Researchers have developed a device that can track the mysterious organ in real time, and may help unlock the key to a healthy pregnancy.

Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic:

Placentas get kind of a bum rap.

This is possibly because of all the hoopla about the mothers who blend their placentas into smoothies and eat them, which is not a thing most women do. Even beyond the organ’s ritualistic associations, the way people talk about the placenta is implicitly dismissive.

“It is described as the ‘afterbirth,’” said Catherine Spong, an obstetrician/gynecologist and the acting director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). “Like it’s just a thing that comes out afterward. It is an underappreciated organ, and has been understudied.”

To appreciate the placenta, you have to recognize that it’s responsible for sustaining a fetus as it grows into a baby, which is tethered by the umbilical cord to the placenta embedded in a pregnant woman’s uterine wall. Through this arrangement, the placenta provides nutrients and oxygen to the fetus, eliminates waste, regulates fetal temperature, produces hormones, and performs other crucial pregnancy tasks. For one organ to perform so many jobs—duties that would otherwise be handled by separate organs—is extraordinary.

Just as remarkable is the fact that doctors and scientists know so little about the placenta, relative to its importance.

More here.

As New Delhi and Islamabad trade nuclear threats and deadly attacks, a brewing war over shared water resources threatens to turn up the violence.

Michael Kugelman in Foreign Policy:

Early on the morning of Sept. 29, according to India’s Defense Ministryand military, Indian forces staged a “surgical strike” in Pakistan-administered Kashmir that targeted seven terrorist camps and killed multiple militants. Pakistan angrily denied that the daring raid took place, though it did state that two of its soldiers were killed in clashes with Indian troops along their disputed border. New Delhi’s announcement of its strike plunged already tense India-Pakistan relations into deep crisis. It came 11 days after militants identified by India as members of the Pakistani terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 18 soldiers on a military base in the town of Uri, in India-administered Kashmir.

Amid all the shrill rhetoric and saber rattling emanating from India and Pakistan in recent days — including India’s home minister branding Pakistan a “terrorist state” and Pakistan’s defense minister threatening to wage nuclear war on India — one subtle threat issued by India may have sounded relatively innocuous to the casual listener.

More here.

Alex Palmer in Smithsonian:

Those who encounter a piece by Jennifer Trask are likely first struck by its elegance: a baroque gold-coated necklace or an intricate floral broach. But a closer look reveals much more happening below the gilt surface: antlers woven into the necklace; snake vertebrae used as the “petals” of the broach’s flower, giraffe femurs, chicken ribs, cow and camel bones, even teeth. Despite her occasional morbid humor—such as calling one of her works of keys made of cast iron, pearls and bone, Skeleton Keys—Trask emphasizes that she does not see death in the remains that she employs, but rather a rich backstory.

Trask uses this dichotomy of nature and artifice, glamour and decay, to explore complex, seemingly contradictory ideas—and create some extraordinarily cool looking sculptures in the process. Her artworks are now on view as part of the exhibition Visions and Revisions: Renwick Invitational 2016 at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. The works span a 20-year career, and include the 1998 Poison Elixir Bracelet—a gold bracelet of 22-karat capsules containing poinsettia petals and dried blood—and the 2014 Caliper—a turkey wishbone fashioned into a gold-inflected compass. “Bones are not morbid to me, they represent a life lived,” she says. “There is a history in the remnants of a plant or animal.” Trask sees her role as drawing out that history buried in the materials, letting the “material itself dictate what it will become.” This is true in a physical sense—how far can she bend a particular horn or how careful must she be to carve antique frame fragments. It depends on the material’s density or grain. But it is true also in her pursuit of the more spiritual aspects of the material, allowing it to form its own shape and following its lead.

More here.

Gina Kolata and Seawell Chan in The New York Times:

Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for his discoveries on how cells recycle their content, a process known as autophagy, a Greek term for “self-eating.” It is a crucial process. During starvation, cells break down proteins and nonessential components and reuse them for energy. Cells also use autophagy to destroy invading viruses and bacteria, sending them off for recycling. And cells use autophagy to get rid of damaged structures. The process is thought to go awry in cancer, infectious diseases, immunological diseases and neurodegenerative disorders. Disruptions in autophagy are also thought to play a role in aging. But little was known about how autophagy happens, what genes were involved, or its role in disease and normal development until Dr. Ohsumi began studying the process in baker’s yeast.

Why Did He Win?

The process he studies is critical for cells to survive and to stay healthy. The autophagy genes and the metabolic pathways he discovered in yeast are used by higher organisms, including humans. And mutations in those genes can cause disease. His work led to a new field and inspired hundreds of researchers around the world to study the process and opened a new area of inquiry. “Without him, the whole field doesn’t exist,” said Seungmin Hwang, an assistant professor in the department of pathology at the University of Chicago. “He set up the field.”

