June Thunderstorm in The Baffler:

Does the gardener complain to her employer that raking leaves blisters her hand? Does the house painter point out that the job ranks in the top five professions for incidence of alcoholism? The job is so goddamned boring, not to mention dehydrating (the drying agent in the paint gets into your system), that drinking or smoking something with a kick all day is the only way to avoid hanging yourself from a scaffold. Who has encountered a special acronym for the tendonitis that afflicts janitors who empty the cardboard coffee cups out of grad students’ trash cans every day? If the janitors do get time off to see a doctor, they are likely to be told they have a bad case of “tennis elbow.”

You see, the assumption behind efforts to eradicate “ableism” seems to be that only some people—people with recognized disabilities, and not, for example, workers routinely in harm’s way—deserve protection from dust, paint, and lifting boxes. Only some people don’t like seeing themselves bleed. Only some people are damaged by inhaling trisodium phosphate. And only some people should get to have their papers graded easy…

It would be a mistake to throw away the concept of “disabled” (or “differently abled”), and with it decades of struggle on the part of disability rights activists—especially now, when differently abled people of all sorts are increasingly marginalized by the dismantling of welfare states. But if the concept of “disability” is to benefit the poor as well as the prosperous, then the word “class” must make a comeback. After all, the license to stop working “when it hurts” and to attribute shortcomings and mistakes to “health issues” (as opposed to “personal failures”) has constituted class privilege for a very long time. Meanwhile, the majority of the world’s people continue to suffer the unhealthful consequences of building, cleaning, scraping, assembling chipboards, painting, and raking leaves, while the university-minted elites sit around pushing paper, organizing anti-oppression workshops, and refreshing their Facebook pages as they complain about the pathological conditions of their own lives. So long as window-cleaners, maids, plumbers, janitors, food-servers, and others on the lower rungs of the occupational hierarchy are expected to perform the tasks required in their jobs, they will be in pain, and so long as they are paid as little as they are, there’s no escaping it.

Read the rest here.

Jasper Rees in The Telegraph:

In a National Theatre rehearsal room, a stagehand is dumping a hundred or so empty plastic water bottles from a bin liner onto the floor. Set dressing tends to be a bit more fastidious, even decorous. The main reassurance that this isn’t theatre being done on the cheap is the presence of playwright Sir David Hare, artistic director elect Rufus Norris and the esteemed actress Meera Syal. For 20 minutes, Syal leads the cast of 25 South Asian actors in a run-through of the National’s forthcoming epic, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. It is perhaps the biggest play about waste ever mounted.

The source material is a remarkably powerful book by Katherine Boo, a New Yorker journalist who spent more than three years meticulously documenting lives in Annawadi, a teeming slum in the shadow of Mumbai airport. Behind the Beautiful Forevers was published simultaneously in the US and India in 2012, was widely hailed and won numerous awards: it shone a torch on endemic corruption and abject poverty, refusing to sentimentalise its subjects while giving them their humanity: Boo’s Annawadians quarrel and joke, strive and connive like the rest of us, but with a much shorter life expectancy. The book was bound to journey away from the page and the first person to pounce and option it was the omnivorous New York producer Scott Rudin. He gave the idea of staging it to Hare, who for Rudin had adapted Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours. But Boo was not initially persuaded.

Andrew J, Bacevich in The New York Times:

The author of this book has a lot to answer for. “I am a United States Army general,” Daniel Bolger writes, “and I lost the Global War on Terrorism.” The fault is not his alone, of course. Bolger’s peers offered plenty of help. As he sees it, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, abysmal generalship pretty much doomed American efforts. The judgment that those wars qualify as lost — loss defined as failing to achieve stated objectives — is surely correct. On that score, Bolger’s honesty is refreshing, even if his explanation for that failure falls short. In measured doses, self-flagellation cleanses and clarifies. But heaping all the blame on America’s generals lets too many others off the hook.

