Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 2006, Anna Meredith came across a dead red squirrel with a weird skin disorder. Its ears lacked the characteristic red tufts, and were instead swollen, smooth, and shiny, like the cauliflower ears of boxers and rugby players. Its nose, muzzle, and eyelids were similarly swollen and hairless. Meredith, a professor of conservation medicine at the University of Edinburgh, had never seen anything like this before.

But she soon saw the same problems again—in six more squirrels over the next six years. She and her colleagues analyzed tissue samples from the dead animals. And to their surprise, they discovered that the squirrels had leprosy.

That’s astonishing for two reasons. First, even though leprosy still affects at least 385,000 people around the world (including a few hundred in the U.S.), the disease was eradicated from Britain several centuries ago. Second, squirrels aren’t meant to get leprosy.

The disease is mainly caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium leprae, which attacks the skin and peripheral nerves. Chimps and some monkeys can occasionally catch it from people, but until now, scientists knew of only two species that naturally harbor the disease: humans, and nine-banded armadillos in the southern United States. The latter actually acquired the disease from the former; European settlers brought leprosy to the New World and then passed it onto armadillos several centuries ago.

More here.

Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books:

Donald Trump’s quasi-apocalyptic victory marks the end of American exceptionalism: a certain idea of America, as a model of democracy and freedom, is dead. Trump didn’t kill it; he declared it dead with a campaign that was as surreal as it was reactionary. ‘It’s a nightmare,’ a French friend wrote to me in an email. ‘It’s worse than a nightmare,’ I replied. ‘It’s reality.’

But how to explain this reality? How did Trump – the least qualified candidate in American history, a narcissistic, desensitised bully who could not put together a complete sentence, much less an argument – seduce the American electorate? Some see his victory as a misdirected working-class rebellion, staged by resentful middle-class whites who were effectively proletarianised by neoliberal policies promoted by both of America’s major political parties. Others see it as a racist, xenophobic uprising, led by a vanguard of white nationalists who have rallied around Trump as their figurehead.

Both explanations have a kernel of truth. Trump is inconceivable without the 2008 financial crisis, and Obama’s reliance on Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and the other ‘Harvard boys’ reinforced the impression that American liberalism was an elite ideology, and globalisation a luxury that working people could no longer afford. Popular resentment against elites has increasingly been deflected towards vulnerable minorities, especially immigrants and undocumented workers supposedly coddled by liberals.

More here.

Artemis Seaford in The American Interest:

For many of us liberal academic types, the feeling of waking up in America on Wednesday morning resembled that of receiving an invitation to the funeral of a friend who was inexplicably shot walking down the street the night before.

Once we process this grief, it will be time to reflect on what happened. How we explain the electoral outcome is crucially important, because it will shape our understanding of how we move forward. A popular knee-jerk reaction has been to attribute the outcome exclusively to bigotry, misogyny, the Electoral College, uneducated white males, and voter identification laws. This is usually followed by a vow to “fight sexism and racism in all its forms.”

There is nothing prima facie objectionable with such a reaction. However, just below its surface lies the proposition that nearly half American voters have finally shown us their true bigoted, misogynist colors, and the implication that it is up to us, liberal savants, to show them why they are wrong. Going down this route means going about liberal “business as usual.” It means digging in our heels in the face of an external threat and doubling down on our positions, taking them even more for granted than before.

A more productive response would be to engage in thoughtful soul-searching about what we missed. This will require recognizing that tens of millions of Americans voted for Trump despite his bigotry, not because of it. Our demand that they simply put universal values above their own perceived self-interest was a step too far, and their refusal to comply does not automatically make them racists. But it does say something about the moment we live in that we have so far failed to put our finger on.

More here.

Barney Ronay at Literary Review:

Sometimes, though, the balance is just right. The basis of Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game is a literary friendship entwined around football and given form in a prolific exchange of letters during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The title refers to both the geographical locations and the contrasting characters of the letter writers, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund.

