Anna Nowogrodzki in Scientific American:

There’s a little too much wishful thinking about mindfulness, and it is skewing how researchers report their studies of the technique. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, analysed 124 published trials of mindfulness as a mental-health treatment, and found that scientists reported positive findings 60% more often than is statistically likely. The team also examined another 21 trials that were registered with databases such as ClinicalTrials.gov; of these, 62% were unpublished 30 months after they finished. The findings—reported in PLoS ONE on April 8— hint that negative results are going unpublished. Mindfulness is the practice of being aware of thoughts and feelings without judging them good or bad. Mental-health treatments that focus on this method include mindfulness-based stress reduction—an 8-week group-based programme that includes yoga and daily meditation—and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.

A bias toward publishing studies that find the technique to be effective withholds important information from mental-health clinicians and patients, says Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University in Florida, who was not involved in the study. “I think this is a very important finding,” he adds. “We’ll invest a lot of social and financial capital in these issues, and a lot of that can be misplaced unless we have good data.” For the 124 trials, the researchers calculated the probability that a trial with that sample size could detect the result reported. Experiments with smaller sample sizes are more affected by chance and thus worse at detecting statistically significant positive results. The scientists’ calculations suggested that 66 of 124 trials would have positive results. Instead, 108 trials had positive results. And none of the 21 registered trials adequately specified which of the variables they tracked would be the main one used to evaluate success.

More here.

Home
.
Driving Route 20 to Syracuse past pastures of cows and falling silos

you feel the desert stillness near the refineries at the Syrian border.

Walking in fog on Mecox Bay, the long lines of squawking birds on shore,

you’re walking along Flinders Street Station, the flaring yellow stone and walls
of windows where your uncle landed after he fled a Turkish prison.

You walked all day along the Yarra, crossing the sculptural bridges with their
twisting steel,

the hollow sound of the didgeridoo like the flutes of Anatolia.

One road is paved with coins, another with razor blades and ripped condoms.

Walking the boardwalk in January past Atlantic City Hall, the rusted Deco
ticket sign, the waves black into white,
you smell the grilled ćevapi in the Baščaršija of Sarajevo,

and that street took you to the Jewish cemetery where the weeds grew over
the slabs and a mausoleum stood intact.
There was a trail of carnelian you followed in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem

and picking up those stones now, you’re walking in the salt marsh on the
potato fields,
the day undercut by the flatness of the sky, the wide view of the Atlantic, the
cold spray.

Your uncle stashed silk and linen, lace and silver in a suitcase on a ship that
docked not far from here; the ship moved in and out of port for years, and
your uncle kept coming

and going, from Melbourne to London to Kolkata and back, never returning to
the Armenian village near the Black Sea.

The topaz ring you passed on in a silver shop in Aleppo appeared on Lexington
off 65th;
the shop owner, a young guy from Ivory Coast, shrugged when you told him you
had seen it

before; the shuffled dust of that street fills your throat and you remember how a
slew of
coins poured out of your pocket like a slinky near the ruined castle now a disco in

Thessaloniki where a young girl was stabbed under the strobe lights—lights that
lit the

sky that was the iridescent eye of a peacock in Larnaca at noon, when you walked
into the

church where Lazarus had come home to die and you forgot that Lazarus died

because the story was in one of your uncle’s books that were wrapped in
newspaper in a suitcase and
stashed under the seat of an old Ford, and when he got to the border

he left the car and walked the rest of the way, and when you pass the apartment

on 116th and Broadway—where your father grew up (though it’s a dorm now)—
that suitcase is buried in a closet under clothes, and when you walk past the
security guard

at the big glass entrance door, you’re walking through wet grass, clouds
clumped on a hillside, a subway station sliding into water.
.

by Peter Balakian
from New Letters
University of Chicago Press, 2016

Lionel Shriver in Prospect:

From childhood, I experienced being female as an imposition. Growing up between two brothers, I was the one who had to wear stupid dresses, and worry about (the horror, in my day) letting my panties show on the swings. My brothers got to take off their shirts during sultry North Carolinian summers, while I wasn’t allowed to, even during the years my chest looked just like theirs.

