Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Invasive species are both a fact of life and a scientific puzzle. Humans transport animals and plants thousands of miles from where they first evolved — sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally. Many of those species die off in their new homes. Some barely eke out an existence.

But some become ecological nightmares. In the Northeast, emerald ash borers are destroying ash trees, while Japanese barberry is blanketing forest floors, outcompeting native plants. Scientists aren’t certain why species like these are proving superior so far from home.

“If natives are adapted to their environment and exotics are from somewhere else, why are they able to invade?” asked Dov F. Sax, an ecologist at Brown University.

A big part of the answer may be found in the habitats in which invasive species evolve. Many alien species in the northeastern United States, including the emerald ash borer and Japanese barberry, invaded from East Asia. But the opposite is not true. Few species from the northeastern United States have become problems in East Asia.

In a new study published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, Dr. Sax and Jason D. Fridley, a biologist at Syracuse University, argue that this is not a coincidence. They offer evidence that some parts of the world have been evolutionary incubators, producing superior competitors primed to thrive in other environments.

More here.

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon:

Here’s a news flash: None of these heated public debates about atheism and religion, or about how Western “liberals” should think about Islam, ever reach a satisfactory conclusion. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that talk-show hosts and movie stars (just for instance) aren’t necessarily the best people to bring nuance or thoughtfulness or clarity to these conversations. An even bigger reason may be that religion in general, and fundamentalist religion in particular, is a major sore spot in Western culture, a source of tremendous vulnerability and anxiety.

One of the few propositions that Reza Aslan and Sam Harris might both agree with is that God’s return to the world-historical stage long after Nietzsche supposedly killed him off, as both an internal and external enemy of the Western secular-capitalist order, is a dangerous phenomenon for which our society has no clear answer. Our exaggerated response to ISIS is a dead giveaway: They may be a stateless desert army of bloodthirsty nutjobs, but they have something we lost a long time ago and can’t get back.

Fundamentalist Christianity appeared to be on a long, slow decline in the United States. Now right-wing Christians have mounted a vigorous counterattack against reproductive rights, largely by cloaking themselves (ingeniously, it must be said) in pseudo-liberal sheep’s clothing, as an oppressed and disenfranchised group entitled to legal protection. Similarly, fundamentalist Islam seemed to be on the run in the Middle East, although that required the expenditure of trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of human lives and the last reservoir of goodwill toward America in the Arab world. Then came the rollout of ISIS, with its genocidal mass killings and its beheading videos: an al-Qaida 2.0 for the YouTube age, with better graphics and an even more deranged vision.

More here.

Gil Anidjar in a forum remembering Derrida at the LA Review of Books:

SOMETIME AROUND 1989, Jacques Derrida must have agreed to give the opening keynote at the UCLA conference entitled “Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’: Probing the Limits of Representation.” Derrida must have agreed since, on 26 April 1990, in front of an undoubtedly sizable audience, he delivered that lecture, a reading of Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” that has since become one of Derrida’s most influential and most generative texts.

The academic equivalent of a star-studded event — in Los Angeles no less! — the conference had been explicitly and centrally organized as a defensive call to arms against those who might question, in the name of historical probity, the historical profession’s strenuous policing of Holocaust testimony, evidence, and representation. The conference singled out Hayden White, himself a historian, as representative of the risks — and negationist, even fascistic, inclinations, however unwitting — courted by “postmodernist” claims. White participated in the conference, and he was duly included, along with numerous detractors of his, in the published proceedings. Derrida was not.

more here.

Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New York Times:

ONE feature of the tragic case of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first traveler known to have carried the Ebola virus into the United States, rankles me as a physician: Even if every system in place to identify suspected carriers had been working perfectly, he may have still set off a mini-epidemic in Dallas. Mr. Duncan, recall, was screened before his flight and found to have a normal temperature. Asked specifically about exposures, he denied any contact with the ill. On Sept. 25, when he first presented to the emergency room with a fever, he was discharged. He returned three days later with fulminant infection. But the fact remains that even if Mr. Duncan had been identified and isolated on the first visit, it may have been too late. He had probably been exuding the virus for days. The news that a nurse who helped treat Mr. Duncan has now tested positive for the disease, evidently because of a breach of safety protocols, adds to the picture of disorder.

