Kazi Anis Ahmed in The Guardian:

Things we don’t write about: The Prophet. The Quran. The mosque. The hijab. Indeed, anything to do with Islam that might offend anyone willing to kill. The problem is that we can never be certain what will offend them. The killing types are no longer visible, wizened old men who regularly announce where the red line lays. The mantle has passed onto teenagers wielding machetes, belonging to secret cliques, guided by international ideologies with vicious local consequences.

In a bewildering new trend, it is young rationalist bloggers in Bangladesh who have emerged as the primary target of Islamic extremists. How peculiar indeed, that killers espousing a retrograde vision of the world should be so obsessed with the most twenty-first century of media: the blog. Four bloggers have been hacked to death since the beginning of this year, and dozens more live in fear of becoming the next victim.

There is a specific history at play here. The secular bloggers of Bangladesh led a mass secular movement in 2013 demanding the death penalty for war crimes committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence. What’s unfolding now is in great part payback for the “insolence” of those seeking belated justice for a long-ignored genocide.

More here.

Rowan Williams at Literary Review:

What if morality had more to do with habit and character, with the grace of receiving as well as of giving, rather than being just the sum total of right actions? Singer and many (but not all) of the figures whose stories feature inStrangers Drowning are committed Kantians in their ethics: they believe that morality is about the quest for the unequivocally good action. But, as the dilemmas flagged in the title should tell us, there are choices in which there is no unequivocally good outcome. Talking as though there were one can imperceptibly encourage us to ignore certain kinds of suffering or pain in the way touched on earlier. As many moral philosophers have insisted over the last few decades, focusing on how to make infallibly right choices (and also on hard cases where this looks practically impossible) isn’t a very useful way of thinking about a good life as opposed to an ensemble of right answers. Part of the discomfort generated by some of MacFarquhar’s case studies is to do with a sense that some people are looking almost obsessively for a scheme of ideas that will assure them beyond doubt that they are doing what is right. The more sympathetic figures in this book are those who ruefully acknowledge that their moral maximalism cannot ever quite deliver this and that the human cost along the way may be disturbingly high; or those whose generosity has about it some dimension of warmth or joy as well as effectiveness.

more here.

Katrine Øgaard Jensen at The Quarterly Review:

Although Naja Marie Aidt made her English-language debut just last year with a short story collection entitled Baboon (Two Lines Press), in Denmark she has been required reading in most middle school and high school classes since the 1990s. A poet and author with nearly 20 works in various genres, Aidt has received numerous honors, including the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for Baboon in 2008.

Aidt debuted in Denmark in 1991 with the poetry collection Så længe jeg er ung, and since then she has mainly been known for her poems and short stories. Her first novel, Sten, saks, papir, came out in Denmark in 2012, some 21 years after her first poetry collection. Now that novel has been published by Open Letter Books as Rock, Paper, Scissors, in K.E. Semmel’s translation.

In Rock, Paper, Scissors, we follow Thomas O’Mally Lindström—the owner of a small, successful stationery business—whose abusive and criminal father, Jacques, just passed away in prison. Along with his neurotic and temperamental sister, Jenny, Thomas reluctantly goes through their father’s old apartment, where he finds a broken toaster containing a large sum of money. Thomas decides to keep the money in his basement, even though he knows Jacques probably acquired it illegally. From this point, a thriller-like plot begins to unfold. Thomas becomes increasingly anxious, especially when a charming man by the name of Luke shows up at his father’s funeral. Luke—a nephew of one of Jacques’s old associates—seemingly had a close relationship with Thomas’s father.

more here.

Nikolaus Wachsmann at The Guardian:

Most Germans did not want war in 1939. When it came, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, there was no euphoria and flag-waving, as there had been in 1914, but dejection; the people were downcast, one diarist noted. The mood soon lifted, as the Third Reich overran its neighbours, but most Germans still hoped for a quick conclusion. As Nicholas Stargardt points out in his outstanding history of Germany during the second world war, the Nazi regime was most popular “when it promised peace, prosperity and easy victories”. And yet, German troops continued to fight an ever more protracted battle, with ever more brutality, while the home front held tight. Even when it was clear that all was lost, there was no collapse or uprising, as in 1918. Why?

