Danielle Gerhardt in The Scientist:

In the last two years, scientists achieved two genomic milestones: the complete sequences of the human non-Y genome and, just this past August, that of the Y chromosome.^1,2 With the final pages of the human genetic playbook complete, plenty of mysteries remain, including the function of many of the 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. To encourage research on these many mystery genes, a team of scientists have created a new publicly available database that ranks genes based on how little is known about them.³ Using this new directory, they selected more than 200 neglected genes that are evolutionarily conserved between fruit flies and humans. The systematic silencing of these genes in fruit flies revealed that many are essential for survival and other important biological functions, demonstrating that there is still much to be explored in the vast unknowns in the genome.

Sean Munro, a biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and coauthor of the paper, noted that the functional unknome—a portmanteau of unknown genome and a catchall coined by the authors to describe the collection of known genes with unknown function—has shrunk since the early 2000s, but scientists have plenty of ground to cover. “There’s still a couple thousand genes in the human genome, at least, for which essentially nothing is known, and then there are some where a little is known, but not very much,” said Munro.

More here.

The Endless Journey

Man instinctively regards himself
as a wanderer and wayfarer,
and it is second nature for him
to go on pilgrimage in search
of a privileged and holy place,
a center and source of
indefectible life.

This hope is built into his psychology,
and whether he acts it out or simply
dreams it, his heart seeks to return
to a mythical source, a place
of “origin,” the “home”
where the ancestors came from,
the mountain where the ancient
fathers were in direct communication
with heaven, the place of the
creation of the world, paradise
itself, with its sacred
tree of life.

Thomas Merton
from Poetic Outlaws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtiuIrQrKn8&ab_channel=ExtrassChannels

Julian Coman at The Guardian:

Robinson illustrates how the ancient Hebrew authors borrowed liberally from the Babylonian mythologies created by their near-east neighbours. But with a crucial distinction. Great narratives such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish feature fickle, rivalrous deities who turn their ruthless gaze on mortals only when it serves their interest. In stark contrast, Genesis portrays a troubled love story between humanity and a divine creator who is described as, extraordinarily, “having created man in his own image”.

The vision of a single omniscient and benevolent God is a staggering new departure in ancient literature, with implications all the way down to design details. In the Garden of Eden, Robinson points out, “the beauty of the trees is noted before the fact that they yield food”. Here is a world packed with signs of a divine desire that the first humans feel at home. Compared with the surrounding myths on offer, this vision “is from the beginning an immeasurable elevation of status”.

more here.

Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times:

Modern art can baffle and intimidate. Keith Haring strove to democratize it.

Haring, who died at 31 of complications from AIDS after a brief but dizzyingly productive international career, drew and painted for the masses and the kids, sometimes getting handcuffed and fined for his trouble. In the garbage-and-graffiti-weary New York of the 1980s, his creations — first chalked on blank advertising boards in subways, then bolder and more enduring, like the safety-orange “Crack Is Wack” mural that still stands in an East Harlem handball court — were like a fresh new roll of wallpaper. As his canvases and sculptures began selling to private collectors for big bucks, he carried on doing public work, notably for a children’s hospital in Paris. He loved children, and his more G-rated drawings — with faint inflection of Robert Hargreaves’s Mr. Men and Little Miss series — have been grafted onto many books for them, one by his sister Kay Haring.

more here.

Ed McNally in Sidecar:

‘It’s coming ever more sharply into focus’, declared Anthony Blinken on a recent trip to Doha, speaking of a ‘practical, timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel’. America’s Arab clients have also been invoking the two-state paradigm, with both the Saudis and Qataris stressing the need for such a ‘comprehensive settlement’. In the UK, David Cameron has declared his firm support for Palestinian statehood, while in Brussels Josep Borrell has insisted that this is ‘the only way to establish peace’. These statements can be seen as a frantic attempt at imperial containment. If the Palestinians cannot be ignored entirely, as in the Abraham Accords framework, better to push for a demilitarized, segmented Palestinian quasi-‘state’ so that Israeli normalization can proceed apace. Biden, personally and politically minutes to midnight, is desperate to put Jared Kushner’s agenda for the Middle East back on track after its derailing on 7 October.

How should we respond to the inglorious return and cadaverous persistence of two-statism? The most common reflex is to dismiss it as dangerous imperial ‘fantasy’, premised on the diplomatic formalization of the apartheid regime, and to advocate for one state as the only realistic alternative. This latter position was first formally put forward by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the aftermath of the Naksa. It was then adopted by Arafat and Abu Iyad as the official line of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In Oslo’s wake, Palestinian intellectuals – Edward Said, Ghada Karmi, Lama Abu-Odeh, Joseph Massad, Ali Abunimah, George Bisharat and Yousef Munayyer, among others – returned to this framework.