In the wake of the Duncan case, three strategies to contain the entry and spread of Ebola in the United States have been proposed. The first suggests drastic restrictions on travel from Ebola-affected nations. The second involves screening travelers from Ebola-affected areas with a thermometer, which the federal government is beginning to do at selected airports. The third proposes the isolation of all suspected symptomatic patients and monitoring or quarantining everyone who came into contact with them. Yet all these strategies have crucial flaws. In the absence of any established anti-viral treatment, we may need to rethink the concept of quarantine itself. “Quarantine” sounds like a medieval concept because it is. Invented in the mid-1300s to stop the bubonic plague, the word derives from the Italian for “40 days,” the time used to isolate potential carriers. Although the practice of quarantine has been reformed over the centuries, pitfalls remain. They are especially evident during this epidemic.

More here.

Old Movies

Screw physics!
days gain speed,
no doubt —

this ellipse is being spun post haste,
the moon almost cannot keep up,
solar winds rush through my hair,
its thin ends whip around the sun
in tender furies

the leaves of months are ripped as they were in old films
suggesting passing time with bygones overlaid,
accelerating as strips of perforated cellulose fly by,
each frame a day, sometimes so fast
this car's momentary wheels spin back
like buckboard spokes and Model-As
—its scenes collect on a reel of years
much closer to its hub than I am now
on the fringes of a still unknown galaxy
whose recollected hurricanes of breath and dust
now seem more like flurries

still clinging to its spiral tip
someday I'll lose this grip
and slip beyond the lip
of breath and worries
.

by Jim Culleny
10/12/14

Subhankar Banerjee. Caribou Migration I. 2002.

“The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the core calving area of the Porcupine River caribou herd. It is also the most debated public land in the United States history – whether to open up this land to oil and gas development or to preserve it has been raging in the halls of the United States Congress for over thirty years. This caribou herd has symbolized the Arctic Refuge – both for its ecological and cultural significance. Individual caribou from this herd may travel more than three thousand miles during their yearly movements, making it one of the longest terrestrial migrations of any land animal on the planet. Numerous indigenous communities living within the range of the herd have depended on the caribou for subsistence food. The Gwich'in people of Alaska, and the northern Yukon and Northwest Territories in Canada, live on or near the migratory route of this herd, have relied upon the caribou for many millennia to meet their subsistence as well as cultural and spiritual needs. The Gwich'in are caribou people. They call the calving ground of the caribou “Iizhik Gwats'an Gwandaii Goodlit” (The Sacred Place Where Life Begins). To open up the caribou calving ground to oil and gas development is a human-rights issue for the Gwich'in Nation. In addition to the perceived threat of oil development in their calving ground, this caribou herd has been severely impacted by climate change in recent years. International scientific community has stated that climate change has impacted this herd more than most of the other large caribou herds across the circumpolar Arctic. Their numbers has declined steadily at a 3.5% per year since 1989 from 178,000 animals to a low of 123,000 in 2001. Warmer, wetter autumn resulting in more frequent icing conditions; warmer, wetter winter resulting in deeper and denser snow; and warmer spring resulting in more freeze-thaw days and faster spring melt are among the key negative climate change impacts on the caribou and their habitat. In the photograph pregnant females are migrating over Coleen River on the south side of the Brooks Range Mountain on their way to the coastal plain for calving.” (From Banerjee's website.)

More here, here and here.

Michael Mechanic in Mother Jones:

In Being Mortal, Gawande, a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker, takes on the utter failure of the medical profession when it comes to helping people die well, and the short-sightedness of the elder facilities that infantilize people rather than bother to figure out what they actually need to maintain a modicum of meaning in what's left of their lives. In the process, he gives us a lesson on the basic physiology of aging and on the social and technological changes that led to most of us dying in hospitals and institutions rather than at home with our loved ones. And he chronicles the rise of the nursing home and the creation of assisted living as its antidote—if only it were.

