Chris Mooney in the Washington Post:

It is, for our home planet, an extremely warm year.

Indeed, last week we learned from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the first eight months of 2015 were the hottest such stretch yet recorded for the globe’s surface land and oceans, based on temperature records going back to 1880. It’s just the latest evidence that we are, indeed, on course for a record-breaking warm year in 2015.

Yet, if you look closely, there’s one part of the planet that is bucking the trend. In the North Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland and Iceland, the ocean surface has seen very cold temperatures for the past eight months:

What’s up with that?

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Akim Reinhardt in his blog, The Public Professor:

As a boy of 8 and 9 and 10, growing up in the Bronx, I was a big New York Yankees fan. When you grow up in the Bronx, that’s really all there is to brag about. A zoo and the Yankees.

Nearly every game aired on channel 11 WPIX, and I watched as many as I could, which was nearly all of them.

The Yankees are by far the most successful team in the history of American sports. Not even close. They’re probably the most successful team in the world. For this reason, rooting for the Yankees has often been equated with rooting for a large, wealthy corporation like IBM or GM. I’ve always thought it’s a very poor analogy.

Rooting for the Yankees is actually like rooting for the United States. Each in their own way, the Yankees and United States are the 300 lb. gorilla, that most powerful of entities winning far more than anyone else. Their wealth creates many advantages. Supporters expect them to win, and they usually do. Opponents absolutely revel in their defeats.

All that success means you will be adored by some non-natives who are tired of losing and want to bask in your glory, even if it must be from afar. But mostly you are hated. Anywhere you go in America, some people love the Yankees and many more hate them. Just like the United States is either loved or hated everywhere else in the world.

Who hates IBM?

More here.

John Feffer in The Nation:

They were the “best and the brightest,” but on a spaceship, not planet Earth, and they exemplified the liberal optimism of their era. The original Star Trek, whose three-year TV run began in 1966, featured a talented, multiethnic crew. The indomitable Captain Kirk had the can-do sex appeal of a Kennedy; his chief adviser, the half-human, half-Vulcan Mr. Spock, offered the cool rationality of that “IBM machine with legs,” then–Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. And the USS Enterprise, on a mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” pursued a seemingly benign anthropological interest in seeking out, engaging with, and trying to understand the native populations of a fascinating variety of distant worlds.

The “prime directive,” designed to govern the conduct of Kirk and his crew on their episodic journey, required non-interference in the workings of alien civilizations. This approach mirrored the evolving anti-war sympathies of series creator Gene Roddenberry and many of the show’s scriptwriters. The Vietnam War, which raged through the years of its initial run, was then demonstrating to more and more Americans the folly of trying to reengineer a society distant both geographically and culturally. The best and the brightest, on Earth as on the Enterprise, began to have second thoughts in the mid-1960s about such hubris.

Even as they deliberately linked violent terrestrial interventions with celestial ones, however, the makers of Star Trek never questioned the most basic premise of a series that would delight fans for decades, spawning endless TV and movie sequels. Might it not have been better for the universe as a whole if the Enterprise had never left Earth in the first place and if Earth hadn’t meddled in matters beyond its own solar system?

More here.

Margaret Eby at The Paris Review:

Some friendships hover between romantic and platonic, anchored to the latter by circumstance or fate. It’s a sitcom trope: the will-they-or-won’t-they couple, always teetering at the edge of love. But though TV demands a tidy resolution—the answer is almost always that they will, and do—in life such friendships often remain in limbo indefinitely, stretching on for years, even decades.

Such was the case for Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald. By the time they became acquainted, in 1970, both were well established in their fields—Welty in that nebulous genre called Southern literature, and MacDonald in hard-boiled detective fiction. Welty’s stories and novels captured the voice of small towns in Mississippi; MacDonald, the pen name for Ken Millar, set his novels in Southern California, where he and his wife, Margaret, had settled. His books explored, through his Philip Marlowe–equivalent Lew Archer, the ways in which the dream of suburbia could turn twisted and nightmarish.

