K. C. Cole in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Why build a universe anyway?

To create something beautiful, concludes Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek in his relentlessly engaging new book, A Beautiful Question. “Many motivations have been ascribed to the Creator,” he points out, “but artist ambition is rarely prominent among them.”

The beautiful question the book considers, stated simply, is this: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?”

The answer is an emphatic yes: “You bet it does,” Wilczek writes. “And so do you.”

What is the meaning of “beautiful”? Physics is pretty clear on the issue, and Wilczek makes the argument deeper, broader, and far more colorful (literally and figuratively) than ever before: it is harmony, balance, and above all symmetry, the core of artistry.

Symmetry is seductive, whether it appears in natural forms, like snowflakes, snails, and faces, or in human creations, like doilies, arches, and decorative tiles.

In physics, symmetries underlie every fundamental law, because symmetries reveal the deep truths often hidden behind superficial differences. Energy and matter are two sides of a coin, as are space and time, electricity and magnetism, waves and particles.

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Michael Upchurch at The American Scholar:

Our native language can be like a well-worn shirt, so comfortable that it’s easy to forget one is wearing it. But all permutations seem possible with language once we’ve been jarred out of our own. With the help of polyglots and linguists, we can even begin to make sense of the babel.

Two new books provide the lay reader with lively tours through the mysteries of language. Dutch writer Gaston Dorren’s Lingo serves up story after story about linguistic differences. He notes how the definite article (“the”) is attached to the ends of nouns in Romanian, Bulgarian, and Albanian rather than in front of them as a separate word. He suggests that Icelandic has stayed so unchanged over the centuries thanks to its “monolingual environment, strong social networks and perhaps the absence of a youth culture.” And he explains why, if we want to say “I call her” in Basque, we’ll wind up saying something that translates literally as “Me calls she.”

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Anne Enright at the London Review of Books:

It is tempting to see Antigone as a play not just about the mourning female voice, or about kinship and the law, but about the political use of the body after death. Creon, the ruler of Thebes, dishonours the body of his nephew to serve as a warning to other potential enemies of the state. One brother, Eteocles, has been buried ‘in accordance with justice and law’, the other, Polynices, ‘is to lie unwept and unburied’ – this according to their sister Antigone, who has already decided at the play’s opening to ignore Creon’s edict and bury the corpse. And so she does. When asked to deny the crime, she says, in Anne Carson’s 2012 translation of Sophocles: ‘I did the deed I do not deny it.’ She does not seek to justify her actions within the terms of Creon’s law: she negates the law by handing it back to him, intact – ‘If you call that law.’

Antigone later says she is being punished for ‘an act of perfect piety’, but that act is also perfectly wordless in the play. The speeches she makes to her sister Ismene and to Creon are before and after the fact. She is a woman who breaks an unjust law. We can ask if she does this from inside or outside the legal or linguistic system of the play, or of the state, but it is good to bear in mind that Antigone does not bury her brother with words, but with dust.

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Chris Mooney in the Washington Post:

For some time, social science researchers have been studying an oddity about the U.S. — compared with many other nations, we’re a hotbed of global warming doubt and denial. Accordingly, and to counteract this, a variety of messages or ways of “re-framing” the issue have been proposed, often with the goal of appealing to the ideology of political conservatives, which is where most of the doubt lies.

Some of the most popular framing ideas include talking about climate change in the context of economic opportunity (solving climate change will lead to a clean energy boom), national security (not solving it will make the world a dangerous place), faith-based ethics (we need to be good stewards of the Creation) and public health (climate change will make us sicker, or lead to the spread of diseases).

Now, however, a new study suggests not only that these messages may not be particularly effective, but that messages espousing climate change doubt or denial — which are ever-present in the din of public debate and discourse — appear to have considerably more impact.

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Adam Grant in Evonomics:

Here are some of my favorite surprising studies. What do they have in common?

• People are more likely to buy jam when they’re presented with 6 flavors than 24.
• After inspecting a house, real estate agents thought it was $14,000 more valuable when the seller listed it at $149,900 than $119,900.
• When children play a fun game and then get rewarded for it, they lose interest in playing the game once the rewards are gone.
• People conserve more energy when they see their neighbors’ consumption rates.
• If you flip a coin six times, people think Heads-Heads-Heads-Tails-Tails-Tails is less likely than Heads-Tails-Tails-Heads-Heads-Tails, even though the two are equally likely.
• Managers underestimate the intrinsic motivation of their employees.

They’ve all appeared in the media as studies done by behavioral economists, when in fact they were done by psychologists.