Before retiring in 2013 as a three-star general, Bolger served 35 years on active duty, a career culminating with two tours in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. As he ascended through the ranks, he earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago. While teaching that subject at West Point and after returning to the field army, he published several books on military subjects. “Why We Lost” arrives well padded with war stories. Recounting combat actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, those stories testify to the bravery, resourcefulness and resolve of American soldiers — mainly sergeants, captains and lieutenant colonels. Yet “above that tactical excellence,” Bolger writes, “yawned a howling waste.” At the very top, the troops were ill-led. Perhaps so, but Bolger’s critique of that leadership distorts even as it purports to expose.

More here.

Elahe Izadi in the Washington Post:

People's Internet usage has opened a new door for predictive data. There are already some tools out there, such as Google Trends, which tries to “nowcast,” or show what's happening right now with the spread of certain diseases in the world. There have been studies, too, on whether Twitter can accurately predict how a disease is spreading.

But getting access to Google Trends or Twitter data is not always easy — or cheap. So a team of mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists got together to see if they could use something that's completely open and free: Wikipedia.

As it turns out, they could accurately forecast how influenza and dengue spread based purely on people's reading habits of Wikipedia articles. Last week, they showed how their algorithm could predict flu season in the United States. The full results of their research are published in this week's PLOS Computational Biology…

Researchers looked at seven diseases and 11 countries over a period of three years, starting in 2010, and compared page views on Wikipedia articles about those diseases to official data from health ministries. By looking at readers' habits, they successfully predicted the spreads of influenza in the United States, Poland, Thailand and Japan and dengue in Brazil and Thailand at least 28 days in advance.

Read the rest here.

Dashiell Bennett in The Atlantic:

A new “net neutrality” plan released by the White House on Monday morning includes an endorsement of an old idea that some activists have been pushing for years: the treatment of the Internet as a public utility.

In a letter and a video posted on the White House website, President Obama said he believes “the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act,” allowing Internet Service Providers to be more heavily regulated. According to Obama, the change would acknowledge that “the Internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life.”

Obama's argument explicitly rejects proposed rules that FCC considered earlier this year to allow paid prioritization, a plan by which content providers can make deals with ISPs to get faster service to their websites. (Those rules are still under consideration and have not been finalized.) The White House proposal calls for no paid prioritization, no blocking of any content that is not illegal, and no throttling of Internet services, where some customers have their Internet speeds artificially slowed down.

The proposal also asks that any new rules include mobile broadband, which is already the primary access point for many users.

As the president himself reminds us, the FCC does not answer to him, and does not have to listen to (or even consider) his suggestions. So there are no guarantees that any of these rules will even come to pass. However, an endorsement by the White House would be the strongest push yet toward an FCC that treats all Internet traffic as equal.

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

You’ve got a group of people with a mysterious disease, and you suspect that some microbe might be responsible. You collect blood and tissue samples, you extract the DNA from them using a commonly used kit of chemicals, and you sequence the lot. Eureka! You find that every patient has the same microbe—let’s say Bradyrhizobium, or Brady for short. Congratulations, you have discovered the cause of Disease X.

Don’t celebrate yet.

You run the exact same procedure on nothing more than a tube of sterile water and… you find Brady. The microbe wasn’t in your patients. It was in the chemical reagents you used in your experiments. It’s not the cause of Disease X; it’s a contaminant.

Versions of this story could be playing out in dozens of labs around the world. A team of scientists led by Susannah Salter and Alan Walker at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has shown that DNA extraction kits, and other lab reagents commonly used in microbe studies, are almost always contaminated by low levels of microbial DNA.

Bradyrhizobium is a common culprit, but the team have identified a list of around 100 microbes whose DNA regularly turn up when sequencing supposedly “blank” tubes of water.

More here.

David Remnick in The New Yorker:

Reuven (Ruvi) Rivlin, the new President of Israel, is ardently opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state. He is instead a proponent of Greater Israel, one Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. He professes to be mystified that anyone should object to the continued construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank: “It can’t be ‘occupied territory’ if the land is your own.”

