Emma Foehringer Merchant in Undark:

Best Bees is one of the many companies carving out a niche in a commercial landscape increasingly focused on advertising environmental responsibility, pushed by both customer demand and regulatory requirements. Testing environmental DNA, which allows data to be gathered from the tiny pieces of skin, scales, and slime that species shed as they move through the world, has been framed as a cheap and efficient way to understand a corporation’s impact.

As supporters lobby for regulatory acceptance, a group of large consulting companies and eDNA specialists see the tool as a promising way to monitor corporate sustainability, like measuring the success of conservation efforts or the possible effects of a new bridge or parking lot. Experts say eDNA has limitations and drawbacks. So far, it appears that the tool is best used as one tool among a suite of monitoring methods, so it’s unlikely the technology will completely disrupt the environmental consulting industry, which according to The Insight Partners, a market research firm, was valued at more than $34 billion globally in 2020. But eDNA has undoubtedly created new opportunities to gather and monetize data.

More here.

Yascha Mounk and Jonathan Haidt at Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: It’s always a pleasure to have you on the podcast and particularly when you have an important new book which you have just published called The Anxious Generation, which really speaks to so many core concerns of what is happening in the United States, in Britain and around the world today.

Why should we take this trend seriously? Why should we think that there really is something unusual about the rise of mental illness and other ills among teenagers and particularly young girls? And why should we think that this really is down to the rise of the internet and of social media in particular? And now I’m asking this because of course there have been many moral panics over the course of decades, right? Why is this not a moral panic, but a real trend that’s going on?

Jonathan Haidt: There certainly is a moral panic going on and it looks similar to previous ones. You know, the press gets involved, you get scare stories. But the question is, is it a justified panic or not?

More here.

To the Woman I saw Today Who Wept in Her car

I get it.
We are strangers,
but I know the heart is a hive
and someone has knocked yours
from its high branch in your chest
and it lays cracked and splayed,
spilling honey all over
the ground floor of your gut
and the bees inside
that you’ve trained
over the days and years
to stay put, swarm
the terrain of your organs,
yes,
right here in traffic,
while we wait for the light to change.

I get it.
How this array of metal and plastic
tends to go womb room
once the door shuts,
and maybe you were singing
only moments before
you got the call,
or remembered that thing
you had tucked back and built
such sturdy scaffolding all around,
and now here it comes to knock
you adrift with only your steering
wheel to hold you up.

Or, maybe today
was just a tough day
and the sunlight
and warm weather
and blossoming limbs
and smiling pedestrians
waiting for their turn to cross
are much too much to take
when you think of all that’s left
to do, and here you are,
a reed stuck in the mud
of a rush hour intersection,
with so very many hours left to go.

Woman,
I know you.
I know how that thing
when left unattended
will show up as a typhoon
at your front door
demanding to be let in
or it will take
the whole damn house with it.

I know this place too.
I get it.

But because we are strangers,
because you did not see me see you,
my gaze has no more effect
than a phantom that stares at the living.
And yet, I want you to know that
today, in the hive of my heart,
there is room enough
for you.

by Bianca Lynne Spriggs
from Split This Rock

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

From NBC News:

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new cancer therapy that could one day transform the way a majority of aggressive and advanced tumors are treated. The treatment, called Amtagvi, from Iovance Biotherapeutics, is for metastatic melanoma patients who have already tried and failed other drugs. It’s known as TIL therapy and involves boosting the number of immune cells inside tumors, harnessing their power to fight the cancer.

It’s the first time a cellular therapy has been approved to treat solid tumors. The drug was given a fast-track approval based on the results of a phase 2 clinical trial. The company is conducting a larger phase 3 trial to confirm the treatment’s benefits. The therapy’s list price — the price before insurance and other potential discounts — is $515,000 per patient. “This is going to be huge,” said Dr. Elizabeth Buchbinder, a senior physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Melanoma is “not one of those cancers where there’s like 20 different” possible treatments, she said. “You start running out of options fast.”

More here.

Michael Prodger in The New Statesman:

In May 1606, Caravaggio’s rackety life caught up with him. He already had a long list of misdemeanours against his name. He had been twice arrested for carrying a sword without a permit; put on trial by the Roman authorities for writing scurrilous verses about a rival, Giovanni Baglione (or “Johnny Bollocks” according to the poems); arrested for affray and assault, in one incident being injured himself (his testimony to the police survives: “I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs. I don’t know where it was and there was no one else there”); arrested again for smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter; for throwing stones and abusing a constable (telling him he could “stick [his sword] up his arse”); and for smearing excrement on the house of the landlady who had had his belongings seized in payment of missed rent. There were more incidents, all meticulously recorded in the Roman archives.

Eventually, however, he overstepped so far that even his lofty clerical patrons, notably cardinals Del Monte and Borghese, could no longer help him.

More here.

