An editorial in Scientific American:

“We will get woolly mammoths back.” So vowed environmentalist Stewart Brand at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., in February in laying out his vision for reviving extinct species. The mammoth isn't the only vanished creature Brand and other proponents of “de-extinction” want to resurrect. The passenger pigeon, Caribbean monk seal and great auk are among the other candidates—all species that blinked out at least in part because of Homo sapiens. “Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years,” Brand asserted. “We have the ability now—and maybe the moral obligation—to repair some of the damage.”

Just a few years ago such de-extinction was the purview of science fiction. Now it is so near at hand that in March, Brand's Long Now Foundation, along with TED and the National Geographic Society, convened an entire conference on the topic. Indeed, thanks to recent advances in cloning and the sequencing of ancient DNA, among other feats of biotechnology, researchers may soon be able to re-create any number of species once thought to be gone for good.

That does not mean that they should, however. The idea of bringing back extinct species holds obvious gee-whiz appeal and a respite from a steady stream of grim news. Yet with limited intellectual bandwidth and financial resources to go around, de-extinction threatens to divert attention from the modern biodiversity crisis.

Attraction and repulsion combined to create a sick fascination for Shillong’s street food when I was growing up in that city in the 1980s and 90s. Brightly-coloured ice lollies, whose flavour diminished as their oranges and yellows drained into one’s mouth, were sold out of ice-boxes slung around the necks of their itinerant vendors, and were nicknamed ‘nala-pani’ or drain water. The dubious provenance of the water that went into them made them something of a delicious taboo. It is impossible to separate the lure of aloo-muri from the unwashed hands of their makers The channa-wallahs, who rang little bells to attract customers to their none-too-clean but delectable wares, were itinerant too, unlike the aloo-muri men who always occupied strategic spots outside schools; they did their best business in the late afternoon when bored and hungry children poured out of classrooms. It is impossible to separate the lure of aloo-muri from the unwashed hands of their makers, the weathered, rusting tins that hold powdered masalas, the grated white papaya standing open to the elements, and the muddy looking tamarind water. This mix of puffed rice and boiled potatoes is Shillong’s signature street food; its overpowering spiciness, so strong that it actually kills all taste, and so remote from the milder and earthier flavours of the food native to the city, is a combination of the forbidden, the grubby and the exotic.

more from Anjum Hasan at Granta here.

Today, Taksim Square is Istanbul’s chestnut tree. I’ve been living in Istanbul for sixty years, and I cannot imagine that there is a single inhabitant of this city who does not have at least one memory connected to Taksim Square. In the nineteen-thirties, the old artillery barracks, which the government now wants to convert into a shopping mall, contained a small football stadium that hosted official matches. The famous club Taksim Gazino, which was the center of Istanbul night life in the nineteen-forties and fifties, stood on a corner of Gezi Park. Later, buildings were demolished, trees were cut down, new trees were planted, and a row of shops and Istanbul’s most famous art gallery were set up along one side of the park. In the nineteen-sixties, I used to dream of becoming a painter and displaying my work at this gallery. In the seventies, the square was home to enthusiastic celebrations of Labor Day, led by leftist trade unions and N.G.O.s; for a time, I took part in these gatherings. (In 1977, forty-two people were killed in an outburst of provoked violence and the chaos that followed.) In my youth, I watched with curiosity and pleasure as all manner of political parties—right wing and left wing, nationalists, conservatives, socialists, and social democrats—held rallies in Taksim.

more from Orhan Pamuk at The New Yorker here.

From Five Books:

Tell me why you started with the sayings of the Buddha.

The Dhammapada is one of the greatest psychological works ever written, and certainly one of the greatest before 1900. It is masterful in its understanding of the nature of consciousness, and in particular the way we are always striving and never satisfied. You can turn to it – and people have turned to it throughout the ages – at times of trouble, at times of disappointment, at times of loss, and it takes you out of yourself. It shows you that your problems, your feelings, are just timeless manifestations of the human condition. It also gives specific recommendations for how to deal with those problems, which is to let go, to accept, and to work on yourself. So I think this is a kind of tonic that we ambitious Westerners often need to hear.

Is there a specific saying that you particularly like?

