Michael Fried at nonsite:

But, again, my aim in these remarks is not to critique Greenberg’s ideas. Instead I want to seize upon the thought of density or intensity or weight of intuited decision and to associate that thought with a body of work to which, on theoretical grounds, it might seem to have nothing in common—the photographic oeuvre of Robert Adams. Very briefly: Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937; his family subsequently moved to Madison, Wis­consin and a few years later to the suburbs of Denver. Adams got his B.A. from the University of Redlands in California, and went on to do a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. In 1962 he began teaching English at Colorado College but around that time became interested in taking and making photographs; by 1967 he was doing so seri­­ously, and in 1970 he stopped teaching in order to photo­graph full time. An important photobook, The New West: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range, appeared in 1974 and a year later his work was shown in the impor­tant exhibition (in retrospect a mile­stone in American photographic history), New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). Since that time superb photobooks have appeared with some regularity (Denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area [1977]; Los Angeles Spring [1986]; What We Bought: The New World, Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, 1970-74 [1995 and 2009]; and Turning Back: A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration [2005] among them), and of course for a long time now Adams has been widely recognized as one of the most distinguished photographers at work anywhere. My personal familiarity with his art is quite recent, dating as it does from the major retro­spective exhibition, a selection of nearly 300 works, organized by Joshua Chuang for the Yale University Art Gallery, which opened in Vancouver in the fall of 2010 and over the next few years traveled to a number of venues in this country and Europe.8 (I saw it in New Haven in the fall of 2012 after having caught it some months before at LACMA. Let me also say that I had the privilege of going through the exhibition at LACMA with Jim Welling and at Yale with Josh Chuang; I’m grateful to them both for count­less insights.) Simply put, I was swept away by what I saw. Naturally I had admired individual photographs and even small shows of Adams’s work in the past. But Josh Chuang’s exhibition established Adams’s sta­ture as a major artist beyond the possibility of dispute, by virtue both of the taste, intel­ligence, and amplitude of the selection and, in both museums but espe­cially in New Haven, the effectiveness of the installation.

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Jennifer Jacquet at Lapham's Quarterly:

The current array of species disappearances is comparable in rate and size to the five other mass extinctions in earth’s 4.5-billion-year history. But only since the second half of the twentieth century—with the creation of international scientific bodies, and databases that tally likely extinct species (to date, nine pages of very small font)—have we come to understand the magnitude. This havoc we have wreaked on earth’s biological system feels fundamentally different than that which we have wreaked on its physical system. We feel bad for warming glaciers and making the oceans more acidic, but we feel particularly bad about annihilating wild animals that managed to struggle for their survival alongside us year after year. They struggled against all odds but one.

Dealing with the disaster we have created means finding a way to reckon with our guilt for causing it. “Why stick around to see the last beautiful wild places getting ruined, and to hate my own species, and to feel that I, too, in my small way, was one of the guilty ruiners?” asked Jonathan Franzen in 2006. “The guilt of knowing what human beings have done” is how conservation biologist George Schaller described the feeling he gets when he looks at the Serengeti. In 2008 Schaller made one of the most definitive statements of Anthropocene-inspired self-reproach. “Obviously,” he said, “humans are evolution’s greatest mistake.” And in 2015 Pope Francis joined the chorus of mourners. “Because of us,” he wrote in his encyclicalLaudato Si’, “thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.”

In 1961 psychoanalyst William Niederland coined the term survivor syndrome after conducting a study of those who survived Nazi concentration camps as well as survivors of natural disasters and car accidents. Niederland noted that among their symptoms were chronic depression and anxiety. Many camp survivors whom the SS had “selected” to live found it difficult to relate to ordinary people and have ordinary feelings. Sigmund Freud , page 44] had intimated the idea in an 1896 letter in which he discussed his father’s death, describing a “tendency toward self-reproach which death invariably leaves.”

