David Noonan in Smithsonian:

Two hundred and thirty-five years after the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani reported that dismembered frog legs twitch in response to a static charge applied to a nerve, we are still exploring the mysteries of what he called “animal electricity,” especially in the brain. That the brain generates a bit of its own electricity, which can be detected by an electroencephalogram, or EEG, is well established, as is the fact that some neurosurgeons today sometimes use hair-thin electrodes to stimulate deep brain structures and stop Parkinson’s tremors. But scientists are now exploring a question that is, well, mind-boggling: Can low-voltage doses of electricity, transmitted through hair, skin and skull directly into particular regions of the brain, make already healthy people sharper and more alert?

Aron Barbey, a 39-year-old neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, is a leader in this research, though he is excruciatingly cautious about its prospects. He resists the idea that tomorrow’s malls and airports will feature commercial brain-charging stations, updated versions of today’s massage stops, but if that future (or something like it) comes to pass, his work will have played a critical role in bringing it about. Barbey is the director of the UI’s Decision Neuroscience Laboratory at the university’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and his experiments appear to point to a time when students, soldiers, executives and the elderly could all benefit from a treatment called transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS).

More here.

Hearing Parker for the First Time

The blue notes spiraling up from the transistor radio
tuned to WNOE, New Orleans, lifted me out of bed
in Seward County, Kansas, where the plains wind riffed
telephone wires in tones less strange than the bird songs
of Charlie Parker. I played high school tenor sax the way,
I thought, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young might have
if they were, like me, untalented and white, but Ornithology
came winding up from the dark delta of blues and dixieland
into my room on the treeless and hymn-ridden high plains
like a dust devil spinning me into the Eleusinian mysteries
of the jazz gods though later I would learn that his long
apprenticeship in Kansas City and an eremite’s devotion
to the hard rule of craft gave him the hands that held
the reins of the white horse that carried him to New York
and 52nd Street, farther from wheat fields and dry creek beds
than I would ever travel, and then carried him away.

by B.H. Fairchild
from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
W.W. Norton, 2003
.

From KurzweilAI:

Australian researchers have discovered that an existing medication could have promise in preventing breast cancer in women carrying a faulty BRCA1 gene, who are at high risk of developing aggressive breast cancer. Currently, many women with this mutation choose surgical removal of breast tissue and ovaries to reduce their chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Notably, in May 2013, actress Angelina Jolie, who reportedly had with an estimated 87 per cent risk of breast cancer and 50 per cent risk of ovarian cancer, chose to have d2ouble mastectomy with breast reconstruction. Women with mutation have an approximately 65% cumulative risk of developing breast cancer by age 70, the researchers note, based on a 2003 combined analysis of 22 studies.

A drug option

But now, another option may be be possible, as 16 scientists (most in Australia) report in an advance online paper in Nature Medicine this week. The researchers discovered that pre-cancerous cells could be identified by a marker protein called RANK. A concurrent study led by an Austrian group had also identified the importance of RANK. This was an important breakthrough, they said, because an inhibitor of the RANK signalling pathway was already in clinical use: the drug denosumab. The researchers suggest the drug may have potential to prevent breast cancer from developing. If confirmed in clinical studies, this would provide a non-surgical option to prevent breast cancer in women with elevated genetic risk.

More here.

Sumayya Kassamali in Caravan:

“AND WERE YOU POLITICALLY INVOLVED in Beirut?” an interviewer once asked Faiz Ahmed Faiz, arguably the greatest Urdu poet of the last century. “I was, indeed, yes!” he replied. “You had to be, if you were part of the suffering of the place and of the people.”

