Patrick Doan in the European Review of Books:

Where there’s an airport, there’s security, and where there’s China, there’s screening, so here we are at the checkpoint at Baiyun International Airport, where austere officials are checking that we’re not carrying anything suspicious. We go through the scanner first, and A-kong takes his time. When the diaphanous image of his suitcase’s entrails finally appears on the screen, the agents are surprised to see quite clearly a thirty-centimeter knife, lying peacefully alongside twelve boxes of Doliprane (paracetamol) 1000mg, one hundred and eighty COVID masks (which he will later offer to my cousin) and eight camera batteries — for A-kong suffers from a rather severe scopic compulsion. A conversation in Mandarin ensues between the agent and my father, who hopes to convince the woman not to confiscate his « fruit knife ». Meanwhile, while my wife Insa questions the reliability of Luchthaven Schiphol’s security service (we’d flown from Amsterdam), my daughter Elly rolls her eyes, my son Robin pretends to look at his smartphone (without a network), and I watch my father adopt a familiar posture: a man of good faith imploring clemency from his next superior. This time his plea has little effect. But I know it has worked before — at least once.

It was forty-seven years ago, in a sweet potato field on the edge of the jungle. A few days earlier, the Khmer Rouge had entered Phnom Penh as liberators, then started shooting at everyone.

More here.

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Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

This is the third of a trio of reviews in which I take a brief detour into ants and collective behaviour more generally. I previously reviewed The Ant Collective, a graphical introduction to ant behaviour, and entomologist Deborah M. Gordon’s Ant Encounters, a primer on how collective behaviour in ants comes about. The Ecology of Collective Behavior is the second book by Gordon that I will examine. It proposes a research programme to figure out both how collective behaviour responds to changing environmental conditions, and how it evolves. Though squarely aimed at professional biologists, this brief and interesting book is nevertheless accessible to a wider interested audience and makes its case with nary an equation in sight.

One of the most familiar examples of collective behaviour is swarming, where large numbers of animals move in a coordinated fashion, whether flocks of birds or schools of fish. However, collective behaviour can take many different forms and it has proven incredibly tricky to develop a general theory that successfully captures the diversity of processes generating it.

More here.

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Zachary Karabell at The Edgy Optimist:

A bit more than a decade ago, I launched a column for The Atlantic and Reuters and then Slate. It was called “The Edgy Optimist.” The goal was to take a weekly look at what might go right, rather than focus relentlessly on all that is going wrong. Now, in a time of deep pessimism bordering on despair, I’m re-launching “The Edgy Optimist,” and I hope you will join me.

When I started the column, the prevailing mood was dark in the United States, but today, arguably, the mood is far darker, with few corners of the world immune from the belief that tomorrow will inevitably and inexorably be worse than the present. Polls of public opinion in country after county confirm that publics everywhere feel a deep sense of unease about politics, the economy, the climate and above all, the future.

In this maelstrom of negativity, optimism can feel almost offensive. It seems to fly in the face of the intense struggles so many confront. My optimism says not that we are overstating our problems but that we are underestimating our capacity to solve them, and my edginess is that there are dangers in not looking at the upsides.

This is not about firemen saving cats in trees; this is about how we shape our future. Pessimism can create its own dystopian doom loop: the despairing conviction that we lack the ability to create a better world can itself be toxic.

More here.

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Abdul-Ilah As-Saadi in Al-Jazeera:

Ashura is marked on the 10th day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, by all Muslims. It marks the day Nuh (Noah) left the Ark and the day Musa (Moses) was saved from the Pharaoh of Egypt by God. The Prophet Muhammad used to fast on Ashura in Mecca, where it became a common tradition for the early Muslims. Ashura this year will be marked in most places on August 29. But for the Shia, it is also a major religious event to commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn Ibn Ali al-Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who died at the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD.

…The death of Imam al-Hussein is considered by the Shia community to be a symbol of humanity’s struggle against injustice, tyranny and oppression. The primary rituals and observances on Ashura consist of public expressions of mourning. Some in the Shia community resort to self-flagellation with chains and the blunt ends of swords. This is intended to exemplify the suffering Imam al-Hussein experienced shortly before his beheading.

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Every two weeks at Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington, a five-year-old child stops by for a fresh dose of genetically engineered immune cells administered directly into the fluid around their brain.