There are two big ideas that I found especially useful when I wrote The Happiness Hypothesis. One is an idea common to most great intellectual traditions. The quote is: ‘All that we are arises with our thoughts, with our thoughts we make the world.’ It’s not unique to Buddha, but it is one of the earliest statements of that idea, that we need to focus on changing our thoughts, rather than making the world conform to our wishes.

The other big idea is that the mind is like a rider on an elephant. Buddha uses this metaphor: ‘My own mind used to wander wherever pleasure or desire or lust led it, but now I have it tamed, I guide it, as the keeper guides the wild elephant.’

More here.

Santiago Zabala and Creston Davis in Al Jazeera:

At a recent Google Zeitgeist conference, Stephen Hawking boldly pronounced that “philosophy is dead”.

It is dead, he thinks, because philosophy is passé. Hawking believes philosophy is like a guy who shows up at a cocktail party just after the guests have left. Why would one of the most intelligent humans alive say such a provocative thing? His reasons are obvious: “Philosophers,” Hawking says, “have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.”

According to Hawking, the conversation about the truth of the world rests in the hands of elite physics professors funded by multinational corporations and national governments. Should we believe this pronouncement just because it comes from an eminence such as Hawking? Could it be that some categorical mistake has been committed by the likes of Hawking who, in our opinion, mistakes philosophy for theology?

The debate over the death of philosophy begun by Hawking not only rests on wrong premises, but also searches for an inadequate solution. First, philosophy is still taught in universities, and second, philosophers continue to write books that disagree on the meaning of our existential relation with the world. We submit that a more precise question needs to be addressed: Which philosophy is dead?

More here.

From Phys.org:

Most of the matter in the universe may be made out of particles that possess an unusual, donut-shaped electromagnetic field called an anapole.

This proposal, which endows dark matter particles with a rare form of electromagnetism, has been strengthened by a detailed analysis performed by a pair of theoretical physicists at Vanderbilt University: Professor Robert Scherrer and post-doctoral fellow Chiu Man Ho. An article about the research was published online last month by the journal Physics Letters B.

“There are a great many different theories about the nature of dark matter. What I like about this theory is its simplicity, uniqueness and the fact that it can be tested,” said Scherrer.

In the article, titled “Anapole Dark Matter,” the physicists propose that dark matter, an invisible form of matter that makes up 85 percent of the all the matter in the universe, may be made out of a type of basic particle called the Majorana fermion. The particle's existence was predicted in the 1930's but has stubbornly resisted detection.

A number of physicists have suggested that dark matter is made from Majorana particles, but Scherrer and Ho have performed detailed calculations that demonstrate that these particles are uniquely suited to possess a rare, donut-shaped type of electromagnetic field called an anapole. This field gives them properties that differ from those of particles that possess the more common fields possessing two poles (north and south, positive and negative) and explains why they are so difficult to detect.

More here.

From New Statesman:

Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra focuses on the ten years from 1977, when the pianist Liberace met Scott Thorson, who became his lover as well as chauffeuring him onstage in a cream Rolls-Royce for his Las Vegas performances. How best to explain Liberace? As a child in the 1970s, I was struck by his similarity to the most decadent item in our larder, the Mr Kipling French Fancy. It was even jazzier than the Viscount biscuit (imagine: a biscuit in a wrapper!) but it also made me slightly sick. That’s Liberace: imagine a French Fancy at a grand piano, decked out in jewellery that would make the average hip-hop performer look frugal, and you’re in the right ballroom. I mean, ballpark. No sooner have the posters come down for Side Effects, which Soderbergh announced would mark his farewell to cinema, than this new movie is upon us. To the casual observer, the director may seem like the child who has difficulty starting his sponsored silence (“I’m not talking from . . . now! No – from now”). However, Behind the Candelabra was made for television. Soderbergh had hoped to make it for cinema, only to be told by studio executives that it was too gay. Instead, he shot it for HBO, the pioneering US cable network responsible for almost every great TV series of the past 15 years. For Hollywood to reject something starring Matt Damon and Michael Douglas, the project would have to be as gay as a white, fox-fur coat with a 16-foot train, or a hunk in a diamante posing pouch, or a rhinestoneencrusted queen being pleasured in the back room of a Los Angeles porn shop. Behind the Candelabra features all these and more.

