Peter Andrey Smith in Nature:

Nearly a year has passed since Rebecca Knickmeyer first met the participants in her latest study on brain development. Knickmeyer, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, expects to see how 30 newborns have grown into crawling, inquisitive one-year-olds, using a battery of behavioural and temperament tests. In one test, a child's mother might disappear from the testing suite and then reappear with a stranger. Another ratchets up the weirdness with some Halloween masks. Then, if all goes well, the kids should nap peacefully as a noisy magnetic resonance imaging machine scans their brains.

“We try to be prepared for everything,” Knickmeyer says. “We know exactly what to do if kids make a break for the door.”

Knickmeyer is excited to see something else from the children — their faecal microbiota, the array of bacteria, viruses and other microbes that inhabit their guts. Her project (affectionately known as 'the poop study') is part of a small but growing effort by neuroscientists to see whether the microbes that colonize the gut in infancy can alter brain development.

The project comes at a crucial juncture. A growing body of data, mostly from animals raised in sterile, germ-free conditions, shows that microbes in the gut influence behaviour and can alter brain physiology and neurochemistry.

More here.

Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker:

On the evening of October 6, 1849, the hundred and twenty people aboard the brig St. John threw a party. The St. John was a so-called famine ship: Boston-bound from Galway, it was filled with passengers fleeing the mass starvation then devastating Ireland. They had been at sea for a month; now, with less than a day’s sail remaining, they celebrated the imminent end of their journey and, they hoped, the beginning of a better life in America. Early the next morning, the ship was caught in a northeaster, driven toward shore, and dashed upon the rocks just outside Cohasset Harbor. Those on deck were swept overboard. Those below deck drowned when the hull smashed open. Within an hour, the ship had broken up entirely. All but nine crew members and roughly a dozen passengers perished.

Two days later, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts native, en route from Concord to Cape Cod, got word of the disaster and detoured to Cohasset to see it for himself. When he arrived, fragments of the wreck were scattered across the strand. Those victims who had already washed ashore lay in rough wooden boxes on a nearby hillside. The living were trying to identify the dead—a difficult task, since some of the bodies were bloated from drowning, while others had struck repeatedly against the rocks. Out of sentiment or to save labor, the bodies of children were placed alongside their mothers in the same coffin.

The visitor from Concord, surveying all this, found himself unmoved. “On the whole,” he wrote, “it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity?” This impassive witness also had stern words for those who, undone by the tragedy, could no longer enjoy strolling along the beach. Surely, he admonished, “its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still.”

Who was this cold-eyed man who saw in loss of life only aesthetic gain, who identified not with the drowned or the bereaved but with the storm? This was Henry David Thoreau, that great partisan of the pond, describing his visit to Cohasset in “Cape Cod.”

More here.

Roslyn Sulcas in The New York Times:

Asad Raza

(American, 40)

These days, people either do live, performative work or create a mise en scène that is empty. When Nicola asked me to something for Frieze, I thought I’d like to create something that includes both elements, but where one thing isn’t dependent on the other. I was interested in the preclassical Greek period, the deep past as a form of science fiction. We don’t know that much about it and have to try to think ourselves into it. I thought about figures that have survived in the imagination until today, and became interested in the Greek god Pan. He has been worshipped for 5,000 years and still echoes in our culture — think of the film “Pan’s Labyrinth,” and ideas about satyrs and nature. Although he was worshiped as a god, he is not powerful, not bigger than humans. He is half-goat, animalistic, and inhabits the same world. We have had a long period of worshipping a deity, in various religions, who is higher, more perfect, unknowable. There was something intriguing to me about the worship of someone who was not that. I decided to make a space that would be like a place where Pan might have been worshipped. There will be a philosopher, a choreographer, a singer and children, who I thought it was important to have there. At times they will all overlap.

More here.

Amira Hass in Haaretz:

Yes, this is a war, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with his mandate from the people, has ordered its intensification. He does not listen to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ messages of conciliation and acceptance in calmer times, why should he listen to them now? Netanyahu is intensifying the war mainly in East Jerusalem, with orgies of collective punishment. He thus further reveals Israel’s success in physically disconnecting Jerusalem from most of the Palestinian population, accenting the absence of Palestinian leadership in East Jerusalem and the weakness of the government in Ramallah — which is trying to stop the drift in the rest of the West Bank. The war did not start last Thursday, it does not start with the Jewish victims and does not end when no Jews are murdered. The Palestinians are fighting for their life, in the full sense of the word. We Israeli Jews are fighting for our privilege as a nation of masters, in the full ugliness of the term.