More here.

Amos Kenan at The Nation (originally published in 1982):

The Russians once invented a translating machine. To test it they inserted the English phrase, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” The result, in Russian, came out, “The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten.”

Shimon Peres is this kind of distorted reproduction, just as his Labor Party is a distorted reproduction.

Shimon Peres is an apparatchik—of an apparat that does not function anymore because its motor is dead. The motor was once fueled by the original spirit of Zionism, in its socialist version, a dream of two generations of humble prophets and naive visionaries: Zionism not just as another national liberation movement but as an experience in humanity, not only to create a new Jew in a new homeland but to create a new specimen of humankind. That dream has been turned into a nightmare by the experience of statehood and the needs of Realpolitik, and it is the Israeli Labor Party that is responsible. It is the Labor Party that is to blame for the face that Israel is now wearing, the face of Menachem Begin and Arid Sharon, of military oppression and moral decline.

more here.

Maya Jasanoff at the New York Review of Books:

Americans learn about slavery as an “original sin” that tempted the better angels of our nation’s egalitarian nature. But “the thing about American slavery,” writes Greg Grandin in his 2014 book The Empire of Necessity, about an uprising on a slave ship off the coast of Chile and the successful effort to end it, is that “it never was just about slavery.” It was about an idea of freedom that depended on owning and protecting personal property. As more and more settlers arrived in the English colonies, the property they owned increasingly took the human form of African slaves. Edmund Morgan captured the paradox in the title of his classic American Slavery, American Freedom: “Freedom for some required the enslavement of others.” When the patriots protested British taxation as a form of “slavery,” they weren’t being hypocrites. They were defending what they believed to be the essence of freedom: the right to preserve their property.

The Empire of Necessity explores “the fullness of the paradox of freedom and slavery” in the America of the early 1800s. Yet to understand the chokehold of slavery on American ideas of freedom, it helps to go back to the beginning. At the time of the Revolution, slavery had been a fixture of the thirteen colonies for as long as the US today has been without it. “Slavery was in England’s American colonies, even its New England colonies, from the very beginning,” explains Princeton historian Wendy Warren in her deeply thoughtful, elegantly written New England Bound, an exploration of captivity in seventeenth-century New England.

more here.

Matteo Pericoli at The Paris Review:

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s mystery novel The Judge and His Hangman revolves around a sudden nighttime encounter between chief detective Bärlach, an inspector with the Bern police, and his eternal rival, Gastmann.

During the encounter, we learn that the two men had met forty years earlier at a dive bar in the Bosporus where, inebriated, they made a bet that will bind them for the rest of their lives. Bärlach maintained that committing a crime is an “act of stupidity”: human imperfection, the unpredictable actions of others, and the inability of taking chance into account are the reasons why most crimes are inevitably solved. His rival, “more for the sake of argument than out of conviction,” instead maintained that it was exactly becauseof “the entanglement of human relationships” that he could commit unsolvable crimes, crimes that Bärlach would never be able to prove. From that day on, the detective vowed to spend his life trying to nail his rival.

more here.

Joe Gillon Hypnotizes his Son

For my father

When you wake up, in your fourteenth year,
I’m forty, the attrition of muscle fiber
in me will (energy cannot be, etc.) appear
in you as a new flex. You’ll write vers libre,
none of this constraint, hold what molests
you in your palm, swill whole decanters.
You’ll understand the jokes about women’s breasts
had something reverential at their centers.
A distance, thin as silver foil, will hiss
once, hover, then drop in the space between us.
Now: how I dandle you, wipe the comma of piss
where it collects at your rim, promise you’re a genus
better than I was, my cribside pace, my kiss…
You won’t remember any of this.

Albert Goldbarth
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986
.

Guido van Helten. Heroes, OK Foods Feedmill Triptych. 2016.

“Painted over the course of two weeks in September, prior and during The Unexpected Project: 2016, the triptych sponsored by OK Foods prominently feature a company legend, Gene “Beck” Beckham, and two other locals: Kristina Jones and Edward Paradela.”

More here, here, and here.

From Science Daily:

A study on human behavior has revealed that 90% of the population can be classified into four basic personality types: Optimistic, Pessimistic, Trusting and Envious. However, the latter of the four types, Envious, is the most common, with 30% compared to 20% for each of the other groups.

This is one of the main conclusions of a study recently published in the journal, Science Advances by researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, together with colleagues from the universities of Barcelona, Rovira i Virgili and Zaragoza. The study analyzed the responses of 541 volunteers to hundreds of social dilemmas, with options leading to collaboration or conflict with others, based on individual or collective interests.