…The movie’s richness lies in its performances. Damon negotiates skilfully Scott’s descent from bliss to frazzled insecurity. Rob Lowe has a succulent cameo as a plastic surgeon whose rigid, feline pout reveals that he has been getting high on his own supply. Douglas, meanwhile, conveys sublimely a creosoted smarm that is rarely unsympathetic. He has captured the preening, liquid voice (he pronounces Scott’s name “Scaaaaart”) and he convinces us that Liberace’s declarations of intimacy were no less sincere for being reproduced verbatim onstage in front of thousands or in a hot tub with his latest squeeze.

More here. (Note: Brilliant performance by Michalel Douglas…see the film if you can.)

From Nature:

In the push to match medical therapies to the genetic underpinnings of disease, lung-cancer treatments have been at the frontier. But the 1.6 million people diagnosed with this cancer every year will take scant comfort in knowing that of the past 20 late-stage trials of drugs to treat it, only two yielded positive results. And in only one of those 20 were patients chosen systematically by screening for biomarkers such as relevant blood proteins or DNA sequences.

Now, an ambitious project aims to improve those success rates and speed new treatments to market by matching companies with the patients whose tumours are most genetically relevant to the therapies they are trying to develop. The project is slated to launch next year and, if successful, could be expanded to other cancers. The project was spearheaded by the Friends of Cancer Research, a think tank and advocacy group in Washington DC, and has won the support of the US National Cancer Institute and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The idea is to streamline the drug-approval process by bringing pharmaceutical companies together to test multiple experimental drugs in late-stage clinical trials under a single, ‘master’ protocol. “The drive is to make the whole process of personalized medicine more efficient,” says Eric Rubin, vice-president of oncology clinical research at Merck, a pharmaceutical firm based in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey.

More here.

Over at Princeton University Press:

The arguments found here have been gestating for a long time, as I wrote about peasants, class conflict, resistance, development projects, and marginal peoples in the hills of Southeast Asia. Again and again over three decades, I found myself having said something in a seminar discussion or having written something and then catching myself thinking, “Now, that sounds like what an anarchist would argue.” In geometry, two points make a line; but when the third, fourth, and fifth points all fall on the same line, then the coincidence is hard to ignore. Struck by that coincidence, I decided it was time to read the anarchist classics and the histories of anarchist movements. To that end, I taught a large undergraduate lecture course on anarchism in an effort to educate myself and perhaps work out my relationship to anarchism. The result, having sat on the back burner for the better part of twenty years after the course ended, is assembled here.

My interest in the anarchist critique of the state was born of disillusionment and dashed hopes in revolutionary change. This was a common enough experience for those who came to political consciousness in the 1960s in North America. For me and many others, the 1960s were the high tide of what one might call a romance with peasant wars of national liberation. I was, for a time, fully swept up in this moment of utopian possibilities. I followed with some awe and, in retrospect, a great deal of naiveté the referendum for independence in Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea, the pan-African initiatives of Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, the early elections in Indonesia, the independence and first elections in Burma, where I had spent a year, and, of course, the land reforms in revolutionary China and nationwide elections in India.

The disillusionment was propelled by two processes: historical inquiry and current events. It dawned on me, as it should have earlier, that virtually every major successful revolution ended by creating a state more powerful than the one it overthrew, a state that in turn was able to extract more resources from and exercise more control over the very populations it was designed to serve.

Pranab Bardhan reviews some recent books on development in The Boston Review:

The classical economists, from William Petty and Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, were all development economists. They offered general theories of markets and growth and wrote about a particular developing country (typically Britain) going through a process of industrial transformation.

Then, for more than a century, development shifted from the economic and intellectual core to the periphery. Debates about development focused on controversies over Soviet industrialization and on the need for protectionist policies to defend infant industries in places—such as the United States, Germany, Eastern Europe, Australia, and India—trying to “catch up” with England.

After the Second World War, as a large number of countries became independent (or “liberated,” as in China), development economics blossomed but remained at the intellectual margins of the economics discipline. Underdevelopment was conventionally understood as the product of market and institutional failures. In the prevailing paradigm, such failures were regarded as exotic exceptions or as the remediable results of bad policies instituted by new governments.