Gabrielle Gurley in The American Prospect:

The Port of Baltimore was on a roll. In February, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore celebrated new record traffic at the vessel and terminal hub and installed a new executive director, Jonathan Daniels, at the Maryland Port Administration. The port already was an established leader in auto imports and exports, thanks to its closer proximity to the Midwest than other ports, and led the country in passenger vehicle shipping for 13 consecutive years.

The container ship crash and collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge pushed those milestones aside in seconds. Maryland faces a grim recovery mission for the men killed, and what promises to be one of the country’s most closely watched infrastructure projects at one of the East Coast’s busiest ports.

More here.

William E. Scheuerman in the Boston Review:

Of course, autocrats always tout their achievements, or insist that their regimes rest on the will of the people. Even Nazi Germany claimed popular legitimacy, a racist and anti-Semitic Volks-sovereignty. Soviet apologists and fellow travelers labeled Stalin’s Eastern European vassal states “people’s democracies.” The contemporary narrative seems depressingly familiar. Even so, the specter of powerful autocratic states that parasitically mimic democracy, while in reality eviscerating its core, should alarm us. Are democracy’s rivals indeed gaining ground? And, what precisely is different this time?

John Keane’s illuminating study of what he dubs the new despotism persuasively argues that its momentum in China, Hungary, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the UAE, and many other countries offers evidence both for its viability today and its longevity in times to come.

More here.

Sameer Pandya at the LARB:

THIS YEAR marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. I’ve never loved the novel, nor have I been able to let go of it. And so I started reading it again as I began a passage of my own to India—where I lived until I was eight—with my wife and our two teenage sons.

Across his work, but particularly in Passage, Forster uses miscommunication, or what he calls “muddles,” as a productive source of narrative tension and propulsion. “Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.” The opening line sets up the location of the novel’s primary action in a cave that produces only an echo—the absence of real communication.

A young Englishwoman named Adela Quested arrives in British India with Mrs. Moore, her prospective mother-in-law, so that Adela can determine if she and Mrs. Moore’s son, Ronny, are the right match.

more here.

Rachel Connolly at the Paris Review:

While reading Maradona’s autobiography this past winter, I found that every few pages I would whisper or write in the margins, “I love you, Maradona.” Sadness crept up on me as I turned to the last chapter, and it intensified to heartbreak when I read its first lines: “They say I can’t keep quiet, that I talk about everything, and it’s true. They say I fell out with the Pope. It’s true.” I was devastated to be leaving Maradona’s world and returning to the ordinary one, where nobody ever picks a fight with the Pope.

I started reading El Diego: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Footballer, ghostwritten by Daniel Arcucci and translated to English by Marcela Mora y Araujo. He said reading it was the most fun he’d had with a book. I came to El Diego with basically no knowledge of Maradona or even of soccer. I would have said I hated soccer actually. I hate the buzzing noise the crowds make on the TV. But from the very first page I found Maradona’s voice so addictive and original that reading El Diego felt like falling in love.

more here.

Untitled

Late one night in my office
one mile from home, I stared

out my window in an insomniac haze.
Remember how crazed I used to be?

Turns out eight hours of sleep
is the only vision quest I need.

Anyhow, as I stared out the window,
I saw a transformer sizzle

And spark down the block.
Accidental and gorgeous fireworks.

Then that transformer boomed
and turned the neighborhood

Into one large and powerless room.
In five minutes, the closed supermarket

parking lot below me was crowded
with dozens of black teens and young
adults.

A sudden party! And the bass that shook
their car windows shook my office
window!

Then three minutes after the party started,
six police cars pulled into the parking lot.

Oh, shit! Oh, shit! I wondered if somebody
was going to get shot! But the cops stayed

in their cars, content to just be reminders
of more dangerous possibilities,

while the black teens behaved like teens.
Twenty minutes later, the power came back.

I was surprised it had been fixed
so quickly. Soon enough, the black kids

vacated the lot. And the cops did too.
It was one of those city nights where

Bad things could have happened.
But it was good things that shook the air.

The music and car engines and laughter
singing only about love, not disaster.

by Sherman Alexie
from You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me
Little Brown, 2017

Sarah Klein in Time Magazine:

Almost 25 million adults in the U.S. have high cholesterol, which puts them at a higher risk for a heart attack or stroke in the next decade. But a much bigger portion have what’s called borderline high cholesterol, an in-between place that’s not quite high, but not quite within a normal range. Here’s what to know about borderline cholesterol.

High cholesterol is defined as having a total cholesterol number of 240 mg/dL or above. Someone has borderline cholesterol, meanwhile, when their total cholesterol is in the 200 to 239 range.