There are two easy answers. After the war, many Germans claimed to have been cowed by an omnipotent terror apparatus. More recently, some historians have argued the opposite: the Nazi regime was buoyed by fervent support, with ordinary Germans backing Hitler to the end. Stargardt dismisses both answers convincingly. Domestic terror alone, though ever-present, did not ensure the war’s continuation. Neither did popular enthusiasm for nazism. Of course there was significant support for Hitler’s regime, at least as long as the campaign went well. “God couldn’t have sent us a better war,” one soldier wrote to his wife in summer 1940, as the Wehrmacht routed France. But opinion was fickle, fluctuating with the fortunes of war.

more here.

Paul Elie in Vanity Fair:

Gabriel García Márquez began writing Cien Años de Soledad—One Hundred Years of Solitude—a half-century ago, finishing in late 1966. The novel came off the press in Buenos Aires on May 30, 1967, two days before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, and the response among Spanish-language readers was akin to Beatlemania: crowds, cameras, exclamation points, a sense of a new era beginning. In 1970 the book appeared in English, followed by a paperback edition with a burning sun on its cover, which became a totem of the decade. By the time García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1982, the novel was considered the Don Quixote of the Global South, proof of Latin-American literary prowess, and the author was “Gabo,” known all over the continent by a single name, like his Cuban friend Fidel.

Many years later, interest in Gabo and his great novel is surging. The Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas, recently paid $2.2 million to acquire his archives—including a Spanish typescript of Cien Años de Soledad—and in October a gathering of his family members and academics took a fresh look at his legacy, repeatedly invoking the book as his magnum opus. Unofficially, it’s everybody’s favorite work of world literature and the novel that, more than any other since World War II, has inspired novelists of our time—from Toni Morrison to Salman Rushdie to Junot Díaz. A scene in the movie Chinatown takes place at a Hollywood hacienda dubbed El Macondo Apartments. Bill Clinton, during his first term as president, made it known that he would like to meet Gabo when they were both on Martha’s Vineyard; they wound up swapping insights about Faulkner over dinner at Bill and Rose Styron’s place.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

In the tightly woven networks of the brain, tugging one neuronal thread can unravel numerous circuits. Because of that, the authors of a paper¹ published in Nature on 9 December caution that techniques such as optogenetics — activating neurons with light to control brain circuits — and manipulation with drugs could lead researchers to jump to unwarranted conclusions. In work with rats and zebra finches, neuroscientist Bence Ölveczky of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his team found that stimulating one part of the brain to induce certain behaviours might cause other, unrelated parts to fire simultaneously, and so make it seem as if these circuits are also involved in the behaviour. According to Ölveczky, the experiments suggest that although techniques such as optogenetics may show that a circuit can perform a function, they do not necessarily show that it normally performs that function. “I don’t want to say other studies have been wrong, but there is a danger to overinterpreting,” he says.

Ölveczky and his colleagues discovered these discrepancies by chance while studying rats that they had trained to press a lever in a certain pattern. They injected a drug called muscimol, which temporarily shuts off neurons, into a part of the motor cortex that is involved in paw movement. The animals were no longer able to perform the task, which might be taken as evidence that neurons in this brain region were necessary to its performance. But Ölveczky accidentally damaged one animal’s motor cortex while injecting the drug. He decided to use a toxin to permanently destroy that portion of the brain to see whether such a lesion would have the same effects as the temporary disruption. When the researchers tested this rat ten days later, they were surprised to find that it could still press the lever correctly, despite having not performed the task since the damage occurred. The observation suggested that the damaged circuit was never actually involved in the behaviour in the first place; without practice, the brain cannot simply switch to using a different circuit. The researchers concluded that their muscimol experiment had shut down multiple circuits, some of which were involved in the lever-pressing behaviour.

More here.

From Discover:

Everyone dreams – even people who believe that they “never dream” and can’t remember any of their dreams. That’s according to a group of French researchers writing in the Journal of Sleep Research: Evidence that non-dreamers do dream. In questionnaire surveys, up to 6.5% of people report that they ‘never dream’. Although most of these people report having dreamed at some point in the past, roughly 1 in every 250 people say that they can’t remember ever dreaming – not even once.