The challenges of persistent poverty and underdevelopment eventually undercut this intellectual marginalization. In the last three decades of the 20th century, economists recognized that standard market-equilibrium models—with their smoothly functioning invisible hands—break down in the context of information failures and dysfunctional institutions in all economies. So economists started paying more attention to rumblings from the periphery. As Joseph Stiglitz put the problem in a 1989 essay:

A study of less developed countries is to economics what the study of pathology is to medicine; by understanding what happens when things do not work well, we gain insight into how they work when they do function as designed. The difference is that in economics, pathology is the rule: less than a quarter of mankind lives in the developed economies.

In the past decade, development economics has grown to extraordinary prominence, not just in academia but also in the public arena. This new development economics has moved in two strikingly different directions. The first focuses on micro-level policy interventions. It uses the tools of field experiments and randomized controlled trials (RCT) to evaluate focused strategies for alleviating persistent poverty. The second trend focuses on macro institutions: the structures of democracy, autocracy, centralized and diffused power, and legal protections of property and contracts that organize politics and markets. Drawing ideas from the burgeoning field of institutional economics, this second stream of work has addressed grand, old historical questions such as why some countries have succeeded in the march to prosperity while others have languished.

BEFORE THE FAMOUS BOOK, there was the essay, the thing Agee and Evans were sent to Alabama for in the first place. It never got published. Agee wrote it at least twenty thousand words longer than Fortune wanted; he turned it in late; the rubric under which it was supposed to run was done away with by editorial higher-ups, etc., etc. Anyone who’s written for magazines will recognize the thousand mystifying in-house obstacles that doom so many pieces. The very manuscript of this was considered lost, until Agee’s middle child and younger daughter, Andrea, found it a decade ago, and The Baffler excerpted it last year. Now, at the age of seventy-seven, it exists in full, published by Melville House with the title Cotton Tenants. It’s a very different creature from the book. More restrained. More disciplined, overall—perhaps it’s more correct to say, more confident. Cotton Tenants knows its form: the long, weird, quasi-essayistic, documentary-infused magazine piece, a form older than the novel, despite a heritable instinct in critics to continually be calling it New. Agee was pushing the form—that’s partly what makes it exciting to see and read this new book. He was pushing Luce, too, seeing what he could smuggle into Fortune, stylistically, in a Trojan-horse kind of way. Later, writing for himself and Evans, he was willing to go further.

more from John Jeremiah Sullivan at Bookforum here.

The discovery and publication of Savage Coast is significant, not only because, as Rukeyser’s large body of work on Spain attests, the Spanish Civil War was an essential part of her poetic and political development, but also because it also provides us with new perspectives on the literature of the period. Written long before Orwell’s or Hemingway’s major texts on the Spanish Civil War—at one point she editorializes, “Hemingway doesn’t know beans about Spain”—Savage Coast is only one of a handful of novels by foreign women on the subject and gives us a more complex understanding of how women positioned themselves within historical and cultural processes, offering a unique view of the political, artistic, and intellectual networks that shaped early twentieth-century global solidarities. Rukeyser’s work on Spain likewise offers new methods for exploring the relationship between political radicalism and textual experimentation, as she grapples with issues of documentation and aesthetics, attempting to harness what Virginia Woolf called “granite and rainbow,” within a single text. Savage Coast is both a journalistic account of the first days of the Civil War as well as a fragmented and “visionary” lyric about the formation of Rukeyser’s own political, sexual, and artistic subjectivity inside its history. Her writings, then, give us new forms and vocabulary to work with: they change how we will read other works, seek out and represent suppressed histories; they “open out of the future,” to use Derrida’s phrase.

more from Rowena Kennedy-Epstein at Paris Review here.

Gray’s most acute loathing is for the idea of progress, which has been his target in a number of books, and which is continued in the rather uneventful first 80 pages or so of The Silence of Animals. He allows that progress in the realm of science is a fact. (And also a good: as Thomas De Quincey remarked, a quarter of human misery results from toothache, so the discovery of anesthetic dentistry is a fine thing.) But faith in progress, Gray argues, is a superstition we should do without. He cites, among others, Conrad on colonialism in the Congo and Koestler on Soviet Communism (the Cold War continues to cast a long shadow over Gray’s writing) as evidence of the sheer perniciousness of a belief in progress. He contends, contra Descartes, that human irrationality is the thing most evenly shared in the world. To deny reality in order to sustain faith in a delusion is properly human. For Gray, the liberal humanist’s assurance in the reality of progress is a barely secularized version of the Christian belief in Providence. With the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in mind, Gray writes in Black Mass (2007): “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.” Politics has become a hideous surrogate for religious salvation, and secularism is itself a religious myth. In The Silence of Animals, he writes, “Unbelief today should begin by questioning not religion but secular faith.”

more from Simon Critchley at the LA Review of Books here.