Rivlin does not have the starched personality of an ideologue, however. He resembles a cheerfully overbearing Borscht Belt comedian who knows too many bad jokes to tell in a single set but is determined to try. Sitting in an office decorated with mementos of his right-wing Zionist lineage, he unleashes a cataract of anecdotes, asides, humble bromides, corny one-liners, and historical footnotes. At seventy-five, he has the florid, bulbous mug of a cartoon flatfoot, if that flatfoot were descended from Lithuanian Talmudists and six generations of Jerusalemites. Rivlin’s father, Yosef, was a scholar of Arabic literature. (He translated the Koran and “The Thousand and One Nights.”) Ruvi Rivlin’s temperament is other than scholarly. He is, in fact, given to categorical provocations. After a visit some years ago to a Reform synagogue in Westfield, New Jersey, he declared that the service was “idol worship and not Judaism.”

And yet, since Rivlin was elected President, in June, he has become Israel’s most unlikely moralist. Rivlin—not a left-wing writer from Tel Aviv, not an idealistic justice of the Supreme Court—has emerged as the most prominent critic of racist rhetoric, jingoism, fundamentalism, and sectarian violence, the highest-ranking advocate among Jewish Israelis for the civil rights of the Palestinians both in Israel and in the occupied territories. Last month, he told an academic conference in Jerusalem, “It is time to honestly admit that Israel is sick, and it is our duty to treat this illness.”

More here.

Joanna Scutts at Lapham's Quarterly:

The silence (or Silence, as it tended to be styled in the interwar years) stood at the center of Britain’s Armistice Day rituals. From the beginning it was timed to correspond with the ceremony at the Cenotaph at Whitehall, and was later broadcast from there by radio and then by television. It was important that it was a broadcast ofsilence, not simply a two-minute interruption in transmission: the tension of the silence carried over to the listeners. If it was observed in public, the Silence was simultaneously a performance of remembrance and an opportunity for private remembering. It is difficult to know whether the inviolable sanctity of the Silence was felt to be coercive or oppressive. At the same time, within that public silence, there was no way of controlling what people were actually thinking. Newspapers frequently carried scare stories of “violators” being forcibly silenced and shamed, but they were always careful to present these as the spontaneous reactions of fellow mourners, never as any kind of official punishment.

The idea of the Silence spread quickly from London to Canada and Australia and throughout the Empire. Two years later, according the Times, the ritual became—like the visually identical war cemeteries then being constructed—a way of connecting British remembrance efforts throughout the Empire: “From the jungles of India to the snows of Alaska, on trains, on ships at sea, in every part of the globe where a few British were gathered together, the Two Minute Pause was observed.” It was felt most powerfully in urban, industrial areas, where silence was a rarity—and also, where fears of political unrest in the wake of the Russian Revolution were most acute.

more here.

J. Hoberman at the NYRB:

“What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present,” the provocatively titled exhibit at the RISD Museum in Providence, presents a bracing counter to one prevailing way of telling the story of postwar American art. Somewhat simplified, this traditional account holds that European Surrealism led to Abstract Expressionism, which led to Pop Art and Minimalism, which were followed by Earth Art, Body Art, and Conceptual Art, the return of expressive painting, and so on up to the present, when no one city nor any single movement reigns supreme: a thousand flowers bloom.

But “What Nerve!,” organized by Dan Nadel with Judith Tannenbaum, argues that it was ever thus, and in Nadel’s words, “proposes an alternate history of figurative painting, sculpture and vernacular image-making that has been largely overlooked and undervalued relative to the canon of Modernist abstraction and Conceptual art.” There’s a healthy truculence to the premise and much of the work as well. Indeed, the show immediately engages the eye with two bumptious works of dissident splendor. The seventeen lithographs of H.C. Westermann’s corrosive, cartoony “See America First” series, stripped down travel posters for a dead land, get an additional zetz of Coney Island sensationalism from their proximity to Peter Saul’s blithely outrageous, biomorphic construction in enamel and plastic coated Styrofoam, Man in Electric Chair (1966).

more here.

