Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Violence has erupted across a broad swath of territory in recent months: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia and the American south. Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and the strangest – of world wars. Certainly, forces larger and more complex than in the previous two wars are at work; they outrun our capacity to apprehend them, let alone adjust their direction to our benefit. The early post cold war consensus – that bourgeois democracy has solved the riddle of history, and a global capitalist economy will usher in worldwide prosperity and peace – lies in tatters. But no plausible alternatives of political and economic organisation are in sight. A world organised for the play of individual self-interest looks more and more prone to manic tribalism.

In the lengthening spiral of mutinies from Charleston to central India, the insurgents of Iraq and Syria have monopolised our attention by their swift military victories; their exhibitionistic brutality, especially towards women and minorities; and, most significantly, their brisk seduction of young people from the cities of Europe and the US. Globalisation has everywhere rapidly weakened older forms of authority, in Europe’s social democracies as well as Arab despotisms, and thrown up an array of unpredictable new international actors, from Chinese irredentists and cyberhackers to Syriza and Boko Haram. But the sudden appearance of Islamic State (Isis) in Mosul last year, and the continuing failure to stem its expansion or check its appeal, is the clearest sign of a general perplexity, especially among political elites, who do not seem to know what they are doing and what they are bringing about.

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

Neuroscientists have identified an area of the brain that might give the human mind its unique abilities, including language. The area lit up in human, but not monkey, brains when they were presented with different types of abstract information. The idea that integrating abstract information drives many of the human brain's unique abilities has been around for decades. But a paper published¹ in Current Biology, which directly compares activity in human and macaque monkey brains as they listen to simple auditory patterns, provides the first physical evidence that a specific area for such integration may exist in humans. Other studies that compare monkeys and humans have revealed differences in the brain’s anatomy, for example, but not differences that could explain where humans’ abstract abilities come from, say neuroscientists. “This gives us a powerful clue about what is special about our minds,” says psychologist Gary Marcus at New York University. “Nothing is more important than understanding how we got to be how we are.”

Simple sequence

A team of researchers headed by Stanislas Dehaene at the INSERM Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at Gif-sur-Yvette near Paris, looked at changing patterns of activation in the brain as untrained monkeys and human adults listened to a simple sequence of tones, for example three identical tones followed by a different tone (like the famous four-note opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony: da-da-da-DAH). The researchers played several different sequences with this structure — known as AAAB — and other sequences to the subjects while they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The fMRI technique picks up changes in blood flow in the brain that correlate with regional brain activity. The team wanted to know whether the subjects of both species could recognize two different features of the sequences: the total number of tones, indicating an ability to count, and the way the tones repeat, indicating an ability to recognize this type of algebraic pattern.

More here.

Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books:

Just as there are writers’ writers, so there are painters’ painters: necessary exemplars, moral guides, embodiers of the art. Often they are quiet artists, who lack a shouty biography, who go about their work with modest pertinacity, believing the art greater than the artist. Noisier painters sometimes unwisely patronise them. In France, the 18th century gave us Chardin, the 19th Corot, and the 20th Braque: all true north on the artistic compass. Their relationship with their descendants is sometimes one of influence, more usually one of semi-private conversation across the centuries (Lucian Freud doing versions of Chardin, Hodgkin painting ‘After Corot’). But it also goes beyond that – beyond admiration, beyond style, homage, imitation. Van Gogh, even as he was violently wrenching himself towards a form of painting which still startles us today, was filling his letters and his mind with thoughts of Corot (he also greatly valued Chardin). It was a tribute by the living artist to his predecessor’s clarity of seeing, an acknowledgment that this is what painting is. Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Braque’s studio for the first time, felt that he had arrived ‘at the very heart of painting’.

But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted and more radical than we assume. Corot, for example, once dreamed the whole of Impressionism. As Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in May 1888,

When good père Corot said a few days before he died: last night I saw in my dreams landscapes with entirely pink skies, well, didn’t they come, those pink skies, and yellow and green into the bargain, in Impressionist landscapes? All this is to say that there are things one senses in the future and that really come about.

By the time of Van Gogh’s letter, the century-long struggle in French art between colour and line had been settled in favour of colour. (Settled for the time being, that is – until a few years later Cubism restored the primacy of line.) Corot pink developed into a leading, raging, shocking colour: the pink loitering surreptitiously in shadows, the overt pink of Monet’s haystacks and Van Gogh’s Pink Peach Tree, and still active in the pink of Bonnard’s last painting, Almond Tree in Blossom. But yellow and green were there too, as Van Gogh noted, and orange and red; oh, and blue and black. The tops were taken off all the tubes, and colour seemed to get its freedom and intensity back: richnesses that had been suppressed – either by self-censorship or academic dictate – since the days of Delacroix.