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Tim Lewens in New Humanist:

“What,” asked the distinguished evolutionist Michael Ghiselin in 1997, “does evolution teach us about human nature?” The answer he gave will surprise those who suppose that the evolutionary sciences describe the deepest and most ubiquitous aspects of our psychological makeup. Ghiselin informed his readers that evolution “teaches us that human nature is a superstition.” Why would anyone say such a thing? Doesn’t talk about human nature amount to talk about the ways we are all the same? What could be objectionable about that? We can begin to understand the problems if we look back 180 years. On 2 October 1836, HMS Beagle landed at Falmouth. She had finally returned to England, after a five-year circumnavigation of the globe. One of the Beagle’s passengers was a 27-year-old Charles Darwin. After disembarking he first went to stay at his father’s house in Shrewsbury, but by March of 1837 he had moved to London. It was here that Darwin began to speculate in a series of notebooks on a wide range of topics in natural history and beyond. He formulated his “transmutationist” view of how species had come into existence, he pointed to intense struggle as the primary agent of change in the natural world, and he reflected openly on the impact this image of life’s history might have for human psychology, morality and aesthetic sensibilities. Many of these notebook jottings were transformed, in 1842, into a short “sketch” of Darwin’s theory. By 1844 that short sketch had expanded into a 230-page statement of the evolutionary view. But it was not until 1859 – 15 years later – that the Origin of Species was published. What had Darwin been doing in the meantime?

The answer is that he spent the eight years between 1846 and 1854 working on a gigantic study of barnacles. This period – sometimes referred to as a “delay”, as though Darwin was ready to publish the Origin in the mid-1840s, but somehow lost his nerve – was a puzzle to historians for some time. But it now seems clear how Darwin used his barnacle work as a detailed empirical testing ground for many of his earlier theoretical speculations. One of the most important lessons Darwin took from his meticulous study of barnacle anatomy concerned the ubiquity of variation: “Not only does every external character vary greatly in most of the species,” he wrote, “but the internal parts very often vary to a surprising degree.” He went so far as to assert that it is “hopeless” to find any part or organ “absolutely invariable in form or structure”. Variability in all parts of all species is a primary fact of nature, says Darwin, and this ubiquitous variation is the fuel that powers natural selection. It is the conviction, inherited from Darwin, that species vary in all respects at any moment in time, and that natural selection causes those species to change in profound ways over time, that has made the likes of Ghiselin so sceptical of the thought that species have “natures”.

Evolutionists are not, however, united in their rejection of “human nature”. The eminent evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby announced back in 1990 their intention to defend “the concept of a universal human nature”, and Stephen Pinker’s 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature implies through its title that the deniers of human nature are misguided.

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Sam Apple in The New York Times:

The story of modern cancer research begins, somewhat improbably, with the sea urchin. In the first decade of the 20th century, the German biologist Theodor Boveri discovered that if he fertilized sea-urchin eggs with two sperm rather than one, some of the cells would end up with the wrong number of chromosomes and fail to develop properly. It was the era before modern genetics, but Boveri was aware that cancer cells, like the deformed sea urchin cells, had abnormal chromosomes; whatever caused cancer, he surmised, had something to do with chromosomes. Today Boveri is celebrated for discovering the origins of cancer, but another German scientist, Otto Warburg, was studying sea-urchin eggs around the same time as Boveri. His research, too, was hailed as a major breakthrough in our understanding of cancer. But in the following decades, Warburg’s discovery would largely disappear from the cancer narrative, his contributions considered so negligible that they were left out of textbooks altogether. Unlike Boveri, Warburg wasn’t interested in the chromosomes of sea-urchin eggs. Rather, Warburg was focused on energy, specifically on how the eggs fueled their growth. By the time Warburg turned his attention from sea-urchin cells to the cells of a rat tumor, in 1923, he knew that sea-urchin eggs increased their oxygen consumption significantly as they grew, so he expected to see a similar need for extra oxygen in the rat tumor. Instead, the cancer cells fueled their growth by swallowing up enormous amounts of glucose (blood sugar) and breaking it down without oxygen. The result made no sense. Oxygen-fueled reactions are a much more efficient way of turning food into energy, and there was plenty of oxygen available for the cancer cells to use. But when Warburg tested additional tumors, including ones from humans, he saw the same effect every time. The cancer cells were ravenous for glucose.

