From Phys.org:

A plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe – has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing 'teeth' that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal's legs when it launches into a jump.

The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the “first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure“.

Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science.

The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box.

Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears – essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.

The gear teeth on the opposing hind-legs lock together like those in a car gear-box, ensuring almost complete synchronicity in leg movement – the legs always move within 30 'microseconds' of each other, with one microsecond equal to a millionth of a second.

This is critical for the powerful jumps that are this insect's primary mode of transport, as even miniscule discrepancies in synchronisation between the velocities of its legs at the point of propulsion would result in “yaw rotation” – causing the Issusto spin hopelessly out of control.

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Alex Needham in The Guardian:

On forgiveness

“The really vile and violent and bestial treatment of slaves and their descendants did not succeed in making those descendants reproduce that violence and that corruption and that bestiality. It’s contemporary, but the survivors and the family members who were killed in that church [in Charleston] did not say of the killer ‘I want him dead’ – it was something grander and more humane. It was eloquent and elegant, the response of forgiveness. We sometimes understand that generosity, and I’m not going to tear you up, as a kind of weakness whereas I always thought that that was extreme strength.”

On her experience of community in the deep south

“When we were travelling in the south, there were carriages where black people sat but the most important thing was the porters, who gave you twice as much orange juice and four sandwiches and two pillows – they were so excessively generous and kind that it was like a luxury car. I was thinking not too long ago that when I was at Cornell and I saw a black man I would run toward him – then I thought that these days, with all the discussion about black men as threats, I may not do that. But I certainly wouldn’t run toward a white man, I might just have to flip along by myself.”

On her father’s hatred of white people

“Was he racist? Big time. He wouldn’t let white people in the house. My mother was just the opposite – she didn’t care who you were if you were nice to her. Later, I went down to the little town in Georgia where my father was born and one of the men who was a child at the time said that my father had seen two black men lynched on his street – they were businessmen, they had little stores and so on. He was 14 and he left and went to California and ended up living in Ohio. I think seeing that at 14 – the lynching of two neighbours – and that’s why he thought that white people were incorrigible.”

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Aatish Taseer in The New York Times:

I spent the duration of the election shuttling between its crucible, in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and the drawing rooms of Delhi, where the political elite of the city, a cozy cabal of like-minded journalists and politicians, quaked at the rise of Mr. Modi. I had grown up in this world, and it was one in which class mattered much more than political difference. Nor was its cynicism confined to any one party. I remember being present when the son of a B.J.P. chief minister, a woman now in trouble over corruption, was asked why he wanted to enter politics. “Money,” he said easily, and no one minded. That was the kind of world it was.

Mr. Modi posed a mortal threat to the safety and entitlement of this world, and it was part of his appeal. Nor was there anything sinister in the mandate. Given his background in Hindu nationalism, he was justly an object of suspicion. But when journalists from Delhi would prod voters into giving sectarian reasons for electing him, a majority would stoutly reply, “Why are you asking us about temples, when we’re telling you that we’re electing him because we think he’ll bring development?” That was the mandate. It was very moving, and like many, I held my breath. I see now that I was focused too much on the world the election would supplant, and too little on the one it would bring into being. Because if the Modi election has made anything clear, it is that, one, a social revolution of a kind has already occurred in India; and two, the people, now in charge, might not possess the intellectual power needed to run the country. The cabinet, save for the rare exception, is made up of too many crude, bigoted provincials, united far more by a lack of education than anything so grand as ideology. At the time of writing — and here the one will have to speak for the many — Mr. Modi’s minister of culture had just said of a former Muslim president: “Despite being a Muslim, he was a great nationalist and humanist.” Some 10 days later, there was the hideous incident in which a Muslim man was lynched by a Hindu mob in a village outside Delhi, on the suspicion of slaughtering a cow and eating beef. It was a defining moment, the culmination of 16 months of cultural chauvinism and hysteria under Mr. Modi, the scarcely veiled target of which are India’s roughly 170 million Muslims. This ugliness is eclipsing Mr. Modi’s development agenda, and just this week, there was yet another incident in which a Kashmiri politician was attacked in Srinagar for hosting “a beef party.”

More here.