The child has been making these visits for more than three years, after they were diagnosed with a devastating form of brain and spinal cancer called diffuse midline glioma that has no known cure. But the treatment, called CAR-T-cell therapy, appears to have shrunk their tumour and kept it in check. At 70 treatments and counting, this five-year-old might have received more doses of CAR-T-cell therapy than anyone else on the planet.

His oncologist, Nicholas Vitanza, lights up whenever he talks about the results. Still, Vitanza is keenly aware that the child’s response is unusual. Although several children in Vitanza’s clinical trial might also have benefited from the CAR-T-cell regimen, most responses were not as dramatic or long-lasting as the five-year-old’s. Now, the question that keeps Vitanza and others in his field up at night is: how can they make that success less of an outlier?

More here.

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Ann Thomas in Harvard Magazine:

WHY WOULD A successful college student abruptly stop attending class, ignore his roommates, and begin hallucinating? How does an elderly woman suddenly forget how to navigate a route she has routinely driven for years?

These two hypothetical scenarios seem unrelated. The student’s behavior suggests schizophrenia, typically diagnosed in people in their twenties and thirties, while the woman exhibits a classic symptom of dementia, which is more common in the elderly. But researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical School have uncovered a link between the two conditions. Although the initial focus of the study was on the roots of schizophrenia, the group found some surprising similarities between the brains of patients with schizophrenia and those of healthy older adults.

Flier professor of biomedical science and genetics Steve McCarroll, who previously published groundbreaking work on the genetic roots of schizophrenia, aimed to characterize the biological changes associated with schizophrenia at the level of individual cells. “Knowing the genes is just the first step,” he said.

The next step is to learn which genes get turned on in cells, a process termed gene expression. Emi Ling, a postdoctoral fellow who worked closely with McCarroll and associate professor of psychiatry Sabina Berretta on the project, used single nucleus RNA sequencing to measure and track gene expression in the nucleus of every cell in a tissue sample.

More here.

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Bill Gates in Gates Notes:

Melinda and I sometimes read the same book at the same time. It’s usually a lot of fun, but it can get us in trouble when one of us is further along than the other—which recently happened when we were both reading A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. At one point, I got teary-eyed because one of the characters gets hurt and must go to the hospital. Melinda was a couple chapters behind me. When she saw me crying, she became worried that a character she loved was going to die. I didn’t want to spoil anything for her, so I just had to wait until she caught up to me.

That one scene aside, A Gentleman in Moscow is a fun, clever, and surprisingly upbeat look at Russian history through the eyes of one man. At the beginning of the book, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to spend his life under house arrest in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. It’s 1922, and the Bolsheviks have just taken power of the newly formed Soviet Union. The book follows the Count for the next thirty years as he makes the most of his life despite its limitations. Although the book is fictional, the Metropol is a real hotel. I’ve even been lucky enough to stay there (and it looked mostly the same as Towles describes in the book). It’s the kind of place where you can’t help but picture what it was like at different points in time. The hotel is located across the street from the Kremlin and managed to survive the Bolshevik revolution and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. That’s a lot of history for one building.

More here. (Note: I just watched the 8 Episode series on TV at Abbas’s recommendation. Loved it!)

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Samira Ahmed in New Humanist:

Some of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers – Higgs, Freud, Einstein – reveal so much to us through the objects that surrounded them. Higgs’s passion for music and ordered thinking is apparent through his alphabetised collection. The lack of concern for updating his interior suggests a focus on what’s going on in his mind, rather than material possessions. There is a joy to knowing he waited 47 years for his theory to be verified by the Large Hadron Collider, but lived to see it and secure his Nobel Prize.

Another example is Hawking. Roger Highfield, whose book Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work explored the objects in the physicist’s Cambridge University office, described the contents as the biographical equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. It revealed not just his scientific papers, but also his determination, embodied in his last wheelchair, and his love of fame and jokes. The office held mementoes from filming with the likes of Monty Python and scientific bets signed with his thumbnail – revealing his playful self. Two model trains – the Mallard and the Flying Scotsman – are a sweet reminder of his childhood passion.

Not far from the heavy traffic of one of the main arterial roads into London, you can step inside the mind of Sigmund Freud. He lived the last year of his life in an elegant house and garden in Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead – now a museum. Already 81 when he moved there, Freud’s travel documents are framed in the hallway; a reminder of his escape as a Jewish intellectual from Vienna after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938.

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Joumana Khatib in The New York Times: