Caleb Scharf at Nautilus:

Suppose that, instead of obsessing over colors that indicate the right conditions for life, we look for the colors of life itself? On modern Earth, the dominant light-harvesting mechanisms for life employ a set of pigments we call chlorophylls. These molecules preferentially absorb light in the blue and red, reflecting back greenish tones. As a result, near the surface of Earth’s oceans, microscopic photosynthetic organisms can create vast green blushes, mixed with the scattered blue light of pure water. On dry land, plant life can also produce great swathes of green, blending with the inorganic hues of the planet.

If we could see these signatures in Earthshine—the summed up, one-shot, reflected light of the whole planet—we might be able to tease out the signs of life, and then look for those same signs in distant planets. But evaluating Earthshine is difficult because we seldom have the right spectrographic instruments and telescopes sitting off world. So astronomers have resorted to ingenious methods that measure Earthshine as it reflects from the night side of the moon. It’s a technique that was used from the 1920s to the 1960s to evaluate Earth’s reflectivity, or albedo, but then largely forgotten.

more here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

At the beginning of his essay in the catalog for this year’s Venice Biennale, Okwui Enwezor asks: “What do we see? A void of nothingness? A horizon of possibilities? What to do?” Enwezor is describing, perhaps more accurately than he realizes, the perspective of the visitor to the Venice Biennale—not just this year’s (of which Enwezor is the artistic director and curator), but any biennale curated by anyone in recent memory.

“Leap into the void or into the fray?” These are the possibilities that Enwezor envisions, but there are others, one being to turn back and walk away. Which is what I did, inadvertently, two years ago: Having decided not to attend the preview of the 55th Biennale—thinking that I’d be able to see much more if I visited the show later, when the crowds would be less overwhelming—I never quite got myself sufficiently organized to plan the trip. And that was a shame, because Massimiliano Gioni’s 2013 Venice Biennale, “The Encyclopedic Palace,” might have been among the more interesting ones. Maybe I should just admit to myself that the attendant social whirl, though it distracts from the Biennale’s art, is partly what attracts me, or at least motivates me to go.

more here.

Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker:

Here’s what’s supposed to happen when you fall asleep. Your body temperature falls, even as your feet and hands warm up—the temperature changes likely help the circadian clocks throughout your body to synchronize. Melatonin courses through your system—that tells your brain it’s time to quiet down. Your blood pressure falls and your heart rate slows. Your breathing evens out. You drift off to sleep.

That, at least, is the ideal. But going to sleep isn’t always a simple process, and it seems to have grown more problematic in recent years, as I learned through a series of conversations this May, when some of the world’s leading sleep experts met with me to share their ongoing research into the nature of sleeping. (The meetings were facilitated by a Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship.) According to Charles Czeisler, the chief of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, over the past five decades our average sleep duration on work nights has decreased by an hour and a half, down from eight and a half to just under seven. Thirty-one per cent of us sleep fewer than six hours a night, and sixty-nine per cent report insufficient sleep. When Lisa Matricciani, a sleep researcher at the University of South Australia, looked at available sleep data for children from 1905 to 2008, she found that they’d lost nearly a minute of sleep a year. It’s not just a trend for the adult world. We are, as a population, sleeping less now than we ever have.

more here.

Derrick Jensen in Orion:

THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We’re fucked. Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have — or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective — to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they’re reduced to trying to protect just one tree. Here’s how John Osborn, an extraordinary activist and friend, sums up his reasons for doing the work: “As things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure some doors remain open. If grizzly bears are still alive in twenty, thirty, and forty years, they may still be alive in fifty. If they’re gone in twenty, they’ll be gone forever.” But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We’re losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don’t care. Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women’s shelters in the ’50s and ’60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.

More here.

From More Intelligent Life:

