara Begum Jolly (b. 1960) and Nazia Andaleeb Preema (b. 1974)—explore these issues via the lens of gender. Through their use of different media, messages and content, each confronts what it means to be a woman in a changing Bangladesh that nevertheless still retains very specific gendered expectations. Lipi, Jolly and Preema are part of an international group of artists, which includes Mona Hatoum, Lalla Essaydi, Shirin Neshat, Yoshiko Shimada, Suk-nam Yun and others, who address the multiple binds of being a woman in a postcolonial, globalized, patriarchal society.

More here.

Hussein Ibish in The National:

Mr Trump especially appeals to those white American males who feel blamed, collectively, for all the ills of society, and that they, alone, can be vilified not only without restraint, but also usually with applause. This narrative insists that, in reality, it is actually these middle-class white American males who are being unfairly economically disadvantaged.

Mr Trump, the billionaire, is cleverly exploiting the anger of those who feel, often with complete justification, that they are inexorably slipping from the middle class into the bulging ranks of the working poor.

Immigrants and other minorities could not have accomplished this grand theft without the connivance of traitorous “liberal elites”.

Money-grubbing corporations, the mainstream media, academic snobs, arrogant intellectuals and the hated federal government bureaucracy are the core of the liberal cabal that betrayed “real Americans” for ideological or selfish reasons, and consciously and cynically degraded the country. This imaginary grand betrayal is at the centre of Trumpian rage.

The Republican Party establishment is seen as part of the problem. It is either too weak or compromised by corporate and other interests to effectively defend the country. Only – or even especially – someone unquestionably outside of the thoroughly corrupted system can possibly hope to rehabilitate it.

Narratives about radical, emergency measures needed to reverse national devastation caused by parasitical minorities empowered by back-stabbing elites must be immediately recognisable as the stuff of fascism.

Yet it’s not clear what, if anything, Mr Trump actually believes. He hardly seems a would-be dictator. His campaign most often comes across as a gigantic ego trip, and sometimes even an incredibly elaborate practical joke.

But what explains the eagerness with which his lies, fabrications and reversals are championed by his supporters? It somehow doesn’t matter that his wild claims about blacks being responsible for most murders of whites, or thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, or Barack Obama not having been born in the United States, are demonstrably and incontrovertibly false.

The facts aren’t relevant. All that’s important is the sentiment, even if expressed through evident lies. The emotional “truths” they articulate are much more meaningful than the claims themselves, and therefore their veracity is incidental.

More here.

Jim Yardley in The New York Times Magazine:

The European Union was supposed to be an economic superpower, but after seven years it is still struggling to recover from the global economic crisis. Economic growth is sluggish at best (and uneven, given the divide between a more prosperous north and a debt-burdened south). Adjusting for inflation, the gross domestic product of the 19 countries now sharing Europe’s common currency, the euro, was less in 2014 than it was in 2007. Widespread joblessness and diminishing opportunities confront an entire generation of young Europeans, especially in Spain, Italy, France and Greece. The economic malaise tinges everything: Young people resist marriage for lack of economic opportunity. Poorer European countries are experiencing brain drains as many of their best young professionals and college graduates move abroad. Numerous Greek doctors, for instance, now work in more prosperous Germany while Greece’s health system is in crisis. Even as Toroczkai pushed back against migrants, he complained to me that too many young Hungarians had to leave for London or elsewhere to find work.

The migrants only accentuate the European paradox: A place of deepening pessimism for many of its own young people has become a beacon of hope and safety for migrants, many of them Syrian refugees who have been through the horrors of civil war. Many are young and educated, seemingly a timely fit for a region with an aging population. Except Muslim immigrants present a challenge to European ideals of tolerance, especially in a year of terror attacks, as far-right extremists and conservative political leaders like Orban warn that Europe’s security and ‘‘Christian values’’ are threatened — a reminder of just how fragile the European system has become.

