Brian Owens in Nature:

With Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump talking about walling off the United States from Mexico, ecologists fear for the future of the delicate and surprisingly diverse ecosystems that span Mexico’s border with the southwestern United States. “The southwestern US and northwestern Mexico share their weather, rivers and wildlife,” says Sergio Avila-Villegas, a conservation scientist from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. “The infrastructure on the border cuts through all that and divides a shared landscape in two.” Trump’s policies tend to be short on detail, but he has talked about sealing off the entire 3,200-kilometre border with a wall that would be 10–20 metres high. “We will build a wall,” Trump says in a video on his campaign website. “It will be a great wall. It will do what it is supposed to do: keep illegal immigrants out.” Constructing a wall “would be a huge loss”, says Clinton Epps, a wildlife biologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “We know how important the natural movement of wildlife is for the persistence of many species.” Far from being a barren wasteland, the US–Mexico borderlands have some of the highest diversity of mammals, birds and plants in the continental United States and northern Mexico — including many threatened species.

A wall could divide species that make a home in both nations. Bighorn sheep, for example, live in small groups and rely on cross-border connections to survive, says Epps. Other species, such as jaguars, ocelots and bears, are concentrated in Mexico but have smaller, genetically linked US populations. “Black bears were extirpated in West Texas, and it was a big deal when they re-established in the 1990s,” Epps says. Breaking their links with Mexican bears could put the animals at risk again. And birds that rarely fly, such as roadrunners, or those that swoop low to the ground, such as pygmy owls, could also have trouble surmounting the wall. Such a physical barrier would worsen the habitat disruption caused by noise, bright lights and traffic near the border. And a wall would cut across rivers and streams that cross the border, severing a vital link. “When water crosses the border, it unites ecosystems,” says Avila-Villegas. “If we block the water, it affects nature on a much more fundamental level.”

More here.

Mark Ford at The London Review of Books:

Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words he deployed in his poems. But what exactly is the difference, one can’t help wondering while reading such notes, between an interesting allusion or echo and a mere verbal coincidence? And where should limits be set for the recording of these echoes or coincidences in the age of the internet, when it’s possible to pursue any phrase ad infinitum? Should notes in a scholarly edition aspire to the condition of an entry in the OED? Anyone with an interest in Eliot will be grateful for, and marvel at, the truly extraordinary knowledge of all things Eliotic that underpins these volumes, but – to get my quibble out of the way early, so that I can praise the numerous virtues of this edition with a clear conscience – it is not always easy to discern the value of the links the editors posit between Eliot’s words and the analogous phrases, drawn from a bewildering array of writers, presented for comparison in the commentary.

Those first ten lines of ‘Prufrock’, for instance, elicit, as well as the citations I’ve already mentioned, quotations from Jules Laforgue, W.E. Henley, Théophile Gautier, Russell S. Fowler (author of The Operating Room and the Patient, a 1906 book which includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow Martin (author of The Secrets of the Great City, 1868, which mentions ‘cheap hotels’), the London Baedeker, Cooper’s The Prairie and Hamlet’s ‘overwhelming question’ – ‘“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”

more here.

Clifford Thompson at Threepenny Review:

Among her many other poems, the African-American writer Gwen-dolyn Brooks wrote the following, perhaps her most famous work:

WE REAL COOL

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

The poem adopts the viewpoint of marginalized black boys who shoot pool together. Brooks explained about the passage “We / Jazz June” that these boys, effectively locked out of mainstream society, gleefully attack its cherished symbols: to June, that month of wedding announcements in newspapers’ society pages, the boys bring jazz, originally the music of the low-down. (“Jazz” was once a verb, synonymous with “fuck.”)

I may have read that explanation in a textbook, but it’s possible—and this is the version of events I prefer—that I heard it from Brooks’s own lips, on the one, cringe-worthy occasion when I met her. This was in New York in 1991. I was a freelance (read: an unemployed) writer of twenty-eight, scrounging for a living, and I had signed on to write a young-adult biography of Brooks.