.
then I came home
I threw my heavy bag
off of me in the corridor
you stood waiting for me

those were steps
I made beside you on the ground
one by one
someone bombed the station

a Rumanian shot
another Rumanian with a gun
last year a man lay in this street
blood stayed behind on the pavement

before you leave I gaze after a tram driving away

without us nothing could begin
without us everything’s been done

by Els Moors
from er hangt een hoge lucht boven ons
publisher: Nieuw Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 2006
translation: 2008, Willem Groenewegen

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Jeffrey Zuckerman at The Quarterly Conversation:

And so Pitol writes early in the first volume of his “Trilogy of Memory” that “Lately, I have been very aware that I have a past. Not only because I have reached an age when the greater part of the journey has been traveled, but also because I now know fragments of my childhood that until recently were off-limits to me.” What results from this declaration is a very unusual book that diverges from the standard tropes of memoir. Rather than attempt to divulge personal details or set the record straight, Pitol seeks to do something more personal and internalized: to fill in the gaps and holes of his memory before they grow bigger and deeper. The end result may have been aestheticized after the fact, but we are ultimately reading something that was written for the author alone. We are invited to forget ourselves, to put on the persona of Pitol himself and close up the wounds of time and memory by reading these words of his various travelings, readings, and meetings across the Western world.

After some four hundred pages of The Art of Flight, readers could be excused for thinking ofThe Journey’s 165 pages as a continuation of or an appendix to its predecessor. But to do so would be to underestimate the canvas on which Pitol is now working. When herida reappears in the middle volume of the “Trilogy of Memory,” it does so on a broader scale. In describing a Czech woman who would teach him Russian, Pitol writes that “Like all Czechs, she felt the wound of history in her marrow; she no longer believed in the possibility of a revival of socialism.”

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John Lloyd at the Financial Times:

At the peak of her powers in the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher confronted enemies within the UK and without, some of them created by her own abrasive nature. But the most important were systemic and largely independent of her, and her engagement with them was of global importance. No surprise, then, that the second instalment of Charles Moore’s three-volume authorised biography of the late prime minister should be devoted just to this pivotal five-year period, 1982-87.

From a domestic UK perspective, the episode that loomed largest was the 1984-85 miners’ strike. The trade unions were then getting a measure of the government’s determination to reduce their powers, a policy made starkly apparent by the ending of union representation (albeit with overwhelming staff acquiescence) at the GCHQ secret communications centre in Cheltenham.

To Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, this played to his default position of full-throated militancy. So too did the replacement of the National Coal Board’s corporatist leadership by the free market-inclined Ian MacGregor, a Scots-American business executive.

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Jean Strouse at The New York Review of Books:

At the age of fifty-one, with his work in high demand on both sides of the Atlantic, John Singer Sargent swore off painting portraits. He had been eager for some time to escape the confines of the studio, the pressures of multiple sittings, and society portraiture altogether. “No more paughtraits,” he wrote to a friend in 1907. “I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another especially of the Upper Classes.” He had been charging a thousand guineas a portrait “in order to have fewer to do,” he told another friend, but price did not discourage his affluent clientele.1 A Max Beerbohm cartoon shows the portly, bearded artist peering out the window of his London studio in alarm at a queue of fashionably dressed ladies, with uniformed bellhops holding places in line for more.

Sargent made exceptions to the portrait ban for friends, and for eminences such as Lord Curzon, the archbishop of Canterbury, John D. Rockefeller, and Woodrow Wilson (he turned down Pierpont Morgan). Yet for the most part, once he had slipped the silken shackles of commissions, he turned his attention to painting murals for the Boston Public Library, and to doing more of what he had loved all his life: traveling, often with artist friends, and working outdoors in natural light.

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Barbara Ransby in In These Times:

Grace Lee Boggs died yesterday at the age of 100 and the world is better for the century that she walked it with us. As a writer, insurgent intellectual, revolutionary organizer, mentor, community builder and friend to many, Grace will be dearly missed.

When I was a teenager in Detroit and a wannabe revolutionary in the 1970s I heard the names Grace and Jimmy Boggs all the time. I knew they were beloved and respected in Detroit’s Black activist community, and I just assumed they were both Black. I was surprised to finally meet Grace and discover she was Chinese-American. I had to recalibrate my notions about the Black struggle, “my people” and race itself.

Long after many of Detroit’s young black revolutionaries left Detroit and the revolution, Grace stayed. She was so immersed in the life and struggles of Detroit’s predominately Black communities that she said her FBI file described her as “probably Afro-Chinese.” Alongside her partner in life and politics, former auto-worker and black activist and leader, Jimmy Boggs (who died in 1993), Grace fought the good fight over five decades, writing books, building organizations, organizing campaigns, and teaching by example that “revolution” is a protracted process—not a single event or a spate of protests. She saw the Black struggle as the cutting-edge struggle of her lifetime, intricately linked to many others, and she was humbled to be a part of it.