Welty was an avid reader of crime fiction, so much so that the now-defunct Choctaw Books in Jackson used to keep a pile of paperbacks on hand for when she stopped by.

more here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

When Buchloh derides more or less all of modernist and contemporary representational art, from Giorgio de Chirico’s pittura metafisica to Neo-Expressionism circa 1980, as “a masquerade of alienation from history, a return of the repressed in cultural costume,” the vehemence of his condemnation is impressive until one considers how all-encompassing it is, and how easily it might be turned into praise. After all, maybe the repressed should be encouraged to return—and who’s to say that being alienated from history is categorically bad? Yet as slippery as Buchloh’s rhetoric may be, the object of his fulminations is, at times, clear enough. Klein is an easy target, given that he was an incorrigible mystifier who really did take a reactionary political stance. But Buchloh, who maintains that it’s impossible to “evaluate any artistic production without considering at the same time its manifest political and ideological investments”—and who also feels certain that he can detect its unconscious agenda—forgets that the artist’s politics are not necessarily those of his art. That Balzac was a royalist did not prevent his writing from having a revolutionary effect, or so Marx and Engels believed. Buchloh, by contrast, thinks he’s made his case by citing Klein’s “crypto-fascist statements.” He accuses Donald Judd, who admired the Frenchman’s blue monochrome paintings, of a “patently formalist” approach, and—pot calling the kettle black—considers Judd’s promulgation of autonomous art as an “authoritarian prohibition” of his own brand of Ideologiekritik. But while Buchloh would be happy to prohibit Judd’s attentiveness to form, the latter at least accounts for why Klein is still worth talking about today.

more here.

Phillip Lopate at the Times Literary Supplement:

Styron remains a dimly realized figure in his personal essays. We are told repeatedly the same facts about his childhood in Tidewater, Virginia, his grandmother who owned two slaves, his enlistment in the Marine Corps, his annus mirabilis in 1952 when his first novel was published and he went to France, found a circle of friends who would start The Paris Review, and met his wife. Of course any writer serially engaged in autobiographical accounts will be forced to repeat material; but Styron never rethinks or questions any of it. He uses practically the same language each time. It isn’t that he’s dishonest, but his public presentation of self lacks a more probing honesty: he always seems to be holding back. To get a sense of Styron the man you would have to turn to his daughter Alexandra Styron’s perceptive, frank portrait, Reading My Father (TLS, September 30, 2011). She claims her father had a wicked sense of humour, but there is precious little in evidence here, except maybe for a tongue-in-cheek takedown of Flo Aadland’s pop tell-all about Errol Flynn, The Big Love, and a sweet, whimsical piece about walking his dog, previously uncollected.

In the fallow decades when Styron struggled to bring off a new novel after the success of Sophie’s Choice, he dedicated considerable, if reluctant, energy to non-fiction. Many of the best pieces here, including the brilliant “This Quiet Dust” about how he was moved to write the story of the Negro slave, Nat Turner, appeared in the 1982 collection of that name. Styron was taken to task for The Confessions of Nat Turner by a group of African American critics, who objected to his having had the temerity to write a novel in the voice of a historic black rebel. He seems never to have got over the sting of that controversy, as evidenced by his follow-up piece, “Nat Turner Revisited”. In a tribute to Philip Roth, he singles out Roth’s having been the target of censorious rabbis as his point of identification.

more here.

The Unnamable River

1.

Is it in the anthracite face of a coal miner,
crystallized in the veins and lungs of a steel
worker, pulverized in the grimy hands of a railroad engineer?
Is it in a child naming a star, coconuts washing
ashore, dormant in a volcano along the Rio Grande?

You can travel the four thousand miles of the Nile
to its source and never find it.
You can climb the five highest peaks of the Himalayas
and never recognize it.
You can gaze though the largest telescope
and never see it.

But it's in the capillaries of your lungs.
It's in the space as you slice open a lemon.
It's in a corpse burning on the Ganges,
in rain splashing on banana leaves.

Perhaps you have to know you are about to die
to hunger for it. Perhaps you have to go
alone in the jungle armed with a spear
to truly see it. Perhaps you have to
have pneumonia to sense its crush.

But it's also in the scissor hands of a clock.
It's in the precessing motion of a top
when a torque makes the axis of rotation describe a cone:
and the cone spinning on a point gathers
past, present, future.

