Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

The first time I heard nematode worms can teach us something about human longevity, I balked at the idea. How the hell can a worm with an average lifespan of only 15 days have much in common with a human who lives decades?

The answer is in their genes—especially those that encode for basic life functions, such as metabolism. Thanks to the lowly C. elegans worm, we’ve uncovered genes and molecular pathways, such as insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) signaling that extends healthy longevity in yeast, flies, and mice (and maybe us). Too nerdy? Those pathways also inspired massive scientific and popular interest in metformin, hormones, intermittent fasting, and even the ketogenic diet. To restate: worms have inspired the search for our own fountain of youth.

Still, that’s just one success story. How relevant, exactly, are those genes for humans? We’re rather a freak of nature. Our aging process extends for years, during which we experience a slew of age-related disorders. Diabetes. Heart disease. Dementia. Surprisingly, many of these don’t ever occur in worms and other animals. Something is obviously amiss. In this month’s Nature Metabolism, a global team of scientists argued that it’s high time we turn from worm to human. The key to human longevity, they say, lies in the genes of centenarians. These individuals not only live over 100 years, they also rarely suffer from common age-related diseases. That is, they’re healthy up to their last minute. If evolution was a scientist, then centenarians, and the rest of us, are two experimental groups in action.

Nature has already given us a genetic blueprint for healthy longevity. We just need to decode it.

More here.

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Grant Wong interviews Tejas Parasher in the Journal of the History of Ideas:

Grant Wong: In your article, you argue for a reading of twentieth-century Indian political thought that emphasizes conflict over consensus. You criticize the literature’s embrace of a “parliamentary reading” of anti-colonial constitutional thought that neglects its intellectual diversity. To do so, you juxtapose the ideas of M.N. Roy against those of his contemporaries: “Recovering Roy’s polemics against Indian nationalists… helps us move beyond viewing the democratic thought of India’s founding as a straightforward adoption of a British political model.” What do we miss when we neglect thinkers like Roy? What do we stand to gain by adopting your perspective?

Tejas Parasher: There has long been a tendency amongst political theorists to view the globalization of democracy in the twentieth century through a diffusionist lens. Since the mid-1940s, many have understood the formation of democratic republics in new, post-imperial countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean as indicative of the appeal of the kinds of representative, electoral constitutional systems which prevailed in postwar Western Europe—British parliamentarism, French republicanism, and so on. This is the perspective we find outlined very clearly, for instance, in John Petrov Plamenatz’s On Alien Rule and Self-Government (1960), one of the first attempts by a political philosopher to examine the triangular relationship between democracy, empire, and nationalism.  Plamenatz interprets the democratization of former imperial territories as an enthusiastic embrace of Western representative democracy by nationalist elites, a kind of ideological consummation of liberalism. India, as a particularly successful instance of post-imperial, democratic nation-building, occupies a central place in these narratives.

One of the main aims of my article is to highlight how the diffusionist historiography of democratization is based on a selective, partial understanding of anti-colonial nationalism. The narrative almost entirely elides those anti-colonial thinkers who were deeply apprehensive about representative government and liberal democracy as these regimes existed in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

More here.

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Sanoja Bhaumik interviews Rahul Verma in Phenomenal World:

SANOJA BHAUMIK: It’s been two months since India’s Lok Sabha election, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi must now govern as part of the NDA coalition with other parties. What are the implications of the new NDA coalition for Modi’s government?

RAHUL VERMA: The election results were a surprise. Exit polls had predicted a landslide for the BJP-led government. While some gains for Congress were predicted, few expected that they would reach almost 100 seats. It’s important to note that from his time as the Chief Minister of Gujarat to his tenure as the Prime Minister of India, Modi has never run a coalition government. One may call the BJP-led government in 2014 and 2019 an NDA government because there were allies, but those allies did not have a significant bearing on government formation. As the BJP has lost a significant number of seats from 2019 and is now running a coalition, multiple pressure points have emerged, and they will continue to have a bearing on the government.

First, between 2019 and 2024, it seemed like Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah were in total control of the party. They called the shots. But at the same time, to some extent, we are likely to see a much reduced imprint of Modi and Amit Shah—such as in the choice of Chief Ministers, the next BJP party president, among others. I don’t think this would have occurred if the BJP won the majority.

Second, I think there are going to be some pressure points that will emerge from the larger BJP ideological family. Over two terms, and especially from 2019 to 2024, Prime Minister Modi was able to create a new ideological arc in India’s political landscape. Many of the demands of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-BJP—which has been there for the last seventy-five years—were fulfilled..