More here.

Jonathan Kirshner in Boston Review:

Renoir himself claimed that a film director should have the arrogance to believe that he can change the world but the modesty to believe that if he succeeds in deeply moving four people, it’s a victory,” the great French director Bertrand Tavernier once observed. That wisdom may apply to Tavernier’s own 1992 documentary, La Guerre sans Nom (The War with No Name). Made in collaboration with historian Patrick Rotman, this four-hour film about the Algerian war—the most notable of the handful of documentaries Tavernier shot—did not make much of a splash in France, and it barely managed a few arthouse screenings in the United States before essentially disappearing from circulation. Its viewership stands to expand considerably, however, with its timely release to streaming as part of a larger Tavernier retrospective now available on the Criterion Channel.

Tavernier is best remembered in North America for two dozen disparate, often dazzling, feature films, among them his astonishing debut, The Clockmaker of Saint Paul (1974), the profoundly moving ’Round Midnight (1986), the subtle contemplation A Sunday in the Country (1984), and Dirk Bogarde’s final film (opposite Jane Birkin), Daddy Nostalgia (1990). Tavernier was also an irresistible interview subject, rapturous raconteur, and voracious cinephile, as reflected in his late-career landmark My Journey through French Cinema (2016) and the ten-part television series Journeys through French Cinema (2017–18). With The War with No Name (also known as The Undeclared War), he sought to breathe life into a largely nonexistent national conversation about the blood-soaked military conflict that the French government refused to call a war, in a land that it refused to recognize as a colony. The fighting brought down the fourth French Republic, elicited two attempted military coups, implicated one-time heroes of the resistance in the systematic practice of torture—and in the ruins of its aftermath, in the eyes of most, it was an unpleasant upheaval best forgotten.

Though thirty years old, La Guerre remains a remarkable film—and not only for its evocation of current conflicts, from Gaza to Ukraine.

More here.

Jorge Cotte in The Nation:

Dune: Part Two, the latest installment of Denis Villaneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s enduring (and supposedly unadaptable) science fiction series, carries a great weight on its shoulders. It must succeed as a continuation of the first movie without losing new viewers and while bearing the box office’s dreams for an industry that has flagged in comparison to last year. It must give the thrill of a big science fiction blockbuster, while seeming to undermine the transparent teenage fantasies that flourish throughout those stories.

A desert landscape, spices with magical properties, an occupying force, a community of native warriors, and a handsome young hero, bred and trained to liberate them all—Dune: Part Two has all the right elements of success, including a star-studded cast. Timothée Chalamet transforms from waif to despot; Zendaya guides the audience’s perspective with her pensive eyes; Rebecca Ferguson giving us “Reverend Mother”; Javier Bardem is both affable mentor and zealot; and Austin Butler sheds the Elvis accent and all of his hair.

Villeneuve streamlines the vast scope of Herbert’s story into a series of sweeping set pieces, more plentiful in this installment and meticulously executed. The film charts Paul Atreides’s swift rise while characterizing that rise as a cautionary tale too. For just as Paul needs to save his family and his adopted planet, Arrakis, from the occupying Harkonnens, Villeneuve must salvage knowing self-critique from the jaws of teenage fantasy clichés.

More here.

Over at Know Your Enemy:

Houman Barekat in The Guardian:

Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who writes for Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker, believes her metier is under threat. “I am a professional, and I am in danger,” she declares in My Perfect Opinions, one of eight previously unpublished essays gathered in her first nonfiction book. She wonders if popular digital platforms such as Goodreads, where users can upload book reviews with minimal editorial filtering, will have long-term ramifications for the more considered, rigorous literary criticism that she gets paid to write. What these online communities lack in intellectual acumen, they make up for in sheer weight of numbers. Are they reshaping literary culture in their own image?

The answer seems to be yes. Oyler believes a facile populism has crept into arts and culture commentary in recent years, premised on the notion that, since all taste is ultimately subjective, anything can be as good as anything else – evidenced, for example, in some critics’ insistence that Marvel comics deserve to be treated as serious art. “To reduce appeal to a matter of taste and temperament is the most boring way to be irrefutably correct,” Oyler notes. This tendency, a kind of philistinism dressed up as anti-elitism, lies at the heart of what she calls “today’s crisis in culture criticism”.

More here.

Peter Crockford in Singularity Hub:

All organisms are made of living cells. While it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the first cells came to exist, geologists’ best estimates suggest at least as early as 3.8 billion years ago. But how much life has inhabited this planet since the first cell on Earth? And how much life will ever exist on Earth? In our new study, published in Current Biology, my colleagues from the Weizmann Institute of Science and Smith College and I took aim at these big questions.