Read more »

From PhysOrg:

Mitochondria are not only the power plants of our cells, these tiny structures also play a central role in our physiology. Furthermore, by enabling flexible physiological responses to new environments, mitochondria have helped humans and other mammals to adapt and evolve throughout the history of life on earth. A pioneering scientist in mitochondrial biology, Douglas C. Wallace, Ph.D., synthesizes evidence for the importance of mitochondria in a provocative Perspective article today in the journal Cell. Residing in large numbers outside the nucleus of every cell, mitochondria contain their own DNA, with unique features that “may require a reassessment of some of our core assumptions about human genetics and evolutionary theory,” concludes Wallace, director of the Center for Mitochondrial and Epigenomic Medicine at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Wallace has investigated mitochondria for more than 40 years. In 1988, he was the first to show that mutations in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) can cause inherited human disease. His body of research has focused on how mtDNA mutations contribute to both rare and common diseases by disrupting bioenergetics—chemical reactions that generate energy at the cellular level.

Wallace and colleagues previously showed in the late 1970s that human mitochondrial DNA is inherited exclusively through the mother. They then used this knowledge to reconstruct the ancient migrations of women by comparing variation in mtDNA among populations throughout the world. From such studies, scientists have concluded that humans arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago and that only two mtDNA lineages successfully left Africa about 65,000 years ago to colonize the rest of the world.

More here.

Larissa Macfarquhar in The Guardian:

The term “do-gooder” is, of course, often demeaning. It can mean a silly or intrusive person who tries to do good but ends up only meddling. It can mean someone who seems annoyingly earnest, or priggish, or judgmental. But even when “do-gooder” simply means a person who does good deeds, there is still some scepticism, even antagonism, in it. One reason may be guilt: nobody likes to be reminded, even implicitly, of his own selfishness. Another is irritation: nobody likes to be told, even implicitly, how he should live his life, or be reproached for how he is living it. And nobody likes to be the recipient of charity. But that is not the whole story. Ambivalence towards do-gooders also arises out of a deep uncertainty about how a person ought to live. Is it good to try to live as moral a life as possible – a saintly life? Or does a life like that lack some crucial human quality? Is it right to care for strangers at the expense of your own people? Is it good to bind yourself to a severe morality that constricts spontaneity and freedom? Is it possible for a person to hold himself to unforgiving standards without becoming unforgiving? Is it presumptuous, even blasphemous, for a person to imagine that he can transfigure the world – or to believe that what he does in his life really matters when he is only a tiny, flickering speck in a vast universe? There are powerful forces that push against do-gooders that are among the most fundamental, vital and honourable urges of human life.

For instance: there is family and there are strangers. The do-gooder has a family, like anyone else. If he does not have children, he has parents. But he holds himself to moral commitments that are so stringent and inflexible that they will at some point conflict with his caring for his family. Then he has to decide what to do. To most people, it is obvious that they owe far more to family than to strangers; caring for the children of strangers as much as your own, say, would seem not so much difficult as unnatural, even monstrous. But the do-gooder does not believe his family deserves better than anyone else’s. He loves his more, but he knows that other people love their families just as much. To a do-gooder, taking care of family can seem like a kind of moral alibi – something that may look like selflessness, but is really just an extension of taking care of yourself.

More here.

Peter Reuell in the Harvard Gazette:

As builders go, termites don’t have many tools at their disposal — just their bodies, soil, and saliva. For guidance they have nothing to go on save variations in wind speed and direction and fluctuations in temperature as the sun rises and sets.

Despite such limitations, the insects have managed to develop structures that are efficiently ventilated, a challenge that’s still a struggle for human builders.

Led by L. Mahadevan, Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics, a team of researchers that included postdoctoral fellow Hunter King and MIT grad student Samuel Ocko has for the first time described in detail how termite mounds are ventilated. The study, described in an Aug. 31 paper in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that the structures act similarly to a lung, inhaling and exhaling once a day as they are heated and cooled.

“The direct measurements essentially overthrow the conventional wisdom of the field,” said Mahadevan. “The classic theory was that if you have wind blowing over the mounds, that changes the pressure, and can lead to suction of CO2 from the interior … but that was never directly measured.

“We measured wind velocity and direction inside the mounds at different locations. We measured temperature, CO2 concentrations … and found that temperature oscillations associated with day and night can be used to drive ventilation in a manner not dissimilar to a lung. So the mound ‘breathes’ once a day, so to speak.”

More here.

Alison Gopnik in The Atlantic:

In 1734, in scotland, a 23-year-old was falling apart.