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Christopher Spaide at The New Yorker:

Basil Bunting were not remembered for “Briggflatts”—his longest and best poem, first published fifty years ago—he might still be remembered as the protagonist of a preposterously eventful twentieth-century life. By the age of fifty, he had been a music critic, a sailor, a balloon operator, a wing commander, a military interpreter, a foreign correspondent, and a spy. He had married twice, had four children, lived on three continents (and one boat), survived multiple assassination attempts, and been incarcerated throughout Europe. He had also apprenticed at Ezra Pound’s poetic “Ezuversity” in Rapallo, played an “indifferent” game of chess with General Francisco Franco in the Canary Islands, and communicated with Bakhtiari tribesmen in classical Persian. Educated in Quaker schools, he was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the First World War—and released after a brief hunger strike—only to high-mindedly rush into the Second, during which he served in the Royal Air Force and MI6. Eventually, as he boasted to Pound’s wife, Dorothy, he became “chief of all our Political Intelligence in Persia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.” As a London Times correspondent in Tehran, in 1952, he watched as a hired mob congregated outside his hotel and chanted, “death to mr. bunting!” Guessing, correctly, that nobody calling for Mr. Bunting’s death had ever seen the man, Bunting joined the mob and chanted along with them. Soon after, he and his family fled the country, driving from Iran to Bunting’s mother’s house in England—a one-month trip—in a company car.

By the nineteen-sixties, though, Bunting’s life was at an uncharacteristic lull: he had spent the previous decade in his home of Northumberland, working at local newspapers, where he ended up subediting the business page and stock tables. He confessed in a letter to the publisher Jonathan Williams that his life had been “one of struggling to keep my belly filled and my children’s bellies filled, and no time whatever for literary pre-occupations.”

more here.

Mohammed Hanif in the New York Times:

Karachi, Pakistan — Last month I witnessed an 11-year-old boy’s first interaction with the internet. My nephew knew what the internet was, but he had never had the opportunity to use it. (Internet access in Pakistan is still quite low.) What did he want to look for, I asked. Bermuda Triangle, he said. Why exactly was he interested in the Bermuda Triangle? Because dajjal, our version of the anti-Christ, lives there now. Not much has changed, I thought: As a teenager I devoured stories about clever djinns, heartless monsters and harsh terrains.

Next, he wanted to look for scenes of the torture that angels inflict on dead sinners. Surely, such a thing doesn’t exist on the internet? It does. Getting worried that the boy’s parents might accuse me of corrupting him, I tried to take away the laptop. Just one more, he said, and after haggling over what he meant by one more — one more search, no matter how many hits? Or just one more page? — settled on a blood-curdling video set to a war anthem in which Pakistani soldiers are seen shooting at the Taliban and rescuing kidnapped children.

How did my nephew know about dajjal’s residence and those goings-on in the grave? Because he had heard about them from school friends. And by the end of his first tour of the internet, he had seen with his own eyes what he had only heard as rumor. Dajjal did reside in the Bermuda Triangle: We saw more than one image of that.

Growing up with myths and legends is an essential part of coming of age anywhere, but there comes a time when you expect to outgrow them and confront real monsters, like who you are and your role in making the world what it is. Initially you believe in a terrifying god. Then you think she isn’t terrifying all the time and realize you have to find your own way in life.

More here.

Corey Mueller in Popular Science:

Undoubtedly a hit of the summer, Netflix's Stranger Things is a Sci-Fi horror series that utilizes some serious scientific theories. Although they may use some terminology interchangeably, the series dives into some intense, confusing topics in theoretical physics and astrophysics.

Trying to figure out the science behind this piece of science fiction, Popular Science had the opportunity to speak with theoretical physicist Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. Though he's skeptical of the idea of parallel universes and accessing alternate dimensions, he's open and willing to explore the possibility of them. Here's our conversation with him:

In Stranger Things, they use the terminology parallel universes and alternate dimensions, interchangeably. Are these the same? And if not, what's the difference?

No, I mean, they're not really the same. They're related, but you can have a single universe that has more dimensions than the ones that we're aware of. There's reason to think that there might be more dimensions of space beyond our three that we don't see.

Now, you can also have universes, you can also have multiverse proposals — that is, multiple universe proposals — where each universe only has three dimensions of space, and one of time. You can have many universes, each of which has the same number of dimensions that our naive perception suggests to exist: three space and one time. You can certainly put all those ideas together and have a many universe theory in which you also have extra dimensions of space, so they're not mutually exclusive.

