Max Kozlov in Nature:

A small, unassuming fern-like plant has something massive lurking within: the largest genome ever discovered, outstripping the human genome by more than 50 times¹.

The plant (Tmesipteris oblanceolata) contains a whopping 160 billion base pairs, the units that make up a strand of DNA. That’s 11 billion more than the previous record holder, the flowering plant Paris japonica, and 30 billion more than the marbled lungfish (Protopterus aethiopicus), which has the largest animal genome. The findings were published today in iScience.

Study co-author Jaume Pellicer, an evolutionary biologist at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona in Spain, who also co-discovered P. japonica’s gargantuan genome², had thought that the earlier discovery was close to the genome size limit. “But the evidence has once again surpassed our expectations,” he says.

More here.

James Ley in the Sydney Review of Books:

It is a matter of being able to identify the true conspiracies, recognise genuine injustices and abuses of power, distinguish between credible and dubious information, plausible and implausible explanations. Klein makes a point of acknowledging that the irrational theories she examines in Doppelganger often arise from a justified sense that something is wrong – large pharmaceutical companies, for example, have real histories of unethical conduct and they really did make out like bandits during the pandemic. The question she confronts is how, and why, the valid instinct to distrust the powerful ends up being rerouted into bizarre fantasies.

More here.

Amos Barshad at The Lever:

For the most part, Bowlero doesn’t build its own centers. Instead, it purchases existing ones and makes them over in the Bowlero style: dim lights, loud music, expensive cocktails. At Bowleros, bowling isn’t bowling. It’s “upscale entertainment.”

But for serious bowlers, the lived experience of Bowlero’s rise has come with a marked deterioration in conditions. Someone in Big Mike’s crew warns that lane 26 tonight is sticky right where you step up to bowl: “The approach! The actual approach!”

Someone else says it’s no surprise: “They spend a couple million dollars putting in screens but can’t clean the place.”

The bowlers say prices have gone up. They say the pinsetters keep breaking down, and since there are no mechanics on site, “then you’re just fucked.” They say all the bowling centers within reasonable driving distance are also owned by Bowlero, so “you’re just gonna have to put up with how they do things.”

It all feels thoroughly American: In the interest of short-term profit, a corporation goes about methodically worsening a beloved national pastime.

More here.

Ernst Coppejans in lensculture:

A new documentary portrait series, From the Streets to the Heart, focuses on homeless LGBTQIA+ youth and young adults in New York City. The project was initiated and created by Dutch photographer Ernst Coppejans, who also interviewed each of the 30 subjects to get their background stories and current situations. The combination of dignified portraits and the often harrowing stories (including audio clips allowing us to hear each person’s own voice) creates a palpable and empathetic understanding of how these people came to be who and where they are in the present moment. The project is a testament to the courage and resilience of people who are compelled to take very difficult steps in their lives to be true to themselves — despite tremendous emotional and financial challenges, physical danger and everyday prejudice.

Lily, 36. “I’m from a small town called Taunton, Massachusetts. I am trans.”

More here.

A Litany For Survival

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

by Andre Lorde
from Poetic Outlaws

Jeremy Waldron in Political Philosophy:

What makes something a damned lie? It’s an odd question, but I want to use the phrase as a lens for examining the wrongness (and variations in the wrongness) of lying in a number of different areas of public life.

Towards the end of his (first) presidency, headlines in several op-ed pieces talked about the “damned lies” of President Trump. Paul Krugman had a column in the New York Times titled “Lies, Damned Lies and Trump Rallies.” John Nichols wrote that “The President’s Damned Lies Are Killing Us.” And way back in 2018, the National Catholic Reporter headlined an opinion piece “Lies, Damned Lies, and Presidential Tweets.”¹ It’s a familiar phrase, and it sounded good. But what were they getting at? Is “damned lies” anything more than rhetoric? Our authors offered no insight into what they meant. The phrase “damned lies,” which appears only in titles but not in texts, is evidently just an expression—a way to denounce the former President’s lying.² The phrase looks like it’s meant to pick out a particularly egregious kind of lie—qualitatively different from ordinary lies. But Krugman et al. didn’t tell us what a lie horrendous enough to be damned would consist in.

Donald Trump, we know, is a liar—not just in the sense that he has told lies (which most of us do sometimes), but in the sense of being an inveterate lie-teller, thousands upon thousands of lies, a man whose propensity to falsehood is one of the leading hallmarks of his character. Here too, terminology is interesting…

More here.

Joann Wypijewski in Sidecar:

On 30 May, around cocktail time, a jury in New York criminal court found former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump guilty on all thirty-four counts of falsifying business records to cover up a payoff for Stormy Daniels’ silence in the run-up to the 2016 election. Throughout the five-week trial (on state, not federal, charges), Trump had been crafting the story of its end: the proceedings, and now the verdict, are ‘a disgrace’, ‘rigged’, presided over by ‘a judge who was corrupt’, and all of it – every grand juror and trial juror and prosecution employee and court officer – worked by orders of the Biden Administration. On the legal front, Trump will appeal. On the financial front, the verdict has been a boon, raising $52.8 million for the candidate in twenty-four hours. On the political front, CBS News immediately reported that his campaign vowed to launch ‘a grievance war across the country’.

The grievance war has been ginning up for some time. Every day, many times a day, for years, the campaign, the Republican Party and its sound machine have been broadcasting a twin message of alarm: the law is against us; the law is us. Contradiction is the point. Fear is the operative instrument: while the ‘very innocent man’ suffers, crime stalks every citizen. Immigrants and terrorists flood the country from foreign prisons and mental institutions, raping women, stealing jobs from citizens, driving down their wages, destroying their communities. The country is ‘a mess’, government broken and venal. Law and order lie prostrate, police handcuffed by the woke mob. It’s ‘American carnage’ redux, as bloodletting around the world and ‘Jihad Joe’ represent US impotence or worse – and all of this while January 6 patriots languish in federal prison. ‘Remember, it’s not me they’re after’, Trump’s campaign messages wail, ‘THEY’RE AFTER YOU – I’M JUST STANDING IN THEIR WAY!’

