David Remnick in The New Yorker:

The morning after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Barack Obama summoned staff members to the Oval Office. Some were fairly junior and had never been in the room before. They were sombre, hollowed out, some fighting tears, humiliated by the defeat, fearful of autocracy’s moving vans pulling up to the door. Although Obama and his people admit that the election results caught them completely by surprise—“We had no plan for this,” one told me—the President sought to be reassuring.

“This is not the apocalypse,” Obama said. History does not move in straight lines; sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward. A couple of days later, when I asked the President about that consolation, he offered this: “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”

Obama’s insistence on hope felt more willed than audacious. It spoke to the civic duty he felt to prevent despair not only among the young people in the West Wing but also among countless Americans across the country. At the White House, as elsewhere, dread and dejection were compounded by shock. Administration officials recalled the collective sense of confidence about the election that had persisted for many months, the sense of balloons and confetti waiting to be released. Last January, on the eve of his final State of the Union address, Obama submitted to a breezy walk-and-talk interview in the White House with the “Today” show. Wry and self-possessed, he told Matt Lauer that no matter what happened in the election he was sure that “the overwhelming majority” of Americans would never submit to Donald Trump’s appeals to their fears, that they would see through his “simplistic solutions and scapegoating.”

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Edith Hall at Prospect:

Can there be a Christian reading of tragedy? Can a pre-Christian, pagan, literary genre, which confronts the gross unfairness of human pain, be reconciled with the idea of a loving deity? Expectations must be high of a book about tragedy professing to explore these questions by Rowan Williams. He is the most intellectually renowned British churchman alive, a former Archbishop of Canterbury and now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has always enriched his prolific theological and church-historical studies with intense reflections on philosophy and literature; in addition to his more than 30 volumes on Christianity, he has published on Fydor Dostoyevsky and WH Auden and even volumes of his own poetry. The Tragic Imagination is a short monograph, a little over 40,000 words, arguing for the past and continuing importance of tragic drama and its compatibility—indeed affinity—with a philosophically inflected Christian outlook.

As Archbishop, Williams elicited criticism from Anglicans who regarded him as too scholarly to be an effective leader, and too interested in analytical complexities to be an effective interpreter of the Gospel. On the other hand, he disappointed the political left, who felt he failed to deliver on the hopes inspired by his sensitivity to interfaith issues, apparent preparedness to embrace a degree of cultural relativism, and well-known sympathy with the poor.

The overall effect of The Tragic Imagination will do nothing to alter the public perception that Williams instinctively rejects clarity in favour of sitting on intellectual fences to ponder arcane points of metaphysics and excavate the views of obscure thinkers.

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J.P. Smith at The Millions:

As in so many of his novels, Modiano’s obsession with places, names, phone numbers, and those mysterious telephonic zones of intermediacy where people can dial a number and exchange information in a kind of background haze, frail voices trying to connect, reappear in the author’s 2012 novel, L’Herbe des nuits, translated by Mark Polizzotti as The Black Notebook and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The narrator, Jean, populates the streets of Paris with those who have walked it long before: the 19th-century writers Gérard de Nerval, Tristan Corbière, and Charles Baudelaire, whose mistress, Jeanne Duval, floats wraithlike through the pages, as though saying that the past never truly leaves its roots, that the ghosts of the people who once walked these streets linger on forever. Unlike in his other novels, the events here come much later than the dark years of the Occupation which have provided him with his richest harvest: the ’60s, with l’Affaire Ben Barka.

Mehdi Ben Barka was a Moroccan politician, leader of the left-wing National Union of Popular Forces, active in various anti-colonial movements, and considered dangerous both by France and the United States. After being exiled, he settled in Paris, vanishing in 1965. It was said that he had been kidnapped by, variously, French officers, the CIA or by a Moroccan government minister, interrogated, tortured, his body dissolved in a vat of acid. His remains have never been found.

