Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Many of our primate ancestors probably ended up in the bellies of big cats. How else to explain bite marks on the bones of ancient hominins, the apparent gnawing of leopards or other African felines?

Big cats still pose a threat to primates. In one study of chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast, for example, scientists estimated that each chimp ran a 30 percent risk of being attacked by a leopard every year.

A new study suggests that the big cats may be getting some tiny help on the hunt. A parasite infecting the brains of some primates, including perhaps our forebears, may make them less wary.

What does the parasite get out of it? A ride into its feline host.

The parasite is Toxoplasma gondii, a remarkably successful single-celled organism. An estimated 11 percent of Americans have dormant Toxoplasma cysts in their brains; in some countries, the rate is as high as 90 percent.

Infection with the parasite poses a serious threat to fetuses and to people with compromised immune systems. But the vast majority of those infected appear to suffer no serious symptoms. Their healthy immune systems keep the parasite in check.

More here.

Fiona MacDonald in Science Alert:

A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles – almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published – freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers.

For those of you who aren't already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it's sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn't afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it's since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court – a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

“Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,”Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.”

If it sounds like a modern day Robin Hood struggle, that's because it kinda is. But in this story, it's not just the poor who don't have access to scientific papers – journal subscriptions have become so expensive that leading universities such as Harvard and Cornell have admitted they can no longer afford them. Researchers have also taken a stand – with 15,000 scientists vowing to boycott publisher Elsevier in part for its excessive paywall fees.

More here.

Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine:

The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a sad and tragic event for his loved ones, including 28 grandchildren and a large network of admirers. The political stakes for the country, its governing institutions, and, yes, the planet dwarf them in scale. The mortality of Supreme Court Justices is an element of wild randomness in the American political system. Enormous stakes rest upon the frail vulnerabilities of human flesh. Thurgood Marshall’s retirement 13 months before the 1992 presidential election, and two years before his death, paved the way for his replacement by Clarence Thomas. In today’s polarized era, no justice who had the physical ability to stay on would depart a Supreme Court seat under an opposing-party president. Whether and how the current system can handle these jolts of random chance is an open question.

The immediate and easily foreseeable impact is staggering. Last week, the Supreme Court issued a stay delaying the implementation of Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The stay indicated that a majority of the justices foresee a reasonably high likelihood that they would ultimately strike down Obama’s plan, which could jeopardize the Paris climate agreement and leave greenhouse gasses unchecked. Without Scalia on the Court, the odds of this drop to virtually zero. The challenge is set to be decided by a D.C. Circuit panel composed of a majority of Democratic appointees, which will almost certainly uphold the regulations. If the plan is upheld, it would require a majority of the Court to strike it down. With the Court now tied 4-4, such a ruling now seems nearly impossible.

Even if the Senate does not confirm any successor, then, Scalia’s absence alone reshapes the Court.

More here.

You say I cannot have it if you find my heart.
It was once mine: now I know who has it.

Love is by far the best thing in life. It took
All my sorrows: but has me hooked to it.

She is coy & cunning, sweet, exacting too.
She is playing you when you do not know it.

The heart can tell its story: what I know is this,
Every time I look for it, you say you have it.

My mentor likes to rub salt in my wounds.
Sir Tormentor, I ask, what do you take from it?
.

by Ghalib
from Kenyon Review, Winter 2013
translation: M. Shahid Alam

________________________________________________

Editor's Note, Kenyon Review:

Ghalib is the pen name of Mirza Asadullah Khan, a poet of
nineteenth-century India, wrote in Urdu and Persian.
He is widely regarded as the greatest poet of the Urdu language.

________________________________________________

Article by M. Shahid Alam:
Urdu Ghazals of Ghalib
.
.

Salley Vickers in the New Statesman:

In the sage words of the novelist William Maxwell, “It is impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness.” The psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips has, for some time, been engaged in investigating this enigma. A recent collection of essays, Missing Out, explored our propensity to attach a greater value to what we have not, rather than what we have. His latest book, Unforbidden Pleasures, is a profound meditation on our reluctance to enjoy ourselves as we might and, more crucially, as we are apparently granted the freedom to do.

A good deal of complex thinking and ­reference is compressed into two hundred or so pages. Phillips’s first witness is Oscar Wilde, whose provocatively intelligent statement on political engagement – “The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings” – sets the book’s terms. “It is, of course, Wilde’s point that socialism interferes with sociability,” Phillips comments. Our ideologies – whether extraneous, as political or moral systems, or internalised – estrange us from our more creative and enjoyable instincts.