More here.

Raphaële Chappe over at INET:

General equilibrium theory is presented by Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green in two rather different ways. One is entirely abstractly, as relating to the idea that “we must simultaneously determine the equilibrium values of all variables of interest” (MWG, p.511). One can hardly quarrel with this ambition, if one is adopting an equilibrium approach at all. The other, rather more specific, involves the idea that “it aims at reducing the set of variables taken as exogenous to a small number of physical realities (e.g. the set of economic agents, the available technologies, the preferences and physical endowments of goods of various agents)” (MWG, p.511). Leave aside the point that “preferences” are hardly “physical”. This particular attempt at parsimony will have to justify itself through its successes.

One of the arguments as to why it has been successful is that it helps, we are told, to establish the conditions under which “market economies” have certain desirable properties. Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green, for instance, claim that the so-called First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics presents a ‘formal expression for competitive market economies of Adam Smith’s claimed” invisible hand” property of markets’ (p.545).[1] There is, however, a critical ambiguity here: do we mean by “market economies” the theoretical objects within the universe of general equilibrium theory or the real fields of activity they claim to model? If there were no relation then presumably the former would lose some of their interest.

As is well known, Cournot, Marshall and others began to establish a mathematical framework for partial equilibrium analysis, and Edgeworth and Walras posed and to a degree addressed the problem of identifying the conditions under which a price system might enable supply to be equated to demand simultaneously in all markets for traded commodities. However, it was only in the early 1950s, with the work of Arrow and Debreu, that research in the area of study that came to be called general equilibrium theory led to a formal demonstration of conditions for such an equilibrium to exist and to have specific desirable properties.

Arguably, the importance attached to research in general equilibrium came in part from the need to address a contrary idea, which had been prominent in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth: that of the anarchy of the market — the idea that the market is not harmonious and self-adjusting, automatically making its way to equilibrium, but rather unstable and even wasteful and chaotic.

More here.

Christopher Bellaigue in The Economist:

One of Simon Henderson’s first decisions after taking over last summer as headmaster of Eton College was to move his office out of the labyrinthine, late-medieval centre of the school and into a corporate bunker that has been appended (“insensitively”, as an architectural historian might say) to a Victorian teaching block. Here, in classless, optimistic tones, Henderson lays out a vision of a formerly Olympian institution becoming a mirror of modern society, diversifying its intake so that anyone “from a poor boy at a primary school in the north of England to one from a great fee-paying prep school in the south” can aspire to be educated there (so long as he’s a he, of course), joyfully sharing expertise, teachers and facilities with the state sector – in short, striving “to be relevant and to contribute”. His aspiration that Eton should become an agent of social change is not one that many of his 70 predecessors in the job over the past six centuries would have shared; and it is somehow no surprise to hear that he has incurred the displeasure of some of the more traditionally minded boys by high-fiving them. What had happened, I wondered as I left the bunker, to the Eton I knew when I was a pupil in the late 1980s – a school so grand it didn’t care what anyone thought of it, a four-letter word for the Left, a source of pride for the Right, and a British brand to rival Marmite and King Arthur?

To judge from appearances in this historic little town across the Thames from Windsor Castle, which many tourists think is worth a visit between the Round Tower and Legoland, the answer is actually not a lot. Aside from the fact that there are more brown, black and Asian faces around, the boys go about in their undertakers’ uniforms of tailcoats and starched collars, as they seem to have done for centuries, learning in the old schoolrooms and depleting testosterone on the old playing fields before being locked up for the night in houses they share with 50 of their peers (each boy has his own room). As the absence of girls demonstrates, Eton considers itself exempt from the modern belief in the integration of the sexes that so many independent schools now espouse. And it remains a boarding school – a form of education which is in decline, and which some people consider a mild form of child abuse. Add to all this the statue of Henry VI, who founded the school in 1440, amid the uneven cobbles of School Yard, and the masters cycling in their gowns to their mid-morning meeting, resembling nothing so much as a synod of ravens, and you get the opposite impression to that conveyed by Henderson: one of solidity, immobility – anything but dynamism.

