Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

From the Renaissance onwards, the building type that architects ­favoured as the ultimate showcase for their prowess was the church. It worked for Michelangelo and Borromini in 16th- and 17th-century Rome and for Wren and Hawksmoor in London after the Great Fire; churches were the ideal vehicle for both Pugin’s Victorian Gothic and Alvar Aalto’s 20th-century minimalism. But now, the building that architects most want to design is a modern place of worship – the art museum.

It was (with a nod to the Pompidou Centre) Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, inaugurated in 1997, that changed everything. Here was a building that was a work of art in its own right, which spurred urban growth and transformed the city in which it stood from a provincial backwater to a tourist destination. And this, even though the works on display were less striking than the building itself.

The Guggenheim and museums by other starchitects such as Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Norman Foster also did two other things: they helped the public to accept challenging building design and they cemented the interdependence of modern art and modern architecture. The critic Hal Foster has written about the latter phenomenon in The Art-Architecture Complex. The gallery, he says, has become the “primary site of image-making and space-shaping in our cultural economy”. And not always in a beneficial way: big buildings mean big capital, and the good and the bad that brings with it.

more here.

Michael Lipkin a The Paris Review:

In 1992, a medievalist named Norman Cantor published Inventing the Middle Ages, a series of light, biographical sketches intended to show readers how a few historians from the twentieth century had brought the Middle Ages alive to the general public, with, as the flap copy put it, “vivid images of wars, tournaments, plagues, saints and kings, knights and ladies.” One chapter, “The Nazi Twins,” was devoted partly to Ernst Kantorowicz, a Princeton scholar who’d written a magisterial study of sovereignty in medieval law, philosophy, and art. Cantor alleged that Kantorowicz—who was not only Jewish, but had spoken up against Hitler at great peril to his academic career, and whose mother has perished in a concentration camp—had “impeccable Nazi credentials”: an outrageous slander, in the eyes of his former students and colleagues. When The New York Review of Books ran a largely favorable essay on Inventing the Middle Ages, the magazine received a flood of angry letters. “Where is this Cantor [a] professor? Disney World?” demanded one reader.

But “this Cantor” was not entirely specious in his claims. In 1927, when he was only thirty, Kantorowicz had written a seven-hundred-page biography of Frederick II, a Holy Roman Emperor from the thirteenth century. In lofty German that imitated the Latin style of Frederick’s time, Kantorowicz painted the Emperor as a redeemer of the German people who united the north with the Roman south and brought the barbaric East under his iron rule. Kantorowicz had a Hindu good luck symbol, the swastika, put on the biography’s cover, and on its dedication page he recalled laying a wreath on Frederick’s grave in Palermo.

more here.

Lauren Hossack in The F Word:

What if everything we think about romance is wrong? Why do many women have such skewed relationships with their bodies? How does one navigate the sometimes murky waters of consent? These are just some of the questions that have been bothering comedian and actor Sara Pascoe. So she went off and researched them all, and the result is Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body. It’s part autobiography, part history, part science – and all very funny. Her refreshing, honest writing breaks down otherwise complex scientific studies and peppers them with anecdotes from her own life that elicit laughter, sympathy and self-reflection in equal measure.

A hybrid work, Animal tackles scientific theories of human behaviour along with medical and cultural history, making them easy for the lay person to understand. The problems and pressures cis women face are given the serious analysis they deserve, but there’s plenty of room for laughter too. It’s a highly entertaining and engaging read, full of facts you might be shocked to realise you didn’t know already. For instance, did you know that the menstrual cycle can last anywhere from 20 to 60 days? If not, like Pascoe, you need no longer panic about not adhering to the oft-publicised 28-day cycle – turns out that’s just the average length. Recollections of disastrous relationships, her first period and the abortion she had as a teenager serve as jumping-off points before these issues are explored in a wider context. Reflections include how the advice in teen magazines can leave you ill-equipped when it comes to relationships. Pascoe doesn’t let the media off lightly for what it teaches girls and women, or how it represents them. Animal is a sharp reminder not to believe everything you read, although, like the author, many of us have already learned the hard way.

More here.