The picture can seem pretty bleak. Many of Gawande's subjects are dealing with the always-hopeful oncologists who, rather than accept the inevitable, coax their patients into trying futile fourth-line chemotherapies that nobody can pronounce. And then you've got hospitals axing their geriatrics departments (aging Boomers be damned) because Medicare won't cover the extra costs of making someone's last years worth living. There's also a deeply personal aspect to the book, which goes on sale today. Gawande recounts the recent travails of his family, which began when his father, also a surgeon, was diagnosed with a cancer that would slowly eat away at his physical capabilities and ultimately end his life.

But Being Mortal is hopeful, too, and that's why it could make a difference.

More here.

Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post:

When television host Bill Maher declares on his weekly show that “the Muslim world . . . has too much in common with ISIS ” and guest Sam Harris says that Islam is “the mother lode of bad ideas,” I understand why people are upset. Maher and Harris, an author, made crude simplifications and exaggerations. And yet, they were also talking about something real.

I know the arguments against speaking of Islam as violent and reactionary. It has a following of 1.6 billion people. Places such as Indonesia and India have hundreds of millions of Muslims who don’t fit these caricatures. That’s why Maher and Harris are guilty of gross generalizations. But let’s be honest. Islam has a problem today. The places that have trouble accommodating themselves to the modern world are disproportionately Muslim.

In 2013, of the top 10 groups that perpetrated terrorist attacks, seven were Muslim. Of the top 10 countries where terrorist attacks took place, seven were Muslim-majority. The Pew Research Center rates countries on the level of restrictions that governments impose on the free exercise of religion. Of the 24 most restrictive countries, 19 are Muslim-majority. Of the 21 countries that have laws against apostasy, all have Muslim majorities.

There is a cancer of extremism within Islam today.

More here.

Sarah Knapton in The Telegraph:

A cure for diabetes could be imminent after scientists discovered how to make huge quantities of insulin-producing cells, in a breakthrough hailed as significant as antibiotics.

Harvard University has, for the first time, managed to manufacture the millions of beta cells required for transplantation.

It could mean the end of daily insulin injections for the 400,000 people in Britain living with Type 1 diabetes.

And it marks the culmination of 23-years of research for Harvard professor Doug Melton who has been trying to find a cure for the disease since his son Sam was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes as a baby.

“We are now just one pre-clinical step away from the finish line,” said Prof Melton.

Asked about his children’s reaction he said: “I think like all kids, they always assumed that if I said I'd do this, I'd do it.”

More here.

Faraz Talat in Dawn:

Dear Malala,

Despite all that occurred, I’d always lugged around with me a sliver of optimism. They referred to me as Pakistan’s ‘only’ Nobel laureate; I insisted on being called the “first”. I was born in a small town called Santokh Das; arguably not as beautiful as your Swat valley, but it did have much to offer. I grew up in Jhang, a city now tainted by its name’s association with dangerous groups. My father was an education officer working for the Punjab government. I have a feeling your father would've liked him. Like you, I took a keen interest in my studies. I enjoyed English and Urdu literature, but excelled at mathematics. At a very young age, I scored the highest marks ever recorded then, in my matriculation exam. My education, however, was never as politically challenging as yours. I did not have to contend with the Taliban destroying my school, or forbidding boys from receiving education. But whatever barriers they constructed in your way, you bravely broke through them. In fact, you continue to defy them with every breath you take.

Winning the Nobel prize has enraged your attackers, as it has annoyed many of your countrymen.

It takes courage to walk through it all, and knowing you, courage is not in short supply. Not a lot has changed in this country. You were mocked and alienated by your countrymen, when you did nothing wrong. I know something of that. As a nation, we do not want to be celebrated. What we wish for, is to be pitied. They were pleased with you as long as you were another local victim. But then, you cast off your victimhood and emerged as a hero, a beacon of hope for young girls around the world. That’s where you lost them.

…You are the new 'traitor'.

You are presented with the dire challenge of bringing peace and pride to a country, that doesn't want your gift. Like a mother of a particularly rebellious child, you must find a way to love them nonetheless. Eventually, I pray, they will understand. I had the privilege of being the first to offer this country a Nobel Prize. But now there are two of us.