Yet the impositions were just beginning. Periods were hideous. Did my brothers get puffy once a month, suffer terrible back aches and go back to wearing smelly de facto diapers? I was the one, too, who had the fear of God put in her about getting pregnant. In comparison to their sons, my parents clearly had reduced expectations for my career prospects. Ruefully, at 87, my father finally conceded last year: “You know, we may have underestimated you.” He still hasn’t quite brought himself to admit why: I was the girl.

But I was historically fortunate. By the time I entered university in 1974, a revolution was well under way. As I understood it, “women’s liberation” meant that the frilly cookie-cutter template of femininity had been chucked out. Being female was no longer defined in terms of skirts, high heels, and homemaking. Men and women were equal. Both sexes were just people. We had entered the post-gender world.

Fast-forward to 2016: I was wrong.

We have entered instead an oppressively gendered world, in which identity is more bound up in one’s sex than ever before.

More here.

Alison Gopnik in The Atlantic:

For 2,000 years, there was an intuitive, elegant, compelling picture of how the world worked. It was called “the ladder of nature.” In the canonical version, God was at the top, followed by angels, who were followed by humans. Then came the animals, starting with noble wild beasts and descending to domestic animals and insects. Human animals followed the scheme, too. Women ranked lower than men, and children were beneath them. The ladder of nature was a scientific picture, but it was also a moral and political one. It was only natural that creatures higher up would have dominion over those lower down.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection delivered a serious blow to this conception. Natural selection is a blind historical process, stripped of moral hierarchy. A cockroach is just as well adapted to its environment as I am to mine. In fact, the bug may be better adapted—cockroaches have been around a lot longer than humans have, and may well survive after we are gone. But the very word evolution can imply a progression—New Agers talk about becoming “more evolved”—and in the 19th century, it was still common to translate evolutionary ideas into ladder-of-nature terms.

Modern biological science has in principle rejected the ladder of nature. But the intuitive picture is still powerful. In particular, the idea that children and nonhuman animals are lesser beings has been surprisingly persistent.

More here.

An in-depth report on the inconclusive battle to take one little village called Kudilah exposes the weakness of the strategy to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-biggest city.

Scott Atran in the Daily Beast:

It is April, and fighting is stalled, with part of the Iraqi army forces camped at the village of Kudilah and unable to advance because of fierce resistance and counterattacks by the so-called Islamic State. The research team that first came here in February to talk to fighters on all sides about a ferocious battle that was supposed to be over, or at least ending, is continuing its interviews.

Our aim is to better understand the “will to fight.” President Barack Obama and his National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, have called this “the imponderable” that has led to an overestimation of the allied ability to degrade and destroy Islamic State forces and an underestimation of their ability to resist.

At Kudilah, fighters from the Islamic State (also known by the acronyms ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh) are pitted against Arab Sunni tribesmen along with Kurds of the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga of the Kurdish Regional Government.

American and German military advisors and contractors planned the battle, in part, to test out the coalition of forces needed for the eventual assault on the nearby city of Mosul, the second biggest metropolis in Iraq and by far the largest population center under ISIS control anywhere.

More here.

Jacob Mikanowski at The Point:

In 1949, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia decided to honor Stalin by building a monument to him in Prague. It was going to be the largest statue of its kind in the world. A contest was held to decide who would have the honor of designing it. Every sculptor in Czechoslovakia was required to participate. Most sabotaged their chances on purpose by portraying the great leader in unsuitable poses, smiling or spreading his arms like Jesus. Otakar Švec who learned the art of sculpture as a child from his pastry-chef father, took the extra precaution of getting blind drunk. Unfortunately for him, he won anyway.

For the next four years, party dignitaries visited Švec every week in his studio to offer their advice on his vision. In Švec’s design, Stalin stood at the head of a line of people, who symbolized the People. Behind him followed a worker, an agronomist, a female partisan and a Russian soldier. Every time they came, they tried to make Stalin taller, and the followers lower. Construction began, granite blocks were carved, and still the critiques kept coming. Švec’s wife couldn’t stand the pressure, and committed suicide.

At long last, the monument was done. The night before the unveiling, Švec took a ride to inspect his sculpture. The cab driver told him he wants to show him something. The lady partisan is holding onto the Russian soldiers’ fly. “Whoever designed that is going to be shot for sure,” he told Švec. He killed himself that same night. For fifty days, no one found his body.

more here.

Astra Taylor at The Baffler:

As my friend Jonathan Matthew Smucker, whom I met at Zuccotti Park during the early days of Occupy Wall Street, argues in a forthcoming book, the term activist is suspiciously devoid of content. “Labels are certainly not new to collective political action,” Smucker writes, pointing to classifications like abolitionist, populist, suffragette, unionist, and socialist, which all convey a clear position on an issue. But activist is a generic category associated with oddly specific stereotypes: today, the term signals not so much a certain set of political opinions or behaviors as a certain temperament. In our increasingly sorted and labeled society, activists are analogous to skateboarders or foodies or dead heads, each inhabiting a particular niche in America’s grand and heterogeneous cultural ecosystem—by some quirk of personality, they enjoy long meetings, shouting slogans, and spending a night or two in jail the way others may savor a glass of biodynamic wine. Worse still, Smucker contends, is the fact that many activists seem to relish their marginalization, interpreting their small numbers as evidence of their specialness, their membership in an exclusive and righteous clique, effectiveness be damned.

While there are notable exceptions, many strands of contemporary activism risk emphasizing the self over the collective. By contrast, organizing is cooperative by definition: it aims to bring others into the fold, to build and exercise shared power. Organizing, as Smucker smartly defines it, involves turning “a social bloc into a political force.” Today, anyone can be an activist, even someone who operates alone, accountable to no one—for example, relentlessly trying to raise awareness about an important issue. Raising awareness—one of contemporary activism’s preferred aims—can be extremely valuable (at least I hope so, since I have spent so much time trying to do it), but education is not organizing, which involves not just enlightening whoever happens to encounter your message, but also aggregating people around common interests so that they can strategically wield their combined strength.

more here.

Daphne Merkin at Bookforum:

There is something about the Brontë sisters that is enduringly fascinating, something about their strange, gifted, and woefully abbreviated lives (none of them lived to forty) that reads like the stuff of myth. Perhaps it’s the combination of great personal privation and great artistic willfulness, the mixture of geographic isolation and literary renown, that lends their story an elemental note of warring forces both within and without. To think of these three motherless and conspicuously inbred young women—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—living off in a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors together with an eccentric curate father and an alcoholic brother, in a Victorian climate that was unconducive to the creative aspirations of the female gender, and yet all the same producing a clutch of game-changing novels (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey), is to wonder at the ways in which character and imaginative vision can triumph over circumstance.

Among the bevy of books about this compelling family that have come out in recent years, there have been Juliet Barker’s heroically researched 1997 biography, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, and Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth, published in 2004. Miller’s gracefully written and wonderfully entertaining account—or “meta-biography,” as she calls it—reexamined the ways in which the Brontës’ “lonely moorland lives” underwent a process of mythification even before Charlotte, the last sister, died in 1855. This “beguiled infatuation,” as Henry James put it, began with Elizabeth Gaskell’s landmark Life of Charlotte Brontë, which Miller describes as “arguably the most famous English biography of the nineteenth century” and one that “set the agenda which would turn the Brontës into icons.”

more here.

Frances Chiem in Two Serious Ladies:

The mountain that appears behind the “Welcome to Twin Peaks” sign in the show’s title sequence is in fact a real topographical feature, not a facade or even a composite image. The real “Twin Peaks” are Mt Si and Little Si, two of the most popular hiking areas in Washington’s King County. The gender parity on the trails is pretty impressive, even for the outdoor-recreation oriented Pacific Northwest. You are as likely to see groups of women in Lululemon as you are to see Boy Scout troops and families being dragged along by multiple purebred dogs. Both the fictional wilderness of Twin Peaks and the real wilderness near my home are, without a doubt, male dominated, but progressive Seattle is working to lessen this gender parity. The REI flagship store – a sprawling complex complete with indoor bike paths and a climbing wall a few minutes from my downtown office – hosts climbing, backpacking and mountain bike classes just for women. There is a concerted effort to get women into the wild. Multiple regional nonprofits like the Washington Trails Association and Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust also have programs with this end in mind. The popular trails 40 minutes from Seattle continue to play a significant role in getting urban women outside. These are safe, friendly spaces transformed into something abjectly unfriendly in Twin Peaks. Though the series’ iconic peaks reside in Western Washington, it would make the most sense politically and geographically to assume that the series itself is meant to be set on the Eastern side of the state.

In the pilot episode, abusive trucker Leo Johnson calls his teenage bride from the road (allegedly from Butte, Montana) and abruptly shows up in the driveway the following morning. He would not have been able to make it from Montana to Twin Peaks as quickly as he did if the town were west of the Cascades. David Lynch has also said that the town was somewhat based on Missoula, Montana, which shares a topography more similar to the right side of Washington than the left. That level of specificity may seem nitpicky, but the east/west distinction is essential to understanding Washington’s political identity. Western Washington is liberal, the land of Microsoft, Boeing and multiple national parks. Eastern Washington is rural, mostly conservative, its industry is the land.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

In rare instances, DNA is known to have jumped from one species to another. If a parasite's DNA jumps to its host's genome, it could leave evidence of that parasitic interaction that could be found millions of years later—a DNA 'fossil' of sorts. An international research team led from Uppsala University has discovered a new type of so-called transposable element that occurred in the genomes of certain birds and nematodes. The results are published in Nature Communications. Dr. Alexander Suh at Uppsala University is an expert on the small stretches of DNA that tend to jump from one place to another, called transposable elements. Working with a team from eleven institutions in five countries, the researchers discovered a new type of transposable element that occurred in certain bird genomes but not others. By searching DNA databases, the team discovered that the only other animals that shared the new transposable element were nematode worms that are parasites of humans and other mammals.

'This finding was so unexpected that we were literally speechless at first,' says Alexander Suh. By comparing the DNA sequences of each instance of the transposable element, Suh and his team were able to figure out that the transfer of DNA between nematodes and birds occurred in two waves across the entire tropics, including remote places like Madagascar. They involved charismatic groups of birds such as parrots, hummingbirds, manakins. Certain human diseases, such as avian flu and HIV/AIDS, are known to have jumped onto our species from animal hosts. Epidemiologists have only recently realized the importance of these so-called 'zoonoses'.

More here.

Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

The books of quotations that rarely let you down are commonplace books, those intellectual scrapbooks made for personal use and compiled by a single avid reader. Packed with miscellaneous delights — phrases, jokes, anecdotes, lovely sentences — they read like secret autobiographies, back catalogs of joy and heartbreak. You can apply them like compresses on the ugly bruises of life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson kept one; so did Thomas Hardy. W. H. Auden issued his under the title “A Certain World” (1970). A lesser-known figure, the English belletrist Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947) had his collected in“Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks,” published in 1981. It’s become a bit of a cult item.

These days, it’s rare that anyone publishes one. This is a reason to welcome the poet J. D. McClatchy’s “Sweet Theft: A Poet’s Commonplace Book.” Another reason is that it’s civilized and civilizing while being intimate and offbeat. It’s a treat to walk its aisles and browse its well-stocked shelves.

More here.

Zaheer Kazmi in 3AM Magazine:

Refracting the exhibitionism of Charles Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century flâneur through the gaze of today’s consumer culture, Susan Buck-Morss has observed that ‘In commodity society all of us are prostitutes, selling ourselves to strangers; all of us are collectors of things.’ The figure of the flâneur, later to be theorised by Walter Benjamin, lived on in mid-twentieth century psychogeography and assimilated the practices of Baudelaire’s rarefied urban gent to those of the lower classes. The Situationist dérive – an act of unmapped urban drifting – was intended to create an alternative cartography which transcended the panoptic confines of the late modern city’s disciplining street grid where nobody could lose themselves in the crowd. A spontaneous walk off the beaten path, rejecting state-controlled urban planning, was reimagined as a crime against bourgeois convention and a gesture towards freedom.