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Darel E. Paul in Compact Magazine:

The possibility of communal violence depends, of course, on the coexistence of distinct communities. In the 21st-century United Kingdom outside Northern Ireland, this condition is a product of the country’s post-1997 mass immigration. Before Tony Blair became prime minister, annual legal immigration routinely ran about 300,000. That number doubled by the time Blair left office in 2007 and reached 800,000 under the Conservatives before Brexit. Over the past two years, legal immigration into Britain—nearly all of which settled in England—surpassed 1.2 million annually, more than 80 percent from non-European countries. The necessary outcome has been significant ethnic change. In 2001, Britain was 88 percent white British. In 20 years, the figure has fallen to 75 percent. In light of the past two years, that number is lower still today.

Other countries in the Anglosphere—those sharing not only Britain’s language, but a similar liberal polity, economy, culture, and civic national identity—have undergone similarly dramatic racial and ethnic transformations. Australia hasn’t collected such data since the 1970s, but its native English-speaking population dropped to 72 percent in 2021, down from 85 percent in 1991. From 1991 to 2021, the white share of the Canadian population fell to 74 percent, down from 91 percent. In New Zealand, those with European ethnicity made up 68 percent of the population last year, down from 83 percent in 1991. In the United States, the most diverse of all the Anglosphere countries undergoing the most rapid racial and ethnic transformation, the non-Hispanic white share of the population dropped to 58 percent in 2020, down from 76 percent three decades earlier.

Yet none of these other countries is witnessing communal conflict like Britain’s. Why not?

More here.

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Richard Seymour in Sidecar:

What just happened? For almost a week, towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland were in the grip of pogromist reaction. In Hull, Sunderland, Rotherham, Liverpool, Aldershot, Leeds, Middlesborough, Tamworth, Belfast, Bolton, Stoke-on-Trent, Doncaster and Manchester, networked mobs of fascoid agitators and disorganized racists were thrilled by their own exuberant violence. In Rotherham, they set fire to a Holiday Inn hotel housing asylum seekers. In Middlesborough, they blocked roads and only let traffic through if drivers were verified as ‘white’ and ‘English’, momentarily enjoying the arbitrary power of both the traffic warden and the border official.

In Tamworth, where the recently elected Labour MP had inveighed against spending on asylum hotels (incorrectly claiming that they cost the area £8m a day), they rampaged through the Holiday Inn Express and, in the ruins, left graffiti reading: ‘England’, ‘Fuck Pakis’ and ‘Get Out’. In Hull, as crowds dragged a man out of his car for a beating, participants shouted ‘kill them!’ In Belfast, where a hijabi was reportedly punched in the face while holding her baby, they destroyed Muslim shops and tried to march on the local mosque, chanting ‘get ’em out’. In Newtownards, a mosque was attacked with a petrol bomb. In Crosby, a Muslim man was stabbed.

Worryingly, while far-right activists played a role, it was probably secondary. The riots, rather than being caused by handfuls of organized fascists, provided them with their best recruiting grounds in years. Many people who had never been ‘political’ before, and perhaps never even voted, turned out to burn asylum seekers or assault Muslims.

More here.

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Shalinee Sharma in Time Magazine:

Across the nation, kids are heading back to school. It’s an exciting time. I remember both the joy and the nervousness that came with my now twin 13-year-olds’ first starting school. In fact, one day in particular stands out. I was rushing to the school, late as usual. As I hustled up four flights of stairs to their classroom, another parent interrupted my thoughts and started talking. “She’s like me, basically,” the woman said. “She’s just not a math kid. We are creative types.” I looked up, startled; I couldn’t hide my reaction. Here was a mom, already ruling out an entire world of possibilities for her child whose education had barely begun. Imagine if we treated reading in the same manner.

The experience I had at pick-up is far from unique. As a math learning expert, I understand how deeply ingrained the myth of the math kid is in our education system. We classify or sort kids based on our perception of their varied, inborn math ability—”math kids” on one side, everyone else on the other.

This view ignores the science that says all humans have an inherent number sense and ability to think mathematically from the start. In fact, scientists have proven that babies and toddlers show and develop numeracy—the ability to understand and work with numbers—early on. Babies only a few days old can distinguish two from three.

More here.

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Brian J. A. Boyd in The New Atlantis:

In America today, we are bad at conscious decisionmaking about technology. Our best efforts lately leave much to be desired: a decade of zero-sum argument about whose speech norms will prevail on social media, a long-delayed and fragmented debate about smartphones conducted through research about a teen mental health crisis, and scaremongering and special interests determining the fate of what was once the promise of “too cheap to meter” nuclear energy.

Our tech debates do not begin by deliberating about what kind of future we want and then reasoning about which paths lead to where we want to go. Instead they go backward: we let technology drive where it may, and then after the fact we develop an “ethics of” this or that, as if the technology is the main event and how we want to live is the sideshow. When we do wander to the sideshow, we hear principles like “bias,” “misinformation,” “mental health,” “privacy,” “innovation,” “justice,” “equity,” and “global competitiveness” used as if we all share an understanding of why we’re focused on them and what they even mean.

But which research studies will decide the scientific “consensus”? Who anoints the experts? Whose ethics will be encoded in regulations, laws, and algorithms?