Knausgaard is the Norwegian author of a hugely successful six-part series of autobiographical novels called My Struggle. Ekelund is a Swedish writer and academic. Knausgaard is the home party. He watches the World Cup from the family sofa in Norway, constantly exhausted by the drudgery of parenthood. Ekelund is the away one. He travels, he has experiences, he watches the World Cup from the streets of Rio itself. ‘I desire reality, intensity, life,’ he points out early on.

They’re both pictured on the dust jacket. One is handsome and lean, hair swept back, a look of destiny in his eyes. The other is chubby-faced, beaming gamely beneath a muddle of curls. Can you guess which is which? Wrong! Ekelund, the away man, is the baby-faced dork. Home boy Knausgaard has the steely glint. On the page, though, they’re both perfectly in character. And for a while, as the letters cross, the scene is set and the tournament begins, their interplay takes on the familiar cut and thrust of a football match.

more here.

Richard Gehr at Rolling Stone:

Cohen was the dark eminence among a small pantheon of extremely influential singer-songwriters to emerge in the Sixties and early Seventies. Only Bob Dylan exerted a more profound influence upon his generation, and perhaps only Paul Simon and fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell equaled him as a song poet.

Cohen's haunting bass voice, nylon-stringed guitar patterns and Greek-chorus backing vocals shaped evocative songs that dealt with love and hate, sex and spirituality, war and peace, ecstasy and depression. He was also the rare artist of his generation to enjoy artistic success into his Eighties, releasing his final album, You Want It Darker, earlier this year.

“I never had the sense that there was an end,” he said in 1992. “That there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot.”

“For many of us, Leonard Cohen was the greatest songwriter of them all,” Nick Cave, who covered Cohen classics like “Avalanche,” “I'm Your Man”and “Suzanne,” said in a statement. “Utterly unique and impossible to imitate no matter how hard we tried. He will be deeply missed by so many.”

more here.

Ryan Gilbey at The New Statesman:

Great cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who died this week aged 92, was the eyes of the French New Wave: after beginning his career in photojournalism and reportage, he worked with Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut on some of the films that made their name, including À bout de souffle for the former and Shoot the Piano Player and Jules et Jim for the latter.

You might also say he was the wheels of that movement – he was pushed in a wheelchair by Jean-Luc Godard to achieve the fluid, free-flowing dolly shots in their groundbreaking collaboration À bout de souffle, and created the tracking shot to end them all, prowling alongside a bloody and never-ending traffic jam, inWeekend.

He had met Godard in the late 1950s. “The first time I saw Jean-Luc Godard, he was . . . shaggy-haired, smoking his pipe, withdrawn behind his dark glasses, silent,” Coutard recalled. “At second contact, the preparation for À bout de souffle, he was more talkative . . . Little by little we found we needed to abandon the conventional, and even go against the rules and the accepted ‘cinematographic grammar.’”

more here.

Andrea Gawrylewski in Scientific American:

Dear New Zealand,

The two largest nations in the English-speaking world have just suffered catastrophes at the hands of voters—in both cases the uneducated, anti-intellectual portion of voters. Science in both countries will be hit extremely hard: In the one case, by the xenophobically inspired severing of painstakingly built-up relationships with European partners; in the other case by the election of an unqualified, narcissistic, misogynistic sick joke as president. In neither case is the disaster going to be short-lived: in America because of the nonretirement rule of the Supreme Court; in Britain because Brexit is irreversible.

There are top scientists in America and Britain—talented, creative people, desperate to escape the redneck bigotry of their home countries. Dear New Zealand, you are a deeply civilized small nation, with a low population in a pair of beautiful, spacious islands. You care about climate change, the future of the planet and other scientifically important issues. Why not write to all the Nobel Prize winners in Britain and America, write to the Fields medalists, Kyoto and Crafoord Prize and International Cosmos Prize winners, the Fellows of the Royal Society, the elite scientists in the National Academy of Sciences, the Fellows of the British Academy and similar bodies in America. Offer them citizenship. The contribution that creative intellectuals can make to the prosperity and cultural life of a nation is out of all proportion to their numbers. You could make New Zealand the Athens of the modern world.