Mitch Leslie in Science:

On a cool day in March 2000, several hundred researchers jammed into a hotel auditorium in Salt Lake City, eager to see a showdown over what had become one of the most controversial ideas in cancer research. On one side stood cancer biologist Mary Hendrix of the University of Iowa Cancer Center in Iowa City, whose team the year before had reported an unusual, seemingly new way through which tumor cells can tap into the blood supply and obtain nutrients. Facing off against her was tumor vascular biologist Donald McDonald of the University of California, San Francisco, who was certain that she and her colleagues had misinterpreted their data. “This debate had the feeling of a boxing match—with the championship belt hanging in the balance,” Hendrix recalls.

Researchers knew at the time that tumors can induce the endothelial cells of normal blood vessels to form new supply lines into a tumor, a process called angiogenesis. But Hendrix and her colleagues contended that tumor cells themselves sometimes create their own blood-delivering tubes, a mechanism they dubbed vasculogenic mimicry (also known as vascular mimicry). Their 1999 paper “started lots of upheaval,” says histopathologist Francesco Pezzella of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The Utah debate, held at a Keystone meeting, was the first public discussion of the concept. In the end, neither side scored a knockout. Hendrix asserted that the loops and networks her team had observed represented a mini–circulatory system produced by the tumors themselves. McDonald countered that the patterns were folds of connective tissue, not tubes that carried blood. In the years since, the controversy has waned, and Hendrix and other researchers have pieced together a picture of how tumors build their own blood vessels and how they can affect prognosis and treatment. But some scientists continue to find the idea deeply unsettling. Now, vasculogenic mimicry faces another big test. The first clinical trial of a drug to block the process—and thus potentially limit tumor growth—has begun in the United States and Taiwan. If the drug succeeds, it would bolster what Hendrix and other researchers have been saying about these do-it-yourself blood vessels for nearly 17 years. And it might also explain why some of the most hyped drugs in cancer therapy—angiogenesis inhibitors—have underperformed.

More here.

Extracted

—For my mother, Paulina (1926–2000)

When I go out to my garden
all I desire is a world with the mute on,
but there comes my neighbor, the haughty one, the one
who distinguishes himself by pronouncing words wrong in two languages,
the one who thinks himself too smart to work.
Or when I’m crouched beneath the fig tree, searching
for the darkest, sweetest fig—there suddenly appears
my elderly neighbor,
peering between the coral branches of bougainvillea,
offering me bits of her mind
like appetizers.
And it’s not that she doesn’t please me—
because in truth I love to see her
so full of life at 85,
so clearheaded, her eyes shining like the windows
of a house well cared for, like hers,
the one she bought in 1947,
the one that’s in her own name and not her husband’s.
But what happens is that when I finally leave my work
abandoned inside, on top of my desk,
I desire a wordless world, desire nothing
more than the silent vines of my mind
feeling into dark places—blood-sweet—
like a tongue exploring the hole left by a tooth that’s been extracted

by Aleida Rodriguez
from The Face of Poetry
University of California Press, 2005
translation by author

Read more »

Morgan Meis in The New Yorker:

The drawings of the late-nineteenth-century English illustrator and author Aubrey Beardsley are so sexually charged that even a critic as generally snobbish and patrician as Kenneth Clark, in accounting for his youthful fondness for them, all but described the works, in a 1976 essay for The New York Review of Books, as autoerotic visual aids. Calling the drawings “a kind of catmint to adolescents,” Clark wrote that they “suggested vice . . . with an adolescent intensity which communicated itself through every fold and tightly drawn outline of an ostensibly austere style.” He added, “I like to think that my interest was not only sexual.”

Beardsley did not think of himself as a pornographer—he thought of himself as a fine artist and a dandy. He ran with the British Decadents, who worshipped beauty. They were inspired and amused by the antics and the art of the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler. They grew up in a post-Romantic era and were stimulated, visually, by the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. They hung out, most notoriously, with Oscar Wilde.