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Nicholas Dames at The Nation:

But where can one find a good enough teller these days? What venues can play host to a critical sensibility that is both distinctive and imitable? What institutions can afford to supply the cultural critic with a steady income and a stable intellectual home? These are embarrassing questions to ask. It is unlikely that such a figure would emerge today from print journalism, as the walls close in on the handful of venues that still bother with criticism at all. It is even less likely that the Internet, each corner of which is constantly undergoing mitosis, can nurture a voice with the necessary kind of consistency and economic stability. Least likely of all is the university, which is presently too engaged in a struggle for legitimacy to speak for a public. Suggest any one of these sites and you can hear the laughter in advance. Too commercial, too hurried, too rarefied—and all of it too partial: Any setting that might give the critic a connection to genuine, generalizable experience is virtually out of reach.

Or so it seems. But the fact is that, in one sense, criticism is doing better than ever, appearing with great frequency in the pages of high-circulation magazines like The New Yorker, online in publications like the Los Angeles Review of Books, and in the single columns of little magazines like n+1, The Baffler, and Dissent. Unlike in previous eras, however, criticism’s renewed vitality has come with a disturbing new register of anxiety and self-consciousness. Once, critics like Trilling, Sontag, and Kael commanded the attention of a large audience and were expected to shape and challenge a still roughly homogenous public opinion. Today, many critics struggle to find a unified culture to interpret and criticize and a public to address.

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From Phys.Org:

A team of researchers working at a company called Alkahest has reported at this year's Society for Neuroscience annual meeting that injections of blood plasma from young human beings caused aging mice to regain some youthful attributes. Company representative Sakura Minami claimed that testing with mice given youthful human plasma led to improved cognition in middle-aged mice. She has also spoken to the media regarding the experiments and results conducted by the company.

Prior research has shown that if an older mouse physically shared a blood system with a younger, that the older mouse would become rejuvenated while the younger mouse would take on symptoms of aging. Other studies have shown that simply injecting older mice with younger mouse plasma also had rejuvenating effects. Now, in this new study, the researchers claim the same to be true for blood plasma from young humans. The study consisted of injecting year old (middle-aged) mice with plasma from human teenagers. The mice were injected with the plasma twice a week for three weeks and were then subjected to tests (including a Barnes maze) that have been designed to test their mental abilities. Minami claims that the treated older mice scored close to young mice on the tests, suggesting they had undergone mental rejuvenation. She reported that the company had also studied portions of the brains of the treated mice—specifically the hippocampus, which is known to be involved in learning and memory—and found signs of neurogenesis.

More here.

Gillian Beer in Nature:

Lewis Carroll's lucid dreams draw in endless fresh contexts for interpretation as they continue to delight and disturb. How did Charles Dodgson — Carroll's real name — do it? The story used to be that this 'mediocre' English mathematician, isolated at Christ Church College, Oxford, somehow miraculously produced Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). The unlikely tale persisted, perhaps because so little evidence seemed to have survived of Dodgson's reading; at his death, most of his books were hastily sold off.

…Carroll's taste for games and play was shared by many of his contemporaries, and understood as essential intellectual stimulus. For instance, Sylvester's 1869 address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science emphasized the need to quicken the mind of students “with the doctrine of the imaginary and the inconceivable”. The logician Augustus de Morgan wrote in 1859 “All that is thinkable is possible; all that is impossible is unthinkable: that is, so far as our knowledge can go.” Carroll, who knew both men, put it this way in an encounter between Alice and the White Queen in Looking-Glass:

 Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said: “one can't believe impossible things.”

 “I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always
  did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible
  things before breakfast.”

The idea of rigorous training in believing the impossible nicely tilts at Victorian learning rituals in the style of Gradgrind, Charles Dickens's rigid pedagogue in Hard Times (1854). Nonsense was also valued by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who appreciated both the Alice books. His 1873 poem 'Molecular evolution' declared:

 What combination of ideas,
 Nonsense alone can wisely form!
 What sage has half the power that she has,
 To take the towers of truth by storm?

Carroll put several systems in motion at once in his scenes, to produce new absurdities and insights.

More here.