Yes, dear New Zealand, I know it’s an unrealistic, surreal pipe dream. But on the day after U.S. election day, in the year of Brexit, the distinction between the surreal and the awfulness of the real seems to merge in a bad trip from which a pipe dream is the only refuge.

Yours,

Richard Dawkins, founder and board chairman, Richard Dawkins Foundation.

More here.

François Furstenberg on his Facebook wall:

1. I have spent most of the last quarter century studying U.S. history, dwelling much on its darker aspects: slavery and the slave trade; genocide and land expropriation; the limits of liberal citizenship; the cruelties petty and great, fathomable and unfathomable, by which the United States became a global power. We’ve seen far worse than this. For god’s sake, why, then, am I so shocked, dismayed, and upset by what has just happened?

2. Politics always involves some element of performance and theatricality, of course, and it always has. But I think we’ve entered a qualitatively new era here, probably related to the media conglomerates that disseminate most of our news, and which must bear no small part of the blame for this fiasco. For a long time now, elections have been transformed from an exercise in democracy into an entertainment spectacle. We have theme songs, logos, fancy sets, famous stars, and so much more. No matter how great the mismatch we’ve got to keep it close, make it a good show, keep the viewers’ attention. Watching ABC last night, with their stage set in Times Square, I was reminded more of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve special with the apple dropping and pop singers performing than I was of a forum for election returns. Instead of being limited to a few weeks or months, as they are in other countries, elections here are always ongoing affairs, and no doubt people are already talking about 2020 and who is up and who is down. In short, elections have become virtually indistinguishable from a vapid reality television show and I suppose we should not be surprised that the winner is a vapid reality television star.

3. I share the opinion of people like Thomas Frank who believe the Democratic Party has sown the seeds of the disaster since at least Bill Clinton if not before. By abandoning labor and shedding any class language or analysis from its politics, allying itself instead to the monied professional classes, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, the party advanced an agenda of deregulation and free trade for labor alongside protectionism for large corporations and elite professions. It thus allowed the Republican Party, traditionally the party of capital, to knock down one of the pillars of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition. You reap what you sow I suppose. But will the powers that be in the Democratic Party change course? Charles Schumer seems set to be the new Senate minority leader, and yet he exemplifies perhaps more than anyone the Democratic Party that has failed. Is the party capable of change?

More here. [François Furstenberg is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University.]

Fredrik deBoer in the Washington Post:

Donald Trump’s stunning victory is less surprising when we remember a simple fact: Hillary Clinton is a deeply unpopular politician. She won a hotly contested primary victory against a uniquely popular candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders. In her place, could he have beaten Trump?

That Clinton has unusually high unfavorables has been true for decades. Indeed, it has been a steady fact of her political life. She has annually ranked among the least-liked politicians on the national stage since she was the first lady. In recent years, her low favorability rating was matched only by that of her opponent, animated hate Muppet Donald Trump. In contrast, Sanders enjoys very high popularity, ranking as the most popular senator for two years in a row. Nationally, his favorability rating is more than 10 points higher than Clinton’s, and his unfavorability rating is more than 15 points lower. This popularity would have been a real asset on the campaign trail.

Clinton’s inability to ever capture the approval of most Americans hurt her in a number of ways. Consider her performance in predominantly black, working-class counties in Michigan. These are precisely the kinds of areas that she was supposed to count on in the Rust Belt, the “blue wall” that would supposedly secure her victory even if she lost out in Florida and North Carolina.

More here.

Greg Borzo in Phys.org:

New research conducted at the University of Chicago has confirmed a decades-old theory describing the dynamics of continuous phase transitions.

The findings, published in the Nov. 4 issue of Science, provide the first clear demonstration of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism for a quantum phase transition in both space and time. Prof. Cheng Chin and his team of UChicago physicists observed the transition in gaseous cesium atoms at temperatures near absolute zero.