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Amy Dru Stanley reviews Alex Gourevitch's From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century in Dissent:

In October 2010, workers at a McDonald’s restaurant in Canton, Ohio opened their pay envelopes to find political leaflets, printed on the McDonald’s letterhead, warning about the upcoming midterm election:

If the right people are elected we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above our present levels. If others are elected we will not.

The leaflet named three Republican candidates—John Kasich for governor, Rob Portman for Senate, and Jim Renacci for Congress—who would help McDonald’s “business grow in the future.”

The purpose was clear: to intimidate voters exercising their right of franchise by highlighting their economic dependency as workers. A spokesman for McDonald’s U.S.A. apologized for the leaflet campaign, explaining that the tactic did not reflect company policy. A week later, Kasich, Portman, and Renacci were elected.

Nationwide, more than half the families of fast food workers, whose pay hovers near the federal minimum wage, depend on public assistance programs to survive. Food stamps, earned income tax credit, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) offer a lifeline to employees like those at McDonald’s, according to Fast Food, Poverty Wages, a 2013 report produced by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Low wages and lack of benefits “come at a public cost”—about $7 billion a year, which is what is required to fund these aid programs.

The public cost of economic dependency is nothing new in the American polity. As Thomas Jefferson wrote of the urban working class just after the American Revolution, “dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” His concern was not with poor relief but with the loss of freedom rooted in property ownership. “The mobs of great cities,” he observed, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” The problem was the decay of republican government due to the declension of a citizenry lacking economic independence and therefore subject to political coercion.

Today, workers earning poverty wages are at risk of the unfreedom feared by the founders: equal pursuit of happiness seems barely possible for makers of Happy Meals scraping together a living. The McDonald’s pay envelope stuffed with a political message made all too explicit the abuse of economic power.

More here.

Michele Filgate in The Brooklyn Quarterly:

Writers of biography are translators of the human experience, responsible for reconstructing a life and deciphering it for us.

It’s a form that has evolved over time—one which Virginia Woolf examined closely in her famous essay, “The Art of Biography.” She wrote that “almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection…He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.”

What matters to many contemporary readers is that these fertile facts have the weight of truth behind them. “By telling us true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline,” Woolf elaborated, “the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest.”

To document a life through biography, Woolf’s essay seems to say, is to perform a radical and creative act.

The word “document” comes from the Latin word documentum: lesson and proof.

We document other people’s lives in order to understand our own, in order to humanize history, in order to make a narrative out of everything. One person’s life can be told in many different ways. It’s a matter of interpretation.

The biographer’s perception of her subject is key. She gives us a life that has already been lived, so that we can live it again in a condensed amount of time—the amount of time it takes to read the book. To do this, she must spend countless hours sifting through manuscripts, letters, diaries, articles, thousands upon thousands of words.

Which lives are worth documenting in biography and which facts within those chosen lives are worth endowing with meaning? These are not foregone conclusions. They reflect and perpetuate our societal shortcomings, especially in considering women. Rachel Holmes’ book, Eleanor Marx: A Life, is a biography of a protofeminist, and is also a feminist biography. The author’s approach tackles head-on the multiple facets of Marx’s professional and personal life—documented and undocumented—in a pursuit of a richer portrayal that looks beyond the simply scandalous or the adjacent-to-fame. “Eleanor Marx the politician, thinker, feminist, and activist leaves us with our own question of personal responsibility to the common interest that is essential to social existence,” (448) Holmes writes. She was more than just someone who lived an extraordinary life; she is a reminder of “how we got here, where the democratic liberties we enjoy came from.” (448)

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Craig Lambert in The Chronicle of Higher Ed:

George Scialabba is no wild man. A soft-spoken, introverted soul, he doesn’t drink or smoke; no alcohol, tobacco, or recreational drugs. Healthy, moderate eating (no red meat, and “a kind of cerebral Mediterranean diet”) keeps Scialabba, at age 67, lean to a degree that is downright un-American. He has never married nor fathered children, and lives alone in a one-bedroom condo he has occupied since 1980. He doesn’t play sports (“I don’t exercise — I fidget”). For 35 years, Scialabba, a Harvard College alumnus, held a low-level clerical job at his alma mater that suited his low-profile style. For the past decade, his desk has occupied a windowless basement in a large academic building.

That’s the physical Scialabba: a bespectacled reed who could slip into any cocktail party nearly unnoticed.

The intellectual Scialabba is another story. Over those same 35 years, he has written nearly 400 essays and book reviews for The American Conservative, The Boston Globe, Commonweal, Dissent, Grand Street, The Nation, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, and many other outlets. His acuity, erudition, and polished prose have earned him thousands of readers and the admiration of some of the country’s leading minds.