But is it possible that these “non-dreamers” do in fact have dreams, but just can’t remember them? To study this question, Herlin et al., authors of the new paper, looked at people with REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), a condition in which patients make movements, sometimes violent ones, while they sleep. Sometimes these movements are accompanied by speech. The movements seen in RBD are often quite complex and, interestingly, they seem to correspond to the content of the dreams that patients are experiencing. At least some of the actions seen in RBD are ‘acted out’ dreams. Herlin et al. report that some RBD patients report never dreaming: out of 289 diagnosed RBD cases, 2.7% reported that they had not dreamed for at least 10 years, and 1.1% said that they had never dreamed ever. However, in many cases their actions during sleep (captured on video in the sleep clinic) suggested that they were dreaming.

More here.

Phoebe Malt Bovy in The New Republic:

Ban guns. All guns. Get rid of guns in homes, and on the streets, and, as much as possible, on police. Not just because of San Bernardino, or whichever mass shooting may pop up next, but also not not because of those. Don’t sort the population into those who might do something evil or foolish or self-destructive with a gun and those who surely will not. As if this could be known—as if it could be assessed without massively violating civil liberties and stigmatizing the mentally ill. Ban guns! Not just gun violence. Not just certain guns. Not just already-technically-illegal guns. All of them.

I used to refer to my position on this issue as being in favor of gun control. Which is true, except that “gun control” at its most radical still tends to refer to bans on certain weapons and closing loopholes. The recent New York Timesfront-page editorial, as much as itinfuriated some, was still too tentative. “Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership,” the paper argued, making the case for “reasonable regulation,” nothing more. Even the rare ban-guns arguments involve prefacing and hedging and disclaimers. “We shouldn’t ‘take them away’ from people who currently own them, necessarily,” writes Hollis Phelps in Salon. Oh, but we should.

I say this not to win some sort of ideological purity contest, but because banning guns urgently needs to become a rhetorical and conceptual possibility.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

A logical paradox at the heart of mathematics and computer science turns out to have implications for the real world, making a basic question about matter fundamentally unanswerable.

In 1931, Austrian-born mathematician Kurt Gödel shook the academic world when he announced that some statements are ‘undecidable’, meaning that it is impossible to prove them either true or false. Three researchers have now found that the same principle makes it impossible to calculate an important property of a material — the gaps between the lowest energy levels of its electrons — from an idealized model of its atoms.

The result also raises the possibility that a related problem in particle physics — which has a US$1-million prize attached to it — could be similarly unsolvable, says Toby Cubitt, a quantum-information theorist at University College London and one of the authors of the study.

The finding, published on 9 December in Nature¹, and in a longer, 140-page version on the arXiv preprint server², is “genuinely shocking, and probably a big surprise for almost everybody working on condensed-matter theory”, says Christian Gogolin, a quantum information theorist at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain.

More here.

Richard Kind in New Matilda:

‘Another day, another tweet from Richard Dawkins’ wrote Eleanor Robertson last July, in response to the controversial professor’s latest foray into the Twittersphere.

Ah yes, I can remember thinking, another article on Richard Dawkins and how he and his fellow New Atheists are disappointing progressive expectations! Not that he didn’t deserve it, mind, having just used a moral taxonomy of rape in order to make a point about logic: not something you can do with much sensitivity in 140 characters or less, or even 140 characters or more.

But the backlash, too, is part of the ritual, and Newtonian in its predictability….

Does Dawkins make an arse of himself when he holds forth on the state of science in Islamic countries or goes ape-shit over a small jar of honey? Yes, he does.

Is Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, a crass and increasingly reactionary numpty? No question.

Does it follow that the New Atheism is an invitation to Western self-congratulation, Enlightenment fundamentalism and eliminationist Islamophobia, as Jeff Sparrow more or less averred in a Guardian article a few days ago? (Jeff had taken Dawkins’ tweets about US schoolboy Ahmed Mohamed and his unexploding clock as his text). In the minds of many progressives, it does.