And, I’m still counting.

Yours truly, Abdus Salam

More here.

Jenny Diski in LRB:

The future flashed before my eyes in all its pre-ordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness, the sort that comes over you when you are set on a track by something outside your control, and which, although it is not your experience, is so known in all its cultural forms that you could unscrew the cap of the pen in your hand and jot down in the notebook on your lap every single thing that will happen and everything that will be felt for the foreseeable future. Including the surprises.

I got a joke in.

‘So – we’d better get cooking the meth,’ I said to the Poet, sitting to one side and slightly behind me. The Poet with an effort got his face to work and responded properly. ‘This time we quit while the going’s good.’ The doctor and nurse were blank. When we got home the Poet said he supposed they didn’t watch much US TV drama. It was only later that I thought that maybe, ever since Breaking Bad’s first broadcast, oncologists and their nurses all over the Western world have been subjected to the meth-cooking joke each time they have applied their latest, assiduously rehearsed, non-brutal techniques for telling a patient as gently but honestly as possible, having first sized up their inner resilience with a few apparently innocent questions (‘Tell me what you have been expecting from this appointment’), that they have inoperable cancer. Perhaps they failed to laugh at my – doubtless evasive – bid to lighten the mood, not because they didn’t get the reference, but because they had said to each other too often after such an appointment: ‘If I hear one more patient say they should start cooking meth, I’m going to wrestle them to the ground and bellow death into their faces – “Pay attention, I’m fucking telling you something important!”’ I was mortified at the thought that before I’d properly started out on the cancer road, I’d committed my first platitude. I was already a predictable cancer patient.

More here.

Jonathon Green in Salon:

Slang’s literary origins are widespread and ever-expanding. Its social roots, however, are narrow and focused: the city. If, as has been suggested, the story of standard English is that of a London language, so too is that of English slang. And the pattern would be repeated elsewhere as colonies became independent and rural settlements became major conurbations. London’s chroniclers had always noted the urban vocabularies, though none before the eighteenth century had rendered their discoveries lexicographical. The pioneer of such investigations, John Stow, laying out Elizabethan London in his Survey of London (1598), had barely touched on language (his text offers gong farmer, a latrine cleaner, night-walker, a thief, and white money, meaning silver coins). In time those who told London’s story would offer a far more central position to the city’s speech, alongside its population and topography. The first of these were the Jacobean city playwrights, but they suborned the language to their plays. For those whose work helped showcase the city’s particular way of speaking, one must look at the turn of the seventeenth century’s Ned Ward and Thomas Brown, and on to their successors.

Ned Ward declared himself ‘The London Spy’, while Tom Brown was a satirist of the city’s ‘Amusements Serious and Comical’. The works of both make clear the extent to which slang was interwoven with the metropolis which both created it and used it as part of daily life. Neither author was remotely canonical. In 1726 the New England puritan Cotton Mather bracketed their works with those of Samuel Butler (author of Hudibras) – all three sold well in the colonies – and enjoined his readership against ‘such Pestilences, and indeed all those worse than Egyptian Toads (the Spawns of a Butler, and a Brown, and a Ward …)’. Lord Macaulay, in his History of England (1849), would sneer at both: of Ward he wrote, ‘I am almost ashamed to quote such nauseous balderdash; but I have been forced to descend even lower, if possible, in search of materials,’ while Brown was ‘An idle man of wit and pleasure, who little thought that his buffoonery would ever be cited to illustrate the history of his times’. He then used them both, as have historians ever since.

More here.