More here.

Gwynn Guilford in Quartz:

Sneakily but steadily, the Chinese government is pumping torrents of money into its banks. And many trillions of yuan have been flowing into stocks via the interbank lending markets.

Just as interesting, though, is where the cash isn’t flowing. Despite the flood from the central bank, the money geysering forth isn’t making its way into ordinary people’s pockets, their checking accounts, or growth-boosting infrastructure projects. That’s a disquieting hint that China’s $30 trillion in debt is terrorizing its economy far more than the country’s robust 7% GDP growth rate implies.

The first thing to note is the scale of the sums gushing out of the People’s Bank of China. Sources of this largesse include interbank lending, lowering of bank capital requirements—which freed up an estimated 1.5 trillion yuan ($240 billion)—and “innovative liquidity tools” (meaning, backdoor lending to banks).

This money should spur growth. However, Wei Yao, economist at Société Générale, has spotted a curious divergence that suggests it’s not.

More here.

Tosin Thompson in The New Statesman:

Every year, we travel through time.

In autumn, we travel forward in time by one hour, and in the spring, we travel back in time by one hour. Every four years we gain 24 hours in February, and every three years an extra second is added to a minute.

Time appears, and then – *poof* – disappears again. But, wait a minute (whatever a minute is). Time cannot spring in and out of existence, can it? Time loans the universe a second, an hour, or possibly a day until the deadline whereby the universe must pay time back, right? But where has time been all this time?

Time is hard to define. We measure time in years (the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun), days (one rotation of the Earth) and lunar months (the time it takes the moon to wax and wane). Time – hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds, nanoseconds – are all man-made constructs. We made them up.

And time is a concept that doesn’t necessarily apply to the universe.

Time has always been inextricably linked with the sun. The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians used sundials that roughly divided daylight into 12 equal segments. 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes are the product of the ancient Mesopotamian sexigesimal (base 60) numbering system. The French attempted to use the decimal system (base 10 rather than 12) for time-keeping, but that never caught on. The Greeks improved the sundial by marking gradations on sundials to indicate the divisions of time during the day.

And then the Scientific Revolution (1550-1700) came along. According to Vincenzo Viviani, Galileo's first biographer, 20-year-old Galileo got bored during prayers at the Cathedral of Pisa in 1583. As he daydreamed, something caught his eye: a swinging altar lamp. Curiosity got the better of him and he swung the lamp to find out how long it took to swing back and forth. He used his pulse to time large and small swings.

Galileo discovered something remarkable that nobody else had: the period of each swing was exactly the same. Then, the pendulum clock was born – the most accurate way of timekeeping at the time.

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

We all know people who act very differently depending on the company they find themselves in. They can be delightful in some circles, and obnoxious in others. The same principles apply to the microbes in our bodies—our microbiome. They have important roles in digestion, immunity, and health, but none of them is inherently good. They can be helpful in one part of the body and harmful in another, beneficial when paired with certain partners and detrimental when teamed up with others.

This means that, as I’ve written before, there’s no such thing as a “healthy microbiome”. Context matters. And contrary to what some companies might tell you, we’re still not very good at looking predicting what any particular community of microbes means for our health. One common approach is to compare microbiomes in people with or without a disease, single out species that distinguish the two groups, and use their presence or absence to make predictions. But those same bugs might have the opposite effect, or none at all, in another setting.

Alyxandria Schubert from the University of Michigan used a less reductionist approach—one that embraces the complexity of the microbiome rather than shoving it aside.

More here.

Eric Homberger in The Guardian:

Anointed “our pre-eminent lefty” among contemporary American novelists, EL Doctorow, who has died aged 84, was praised as the “epic poet” of the forgotten American left. It was praise that he did not welcome. He proved elusive when dealing with the pigeonholes crafted by reviewers, and not a few readers. In a career spanning five decades, Doctorow feared that tidy labels were a distraction. He lived contentedly within the paradoxes of his career.

He did not want to be called a political novelist. “My premise is that the language of politics can’t accommodate the complexity of fiction, which as a mode of thought is intuitive, metaphysical, mythic.” Although he wrote lovingly of the lost world of the Jewish Bronx in the 1930s, where he grew up, he rejected the idea that he was an autobiographical writer. “Every book is an act of composition,” he remarked in 1989, “and if you happen to use memories or materials from your own mind, they are like any other resource; they have to be composed. And the act of composition has no regard where the material comes from. So when it’s all done it’s all autobiographical and none of it is.”