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Alex Mar in The Believer Magazine:

Maybe it was during nap time or snack time or shortly after their parents dropped them off each day, but it was certainly during preschool hours that the teachers Mrs. McMartin and Mr. Buckey led the children through trapdoors in the classroom floor and down into the maze of tunnels. There below, the cold walls were covered in images of Satan, with his red face and massive horns (any child would have recognized him). There underground, the children—all of them young, between two and five years old—were touched in private places and made to pose for dirty pictures. And maybe those tunnels made up a vast underground network, because somehow, in daylight, without any witnesses, the teachers managed to take the entire class to a nearby Episcopal church, where the grown-ups donned black robes and masks and stood before the altar and slit the throats of baby rabbits and birds and even a couple of turtles, letting the hot blood run into fancy cups. And they passed the cups to the children and forced them to drink the animals’ blood. And babies were killed (maybe); and corpses were dug up from the ground (maybe); and the teachers took the kids out into the cemetery, among the tombstones, and touched them between their legs. And once Mr. Buckey took a long knife and chopped a pony to death right in front of them, saying that their parents would die that way, too, if any of the children said a word about anything that had happened at preschool that day or any other day or ever. And everybody spoke the name of the Devil over and over again, dancing.

These were among the 208 charges of abuse leveled against the seven teachers of the mostly family-run McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, in 1984. It began when the mother of one two-year-old boy claimed that her son had been molested by his teacher. The initial accusations were so over-the-top—not only was there baby killing and blood drinking, but clown costumes were involved—that the DA dismissed them as utterly unsubstantiated. (The mother had also accused the boy’s absent father of abuse, and was eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.) But at this point, the Manhattan Beach chief of police took it upon himself to send around a “confidential” letter to parents of two hundred present and former McMartin students, outlining the charges in detail, and advising them to ask their kids if they, too, had been assaulted. When nearly all the children denied mistreatment, the authorities recommended that the parents take them to Children’s Institute International, a Los Angeles center with a new focus on child-abuse prevention, where they were interviewed with puppets and anatomically correct dolls and asked leading questions, with some case workers outlining very specific abuse scenarios for the kids before they were given a chance to answer on their own.

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Sabine Lou in Nature:

When Lokesh Joshi was studying glycobiology as a postdoc at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, he had mentors who helped to guide his research — and others who trained him in the practice of mindfulness. For up to 45 minutes each morning, in accordance with his teachers' counsel, he would sit on the carpet in a corner of his apartment, close his eyes and focus on his breathing or on the functioning of his internal organs, second by second. “This helped me find my own point of stillness — what I call grounding,” he explains. After regularly practising this morning routine, Joshi found that he could think more clearly, and that he felt better. He no longer had sweaty palms when he was about to give a talk at a conference, for example, nor did he feel anxious or defensive when a manuscript got rejected or needed major revisions. “It helped me take a step back and not react too quickly to my emotions,” he says. And on days that he did not engage in mindfulness practice, he could tell the difference — his stress levels would ratchet up and his ability to concentrate would decrease.

Now vice-president for research at the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway, Joshi continues to practise mindfulness on a daily basis, during his 1.5-kilometre walk to and from his office. He thinks that it is a crucial soft skill for researchers, and he values it so strongly that he organized and spoke at a university conference on the subject in October. The university has also launched a lecture series and free drop-in classes on the art. Mindfulness has long been in use in the corporate, entrepreneurial and other sectors. It is more than a new-age buzzword, said speakers at the conference. “In academic circles, there is fear about mindfulness because people believe it could stop you from thinking,” says Gelong Thubten, a Tibetan Buddhist monk at the Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery near Langholm, UK, who conducted mindfulness sessions during the conference. “But we are not trying to get rid of thoughts — it is the mind that you are training. We are looking at the container, not the content.”

More here.

CarlZimmerinThe New York Times:

Scientists are investigating the epigenetics of fatherhood: how a man’s experiences can alter his sperm, and whether those changes in turn may alter his children. Credit Dann Tardif/LWA, via Corbis. A week before the operation, the man provided a sperm sample to Danish scientists. A week after the procedure, he did so again. A year later, he donated a third sample. Scientists were investigating a tantalizing but controversial hypothesis: that a man’s experiences can alter his sperm, and that those changes in turn may alter his children. That idea runs counter to standard thinking about heredity: that parents pass down only genes to their children. People inherit genes that predispose them to obesity, or stress, or cancer — or they don’t. Whether one’s parents actually were obese or continually anxious doesn’t rewrite those genes. Yet a number of animal experiments in recent years have challenged conventional thinking on heredity, suggesting that something more is at work.

In 2010, for example, Dr. Romain Barres of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues fed male rats a high-fat diet and then mated them with females. Compared with male rats fed a regular diet, those on the high-fat diet fathered offspring that tended to gain more weight, develop more fat and have more trouble regulating insulin levels. Eating high-fat food is just one of several experiences a father can have that can change his offspring. Stress is another. Male rats exposed to stressful experiences — like smelling the odor of a fox — will father pups that have a dampened response to stress.

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Philip Hoare in the New Statesman:

In the autumn of 1849, a young American wearing a new green coat – of which he was inordinately proud – arrived in London. He checked in to a boarding house on Craven Street, a narrow road running down from the Strand to the then unembanked Thames. The house is still there, at the end of a Georgian terrace, an improbable survivor. You may have passed the turning many times and never thought to have walked down it. Even if you had, you may not have noticed that on the wall of the end house, whose bow window still looks out on to the river, is an equally improbable blue plaque. The young American was Herman Melville and the plaque commemorates the author and his greatest creation – the wondrous phantasmagoria that is Moby-Dick, which was born in that boarding house.

That November, the writer wandered around the imperial metropolis, down its “anti-lanes” and river tunnels, from tavern to publisher’s office, trying to sell his latest book,White-Jacket. Melville had been youthfully famous from his debut, a bestselling book of sensual tales of the South Seas, Typee, first published in London, but had become increasingly obscure in his literary output. He knew he had to come up with something spectacular – “a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”.

It is clear from Melville’s journal, one of only two such surviving documents, that his mind was already playing with these ideas.

More here.

Rebecca Onion in Aeon:

What if Adolf Hitler’s paintings had been acclaimed, rather than met with faint praise, and he had gone into art instead of politics? Have you ever wondered whether John F Kennedy would have such a shining reputation if he had survived his assassination and been elected to a second term? Or how the United States might have fared under Japanese occupation? Or what the world would be like if nobody had invented the airplane?

If you enjoy speculating about history in these counterfactual terms, there are many books and movies to satisfy you. The counterfactual is a friend to science-fiction writers and chatting partygoers alike. Yet ‘What if?’ is not a mode of discussion you’ll commonly hear in a university history seminar. At some point in my own graduate-school career, I became well-acculturated to the idea that counterfactualism was (as the British historian E P Thompson wrote in 1978) ‘Geschichtwissenschlopff, unhistorical shit.’

‘“What if?” is a waste of time’ went the headline to the Cambridge historian Richard Evans’ piece in The Guardian last year. Surveying the many instances of public counterfactual discourse in the anniversary commemorations of the First World War, Evans wrote: ‘This kind of fantasising is now all the rage, and threatens to overwhelm our perceptions of what really happened in the past, pushing aside our attempts to explain it in favour of a futile and misguided attempt to decide whether the decisions taken in August 1914 were right or wrong.’ It’s hard enough to do the reading and research required to understand the complexity of actual events, Evans argues. Let’s stay away from alternative universes.

But hold on a minute.

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Joe Carmichael in McSweeney's:

1. Assume bodily form.
2. Assume existence.
3. Learn to feel.
4. Learn to play.
5. Begin to speak.
6. Begin to understand.
7. Become conscious.
8. Become self-conscious.
9. Fear uniqueness.
10. Seek commonality.
11. Learn to speak.
12. Learn to be understood.
13. Begin to see.
14. Begin to correlate.
15. Fear commonality.
16. Seek uniqueness.
17. Find love/faith.
18. Lose love/faith.
19. Undergo crisis.
20. Overdo reaction.

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It was 35 years ago to the day that my English teacher in high school told us John Lennon had been killed. And then he cried. This is Danielle Sloane at CNN:

There was a voice in his head, a gun in his hand, and John Lennon's wife right in front of him. Mark David Chapman knew exactly what he was doing when he decided to take the life of one of the world's most beloved musicians.

“When the car pulled up and Yoko got out, something in the back of my mind was going 'Do it, do it, do it,'” he said, recalling the night of December 8, 1980.

“I stepped off the curb, walked, turned, I took the gun and just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.”

Chapman was speaking with reporter Jim Gaines in a visiting room at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, three years after he killed Lennon. After initially refusing interview requests, he had finally agreed to talk.

The convicted killer sat with Gaines for hundreds of hours of exclusive taped conversations which have been obtained by CNN.