Today, the most visible signs of the subcontinent’s involvement in Beirut are the neon-green-uniformed South Asian men emptying plastic garbage bins into large green trucks on the street. Images of India abound in the city’s hip yoga culture, with Pakistan harder to find. The Arabic word for “Sri Lankan,” in its feminine adjectival form, is widely synonymous with “maid.” Diversity fares mildly better in elite liberal enclaves such as the American University of Beirut or the contemporary art scene, which are generally sprinkled with a few brown faces. There are moments, of course. An independent film festival recently screened the Indian filmmaker Anurag Kashyap’s crime drama Gangs of Wasseypur, a Palestinian refugee camp includes a grocery store stocked with imported ingredients for its Bangladeshi residents (cheap housing and limited state intervention attract the camp’s mixed occupants), and a Nepalese feminist organisation offers a stream of regular programming for its community of domestic workers. In Faiz’s day, Asians had just begun to enter Lebanon’s manual and domestic labour force. But for politically conscious intellectuals in Lahore or Delhi, the tiny Arab country bordered by Syria and Palestine was a closely followed news item in an era marked by the spirit of socialism and Third World solidarity.

In 1977, General Zia ul-Haq deposed Pakistan’s elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in a coup that would lead to over a decade of American-supported military rule. Soon afterwards, the 67-year-old Faiz—a former political prisoner, close associate of Bhutto and outspoken socialist—decided to leave his home in Karachi for Beirut. This seemed a curious choice.

More here.

Daniel Davies in Vox:

One big factor is that the character of a neighborhood is changed by the kind of people who move out just as much as by the kind of people who move in. And regional migration within the UK has been a big phenomenon over the past 20 years, as London and the Southeast have grown – economically and in population terms – much faster than the rest of the country.

Some of the most Euroskeptical areas have seen rapid declines in their population. In Stoke-on-Trent, for example, the local council has so many empty homes that it sometimes sells them for £1 each, in a publicity stunt aimed at attracting economically active people.

This depopulation has been driven by deindustrialization. While the UK has in general been good at creating jobs and keeping unemployment down, the northern and coastal towns where Brexit support is the highest tend to be home to either difficult and dangerous labor-intensive industries or low-level service industry employers like hotels and care homes. As the UK labor force has got more productive and better educated, on average, it’s unsurprising that workers have tended to migrate to the higher-paid new jobs being created in the growing regions around London.

Lopsided and London-centric development is a real problem. And of course, although it is an old cliché for miners and fishermen to hope that their children don’t follow them, that doesn’t make it any less painful to have your children (and now grandchildren) living on the other side of the country, in a world that’s culturally and economically even further away than its geographic distance.

It’s particularly challenging when the housing and employment vacuum created by their departure gets filled with new European immigrants, who act as very visible symbols of the underlying change when you interact with them in their service jobs, or at the doctor’s office.

More here.

Henry Farrell in Crooked Timber:

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s new book, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper does four things. First, it makes the case for the mixed economy – the effort to make the market and state work together. Second, it makes the case that mixed government existed. The US used not to be as divided as it is now, and business, rather than being committed to a virulently anti-state agenda was often relatively pragmatic. Third, it tries to explain how this went South – how mixed government, and indeed government, became a dirty word. Finally, it asks how mixed government can be resuscitated again.

Hacker and Pierson’s political argument, as I read it, has a lot in common with that of old-style liberals like J.K Galbraith and Charles Lindblom. Hacker and Pierson don’t want an overweeningly powerful state – instead, they want a state and market that work together. They borrow Lindblom’s analogy of markets working like the fingers of a hand to provide dexterity, while the state works like a thumb, to provide authority and to help grasp things that need to be grasped. This does not imply that the state and markets should be guided by a single will so much as that they work, when they work well, in complementary ways. Indeed, like both libertarians and many leftists they are highly suspicious of what might happen when the state and private industry build relations that are too congenial. As they describe it (p.5), “Democracy and the market – thumbs and fingers – have to work together, but they also need to be partly independent of each other, or the thumb will seek to provide effective counterpressure to the fingers.”