To the question, “which is the ‘real’ Eton?” – the laboratory for progressive ideas about social inclusion, or an annexe to Britain’s heritage industry – the answer is of course “both”.

More here.

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

In the midst of a deeply divisive presidential campaign, more than 1,000 psychiatrists declared the Republican candidate unfit for the office, citing severe personality defects, including paranoia, a grandiose manner and a Godlike self-image. One doctor called him “a dangerous lunatic.” The year was 1964, and after losing in a landslide, the candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, sued the publisher of Fact magazine, which had published the survey, winning $75,000 in damages. But doctors attacked the survey, too, for its unsupported clinical language and obvious partisanship. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Associationadopted what became known as the Goldwater Rule, declaring it unethical for any psychiatrist to diagnose a public figure’s condition “unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”

Enter Donald J. Trump.

The 2016 Republican nominee’s incendiary, stream-of-consciousness pronouncements have strained that agreement to the breaking point, exposing divisions in the field over whether such restraint is appropriate today. Psychiatrists and psychologists have publicly flouted the Goldwater Rule, tagging Mr. Trump with an assortment of personality problems, including grandiosity, a lack of empathy, and “malignant narcissism.” The clinical insults are flying so thick that earlier this month, the psychiatric associationposted a reminder that breaking the Goldwater Rule “is irresponsible, potentially stigmatizing, and definitely unethical.” Putting a psychiatric label on a candidate they oppose can be a “seemingly irresistible tool for some in the field,” said Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry, medicine and law at Columbia University who disapproves of the practice. “This year, perhaps more than most, they’re persuaded they’re saving the nation from a terrible fate.” William Doherty, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, believes exactly that. In June, Dr. Doherty posted an online manifesto against “Trumpism” that has been signed by more than 2,200 mental healthspecialists. “Yes, for me this is an exception,” Dr. Doherty said. “What we have here is a threat to democracy itself.”

More here.

Elena Passarello at VQR:

We still know very little about the starling brain, really. Our science is only just catching up to the species’ complex body and behavior, some 225 years after Mozart’s death. Among our recent discoveries is a sturdy musical form inside one type of starling song. Though the structure allows enough variation for one starling to sound nothing like the next bird over, all courting males organize their love songs in a four-part sequence of Whistle, Warble, Click, and Screech.

Each bird begins with a set of repeated whistles—a kind of reedy introduction. Next, as the feathers at his throat seethe and puff, he weaves a run of maddening musical snippets—as few as ten or as many as thirty-five—curated into descending tones. Some of these snippets are filched from nearby species (or lawn equipment, or cellular phones). It’s here, in this second movement, that the “Twin-kle Twin-kle” meets the chackerchackerchacker, the smoke alarm, and the Bee Gees. Without stopping, he then slams into the third section, that of the percussive click solo. Syncopated and note-less rattles shoot from his beak at presto speed, as many as fifteen clicks per second. And then he ends with a fortissimofinale of loud, exclamatory shrieks, enough to wake the neighbors.

more here.

Aslı Bâli at Dissent:

Turkey has faced an unprecedented number of crises in the last year. The spillover from the war in Syria has undermined a peace process between the government and the country’s Kurdish community, with the success of Syrian Kurdish militias on the border with Turkey producing fears of separatism among Turkey’s Kurds and prompting the government to relaunch a counter-insurgency campaign (read: war) in the largely Kurdish southeastern provinces. Nationwide, the country has experienced at least five major Islamic State attacks since June 2015. Meanwhile, Turkey now hosts some 2.7 million Syrian refugees. Turkey has also experienced increasing political polarization since the 2013 protests against the government that began in Istanbul’s Gezi Park revealed a deep split in the country. All of these challenges have destabilized the country’s economy and unnerved its population.

Yet almost no one expected, one Friday night in mid-July, to turn on their televisions and see Turkish jets dropping bombs on the country’s own parliament building. Government reforms over more than a decade had civilianized control of Turkey’s military and the armed forces were already embroiled in a brutal war in the southeast. The attempted coup of July 15 and its aftermath has eclipsed the previous crises of the last few years in its magnitude and potential to radically transform the country.

more here.