More here.

Rebecca Lawrence at The Guardian:

Dakwar explores the myths and misconceptions of addiction, as well as the science, and shows how the patient’s experience is at least as important as what the latest research tells us. He describes in detail the use of ketamine given in combination with psychotherapy, and of the difficulties he has faced acquiring permission and funding to pursue his research into a treatment that itself suffers from being labelled a dangerous “street” drug.

Often, though, the lover of literature and philosophy breaks through these rational descriptions, making them less coherent. The impression is of a poet shutting down the scientist, and these sections were, for me, harder to read. This was not due to lack of interest, but perhaps the result of my not being able to share in Dakwar’s subjectivity, in the same way that he describes each person’s unique perception of the colour blue. His style changes, and he writes in longer, more convoluted sentences, as if trying to explain something that can’t quite be grasped.

more here.

Alice Park in Time:

Lately, the biggest news in Alzheimer’s has been around a new drug treatment that can slow cognitive decline by nearly 30% among people in the early stages of the disease. In coming months, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to make a decision about another such promising therapy. But in addition to pharmaceutical interventions, which are expensive and require repeated infusions, making sustained lifestyle changes can also slow the progression of the disease, and possibly even prevent further decline, according to a new study.

In the trial, an intensive program of diet, exercise, stress reduction, and social interaction slowed the progression of cognitive decline as measured on standard tests for dementia, and even improved some people’s symptoms. The study was conducted by Dr. Dean Ornish, founder and president of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a team of scientists. It appeared in the journal Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy.

More here.

The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feeling

I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.

by Donika Kelly
from Poem-a-day, 11/20/2017
the Academy of American Poets.

Nicolas Medina Mora in The Millions:

The region, we’re told, extends from the deserts of Sonora to the straits of Tierra del Fuego, encompassing 7.7 million square miles that are home to 660 million people who share two Latinate languages: Spanish and Portuguese. What complicates the picture is that many in that vast expanse also speak Nahuatl, Quechua, and hundreds of other tongues. But it’s not just the language: the people of this region, we hear, are Catholic. Even if we set aside the fact that many of them are Pentecostal or Jewish, however, the Catholic traditions of Oaxaca would be unrecognizable to churchgoers from Rio de Janeiro. This inconvenient diversity perhaps explains why, when all else fails, we’re told that all of these people love to dance.

Still, isn’t it true that these people share a history of resistance to empire and colonialism? Perhaps. But it’s just as true that all of these countries continue to inflict colonial violence on Indigenous people and that their economic elites are composed almost exclusively of people who could accurately be described as white. Besides, long before the name of the region became a synonym for resistance against Yankee imperialism, the term was popularized by nineteenth-century Frenchmen who, finding it difficult to justify their imperial designs in a part of the world to which they had no connection, were forced to reach back to Ancient Rome and cast themselves as the champions of the “Latin race.”

More here.

Lily Meyer at the NYT:

“Any Person Is the Only Self,” the poet and critic Elisa Gabbert’s third collection of nonfiction, opens with an essay that should be, but isn’t quite, a mission statement. She starts by describing the Denver Public Library’s shelf for recent returns, a miscellaneous display of disconnected works she habitually browsed in the years she lived in Colorado. In part, Gabbert (who is also the Book Review’s poetry columnist) was drawn to the shelf for its “negative hype,” its opposition to the churn of literary publicity. But mainly, she enjoyed playing the odds. “Randomness is interesting,” she writes; “randomness looks beautiful to me.” At the essay’s end, she declares, “I need randomness to be happy.”

So does her prose. When “Any Person Is the Only Self” embraces the random, it’s terrific. When Gabbert neatens or narrows her essays, though, they can feel more dutiful.

“Any Person Is the Only Self” — a seemingly random title, and one to ignore; it’s fussier and vaguer than any of Gabbert’s actual prose — is primarily a collection about reading, akin to Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris” or Alejandro Zambra’s “Not to Read.”

more here.

Hazel Southwell at Ars Technica:

We live in a weird time for autonomous vehicles. Ambitions come and go, but genuinely autonomous cars are further off than solid-state vehicle batteries. Part of the problem with developing autonomous cars is that teaching road cars to take risks is unacceptable.

A race track, though, is a decent place to potentially crash a car. You can take risks there, with every brutal crunch becoming a learning exercise. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a top racing driver without a few wrecks smoldering in their junior career records.)

That’s why 10,000 people descended on the Yas Marina race track in Abu Dhabi to watch the first four-car driverless race.

More here.

Editor’s Note: Two days ago we linked to a NY Times piece which claimed that the COVID pandemic probably started in a lab in China. But we don’t want to give the impression that there is scientific consensus behind this view.

Mathew Ingram at the Columbia Journalism Review:

The uncomfortable truth is that, four and a half years after COVID first appeared, there is still no consensus on where it originated, even if the deranged conspiracy theories about Fauci and others can be safely ruled out. Even scientists who specialize in virology can’t seem to agree. Writing in the New York Times this week, a molecular biologist who works for an institute backed by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued that COVID most likely escaped from a lab, based on a number of points that she articulated. And yet, just hours after that op-ed was published, a virologist went through it point by point on X and argued that the evidence remains unclear. In a recently published survey of more than a hundred and fifty virologists, epidemiologists, and other researchers, a slim majority said they believe that COVID likely emerged naturally from transmission between infected animals.

More here.  And also see this, and this.