Cafe

In that café in a foreign town bearing a French writer’s
name I read Under the Volcano
but with diminishing interest. You should heal yourself,
I thought. I’d become a philistine.
Mexico was distant, and its vast stars
no longer shone for me. The day of the dead continued.
A feast of metaphors and light. Death played the lead.
Alongside a few patrons at the tables, assorted fates:
Prudence, Sorrow, Common Sense. The Consul, Yvonne.
Rain fell. I felt a little happiness. Someone entered,
someone left, someone finally discovered the perpetuum mobile.
I was in a free country. A lonely country.
Nothing happened, the heavy artillery lay still.
The music was indiscriminate: pop seeped
from the speakers, lazily repeating: many things will happen.
No one knew what to do, where to go, why.
I thought of you, our closeness, the scent
of your hair in early autumn.
A plane ascended from the runway
like an earnest student who believes
the ancient masters’ sayings.
Soviet cosmonauts insisted that they didn’t find
God in space, but did they look?
.

by Adam Zagajewski
translation, Clare Cavanagh

Daniel Davies over at Crooked Timber:

What is debt? It’s a promise to pay back a specific amount of money at a specific time. Why is it so popular – why do people always seem to end up getting into it? Why, for example, don’t people make more equity investments, buying a share of someone else’s profits and sharing their risks in the way in which Islamic banking is meant to operate?

Basically, because debt has one big advantage, and it’s the same advantage that market economies have over command economics – it’s really really efficient in terms of the amount of information that people need to gather about each other. If you’re lending money under a debt contract, all you need to think about is Do I think this guy is good for the money?, and all the borrower needs to think about is Can I pay this back?. If you’re trying to make an investment and share the risks, all sorts of other questions come into play: How much could this be worth in a really good outcome? What further projects might grow out of this one? What effect will the sharing of the upside and downside have on the way the thing is managed? Am I selling my shares too cheap?.

If you’ve ever watched “Dragons’ Den” (the format was broadcast as “Shark Tank” in theUSA), you’ll note that the real human drama in the series is not really when the entrepreneur is pitching his or her new invention. What people come to watch that show for is the bit where one of the investors makes an offer. The guy has said he wants £200,000 for 10% of his company, and Duncan Bannatyne or equivalent says he’ll give the money, but he wants 40%. And the entrepreneur sweats on the spot. This, in microcosm, is the stuff that gets cut out of the process when you’re dealing with debt rather than equity. David Graeber wrote a whole gigantic book, one of the messages of which was that from an anthropological view, debt contracts denatured exchange relationships and took them out of their context of cultural human interactions, but in my review, I noted that Graeber didn’t seem to appreciate the extent to which this is a collossal time saver. Having a debt relationship with someone means that they don’t really care all that much about your project as long as you pay them back, but that’s a good thing; it makes investing much less intensive in time and effort.

More here.

Priyamvada Natarajan reviews Philip Ball's Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything and Stuart Firestein's Ignorance: How It Drives Science, in the NYRB:

In Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything, the science writer Philip Ball, a former editor at Nature, reveals how curiosity, combined with wonder, has driven the scientific enterprise since the seventeenth century, and how the ever-transmuting nature of curiosity shifted the practice of science to the highly specialized and impersonal activity that it is perceived as today. Ball traces the intellectual history of curiosity, from the Renaissance cabinets of curiosity to the Large Hadron Collider atCERN that harks back to a view of nature as holding secrets that must be teased out with experimental apparatuses. He shows how curiosity went from being seen as a vice in medieval Catholic Europe, to a shallow form of inquisitiveness that inspired learned societies like the London philosophical club, and then, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, got recast as a virtue. Changes in the notion of curiosity from vice to virtue, he argues, have gone hand in hand with the development of empirical methods in science.

Ball provides one of the clearest explications of the provisional nature of science by tracing the development of the currently accepted germ theory of disease. He shows how the invention of the microscope, which opened up an entirely new, formerly invisible realm, first led to the idea of “animalcules” (developed by Anton von Leeuwenhoek, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke), which was refined by Louis Pasteur and others in the nineteenth century, leading to our present view of pathogens as the agents of disease. Ball traces the entire process from the early proposition and its subsequent refinements, showing clearly what provisionality means—a slow and gradual honing and growing sophistication of our understanding, driven by accumulating data enabled by the invention of ever-newer instruments

This does not mean that theories are mere placeholders waiting to be overthrown (in fact, that happens extremely rarely), but rather that as empirical evidence accumulates they aim at a more comprehensive explanation that subsumes earlier views.

More here.