Andrew Sullivan at The Dish:

Let me put this as baldly as I can. The US fought two long, brutal wars in its response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. We lost both of them – revealing the biggest military machine in the history of the planet as essentially useless in advancing American objectives through war and occupation. Attempts to quash Islamist extremism through democracy were complete failures. The Taliban still has enormous sway in Afghanistan and the only way to prevent the entire Potemkin democracy from imploding is a permanent US troop presence. In Iraq, we are now confronting the very same Sunni insurgency the invasion created in 2003 – just even more murderous. The Jihadism there has only become more extreme under a democratic veneer. And in all this, the U.S. didn’t just lose the wars; it lost the moral high-ground as well. The president himself unleashed brutal torture across all theaters of war – effectively ending any moral authority the US has in international human rights.

These are difficult truths to handle. They reveal that so many brave men and women died for nothing. And so we have to construct myths or bury facts to ensure that we maintain face. But these myths and amnesia have a consequence: they only serve to encourage Washington to make exactly the same mistakes again. To protect its own self-regard, Washington’s elite is prepared to send young Americans to fight in a war they cannot win and indeed have already lost. You see the blinding myopia elsewhere: Washington’s refusal to release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture merely proves that it cannot face the fact that some of the elite are war criminals tout simple, and that these horrific war crimes have changed America’s role in the world.

more here.

Sam Wong in MedicalXpress:

Researchers have gained fresh insights into how 'local' body clocks control waking and sleeping. All animals, from ants to humans, have internal 'circadian' clocks that respond to changes in light and tell the body to rest and go to sleep, or wake up and become active. A master clock found in part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is thought to synchronise lots of 'local' clocks that regulate many aspects of our metabolism, for example in the liver. But until now scientists have not had sufficient evidence to demonstrate the existence of these local clocks in the brain or how they operate. In a new study looking at mice, researchers including Professors Bill Wisden and Nick Franks at Imperial College London and Dr Mick Hastings' group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge have investigated a local clock found in another part of the brain, outside the SCN, known as the tuberomamillary nucleus (TMN). This is made up of histaminergic neurons, which are inactive during sleep, but release a compound called histamine during waking hours, which awakens the body.

…Senior researcher Professor Bill Wisden from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London said: “Getting enough good quality sleep is crucial – it helps keep us mentally and physically healthy, as well as being a key factor in having a good quality of life. A lot of people would love to have more a concentrated and restful night's sleep, but at the moment we still don't know enough about exactly why we fall and stay asleep. Our work with mice suggests that local body clocks play a key role in ensuring their sleeping and waking processes work properly. When a local clock was disrupted, their whole sleep and wake system malfunctioned. Ultimately, understanding local clocks better might enable us to target them to help people have a better night's sleep.”

More here.

Efrain Kristal and Arne De Boever interview Zygmunt Bauman in The LA Review of Books (in two parts):

ARNE DE BOEVER / EFRAIN KRISTAL: Did your military experiences as a young man — particularly those involving the liberation of your native Poland in World War II — have a bearing on your earliest ideas when you became a professor of sociology at the University of Warsaw?

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: They must have, mustn’t they? How could it be otherwise? Be they military or civilian, life experiences cannot but imprint themselves — the more heavily the more acute they are — on life’s trajectory, on the way we perceive the world, respond to it and pick the paths to walk through it. They combine into a matrix of which one’s life’s itinerary is one of the possible permutations. The point, though, is that they do their work silently, stealthily so to speak, and surreptitiously — by prodding rather than spurring, and through sets of options they circumscribe rather than through conscious, deliberate choices. Stanisław Lem, the great Polish storyteller as well as scientist, tried once, not entirely tongue in cheek, to compose an inventory of accidents leading to the birth of the person called “Stanisław Lem,” and then calculate that birth’s probability. He found that scientifically speaking his existence was well nigh impossible (though probability of other people’s births — scoring no better than his — was also infinitely close to zero). And so a word of warning is in order: retrospectively reconstructing causes and motives of choices carries a danger of imputing structure to a flow, and logic — even predetermination — to what was in fact a series of faits accomplis poorly if at all reflected upon at the time of their happening. Contrary to the popular phrase, “hindsight” and “benefit” do not always come in pairs — particularly in autobiographic undertakings.

I recall here these mundane and rather trivial truths to warn you that what I am going to say in reply to your question needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

From early childhood I was enthused with physics and cosmology and intended to devote my life to their study. Perhaps I would’ve tried to follow that intention if not for the vivid exposition of the human potential of inhumanity: the ugly monstrosity of war, of evil let loose, of the horror of continuously bombarded roads crowded with refugees, of the desperate yet vain attempts to escape the advancing Nazi troops leading ultimately to the calamity of exile which was, as I remember being then aware, also the lifesaving marvel — all coming in quick succession. Then the point-blank exposure to the vagabond’s experience of many and different ways of being human — of a variegated patchwork of many and diverse modes of life, none of which appeared to be blameless and attractive enough to be uncritically, wholeheartedly embraced.

More here. Part two here.

Terry Eagleton reviews two new books by Slavoj Žižek, in the Guardian (Photograph: David Levene):

It is said that Jean-Paul Sartre turned white-faced with excitement when a colleague arrived hotfoot from Germany with the news that one could make philosophy out of the ashtray. In these two new books, Slavoj Žižek philosophises in much the same spirit about sex, swearing, decaffeinated coffee, vampires,Henry Kissinger, The Sound of Music, the Muslim Brotherhood, the South Korean suicide rate and a good deal more. If there seems no end to his intellectual promiscuity, it is because he suffers from a rare affliction known as being interested in everything. In Britain, philosophers tend to divide between academics who write for each other and meaning-of-life merchants who beam their reflections at the general public. Part of Žižek’s secret is that he is both at once: a formidably erudite scholar well-versed in Kant and Heidegger who also has a consuming passion for the everyday. He is equally at home with Hegel andHitchcock, the Fall from Eden and the fall of Mubarak. If he knows about Wagnerand Schoenberg, he is also an avid consumer of vampire movies and detective fiction. A lot of his readers have learned to understand Freud or Nietzsche by viewing them through the lens of Jaws or Mary Poppins.

Academic philosophers can be obscure, whereas popularisers aim to be clear. With his urge to dismantle oppositions, Žižek has it both ways here. If some of his ideas can be hard to digest, his style is a model of lucidity. Absolute Recoil is full of intractable stuff, but Trouble in Paradise reports on the political situation in Egypt, China, Korea, Ukraine and the world in general in a crisp, well-crafted prose that any newspaper should be proud to publish. Not that, given Žižek’s provocatively political opinions, many of them would. He sees the world as divided between liberal capitalism and fundamentalism – in other words, between those who believe too little and those who believe too much. Instead of taking sides, however, he stresses the secret complicity between the two camps. Fundamentalism is the ugly creed of those who feel washed up and humiliated by a west that has too often ridden roughshod over their interests. One lesson of the Egyptian revolt, Žižek argues in Trouble in Paradise, is that if moderate liberal forces continue to ignore the radical left, “they will generate an unsurmountable fundamentalist wave”. Toppling tyrants, which all good liberals applaud, is simply a prelude to the hard work of radical social transformation, without which fundamentalism will return. In a world everywhere under the heel of capital, only radical politics can retrieve what is worth saving in the liberal legacy. It is no wonder that Žižek is as unpopular with Channel 4 as he is on Wall Street.

More here.

JM Ledgard in More Intelligent Life:

They work together, share food and send their elders into battle to protect the young. And the world authority on them thinks they have a lot to teach us. J.M. Ledgard goes to Harvard to discuss ants, and more, with E.O. Wilson

What do you think about when you think about ants? An aerial view perhaps, looking down at a line of ants moving along a trail. Go closer. If you stay with it, your view may twist, your ants grow, become singular, each an alien creature, somehow militarised. As primitives we ate them, they were our crunch, and now they are lodged in our subconscious. We know their noise in the soil, even if we do not acknowledge it. The mandibles dominate, snipping, giving the ant its name in Old English, “aemette”, from the proto-Germanic ai mait, meaning to cut away, or to cut off. Even in that early time in Anglo-Saxon lands there was a grim sense of ants swarming, and now we know that army ants move in waves of a million or more, eating through anything in their path, someone staked and tied to the ground, for instance. The blank eyes, the glands under the jawbone secreting pheromones that signal alarm, laid down by foraging ants and reinforced by following ants to show the shortest possible route to a source of food. The antennae, cantilevered at the elbow, twitching at speeds our eye cannot follow. The slender waist, the shimmer and bristle of the exoskeleton, red or black, metallic, so that the ant corpse rots from within, leaving the armour intact. Whereas we are jellies, prick us and do we not bleed…? One way or another, when we think about ants, we tend not to think they are a part of us, or that they have something fundamental to say about us. But they probably do.

More here.

Dan Gunn at the Times Literary Supplement:

Duras was born in April 1914, and her centenary year has been marked in France by a proliferation of publications, most important of which by far are the final two instalments in the superb four-volume Pléiade edition of herOeuvres complètes. Few Duras enthusiasts would place L’Amant quite at the centre of the canon. Yet it is hard to imagine the degree of attention Duras is currently commanding in France, or the fascination with every detail of her biography, without it. Three pages intoL’Amant, the narrator announces: “L’histoire de ma vie n’existe pas. Ça n’existe pas”. The remaining pages serve to qualify this assertion, establishing a life recollected not as a continuum but as a series of pulsations, with crucial moments vividly returning, almost like the snapshots which Duras claims were the novel’s instigation. The intervals between the moments disappear, as does continuity, allowing the early experience to spurt back into the present. By 1984, when L’Amant was published, the elements of that life were already well known, not least through the first of Duras’s great autobiographical fictions, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (1950): the colonial childhood in French Indochina; the early death of the father with the consequent indigence of his wife and children; the hopeless attempt to revive the family fortunes through purchase of a disastrously infertile piece of land; the two brothers, the elder of whom was violent and criminal, the younger of whom needed protecting; above all the stark emotional unavailability of the mother, wrapped up as she was in her financial woes, her loss of social status, her infatuation with her abusive first-born son.

more here.

Interveiw with Roberto Calasso at Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Do you consider yourself a man of the Left?

CALASSO

I wonder what that means today. Certainly the success of Adelphi began, among other things, with the extreme Left. For instance, Joseph Roth, who was one of our great authors, was embraced by the people who were in the movements of the seventies. Yet Nietzsche was never considered terribly orthodox by anybody. Evidently we have managed to upset lots of people, from the Red Brigades to the Opus Dei. I’ll give you just one rather surreal example. In 1979, the Red Brigades published in their magazine, Controinformazione, which was available at the time at all kiosks, a long and detailed article in which Adelphi was presented as the spearhead of a powerful multinational organization whose first aim was to annihilate all hopes of a proletarian revolution. The proof was that we had just published a large selection of prose and poems by Pessoa.

INTERVIEWER

It’s strange, this desire to turn Adelphi—and yourself—into a political machine. In fact, you are far more interested in transcendence than in politics.

CALASSO

Not so much transcendence, but the perception of the powers in us and around us. People talk a lot about religion, but they might as well be talking about huge political parties. The most delicate point to grasp is that society itself has become the major superstition of our times. This is the pivot of the last section of L’ardore. What I mean is that the belief in society as the ultimate crucible of progress creates a vast amount of bigotry even in the so-called secular world. So in actual fact it’s difficult to find an intellectually rigorous atheist. Though I have met many secular bigots.

more here.

From KurzweilAI:

Using 17 genomes, researchers were unable to find rare protein-altering variants significantly associated with extreme longevity, according to a study published November 12, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Hinco Gierman from Stanford University and colleagues.

Supercentenarians are the world’s oldest people, living beyond 110 years of age. Seventy-four are alive worldwide; 22 live in the U.S. The authors of this study performed whole-genome sequencing on 17 supercentenarians to explore the genetic basis underlying extreme human longevity. From this small sample size, the researchers were unable to find rare protein-altering variants significantly associated with extreme longevity compared to control genomes. However, they did find that one supercentenarian carries a variant associated with a heart condition, which had little or no effect on his/her health, as this person lived over 110 years.

More here.