Doctorow wrote a handful of the most influential historical novels of the past half-century, but was determined not to be known simply as a historical novelist. Praised for having “done his homework” on the American Civil war for The March(2005), he claimed that he did little research, freely inventing when the historical record seemed somehow incomplete. There is a moving letter in The March sent by the Union generalissimo William Tecumseh Sherman to a Confederate general whose son was killed in battle. But no such letter was ever written.

More here.

Andrew Rice in The Guardian:

After the coup failed, the raids began. On New Year’s Day this year, FBI agents descended on a blue split-level house in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the dead of night, near Austin, Texas, they searched a million-dollar lakeside villa. Agents interrogated an activist at his house in the working-class town of Jonesboro, Georgia. At a rundown townhouse development in Lexington, Kentucky, they found the wife of a US soldier, with a refrigerator full of her husband’s favourite Gambian delicacies – dishes prepared for a triumphant homecoming and repurposed for mourning.

When the employees of Songhai Development, an Austin building firm, arrived at work on Monday 5 January, they discovered the FBI had visited their offices over the weekend and seized all the company’s computers. The company’s owner, Cherno Njie, was spending the holidays in west Africa. But Doug Hayes, who managed construction for Njie, expected his boss back at any moment – they had an apartment project that was about to face an important zoning commission hearing.

“I guess he really had a two-track mind,” Hayes said in May, with a rueful laugh, over lunch at his favourite Texas barbecue joint. “He had that going, and he also wanted to be president of the Gambia.”

By the end of that Monday, Njie’s name was all over the international news. He had been arrested as he got off a plane at Dulles international airport near Washington DC, and charged with organising a failed attempt to overthrow Yahya Jammeh, the military ruler of the Gambia, a slender riverine nation of fewer than 2 million people. One alleged co-conspirator, a Gambian who had served with the US army, had already confessed to US investigators, telling them he was one of a small group of men from the diaspora who had taken part in a botched nighttime attack in December on Jammeh’s residence.

More here. [Thanks to Margit Oberrauch.]

From More Intelligent Life:

IN JAMES WHALE'S 1931 film of “Frankenstein”, the monster is brought to life as his creator imagined God’s first creatures to have been: by lightning. “Behold!” Victor cries, as the storm lashes his laboratory and its metal armatures begin to glow. “The great ray that first brought life into the world.” A couple of decades later, in a ground-breaking foray into the science of life’s origins, the biochemist Stanley Miller used high-voltage sparks to produce some amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. His Chicago laboratory was less dramatic than Victor’s, but the idea was the same: a flask of gases represented the atmosphere of the early Earth; the sparks, its lightning.

There is lightning, too, in a wonderful new book by Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London, and, I should add, a friend of mine. “The Vital Question”, rated “masterful”, “epic” and “scintillating” by the critics, contains as convincing an account of the origins of life as any now on offer. And it also contains lightning—but as a comparator, not an instigator. The strength of the electric field across the membranes that allow living things to capture the energy they need is a startling 30m volts per metre: the same sort of strength seen in the fields that tear open thunderclouds. Lane belongs to a small and persuasive cabal that is using studies of the way cells access energy to gain insight into all sorts of questions, from why there are different sexes to why creatures grow old (and—a personal favourite—why birds age much more slowly than other creatures of their size). The cabal takes Theodosius Dobzhansky’s well-worn dictum, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, and adds that nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of energetics.

More here.

Dan Bilefsky in The New York Times:

LONDON — The ancient manuscript, written on sheep or goat skin, sat for nearly a century at a university library, with scholars unaware of its significance. That is, until Alba Fedeli, a researcher at the University of Birmingham studying for her doctorate, became captivated by its calligraphy and noticed that two of its pages appeared misbound alongside pages of a similar Quranic manuscript from a later date. The scripts did not match. Prodded by her observations, the university sent the pages out for radiocarbon testing. On Wednesday, researchers at the University of Birmingham revealed the startling finding that the fragments appeared to be part of what could be the world’s oldest copy of the Quran, and researchers say it may have been transcribed by a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad. “We were bowled over, startled indeed,” said David Thomas, a professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham, after he and other researchers learned recently of the manuscript’s provenance.