The Harvard English professor and New Yorker contributor James Wood calls him “one of America’s best all-round intellects.” The author Barbara Ehrenreich asserts that “he is not only astoundingly intelligent, he knows just about everything — history, politics, culture, and literature.” The political theorist Daniela Cammack, currently a visiting lecturer at Yale, declares, “For my money, George is the finest living writer of nonfiction English prose. I know that’s a grand claim, but I stand by it. Every time a new book of [his] essays has come out, I’ve stayed up ’til 4 a.m. devouring it. That doesn’t usually happen.”

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John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

The World Bank and the United Nations have set a goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030, but achieving this target will be very difficult. Today, close to half of all extreme poverty is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which, despite some recent progress, is still beset by war, disease, and a lack of properly functioning institutions. In addition, it is important not to read too much from the extreme-poverty figures as regards the fight against poverty as a whole. If you are an African, an Asian, or a South American, just because you have edged above the World Bank’s bar doesn’t mean that you aren’t still poor. In the poorest forty per cent of countries, according to the bank’s own figures, about half the population is still in “moderate poverty,” which it defines as existing on less than four dollars a day of income.

Furthermore, some of the recent decline in the rate of extreme poverty may be an artifact of how the bank calculates it, which changed recently. In a skeptical piece in the Financial Times, Shawn Donnan explained some of the tricky technical issues, which largely revolve around how to compare prices across countries and across time. Meanwhile, Francisco Ferreira, a senior economist at the World Bank, defended its procedures in a blog post arguing that, whichever numbers are used, the trend in extreme poverty is a downward one.

That does seem to be true, and it’s something to celebrate. Above all else, it reflects the entry of China, India, and other developing countries into the global trading system, not merely as sources of raw materials and cheap labor but also, increasingly, as independent players in global capitalism. In industries ranging from steel to autos to energy to solar panels, Chinese and Indian companies are now competing head-to-head with western rivals. The global market that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about in 1848 is now largely a reality, with individual countries and corporations vying for the spoils.

That’s what trade agreements like the T.P.P. are all about.

More here.

From KurzweialAI:

Penn State researchers have developed a new lab-on-a-chip cell sorting device based on acoustic waves that is capable of the kind of high sorting throughput necessary to compete with commercial fluorescence activated cell sorters, described in the cover story in the current issue of the British journal Lab on a Chip. Commercial fluorescence activated cell sorters have been highly successful in the past 40 years at rapidly and accurately aiding medical diagnosis and biological studies, but they are bulky and too expensive ($200,000 -$1,000,000) for many labs or doctors’ offices. “The current benchtop cell sorters are too expensive, too unsafe, and too high-maintenance. More importantly, they have very low biocompatibility. The cell-sorting process can reduce cell viability and functions by 30–99 percent for many fragile or sensitive cells such as neurons, stem cells, liver cells and sperm cells,” said Tony Jun Huang, Penn State professor of engineering science and mechanics and the paper’s corresponding author. “We are developing an acoustic cell sorter that has the potential to address all these problems.”

High-speed sorting

Microfluidic cell sorters are a promising new tool for single cell sequencing, rare cell isolation, and drug screening. However, many of them operate at only a few hundred cells per second, far too slow to compete with commercial devices that operate on the order of tens of thousands of operations per second. The Penn State system can sort about 3,000 cells per second, with the potential to sort more than 13,000 cells per second. The speed is generated by using focused transducers to create standing surface acoustic waves (SSAWs).

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James Wood at The New Yorker:

The publication of “The Complete Works of Primo Levi” (Liveright), in three volumes, represents a monumental and noble endeavor on the part of its publisher, its general editor, Ann Goldstein, and the many translators who have produced new versions of Levi’s work. Although his best-known work has already benefitted from fine English translation, it’s a gift to have nearly all his writing gathered together, along with work that has not before been published in English (notably, a cache of uncollected essays, written between 1949 and 1987).

Primo Levi was born in Turin, in 1919, into a liberal family, and into an assimilated, educated Jewish-Italian world. He would write, in “If This Is a Man,” that when he first learned the name of his fateful destination, “Auschwitz” meant nothing to him. He only vaguely knew about the existence of Yiddish, “on the basis of a few quotes or jokes that my father, who worked for a few years in Hungary, had picked up.” There were around fifty* thousand Italian Jews, and most of them were supporters of the Fascist government (at least until the race legislation of 1938, which announced a newly aggressive anti-Semitism); a cousin of Levi’s, Eucardio Momigliano, had been one of the founders of the Fascist Party, in 1919. Levi’s father was a member, though more out of convenience than commitment.

