Editorial in Nature:

Early in 1993, a manuscript landed in the Nature offices announcing the results of an unusual — even audacious — experiment. The investigators, led by planetary scientist and broadcaster Carl Sagan, had searched for evidence of life on Earth that could be detected from space. The results, published 30 years ago this week, were “strongly suggestive” that the planet did indeed host life. “These observations constitute a control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial life by modern interplanetary spacecraft,” the team wrote (C. Sagan et al. Nature 365, 715–721; 1993).

The experiment was a master stroke. In 1989, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had launched on a mission to orbit Jupiter, where it was scheduled to arrive in 1995. Sagan and his colleagues wondered whether Galileo would find definitive evidence of life back home if its instruments could be trained on Earth. They persuaded NASA to do just that as the craft flew past the home planet in 1990.

As we describe in an essay, a big concern for the journal’s editors was that the paper did not report a new finding. Nature published it because it was a convincing control experiment to test the accuracy and relevance of the methods being used to detect extraterrestrial life. Had the study found less evidence of life than it did, that would have been even more significant — it would have called into question the relevance of the parameters that scientists proposed as evidence of life on other worlds.

More here.

Pamela Paul in The New York Times:

Last week the literary association Litprom canceled a celebration for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s book “Minor Detail” at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the publishing world’s biggest international book fairs. The novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, was to be honored for having won the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, a German literary prize awarded annually to a woman from the developing world. A panel that Shibli, who splits her time between Jerusalem and Berlin, was to be on with her German translator, Günther Orth, was likewise canceled.

In a statement defending the decision, Juergen Boos, the director of the book fair, distanced the organization from the award, saying the prize came from another group, which was now looking for “a suitable format and setting” to honor Shibli elsewhere. He also said that “we strongly condemn Hamas’s barbaric terror war against Israel” and that the fair “has always been about humanity; its focus has always been on peaceful and democratic discourse.” Furthermore, Boos said, the Frankfurt Book Fair “stands with complete solidarity on the side of Israel.”

More here.

Justin Smith-Ruiu in The New Statesman:

France is nice enough, I suppose, though I must acknowledge that this country, where I have lived for the past ten years, is mostly wasted on me. When it comes to both haute couture and to haute cuisine, I seem to have a lobe of my brain missing: I don’t even detect the virtues of the cultural products that draw so many foreigners to this place, let alone share in the appreciation of them. I don’t drink alcohol (so, no red wine, no “p’tit calva” for my “digestion”), I don’t eat meat (no charcuterie or steak tartare), I avoid empty carbs (no baguette or patisseries). Even when the ingredients suit my exigent diet, I still really do not enjoy wiling away the hours in a commensal spirit. My life in Paris often seems like a constant struggle to avoid getting trapped in one of those interminable lunches to which the people I know here seem happy to sacrifice such a great portion of their days. I’ve just got too much to do, and am perfectly content with the raw carrots and almonds in my backpack.

I fear I see myself in the memorable character of the Unitarian minister in Henry James’s The American (1877), whose church has paid for his trip through Europe to see the great art museums, and who loves these dearly. The problem is that the minister also has a special diet: he can only eat graham crackers and hominy, “A regimen to which he was so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted when, on landing on the Continent, he found that these delicacies did not flourish under the table d’hôte system.”

More here.

Lucy Knight in The Guardian:

“It’s not the easiest book in the world to write, but it’s something I need to get past in order to do anything else. I can’t really start writing a novel that’s got nothing to do with this,” he said. “So I just have to deal with it.”

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder will recount the author’s experience of surviving the attempt on his life. It is “a searing book”, according to Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, and “a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. We are honoured to publish it, and amazed at Salman’s determination to tell his story, and to return to the work he loves.”

Rushdie said: “This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art.”

More here.

Jonathan Kirshner in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

RELATIONS BETWEEN the United States and China have taken a dark and perilous turn. For much of this century, there was reason to hope that China could be welcomed into the liberal international order, and that its thriving there might mitigate the unavoidable tensions of great power politics. Recently, however, positions have hardened in both East and West. China has taken a discouraging, repressive turn towards personalist authoritarianism; in the United States, increasingly illiberal and politically dysfunctional, a more hawkish posture towards the People’s Republic is one of the vanishingly rare postures that garners bipartisan support in Washington.*

Indeed, inside the Beltway, virtually anyone with influence on policy now professes to be a “realist” with regard to American foreign policy towards China. Unfortunately, casually throwing around the word “realism”—often as little more than a euphemism for being “tough”—falls far short of providing a productive guide to policy. Worse, and harrowingly, the two most influential “realist” theories commonly gestured at in this context are flat wrong in their analyses and appalling in their policy prescriptions, proffering misguided and dangerous advice.

More here.