Hiding in plain sight, unable to ever fully escape the ubiquitous reach of the city’s watchful eye, however, the flâneur was not only spectator but spectacle, a seller as well as collector of things. Often identified with dandyism, the decadent liberty of the flâneur – embodied in flamboyant ways of deportment and sartorial choices – was also a subversive expression of art and sexuality that revealed a deeper intimacy between liberty and criminality in the Western public sphere.

More here.

Robert Sapolsky in Nautilus:

Biologists have long known about exceptions to the boring, staid notion that organisms are, and remain, either female or male. Now our culture is inching toward recognizing that the permanent, cleanly binary nature of gender is incorrect.

Along with the high-profile Caitlyn Jenner, and Emmy-nominated actress Laverne Cox, America has seen openly transgender individuals serve as a mayor, state legislator, judge, police officer, a model for a global cosmetics brand, and a high school homecoming queen. Even amid the appallingly high rates of discrimination and violence against transgender individuals, there is a growing recognition that gender designation need not be permanent.

Many people are questioning whether there is even such a thing as “gender.” These are individuals whose psychosexual self-image may be of both genders, a third gender, no gender, or whose visceral perception of the social world does not include implicitly seeing people as gendered.

This new continent was formalized by as august and ancient an institution as Facebook, which offers 58 gender specification options on one’s profile page. These include Agender, Bigender, Intersex, Gender Fluid, Gender Questioning, Non-binary, Pangender, and my two favorites—Two-spirit, with a vaguely Native American grooviness to it, and Other, which basically implies that, Whoa, Nellie, we’ve barely scratched the surface!

More here.

Alexander Stern at the The Stone (New York Times):

Speakers and writers of American English have recently taken to identifying a staggering and constantly changing array of trends, events, memes, products, lifestyle choices and phenomena of nearly every kind with a single label — a thing. In conversation, mention of a surprising fad, behavior or event is now often met with the question, “Is that actually a thing?” Or “When did that become a thing?” Or “How is that even a thing?” Calling something “a thing” is, in this sense, itself a thing.

It would be easy to call this a curiosity of the language and leave it at that. Linguistic trends come and go. Why has “That really gets my goat” survived for so long when we have pretty much given up “You know your onions”? One could, on the other hand, consider the use of “a thing” a symptom of an entire generation’s linguistic sloth, general inarticulateness and penchant for cutesy, empty, half-ironic formulations that create a self-satisfied barrier preventing any form of genuine engagement with the world around them.

I don’t want to do either. My assumption is that language and experience mutually influence each other. Language not only captures experience, it conditions it. It sets expectations for experience and gives shape to it as it happens. What might register as inarticulateness can reflect a different way of understanding and experiencing the world.

more here.

Nathaniel Popkin at Cleaver Magazine:

Wilson leads the reader into his classic work of naturalist philosophy, Biophilia, published in 1984, by describing the experience of entering a forest in Surinam, as if, like Moresco’s unnamed narrator-protagonist, drawn to light, into another world. “In a twist my mind came free and I was aware of the hard workings of the natural world beyond the periphery of ordinary attention,” he writes,

where passions lose their meaning and history is in another dimension, without people, and great events pass without record or judgment. I was a transient of no consequence in this familiar yet deeply alien world that I had come to love.