Warburg’s discovery, later named the Warburg effect, is estimated to occur in up to 80 percent of cancers. It is so fundamental to most cancers that a positron emission tomography (PET) scan, which has emerged as an important tool in the staging and diagnosis of cancer, works simply by revealing the places in the body where cells are consuming extra glucose. In many cases, the more glucose a tumor consumes, the worse a patient’s prognosis.

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The Last Time

The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white tablecloths, he leaned forward

and took my two hands in his hands and said,
I’m going to die soon. I want you to know that.

And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, What surprises me is that you don’t.

And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you’re going to die.

And he said, No, I mean know that you are.

by Marie Howe
from What Living We Do
W.W. Norton, 1998

Acorn Woodpecker. Granary Tree.

“Acorn woodpeckers drill into trees not in order to find acorns, but in order to make holes in which they can store acorns for later use, especially during the winter.

As the acorn dries out, it decreases in size, and the woodpecker moves it to a smaller hole. The birds spend an awful lot of time tending to their granaries in this way, transferring acorns from hole to hole as if engaged in some complicated game of solitaire.

Multiple acorn woodpeckers work together to maintain a single granary, which may be located in a man-made structure – a fence or a wooden building – as well as in a tree trunk. And whereas most woodpecker species are monogamous, acorn woodpeckers take a communal approach to family life. In the bird world, this is called cooperative breeding. Acorn woodpeckers live in groups of up to seven breeding males and three breeding females, plus as many as ten non-breeding helpers. Helpers are young birds who stick around to help their parents raise future broods; only about five per cent of bird species operate in this way.”

More here, here and here.

Ivan Semeniuk in The Globe and Mail:

Earlier this year, Jennifer Doudna, a molecular biologist at UC Berkeley who is known for her role in developing the revolutionary gene-editing technique called CRISPR, got a surprising e-mail from her neighbour. It was a link to a do-it-yourself CRISPR kit on sale for $140 US.

The site included an enticement that until recently would be taken as droll science fiction. “Note to BioHackers: Each Kit comes with all sequence and cloning detail so you can perform your own custom genome engineering.”

Even Doudna, a recent winner of a Canada Gairdner International Award, expresses amazement at the pace, scope and accessibility of the new genetics. In the few short years since she and others got CRISPR to work, the manipulation of genes has become something we can play with at home in our spare time. It’s this newfound capacity, with all its ethical ramifications, that makes Siddhartha Mukherjee’s latest book especially timely.

Mukherjee is a physician and assistant professor at Columbia University whose history of cancer,The Emperor of All Maladies, won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. A gifted writer with knack for storytelling, Mukherjee managed to translate his insider’s view of cancer medicine into a memorable read.

With The Gene: An Intimate History, Mukherjee is attempting to capture something far larger. Genetics is not just a field of research, it is the overarching framework that spans the life sciences and the key to heredity and identity. Where cancer provides a rich world of material for narrative treatment, genetics throws in the entire biological universe.

More here.

Emily Bazelon in the New York Times:

Last November, Meg Muñoz went to Los Angeles to speak at the annual West Coast conference of Amnesty International. She was nervous. Three months earlier, at a meeting attended by about 500 delegates from 80 countries, Amnesty voted to adopt a proposal in favor of the “full decriminalization of consensual sex work,” sparking a storm of controversy. Members of the human rights group in Norway and Sweden resigned en masse, saying the organization’s goal should be to end demand for prostitution, not condone it. Around the world, on social media and in the press, opponents blasted Amnesty. In Los Angeles, protesters ringed the lobby of the Sheraton where the conference was being held, and as Muñoz tried to enter, a woman confronted her and became upset as Muñoz explained that, as a former sex worker, she supported Amnesty’s position. “She agreed to respect my time at the microphone,” Muñoz told me. “That didn’t exactly happen” — the woman and other critics yelled out during her panel — “but I understand why it was so hard for her.”

Muñoz was in the middle of a pitched battle over the terms, and even the meaning, of sex work. In the United States and around the globe, many sex workers (the term activists prefer to “prostitute”) are trying to change how they are perceived and policed. They are fighting the legal status quo, social mores and also mainstream feminism, which has typically focused on saving women from the sex trade rather than supporting sex workers who demand greater rights. But in the last decade, sex-worker activists have gained new allies. If Amnesty’s international board approves a final policy in favor of decriminalization in the next month, it will join forces with public-health organizations that have successfully worked for years with groups of sex workers to halt the spread of H.I.V. and AIDS, especially in developing countries. “The urgency of the H.I.V. epidemic really exploded a lot of taboos,” says Catherine Murphy, an Amnesty policy adviser.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

Despite having lived in Israel for 22 years with no criminal record of any kind, Omar Barghouti (above) was this week denied the right to traveloutside the country. As one of the pioneers of the increasingly powerful movement to impose boycotts, sanctions and divestment measures (BDS) on Israel, Barghouti, an articulate, English-speaking activist, has frequently traveled around the world advocating his position. The Israeli government’s refusal to allow him to travel is obviously intended to suppress his speech and activism. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the world leaders who traveled last year to Paris to participate in that city’s “free speech rally.”

As the husband of a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Barghouti holds a visa of permanent residency in the country, but nonetheless needs official permission to travel outside of Israel, a travel document which – until last week – had been renewed every two years. Haaretz this week reported that beyond the travel ban, Barghouti’s “residency rights in Israel are currently being reconsidered.”

The travel denial came after months of disturbing public threats directed at him by an Israeli government that has grown both more extreme and more fearful of BDS’s growing international popularity.

More here.

Dan Drezner over at the Brookings Institution:

2. Are there hard constraints on the ability of the developing world to converge to developed-country living standards?

One of the common predictions made for the next generation economy is that China will displace the United States as the world’s biggest economy. This is a synecdoche of the deeper forecast that per capita incomes in developing countries will slowly converge towards the living standards of the advance industrialized democracies. The OECD’s Looking to 2060 report is based on “a tendency of GDP per capita to converge across countries” even if that convergence is slow-moving. The EIU’s long-term macroeconomic forecast predicts that China’s per capita income will approximate Japan’s by 2050. The Carnegie Endowment’s World Order in 2050 report presumes that total factor productivity gains in the developing world will be significantly higher than countries on the technological frontier. Looking at the previous twenty years of economic growth, Kemal Dervis posited that by 2030, “The rather stark division of the world into ‘advanced’ and ‘poor’ economies that began with the industrial revolution will end, ceding to a much more differentiated and multipolar world economy.”

Intuitively, this seems rational. The theory is that developing countries have lower incomes primarily because they are capital-deficient and because their economies operate further away from technological frontier. The gains from physical and human capital investment in the developing world should be greater than in the developed world. From Alexander Gerschenkron forward, development economists have presumed that there are some growth advantages to “economic backwardness”

This intuitive logic, however, is somewhat contradicted by the “middle income trap.” Barry Eichengreen, Donghyun Park, and Kwanho Shin have argued in a series of papers that as an economy’s GDP per capita hits close to $10,000, and then again at $16,000, growth slowdowns commence. This makes it very difficult for these economies to converge towards the per capita income levels of the advanced industrialized states. History bears this out. There is a powerful correlation between a country’s GDP per capita in 1960 and that country’s per capita income in 2008. In fact, more countries that were middle income in 1960 had become relatively poorer than had joined the ranks of the rich economies. To be sure, there have been success stories, such as South Korea, Singapore, and Israel. But other success stories, such as Greece, look increasingly fragile. Lant Prichett and Lawrence Summers conclude that “past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Regression to the mean is the single most robust and empirical relevant fact about cross-national growth rates.”

More here.

Bruce Robbins in the LA Review of Books:

WALTER BENJAMIN famously imagined the angel of history, wings spread, propelled backward into the future by an irresistible, all-annihilating wind. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” Benjamin wrote, the angel “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage on wreckage.” The angel can obviously know nothing of the future, to which his back is turned. All he can know is “the pile of debris before him.” This, Benjamin says, is how we should think of progress.

Within months of composing this scenario, Benjamin was dead, a victim of the Nazis. The manner of his death helped make his beautiful, disillusioned tableau of progress-as-catastrophe one of the best remembered takeaways from the Frankfurt School. For those who have not yet had the pleasure, the Frankfurt School was a brilliant group of German-Jewish Marxo-Freudian analysts of culture who (except for Benjamin) escaped the Holocaust and lived long enough to denounce American consumerism, jazz, and the student movement. Their present-day inheritors, collectively known as critical theory, include thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth in Germany and, in the United States, Seyla Benhabib, Thomas McCarthy, Nancy Fraser, Jean Cohen, Andrew Arato, and other luminaries. They and what they made of the concept of progress are the subject of Amy Allen’s difficult but rewarding book, The End of Progress. Allen argues that key members of this generation (the Germans, but for some reason not the Americans) have been too uncritical of progress — much more uncritical than Benjamin or Theodor Adorno or, for that matter, Michel Foucault, whom she drags across the Rhine and conscripts as an ally. Allen exposes, hidden below the philosophical work of Habermas, Honneth, and Rainer Forst, a belief in progress that in her view is fatally Eurocentric, hence unworthy of their high emancipatory project.

Beyond making the charge of Eurocentrism, Allen does not really argue the anti-progress case. She doesn’t compare childhood mortality statistics or the quality of neighborliness, the situation of women or the amount of carbon in the atmosphere now and 100 years ago; the sorts of pros and cons that might come up in a dorm room late at night don’t interest her much. And her indifference to empirical examples is not incidental. The major accusation she levels against the best-known of the critical theorists, Habermas and Honneth, is that although they seem rigorously philosophical, they pay too much attention to facts like these. For Allen’s style of philosophy, any attention is too much attention.

Allen proposes that there are two conceptions of progress. One looks forward; the other, like Benjamin’s angel, looks backward. The forward-looking one is an imperative to act so as to make progress happen. It’s a good thing. The backward-looking one is not.

More here.

Valençay

Paying for identity. Paying for tradition.
The French State pays when it subsidises
an agricultural activity whose workforce
in days no longer measured from sunrise
to sunset over farmland first ploughed
at least some seven millennia in the past
quickly declines alongside the percentage
of its real contribution to GDP. It pays
for time. An ancestral time that only exists
financed by millions and more millions.
It doesn’t pay for alpine goats’ milk. Doesn’t
pay for the dusting of charcoal that covers
the rind. It doesn’t pay for the room, damp
and ventilated, where it’s left to mature.
It pays to keep up an idea, the landscape
suited to that idea. Pays for national pride
or pays for a phrase from Brillat-Savarin.
(It’s best accompanied with a nice Shiraz.)
.

by Sergio Raimondi
from Für ein kommentiertes Wörterbuch /
Para un diccionario crítico de la lengua
publisher: Berenberg, Berlín, 2012
translation: Ben Bollig
first published on Poetry International, 2016
.

Moira Weigel in The New York Times:

Today, we refer to a man inviting a woman to dinner as “traditional.” At first it was scandalous: A woman who arranged to meet a man at a bar or restaurant could find herself interrogated by a vice commission. In the 1920s and ‘30s, as more and more middle-class women started going to college, parents and faculty panicked over the “rating and dating” culture, which led kids to participate in “petting parties” and take “joy rides” with members of the opposite sex. By the 1950s, a new kind of dating took over: “going steady.” Popular advice columnist Dorothy Dix warned in 1939 that going steady was an “insane folly.” But by the post-war era of full employment, this form of courtship made perfect sense. The booming economy, which was targeting the newly flush “teen” demographic, dictated that in order for everyone to partake in new consumer pleasures — for everyone to go out for a burger and root beer float on the weekends — young people had to pair off. Today, the economy is transforming courtship yet again. But the changes aren’t only practical. The economy shapes our feelings and values as well as our behaviors.

The generation of Americans that came of age around the time of the 2008 financial crisis has been told constantly that we must be “flexible” and “adaptable.” Is it so surprising that we have turned into sexual freelancers? Many of us treat relationships like unpaid internships: We cannot expect them to lead to anything long-term, so we use them to get experience. If we look sharp, we might get a free lunch.

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Simms and Laderman in New Statesman:

Jews around the world have recently celebrated Passover, a festival commemorating the exodus of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt. To mark the occasion, the BBC screened a documentary about a modern exodus, the flight of Jews from France. With an estimated 475,000 Jews, France remains home to Europe’s largest Jewish population. But in recent years, rising anti-Semitism and a series of terror attacks have forced out a growing number. As many as 8,000 left in 2014, up from 1,900 five years earlier, a fourfold increase. Most of them are moving to Israel but many are seeking refuge in Britain. French Jewish children now make up half the intake at Jewish schools in London. Anyone who has travelled recently to Paris will have seen signs of the tense atmosphere that French Jewish refugees are leaving behind. Every Jewish building is guarded by soldiers in full combat gear.

Sadly, anti-Semitism in France is only the starkest manifestation of a growing contemporary Jew-hatred in Europe and across the world. The cancerous belief that the world is run by an international Jewish conspiracy shapes the world-view of much of Iran’s governing elite, operatives of Islamic State (IS), nationalist leaders in Slovakia and Hungary, and a major Palestinian political organisation. It even pervades parts of a mainstream British political party, and our university campuses, too. Where did this poison come from, and is there an antidote to it?

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Rich Benjamin at The Guardian:

Spain in Our Hearts offers little in the way of new information, except for a fascinating account of Texaco’s crucial role in bankrolling Franco. Hochschild’s contribution lies in the storytelling, his sure command of military history, and his beautiful sense of private hurt, which together yield original insight. An astute observer of contrasts, he navigates the hairpin turns between intimacy and barbarism, euphoria and despair, naivety and cynicism. The book effortlessly hopscotches from global history to individual – and emotional – experience.

“The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail,” wrote republican volunteer George Orwell. “There must have been two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world, which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaningless of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment’s carelessness.” Manning a frontline trench, Orwell had absent-mindedly poked his head above a parapet, and taken a sniper’s bullet. It missed his carotid artery by a few millimetres. Witnessing the imprisonment, torture and killings ordered by Stalin’s Spanish henchmen against his fellow leftists, disillusioned him, though he continued fighting loyally. “Whichever way you took it,” he wrote, “it was a depressing outlook. But it did not follow that the government was not worth fighting for as against the more naked and developed fascism of Franco and Hitler.”

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Melissa Harrison at The Financial Times:

Alexander Masters is the sole practitioner of a very particular kind of biography. His previous two books were the much-lauded Stuart: A Life Backwards, a portrait of a homeless man, and The Genius in my Basement, about the reclusive mathematical prodigy and transport obsessive Simon Phillips Norton. To call his earlier subjects “ordinary” would be to do them a disservice, but neither were famous or conventionally notable — Masters’ interest is firmly in obscure and unseen lives. That’s not all that sets his books apart: they have a postmodern playfulness, the writing process described in the narrative and their subjects reading and commenting (not always favourably) on the work-in-progress, while doodles, photos and knowing,Tristram Shandy-style jokes dot the text.

A Life Discarded fits comfortably into the tradition he’s established. Its subject, anonymous initially, is the author of 148 diaries that Masters’ friends Dido Davies and Richard Grove, both Cambridge professors, retrieve from a skip. What’s immediately clear is that the earliest notebooks date back to 1959 and that the astonishingly prolific diarist was writing an average of 2,500 words every single day.

Masters does not begin to investigate the books straight away; in fact, it’s 10 years before a house move sees them resurface among his boxes and rekindle his interest. During that time Richard is involved in a car crash and confined to a wheelchair, and Dido, Masters’ writing collaborator for 25 years, is diagnosed with cancer.

more here.