That we notice there’s a war on only when Jews are murdered does not cancel out the fact that Palestinians are being killed all the time, and that all the time we are doing everything in our power to make their lives unbearable. Most of the time it is a unilateral war, waged by us, to get them to say “yes” to the master, thank you very much for keeping us alive in our reservations. When something in the war’s one-sidedness is disturbed, and Jews are murdered, then we pay attention.

More here.

Cirque D'Hiver

Across the floor flits the mechanical toy,
fit for a king of several centuries back.
A little circus horse with real white hair.
His eyes are glossy black.
He bears a little dancer on his back.

She stands upon her toes and turns and turns.
A slanting spray of artificial roses
is stitched across her skirt and tinsel bodice.
Above her head she poses
another spray of artificial roses.

His mane and tail are straight from Chirico.
He has a formal, melancholy soul.
He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back
along the little pole
that pierces both her body and her soul

and goes through his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.
He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,
canters again, bows on one knee,
canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.

The dancer, by this time, has turned her back.
He is the more intelligent by far.
Facing each other rather desperately—
his eye is like a star—
we stare and say, “Well, we have come this far.”

.
by Elizabeth Bishop
from The Complete Poems
publisher: Chatto & Windus, London, 1970

Gary Gutting interviews Nancy Fraser in The NYT's The Stone:

Gary Gutting: You’ve recently written: “As a feminist, I’ve always assumed that by fighting to emancipate women I was building a better world — more egalitarian — just and free. But lately I’ve begun to worry that . . . our critique of sexism is now supplying the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation.” Could you explain what you have in mind?

Nancy Fraser: My feminism emerged from the New Left and is still colored by the thought of that time. For me, feminism is not simply a matter of getting a smattering of individual women into positions of power and privilege within existing social hierarchies. It is rather about overcoming those hierarchies. This requires challenging the structural sources of gender domination in capitalist society — above all, the institutionalized separation of two supposedly distinct kinds of activity: on the one hand, so-called “productive” labor, historically associated with men and remunerated by wages; on the other hand, “caring” activities, often historically unpaid and still performed mainly by women. In my view, this gendered, hierarchical division between “production” and “reproduction” is a defining structure of capitalist society and a deep source of the gender asymmetries hard-wired in it. There can be no “emancipation of women” so long as this structure remains intact.

G.G.: Why can’t responding to feminist concerns be seen as just one major step in correcting the social and economic flaws of our capitalist society, not a fundamental transformation of the system?

N.F.: It certainly can be seen that way. But I am questioning whether today’s feminism is really advancing that process. As I see it, the mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women.

More here.

Elizabeth Drew in The New York Review of Books:

The president’s congressional victory on the nuclear agreement with Iran had many sources, not least of which were the nature and tactics of the opposition. It might have been more difficult to achieve if the Republicans as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allied American group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had given any sense that they had thoughtfully considered the deal that six nations reached with Iran, or if they had offered any alternative. But the agreement with Iran collided with the current state of American politics.

Once the nuclear deal was presented to Congress in July, there was little question that it would fall into the deep crevasse that had developed between the two political parties. Ever since Barack Obama took office in 2009, the Republicans have opposed everything he wanted to do. In keeping with this strategy, within days of the deal’s being announced, numerous Republicans, without bothering to read the agreement or consider it seriously, jumped to oppose it.

The debate on the deal throughout was only ostensibly on its merits. The Republicans’ contempt for Obama—as a Democrat, as a black person, as, in the view of many of them, an illegitimate president—was clear to any close observer. For the first time in US history, the opposition party thumbed its nose at the president by inviting the head of another nation—Netanyahu—to address Congress to urge rejection of an international measure the president supported. When Secretary of State John Kerry, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, appeared before it to testify on the agreement, he was greeted with overt contempt by its Republican members. The current chairman, Bob Corker of Tennessee, told him, “You’ve been fleeced.”

More here.

Phil Plait in Slate:

Kepler data show huge dips in brightness, up to 22 percent in the star. The bottom axis is days after an arbitrary date, and the bottom two panels are close-ups of the top one, centered near 800 days (left) and 1,500 days (right). The average amount of starlight over time is set equal to 1 for ease of display. (Graphs by Boyajian et al.)

Asad Rahim Khan in Herald:

As far as debuts went, there was nothing quite like it. A 250-page novel, with a three-sentence premise: “Darashikoh Shezad is an ex-banker, pot-smoker, and downwardly mobile heroin addict who also happens to have fallen for his best friend’s wife. He is on trial. You are to be his judge.”

