Robin Morgan in Women's Media Center:

Robin: It’s a time for great celebration because My Life on the Road, by Gloria Steinem, is finally out. Tell us about it.

Gloria: About twenty years ago I realized that I was writing least about what I was doing most, which was traveling and organizing on the road. So I began this book—I would work on it one month in the summer and then not for the other eleven months. My hope for it is that it conveys some of the seduction of the road. I noticed that when I say I’m going to another country, people say, “Oh, how interesting,” and when I say I’m traveling here, they say, “Oh, it must be so tiring.”

So I think there is a great lack that should be filled by, I don’t know, rules that every elected politician needs to spend at least two years [on the road] before they run, and have booster shots of a few weeks every few years …

Robin: What different politicians that would make!

Gloria: I think the road is my form of meditation. It forces you to live in the present—you really have no choice. And it is so unexpected; the country is so much more diverse and interesting and exciting and full of energy than the generalizations on television or on the Web about “the American People,” as if we were one lump. And especially now, because it is profoundly shifting in many ways—we are about to become a majority country of people of color, not European Americans.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In 1977, a University of Oxford statistician named Richard Peto pointed out a simple yet puzzling biological fact: We humans should have a lot more cancer than mice, but we don’t. Dr. Peto’s argument was beguilingly simple. Every time a cell divides, there’s a small chance it will gain a mutation that speeds its growth. Cells that accumulate several of these mutations may become cancerous. The bigger an animal is, the more cells it has, and the longer an animal lives, the more times its cells divide. We humans undergo about 10,000 times as many cell divisions as mice — and thus should be far more likely to get cancer. Yet humans and mice have roughly the same lifetime risk of cancer, a circumstance that has come to be known as Peto’s paradox.

…“Every baby elephant should be dropping dead of colon cancer at age 3,” said Dr. Joshua D. Schiffman, a pediatric oncologist at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah.

…Dr. Schiffman and his colleagues found that elephants had evolved new copies of the p53 gene. While humans have only one pair of p53 genes, the scientists identified 20 pairs in elephants. Dr. Lynch and his colleagues also found these extra genes. To trace their evolution, the researchers made a large-scale comparison of elephants to other mammal species — including extinct relatives like woolly mammoths and mastodons whose DNA remains in their fossils. The small ancestors of elephants, Dr. Lynch and his colleagues found, had only one pair of functional p53, like other mammals. But as they evolved to bigger sizes, they steadily evolved extra copies of p53. “Whatever’s going on is special to the elephant lineage,” Dr. Lynch said. To see whether these extra copies of p53 made a difference in fighting cancer, both teams ran experiments on elephant cells. Dr. Schiffman and his colleagues bombarded elephant cells with radiation and DNA-damaging chemicals, while Dr. Lynch’s team used chemicals and ultraviolet rays. In all these cases, the elephant cells responded in the same way: Instead of trying to repair the damage, they simply committed suicide.

More here. (Note: Ga, between elephants and p53, we have a chance to collaborate)

Adrian Villar Rojas. The Most Beautiful of All Mothers. Istanbul Biennial, 2015.

More here, here, and here.

Also watch for: Mr.Rojas and Asad Raza's collaborative art project in New York in November, 2015.

Jennifer M. Morton over at The Philosophers' Magazine Online:

Picture yourself as a young mother with two children. You enrol in university to obtain a bachelor’s degree, hoping to give yourself a better chance at a job that pays a living wage. Maybe you receive government loans to pay for tuition, and rely on your family’s help, but you still don’t have enough to pay for living expenses and childcare. So, you continue working at a job that pays slightly above minimum wage while taking a full load of courses. Every day you wake up early to get the children ready for school and commute an hour or more to university. After class, you pick up your children from school. If you’re lucky, you can drop them off with a relative while you go to work. By the time you return home in the evening, you are tired, but still have many pages to read and assignments to complete. This is your gruelling daily routine. Now, ask yourself: what could philosophy do for you?

I teach philosophy at the City College of New York, an institution which, since its founding in 1847, has attracted a student body as diverse as the city it serves. Many of my students come from minority, low-income, or immigrant communities; some all three. They are strivers – seeking an education in order to become health professionals, teachers, engineers, or lawyers while holding onto jobs and taking care of families. Most of them are more fortunate than our imagined protagonist, but for many of them going to university involves great personal and financial sacrifices. Given that few of my students will ultimately find their way into the academy and that, within that already small cohort, only a fraction will choose to do so in the field of philosophy, the question of why study philosophy has a particular resonance for them, and for me as their teacher.

One answer to this question is pragmatic – philosophy teaches you to think and write logically and clearly. This, we tell our students, will be of use to them no matter what path they pursue. We advertise philosophy, then, as a broadly useful means to a variety of ends. There is a lot of truth to this dispassionate answer, but it is also rather disappointing. It sells philosophy short. A different sort of answer dives into profundity – philosophy aims to discover fundamental truths. Many disciplines aim at knowledge but philosophers, we solemnly tell our students, go deeper – we seek Knowledge with a capital K. This is undeniably the goal of many philosophers, but it can alienate some students (in particular, those who are not interested in pursuing an academic career). Why, these students might ask, is the knowledge that philosophy aims at any deeper than that of more practical fields such as medicine, science, or the law? And why should they care about this kind of knowledge? Even if most professional philosophers aim at the deepest kind of knowledge, this does not show that it is a valuable enterprise for all students, especially for those who are already overcoming significant hurdles to attend university.

More here.

Giulia Bertoluzzi over at Scroll.in:

Founded by the Prophet Zoroaster around 3,500 years ago, the religion claims around 190,000 followers. The official religion in Iran for 1,000 years, its adherents are now a dwindling minority within the Islamic Republic.

Middle East Eye paid a visit to their fire temple (or Agiary), the site of daily services led by Zorastrian priests. The visit coincided with the third Gambahar, one of the six annual festivals designed to celebrate the creation of the Earth.

Mobediar Sarvar Talapolevara enters the temple dressed in a long white dress on top of which a white veil is pinned, and sits close to the small but vigorous fire that crackles in the middle of the temple.

Talapolevara’s immaculate threads are transcendentally laundered, flawless white throughout. Her one accessory is the traditional koshti, a long belt which represents the Zoroastrian basic principles of “good thoughts, good words and good actions”.

“My father was a Parsi, that is a Zoroastrian from India,” she says. “I recall him fastening his belt every day before breakfast and telling us about his childhood in India, where Zoroastrians cling to conservative traditions and kids must wear the koshti from the age of eight.”

“It was my father who encouraged me the most. At first Indian Parsis opposed the idea of the female priests,” Mobed Talapolevara said. “That’s why I was pleasantly surprised upon my initiation as a priest four years ago to receive messages of support from those same Indian Parsis. They even published articles in Indian newspapers and at the International Congress of Zoroastrians.”

More here.

Over at Rationally Speaking:

Parents in the United States are spending more time and energy than ever to ensure that their children turn out happy, healthy, and successful. But what does the evidence suggest about the impact of their efforts? Economist Bryan Caplan (and the author of “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids”) argues that, despite our intuition that parenting choices affect children's life outcomes, there's strong evidence to the contrary. Bryan and Julia discuss his case, and explore what that means for how people should parent and how many kids they should have.

Mike Konczal in Boston Review:

Nineteenth-century America was a place full of hazards. Disease, political oppression, imperialist warfare, poor living conditions, and hard manual labor took their toll, as they still do. But some dangers were peculiar to the era—among them, exploding steamboats.

Between 1825 and 1830, 273 people died in such accidents. DeBow’s Review (1848) noted 233 cases of “bursting boilers,” “collapsing flues,” and other breakdowns, which could cause massive damage. In his 1833 State of the Union address, President Andrew Jackson noted the “many distressing accidents which have of late occurred . . . . by the use of steam power.” But he didn’t simply mourn, instead arguing that the problem demanded “the immediate and unremitting attention of the constituted authorities of the country.” He sought criminal penalties to prevent what he saw as the negligence of carriers.

But the problem was so severe that Congress eventually decided tackle it administratively. Criminalizing bad behavior wasn’t enough; for the good of individual lives and the larger economy, the government would take positive steps to prevent explosions. Under the Steamboat Act of 1852, Congress mandated standards for boiler pressure and testing. Pilots and engineers would be federally licensed. And government inspectors could enforce these rules.