But the era of dandy decadence was short-lived. Oscar Wilde was arrested for “gross indecency” (that is, homosexuality) in 1895, and imprisoned, following his famous trial, shortly thereafter. He died in 1900. Beardsley died two years before, of tuberculosis, having also been tarnished in the Wilde scandal—his friendship with Wilde was considered suspiciously close, causing him to lose his job as art editor for The Yellow Book, a quarterly he co-founded. Edward Burne-Jones, the last of the great Pre-Raphaelites, died the same year, and Whistler died in 1903. As the new century came on, these great figures of the late nineteenth century burned out.

More here.

Noam Chomsky in The Nation:

In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistsadvanced its famous Doomsday Clock to three minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for 30 years. The Bulletin’s statement explaining this advance toward catastrophe invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and “unchecked climate change.” The call condemned world leaders, who “have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe,” endangering “every person on Earth [by] failing to perform their most important duty—ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.”

Since then, there has been good reason to consider moving the hands even closer to doomsday.

As 2015 ended, world leaders met in Paris to address the severe problem of “unchecked climate change.” Hardly a day passes without new evidence of how severe the crisis is. To pick almost at random, shortly before the opening of the Paris conference, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab released a study that both surprised and alarmed scientists who have been studying Arctic ice. The study showed that a huge Greenland glacier, Zachariae Isstrom, “broke loose from a glaciologically stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat,” an unexpected and ominous development. The glacier “holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) if it were to melt completely. And now it’s on a crash diet, losing five billion tons of mass every year. All that ice is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean.”

More here.

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Death is the one certainty in life – a pioneering analysis of blood from one of the world’s oldest and healthiest women has given clues to why it happens.

Born in 1890, Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper was at one point the oldest woman in the world. She was also remarkable for her health, with crystal-clear cognition until she was close to death, and a blood circulatory system free of disease. When she died in 2005, she bequeathed her body to science, with the full support of her living relatives that any outcomes of scientific analysis – as well as her name – be made public.

Researchers have now examined her blood and other tissues to see how they were affected by age.

What they found suggests, as we could perhaps expect, that our lifespan might ultimately be limited by the capacity for stem cells to keep replenishing tissues day in day out. Once the stem cells reach a state of exhaustion that imposes a limit on their own lifespan, they themselves gradually die out and steadily diminish the body’s capacity to keep regenerating vital tissues and cells, such as blood.

More here.

Ian Thomson at the Times Literary Supplement:

Of course, Levi was more than a witness to contemporary barbarism. In much of the newly translated journalism, fiction and poetry he explores the border zone between science and literature. His great scientific memoir, The Periodic Table, published in Italy in 1975, was ahead of its time: only in recent years has science become, in publishing terms, popular and attractive. Long before Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould and others, Levi had sought to make science accessible to the layperson. The Periodic Table gathers up an extraordinary range of writing, from detective fiction to learned scientific commentary. Chronicled are the fumes, stinks, bangs and fiascos (as well as the occasional triumphs) of Levi’s early chemistry experiments in 1930s Turin, his deportation to Auschwitz and post-war recovery as a writer and chemist.

Over a quarter of a century has passed since Levi died in 1987, yet his fame has grown during this period. In certain quarters of the United States, nevertheless, his suicide provoked a degree of moral outrage. By taking his life, an anonymous diarist objected in the New Yorker, Levi had cheated his readers. So violent a gesture (he pitched himself down the stairwell of the block of flats where he lived in Turin) was seen to be at odds with the calm reason of his prose. The belief remains as vulgar as it is short-sighted: the manner of Levi’s death in no way diminishes the importance of his writing. In The Complete Works Levi portrays himself variously as courageous, cowardly, prophetic or naive, but usually well balanced; in reality he was not at all well balanced. Levi and his books are not one and the same. If anything, his suicide reminds us that the life of the artist does not run parallel to his art. The suicide was provoked by a clinical depression, which was compounded by a number of factors, among them the fear of memory loss and, possibly, guilt at having survived Auschwitz. These three volumes, appearing two decades after the two-volume Opere published in Italy in 1997, confirm Primo Levi as one of the most important writers of our time.

more here.