Robert Pinsky in Slate:

Often, the best works of art about an historic event come from long before. Here are four poems from the past, in response to the 2016 presidential election.

First, Walt Whitman’s “Election Day, 1884” written about the nasty Cleveland–Blaine election of that year. Whitman says that the heart of the election is “not in the chosen” but with “the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing.” He speaks of voting day not as sacred but as “powerful,” comparing it not to forest glades or solemn cathedrals but to the fluid, dynamic energy of Niagara Falls.

Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal’s “Somoza Unveils Somoza’s Statue of Somoza at the Somoza Stadium” imagines the voice of egomania in power. The poem’s concluding insight about hate, a terrific final chord in Donald Walsh’s translation, hisses even more effectively in the second person plural familiar of the Spanish: “la odiáis.”

Gwendolyn Brooks’ sonnet from her sequence The Womanhood uses that form to present the relation between art and battle, with their related priorities and demands: a practical, urgent struggle for a black woman poet of Brooks’ lifetime. “To arms, to armor,” she writes, with her fluent mastery of the sonnet form enacting a victory.

More here.

R. Kelly Garrett in Scientific American:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory, many questions have been raised about Facebook’s role in the promotion of inaccurate and highly partisan information during the presidential race and whether this fake news influenced the election’s outcome.

A few have downplayed Facebook’s impact, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said that it is “extremely unlikely” that fake news could have swayed the election. But questions about the social network’s political significance merit more than passing attention.

Do Facebook’s filtering algorithms explain why so many liberals had misplaced confidence in a Clinton victory (echoing the error made by Romney supporters in 2012)? And is the fake news being circulated on Facebook the reason that so many Trump supporters have endorsed demonstrably false statements made by their candidate?

The popular claim that “filter bubbles” are why fake news thrives on Facebook is almost certainly wrong. If the network is encouraging people to believe untruths—and that’s a big if—the problem more likely lies in how the platform interacts with basic human social tendencies. That’s far more difficult to change.

More here.

Jeff Guo in the Washington Post:

We know that Donald Trump voters are angry, and we know that they are fed up. By now, there have been so many attempts to explain Trumpism that the genre has become a target of parody.

But if you’re wondering about the widening fissure between red and blue America, why politics these days have become so fraught and so emotional, Kathy Cramer is one of the best people to ask. For the better part of the past decade, the political science professor has been crisscrossing Wisconsin trying to get inside the minds of rural voters.

Well before President Obama or the tea party, well before the rise of Trump sent reporters scrambling into the heartland looking for answers, Cramer was hanging out in dairy barns and diners and gas stations, sitting with her tape recorder taking notes. Her research seeks to understand how the people of small towns make sense of politics — why they feel the way they feel, why they vote the way they vote.

More here.

Seamus Perry at the Times Literary Supplement:

Modern writers are well known for being difficult but in D. H. Lawrence’s case the phenomenon is less a matter of obscure references or cryptic expressions, and more like what we mean when we say we have a difficult colleague. He could be good company and was capable of great generosity and kindness, but for much of the time he was clearly an impossible person – prickly, sometimes fantastically cantankerous, permanently subject to what he called “spiritual dyspepsia”. This was no doubt partly due to the state of his health, which was always precarious, though there was also an extraordinary tenacity to him: he often gives the impression of someone who used moral fury and bitter denunciation as a way of keeping the show on the road. No one likes to be rejected, but there is something wholly and characteristically individual in his outburst when Heinemann turned down Paul Morel, the first version ofSons and Lovers (1913): “Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today”. The affronts he received were typically cast, like that, as exemplifying a catastrophe affecting English, sometimes Western, culture at large; and his relationships were similarly obliged to symbolize the plight of the modern spirit – “to understand Middleton”, he once said of John Middleton Murry, with whom he had perhaps his most formative male friendship, “you must understand the whole suicidal tendency that has overspread Europe since 1880”. The knock-backs of his writing life were always felt on such a huge scale, as though vastly more was at stake than merely the fate of his books.