In a phase transition, matter changes its form and properties as in transitions from solid to liquid (for example, ice to water) or from liquid to gas (for example, water to steam). Those are known as first-order phase transitions.

A continuous phase transition, or second-order transition, forms defects—such as domain walls, cosmic strings and textures—where some of the matter is stuck between regions in distinct states. The Kibble-Zurek mechanism predicts how such defects and complex structures will form in space and time when a physical system goes through a continuous phase transition. Examples of continuous phase transitions include the spontaneous symmetry breaking in the early universe and, in the case of the experiment by Chin's team, a ferromagnetic phase transition in gaseous cesium atoms.

More here.

Ian P. Beacock in The Point:

In May 1940, Hitler’s armies swept lightning-fast into France and the Low Countries. Fearing the worst as the Nazis advanced, more than eight million panicked civilians left their homes and fled south. It was soon one of the largest mass migrations in recorded history. Today, the French simply call it l’exode: the exodus. Two million Belgians were on the road by June, roughly one-third of the entire country. Six million of the refugees were French. Somewhere between one quarter and one third of them were children. Entire cities emptied overnight. Reims, a bustling regional center in Champagne, lost 98 percent of its quarter-million inhabitants. The town of Evreux shriveled from twenty thousand souls to fewer than two hundred. By June 13, even Paris had been deserted; only the old, the sick and the poor remained behind. Southbound roads coagulated and clogged with overheating cars, teenage boys on bicycles, pushcarts piled high with suitcases and mattresses and tired children. The last trains to leave the capital were choked with people.

One of the refugees, a 62-year-old French novelist named Léon Werth, produced an astonishing eyewitness account of his passage into exile. “We’re not living in ordinary times,” Werth wrote that summer. “We are shipwrecked.” That the memoir was ever published is something of a miracle. Thirty-three days after they left Paris, Werth and his wife Suzanne arrived in Saint-Amour, a village in the foothills of the Jura mountains. The text was completed by autumn, but publishing it in the so-called “free zone” of Vichy France was out of the question: Werth was Jewish. In October, however, Werth was visited by his best friend Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a gifted writer and pilot who smuggled the manuscript out of France via Algiers and Lisbon. Werth never saw the book in print. Lost mysteriously for fifty years, the memoir first appeared in France in 1992. The first English edition of 33 Days appeared last year, a slim volume translated with great dexterity and feeling by Austin Denis Johnston.

More here.

From Nature:

Republican businessman and reality-television star Donald Trump will be the United States’ next president. Although science played only a bit part in this year’s dramatic, hard-fought campaign, many researchers expressed fear and disbelief as Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on 8 November. “Trump will be the first anti-science president we have ever had,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “The consequences are going to be very, very severe.” Trump has questioned the science underlying climate change — at one point suggesting that it was a Chinese hoax — and pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. Although he has offered few details on policies for biomedical research, Trump said last year that he has heard “terrible” things about the US National Institutes of Health; he has also derided NASA as a “logistics agency for low-Earth orbit activity“, and said he would expand the role of the commercial space industry in the US space programme.

Trump’s hard-line positions on immigration — including a pledge to bar Muslims from entering the United States, and a plan to build a wall along the US border with Mexico — have worried research advocates who say such stances could dissuade talented foreign scientists from working or studying at US institutions. “I think at the very least it would put a chilling effect on the interest of scientists from other countries in coming here,” says Kevin Wilson, director of public policy and media relations at the American Society for Cell Biology in Bethesda, Maryland. Some researchers are already thinking about leaving the United States in the wake of the election. “As a Canadian working at a US university, a move back to Canada will be something I'll be looking into,” tweeted Murray Rudd, who studies environmental economics and policy at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. (Read more reaction from scientists.)

More here.