The ancient pieces of manuscript, estimated to be at least 1,370 years old, offered a moment of unity, and insight, for the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. Professor Thomas said it provided tantalizing clues to help settle a scholarly dispute about whether the holy text was actually written down at the time of the prophet, or compiled years later after being passed down by word of mouth. The discovery also offered a joyful moment for a faith that has struggled with internal divisions and external pressures. Muslims believe Muhammad received the revelations that form the Quran, the scripture of Islam, between 610 and 632, the year of his death. Professor Thomas said tests by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit indicated with a probability of more than 94 percent that the parchment dated from 568 to 645.

More here.

Nayanjot Lahiri in Caravan:

THERE IS NOTHING ESPECIALLY STRIKING about the cluster of rocks which crowns the edge of a low hilly ridge near the village of Erragudi in the Andhra region. From a distance, the cluster appears unremarkable, while the ridge on which it sits is somewhat bare, rising out of a patchwork of cultivated fields and sparsely dotted with vegetation. The rocks on it stand a mere 30 metres or so above the plains.

Cascading down the rocks is a dramatic waterfall of words. More than a hundred lines in the ancient Brahmi script are imprinted across several of the boulders. Large portions of this scrawl are exceedingly clear, the characters boldly etched across the rock face. Some segments have deteriorated, while a few of the lines have been defaced by modern graffiti. Yet not even the English and Telugu scribbles of contemporary visitors can diminish the overwhelming impression of messages from antiquity created by the profusion of these ancient words. This copious transcription is part of a royal enunciation. The words and phrases that comprise it were composed by and inscribed at the instructions of Ashoka, the sorrowless one, the third emperor of the dynasty of the Mauryas, and ruler of a terrain that stretched, at one point, from Taxila in the north-west to Kalinga in the east.

Some 2,200 years ago, Ashoka made himself visible through the words that he caused to be inscribed at Erragudi, as well as at scores of other places across India and beyond. They represented an extraordinary democratic innovation—no ruler before him appears to have thought it necessary, or found the technology, to speak directly to his or her subjects. In keeping with Ashoka’s territorial ambitions, the scale of this project was truly imperial. The edicts were inscribed and installed across his lands, often in more than one language. A large and adept provincial administration helped carry his voice out to his subjects. They may even have reached those on the borders of the empire, an important consideration for a monarch who had undergone a religious conversion—one of the most famous in world history—and wished to reassure all people that the path of his dhamma was open to anyone who wished to follow its precepts with the right morals and true zeal. He transformed the way in which the state communicated with its people; in doing so, he hoped to transform the state itself.

More here.

Hugh Roberts in The LRB:

Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad dynasty, established by a clan of the Prophet’s tribe to rule the first Islamic empire. Syria is where, in 1516, the absorption of the Arab world into the Ottoman Empire began, with the Ottoman victory in the battle of Marj Dabiq; where the nahda, the cultural renaissance of the Arab world, blossomed in the 19th century; where the unified Arab kingdom that the British promised the Hashemites, who led the 1916-18 Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, was to have its capital. It is where, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the most politically developed and socially radical version of the dream of Arab unity was conceived by the founders of the Arab Socialist Baath (‘resurrection’) Party. Syria is also the terminus of the Arab Spring.

More here.

George Boolos in Mind (1994) [h/t: Dan Balis]:

First of all, when I say “proved”, what I will mean is “proved with the aid of the whole of math”. Now then: two plus two is four, as you well know. And, of course, it can be proved that two plus two is four (proved, that is, with the aid of the whole of math, as I said, though in the case of two plus two, of course we do not need the whole of math to prove that it is four). And, as may not be quite so clear, it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is four, as well. And it can be proved that it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is four. And so on. In fact, if a claim can be proved, then it can be proved that the claim can be proved. And that too can be proved.

Now, two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is not five, and so on.

Thus: it can be proved that two plus two is not five. Can it be proved as well that two plus two is five?

More here.

Jeet Heer in The New Republic:

E.L. Doctorow, who died yesterday, wrote historical novels that never ran the risk of being merely antiquarian. The past was never really dead for Doctorow, but always connected to present-day realities. Doctorow himself was more than a fiction writer. He was a bridge to an older America, one that shaped the modern world in ways that were often willfully forgotten.

In his 1991 book Postmodernism, the literary critic Fredric Jameson wrotethat “E. L. Doctorow is the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of the American radical tradition: no one with left sympathies can read these splendid novels without a poignant distress that is an authentic way of confronting our own current political dilemmas in the present.”