Wilfred M. McClay at The Hedgehog Review:

From the very beginnings of American history, the concept of merit has enjoyed a certain pride of place. It found a welcoming home in a new republican nation that, from its inception, had sought to proscribe the titles of nobility and other hereditary distinctions of social and political rank, as well as practices such as primogeniture and entail that had long been characteristic of European aristocratic society. But even the most equality-affirming republic would need to generate a pool of talented and effective leaders, a leadership class recruited and empowered for public service. How to find appropriate means by which the members of such a class could be identified, trained, and elevated to that station? Who should lead, and how should the leaders be chosen?

In a republican America, these questions could no longer be answered by reliance upon bloodlines or skillful machinations. The answers would have to be grounded in the concept of merit. Those with demonstrable experience, those seen to possess the skills, knowledge, character, wisdom, and civic virtue requisite for membership in a “natural aristocracy,” would therefore be those most deserving of high standing and high responsibilities. But how were those individuals to be found and nurtured? If they were no longer thought to be available to be plucked from certain family trees, were they instead to be found randomly distributed among the members of a given society, like the souls of gold and silver drawn from the earth (or so the “noble lie” would have it) in Plato’s imaginary republic?1 Would their education, like the education of the Platonic guardians, be the key to developing their natural excellences and harnessing those talents to the furtherance of the public weal?

more here.

My Aunts

Always caught up in what they called
the practical side of life
(theory was for Plato),
up to their elbows in furniture, in bedding,
in cupboards and kitchen gardens,
they never neglected the lavender sachets
that turned a linen closet to a meadow.

The practical side of life,
like the Moon’s unlighted face,
didn’t lack for mysteries;
when Christmastime drew near,
life became pure praxis
and resided temporarily in hallways,
took refuge in suitcases and satchels.

And when somebody died–it happened
even in our family, alas–
my aunts, preoccupied
with death’s practical side,
forgot at last about the lavender,
whose frantic scent bloomed selflessly
beneath a heavy snow of sheets.
Don’t just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,
the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without sound.
.

by Adam Zagajewski
from Without End: New and Selected Poems
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Copyright © 2002
translated by Clare Cavanagh
.

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin. Scarti, 2013.

“Ghetto was published by Trolley Books ten years ago. It documented twelve contemporary gated communities, and was photographed by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin entirely on large format colour negative. The book took three years to produce and is now out of print.

Scarti di avviamento is the technical term at the printers in Italy for the paper that is fed through the printing press to clean the drums of ink between print runs. This by-product is usually destroyed once the book is printed.

But during the printing of Ghetto, the scarti – Italian for scraps – were saved and stored away by publisher Gigi Giannuzzi. Following his untimely death in December 2012 these scarti were discovered.

The twice-printed sheets reveal uncanny and often beautiful combinations.

Yet, in truth, they are nothing but a series of little accidents. …”

More here, here, and here.

Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

To read or reread Hemingway is always, in part, to inquire into the mystery of his significance. The ideals he symbolized are dated — masculinity and “heroic dissipation,” to quote Edmund Wilson in his collection The Wound and the Bow — while the appeal of his deceptively lean style seems to have eluded several generations of American novelists who valued excess over omission. However, if we can’t explain why, we also can’t evade the proposition that Ernest Hemingway continues to matter.

Lesley M. M. Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece “The Sun Also Rises” offers an opportunity to visit the question afresh. It isn’t just an account of Hemingway’s writing of his first major work, but also of an animating moment in literary history, when modernism was maturing in the barrel and Hemingway readied to pour the United States its first major dose. Like Hemingway’s posthumously published A Moveable Feast, Blume’s book covers the author’s search for a style, as well as a subject that would be thoroughly modern but would also capture the wider public’s imagination.

More here.

Scott Anderson in the NYT Magazine:

Before driving into northern Iraq, Dr. Azar Mirkhan changed from his Western clothes into the traditional dress of a Kurdish pesh merga warrior: a tightfitting short woolen jacket over his shirt, baggy pantaloons and a wide cummerbund. He also thought to bring along certain accessories. These included a combat knife, tucked neatly into the waist of his cummerbund, as well as sniper binoculars and a loaded .45 semiautomatic. Should matters turn particularly ticklish, an M-4 assault rifle lay within easy reach on the back seat, with extra clips in the foot well. The doctor shrugged. “It’s a bad neighborhood.”