If Phillips sees in Wilde an ally, it is because the latter’s epicureanism made him suspicious of all enemies of pleasure, most especially self-inflicted punishment. A mistaken respect for a forbidding authority is, in Phillips’s view, the basis of conscience.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Chances are that everyone reading this blog post has heard that LIGO, the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory, officially announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves. Two black holes, caught in a close orbit, gradually lost energy and spiraled toward each other as they emitted gravitational waves, which zipped through space at the speed of light before eventually being detected by our observatories here on Earth. Plenty of other places will give you details on this specific discovery, or tutorials on the nature of gravitational waves, including in user-friendly comic/video form.

What I want to do here is to make sure, in case there was any danger, that nobody loses sight of the extraordinary magnitude of what has been accomplished here. We’ve become a bit blasé about such things: physics makes a prediction, it comes true, yay. But we shouldn’t take it for granted; successes like this reveal something profound about the core nature of reality.

Some guy scribbles down some symbols in an esoteric mixture of Latin, Greek, and mathematical notation. Scribbles originating in his tiny, squishy human brain. (Here are what some of those those scribbles look like, in my own incredibly sloppy handwriting.) Other people (notably Rainer Weiss, Ronald Drever, and Kip Thorne), on the basis of taking those scribbles extremely seriously, launch a plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of decades. They concoct an audacious scheme to shootlaser beams at mirrors to look for modulated displacements of less than a millionth of a billionth of a centimeter — smaller than the diameter of an atomic nucleus.

More here.

Madeleine Albright in the New York Times:

I have spent much of my career as a diplomat. It is an occupation in which words and context matter a great deal. So one might assume I know better than to tell a large number of women to go to hell.

But last Saturday, in the excitement of a campaign event for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, that is essentially what I did, when I delivered a line I have uttered a thousand times to applause, nodding heads and laughter: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” It is a phrase I first used almost 25 years ago, when I was the United States ambassador to the United Nations and worked closely with the six other female U.N. ambassadors. But this time, to my surprise, it went viral.

I absolutely believe what I said, that women should help one another, but this was the wrong context and the wrong time to use that line. I did not mean to argue that women should support a particular candidate based solely on gender. But I understand that I came across as condemning those who disagree with my political preferences. If heaven were open only to those who agreed on politics, I imagine it would be largely unoccupied.

More here.

Vivian Gornick at the New York Times:

It is a truism that every great book survives the literary and cultural conventions of its time and place because the emotional intelligence in it speaks to a reader a hundred years down the road. If I read a Hardy novel, for instance, I ignore the melodramatics — the lost letter, the unexpected storm — because the depth and clarity of Hardy’s understanding carries me well past it. With “Howards End,” I now found I could not get beyond the implausible plot turns; repeatedly, they stopped me in my tracks, even as they seemed to stop Forster himself. When the plot served him least, he gave his characters speeches that were clearly meant to signal his intentions but did not; some inchoateness there that deepened rather than dispelled a lack of clarity. It was as though the writing was speaking in code, the writer’s wisdom operating somewhere behind the prose rather than emerging from it.

Suddenly I realized that I’d been here before. I remembered how struck I was as a student by the sense that something was stirring in the writer that he himself could not work out on the page. At the time, it was this very incapacity that seemed to infuse the novel with mystery and significance. My literary young heart felt something profound afoot, and it knew the thrill of awe and pity. Now, some 40-odd years later, here I was looking once again at the very same conundrum. I no longer found it either profound or mysterious, but yes, it was still delivering awe and pity.

more here.

Barrett Hathcock at The Quarterly Conversation:

Is there a more chastening figure in contemporary American letters than Marilynne Robinson? Is there anyone else who seems, by her small but distinguished oeuvre, to call into question our literary predilections—for Franzonian cultural diagnostics, for confessional self-help, for vast, historical, double-hanky weepers? Or, more generally, is there a writer whose very presence—her unironic devotion to Christianity, her almost creepy level of calm, her spiritual maturity, her belief—undermines our own hectic cultural preoccupations—with Twitter icons, racist presidential candidates, our daily NASDAQ of microaggressions? Perhaps the only person who offers the same level of rebuke to contemporary life is Cormac McCarthy, a kind of grumpy, nihilistic older brother. Together they stand like Easter Island statues, implacable in the bleak gulf stream of our culture.

Which isn’t to say Robinson isn’t any fun. After publishing the almost universally heraldedHousekeeping in 1980 and then becoming something of a modern day Harper Lee, she returned to fiction, like a woken giant, with Gilead in 2004. Since then she has published two more novels in her Gilead trilogy, and they each contain her unassuming, uncondescending sense of magnanimous patience. Reading these novels is not unlike receiving a type of spiritual hug, offered even to the unbelieving.

Her newest book, the collection of essays The Givenness of Things, continues her spiritual exploration even more overtly.

more here.