This “steamboat agency” seems like something straight out of the twentieth century. It relied on the Constitution’s commerce clause to regulate a specific industry for personal safety. It developed these regulations based on scientific understanding. And it combined licensing, rule making, and adjudication, as the New Deal and Great Society agencies did and continue to do. It was, in sum, an early manifestation of an administrative state that contemporary conservatives insist did not exist until Progressive Era reformers built it upon the ashes of a former libertarian utopia.

More here.

Christopher Snowdon in Spiked:

Does free-market capitalism foster an environment in which death and disease flourish? That is the question asked by academics Ted Schrecker and Clare Bambra in How Politics Makes Us Sick: Neoliberal Epidemics. In this strident little tome, they argue that the infectious diseases of the Victorian age – which they claim, in a characteristically ahistorical aside, were stamped out thanks to ‘organised resistance by labour, via trade unions’ – are being replaced by an epidemic of non-communicable diseases, such as cancer and heart disease, as a result of ‘neoliberal’ policies. They argue that things are worst in Britain and the US where neoliberalism supposedly burns most brightly, whereas life is better, though far from perfect, in the Nordic countries because they all have a ‘strongly interventionist state’.

Schrecker and Bambra focus on four ‘neoliberal epidemics’ – obesity, insecurity, austerity and inequality – which they portray as the latter-day equivalents of cholera and tuberculosis. Strikingly, none of these ‘epidemics’ are diseases in a medical sense. Obesity and stress are risk factors for disease; inequality is an economic variable; and ‘austerity’ is a hyperbolic term for balancing the budget through fiscal restraint. It is also notable that all of these issues predate ‘neoliberalism’ by many years and can be found in countries that have a considerably more dirigiste economy than the UK. There is a simple explanation for why cancer and heart disease have become the leading causes of death in rich countries. When there are only two classes of disease, communicable and non-communicable, eradication of the communicable leaves only the non-communicable. Since the concept of a natural death has been defined out of existence, it is inevitable that more people die from non-communicable diseases, albeit usually at an advanced age. It is a trend that should be welcomed.

More here.

David Ignatius in the Washington Post:

Last weekend’s deadly attack on an international hospital in Afghanistan was a reminder of the terrible war that grinds on there, with Afghan civilians caught in the crossfire.

Doctors Without Borders, a globally respected group, has charged that the deaths of 22 patients and staff members at its hospital in Kunduz was a “war crime.” The United States has promised to investigate what Gen. John Campbell, the NATO commander in Kabul, says was a mistake.

The hospital bombing comes as the United States is quietly exploring some diplomatic options that could reduce the violence in Afghanistan — and perhaps even curb the danger of a nuclear Pakistan next door. As with most diplomacy in South Asia, these prospects are “iffy,” at best. But they open a window on what’s happening in a part of the world that, except for disasters such as the Kunduz incident, gets little attention these days.

The United States recognized more than four years ago that the best way out of the Afghanistan conflict would be a diplomatic settlement that involved the Taliban and its sometime sponsors in Pakistan. State Department officials have been conducting secret peace talks, on and off, since 2011. That effort hasn’t borne fruit yet, as the Taliban’s recent offensive in Kunduz shows.

But the pace of negotiations has quickened this year, thanks to an unlikely U.S. diplomatic partnership with China.

More here.

Darling Coffee

The periodic pleasure
of small happenings
is upon us—
behind the stalls
at the farmer’s market
snow glinting in heaps,
a cardinal its chest
puffed out, bloodshod
above the piles of awnings,
passion’s proclivities;
you picking up a sweet potato
turning to me ‘This too?’—
query of tenderness
under the blown red wing.
Remember the brazen world?
Let’s find a room
with a window onto elms
strung with sunlight,
a cafe with polished cups,
darling coffee they call it,
may our bed be stoked
with fresh cut rosemary
and glinting thyme,
all herbs in due season
tucked under wild sheets:
fit for the conjugation of joy.

by Meena Alexander
from Poem-a-Day
Academy of American Poets

Steven Pinker in The Guardian:

People often ask me why I followed my 2011 book on the history of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, with a writing style manual. I like to say that after having written 800 pages on torture, rape, world war, and genocide, it was time to take on some really controversial topics like fused participles, dangling modifiers, and the serial comma.