Roz Kaveney at the Times Literary Supplement:

From a teenage appearance on a news magazine programme defending his right to wear his hair long to the last mimed videos of wrecked, button-eyed beauty, David Bowie was always in control of, and thoughtful about, how he looked. His last stage appearance – at a charity gala – was a performance of “Life on Mars” crooned in the style of Frank Sinatra. His less than entirely successful experiment with high finance – the Bowie Bonds – nonetheless enabled him to re-purchase the whole of his back catalogue. Even when, in the mid-1970s, his personal life – and in particular his problems with cocaine addiction – span out of control and he made ill-judged remarks about fascism, he continued to develop musically and in other modes of performance, such as theatre and film. He was one of the two or three most conscious and conscientious artists in rock music.

A case can be made – and is strongly implied in the video for the late single “The stars are out tonight”– that Bowie was least creative when happiest, when that control was least threatened by his demons. The last two albums – The Next Day and Blackstar – written and assembled when he knew himself to be dying, were a return to greatness. When one of his last artistic enterprises is as flawed yet patchily brilliant as Lazarus, we have to consider the possibility that its flaws are less than they seem or the result of unavoidable practical choices. His record of sheer quicksilver cleverness – he was also one of the most intellectual of rock stars, in his art school autodidact polymath way – demands that concession of us.

more here.

David Beer at berfrois:

Walter Benjamin is full of surprises. This is perhaps why his work seems to have endured so well. He has a knack for carving out unexpected angles on familiar issues. In this collection the surprise is not so much in themes that it covers, many of which are typical of Benjamin’s other work, rather the surprise is in Benjamin’s exploration of different styles. It is a book of experimentation that finds Benjamin in the mode of the storyteller.

The volume gathers together Benjamin’s fiction along with some reviews linking to those fictional themes. Here Benjamin is either writing fiction or writing about fiction. These pieces, like the earlier collection of Benjamin’s radio broadcasts, are a testament to his lifestyle. They show a freelancer at work, trying to eke out a living as a writer. These are the remnants of a peripatetic life of the mind, deployed wherever necessary to make ends meet and to enable his other writings to continue. It was a struggle for Benjamin. But it seems he always liked to produce interesting and creative work, even when it was a necessity of living.

Benjamin probably didn’t mind indulging in some fiction writing or in reviewing fictional works. He always had a soft spot for fiction, particularly detective novels – which he even considered writing himself. This affection is most notable in his short review piece ‘Detective Novels, on Tour’, where he describes the enchantment of finding a detective novel in a station bookstore before a journey.

more here.

Joanna Tice-Jen at The Immanent Frame:

Survey data indicates a growing generational split among evangelicals, with the younger generation supporting a range of left-leaning policies that their parents and grandparents vehemently opposed. These young evangelicals are interested in environmentalism, alleviating global poverty, fighting the AIDS epidemic, andsupporting LGBT rights, while continuing a generally conservative tack on abortion, national defense, and capital punishment. Although, even those core issues are sometimes thrown into question. Furthermore, young evangelicals are more ethnically diverse than previous generations, which also works to shift their politics to the left on most issues.

Historically, this is not a surprising shift, as the story of evangelical America supplies ample precedents for an evangelical leadership that throws their weight behind leftist causes: “the old fashioned gospel” of the Gilded Age; the “social gospel” of the Progressive Era; and the political preaching and religiously-infused activist rhetoric of black evangelical pastors during the civil rights era. Furthermore, since the 1970s, the dominance of the Christian right has always been countered by progressive evangelical denominations and organizations, such as Sojourners and Messiah College. While the forces of the evangelical left will not reach a critical mass in this week’s election, it seems inevitable that they will make their presence known four years from now, if not in earlier congressional and local races.

more here.

Dear Son, when the warm multitudes cry,
Ascend your throne majestically,
But keep in mind the waters where fish
See sceptres descending with no wish
To touch them; sit regal and erect,
But imagine sands where a crown
Has the status of a broken-down
Sofa or mutilated statue:
Remember as bells and cannon boom
The cold deep that does not envy you,
The sunburnt superficial kingdom
Where a king is an object.