In a land of 140 million people, with less than 14 novelists of note between them – both in English and Urdu – Pakistan was unprepared for Moth Smoke in 2000; a decline-and-fall story with everything else in between: heat and hash, nuclear bombs and car chases, kite fights and wars of succession among Mughal princes.

In a way, the 29-year-old Mohsin Hamid could be compared to the 21-year-old Bret Easton Ellis, the boy wonder who blew the lid off the Reagan years with Less Than Zero. Like Hamid’s, Ellis’s maiden novel is a tale of beautiful young drug dealers that ends in tears. Unlike Hamid, Ellis could not write to save his life.

More here.

Sameer Rahim in Prospect:

The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has never been afraid of speaking out. In 2005, he broke a national taboo by speaking to a Swiss newspaper about the killing of one million Armenians during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Subsequently, he was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness” in a case that brought him international attention. In 2006 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the committee praising a writer, “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” During those years, Pamuk told me when I met him in London, he felt he became “too political,” asked to comment about events in his native land in a way western novelists usually are not. But the genial Pamuk also admitted that he finds it difficult to “keep my mouth shut” about the state of his country.

I asked him whether the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), has damaged Turkey’s secular identity. “Before Erdoğan came to power 13 years ago, everyone rightly thought secularism was under threat,” he told me. “Now, according to a newspaper poll, only 5 per cent of the population are worried about Turkey’s secularism, but 67 per cent think he is too authoritarian.” Erdoğan won a landslide parliamentary victory in 2002 with support from mainly poor and religious Turks. Since then he has intensified his grip on power. Last year he became the country’s President and began turning the ceremonial position into a political power base. Pamuk is disturbed by Erdoğan’s manoeuvres. “He has violated Montesquieu’s rules over the division between the judicial, legislative and executive powers. He does this without even hiding his manipulations.”

Pamuk is most worried about Erdoğan’s attitude to freedom of speech. “He is pressuring journalists and newspapers too much,” he said. “This is not acceptable.” As a Nobel prize-winner and internationally renowned writer, Pamuk is freer to criticise the government than ordinary Turkish journalists. I sensed he was speaking on their behalf.

More here.

Ross Anderson in The Atlantic:

In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”

Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.

“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.

The Kepler Space Telescope collected a great deal of light from all of those stars it watched. So much light that Kepler’s science team couldn’t process it all with algorithms. They needed the human eye, and human cognition, which remains unsurpassed in certain sorts of pattern recognition. Kepler’s astronomers decided to found Planet Hunters, a program that asked “citizen scientists” to examine light patterns emitted by the stars, from the comfort of their own homes.

In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as “interesting” and “bizarre.” The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching.

More here.

Max Nelson in Paris Review:

The first time Oscar Wilde saw the inside of a prison, it was 1882—thirteen years before he’d serve the famous criminal sentence that produced De Profundis, his 55,000-word letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Financially pressed and known primarily as a public speaker—by then he had only published a thin volume of poems—he’d committed to a nine-month lecture tour of America. During his stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, he and the young literature professor George Woodberry were taken to visit the local penitentiary. The warden led them into a yard where, Wilde later wrote the suffragist journalist Helena Sickert, they were confronted by “poor odd types of humanity in striped dresses making bricks in the sun.” All the faces he glimpsed, he remarked with relief, “were mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face.”

…“You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art,” Wilde tells Douglas in the letter’s lovestruck last sentence. “Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.” After De Profundis, Wilde published only the long poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and two letters to the Daily Chronicle advocating for specific reforms designed to mitigate the “cruelties of prison life.” He died at forty-six, broke, despondent, and—at the last minute—baptized. He had lived extravagantly, suffered greatly, defended his wounded pride to the end, and hit, in De Profundis, upon a lavish, full harmony of words.

More here.

Broken Bones

She likes a man with a broken nose
Lucky for me, I suppose
Shots coming in like the monthly bills
Soon they’ll be saying I’m over the hill

Well the bell goes clang and you’re on your own
You take your medicine and go home
You take it like a man, on the chin
And you don’t make a fuss when the towel comes in

Now let me go home, got to lay in ice
And I don’t want to hear no more advice
Just give me my clothes
Get me out of this place
How many more stitches in my face?

Those broken bones, you pick ‘em up and carry ‘em
Broken bones, you carry ‘em home
Broken bones, you pick ‘em up and carry ‘em
Broken bones, you carry ‘em home

He had the punch lines, I was the joke
Every shot felt like something broke
It was all much more than a man should stand
And I finally went down to a big right hand

Now let me go home, got to lay in ice
And I don’t want to hear no more advice
Just give me my clothes
Get me out of this place
How many more stitches in my face?