More here.

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Dan Levitt at Big Think:

In 1918, the citizens of Moscow, the new capital of Communist Russia, struggled to maintain a semblance of normal life. It wasn’t easy. A brutal civil war between the White and Red Russian armies was raging. The West had imposed a trade war. The capital was aswirl with revolutionary ideas, new ways of thinking about equality, justice, and history. Those of means who had not fled were demoted to ordinary citizens and forced to share their wealth and homes with the less privileged. Despite all the revolutionary fervor, Alexander Oparin, a young biochemist steeped in radical scientific ideas, received disappointing news. The censorship board would not permit him to publish a manuscript that speculated on how life arose from mere chemicals. Though the Bolsheviks had overthrown the tsar a year ago, their revolutionary ideology had not yet filtered down to the censors, perhaps because they were not yet ready to directly antagonize the Russian Orthodox Church.

Nonetheless, Oparin’s radical ideas would not be suppressed long. They would spark a quest to find the origin of our ancient chemical ancestors—the organic molecules that are the building blocks of life. It would be the first step, he hoped, of an effort to tie “the world of the living” to “the world of the dead.”

More here.

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Tazreena Sajjad in The Conversation:

The protests stem from long-running resentment over a quota system that saw 56% of government positions in Bangladesh reserved for various groups, including 30% for the descendants of freedom fighters who fought in the 1971 War of Independence.

This quota system has proved an enormous barrier to highly coveted civil service positions for the country’s large youth population, many of whom are unemployed.

It had also become a subject of controversy due to how many of those quota jobs went to supporters of the ruling Awami League party.

Under immense pressure from an earlier student mobilization over the issue, Hasina abolished the entire quota system in 2018.

But in June 2024, the country’s high court ruled that move illegal, sparking a fresh round of protests across the country.

More here.

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Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful —
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she had drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

by Sylvia Plath
from Crossing the Water
Harper Collins, 1963

Jay Garfield at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

A final idea that frames Harris’ interpretation of Śāntideva—one that is clearly correct, and unappreciated—is that the universal altruism and the attitudes of kindness, care, impartiality, and joy in the accomplishments of others that Śāntideva recommends do not constitute self-sacrifice or self-abnegation. Instead, Harris demonstrates that, on Śāntideva’s view, they are both constitutive of and instrumental to human happiness (40 ff., 60 ff.). So, when Śāntideva compares pleasure in the everyday world to honey on a razor blade, he is pointing out that the pursuit of our own pleasure in the end yields only pain, because of the attachment it generates to a fragile commodity; when Śāntideva argues that we only become happy when we dedicate ourselves to the welfare of others, the freedom from attachment to our own narrow interest expands our sources of joy. As Harris puts it, “Perfect giving, for Śāntideva, is private, but other-focused; self-benefitting, but radically benevolent; total, and yet not self-injurious” (67).

Harris thus frames Śāntideva’s text as a guide to escaping from the suffering of ordinary life by cultivating virtue, grounded in the insight that we succeed in advancing our own true interests only by detaching ourselves from apparent narrow self-interest and from a concern with the immediate present in favor of a longer and broader moral vision. This reading opens the text beautifully, and it helps the reader to unpack Śāntideva’s arguments.

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Julian Nowogrodzki in Nature:

At least one-quarter of people who have severe brain injuries and cannot respond physically to commands are actually conscious, according to the first international study of its kind¹. Although these people could not, say, give a thumbs-up when prompted, they nevertheless repeatedly showed brain activity when asked to imagine themselves moving or exercising. “This is one of the very big landmark studies” in the field of coma and other consciousness disorders, says Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist at Rigshospitalet, the teaching hospital for Copenhagen University.

The results mean that a substantial number of people with brain injuries who seem unresponsive can hear things going on around them and might even be able to use brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) to communicate, says study leader Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. BCIs are devices implanted into a person’s head that capture brain activity, decode it and translate it into commands that can, for instance, move a computer cursor. “We should be allocating resources to go out and find these people and help them,” Schiff says.

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Ed Simon at Lit Hub:

I imagine the ideal way in which to read Giovanni Boccaccio’s profane and earthy 14th-century classic The Decameron is to be ensconced for a sweltering summer at the Villa Schifanoia. There you would have a small but elegant room overlooking the Tuscan hillsides whose winding roads are lined with those tall and preposterously skinny trees, while evenings would be given over to feasts in the yellow-walled courtyard where you dine on cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto cut to a near-translucent pinkness, pappardelle with fresh pesto studded with garlic and pine-nuts, and a thick cut of charred and marbled ribeye whose interior is as luridly crimson as a muscular human heart.

All of this, obviously, is to be whetted with thimblefuls of grappa and multiple fiascos of chianti. “Much have I eaten, much have I drank, and much have I mocked mankind”—that’s not Boccaccio, it’s the Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos some two millennia before The Decameron, but their worldviews are identical.

more here.

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