Duncan Kelly at the Financial Times:

Realpolitik began as an argument about the possibilities of German unification following the European revolutions of 1848. Its originator was August Ludwig von Rochau, a radical who was jailed for his politics as a student, worked in exile as a travel writer, then returned home to Germany to become a political journalist and, eventually, a politician. In 1853 he published Grundsätze der Realpolitik (roughly translated as “Foundations of Realpolitik”), whose arguments applied particularly to the ramshackle confederation of German states. Rochau’s book suggests all the things you might think of when you hear the word Realpolitik: that politics is about power, about manoeuvring coalitions, about social forces (he focused on the rising middle class in Germany) and their capacity to influence politics, and about the power of ideas in shaping political possibilities — though it takes work to pull that out of his convoluted text.

Rochau published a second version of Realpolitik in 1869, now calling for a strong German national-liberal state able to defend itself against Bonapartist tyranny and to extricate itself from its Austro-Hungarian neighbour. It took a powerful Prussia under Otto von Bismarck make that happen — and, when it did, the German chancellor quickly became regarded as a political visionary. For admirers and critics alike, his name became synonymous withRealpolitik. And as Bew suggests, the subsequent story of Realpolitik is really one of how a historically contingent German idea became divorced from its origins, morphing into a polemical term signalling hardheaded realism (as opposed to “moralism”) about politics.

more here.

Richard Spencer in The Telegraph:

China has a strange image in the West. It is seen as remote and not really comprehensible. As such, the things that are strangest about it are sometimes accepted as part of its difference, even defended. The one-child policy is a curiosity; there is a tendency to believe the Chinese government’s claim that however undesirable, it has been necessary: ren tai duo – too many people. The Communist Party says the whole world should be grateful for this self-sacrifice, says it has prevented the births of 400 million people, a number that would have put a strain on not just China’s economic resources but the earth’s environmental ones.

One of the principal merits of this book is Fong’s demolition of this hocus-pocus. She describes in turn the extraordinarily violent methods with which the policy has been enforced, interviewing victims of compulsory sterilisation, forced abortion, and the theft of babies to be sold into adoption; and expert statistical analysis showing that the effect on population has been much less than claimed – most likely 100, or at most 200 million lives not lived, a small percentage of China’s 1.4 billion, hardly worth the suffering.

More here.

Epitaphs

The Auctioneer
Just before the Coffin-Lidder
nails the eternal ceiling on,
tell the next-to-highest-bidder
I am going, going, gone.

The Magician
I pulled a rabbit from my hat,
rejoined the severed ends of flannel;
I left them guessing at all that
then stepped into this secret panel.

La Grande Dame
People would tell me what they’d heard.
I thought their prophecy would miss.
I’d been taught that, in a word,
I was better than all this.

The Writer
Let the devil play the zither.
Let the angels play their harps.
Given choice, I’d rather
leave a corpus than a corpse.

The Weaver
When Clotho says
you’re out of thread,
that’s not what she means.
She means you’re dead.
.

by John Stone
from In All This Rain
Louisiana State Press, 1980
.
.

Helen Fisher in Nautilus:

George Bernard Shaw knew the power of romantic love and attachment. Both, I will maintain, are addictions—wonderful addictions when the relationship is going well; horribly negative addictions when the partnership breaks down. Moreover, these love addictions evolved a long time ago, as Lucy and her relatives and friends roamed the grass of east Africa some 3.2 million years ago.

Take romantic love. Even a happy lover shows all of the characteristics of an addict. Foremost, besotted men and women crave emotional and physical union with their beloved. This craving is a central component of all addictions. Lovers also feel a rush of exhilaration when thinking about him or her, a form of “intoxication.” As their obsession builds, the lover seeks to interact with the beloved more and more, known in addiction literature as “intensification.” They also think obsessively about their beloved, a form of intrusive thinking fundamental to drug dependence. Lovers also distort reality, change their priorities and daily habits to accommodate the beloved, and often do inappropriate, dangerous, or extreme things to remain in contact with or impress this special other.

Even one’s personality can change, known as “affect disturbance.” Indeed, many smitten humans are willing to sacrifice for their sweetheart, even die for him or her. And like addicts who suffer when they can’t get their drug, the lover suffers when apart from the beloved—“separation anxiety.”

Trouble really starts, however, when a lover is rejected. Most abandoned men and women experience the common signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, sleep disturbances (sleeping way too much or way too little), loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability, and chronic loneliness.

Lovers also relapse the way addicts do. Long after the relationship is over, events, people, places, songs, or other external cues associated with the abandoning partner can trigger memories. This sparks a new round of craving, intrusive thinking, compulsive calling, writing, or showing up—all in hopes of rekindling the romance. Because romantic love is regularly associated with a suite of traits linked with all addictions, several psychologists have come to believe that romantic love can potentially become an addiction.

More here.