Family albums have a habit of turning up surprises. When Jesse Cox found a photo of his great aunt, Australian painter Janet Venn-Brown, casually hanging out with the former chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, he was curious to find out more. What he uncovered was a story of love, murder and mystery.

Jesse Cox at the Australian Broadcasting Company:

On 16 October 1972, Palestinian writer and translator Wael Zuaiter was assassinated in Rome by Mossad, Israel's secret service.

To this day there remain conflicting theories about why Zuaiter was targeted.

Was he involved in terrorism, or was he becoming too influential in Italian politics, advocating for Palestine? Or perhaps most tragically: was it a mistake, a hastily conceived plan resulting from inaccurate intelligence?

On the evening he was killed, Zuaiter had left the apartment of his fiancée, Australian painter Janet Venn-Brown. Janet is my great aunt and growing up I had heard fragments of Zuaiter's story from my mum.

I remember going to see Stephen Spielberg's Munich with her and watching a dramatised version of Zuaiter's assassination played out on the screen. I became intrigued by how our family had somehow been caught up in this much bigger story.

More here.

Robert Trivers in The Unz Review:

I first met S. J. Gould when he was a freshly minted Assistant Professor in Invertebrate Paleontology at Harvard and I a graduate student in evolutionary biology. Invertebrate Paleontology was well known then as a backwater in evolutionary biology, 80% devoted to the study of fossil foraminifera whose utility was that they predicted the presence of oil. In this environment, it was obvious that Gould would go far. New York City Jewish bright, verbiage pouring from his mouth at the slightest provocation, he would surely make a mark here.

This was not why I was visiting him. I had heard he was an expert in ‘allometry’—indeed had done his PhD thesis on the subject. Back then I wanted to know everything in biology, so I sought him out. Allometry refers to the way in which two variables are associated. It can be 1:1—the longer the fore-arm, the longer the total arm, or it can show deviations. For examples, the larger a mammal is, the more of its body consists of bone. Why? Because the strength of bone only goes up as the square of bone length whereas body weight goes up as the cube—thus larger bodies, weighing more, require relatively more bone. But what about antler size, I wanted to know, why is it that the larger the body size of the deer, the relatively larger his antlers? Why would natural selection favor that?

Gould leaned back in his chair. No, you have this all wrong, he said. This is an alternative to natural selection, not a cause of natural selection. My head spun. Natural selection was unable to change a simple allometric relationship regarding antler size that it had presumably created in the first place? Had it not already done so in adjusting bone size to body size? As I left his office, I said to myself, this fool thinks he is bigger than natural selection. Perhaps I should have said, bigger than Darwin, but I felt it as bigger than natural selection itself—surely Stephen was going for the gold!!

More here. [Thanks to Omar Ali.]

Corey Robin in Salon:

George Packer is bored with American politics. “The 2016 campaign doesn’t seem like fun to me,” he writes in The New Yorker. Today’s politics “doesn’t quicken my pulse.” It “doesn’t shock me into a state of alert indignation.” The “thrill is gone.”

When George Packer gets bored, I get worried. It means he’s in the mood for war.

Packer claims he lost his passion for politics sometime between Obama’s first and second term. That’s the moment he confronted “the stuckness of American politics,” the moment when he realized that not only were “the same things” happening but that they would “keep happening.” Money would keep pouring in, filibusterers would keep filibustering, extremists would keep getting more extreme. Now he knows “we are paralyzed.” There are no more surprises.

This isn’t the first time Packer’s found himself yawning his way through a campaign. During the 2000 election, he complained that Al Gore was “more a technician than a leader,” whose “campaign slogan might as well have been, ‘First, do no harm.’” It wasn’t just Gore who had lackluster ambitions; there wasn’t “any burning issue galvanizing the electorate” either. Not just in 2000, but pretty much throughout the 1990s. As Packer would write a year later in the New York Times Magazine:

A strange thing happened after the cold war ended: patriotism all but disappeared from American politics. The right and left essentially offered a choice between hedonisms: tax cuts or spending. No one asked for sacrifice; no one spoke to common purpose.

A burning issue, a galvanized electorate, common purpose, sacrifice: that’s what Packer looks for in politics.

More here.

Jonathan W. White at The American Scholar:

When on March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address from the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol, the sun broke through the clouds and shone down on him as he called for “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” Lincoln hoped for reconciliation between North and South, asking American citizens “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and to “achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace.”

A few weeks later, when Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, cannons boomed in celebration throughout the Union. Four long years of killing and dying were over, and northerners rejoiced at the long-awaited triumph. Many of them welcomed Lincoln’s call for reconciliation. “The hour of victory is always the hour for clemency,” editorialized The New York Times, while Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune headlined “Magnanimity in Triumph” and Henry Ward Beecher preached a sermon in Brooklyn entitled “Love Your Neighbor, the Nation’s Motto.” From ordinary Americans up to the highest councils of the nation, northerners appeared ready to reunite with the South in the spirit of brotherhood. Assistant Secretary of State Frederick W. Seward remembered that the discussion at Lincoln’s final cabinet meeting was focused on “kindly feelings toward the vanquished.”

more here.

Leo Robson at The New Statesman:

Of the several-hundred volumes on Hitchcock published over the past half-century, the majority divide into acts of critical exegesis indifferent to his public persona or even his private self and brisk, myth-laden biography in which Hitchcock emerges as a superb technician, the man who invented the inverse zoom, who got Detective Arbogast to fall backwards so brilliantly down Mrs Bates’s staircase.

Peter Ackroyd, a biographer of Dickens, Blake and London, belongs comfortably to the second camp but nonetheless finds himself in a challenging position. He can’t really argue in 2015 that Hitchcock wasn’t some kind of genius, at least not with the hectic casualness that has characterised his recent work, from his ongoing history of Britain to the series of Brief Lives of which this is the latest. On the other hand, he cannot, as a sceptical Englishman, accept the highfalutin terms in which this tickled showman is routinely praised. But his attempt to rebuff this sort of criticism is undone by the impression that he has never read any.

more here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

For thousands of years, people have moved in and out and around the land of Israel as if on a cosmic conveyor belt—in, out, around, and also down, deep down into the Earth. In Israel, every bit of wall you can see stands for thousands of years of walls unseen. An anonymous, grassy hill on a roadside is 20 layers or more of competing civilizations in Israel, each layer crushing the other, informing the other, and also protecting each other from the forces of Nature that, eventually, come to erase them all. Israelites overtaken by Persians overtaken by Greeks overtaken by Romans overtaken by Arabs overtaken by Crusaders overtaken by Mamluks overtaken by Ottomans, etc. — and on top of the hill, some grass, maybe a goat. Israel is a story of human occupation and also human abandonment. If Israel could be seen on a map of time, you would see layers of people crashing into each other, collapsing on top of one another, pushing each other out, passing each other by, just missing each other, wandering away from each other, buried upon one another. Israel is thick with the endeavors and failures of people.

Home, in Israel, is unstable and always has been. Israel is forever re-organizing her temples, transmogrifying her language. In Israel, we start to wonder if “home” has ever been a place of respite or peace — if it isn’t, instead, a battle, a battle against Time, an attempt to make sense out of our existence on Earth, which comes out of nowhere and seems to go nowhere.

more here.

Erin O'Donnell in Harvard Magazine:

In the mouse world, virgin male mice are not known as nurturers. They’re aggressive and infanticidal, regularly injuring or killing newborn mice fathered by other males. But research led by Catherine Dulac, Higgins professor of molecular and cellular biology, reveals that these murderous mice can be turned into doting dads simply by stimulating a set of neurons, shared by both males and females, that appears to drive parental behavior. Dulac examines control of instinctive behavior in animal brains, particularly social actions such as courtship and parenting. Previous work in her lab revealed that mouse brains hold circuits that determine whether the animals adopt stereotypical male or female behavior: Dulac discovered that the vomeronasal organ (VNO), a set of chemical-sensing receptors in the nasal septa of mice, dictates which of the two circuits is activated. (Female mice lacking a functional VNO engaged in “very bizarre male-like behaviors,” Dulac reports, emitting ultrasonic vocalizations normally sung by males to attract mates.)

In the most recent research, first described in the journal Nature last year, the investigators set out to learn if male mice had a similar capacity to match females’ parenting abilities. A female mouse that has never encountered a male or babies will nonetheless spring into action if pups are placed in her cage. “She will immediately build a nest, retrieve the pups, groom them, and crouch around them,” Dulac explains. “This is very robust, stereotyped behavior. If you do the same experiment with virgin males, they will immediately attack the pups.” Yet when the researchers removed the VNO of virgin male mice, changing the way they sensed the pups, the normally hostile males became “perfect dads,” Dulac reports. The infanticidal instinct vanished; the males built nests and placed the pups in them, groomed the pups, and huddled by them protectively. These findings, she says, suggest that there are “circuits in the male brain that underlie parental behavior,” but those behaviors are “normally repressed.”

More here.

Philip J. Hilt in The New York Times:

The method most commonly used to assess the number of calories in foods is flawed, overestimating the energy provided to the body by proteins, nuts and foods high in fiber by as much as 25 percent, some nutrition experts say.

…An adult aiming to take in 2,000 calories a day on a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet may actually be consuming several hundred calories less, he and other experts said. Calorie estimates for junk foods, particularly processed carbohydrates, are more accurate. The current calorie-counting system was created in the late 1800s by Wilbur Atwater, a scientist at the Department of Agriculture, and has been modified somewhat over the past 100 years. Researchers place a portion of food in a device called a calorimeter and burn it to see how much energy it contains. The heat is absorbed by water; one calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. When experts talk about calories, however, they usually mean kilocalories; one kilocalorie equals 1,000 calories. Those are the amounts you see on food labels.

…Almonds are routinely listed as having about 160 calories a serving, when the real figure is about 120 calories, said Karen Lapsley, the chief scientist at the California Almond Board. Some manufacturers are considering making the change on their labels.

More here.

This one and That one and the Other have families

This one and That one and the Other have families
that are happy and solid, children, grandchildren
even great-grandchildren, who are blonde and study hard,
and verygoodkids, they are good and Christian people
but meanwhile your own children, God of God are
suffering from psoriasis and psychologically
unstable, so why oh God of all the gods of clay
do your children suffer and have tongues of clay?
Your children are your children and seem step-children.
But their children, their grandchildren, their generations
are not like ours this bunch of degenerate
and untouchable fathers and mothers of beggars
yet these your children, God of gods, are still
your children and they recognise you and they do
just what you told them they should do, while they
make the signs, make the sign of the cross, gulp down
hosts like they are dying of hunger (though they are full)
and your priests absolve them, assent and eat with them
oysters and whatever debilities they have,
and they give a blessing to their menstrual women
so that they will bear children and they do bear them,
yet there are hardly any of us, or they die
of natural causes or commit suicide.
Is there a reason why? There is no reason why.
You are the God it occurs to you to be.

by Armando Uribe
from Odio lo que odio, rabio como rabio
publisher: Editorial Universitaria, Santiago de Chile, 1998

Read more »

Sabeen Mahmud. Artist, activist, intellectual; a woman with a true heart. A hero for many.

Murdered in Karachi on Friday, April 24, leaving an immense void.

More here and here.

Tim Maudlin at the PBS Nova website:

How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality?….Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. —Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

This passage from the 2012 book “The Grand Design” set off a firestorm (or at least a brushfire) of controversy. Has philosophy been eclipsed by science in the quest for understanding reality? Is philosophy just dressed-up mysticism, disconnected from scientific understanding?

Many questions about the nature of reality cannot be properly pursued without contemporary physics. Inquiry into the fundamental structure of space, time and matter must take account of the theory of relativity and quantum theory. Philosophers accept this. In fact, several leading philosophers of physics hold doctorates in physics. Yet they chose to affiliate with philosophy departments rather than physics departments because so many physicists strongly discourage questions about the nature of reality. The reigning attitude in physics has been “shut up and calculate”: solve the equations, and do not ask questions about what they mean.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

‘With the rise of China’, Martin Jacques writes in his book When China Rules the World, ‘Western universalism will cease to be universal – and its values and outlook will become steadily less influential. The emergence of China as a global power in effect relativizes everything.’ The transformation of China into an economic superpower raises important and challenging questions about how we perceive the world. Our understanding of history and culture will unquestionably change. The Era of the Warring States may come to be seen as significant as the Peloponnesian War, or 1911, the end of the dynastic era, as important a date as 1789, and the fall of the French monarchy. Kongzi, Mo Tzu and Zhu Xi may become as well known as Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. Lu Xun could be regarded as fine a writer as James Joyce.

But what about our understanding of morality? To what extent will the rise of China and the decline of Europe and America transform the way we understand moral values? Will universalism be seen merely as a form of Western particularism? To what extent will ‘everything be relativised’?

The story of this book is the story of how the centre of gravity of moral thinking has historically shifted. In the ancient world, Greece, Israel, Persia, India and China were all sources of civilization and of distinctive moral philosophies. The concepts that developed at each source were shaped by the particularities of the local culture and social needs; there were, nevertheless, also common themes that spanned continents, from the idea of virtue to the Golden Rule. The rise of monotheism, and in particular of Christianity, transformed the discussion of ethics in Europe, establishing the idea of rule-based morality, guided and anchored by a divine intelligence, and developing ideas of universalism. The emergence of Islam at the end of the first millennium CE, and its expansion through the beginning of the second, created a new centre of intellectual gravity. Drawing upon the heritage of Greece, Persia and India, as well as the Judaic and Christian traditions, the Islamic Empire came to be a bridge both between the Ancient world and early modernity and between East and West. The only empire that in its day could challenge the philosophical and technological supremacy of the Islamic Empire was China, where the arrival of Buddhism from India triggered a renaissance in Confucian thinking. What we can see in this history is not moral progress, in the sense we can witness scientific or technological progress, but the maturing, development and deepening of moral philosophy.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Earlier this week, Chinese researchers reported that they edited the genes of human embryos using a new technique called CRISPR. While these embryos will not be growing up into genetically modified people, I suspect this week will go down as a pivotal moment in the history of medicine. David Cyranoski and Sara Reardon broke the news today at Nature News. Here I’ve put together a quick guide to the history behind this research, what the Chinese scientists did, and what it may signify.

There are thousands of genetic disorders that can occur if a mutation happens to strike an important piece of DNA. Hemophilia, sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis– the list goes on and on. As I wrote in the Atlantic in 2013, a particularly cruel genetic disorder, fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva causes people to grow a second skeleton. It’s caused by a mutation that changes a single “letter” of a single gene, called ACVR1. The protein encoded by the gene doesn’t work properly, triggering a wave of changes in people’s bodies, with the result that when they heal from a bruise, they replace entire chunks of muscle with new bone.

In some cases, people can offset many of the symptoms of genetic disorders with simple changes, like watching what they eat. In other cases, like hemophilia, they have to take regular doses of drugs to remain healthy. In other cases, like fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, there’s no effective treatment yet.

For decades, scientists have tried to develop a new way to treat genetic disorders like these: to heal the patient, heal the gene.

More here.

Robert Collins in The Telegraph:

Dave Eggers has just been reminded why he can’t allow himself near the internet. The night before I meet him in Paris to talk about his latest three novels – published in a burst of creativity over the past three years – he has been up until 3am watching videos on YouTube on a houseboat he has rented in Amsterdam. “I got back, and to wind down I watched the comedy duo Key & Peele,” he says, while we sit in a bijou hotel overlooking the Place du Panthéon. “There’s just hundreds of YouTube clips. I couldn’t stop. That’s my thing. I can’t be near that stuff. I can’t have it in the house. I would never work again.” Eggers, you see, has been working very hard indeed. Since his 2000 debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir about his parents’ deaths from cancer within five weeks of each other and his subsequent rearing of his then eight-year-old brother, Christopher – Eggers has published short stories, novels, anthologies and children’s books. In 2002, he founded a literacy centre, 826 Valencia, for schoolchildren in San Francisco. On the back of its success, he opened a string of them across America, which led to others being set up in Europe. Eggers has come to Paris to visit the latest of these.

In between all this, he has written screenplays – including the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze in 2009 – and founded an organisation that helps American university students find funding. He runs his own publishing house and literary magazine, McSweeney’s. And he has set up another literary magazine, The Believer, as well as founding a series of oral histories about human rights crises, a theme he covered in his 2009 book Zeitoun, which recounted the ordeal of a Syrian-American arrested in New Orleans in the chaos following Hurricane Katrina. Eggers is not so much a literary darling as a one-man social enterprise.

More here.