Amanda Shubert over at Critics at Large:

Jerome Kagan in Salon:

Despite many victories, a number of important problems that are amenable to inquiry or reconceptualization are being ignored. First, scientists studying psychological phenomena should replace their habit of linking one cause to one outcome with an examination of the relations between patterns of causal conditions and patterns of outcomes. A single condition (whether a gene, a secure attachment, premature birth, abuse, harsh socialization, or bullying) that ignores the child’s gender, temperament, ethnicity, social class, and culture usually explains little of the variation in most psychological outcomes.

…Steven Pinker’s decision in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” to pool different types of violent actions by agents who varied in gender, age, ethnicity, and motive into a single category called violence is analogous to grouping the olfactory signals of ants, dances of bees, songs of birds, croaks of frogs, grimaces of monkeys, screams of infants, lullabies by mothers, lectures by professors, and spam messages over the Internet into an omnibus category called communication. The probability of a violent act is palpably higher for males compared with females across the life span. Males between seventeen and thirty years of age commit the vast majority of violent behaviors, in the past as well as today. Older men and children are unlikely to kill, rape, or torture anyone. Males between age seventeen and thirty represented a large proportion of the European population between 1200 and 1700 because more than 50 percent of children died before age five and more than 80 percent of adults died before age fifty. By contrast, males between seventeen and thirty make up less than 20 percent of today’s European population. Hence, a scientist who bases the prevalence of violence on the ratio of the number of homicides over the total population would be likely to discover that the rate of violence decreased across the interval from 1200 to 2000 because the proportion of the total population that was male and between age seventeen and thirty had declined precipitously over those eight hundred years.

More here.

Moonshine

To think
I must be alone:
To love
We must be together.

I think I love you
When I’m alone
More than I think of you
When we’re together.

I cannot think
Without loving
Or love
Without thinking.

Alone I love
To think of us together:
Together I think
I’d love to be alone. .
.

From Science:

Neandertals living 120,000 years ago in what is now Croatia were not exposed to industrial chemicals, and they ate a diet free from processed foods. Yet, that didn't spare them from our modern-day maladies. Scientists have discovered the first known case of a tumor in the rib of a Neandertal man that dates to more than 120,000 years ago. The oldest known human tumor is from less than 4000 years ago. “Relatively little is known about [tumor] prevalence in antiquity,” says forensic anthropologist Douglas Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the new work. This result “is very useful for understanding the roots of this disease.”

The bone—part of an upper left rib from an adult male Neandertal—was originally unearthed between 1899 and 1905 during the excavation of Krapina, a cave in northern Croatia which has yielded hundreds of ancient human remains. But the rib was misfiled and ignored for almost a century until, in 1999, it was briefly described in a list of specimens. More recently, anthropologist David Frayer of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and colleagues began studying the pathologies of bones in the Krapina collections. It was immediately clear that the rib fragment—specimen 120.17 in the collection—wasn't normal. “The bone is broken away so you can look into the marrow chamber, where even in a child, you'd expect to see spongy bone,” Frayer says. “But in this rib, instead of there being a mesh of bone there, it's completely vacant.”

More here.

A poem by by Brian Aldiss, introduced by Michael Caines, in the TLS:

Doubtless a way there is of grasping whole
This troubled cosmos where we fare and die,
Of grasping, and forgiving much thereby.
Well, some will chance, when I lie in the grave,
To quest like Albert Einstein for a key
To ends far obscured. Then let those brave
Unlock the universe’s mystery,

Not I. If, with the Immanent Will’s consent,
Mankind should gain some means to cancel space
And time, to view eternity’s bleak face,
Such vision could wreak endless dole – and fright
The human hopes of far futurity
With woes yet stored, worse far than those which blight
Maids whom I know, and men who once knew me.