As a teenager, he’d thought he had glimpsed a new way of thinking and living, and ever since, he’d been trying to work it out and convey it to others in a great book. The effort was literally driving him mad. His heart raced and his stomach churned. He couldn’t concentrate. Most of all, he just couldn’t get himself to write his book. His doctors diagnosed vapors, weak spirits, and “the Disease of the Learned.” Today, with different terminology but no more insight, we would say he was suffering from anxiety and depression. The doctors told him not to read so much and prescribed antihysteric pills, horseback riding, and claret—the Prozac, yoga, and meditation of their day.

The young man’s name was David Hume. Somehow, during the next three years, he managed not only to recover but also, remarkably, to write his book. Even more remarkably, it turned out to be one of the greatest books in the history of philosophy: A Treatise of Human Nature.

In his Treatise, Hume rejected the traditional religious and philosophical accounts of human nature. Instead, he took Newton as a model and announced a new science of the mind, based on observation and experiment. That new science led him to radical new conclusions.

More here.

Niki Seth-Smith in New Humanist:

Davies’s new book shows how “managing our happiness” is becoming an increasingly lucrative and insidious industry. True to its subtitle, “How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being”, it exposes the powerful interests that benefit from our increased willingness to monitor and meddle with our mental states. But Davies takes us much further than this. It is not just that Hudson Yard will soon exist. It is the fact that this Panopticon project is being heralded as “social progress” and – most disturbingly – that people actually want to live there. The Happiness Industry is the story of how we got here. Davies guides us through a cast of characters who took us forward in this zigzag journey. We start, naturally enough, with the founder of utilitarianism. We know Jeremy Bentham for his principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number”. Davies presents him as a forefather of the happiness industry. His ideas about the state and the free market working to punish and reward, through pleasure and pain, set the stage for “the entangling of psychological research and capitalism” that was to shape twentieth-century business.

The “science of happiness”, then, has been around at least since the Enlightenment. From Wilhelm Wundt, who set up the first psych lab in 1879, through the post war Chicago School of Economics to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the pioneer “management consultant”, Davies’s book shows us that this thinking is nothing new. Then why are we worrying? Google’s “chief happiness officers”, the opening up of official happiness statistics agencies around the globe: these are simply the latest developments in a trend ongoing since the eighteenth century. Not so fast. Yes, Davies’s book argues that the current science is “simply the latest iteration of an ongoing project which assumes the relationship between mind and world is amenable to mathematical scrutiny”. Yet the tools with which we are able to scrutinise ourselves are sharpening at a scarily exponential rate.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

The human body turns its proteins on and off (to alter their function and activity in cells) using “phosphorylation” — the reversible attachment of phosphate groups to proteins. These “decorations” on proteins provide an enormous variety of functions and are essential to all forms of life. Little is known, however, about how this important dynamic process works in humans.

Phosphorylation: a hallmark of disease

Using a special strain of E. coli bacteria, the researchers built a cell-free protein synthesis platform technology that can manufacture large quantities of these human phosphoproteins for scientific study. The goal is to enable scientists to learn more about the function and structure of phosphoproteins and identify which ones are involved in disease. The study was published Sept. 9 in an open-access paper by the journal Nature Communications. Trouble in the phosphorylation process can be a hallmark of disease, such as cancer, inflammation and Alzheimer’s disease. The human proteome (the entire set of expressed proteins) is estimated to be phosphorylated at more than 100,000 unique sites, making study of phosphorylated proteins and their role in disease a daunting task. “Our technology begins to make this a tractable problem,” said Michael C. Jewett, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering who led the Northwestern team. “We now can make these special proteins at unprecedented yields, with a freedom of design that is not possible in living organisms. The consequence of this innovative strategy is enormous.”

A “plug-and-play” protein expression platform

Jewett and his colleagues combined state-of-the-art genome engineering tools and engineered biological “parts” into a “plug-and-play” protein expression platform that is cell-free. Cell-free systems activate complex biological systems without using living intact cells. Crude cell lysates, or extracts, are employed instead.

More here.

Parade

Peter says if you’re going to talk about suffering
you have to mention pleasure too.
Like the way, on the day of the parade, on Forbes Avenue,
one hundred parking tickets flutter
under the windshield wipers of one hundred parked cars.
The accordion band will be along soon,
and the famous Flying Pittsburgettes,
and it’s summer and the sun is shining on the inevitable flags—
Something weird to admire this week on TV:
the handsome face of the white supremacist on trial.
How he looks right back at the lawyers, day after day
—never objecting, never making an apology.
I look at his calm, untroubled face
and think, That motherfucker is going to die white and right,
disappointing everyone like me
who thinks that punishment should be a kind of education.
My attitude is like what God says in the Bible:
Love your brother, or be destroyed.
Then Moses or somebody says back to God,
If I love you,
will you destroy my enemies?
and God says—this is in translation—, No Problemo.
Here, everyone is talking about the price of freedom,
and about how we as a people are united in our down payment.
about how we will fight to the very bottom of our bank account.
And the sky is so blue it looks like it may last forever
and the skinny tuba player goes oompahpah
and everybody cheers.
In the big store window of the travel agency downtown,
a ten-foot sign says, WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
The letters have been cut with scissors out of blue construction paper
and pasted carefully to the sign by someone’s hand.
What I want to know is, who will issue the ticket
for improper use of the collective pronoun?
What I want to know is, who will find and punish the maker
of these impossible promises?
.

by Tony Hoagland
from What Narcissism Means to Me
Graywold Press, 2003

John Waters in The Guardian:

I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn’t speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, “What? That’s your son.” I was really creating a character for myself and I always had a secret world. When the song I Ain’t Got No Home by Clarence Frogman Henry came out, he sang like a girl and a frog and I thought, “God, I’m trisexual.” But hey; I was a premature baby. I was overly baptised. That’s what happened.

All a parent has to do is make their kid feel safe and mine did. I heard my parents talking about me one day when I was at the top of the steps listening, like all children do, and my mother just said, “Yeah, he’s an odd duck” and then I thought, “OK, all right; they did their best to understand.” My father was horrified by my movies yet he lent me the money to make the early ones. And I paid him back with interest.

My mother’s brother became the undersecretary of the interior for Nixon, which did cause a little drama in my family because I was going to riots and everything, but he turned out great and gave us a nice cheque for an Aids benefit we had for the Serial Mom premiere.

More here.

Ewan Birney in The Guardian:

Recently, the Guardian published a story based on a scientific paper that claimed the stress experienced by Holocaust survivors somehow was detectable in their children through a process known as epigenetics. The paper was riddled with flaws: the scientists studied blood, which is a mixture of cell types, meaning there are any number of causes for the changes reported. The scientists only looked at a tiny subset of genes. They had an absurdly small sample size of 32 people, a tiny eight-person control group, who didn’t really look like good controls, and produced a contorted argument for why their data supported their original hypothesis. The paper probably shouldn’t have made it through to the scientific literature, and it certainly shouldn’t have made it to your Saturday breakfast reading. I don’t believe it and I’ll outline some reasons why below.

The scientific paper and newspaper story point to a rising interest in epigenetics. This is a seductive but rather slippery word that has come to mean a variety of things in relation to how molecular structures close to DNA work, in particular modification of DNA bases by methylation. It is certainly exciting, and has become a leading mechanism to explain how the environment communicates with our genes. But it’s also easy to oversimplify, and has been set up by some people as an inaccurate alternative to genetics.

David Patrikarakos in Politico:

Yanis Varoufakis lives in understated elegance. His apartment is spacious and pleasing to the eye. Shelves bulge with books on politics and economics, unsurprising for a university professor who was, until July, Greece’s finance minister.

Varoufakis is welcoming. He makes us coffee and puts a box of chocolates on the table, next to Joseph Stiglitz’s book on inequality, “The Great Divide.” He’s dressed in a dark red T-shirt and dark trousers, and pads around in his socks. When we arranged this meeting, he told me he didn’t want to talk about Greece’s election because he thought it a sad affair. After Sunday’s vote, though, he’s willing to speak.

I ask why he found it so depressing. After all, the voters didn’t punish his former government colleagues in Syriza or Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister. “I don’t want to reduce the significance of Alexis’ triumph,” he says, “but compared to the referendum, we had 1.6 million people who abstained. The party lost 363,000 votes since January. The democratic deficit has grown substantially. Even those who voted for [Tsipras], did so with sorrow and apprehension in their hearts. It was just a very sad election.”

“The great winners of this election,” he continues, “besides Alexis, were the Troika [the IMF, European Commission and ECB].”

More here.