Since that 1960s field study, the entomologist has spent nearly six more decades immersed in nature. He sees human history as inextricably connected to the much longer biological history of the earth and yet he’s conscious of man’s latent power. As a practical matter, it’s just better if—aside from field biologists like himself—we stay away, let nature be nature, at least for the world’s most sensitive biospheres. Moresco, from an opposite tact (his narrator’s life is fading), imagines flora and fauna taking back the planet after humans “have disappeared from the face of this little planet lost in the galaxies.” Giono, whose startling novels immersed in the pre-modern world of rural Provence are just now reaching contemporary English readers, imagines his peasant characters in constant dialogue with unpredictable nature, which even in the most benign circumstance is close at hand. A similar claustrophobia inhabits the fog gray Wales that Jones has created in Everything I Found at the Beach and his earlier The Dig, where to survive people must get their hands dirty. In Jones’s Wales, nature exploited for man is profit for some, subsistence, or worse, for most others.

more here.

Perry Anderson at the London Review of Books:

Half-hidden, the roots of this debacle lay in the soil of the PT’s model of growth itself. From the outset, its success relied on two kinds of nutrient: a super-cycle of commodity prices, and a domestic consumption boom. Between 2005 and 2011, the terms of trade for Brazil improved by a third, as demand for its raw materials from China and elsewhere increased the value of its principal exports and the volume of tax receipts for social expenditures. By the end of Lula’s second term, the share of primary commodities in the Brazilian export package had jumped from 28 to 41 per cent, and manufactures had fallen from 55 to 44 per cent; by the end of Dilma’s first term, raw materials accounted for more than half the value of all exports. But from 2011 onwards the prices of the country’s leading tradable goods collapsed: iron ore dropped from $180 to $55 a ton, soya from $18 to $8 a bushel, crude oil from $140 to $50 a barrel. Compounding the end of the overseas bonanza, domestic consumption hit the buffers. Throughout its rule, the core strategy of the PT had been to expand home demand by increasing popular purchasing power. That was achieved not only by raising the minimum wage and making cash transfers to the poor – the Bolsa Família – but by a massive injection of consumer credit. Over the decade from 2005 to 2015, total debt owed by the private sector increased from 43 to 93 per cent of GDP, with consumer loans running at double the level of neighbouring countries. By the time Dilma was re-elected in late 2014, interest payments on household credit were absorbing more than a fifth of average disposable income. Along with the exhaustion of the commodity boom, the consumer spree was no longer sustainable. The two motors of growth had stalled.

In 2011 the aim of Mantega’s new economic matrix had been to kick-start the economy by lifting investment. But his means of doing so had diminished. State banks had been steadily increasing their share of loan capital, from a third to a half of all credit since he took over in 2006 – the portfolio of the government’s development bank, BNDES, rose sevenfold after 2007. Offering preferential rates to leading companies that added up to a much larger subsidy than outlays to poor families, the ‘Bolsa Empresarial’ cost the treasury about double the Bolsa Família.

more here.

Olivia Schwob in Harvard Magazine:

Ellen Harvey ’89 is between shows, so most of her work is packed up, the walls of her studio baring their industrial concrete. Only one piece, unfinished, is propped by the entrance: a massive grayscale cityscape. Blending in with its surroundings, it at first resembles a blown-up photograph. Careful scrutiny gradually reveals thin strokes of oil paint, which bring out the window ledges of warehouses and a water tower’s spindly legs; daubs name the trees and clouds. Where most of her work takes the form of multi-part installations, this painting stands alone. But in another sense, it’s a classic Harvey: its power lies in the accumulation of small moments into an overwhelming whole.

Harvey works in other media, but may be best known for her exhaustive collections of paintings about painting: a copy of every nude in Miami’s Bass museum; a miniature version of every work in the Whitney Museum catalog; a portrait of every piece of metalwork in the Barnes Foundation’s collection. The projects are rapturous bordering on obsessive-compulsive, but reducing them to genre-worship would be a mistake. Harvey uses her fascination with traditional art techniques to comment on “art” as an enterprise, and to point out its potential for multiple “failures”—failures to communicate, to preserve, to record, to hold value; she readily acknowledges painting’s potential to become merely “wallpaper for the rich.” This interest in failure derives from her own unconventional start as an artist: Harvey switched careers after attending Yale Law School, and has never studied art formally. Though recognition of her work is growing, and art institutions worldwide seek her out more frequently, she still considers herself something of an outsider in that world.

More here.