Expect no help from others, for who
Talk sense to princes or refer to
The scorpion in official speeches
As they unveil some granite Progress
Leading a child and holding a bunch
Of lilies? In their Royal Zoos the
Shark and the octopus are tactfully
Omitted; synchronized clocks march on
Within their powers; without, remain
The ocean flats where no subscription
Concerts are given, the desert plain
Where there is nothing for lunch.

Read more »

Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books:

For generations of Americans especially, and young Americans even more, driving and the open road promised a kind of freedom: the ability to light out for the territory, even if the territory was only the mall one town over. Autonomous vehicles also come with the promise of freedom, the freedom of getting places without having to pay attention to the open (or, more likely, clogged) road, and with it, the freedom to sleep, work, read e-mail, text, play, have sex, drink a beer, watch a movie, or do nothing at all. In the words of the Morgan Stanley analysts, whose enthusiasm is matched by advocates in Silicon Valley and cheerleaders in Detroit, driverless vehicles will deliver us to a “utopian society.”

That utopia looks something like this: fleets of autonomous vehicles—call them taxi bots—owned by companies like Uber and Google, able to be deployed on demand, that will eliminate, for the most part, the need for private car ownership. (Currently, most privately owned cars sit idle for most of the day, simply taking up space and depreciating in value.) Fewer privately owned vehicles will result in fewer cars on the road overall. With fewer cars will come fewer traffic jams and fewer accidents. Fewer accidents will enable cars to be made from lighter materials, saving on fuel. They will be smaller, too, since cars will no longer need to be armored against one another.

With less private car ownership, individuals will be freed of car payments, fuel and maintenance costs, and insurance premiums. Riders will have more disposable income and less debt. The built environment will improve as well, as road signs are eliminated—smart cars always know where they are and where they are going—and parking spaces, having become obsolete, are converted into green spaces. And if this weren’t utopian enough, the Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that switching to full vehicle autonomy will save the United States economy alone $1.3 trillion a year.

There are many assumptions embedded in this scenario, the most obvious being that people will be willing to give up private car ownership and ride in shared, driverless vehicles. (Depending on the situation, sharing either means using cars owned by fleet companies in place of privately owned vehicles, or shuttling in cars owned by fleet companies with other riders, most likely strangers going to proximate destinations.) There is no way to know yet if this will happen. In a survey by the Insurance Information Institute last May, 55 percent of respondents said they would not ride in an autonomous vehicle. But that could change as self-driving cars become more commonplace, and as today’s young adults, who have been slower to get drivers’ licenses and own cars than their parents’ generation, and who have been early adopters of car-sharing businesses like Zipcar and Uber, become the dominant demographic.

More here.

Oliver Roeder in Nautilus:

It’s not hard to find close elections.

In 2015, a Mississippi state house race ended in a tie, after which the winner was decided by drawing straws. A 2013 mayoral race in the Philippines was deadlocked and resolved with a coin toss. A 2013 legislative election in Austria was decided by a single vote, after wrangling over the validity of a ballot featuring a vulgar cartoon. Heck, I didn’t have to look far to find examples: In 1990, my own uncle lost his bid for Congress by less than 1 percent of the vote.

But there is one election that is so consistently close, and so important, that it deserves special consideration—the United States presidential election.

I plotted the top two popular vote-getters in every U.S. presidential election since 1824, using data from The American Presidency Project. The top two contenders, typically a Democratic and a Republican, but occasionally a Whig, have danced closely around the 50-50 mark for nearly 100 years. Only four times since 1824 has the winner received more than 60 percent of the popular vote. Since 2000, the candidates have been separated by an average of 3.5 points. The median and average separations have been 8.2 and 9.5 points since 1824—a figure skewed upward due to a few outlying and not particularly close races. (The electoral tally doesn’t usually appear so close because the Electoral College tends to magnify differences in the popular vote.)

This is a feature of U.S. politics that many of us have become accustomed to. So is it unsurprising? Not really. “Considering all of the factors that go into what would make an election close or not close—incumbency, the brand of the parties—my perspective is that there’s a surprising rate of close elections,” Eitan Hersh, a Yale political scientist and the author of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters, told me.

The question is, why?

More here.