Not mine. In fact I think there’s something iffy about much of the Anti-New Atheist commentary.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed nanoparticles that swell and burst when exposed to near-infrared laser light. These “nanobombs” may be able to kill cancer cells outright, or at least stall their growth — overcoming a biological barrier that has blocked development of drug agents that attempt to alter cancer-cell gene expression (conversion of genes to proteins). These kinds of drug agents are generally forms of RNA (ribonucleic acid), and are notoriously difficult to use as drugs for two main reasons:

• They are quickly degraded when free in the bloodstream.
• When ordinary nanoparticles are taken up by cancer cells, the cancer cells often enclose them in small compartments called endosomes, preventing the drug molecules from reaching their target, and degrading them.

Zapping tumors and cancer stem cells with laser light and nanoparticles

In this new study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, the researchers packaged nanoparticles with the RNA agent (drug) and ammonium bicarbonate, causing the nanoparticles to swell (as it does in baking bread) three times or more in size when exposed to the heat generated by near-infrared laser light. That causes the endosomes to burst, dispersing the therapeutic RNA drug into the cell. For their study, the researchers used human prostate cancer cells and tumors in an animal model. The nanoparticles were equipped to target cancer-stem-like cells (CSCs), which are cancer cells with properties of stem cells. CSCs often resist therapy and are thought to play an important role in cancer development and recurrence. The therapeutic agent in the nanoparticles was a form of microRNA called miR-34a. The researchers chose this molecule because it can lower the levels of a protein (CD44) that is crucial for CSC survival. Near-infrared light can penetrate tissue to a depth of one centimeter or more, depending on laser-light wavelength and power (see “‘Golden window’ wavelength range for optimal deep-brain near-infrared imaging determined”). For deeper tumors, the light would be delivered using minimally invasive surgery.

More here.

Victoria Glendinning at Literary Review:

I knew a man of Iris Murdoch’s generation, attractive to many women, who told me how he dreaded the ‘fat envelopes’ addressed to him at his office, stuffed with closely written pages. Wonderful though Iris Murdoch was, I could not help wondering as I read these overwhelming letters, published for the first time in this book (two printed pages of which constitute ten pages of her writing paper), whether some of her friends and lovers occasionally felt the same. She talked on paper as immoderately as some people talk on the telephone.

In her youth and in her prime she continually fell in love, or into intense friendships. ‘I find myself quite astonishingly interested in the opposite sex, and capable of being in love with about six men at once,’ she confessed. This led to imbroglios. Here is an extract from a letter written in 1945 to a former love, her Oxford contemporary David Hicks:

but anyway, it started when I went to live with a young man whom I didn’t love but whom I felt sorry for because he was in love with me, and because he has a complex about women (because of a homosexual past) … This was one Michael Foot [the historian M R D Foot] of Oxford, whom you may remember. In the midst of this, the brilliant and darling Pip Bosanquet came to lodge at Seaforth, who was then breaking off her relations with an economics don at Balliol, called Thomas Balogh, a horribly clever Hungarian Jew. I met Thomas, fell terribly in love, and he with me, and thus involved Michael in some rather hideous sufferings – in the course of which I somehow managed to avert my eyes and be, most of the time, insanely happy with Thomas. That is until I began to realize that Thomas was the devil incarnate and that I must tear myself away, although I adored him more and more madly every day. Pip, whom I love too, more than I ever thought I could love any woman, fell in love with Michael, most successfully salvaged what was left after my behaviour and married him.

more here.

Ingrid D. Rowland at The New York Review of Books:

The Frick is a marvelous place to compare Andrea’s virtuosity with that of other great painters from the same Italian tradition. In contrast to an artist like Paolo Veronese, who paints with unrelenting intensity right to the very corners of his canvases, or Raphael, who can give a tiny background the same definition as the main event, Andrea concentrates his effort on a few central figures, or, as in the case of the scholar with the book that can also read as a block, on a face, leaving the rest in a pleasant haze. This uneven level of attention is surely what Vasari meant when he said that Andrea “lacked the elaboration, grandeur, and versatility of style that can be seen in others.” His paintings, beneath their ravishing surfaces, are rather stark and simple compared with the pinpoint detail of Bronzino, or Vasari’s crowd scenes, or Pontormo’s intricately interlaced compositions.