Tom Stern at Literary Review:

Which famous philosopher wrote, ‘I have experienced so much, happy and sad, enlivening and dispiriting, but God has led me safely through it all as does a father his weak little child’? The words are taken from the autobiography of the profoundly religious thirteen-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was given to writing autobiographies. The most famous of these, Ecce Homo, was penned in 1888, shortly before, or perhaps during, his descent into madness. You might have heard of that one because it contains chapters such as ‘Why I am So Clever’ and ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’. From 1858 to the end of the 1860s, Nietzsche wrote at least six autobiographies. These take centre stage in Daniel Blue’s new book on Nietzsche, covering the years 1844–69. We might be tempted to think of this as ‘Nietzsche: The Early Years’, but that would have misleading connotations. ‘Early Nietzsche’ customarily refers to the period 1868–76, when he was overtly under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Richard Wagner’s personality. In Blue’s 320 page account, Nietzsche buys Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation on page 216 and meets Wagner on page 300. This is ‘Nietzsche: Before the Early Years’. Eight years old on page 58, eighteen halfway through, we leave him aged twenty-four, arriving in Basel to take up his first university position in philology: employed, financially independent and no longer asking his mother to do his washing.

more here.

Drew Nellins Smith at The Millions:

Literature about sex, no matter who has written it, is almost always terrible, and everybody knows it. This is widely known and acknowledged — even on this very site, by both the great Sonya Chung and Julia Fierro. We’re all so tuned into its legendary badness that even relatively minor offenses in the realm of sex writing annoy us far more than other writerly transgressions. An imperfect depiction of sex is far worse for some reason than an inept description of someone entering a room or having a marital spat or whatever other things a book might get wrong without anyone disapproving quite so mercilessly.

There is sufficient scorn for bad sex writing that the Literary Review famously awards an annual prize for it. Though “prize” seems like a funny term for becoming the object of public ridicule and mockery. It’s a missing component of the human brain, the ability to recognize one’s own completely botched attempts at writing about penetration, blow jobs, and the rest of it. Most writers, one must assume, push themselves away from their desks at the end of their earnest writing sessions and think to themselves, Job well done. Only to discover a few months or years later that they have gone and humiliated themselves, at least according to a bunch of smug bastards on the other side of the ocean.

Which isn’t to say I’m not in sympathy with the smug bastards. In writing my own book full of sex, there was almost no one I could turn to for inspiration. There wasn’t a single book I looked to and thought, “What I’m trying to do is write sex like she did or like he did.”

more here.

Rupert Neate in The Guardian:

Getting locked up is unlikely to be good for your health but it’s “terrific, terrific” business for the booming private industry supplying doctors and nurses to jails and prisons. Many of those suppliers descended on Austin, Texas, last month to tout their services directly to jail administrators at the 35th annual American Jail Association conference.

As trade fairs go, this one is a little macabre. Companies line up to market everything from jumpsuits and meal trays to masks to stop prisoners from spitting, straitjackets and other full-body restraints. Once the national anthem had been observed and the AJA’s chaplain had led a prayer for jailers across the country, those gathered at Austin’s convention centre could get down to business: making money.

How long prisons will continue to be such money-spinners could depend on who wins the race for the White House. On the campaign trail Hillary Clinton has vowed to “end private prisons and private detention centers. They are wrong.” Donald Trump, on the other hand, has called for increased outsourcing of prisons. “I do think we can do a lot of privatizations, and private prisons it seems work a lot better,” he said in an MSNBC town hall earlier this month.

In the meantime, Ahmad Afzal and his two brothers are making a “very good living” manufacturing prison jumpsuits, underwear and suicide safety smocks in Pakistan and selling them to US jails.

More here. [Thanks to Anna Hall.]

Refugee Blues

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
“If you've got no passport you're officially dead”:
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, “They must die”:
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

by WH Auden
from Selected Poems
Vintage Books 1979

Eboo Patel in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I recently met a graduate of an elite liberal-arts college who was working as the activities coordinator in a facility for senior citizens. The most interesting part of her job, she said, had to do with the diverse religious identities of her clients. She was constantly organizing event spaces for various religious holidays, working with the kitchen to make sure food was prepared in a manner that met different religious specifications, and arranging for funeral services according to the rites of diverse faith traditions. Occasionally she had to help calm an argument over doctrinal disagreements or contradictory religious practices. “I had to learn most of this on the fly,” she told me. “The one part of identity we never talked about in college was faith.” I was reminded of this story as I read through the recent Chronicle special report on diversity. As usual, the articles were sharp and provocative. And as usual, religious identity was totally ignored.