JOHN HAMMOND WAS a boy of ten when he fell in love with the new music called jazz. Rather than heading home after school to his family’s mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he would jump on an uptown bus and deposit himself, 30 blocks away, in a different world. The world he left behind was monied, white, sedate; the one to which he travelled was poor, black and popping with energy. To John Hammond, it felt like real life. The shop-owners and doormen of Harlem got used to the sight of the skinny white kid in a blue blazer and peaked cap, riffling through records in music stores, flashing a toothy grin at every-one he encountered. This was the early 1920s. By 1930, Harlem had usurped the South Side of Chicago as the prime destination for America’s jazz and blues musicians. At venues like the Lafayette, Big John’s Gin Mill, Minton’s and the Cotton Club, players and fans would drink, flirt, smoke and play. Hammond was still making the trip uptown, only now they let him into the clubs. In his button-down shirt and tie, he cut an incongruous figure. But he was friendly with dozens of black musicians and club-owners who knew that this lemonade-sipping young white man loved the same music they did and knew all about it. Hammond was born to immense wealth (his mother was a Vanderbilt) but longed to fly the gilded cage. To his father’s dismay, he dropped out of Yale in 1931 to work in the fast-growing record business. To succeed, he needed to find and record new artists. So he crisscrossed New York, from Greenwich Village to Harlem, in search of undiscovered talent. “Drop into almost any nightclub…any recording date or broadcast or audition or rehearsal,” wrote a jazz critic, Otis Ferguson, “and if you stick around long enough, you are almost sure to see John Henry Hammond, Jr, in the flesh, if briefly.”

One February night in 1933, Hammond rapped on an anonymous door on 133rd St. One of his singer friends, Monette Moore, ran a new speakeasy, and he had come to see her perform. As it turned out, she couldn’t make it. Her replacement was a girl called Billie Holiday. Hammond hadn’t heard of her—which meant nobody had—but she took his breath away. Just 17, Holiday was tall, unconventionally beautiful, with an imperious bearing. Her artistry gave Hammond shivers. She sang just behind the beat, her voice wafting languidly over the accompaniment like smoke from a cigarette. She didn’t just sing the songs, she played them with her voice. “I was overwhelmed,” Hammond said.

More here.

Juliette McGregor in Discover:

Ever fancied having a superpower? Something you can call upon when you need it, to hand you extra information about the world? OK, it’s not X-ray vision, but your eyes do have abilities that you might not be aware of. We are all familiar with color and brightness, but there is a third property of light: “polarization,” which tells us the orientation in which light waves are oscillating. Animals, like bees and ants, use the polarization patterns in the sky as a navigation aid. But few people, even in the scientific community, are aware that humans can sense the polarization of light with the naked eye. In research we’ve just published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, we used an experiment that was originally designed to test the visual abilities of octopuses and cuttlefish to investigate our human ability to perceive this polarized light.

Polarized Light

Imagine a jump rope is a light wave traveling through space. If you move the rope from side to side, the wave you make is horizontally polarized. But if you shake it up and down you create a vertically polarized wave. Generally, light is a mixture of polarizations, but sometimes – for example in parts of the sky, on your computer screen and in reflections from water or glass – a large percentage of the waves are oscillating in the same orientation. This light is described as being strongly polarized.

More here.

Stridulation Sonnet

Tiger beetles, crickets, velvet ants, all
know the useful friction of part on part,
how rub of wing to leg, plectrum to file,
marks territories, summons mates. How

a lip rasped over finely tined ridges can
play sweet as a needle on vinyl. But
sometimes a lone body is insufficient.
So the sapsucker drums chimney flashing

for our amped-up morning reveille. Or,
later, home again, the wind’s papery
come hither through the locust leaves. The roof
arcing its tin back to meet the rain.

The bed’s soft creak as I roll to my side.
What sounds will your body make against mine?

by Jessica Jacobs
from The Academy of American Poets

Louis Hughes in Nature:

Biologist Louise Hughes heads the bio-imaging unit at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. Also a multimedia artist, she makes labwork-inspired jewellery — including gold pieces based on structures such as the hepatitis virus. Here she talks electron microscopy, centrioles and chromosome earrings.

How do you see the relationship of scientific images and art?

I have always considered microscopy images and data to be beautiful. During my master’s degree in biological electron microscopy, I learned how to take images using negative plates and film — the use of modern digital cameras in an electron microscope is relatively recent. I see electron microscopy as another form of photography, just using a rather complicated camera. Art and science are both ways of looking at the world. How we use images and produce the graphics that explain our interpretation of the information we receive differs between the two disciplines, but there is a process that is similar.

You make 3D objects based on microscopic images for research and outreach, and also as jewellery?