A prime example of what Jameson had in mind was Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), about a 1960s student activist researching his parents, executed spies loosely based on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Book of Daniel is much more polarizing than other Doctorow’s other novels—former editor of the New York Times Book Review Sam Tanenhausdismissed it as “kitsch” on twitter yesterday—but it is central to his development as a writer. It was in The Book of Daniel that Doctorow discovered his great theme, the return of the repressed, the way the political movements that were crushed by McCarthyism in the early cold war came to the fore in other guises in the 1960s.

Doctorow’s historical vision was enormous in scope and bookended by two wars: the Civil War and the Vietnam War. His prime interest was the America that ran from Abraham Lincoln to Harry Truman, the America that crushed the Confederacy but left the problem of slavery unresolved, the America of mass immigration and industrialization, of labor unions and robber barons.

More here.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Time:

Serena Williams won her 21st Grand Slam title at Wimbledon this month. This marks the 17th time in a row that she has defeated Maria Sharapova. Yet Williams, who has earned more prize money than any female player in tennis history, is continually overshadowed by the woman whom she consistently beats. In 2013, Sharapova earned $29 million, $23 million of that from endorsements. That same year, Williams earned $20.5 million, only $12 million of that from endorsements. How’s that possible? Because endorsements don’t always reward the best athlete. They often reward the most presentable according to the Western cultural ideal of beauty.

I know, you think this article is about racism. It’s not.

Misty Copeland just became the first African-American woman to be named principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. But when she was 13, she was rejected from a ballet academy for having the wrong body type. As an ad featuring Ms. Copeland put it, summarizing the responses she received early in her career: “Dear candidate, Thank you for your application to our ballet academy. Unfortunately, you have not been accepted. You lack the right feet, Achilles tendons, turnout, torso length, and bust.” At 13? That criticism of her body being too muscular and “mature” has followed her throughout her career. “There are people who say that I don’t have the body to be a dancer, that my legs are too muscular, that I shouldn’t be wearing a tutu, that I don’t fit in,” Copeland said in response.

What do these two highly successful athletic women have in common? They seem to endure more body shaming than their white, less successful counterparts.

More here.

Lamya H in Salon:

I’m excited about this date, I really am.

It’s been a while since my last heartbreak, and my best friend has personally taken on the task of deciding for me that it’s time to move on. She has yelled at me to download Tinder, cheered me on as I cobble together a profile. Encouraged me to swipe right a few times, talk to women I match with. It’s taken a while, but I’m starting to get into it. And now I’m excited about this date.

She’s risen to the top of my tinder crushes, this date. The banter – an essential component of all my crushing – has been electric, and she’s smart and funny and gorgeous to boot.

We’re meeting for ice cream, and she’s a little late, my date. I scan the passing faces for resemblances to the photos she has up on Tinder, wanting to spot her before she does me. “Look for the hijab,” I’ve told her, a little anxious to reveal what’s under the hats and the helmets in my own pictures. “I’m hard to miss.” Her nonchalant response – neither fetishizing nor surprised – puts me at ease. I’m excited about this date.

Except.

Except we spot each other at the same time, exchange shy glances and quick hellos before ordering, sit down with our ice creams, and her second question to me is: “So. Tell me, Lamya. How are you queer and Muslim at the same time?”

Always, the except.

This happens often enough that I have a strategy. For basic white girls with no subtlety, for women at lesbian bars making small talk, for those who have taken no time to get to know me and are obviously not invested in my answers. For quick dismissals, for moving on.

More here.

Doug Henwood in Jacobin:

Paul Mason has a breathless piecein the Guardian making grand New Economy claims that sound like recycled propaganda from the late 1990s — though he gives them a left spin: post-materiality is already liberating us. I wrote a book that was in large part about all that ideological froth, published in 2003, and so far I’ve been struck by the non-revival of that discourse despite a new tech bubble. Uber and Snapchat don’t excite the same utopian passions that the initial massification of the web did.

I’ll pass on refuting Mason’s article, because I already did that twelve years ago. But I do want to comment on one point that Mason makes — one that’s ubiquitous in a lot of economic commentary today: capitalists don’t need workers anymore. As he puts it:

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed — not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

I can’t make sense of the “currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences” — has capitalism ever skipped an innovation because of its social consequences? — but there’s no evidence that info tech is “hugely diminish[ing] the amount of work needed.” Sure, wages and benefits stink, but that’s about politics and class power, not because of the latest generation of Intel chips or something fresh out of the latest TechCrunch Disrupt.

More here.