Currently composed of 28 member states, from Germany, the industrial giant, to Malta, the tiny archipelago, the European Union is a bureaucratic machine jerry-built in pursuit of a utopian dream, the post-World War II vision that a unified Europe would be a peaceful and prosperous Europe. Nationalism and extremism had led to Hitler and the Holocaust and, before that, centuries of war. The New Europe was supposed to make future wars impossible and create harmony.

More here.

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Guardian:

I realized that there was something wrong with an arrangement whereby a relatively affluent person such as I had become could afford to write about minimum wage jobs, squirrels as an urban food source or the penalties for sleeping in parks, while the people who were actually experiencing these sorts of things, or were in danger of experiencing them, could not.

In the last few years, I’ve gotten to know a number of people who are at least as qualified writers as I am, especially when it comes to the subject of poverty, but who’ve been held back by their own poverty. There’s Darryl Wellington, for example, a local columnist (and poet) in Santa Fe who has, at times, had to supplement his tiny income by selling his plasma – a fallback that can have serious health consequences. Or Joe Williams, who, after losing an editorial job, was reduced to writing for $50 a piece for online political sites while mowing lawns and working in a sporting goods store for $10 an hour to pay for a room in a friend’s house. Linda Tirado was blogging about her job as a cook at Ihop when she managed to snag a contract for a powerful book entitled Hand to Mouth (for which I wrote the preface). Now she is working on a “multi-media mentoring project” to help other working-class journalists get published.

There are many thousands of people like these – gifted journalists who want to address serious social issues but cannot afford to do so in a media environment that thrives by refusing to pay, or anywhere near adequately pay, its “content providers.” Some were born into poverty and have stories to tell about coping with low-wage jobs, evictions or life as a foster child. Others inhabit the once-proud urban “creative class,” which now finds itself priced out of its traditional neighborhoods, like Park Slope or LA’s Echo Park, scrambling for health insurance and childcare, sleeping on other people’s couches. They want to write – or do photography or documentaries. They have a lot to say, but it’s beginning to make more sense to apply for work as a cashier or a fry-cook.

This is the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals who can’t muster up expenses to even start on the articles, photo-essays and videos they want to do, much less find an outlet to cover the costs of doing them. You can’t, say, hop on a plane to cover a police shooting in your hometown if you don’t have a credit card.

More here.

First, Todd Alcott (warning–spoilers ahead):

Before I go, I’d like to say one more thing on the politics of The Force Awakens. People have commented on my posts (not here, but elsewhere on the internet) saying that the casting of The Force Awakens is nothing but a cynical cash-grab on the behalf of the studio. They point to The Hunger Games and Jessica Jones as examples of how this is the “hip new thing that people seem to like,” and that this too will pass and The Force Awakens will eventually be seen as dated. Likewise, the “Mary Sue” question of Rey elicits learned, beard-stroking responses from people about how it’s a shame that Rey is so competent, but it is, perhaps, inevitable that Disney would demand such an element in the script in order to expand their audience base. “You know, to bring in the Hunger Games crowd.” They strive in their comments to be wiser-than-thou, in the manner of Republicans saying how it is wiser to know that poor people are lazy and proceed from there. Their tone is exactly the manner of the woman at the party who says “I’m not racist, but…”

The supposition underlying the first remark is that narratives focussing on straight white men are, of course, the absolute norm, and, when the culture has gotten over its current fad of non-white, non-male casting, things will return to normal and all will be well. The supposition underlying the Rey comments, meanwhile, is that females are less than human, and should not be allowed to play in the boys’ sandbox.