“We create these thresholds—which are admittedly somewhat artificial—to classify people so we can understand if we need to do further analysis or assessment to understand their risk for cardiovascular disease,” says Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, past president of the American Heart Association and a professor of cardiology and the chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. There’s some flexibility: Some people may be completely healthy with a total cholesterol level of 235, while others could be at risk at 205. It depends on a person’s other risk factors. But broadly speaking, these thresholds help doctors make decisions about patient care.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

This six-legged animal isn’t an insect: it’s a mouse with two extra limbs where its genitals should be. Research on this genetically engineered rodent, which was published on 20 March in Nature Communications¹, has revealed a way in which changes in DNA’s 3D structure can affect how embryos develop. Developmental biologist Moisés Mallo, at the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Oeiras, Portugal, and his colleagues were studying one of the receptor proteins, Tgfbr1, in a signalling pathway that is involved in many aspects of embryonic development. The scientists inactivated the Tgfbr1 gene in mouse embryos about halfway through development to see how the change affected spinal-cord development. Then, Mallo’s graduate student, Anastasiia Lozovska, came to his office to tell him she’d found that one of the bioengineered embryos had genitals that looked similar to two extra hind limbs. Her finding sent the research down an unexpected path. “I didn’t choose the project, the project chose me,” Mallo says.

Researchers have long known that, in most four-limbed animals, both the external genitalia (penis or clitoris) and hind limbs develop from the same primordial structures. When Mallo’s team looked further into the six-legged mouse phenomenon, they found that Tgfbr1 directs these structures to become either genitalia or limbs by altering the way that DNA folds in the structure’s cells. Deactivating the protein changed the activity of other genes, resulting in extra limbs and no true external genitalia.

More here.

Ed Simon in The Hedgehog Review:

Despite the stereotype of being the Norman Rockwell of verse, Robert Frost’s standing, even sixty-one years after his death, remains blue-chip, still perhaps the most famous American poet among the general public. Frost’s work remains anthologized and interpreted, and taught in secondary and undergraduate classrooms; his lyrics among the handful that can be expected to be namedropped as a reader’s favorite poem (two roads and all of that). If anything, Frost has suffered from the albatross of presumed accessibility. Among the luminaries of American Modernism, Ezra Pound was experimental, T.S. Eliot cerebral, H.D. hermetic, Langston Hughes revolutionary, Wallace Stevens incandescent, and William Carlos Williams visionary, but Frost is readable. David Orr writes in his excellent book-length close reading The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong (2015) that Frost is a poet whose “signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches” that it can become easy to forget the man who penned such phrases.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Technology is changing the world, in good and bad ways. Artificial intelligence, internet connectivity, biological engineering, and climate change are dramatically altering the parameters of human life. What can we say about how this will extend into the future? Will the pace of change level off, or smoothly continue, or hit a singularity in a finite time? In this informal solo episode, I think through what I believe will be some of the major forces shaping how human life will change over the decades to come, exploring the very real possibility that we will experience a dramatic phase transition into a new kind of equilibrium.

More here.

Julia Friedman in Quillette:

On my last visit to the National Gallery in London in October 2022, during Frieze Week, the wall beneath Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic Sunflowers still displayed noticeable palm-sized daubs of unmatched gray paint. The day before, Just Stop Oil protestors Phoebe Plummer, and Anna Holland had glued themselves to that wall, after dousing the painting with Heinz tomato soup. Their timing (Frieze Week) and venue for this instance of performative activism was not incidental. It pitted the purported excess of attention given to art—here represented by Van Gogh’s masterpiece—against the scarcity of “food” and “justice” for those affected by rampant inflation. In this zero-sum scenario, a choice had to be made between culture and human beings: “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?” demanded Plummer, as she knelt beneath the soup-stained still life, one palm already affixed to the wall behind her. The efficacy of this attack, news of which quickly spread across both legacy and social media, derived from the cult status of Sunflowers: its cultural cachet, its recognizability and ubiquity. Yet Plummer and Holland saw it only as a prop for acting out their scripted and rehearsed demonstration.

To the casual observer, this stagy use of an artwork as a backdrop for an ideological statement might have little in common with another, much subtler case when a different National Gallery painting served as a prop. This time there was no super glue, tomato soup, or declarative recitations, and no need to involve security.

More here.

Mohsin Hamid at Georgetown University Global Dialogues:

When it comes to our understanding of the world, we are all like the blind men in the story of the blind men and the elephant. We each know the elephant from our own small vantage point, and what we know is partial and prone to distortions. It is from speaking to one another, reading one another, that a more accurate picture appears. Unfortunately, too often, those we speak to and read come from places very close to ours, whether physically or ideologically, and so the elephant we see together looks to us uncannily like something else, like a wall or a weapon or a trophy, perhaps. I would like to describe the elephant, the world, as I perceive it from my vantage point in Lahore, Pakistan, in the early months of the year 2024. I do this in the hope that each of us, in describing it, helps all of us see it a little better.

The first thing that strikes me about the world is that it is has become poisonous. We cannot breathe. From November until February the blue sky is hidden behind a low ceiling of grey. This is not from clouds but from smoke. It is uncanny to take a flight in these months, to burst only seconds after take-off into the blindingly bright light and see not a city but a grey blanket below.

More here.