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Adolph Reed, Jr. at nonsite:

Birch and Heideman and I apparently talk past each other regarding whether BLM should be seen as a serious political movement. Where one comes down on that question depends on how one understands what counts as a movement. I have no idea what their criteria are; I do know that, as public relations engineering has become increasingly prominent as an alternative to slow, careful organizing and constituency building, the label has been thrown around ever more promiscuously. When I refer to a political movement, as I’ve stressed for many years,16 I mean a relatively durable social and political force with a demonstrated capacity to mobilize resources and clearly defined constituencies – including actual people who have names and addresses – to advance programs and agendas with the goal of altering public policy and/or power relations. I don’t see how BLM qualifies by that standard. Activism undertaken under that name has contributed significantly to focusing public attention on patterns of police abuse and broader miscarriages of justice in the criminal justice system. However, from the perspective I indicate, extrapolations from that fact to broader claims that BLM is a substantial political movement are hyperbolic or aspirational.

Birch and Heideman may operate with a different understanding of what constitutes a political movement. I assume they do because of their insistence that BLM is one, but they don’t address that question. They seem to accept proclamation by the self-appointed spokespersons – including those who claim not to be spokespersons while obviously adopting that role – press releases, demonstrations and other staged events in the mass-mediated (including social media) pageantry of protest as adequate evidence.

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The Squirt Under the Bed

Who’s the squirt under your bed
that unfurled his fist yesterday
to pluck at my skirts? At dusk
his goggley eyes seized me in their stare

his lips in a crimson sulk
a tumid tongue thrust through them.
In the early hours I listened to his babble
and now I catch a whiff of his nappy.

Is he your sprog or is it thinkable
that he’s mine – the infant
snatched by the hag of Bull Balbhae
who reached a long arm down our chimney?

Is he someone’s wild oats
or a changeling from the fairy fort?
The youngster you always yearned to have
or a child I’ve conjured up?

It doesn’t matter a damn.
Let’s deck him out in vest and pants
or in ribbons and a frock
we’ll put him in the pram
and truck together round the block
regale him with the oddities.
.

by Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin
from Meirge an Laoich
publisher: Coisceim, Dublin, 2013
translation: 2016, Cathi Weldon
.

Aarti Shahani in NPR:

Mark Zuckerberg — one of the most insightful, adept leaders in the business world — has a problem. It's a problem he's been slow to acknowledge, even though it's become more apparent by the day. Several current and former Facebook employees tell NPR there is a lot of internal turmoil about how the platform does and doesn't censor content that users find offensive. And outside Facebook, the public is regularly confounded by the company's decisions — around controversial posts and around fake news. (Did Pope Francis really endorse Donald Trump? Does Hillary Clinton really have a body double?)

Behind whatever the controversy of the moment happens to be, there's a deep-seated problem. The problem is this: at age 19, the then-boy genius started a social network that was basically a tech-savvy way to check out classmates in school. Then, over the course of 12 years, he made some very strategic decisions that have morphed Facebook into the most powerful distributor on earth — the new front page of the news for more than 1 billion people every day. But Zuckerberg didn't sign up to head a media company — as in, one that has to make editorial judgments. He and his team have made a very complex set of contradictory rules — a bias toward restricted speech for regular users, and toward free speech for “news” (real or fake). And the company relies on a sprawling army of subcontractors to enforce the rules. People involved in trying to make it work say they're in way over their heads. As one employee put it, “We started out of a college dorm. I mean c'mon, we're Facebook. We never wanted to deal with this shit.”

More here.

Wilson and Stone in Phys.Org:

Adapt or die. That's the reality for an animal species when it is faced with a harsh environment. Until now, many scientists have assumed that the more challenging an animal's environment, the greater the pressure to adapt and the faster its genes evolve. But we have just published new research in Royal Society Open Science that shows that genes might actually evolve faster when the pressure to adapt is reduced. We built a simple computer model of how evolution may be affected by the way animals interact with each other when they're in groups. Specifically, we looked at what happens to animals that huddle together to keep warm. We found that when animals huddle in larger groups, their genes for regulating temperature evolve faster, even though there is less pressure to adapt to the cold environment because of the warmth of the huddle. This shows that an organism's evolution doesn't just depend on its environment but also on how it behaves.