For Gaines, it was personal interest that compelled him to delve into the mystery of why Chapman killed Lennon.

More here.

From New Scientist:

The last drug has fallen. Bacteria carrying a gene that allows them to resist polymyxins, the antibiotics of last resort for some kinds of infection, have been found in Denmark and China, prompting a global search for the gene.

The discovery means that gram-negative bacteria, which cause common gut, urinary and blood infections in humans, can now become “pan-resistant”, with genes that defeat all antibiotics now available. That will make some infections incurable, unless new kinds of antibiotics are brought to market soon.

Colistin, the most common polymyxin, is a last-resort treatment for infections with bacteria such as E. coli and Klebsiella that resist all other available antibiotics.

In November, Yi-Yun Liu at South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou and colleagues discovered a gene for resistance to colistin in infected livestock, meat and humans. The mcr-1 gene can pass easily between bacteria, and the researchers predicted it could soon go global.

Unknown to them, it already had.

More here.

George Scialabba at The Baffler:

If irony alerts had been invented before 1977, they might have saved Christopher Lasch a lot of grief. The title of his controversial book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged misled many of his critics. Lasch was widely taken to mean that a haven is what the family used to be before it was besieged by feminism and sexual liberation. Feminists retorted that this was a nostalgic fiction: the traditional family had never been any such idyll, especially for women. Lasch could only be an apologist for patriarchy, misappropriating psychoanalytic theory in a reactionary effort to restore male authority. Reviewing Lasch’s final, posthumous collection, Women and the Common Life, the usually astute Ellen Willis took him to task for his “fail[ure] to take patriarchy seriously” and his “adamant denial of any redeeming social value in modern liberalism.” No doubt this had the long-suffering Lasch growling in his grave.

Haven in a Heartless World is a densely argued book, and Lasch himself was not certain what his arguments implied, practically. (He died in his prime, at sixty-one, before he could spell out the programmatic implications of his far-reaching critique of modernity.) But far from idealizing the nuclear family, Lasch portrayed it as a doomed adaptation to industrial development. The transition from household production to mass production inaugurated a new world—a heartless world, to which the ideology of the family as a domestic sanctuary, a haven, was one response. The premodern, preindustrial family was besieged (and vanquished) by market forces; the modern family is besieged by the “helping” (which has turned out to mean “controlling”) professions.

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Colm Tóibín at the New York Review of Books:

Clarice Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920 and taken to Brazil as an infant. Raised in Recife, the north of the country, she married a diplomat and thus spent many years traveling before returning to Brazil to live in Rio de Janeiro. In 1966 she was badly injured in a fire in her apartment. She died in 1977.

By the time of her death, she had become, Benjamin Moser writes in his biography of her, “one of the mythical figures of Brazil, the Sphinx of Rio de Janeiro, a woman who fascinated her countrymen virtually from adolescence.”^* Her looks were often commented on and there was much gushing nonsense written about her. The translator Gregory Rabassa, for example, recalled being “flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” The poet Ferreira Gullar remarked that “she looked like a she-wolf, a fascinating wolf.” And the French critic Hélène Cixous declared that Lispector was what Kafka would have been had he been a woman, or “if Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Heidegger could have ceased being German.”

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Ginger Strand at The New Yorker:

Jane would continue to be the source of his confidence for the next twenty-five years. Many of the ideas and images for which he became known had their source in the couple’s mutual dialogue. “You ask me questions I like to answer,” he told her. In his letters to Jane he mused on the nature of time, on the dangers of science, on the existence or nonexistence of God. “The greatest man to ever live will be the one that invents the real God, and presents the World with a book of His teachings,” he wrote her in 1945. “A bible written in a Lunatic Asylum may be the answer.” It’s hard to imagine a better summary of Bokononism, the fictitious religion Vonnegut would go on to depict in “Cat’s Cradle.”

In “Timequake,” his semi-autobiographical last novel, published in 1997, Vonnegut recalls that Jane submitted a controversial thesis when she was at Swarthmore. It argued “that all that could be learned from history was that history itself was absolutely nonsensical, so study something else, like music.” He is, in essence, glossing the last line of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” where Billy Pilgrim wakes up to discover that the war has ended. He and his buddies wander outside into a springtime day. Birds are singing. “One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, ‘Poo-tee-weet?’ ” As Jane had argued, there’s no meaning to be made from a massacre, from death in industrial quantities.

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Rachel Rose. Still from Everything and More, 2015. High-definition video, color, sound; 11:33 min.;

with mylar, PVC, and carpet.

Currently at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

More here, and here.