Levi gives ebullient life to this comfortable, sometimes eccentric world in “The Periodic Table”—a memoir, a history, an essay in elegy, and the best example of his various literary talents.

more here.

Debarati Sanyal at Public Books:

Patrick Modiano’s reputation as a writer of wartime Paris was sealed last fall by the Nobel Prize, which recognized him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”1 This is in keeping with Modiano’s own claim that the Nazi occupation and its aftermath form the matrix of his literary imaginings, from La Place de L’Étoile (1968), which catapulted him into literary fame, to his most famous translated novel, Dora Bruder (1997), about a Jewish runaway deported to Auschwitz.2

There is, however, a much longer history to Modiano’s melancholy fiction, with its distinct blend of personal rumination and precarious historical retrieval. Its roots lie in 19th-century Paris, a city so swiftly transformed by modernization that only an “art of memory” could recollect what had been and was no longer there. Charles Baudelaire’s “The Swan” famously recalls those disappeared by modernization:

Paris changes! but nothing in my melancholy
Has stirred! New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of stone,
Old neighborhoods, all for me become allegory,
And my cherished memories are heavier than rocks.3

For Baudelaire, the modern poet was a symbolic ragpicker, less an idle flaneur than an anxious prowler who collected modernity’s debris and stored it in poetic memory.

more here.

For Example

There was an old Dutch lady
Lived in a room in the house
In front of my small shack
Who sat all day in the garden
By my door and read.
She said she knew the East
And once had seen a book
On Buddhist monks. “And you
Got no business going to
Japan. The thing to be
Is Life, is young and travel
Much and love. I know
The way you are, you study hard
But you have friends that
Come and stay, and bike, and
There’s the little tree you
Planted by the wall” As I
Filled my water bucket from
A hose. The sun lit up
Her thin white hair a bird
Squawked from the Avocado at the air
& Bodhisattvas teach us everywhere.
.

By Gary Snyder
From Left Out in the Rain
North Point Press, 1986

Thomas Frank at The Baffler:

In his 2005 study of prize-giving, The Economy of Prestige, the English professor James English takes note of the dizzying proliferation of honors and awards in recent decades—it’s “a kind of cultural frenzy,” he writes. “Just indexing all these prizes is a daunting task.” Indeed it is. In the course of researching this article, I discovered numerous distinctions I had never heard of before, including the American Creativity Association’s Special Achievement Award, a right-wing imitation of the Genius Grant called the Bradley Prize (every conservative newspaper columnist will eventually get one), and a literary honor that is named for Rob Bingham, a friend of mine who died tragically in 1999.

What James English tells us about the countless foundations and academies that make these awards is that they are not simply neutral observers, impartially recognizing merit from some lofty height. They are always engaged in a cultural project of their own—usually to establish themselves as authorities and their own concerns as correct ones.

In pursuit of that project, all award programs face the same problems. Because the reputation of the prize must itself be established for the academy in question to set about judging the merits of others, all prize programs gravitate toward convention. They tend overwhelmingly to reward people whose reputations are already made. Indeed, as the competition between prizes grows more intense, English tells us, the pressure to associate a prize with safe and unquestionably prestigious figures only grows.

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Michael Lind in The Smart Set:

Can world literature exist? It depends on what is meant by world literature.

The phrase Weltliteratur was coined by Goethe. The German polymath told his disciple Johann Peter Eckermann in 1827: “I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at times to hundreds and hundreds of men…. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term, the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”

But what is world literature? World literature comes in two alternate, conceivable versions: contemporary world literature and global classicism. Contemporary world literature is the literature of contemporary societies — particularly works of literature that obtain an international reputation. Global classicism might be described as contemporary literature inspired by the multiple traditions of the premodern regional literate civilizations of Eurasia, including the Chinese, Indian, Greco-Roman, Euro-Christian, and Muslim.

Goethe contributed to both kinds of world literature. He owed his early fame to The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a novel for a bourgeois readership that was strikingly modern for its time and translated into many languages. But in his subsequent literary career, after repudiating romanticism for classicism, the Sage of Weimar experimented with premodern and foreign models, adapting genres and forms from ancient Greece and Rome as well as medieval European balladry. Among the recondite late works of his old age are poems inspired by the medieval Persian poet Hafez, the West-Eastern Diwan (1819), the very name of which evokes cross-cultural exchange.

The two versions of world literature follow these two trails blazed by Goethe. There is the contemporary world literature of Werther and there is also the self-consciously classicist world literature symbolized by the West-Eastern Diwan. The one has a vast potential audience, the other a small but sophisticated audience.

More here.