I use a combination of techniques, including microscopy, digital modelling and 3D printing, and make adjustments until I have created the item I want. For outreach I generally make large plastic printed models, as close a replica of the 3D data as I can manage. For jewellery, I print the model in wax using a 3D printer (for the ‘lost wax’ casting method), which ensures a high level of detail. At the moment my favourite metal to work with is bronze: I feel the colour and weight create really striking items. I use microscopic structures in jewellery because they are aesthetically satisfying, and also universally human: at the cellular/organelle level there is no difference in race, sexual orientation, religion, country, wealth. We all have the same cellular components. Viruses can infect any one of us. My personal favourites are centrioles and axonemes — micro-tube structures found in cells. These beautiful, fascinating, endlessly complex biological structures apply across a wide range of organisms and kingdoms. I am now expanding the range to incorporate structures such as organelles and macromolecules. My awe at this amazing miniature architecture is not going to diminish any time soon.

More here.

Thomas Piketty , Jeffrey Sachs , Heiner Flassbeck , Dani Rodrik and Simon Wren-Lewis in The Nation:

The never-ending austerity that Europe is force-feeding the Greek people is simply not working. Now Greece has loudly said no more.

As most of the world knew it would, the financial demands made by Europe have crushed the Greek economy, led to mass unemployment, a collapse of the banking system, made the external debt crisis far worse, with the debt problem escalating to an unpayable 175 percent of GDP. The economy now lies broken with tax receipts nose-diving, output and employment depressed, and businesses starved of capital.

The humanitarian impact has been colossal—40 percent of children now live in poverty, infant mortality is sky-rocketing and youth unemployment is close to 50 percent. Corruption, tax evasion and bad accounting by previous Greek governments helped create the debt problem. The Greeks have complied with much of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s call for austerity—cut salaries, cut government spending, slashed pensions, privatized and deregulated, and raised taxes. But in recent years the series of so-called adjustment programs inflicted on the likes of Greece has served only to make a Great Depression the likes of which have been unseen in Europe since 1929-1933. The medicine prescribed by the German Finance Ministry and Brussels has bled the patient, not cured the disease.

Together we urge Chancellor Merkel and the Troika to consider a course correction, to avoid further disaster and enable Greece to remain in the eurozone. Right now, the Greek government is being asked to put a gun to its head and pull the trigger. Sadly, the bullet will not only kill off Greece’s future in Europe. The collateral damage will kill the Eurozone as a beacon of hope, democracy and prosperity, and could lead to far-reaching economic consequences across the world.

More here.

Carrol Clarkson in Berfrois:

On 21 December, 2012, I had the privilege of introducing J.M. Coetzee to an expectant audience at the University of Cape Town; he was about to read from his new, as yet unpublished work, The Childhood of Jesus. The occasion marked Coetzee’s return to UCT in an official capacity for the first time since his leaving for Australia in 2002. But here was my dilemma: what would I call him? If mine was to be an “introduction” in the Oxford English Dictionary sense of “presentation of persons to each other, with communication of names”, how many different names there were by which various members of the audience knew our distinguished guest: “J.M. Coetzee”, author, Nobel Laureate, twice winner of the Booker Prize; “Coetzee”, the writer whose novels and critical essays constitute such a rich resource for students of literature; “John M. Coetzee”, the animal rights group patron; “Professor Coetzee”, a former staff member of the Department of English Language and Literature at UCT; and to many present on the evening of December the 21st, “John”—a colleague, a former fellow-student, a friend.

Further still, in more complicated ways, the person standing before us was also “known” to us through the “J.M. Coetzee” of John Kannemeyer’s biography, which had just been published; “known” to us through the “John” of Coetzee’s fictional autobiographies, Boyhood, Youth, andSummertime; through “J.C.” of Diary of a Bad Year (the protagonist shares the author’s initials, and, like him, has written a novel calledWaiting for the Barbarians and a collection of essays on censorship). The person before us was also “known” to us through Elizabeth Costello, who, it seems, is also the author of Slow Man.

In the novel that shares her name, Elizabeth Costello, the writer, stands before a gate and is expected to make a statement of her beliefs if she is to pass through. One of her responses subtends much of the discussion in this paper:

Her books certainly evince no faith in art. Now that it is over and done with, that life-time labour of writing, she is capable of casting a glance back over it that is cool enough, she believes, even cold enough, not to be deceived. Her books teach nothing, preach nothing; they merely spell out, as clearly as they can, how people lived in a certain time and place. More modestly put, they spell out how one person lived, one among billions: the person whom she, to herself, calls she, and whom others call Elizabeth Costello. If, in the end, she believes in her books themselves more than she believes in that person, it is belief only in the sense that a carpenter believes in a sturdy table or a cooper in a stout barrel. Her books are, she believes, better put together than she is. (Elizabeth Costello 207-8)

Novels, like those written by Elizabeth Costello or by J.M. Coetzee, may well “teach nothing, preach nothing” at the level of overt theme. But (as this paper suggests), an analysis of a formal literary device in narrative fiction may well be one way of thinking through questions more usually associated with moral philosophy.

More here.

Peter Singer starts with this initial piece at the Boston Review:

I met Matt Wage in 2009 when he took my Practical Ethics class at Princeton University. In the readings relating to global poverty and what we ought to be doing about it, he found an estimate of how much it costs to save the life of one of the millions of children who die each year from diseases that we can prevent or cure. This led him to calculate how many lives he could save, over his lifetime, assuming he earned an average income and donated 10 percent of it to a highly effective organization, such as one providing families with bed nets to prevent malaria, a major killer of children. He discovered that he could, with that level of donation, save about one hundred lives. He thought to himself, “Suppose you see a burning building, and you run through the flames and kick a door open, and let one hundred people out. That would be the greatest moment in your life. And I could do as much good as that!”

Two years later Wage graduated, receiving the Philosophy Department’s prize for the best senior thesis of the year. He was accepted by the University of Oxford for postgraduate study. Many students who major in philosophy dream of an opportunity like that—I know I did—but by then Wage had done a lot of thinking about what career would do the most good. Over many discussions with others, he came to a very different choice: he took a job on Wall Street, working for an arbitrage trading firm. On a higher income, he would be able to give much more, both as a percentage and in dollars, than 10 percent of a professor’s income. One year after graduating, Wage was donating a six-figure sum—roughly half his annual earnings—to highly effective charities. He was on the way to saving a hundred lives, not over his entire career but within the first year or two of his working life and every year thereafter.

Wage is part of an exciting new movement: effective altruism. At universities from Oxford to Harvard and the University of Washington, from Bayreuth in Germany to Brisbane in Australia, effective altruism organizations are forming. Effective altruists are engaging in lively discussions on social media and websites, and their ideas are being examined in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even the Wall Street Journal. Philosophy, and more specifically practical ethics, has played an important role in effective altruism’s development, and effective altruism shows that philosophy is returning to its Socratic role of challenging our ideas about what it is to live an ethical life. In doing so, philosophy has demonstrated its ability to transform, sometimes quite dramatically, the lives of those who study it. Moreover, it is a transformation that, I believe, should be welcomed because it makes the world a better place.

More here.

From Jonathan David Kranz:

1. What’s the surprising inspiration behind one (your choice) of the articles or books you’ve published?

This year marks the centennial of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and I was asked to contribute a short story to an anthology that marks the occasion. While I cast around for an idea that would fit, the song “La Vie En Rose” played over and over in my head with annoying persistence. I couldn’t make it stop, so I finally stopped ignoring it and actually considered the lyrics. The instant I thought about life, seen through rose colored glasses, a vivid image flashed to mind: sunset over the Notre Dame, and two lovers separated by the Seine. Suddenly, I knew exactly what the story was going to be about — redshift and increasing distances.

2. If you could rescue one obscure book and make it more widely known to the world, which book would you choose and why?

The Dean’s Watch, by Elizabeth Goudge. Goudge is one of the last Victorian authors, and even though the undertones of faith in her books don’t always sit well with a modern audience, her writing has a lyrical beauty that is timeless. She has a flair for description, and picking just the right detail to zoom in on. She shows an incredible depth of understanding, and compassion, for each of her characters and her ability to completely inhabit their various perspectives is astounding. Her stories feel quiet and restful, there’s no high drama anywhere – yet they keep you engaged while you read them, and stay with you afterwards. I love most of her work, but The Dean’s Watch is up there at the top of my list, so that’s the one I would rescue from obscurity if I could.

More here.

Alex Bilmes in Esquire:

ESQ: Many of your songs are autobiographical. One of the reasons they resonate is people know what they're about: 'Let it Be', about your mum; 'Maybe I'm Amazed', about Linda. Are you thinking about those people when you play those songs? Isn't it painful?

PM: No, not always. I'm really doing them just because they're songs. I mean, when I do 'Let it Be' I'm not thinking about my mum. If there's one thing I know it's that everyone in that audience is thinking something different. And that's 50,000 different thoughts, depending on the capacity of the hall. Obviously, when I do 'Here Today' as I do, that is very personal. That is me talking to John. But as you sing them you review them. So I go, [sings] “What about the night we cried?” And I'm thinking, “Oh, yeah: Key West”. We were all drunk. We'd delayed Jacksonville because of a hurricane. We got parked in Key West and we stayed up all night and we got drunk – “Let me tell you, man, you're fucking great” – so I know that's what I'm talking about. I know the night. I do think of that.