Like his contemporary Baccio Bandinelli, a divine draftsman and a competent sculptor, Andrea del Sarto may be one of those Florentine artists for whom drawing had become an activity that Giorgio Vasari was perhaps the first to understand in all its significance: the most essential act in the mysterious process of making art.

more here.

Taciana Arcimovic at Eurozine:

The topic of “neighbourhood” has probably never been more of a burning issue in eastern European than today, both in terms of physical geography and political space. The annexation of Crimea and military action in eastern Ukraine have destroyed the illusion of stable borders post-1990, jeopardizing the chances for peaceful neighbourhoods throughout Europe. Having seen what has already happened in Transnistria and South Ossetia, it is quite possible that the “unresolved” question of Russian activities in Ukraine might trigger similar “conflicts” with other “neighbouring” countries, particularly now that the Russian government no longer seeks to conceal its imperial paradigm. This is also certain to affect the geopolitical situation in Europe in general. In this context, it is hardly surprising that countries such as Lithuania, Belarus and Estonia have voiced concern regarding their own autonomy. In light of their centuries-old experience of being Russia's “neighbours”, questions such as Is Lithuania next? Or will it be Belarus? Or perhaps Narva? are fully justified.

This is why discussion of this topic seems more crucial today than ever, especially for former Soviet bloc countries, because of the multiple traumas linked to their “shared history”, first as part of the Russian empire and later of the Soviet Union, and subsequently their status as neighbours of present-day Russia. Many of these traumas have yet to be properly discussed and processed by the global community, which continues to regard the post-Soviet space as a single entity or, more precisely, a region, rather than in terms of individual autonomous entities.

more here.

Variations on the Word Love

This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.

by Margaret Atwood

Shoshana Devora in The F Word:

Linda starts with a sales pitch at the Swan Beauty Corporation (visually and linguistically striking in its resemblance to a much more familiar beauty brand). The protagonist after whom the play is named is advocating a new ad campaign, ‘Visibility’. She explains that women in the over-fifties category suffer from a feeling of invisibility. They’re not represented in the media, except by Helen Mirren. Products are marketed to them using models in their thirties. People in the workplace talk over them. Women become concerned when nobody whistles anymore as they walk past construction sites. Linda wants to “help invisible women feel seen again”. Naturally, this feels a little problematic. No women should feel invisible and it’s true that older women are underrepresented in the media and denied a prime place in society. Yet it’s hardly positive that the opposite – being visible – means being sexually harassed and exploited or that visibility is seen exclusively in terms of physical beauty and sexuality.

This duality of women’s visibility or otherwise is one of the central themes of the play. There are women who become invisible, because they’re no longer seen as sexually relevant in society, and are denied opportunities as a result – women such as Linda herself. And then there are the women, like Linda’s daughter Alice, who seek invisibility as a remedy to the constant objectification they face and uninvited attention on their bodies. Alice is Linda’s older daughter; a decade previously she was a victim of what is now known as ‘revenge porn’, when her ex-boyfriend released explicit photos of her after she ended their relationship, causing her academic ambitions to be dashed. She has suffered ever since and now camouflages herself in a skunk onesie in an attempt to repel male attention.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Stat:

Reaching into the jetsam on his desk, Epstein fished out a metal washer the size of a beer coaster. The hole at the center was sealed with two disk-shaped membranes. He showed it off for a little while, and then he retrieved three black boxes. They had perforations on their sides and were each about the size and shape of a stick of chewing gum. Finally, Epstein unearthed a cast-off box originally used for storing pipette tips. One side was open, and the other was lined with a membrane sheet.

These are the tools that Epstein and his colleagues have used to make scientific headlines. And they’re cheap. The hacked pipette tip box costs less than $10 to make. “You could build this in your garage,” he said, turning the box over in his hand.

Behind these cheap items there’s a powerful idea. Bacteria make antibiotics naturally, which means that if you can grow new bacteria in a lab, the microbes can offer up new drugs. Unfortunately, for the past century, microbiologists have failed to unlock the secret to cultivating the vast majority of bacterial species.

Now Epstein and his colleagues have found a way to make many of them thrive.

More here.