This is not so much a critique of The Chronicle as it is an observation about higher-education discourse more generally. Colleges are generally quick to respond to one set of important identity issues (racialized policing, transgender accommodations, sexist pay disparities) with academic and co-curricular programs meant to prepare leaders who can engage such challenges. Unfortunately, other dimensions of diversity, namely religion, get short shrift. But even a casual perusal of The New York Times on any given day illustrates that religious diversity issues — from diplomacy across religious divides to tailoring public-health campaigns to particular religious communities — are just as challenging as other identity issues. And the experience of the recent graduate I mentioned earlier who was working through religious issues at a senior citizens’ center could as easily have taken place at a school, a company, a hospital, a YMCA, or, indeed, a college campus — in other words, the spaces where much of American life takes place, and where college graduates get jobs.

Given this reality, I’d like to make a small proposal: Any college that promises to prepare global citizens has to take religious diversity seriously enough to educate their students to be interfaith leaders.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Geneticists from KU Leuven, Belgium, have shown that tumour protein TP53 knows exactly where to bind to our DNA to prevent cancer. Once bound to this specific DNA sequence, the protein can activate the right genes to repair damaged cells. All cells in our body have the same DNA, yet they're all very different. One cell may become a brain cell, the other a muscle cell. This is because not all genes are active – or 'switched on' – in every cell. Professor Stein Aerts and his team study the 'switches' that turn genes on and off. Gaining insight into these mechanisms is very important, because genetic defects and differences may not only be in our genes, but also in the 'switches' that control them. It's a known fact that genes are activated when a protein binds to a specific sequence on our DNA. But how does this protein find its way in our extraordinarily complex DNA? Scientists have thus far been assuming that one protein could never locate the exact DNA sequence to activate a specific gene all by itself – at least not in human beings. However, Professor Aerts and his colleagues from the Department of Human Genetics at KU Leuven, Belgium, have now shown that some of these proteins are in fact capable of locating their targets autonomously. Furthermore, the composition of some DNA switches turns out to be unexpectedly simple.

“We used next-generation sequencing to test the capacity of DNA sequences to act as switches for more than 1500 DNA sequences at the same time,” explains Professor Stein Aerts. By way of comparison: in the past, researchers had to test all switches one by one. “We then used supercomputers and advanced computer models to examine the differences between effective and non-effective switches. That's how we discovered that TP53 is able to locate the exact DNA sequence to which it needs to bind – all by itself.” “The protein TP53 plays a crucial role in the prevention of cancer. When a cell is damaged – because of UV or radioactivity, for instance – TP53 switches on the right genes to repair the cell. A cell sometimes loses TP53, so that cancer can start developing there. In about 50% of all cancers, there's a problem with the protein TP53. That's why it's so important to unravel its underlying mechanisms.”

More here.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey in Reason:

Contrary to economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty, our riches cannot be explained by the accumulation of capital, as the misleading word capitalism implies. The Great Enrichment did not come from piling brick on brick, or bachelor's degree on bachelor's degree, or bank balance on bank balance, but from piling idea on idea. The accumulation of capital was of course necessary. But so were a labor force and the existence of liquid water. Oxygen is necessary for a fire. Yet it would be unhelpful to explain the Chicago Fire of October 8–10, 1871, by the presence of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere.

The modern world, in other words, can't be explained by routine brick piling, such as the Indian Ocean trade, English banking, canals, the British savings rate, the Atlantic slave trade, the enclosure movement, the exploitation of workers in satanic mills, or the original accumulation of capital in European cities. Such routines are too common in world history and too feeble in quantitative oomph to explain the 30- to 100-fold enrichment per person unique to the past two centuries.