ESQ: So you don't find yourself moved, in the way the crowd is, by the emotional content of the songs?

PM: Not all the time. You wouldn't be able to sing. You'd just be crying. But yeah, there are moments. I think it was in South America. There was a very tall, statuesque man with a beard, very good-looking man. And he had his arm round what was apparently his daughter. Might not have been! No, it was, it was clearly his daughter. I'm singing 'Let it Be' and I look out there and I see him standing and she's looking up at him and he glances down at her and they share a moment, and I'm like, “Whoa!” [He shivers.] It really hit me. It's hard to sing through that.

More here.

Richard J. Evans at the New York Review of Books:

In the popular imagination, the Nazi concentration camp now features mainly as a place where Jews were taken to be gassed. In a recent German opinion poll, most respondents associated the camps with the persecution and murder of Jews; under 10 percent mentioned other categories of camp prisoners, such as Communists, criminals, or homosexuals. The power of the “Holocaust” as a concept has all but obliterated other aspects of the crimes of the Nazis and the sufferings of their victims and driven the history of the camps from cultural memory. No crime in human history outdoes the genocidal extermination of six million European Jews on the orders of the leader of Germany’s self-styled “Third Reich.” Yet the majority of the Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder were not killed in the camps; they were shot, starved to death, or left to die of diseases that could easily have been prevented or treated but were not. The concentration camp was in no way synonymous with the Holocaust.

While facilities such as Treblinka or Auschwitz-Birkenau, constructed for no other purpose than mass murder, were first established during World War II, the history of the concentration camp, as Nikolaus Wachsmann reminds us in his impressive and authoritative new study, begins much earlier. The idea of concentrating a state’s enemies in a camp went back at least to the end of the nineteenth century, following the invention of barbed wire and the machine gun, in the Boer War and the Spanish-American War, and found expression in the Soviet system of labor camps and other products of twentieth-century dictatorships.

more here.

Franklin Strong at The Millions:

Look again at “On Self-Respect.” The whole essay is an act of gender-bending. Didion rejects the role of Cathy from Wuthering Heights, and of Francesca da Rimini. Instead, she compares herself to Raskolnikov and says she wants to be more like Rhett Butler. She puts Jordan Baker’s manhood up against Julian English’s: Jordan wins. And then there are the references to the Wild West, to Waterloo and the playing fields of Eton, and to Chinese Gordon holding Khartoum against the Mahdi.

(By the way, I had to look up Chinese Gordon and the Mahdi. I think that should go on the record if we’re going to make something out of me not knowing about crepe-de-Chinewrappers.)

Besides Didion’s subject matter (wildfires, John Wayne), Jessica zooms in on what she calls Didion’s “glacial emotional distance.” Coolness, hardness, distance: these are characteristics that show up regularly in writing about Didion’s writing. Here’s Roiphe:

There is in her delicate, urban, neurotic sensibility something of the hardy pioneer ancestors she describes, jettisoning rosewood chests in the crossing, burying the dead on the wagon trail, never looking back. At one point she quotes another child of California, Patty Hearst, saying, ‘Never examine your feelings — they’re no help at all.’

more here.

James McAuley at Aeon Magazine:

In the US, Arendt was rewarded handsomely for her intellect and tenacity, becoming a bestselling author published by the most prestigious trade presses as well as the first woman appointed to a professorship at Princeton. She also enjoyed a celebrity presence at the University of Chicago and the New School in New York, the stages on which she fashioned herself an eminence in the republic of letters. This is how she appears in Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 biopic: a dowager queen of Riverside Drive, sparring with pundits such as Norman Podhoretz and Kurt Blumenfeld by day and entertaining authors such as Mary McCarthy and Philip Rahv by night. Add wine, cigarettes and scandal, and this Arendt becomes a kind of monument, the avatar for a bygone era when the literary feud was still a line in the sand, and the personal was not merely political, but ideological.

But there is more to Arendt’s unsettled legacy than glamour, controversy and a provocative set of historical and philosophical interpretations. Forty years after her death, perhaps the most enduring contribution of this decidedly 20th-century thinker is her thinking about a cosmopolitanism suited to the challenges of the 21st century she’d never see.

more here.

Sughra Raza. Catwalk Theater, Johannesburg, August 2014.

Digital photograph.