Our destination that day in May 2015 was the place of Azar’s greatest sorrow, one that haunted him still. The previous year, ISIS gunmen had cut a murderous swath through northern Iraq, brushing away an Iraqi Army vastly greater in size, and then turning their attention to the Kurds. Azar had divined precisely where the ISIS killers were about to strike, knew that tens of thousands of civilians stood helpless in their path, but had been unable to get anyone to heed his warnings. In desperation, he had loaded up his car with guns and raced to the scene, only to come to a spot in the road where he saw he was just hours too late. “It was obvious,” Azar said, “so obvious. But no one wanted to listen.” On that day, we were returning to the place where the fabled Kurdish warriors of northern Iraq had been outmaneuvered and put to flight, where Dr. Azar Mirkhan had failed to avert a colossal tragedy — and where, for many more months to come, he would continue to battle ISIS.

Azar is a practicing urologist, but even without the firepower and warrior get-up, the 41-year-old would exude the aura of a hunter. He walks with a curious loping gait that produces little sound, and in conversation has a tendency to tuck his chin and stare from beneath heavy-lidded eyes, rather as if he were sighting down a gun. With his prominent nose and jet black pompadour, he bears a passing resemblance to a young Johnny Cash.

The weaponry also complemented the doctor’s personal philosophy, as expressed in a scene from one of his favorite movies, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” when a bathing Eli Wallach is caught off guard by a man seeking to kill him. Rather than immediately shoot Wallach, the would-be assassin goes into a triumphant soliloquy, allowing Wallach to kill him first.

“When you have to shoot, shoot; don’t talk,” Azar quoted from the movie. “That is us Kurds now. This is not the time to talk, but to shoot.”

Azar is one of six people whose lives are chronicled in these pages. The six are from different regions, different cities, different tribes, different families, but they share, along with millions of other people in and from the Middle East, an experience of profound unraveling. Their lives have been forever altered by upheavals that began in 2003 with the American invasion of Iraq, and then accelerated with the series of revolutions and insurrections that have collectively become known in the West as the Arab Spring. They continue today with the depredations of ISIS, with terrorist attacks and with failing states.

More here.

Stephen Hsu in Nautilus:

For many years I lived in Eugene, Oregon, also known as “track-town USA” for its long tradition in track and field. Each summer high-profile meets like the United States National Championships or Olympic Trials would bring world-class competitors to the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. It was exciting to bump into great athletes at the local cafe or ice cream shop, or even find myself lifting weights or running on a track next to them. One morning I was shocked to be passed as if standing still by a woman running 400-meter repeats. Her training pace was as fast as I could run a flat out sprint over a much shorter distance.

The simple fact was that she was an extreme outlier, and I wasn’t. Athletic performance follows a normal distribution, like many other quantities in nature. That means that the number of people capable of exceptional performance falls off exponentially as performance levels increase. While an 11-second 100-meter can win a high school student the league or district championship, a good state champion runs sub-11, and among 100 state champions only a few have any hope of running near 10 seconds.

Keep going along this curve, and you get to the freaks among freaks—competitors who shatter records and push limits beyond imagination. When Carl Lewis dominated sprinting in the late 1980s, sub-10 second 100m times were rare, and anything in the 10-second flat range guaranteed a high finish, even at the Olympics. Lewis was a graceful 6 feet 2 inches, considered tall for a sprinter. Heights much greater than his were supposed to be a disadvantage for a sprinter, forcing a slower cadence and reduced speeds—at least that was the conventional wisdom.

So no one anticipated the coming of a Usain Bolt. At a muscular 6 feet 5 inches, and finishing almost half a second faster than the best of the previous generation, he seemed to come from another species entirely. His stride length can reach a remarkable 9.3 feet, and, in the words of a 2013 study in the European Journal of Physics, demonstrated performance that “is of physical interest since he can achieve, until now, accelerations and speeds that no other runner can.”

Bolt’s times weren’t just faster than anyone else in the world. They were considerably faster even than those of a world-class runner from the previous generation that was using performance-enhancing drugs.

More here.