It’s not much of an exaggeration. After two decades of writing popular books and articles about language, I’ve learned that people have strong opinions on the quality of writing today, with almost everyone finding it deplorable. I’ve also come to realise that people are confused about what exactly they should deplore. Outrage at mispunctuation gets blended with complaints about bureaucratese and academese, which are conflated with disgust at politicians’ evasions, which in turn are merged with umbrage at an endless list of solecisms, blunders, and peeves.

I can get as grumpy as anyone about bad writing. But as a scientist who studies language for a living (and who has had to unlearn the bad habits of academic writing) I long ago developed my own opinions on why so much prose is so egregious.

Contrary to the ubiquitous moaning about the imminent demise of the language, this is not a new problem. Similar lamentations about the slovenly habits of the young and the decline of English have appeared regularly since the invention of the printing press.

More here.

A Japanese mathematician claims to have solved one of the most important problems in his field. The trouble is, hardly anyone can work out whether he's right.

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Sometime on the morning of 30 August 2012, Shinichi Mochizuki quietly posted four papers on his website.

The papers were huge — more than 500 pages in all — packed densely with symbols, and the culmination of more than a decade of solitary work. They also had the potential to be an academic bombshell. In them, Mochizuki claimed to have solved the abc conjecture, a 27-year-old problem in number theory that no other mathematician had even come close to solving. If his proof was correct, it would be one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics this century and would completely revolutionize the study of equations with whole numbers.

Mochizuki, however, did not make a fuss about his proof. The respected mathematician, who works at Kyoto University's Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) in Japan, did not even announce his work to peers around the world. He simply posted the papers, and waited for the world to find out.

Probably the first person to notice the papers was Akio Tamagawa, a colleague of Mochizuki's at RIMS. He, like other researchers, knew that Mochizuki had been working on the conjecture for years and had been finalizing his work. That same day, Tamagawa e-mailed the news to one of his collaborators, number theorist Ivan Fesenko of the University of Nottingham, UK. Fesenko immediately downloaded the papers and started to read. But he soon became “bewildered”, he says. “It was impossible to understand them.”

More here.

From Phys.org:

A plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe – has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing 'teeth' that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal's legs when it launches into a jump.

The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the “first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure“.

Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science.

The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box.

Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears – essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.

The gear teeth on the opposing hind-legs lock together like those in a car gear-box, ensuring almost complete synchronicity in leg movement – the legs always move within 30 'microseconds' of each other, with one microsecond equal to a millionth of a second.

This is critical for the powerful jumps that are this insect's primary mode of transport, as even miniscule discrepancies in synchronisation between the velocities of its legs at the point of propulsion would result in “yaw rotation” – causing the Issusto spin hopelessly out of control.

More here.

Alex Needham in The Guardian:

On forgiveness

“The really vile and violent and bestial treatment of slaves and their descendants did not succeed in making those descendants reproduce that violence and that corruption and that bestiality. It’s contemporary, but the survivors and the family members who were killed in that church [in Charleston] did not say of the killer ‘I want him dead’ – it was something grander and more humane. It was eloquent and elegant, the response of forgiveness. We sometimes understand that generosity, and I’m not going to tear you up, as a kind of weakness whereas I always thought that that was extreme strength.”

On her experience of community in the deep south

“When we were travelling in the south, there were carriages where black people sat but the most important thing was the porters, who gave you twice as much orange juice and four sandwiches and two pillows – they were so excessively generous and kind that it was like a luxury car. I was thinking not too long ago that when I was at Cornell and I saw a black man I would run toward him – then I thought that these days, with all the discussion about black men as threats, I may not do that. But I certainly wouldn’t run toward a white man, I might just have to flip along by myself.”

On her father’s hatred of white people

“Was he racist? Big time. He wouldn’t let white people in the house. My mother was just the opposite – she didn’t care who you were if you were nice to her. Later, I went down to the little town in Georgia where my father was born and one of the men who was a child at the time said that my father had seen two black men lynched on his street – they were businessmen, they had little stores and so on. He was 14 and he left and went to California and ended up living in Ohio. I think seeing that at 14 – the lynching of two neighbours – and that’s why he thought that white people were incorrigible.”

More here.