More here. And Aaron Bady in The New Inquiry:

To criticize The Force Awakens for “recycling” the first three Star Wars movies—to complain that it’s “un-original” compared to that original work of genius—misses the point of the franchise so thoroughly and dramatically that this critical impulse seems more interesting to me than the movie itself. The one thing the original trilogy wasn’t was original. Similarly, The Force Awakens is great, but it isn’t interesting. The jokes are good, the action is organic and compelling, the characters are well inhabited by competent actors, and the cinematography and music is excellent and consistently inventive. But everything that puts you in the moment, when you’re watching it, falls apart as soon as you turn your brain back on. As experience, as ritualistic performance, as society-wide holiday, and as entertainment-industrial-complex, Star Wars is a strange and magnificent and disgusting enterprise. As original story, it’s total crap.

But of course it is. The more interesting question is why we would expect otherwise? Why would anyone act surprised when the new Star Wars turns out to be precisely as predictable and coherent as the story of Christmas itself, or as nakedly designed to sell toys to children? No one complains that this year’s Christmas only re-packages and recycles the stories of Christmases past, and to pretend to be scandalized by how commercial Christmas is “getting” is, itself, a clichéd-to-death joke. The same is true of Star Wars. You can be cynical or you can enjoy it; you can turn your brain on or leave it off. But you can’t have it both ways. Star Wars is what it is, and you can participate, or not. But there’s nothing else it should be.

More here.

Crooked Timber is hosting a seminar on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Kenneth Arrow on Piketty:

Professor Piketty and his colleagues at the Top Income Distribution Study have put us all in great debt for the great increase in our knowledge of historical development of inequalities in income and in wealth in a number of leading countries.

Notice I have already mentioned two inequalities, income and wealth. There is one more leading inequality which does not receive much attention in Piketty’s work: consumption. Papers and books have already appeared which try to measure this inequality. Many more inequalities, e.g. health, educational achievement, race, and gender differences have been the subject of study, but these are more specialized and less central to economic analysis.

There is a strong argument for emphasizing consumption. Why, after all, do we consider inequality in wealth, income, or consumption to be undesirable? If we consider only economic arguments, it is because the poor are being deprived of goods that are valuable to their lives, exactly because they are more basic than the desires of the rich.

This has important implications for how we evaluate Piketty’s arguments about inequality. It suggests an alternative metric of inequality, one under which some of the problems that Piketty identifies are not, in fact, problematic.

Consider a world, like that envisioned by Piketty, in which the rich consume relatively little (compared with their property income). They accumulate wealth by investing in industry, thereby increasing output in the future. If they do not consume more in the future, but instead, simply continue to accumulate, then the additional future output is available for the consumption of the poor.

More here.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig makes the case in Dissent:

Viewing the relationship between Christianity and leftism as inherently antagonistic is firstly a disservice to history. Despite the efforts of the business leaders who conquered Christian thought during the Great Depression, American Christians have never supported capitalist domination of governance or of society. Consider, for instance, a recent study by historian Heath Carter of the Christian roots of labor union organizing in Chicago during the Gilded Age. In Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago, Carter recovers what has been lost to the rhetoric of the Christian right, namely that Christianity (even its evangelical iterations) aligns very well with the goals of organizers fighting for justice and dignity in their work. Indeed, America’s labor movement has long enjoyed support from Christianity of all stripes, from the Catholicism of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, to the peace-oriented Protestantism of A.J. Muste and the Society of Friends.

Outside of labor organizing, Christian theology has also influenced other leftist social movements, such as black power in the United States and liberation theology in Latin America. American civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked this theology of liberation to agitate not only for racial justice, but for equality everywhere and for everyone, including in the sphere of economics. Today, the same line of reasoning is evident in the words and writings of Pope Francis, who has added environmental concerns to the issues we must address so that all can flourish equally.

Christianity, in other words, is no more destined for a cozy relationship with neoliberal, free-market politics than any other ideology, and perhaps less so, given its longstanding interest in the poor. The fact that Christianity is reflexively associated with conservatism in the United States is not so much an accident of history as it is a concerted effort on the part of vested, moneyed interests.

More here. To read the counterpart to Bruenig by Susan Jacoby, click here.