Specifically, this work is part of game theory, a branch of mathematics with applications in sociology and economics, which examines the behavior of people when they face a dilemma and have to make decisions. These decisions will have different consequences which will also depend on what the other party involved decides to do. “Those involved are asked to participate in pairs, these pairs change, not only in each round, but also each time the game changes. So, the best option could be to cooperate or, on the other hand, to oppose or betray ….. In this way, we can obtain information about what people do in very different social situations,” explained one of the authors of the study, Anxo Sánchez, who is a professor in GISC (Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos / Interdisciplinary Group of Complex Systems), which is part of the Department of Mathematics at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M).

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Nathaniel Rich in the New York Review of Books:

Six books and several dozen Sports Illustrated articles into his journalistic career, George Plimpton still couldn’t type the words “participatory journalism” with a straight face. “‘Participatory journalism’—that ugly descriptive,” he writes in the first pages ofShadow Box (1977), sighing over his Underwood. Though he became nationally known as the subgenre’s paragon and the term pursued him into his obituaries, Plimpton was only a journalist in the sense that James Thurber was an illustrator and Robert Benchley a newspaper columnist. He went places, spoke to people, and wrote down his observations, but the reporting wasn’t the point. What was the point? The storytelling, the humanity, the comedy.

It was an odd match to begin with: for a writer of Plimpton’s background, journalism ranked on the literary hierarchy somewhere below light verse and pulp westerns. InGeorge, Being George, Charles Michener, Plimpton’s editor at The New Yorker, explained:

Journalists were from a rougher background. They tended not to be Ivy League, white-shoe boys, which George was certainly the epitome of. When I came into that world, I was at Yale and people would say, “Why do you want to be a journalist? It’s sleazy. That isn’t for people like you.”

Journalism was not to be taken seriously, but comedy writing was even more of a joke. What was the president of the Harvard Lampoon, class of 1948, to do?

More here.

John Kaag in Arc:

The story of twentieth-century American philosophy is the story of philosophy losing its personality. In their quest for objective certainty, many mainstream philosophers assiduously avoided what is termed the “biographical fallacy,” the supposed mistake of interpreting a philosophical theory by considering how it arose from the events in a thinker’s life. This, along with a host of other factors, led to philosophy being severed from the business of living. Philosophy became theoretically pure, abstract, which is to say, impersonal.

Philosophy hasn’t always been like this.

Plato’s Apology, arguably the founding moment of Western philosophy, is a well-reasoned defense (apologia) of the philosophical life; we still talk about Socrates as the archetypal philosopher because he is willing to stake everything, his very existence, on the love of wisdom.

More here.

Chris Wilson in Time Magazine:

When it comes to political warfare, the Republican party has the superior ground game—literally. “If land could vote, the Republicans would do a lot better,” says Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott, who dabbles in election forecasting when not studying time travel or general relativity. A glance at the map of any recent presidential contest confirms this. Due to their dominance in large, low-population states like Wyoming and the Dakotas, Republicans appear visually to command a dominant lead even when the actual results are very close. To remedy that problem, Gott and fellow cosmologist Wes Colley invented a map that visualizes each state with blocks according to the number of electoral votes it receives, such that the area of red and blue exactly corresponds to the results of the electoral college. TIME developed an interactive version of this map below that you can populate with a variety of different forecasts for the 2016 election.

In 2004, the method that Colley and Gott developed correctly predicted every state except Hawaii, where only two polls were conducted. In 2008, they missed three states and one electoral vote in Nebraska, one of two states that splits its electoral votes by congressional district. (The other is Maine, which is why the above map specifies district numbers for those two states.) In 2012, they only missed Florida. This year, Gott points out, Clinton has a “firewall” of 273 electoral votes—three more than she needs to win—in which she has won nearly every poll conducted. The most vulnerable of those is Colorado, according to his method. So don’t be surprised if you see her heading there in the coming weeks. Virtually every forecaster has Clinton with better-than-even odds of winning, but that gap is narrowing. And there are many more polls to come.

More here.

James Tozer in The Economist:

Most people would happily work for fewer hours each week. But data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show that having more downtime is no guarantee of feeling more at ease. Countries with longer working hours – which tend to be poorer places – generally have fewer reported cases of stress-related illness. Countries with shorter working hours – mostly richer places – typically have high incidences of anxiety and depression. Long holidays aren’t a guarantee of contentment either. The French and Finnish governments require workers to be given six weeks’ paid leave a year, yet those countries have high levels of reported stress.

These data are put together by the WHO, which tallies cases in each country, weighted by severity. The most stressed nation in this sample is the Netherlands. In 2012, anxiety and depression cost 30- to 60-year-old Dutch adults about 32 years of healthy life per 1,000 people. Measured in those terms, the burden was greater than stomach, colon, liver, pancreatic, lung, breast and cervical cancers put together. Mexican workers, by contrast, clock 60% more hours at work, and are a third as wealthy – yet are diagnosed with psychological problems half as often as the Dutch.

More here.