Those broken bones, you pick ‘em up and carry ‘em
Broken bones, you carry ‘em home
Broken bones, you pick ‘em up and carry ‘em
Broken bones, you carry ‘em home
.

by Mark Knopfler
from Tracker

Listen here

Richard Bright in Interalia Magazine:

Richard Bright: Can we begin with you saying something about your background?

Zara Houshmand: I grew up as a third culture kid, Iranian-American raised in the Philippines, then later living in Iran, the UK, and the US. That suspension between cultures—both the outsider view and the bridging skills learned early—are very much part of who I am and the ideas I’m drawn too. Much of my work has to do with cross-cultural communication, not just the obvious—literary translation, bilingual theatre, writing from an Iranian view for Western audiences—but also dialogue between cultures in a broader sense, between science and Buddhism, art and technology, in a way that’s focused more on the process than any particular position. Collaborative process is another thread of this that’s woven throughout my life.

But at heart I’m a writer, in love with poetry and theatre. I studied English literature and an interest in oral literature through the Old English led me into traditional Asian theatre forms including Tibetan opera and Balinese shadow puppetry. I’m fascinated by the tension between traditional structures and improvisation, by the roots of theatre in ritual experienced directly, not just as history, and by the roots of composition in performance.

RB: In 2000, you made a commitment to translate one of Rumi’s quatrains every day. Can you say more about this?

ZH: When I first encountered the popular American translations of Rumi, I was disturbed. I didn’t recognize what I was reading, as if the entire mindset of Persian culture had been bleached out, leaving a generic, whitewashed spirituality.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

This isn’t, by the way, one of those misconceptions that rattles around the popular-explanation sphere, while experts sit back silently and roll their eyes. Experts get this one wrong all the time. “Inflation was a period of superluminal expansion” is repeated, for example, in these texts by by Tai-Peng Cheng, by Joel Primack, and by Lawrence Krauss, all of whom should certainly know better.

The great thing about the superluminal-expansion misconception is that it’s actually a mangle of several different problems, which sadly don’t cancel out to give you the right answer.

1.The expansion of the universe doesn’t have a “speed.” Really the discussion should begin and end right there. Comparing the expansion rate of the universe to the speed of light is like comparing the height of a building to your weight. You’re not doing good scientific explanation; you’ve had too much to drink and should just go home.The expansion of the universe is quantified by the Hubble constant, which is typically quoted in crazy units of kilometers per second per megaparsec. That’s (distance divided by time) divided by distance, or simply 1/time. Speed, meanwhile, is measured in distance/time. Not the same units! Comparing the two concepts is crazy.

Admittedly, you can construct a quantity with units of velocity from the Hubble constant, using Hubble’s law, v = Hd (the apparent velocity of a galaxy is given by the Hubble constant times its distance). Individual galaxies are indeed associated with recession velocities. But different galaxies, manifestly, have different velocities. The idea of even talking about “the expansion velocity of the universe” is bizarre and never should have been entertained in the first place.

2. There is no well-defined notion of “the velocity of distant objects” in general relativity.There is a rule, valid both in special relativity and general relativity, that says two objects cannot pass by each other with relative velocities faster than the speed of light. In special relativity, where spacetime is a fixed, flat, Minkowskian geometry, we can pick a global reference frame and extend that rule to distant objects. In general relativity, we just can’t.

More here.

Peter Boettke in Politico:

Princeton University Professor Angus Deaton has won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, and it is a very worthy award. The 69-year-old Scottish-born economist has contributed to our understanding at a theoretical, empirical, and policy-relevant level throughout his very productive career. And he continues to challenge his fellow economists methodologically, analytically, and practically with new works. In many ways, this was a very inspiring choice.

Let me explain. Deaton’s first main idea was the basic one that people don’t eat growth rates: We learn a lot more from studying consumption behavior than we would from focusing our attention on aggregate income measures. It is a decidedly microeconomic approach to empirical analysis, and in so doing he innovated ways to conduct household surveys. And this way of measuring human well-being opened eyes to the plight of the world’s poor, and the economic improvements in global development. In many ways, Deaton’s work provides the scientific underpinnings of Hans Rosling’s BBC Four video, The Joy of Stats, on 200 countries, 200 Years or his TED Talk on the washing machine.

Deaton’s work made us see the impact innovation and development has had on the well-being of the world’s poor. In this sense, his receiving the Nobel is also a nod by the committee to economic history and the fundamental importance of development economics as a field as much as to the theoretical and empirical thrust of Deaton’s work on consumption behavior.

More here.