When animals such as rats and mice huddle together in groups, they can maintain a high body temperature without using as much energy as they would on their own. We wanted to understand how this kind of group behaviour would affect a species' evolution. To do this, we built a computer model simulating how the species' genes changed and were passed on over multiple generations. When the effects of huddling were built into the computer model, the reduced pressure to adapt was actually found to accelerate evolution of the genes controlling heat production and heat loss. Why was this? Well, when there's less pressure to evolve, the genes are freer to experiment. When two related genes (or sets of genes) are well adapted to the environment, mutation of one gene may have catastrophic consequences for the species unless the other gene mutates at the same time in a complementary way.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

The paintings are of simple things: drapes fluttering in the breeze, a young boy making his way down a hill and across a meadow, ten or fifteen leaves dying on the spindly branch of a tree in late autumn. These images are painted with care, often in tempera, sometimes in watercolor. The attention to detail and the focus on craft evokes some of the great masters of old. Albrecht Dürer comes to mind.

As in Dürer, a tuft of grass becomes the occasion for a display of skill so precise it verges on the ridiculous. Why would anyone in his right mind pay such close attention to the way a single brown stalk of wheat catches the light at the close of an autumn’s day?

The almost homely nature of Andrew Wyeth’s pictures, the studiousness with which they avoid big subject matter and big questions would seem to render them unobjectionable to the extreme. And yet, people have objected. They continue to object, sometimes mightily. From the middle of the 20^th century—when Wyeth first started to get attention—to his death in 2009, these humble paintings have managed to piss people off. Important people.

So, we have a conundrum. How did a regional painter who lived in, and painted images of, rural Pennsylvania for his entire life (as well as his summer home in Cushing, Maine) become a lightning rod for art world controversy? Why get worked up over paintings that at face value are so very, very polite?

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Jennifer Oullette in Quanta:

The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain — which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer.

As recently as 10 years ago, Fisher’s hypothesis would have been dismissed by many as nonsense. Physicists have been burned by this sort of thing before, most notably in 1989, when Roger Penrose proposed that mysterious protein structures called “microtubules” played a role in human consciousness by exploiting quantum effects. Few researchers believe such a hypothesis plausible. Patricia Churchland, a neurophilosopher at the University of California, San Diego, memorably opined that one might as well invoke “pixie dust in the synapses” to explain human cognition.

Fisher’s hypothesis faces the same daunting obstacle that has plagued microtubules: a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. To build an operating quantum computer, you need to connect qubits — quantum bits of information — in a process called entanglement. But entangled qubits exist in a fragile state. They must be carefully shielded from any noise in the surrounding environment. Just one photon bumping into your qubit would be enough to make the entire system “decohere,” destroying the entanglement and wiping out the quantum properties of the system.

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S. Abbas Raza in The Wire:

The US really has become two countries: the rich and everyone else. The rich have their world-class private schools, the rest have their shoddy public ones; the rich have their gated communities, the rest have their ghettos and trailer parks; the rich have fancy private doctors, the rest can always just go to hospital emergency rooms that bankrupt them; the rich eat in restaurants where the kitchen help works 12-hour days, six days a week, doing back-breaking labour for less than minimum wage and without health insurance or job security of any kind. Where was the outrage of those who pen daily screeds now against half the country, when for years they calmly faced the massive obscenity of the growing ranks of disabled veterans and the mentally ill and the otherwise unfortunate who slept on our cold and rainy sidewalks as we hopped over them to get into our taxis after drinks in the bar of some chic and trendy hotel? The lack of safety nets for the unfortunate, the already shocking but still growing levels of inequality of wealth and income – as well as the inequality of opportunity – of American society is the real obscenity and sickness, worthy of ten times more shame for every American than the recent election of an unqualified retrograde to the highest office in the land. Where has the outrage about that been?

More here.