Hear again that amazing fact: In the two centuries after 1800, the goods and services made and consumed by the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by a factor of 30 to 100—that is, a rise of 2,900 to 9,900 percent. The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has dwarfed any of the previous and temporary enrichments. It was caused by massively better ideas in technology and institutions.

More here.

From the website of The Sync Project:

WHAT IS IT?

The Sync Project is a biotech company developing music as precision medicine.

Intuitively we know the power that music has over us. We use music to regulate mood, to get pumped up, to work out, to relax. There is also strong directional evidence in science. Recent research has shown that music affects the same neural pathways that are regulated by pharmaceuticals such as psychostimulants and other drugs.

The Sync Project is building on this foundation and partnering with the world’s leading scientists and musicians on the first-ever large-scale studies to measure how the structural properties of music – like beat, key and timbre – impact biometrics such as heart rate, brain activity and sleep patterns.

We’ve built the mobile app and platform to gather this dataset and have started collecting data across a range of conditions. The platform integrates with streaming music services (like Spotify) and biometric sensors (like Apple Watch, Basis Peak, MUSE, ŌURA Ring and others). We then apply machine learning to this unique dataset to develop personalized music therapeutics. Think of us as a biometric recommendation engine for music.

Our goal is the clinical application of music in a variety of health conditions including sleep disorders, fatigue, movement disorders, stroke recovery, anxiety and pain.

YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT?

Quite serious. The Sync Project is based on the best neuroscience and clinical studies on the health effects of music. Take the example of pain. It may seem surprising, but studies have shown that when people are played the right music after an operation they request less opioids (pain medication). Opioid abuse has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, and it often begins with a prescription for pain medication following surgery or injury. We need to pursue alternative solutions for managing pain and other conditions, and clinically-validated, personalized music therapeutics present a promising option.

More here.

David Brin in Evonomics:

Even conservatives now admit that conservatism has changed. Take the Ronald Reagan who Republican activists idolize in abstract; in real life he raised taxes, increased regulations, signed environmental laws, and (worst of all) negotiated countless compromise give-and-take, pragmatic measures in tandem with a Congress run by the other party. As did Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, giants who argued with genteel courtesy and who revered both knowledge and intellect, especially science. Even the most fervid Tea Party aficionado would avow that today’s GOP has little room for such things—as Goldwater and Buckley themselves proclaimed, to their dismay, before they died.

In this analysis, I’d like to focus on one of the directions that conservatism has gone a-wandering. But note first: I’ll try to do this without taking a single position that could fairly be called even slightly left-of center—by the old standards at least.

My entire critique will be from what used to be a completely conservative perspective. You’ll know this by the historical figure whom I cite above all others.

It begins provocatively, with prominent online commentator John Robb, who offers a simple and clearly-correct explanation for the gross mismanagement of the U.S. economy in the first decade of the 21st Century—an appraisal that seems both tragically on-target and stunningly ironic. Ironic in ways I plan to elaborate—and I expect you’ll not look at the hoary old “left-vs-right” axis in the same way, ever again.

More here.

Vasudevan Mukunth in The Wire:

The experiment that first directly detected gravitational waves in the spacetime continuum has repeated the feat, scientists announced at a meeting in San Diego on June 15. The achievement establishes the experiment, called LIGO, as the primary tool with which astrophysicists now observe the play of gravity around massive bodies in the universe. It also reposes faith in some of the sophisticated techniques developed by scientists to detect and study gravitational waves, and highlights the challenges in the road ahead.

“This finding confirms the fact that the first detection wasn’t an isolated event,” P. Ajith, leader of the astrophysical relativity group at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bengaluru, told The Wire. “But more importantly, this is the beginning of serious gravitational astronomy.”

LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. Its two identical detectors are located in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. In the wee hours of December 26, 2015, they detected gravitational waves originating from a pair of black holes that were about to merge, about 1.3 billion lightyears away. Before the merger, in the inspiral phase, the black holes rapidly spiral in tight orbits around each other, their acceleration sending away ripples of gravitational energy that alternatively contract and expand spacetime (by minuscule amounts) as they move through it – much as a wave passing through a sheet of cloth would.

More here.