Carbon on Earth

Every year, about 200 billion tons of carbon is taken up through what is known as primary production. During primary production, inorganic carbon—such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and bicarbonate in the ocean—is used for energy and to build the organic molecules life needs.

Today, the most notable contributor to this effort is oxygenic photosynthesis, where sunlight and water are key ingredients. However, deciphering past rates of primary production has been a challenging task. In lieu of a time machine, scientists like myself rely on clues left in ancient sedimentary rocks to reconstruct past environments. In the case of primary production, the isotopic composition of oxygen in the form of sulfate in ancient salt deposits allows for such estimates to be made. In our study, we compiled all previous estimates of ancient primary production derived through the method above, as well as many others. The outcome of this productivity census was that we were able to estimate that 100 quintillion (or 100 billion billion) tons of carbon have been through primary production since the origin of life. Big numbers like this are difficult to picture; 100 quintillion tons of carbon is about 100 times the amount of carbon contained within the Earth, a pretty impressive feat for Earth’s primary producers.

More here.

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Mark Robert Rank in The Conversation:

One of the blockbuster films of the past year, “Oppenheimer,” tells the dramatic story of the development of the atomic bomb and the physicist who headed those efforts, J. Robert Oppenheimer. But despite the Manhattan Project’s success depicted in the film, in his latter years, Oppenheimer became increasingly worried about a nuclear holocaust resulting from the proliferation of these weapons.

Over the past 80 years, the threat of such nuclear annihilation was perhaps never greater than during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

President John F. Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, said that nuclear war was averted during that crisis by “just plain dumb luck.” As I detail in my forthcoming book, “The Random Factor,” nowhere was the influence of chance and luck more evident than on Oct. 27, 1962.

More here.

Aaron Gell in The New Republic:

If anti-Zionist Judaism has long sounded like an oxymoron, chalk it up to two factors: the Shoah, which convinced many Jews that they could never again entrust their welfare to a non-Jewish majority; and a remarkably effective effort by the Zionist establishment to weave the nation-state project into the fabric of Jewish life. But things change: A few days after October 7, I was biking along Brooklyn’s Prospect Park when I came upon a demonstration in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s apartment building. I’d spent the week absorbed in the news, struggling to take in the immensity and cruelty of the Hamas attack and horrified by the ruthlessness of Israel’s military response. As demonstrators, many carrying signs reading NOT IN MY NAME, marched down the road to Grand Army Plaza, I noticed that some were wearing tallitot and yarmulkes, and I found myself overcome with emotion. This, the first post–October 7 protest by Jewish Voice for Peace—a group I had never even heard of—struck me as a welcome response to what we’d been seeing, and a deeply Jewish one. I ditched my bike and joined the throng.

I mention this in the spirit of full disclosure: I’m hardly an objective observer. I’m a secular Jew, with my own particular set of feelings about Israel—a confusing mix of esteem, curiosity, anguish, and sometimes shame.

More here.

Nero’s Term

Nero was not alarmed when he heard
the prophesy of the Delphic Oracle.
“Let him fear the seventy-three years.”
There was still ample time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty years old. The term
the god allots to him is quite sufficient
for him to prepare for perils to come.

Now he will return to Rome slightly fatigued,
but delightfully fatigued from his journey,
which consisted entirely of days of pleasure
at the theaters, the gardens, the athletic fields . . .
evenings spent in the cities of Greece . . .
Ah the voluptuous delight of nude bodies, above all . . .

Those things Nero thought. And in Spain Galba
secretly assembles and drills his army,
the old man of seventy-three.

by C. P. Cavafy
from The Complete Poems of Cavafy
Harvest Books, 1961

Nicholas Dirks in Undark:

REVOLTS AGAINST SCIENCE are often deeply irrational, as we witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic, with political polarization around lifesaving vaccines and critical public health measures. But public distrust of science has too often been enabled through its manipulation by corporate interests, including big tobacco and oil, as well as by the dangers associated with its use in war.

The closing moments of Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award-nominated film “Oppenheimer” — based on the biography “American Prometheus” — depict a fictional scene in which the physicist is speaking with Albert Einstein by a pond at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Oppenheimer reminds Einstein of the time several years earlier, during the Second World War, when he asked him whether he thought there was any chance that nuclear fission might set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. Einstein had refused to offer an opinion, and Oppenheimer continued his work to develop the bomb.

Looking wistfully away from Einstein, he says that perhaps it did — that the bomb did set off an uncontrollable chain reaction that would, in the end, destroy the world. These final words give the lie to his hope that such a terrible weapon would stop all wars, an admission of his failure to fully anticipate the political reality of nuclear power.

Oppenheimer’s ambivalence is in a larger sense the story of modern-day science.

More here.