In a mixed economy, government provides services and goods that will be underprovided by the private sector, or perhaps not provided at all. It also regulates market actors, obliging them to behave more honestly towards the consumers of their products. As the economy becomes increasingly complex, it becomes increasingly easy for private sector interests to take advantage of ordinary people. Regulators can help restrain business through regulation and antitrust (Hacker and Pierson acknowledge Woodrow Wilson’s racism but have kind words for his efforts to build the institutions that would regulate market competition). Unless business is restrained by the state, it is liable to behave badly.

More here.

Paul O’Mahoney at The Dublin Review of Books:

This latest addition to the prolific Žižek’s output is in large part culled from pieces of journalism published over the past twelve months, dealing with the migrant crisis and related phenomena, from the Paris terror attacks of November 2015 to the mass sexual assaults during new year’s celebrations in Cologne. The book allows for presentation of these reflections in a more considered and consistent form; and, while its tone, brisker pace and brevity may betray its journalistic origins, it is not inappropriate, given the urgency of the subject matter and the need for practical proposals, that it should have more references to other pieces of journalism and sociological research and fewer to the German Idealist philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis so associated with Žižek’s work.

The figure of the neighbour, in the abstract, the multiplicity of that figure’s potential manifestations and equally diverse forms of “troubles with the neighbours”, have always been central to Žižek’s work; it is thus no surprise that migrations unprecedented in the era of welfare state capitalism should not only occasion his direct reflections but also, and more unusually, force his hand as regards offering solutions. The current mass migrations of course present a dual challenge: on the one side, the European destination countries feel it acutely and fear it as a potential threat to their way of life, an unexampled form of present, and promise of future, “troubles with the neighbours”. The challenge facing those attempting to reach Europe meanwhile is not only to stay alive; it does not end with their gaining Europe but is only transformed into a fresh set of troubles in a new neighbourhood.

more here.

Josephine Livingstone at The New Yorker:

The medieval poem “Pearl” was written by someone whose identity we do not know, and is set mostly within a dream. Neither of these facts is unusual in medieval poetry. Authorship is often unclear for works from that period, and dreams were popular as literary devices: then, as now, dreams allow poets to illustrate ideas that might otherwise be inexpressible. The “Pearl” poet used the technique to account for an experience that still seems impossible to describe—the loss of a child.

In the poem, the narrator visits the spot where a pearl once slipped from his grasp and got lost among “Gilofre, gyngure, & gromylyoune, / & pyonys powdered ay bytwene” (“ginger, gromwell, and gillyflower / with peonies scattered in between”). Swooning into unconsciousness, he comes to in a dream, in a place he has never been before, where cliffs split the sky (“ther klyfez cleven”). Across a river, he sees his pearl again, but now the “perle” is no mere thing—she is a young girl, richly arrayed in an elaborate outfit covered in pearls. Pearl also seems to be her name, or at least it is how the man addresses her: “ ‘O perle,’ quod I . . . ‘Art thou my perle?’ ” In reply, she calls him a jeweller, and he refers to her as a gem (“ ‘Jueler,’ sayde that gemme clene”).

more here.

Anthony Madrid at The Paris Review:

Here is my own attempt at delivering the thing in all its roguish wit or egomaniacal misogyny:

Could Beatrice master the technique?
Or Laura write a sonnet—? Ach, enough.
I taught these Russian women how to speak.
God! if only I could make ’em all shut up.

One piece of serendipity that keeps nagging at me, which I shall not withhold here: it’s quite possible to make a new, macaronic epigram out of this material, wherein the second half translates the first. You’ll have to read it aloud to see how it strangely rhymes:

Ya nauchila zhenshchin govorit’…
No, Bozhe, kak ikh zamalchat’ zastavit’!
I taught these Russian women how to speak.
Now somebody show me how to make ’em stoppit!

It’s not necessary to read Akhmatova’s first two lines as if she is straightforwardly speaking from her own position, by the way. She may have thought—I’m convinced she did think—that it was obviously possible for a woman to “glorify love’s fire,” “create like Dante,” and so on; she had done it herself. So, when the greatest female poet of all time (in her own eyes and those of others) asks, “Can women write great stuff?” she’s channeling a voice not quite her own.

more here.

Judith Stark in The Conversation:

This is an enduring dilemma in the area of ethics and one that has recently come to light with charges of unethical behavior brought against a prominent philosopher, Professor Thomas Pogge of Yale University. Pogge has been accused of manipulating younger women in his field into sexual relationships, a charge he has strenuously denied.

Without making any judgment on the case itself, this situation raises larger questions about how the behavior of the experts in ethics is to be reviewed and evaluated.

As with most professions, there are no “ethics police” in the professions themselves. We who work in these professions are expected to police ourselves according to our codes of ethics, as is the case, for example, with physicians, lawyers and clergy members. Obviously, law enforcement comes into the picture with actions that are against the law.

Of course, we know that these professions also harbor people who do engage in unethical behavior, but in the case of experts in ethics, should we expect a higher standard of good behavior simply because they are experts in ethics?

More here.

Breaking Pitch

My father raises his hand to signal “enough,”
but I'm still pitching, and the ball spins
off my fingertips–a breaking pitch
with so much stuff on it my imaginary batter
is too baffled to swing, so much stuff
the angels whistle, the crows near
the garbage cans take off in a flurry
of caws, and the mosquitoes burst in midair,
so much stuff my father, fear
in his eyes, hits the pavement,
behind him glass shattering.

Above the garage, Mrs. Golub, who runs
a vacuum cleaner over her wood floors every two hours,
yells out the window,”I told you something
bad would happen if you let that kid play here.”
And Miss Lamar pushes her long
nose into the screen, “See if my car
has any glass on it,” and Mr. Gorelick,
who sells silk ties to posh men's shops,
shouts, “Clean up the mess, boy.”

I hear the cars on Clayton Road,
their tinny horns, the wind shaking
down leaves, the sound of the breaking
pitch trembling the wires that cross
from neighborhood to neighborhood, echoing
in shells strung from my best friend's
doorway, the white horsehide glinting
in the sun, a flash of light,
a prophecy of greatness.

Shaking his head, my father comes toward me,
his tightened fists warning me that I'll be sorry.
“Helluva curve,” he mutters, “helluva curve.”

by Jeff Friedman
from, Working in Flour
Carnegie University Press
.

Andreas Kluth in 1843 Magazine:

Many Germans have been glued to a television series, “Where We Come From”, that explains Germany’s long, complicated and often tragic history. The “we” in the title, however, is deceptive, for the host and narrator is Sir Christopher Clark, an Australian historian knighted for his services to Anglo-German relations. His academic credentials are excellent. His book on Prussia, “Iron Kingdom”, may be the best on the subject. His tome on the first world war, “The Sleepwalkers”, became a bestseller. But Germany has plenty of its own historians. Why Clark? The answer starts with the dappled bow tie he wears as he drives around Germany in a red cabriolet vw Beetle: the quintessential Brit (Aussies are close enough) in the quintessential German vehicle. Then there’s the language. Clark speaks grammatically flawless German, but with enough of an English cadence to sound cheeky, witty and incisive. Occasionally he uses humour, which can still be shocking on German public television. Sometimes he even says nice things about the country’s past, which to Germans is truly shocking. He does not seem full of himself. To Germans that is refreshing.

German Anglophiles consider such attributes “Anglo-Saxon”. The term is stretchable in this context and includes anybody English-speaking, whether Celtic or Saxon, pale or brown, from down under or beyond the pond. Clark is not an isolated case. The late Gordon Craig, a Scottish-American historian, achieved similar success. So has Timothy Garton Ash, a historian at Oxford and Stanford, who wows Germans with pithy insights delivered in sophisticated German.

More here.

Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

I’m standing in the spiraling rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, and over me dangles a chaotic mess held together by translucent Plexiglas. In the shadow the sculpture casts on the wall, the shapes converge in a pleasing negative blending intention and happenstance – impossible to predict, yet clearly part of a plan. On evidence, this is an artist thinking experimentally, and in multiple dimensions.

The industrial designer, artist and photographer Lázló Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was certainly that. As the Guggenheim’s retrospective Moholy-Nagy: Future Present shows, the Hungarian pioneer of the Bauhaus and beyond worked in a dazzling array of media: film, photography, painting, sculpture, graphic design and typography. But behind the restless eclecticism, he adhered to the unifying theory (with the Constructivists) that art is integral to social transformation and must embrace new technologies. At a time of vast industrial expansion, he declaimed himself as “[n]ot against technological progress, but with it”, championing novel industrial materials — from Formica and aluminium to the Plexiglas in Dual Form with Chromium Rods (1946) in the rotunda. Drawn towards the airy, the transparent and the brilliantly coloured, he was also in love with light and movement: like contemporary Alexander Calder, he engineered moving parts and even electric motors into kinetic sculptures.

More here.

Yoona Lee in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In 1993 an unusually precocious 23-year-old named Alain de Botton rocked the literary world with the release of his first novel, On Love (also known as Essays in Love). Since then he has become a minor cultural phenomenon, thanks in part to his preternatural understanding of the human condition, unerringly articulate writing, and embrace of a mind-bogglingly broad array of subject matter, from commercial cookie manufacturing to Roman architecture. An accomplished polymath, de Botton is a journalist, novelist, and philosopher who has even founded a global, multichannel enterprise called The School of Life. For more than two decades, his second novel has been breathlessly anticipated by his admirers.

Written in de Botton’s characteristic style — accessible and sprinkled with friendly parenthetical asides — The Course of Love picks up where On Love leaves off. The main character of that novel, a Lebanese-German named Rabih Khan, has grown into a young man of 31. An architect now living in Edinburgh, he still slams doors during arguments, enjoys a good sulk now and then, and has a penchant for pragmatic, independent-minded women with ruddy hair and charmingly imperfect teeth. He is still an unabashed and incurable Romantic.

When Rabih meets his client, an unflappable Scottish woman named Kirsten McLelland, he quickly falls deeply in love. Soon they are dating, and at the end of the second chapter, de Botton summarizes their entire subsequent relationship in stark terms. The couple will marry and encounter major challenges along with the banality of domestic life. Over the course of 13 years, they will have a daughter followed by a son, and one will have an affair. “This will be the real love story,” the author concludes.

More here.

Sean Carroll in UnDark:

There are two things going on, both of which are crucial to the operation of a pendulum clock. One is a little gizmo called an escapement, which turns the back-and-forth-rocking of the pendulum into the one-way ticking of the clock. Robert Hooke, a rival of Isaac Newton’s, invented the first escapement back in the seventeenth century. The clock hands are driven by an “escape wheel” with pointed teeth that are angled in a uniform direction. The pendulum, meanwhile, is connected to a two-armed piece called the “anchor.” As the anchor rocks back and forth, one of the arms first pushes the escape wheel in one direction, and then the other catches the teeth so that the wheel cannot move in the other. In this way, the oscillations of the pendulum become the uniform motion of the clock hands.

All of this sounds good, and would seem at first to be sufficient: the angling of the anchor arms and the teeth on the escape wheel provide a directionality to the motion of the clock. Except: where did entropy come in? How does the universal arrow of time governed by increasing entropy become related to the local arrow of time of this particular clock?

The answer resides in the seemingly innocent lifting and pushing of the anchor. It seems, by looking at the drawing of an escapement, that the wheel can obviously move in only one direction. But the underlying laws of physics assure us that if something can move in one direction, it can also move in the reversed direction. In this case, that would involve the anchor briefly lifting up, with the escape wheel swiftly and spontaneously moving backwards while it was lifted.

Why doesn’t that happen, and what does it have to do with entropy?

More here.

Shoaib Daniyal in Scroll.in:

At the height of the Islamic Golden Age – a period from the mid-8th century to the mid-13th century when Islamic civilisation is believed to have reached its intellectual and cultural zenith – homosexuality was openly spoken and written about. Abu Nuwas (756-814), one of the great Arab classical poets during the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, wrote publicly about his homosexual desires and relations. His homoerotic poetry was openly circulated right up until the 20th century.

Nuwas was an important historical figure – he even made a couple of appearances in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (known in Urdu as Alif Laila). It was only as late as 2001 that Arabs started to blush at Nuwas’ homoerotism. In 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, under pressure from Islamic fundamentalists, burnt 6,000 volumes of his poetry.

Most modern Muslims, therefore, have little knowledge of what the Islamic Golden Age was really about, even though they keep on wanting to go back to it.

“ISIS have no idea what restoring the Caliphate actually means,” a tweet by Belgian-Egyptian journalist Khaled Diab said. “In Baghdad, it’d involve booze, odes to wine, science… and a gay court poet.”

More here.

Christopher Benfey at The New York Review of Books:

A multivalent exhibition now at the New-York Historical Society, drawn from the sprawling folk art collection of the sculptor Elie Nadelman (1882-1946) and his independently wealthy wife, Viola (1878-1962), is far more interesting than even its organizers seem to realize. The more than two hundred objects on display range from clipper ship figureheads (“It was not just a sailor who carved this but an artist,” Nadelman remarked of a ravishing gilded eagle with detachable wings) to miniature carved animals, amid a trove of carefully selected pottery, exquisitely detailed needle-cases, and an early, ingenious earthenware roach motel—the glazed, funnel-shaped opening of which traps roaches lured inside by molasses. This staggering array of material is complemented by a dozen or so of Nadelman’s wondrous figurative sculptures, fashioned in weathered cherry or mahogany and often given an overlay of seemingly aging paint.

The big news of the exhibition is that Nadelman (along with Viola, already a well-informed specialist, before their 1919 marriage, in antique lace and embroidery) was also among the first generation of serious collectors of American folk art and among the first to use the Germanic derived notion of a national “Volk” to confer prestige on such objects rather than the pejorative adjective “primitive,” favored by early twentieth-century enthusiasts of African masks, “peasant” carvings, and Native American pottery.

more here.

Andrew Brown at The Boston Globe:

The campaign to get Britain out of the European Union is hard enough to understand if you are British. For foreigners it must be quite incomprehensible. Although Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are all solidly in favor of remaining, English attitudes towards Europe have become as delusional, and as powerful, as American attitudes towards gun control. We are suffering from national psychosis: post-imperial stress disorder.

Three dates are useful in understanding the deeper roots of what is happening to this country — 1945, 1956, and 1966. 1945, when the second world war ended, still feels like yesterday in the English imagination. We were bankrupt, with our cities bombed to rubble and hundreds of thousands of young men killed or wounded. Food, clothing, and petrol were all rationed and would be for another five years. But when you ask if British society was better then, a huge majority of the English people think it was. The overall figure is 51 percent worse today to 27 percent better, and when you break it down it is only those under 24 or non-white who think things have really gotten better since the war. Otherwise men and women from every region of the country believe that British society has got worse in the 70 years of European peace and unimaginable prosperity since the war.

The problem, you see, is that this peace and prosperity did not come on our own terms — which brings us to the second crucial date, of 1956. That was when the British Army, in collaboration with the French and the Israelis, invaded Egypt to recapture the Suez canal. I was there, though only a year old: My father was at the time the British consul in Ismailia, on the canal. He’d known things were going wrong for months, ever since he received a top-secret coded cable asking where the post office was in Ismailia — something that showed that an invasion was being planned, but that no one had any maps for it.

more here.