Bonnie Costello at Salmagundi:

I had read a few of the novels of Herta Müller with their bleak depictions of a world of social deceptions and betrayals, of people losing their humanity under an inhuman system. “The ant is carrying a dead fly three times its size. The ant can’t see the way ahead, it flips the fly around and crawls back.” Eviscerations of the private life; victim and perpetrator one Janus face. This was a nightmare vision, not a tragic vision, as Claudio Magris put it about so much modern literature of mitteleuropa. But she had left Romania in the 80s and never returned. Then there was the Romanian philosopher, Emil Cioran, one of Susan Sontag’s favorites. He had climbed “the heights of despair,” the title of one of his early books, in 1934. Unsurprisingly, he reached further dismal “heights” through the decades that followed. But then again Cioran, on further study, turned out to be a self-proclaimed “Hitlerist” aligned with the Iron Guard (Romanian fascists), who had left Romania for France in the forties. They had not seen the democratic outpouring just a year before my visit, when crowds had taken to the streets to protest government corruption. The parliament had had the gall to legalize low-level graft and fire the judges who challenged it, but the rallies had shamed them, at least for awhile. (The PSD turned hoses full force on demonstrators, injuring hundreds; but the real news, I want to believe, is that the crowds were back again the next night.)

more here.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

The curators have wisely given the exhibition a chronological hang which allows the viewer to see clearly just how much Guston’s art changed. His paintings of the 1930s and 1940s started in crisp-edged European modernism – with Picasso prominent – and moved into American social realism. He painted murals under the auspices of the New Deal Federal Art Project and works of social and political commentary. In Sunday Interior (1941), for example, he created a potent image of the marginalised – a young black man smoking against the background of an empty street. With Bombardment (1937), a tondo of explosions and hurtling bodies, he expressed his horror at the fascist bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, the subject also of Picasso’s most celebrated work.

Being a painter, Guston thought, was about “fixing an image you can tolerate” and as the 1940s progressed his pictures made him increasingly itchy. “Everything seemed unsuccessful, I couldn’t continue figuration.”

more here.

Bassem Eid in Newsweek:

In a since-deleted thread on the messaging platform X, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which services Palestinians in Gaza claimed that men acting under Hamas authorities seized fuel, medical supplies, and other types of material that were supposed to be used for strictly humanitarian purposes. UNRWA later deleted the post and withdrew the claims, but Axios journalist Barak Ravid confirmed it happened.

To those of us on the front lines, this does not come as a surprise: UNRWA has a troubling record of supporting Hamas. UNWRA employs known Hamas terrorists and turns a blind eye when its own ambulances and UNWRA vehicles are used to transport weapons and explosives. It also circulates textbooks in the Gaza Strip that spread vile antisemitic messaging—with the horrific results we saw on October 7. UNRWA doesn’t even hide their outward support for Hamas; they provide direct financial support to its terror activities. And while it covers for Hamas, the agency is quick to criticize Israel for warning the Palestinians in the northern part of the Strip to relocate for their own safety ahead of Israel’s expected ground offensive. Their willingness to carry water for Hamas knows no bounds.

More here.

Leron Barton in Newsweek:

Many use the word solidarity when describing a bond with friends, coworkers, and teammates, but I like to apply the word when describing a fight for shared interests between different types of people, whether it be the battle against racism, LGBTQ+ rights, and labor—solidarity speaks of unity. “When one wins, we all win. When one dies, we all die.” Those words from older activists echo loud today. As a Black man in America, I feel empathy for the people of Palestine. I stand with them. Like millions around the world, I have been focused on the war between Israel and Hamas. What started out as a retaliation for the rocket attack by Hamas on southern Israel during the Jewish holiday Simchat Torah has turned into a barrage of gunfire, bombs, and the potential destruction of Gaza.

As I watched the news and read reports about the conditions in Gaza, I said to myself, “This is another reason to be xenophobic and bigoted towards people in the Middle East.” I began learning about what I would refer to as “The Conflict” years ago. I would always sit with my Grandfather and watch news reports about the 75-year-old battle in Palestine. My family members would comment “It is sad what’s going on over there. They are taking their land.” Later, I read The Case For Israel by Alan Dershowitz, as well as essays and interviews by Palestinian scholars and activists such as Zena Agha. I wanted to read “both sides” to get an understanding of what was happening.

More here.

Norman Doidge in Tablet:

Rachel Gorman in The Scientist:

An insect lands on the open leaves of a Venus flytrap plant, drawn to an appealing scent. It noses around and accidentally brushes one of the trap’s trigger hairs. An action potential shoots across the leaf blade. The insect keeps moving and bends another trigger hair, propagating a second action potential; suddenly, the leaves snap shut, trapping the insect, enveloping it in digestive juices, and absorbing the bug’s rich nutrients. How these two light touches trigger abrupt shutting of the leaves has been hypothesized, but never proven. Now, in a new study published in Current Biology, a team of researchers knocked out two ion channels, making it harder to produce action potentials and proving the channels’ importance in leaf closing.¹ “The paper is a very big technical advance,” said plant biophysicist Rainer Hedrich at the University of Wurzburg who was not involved in the study. “It is possible to knock out genes in an excitable plant and test hypotheses.”

More here.

Julien Crockett in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

JULIEN CROCKETT: I want to start with a quote from the end of your book where you discuss the final stage of life—death—and what happens with the failures we accumulate along the way:

An odd party indeed, but when you think about it, a better arrangement is hard to imagine. For when we finally make it to the door, we know exactly what we leave behind—what we have been. We exit clean and unattached to anything, scar-covered and worn out, yet whole. With some luck, even cured.

“Cured” is an interesting word choice, implying that we are sick. What do you mean by “cured”?

COSTICA BRADATAN: Of course we are sick. For what is life, after all, if not a genetically transmitted disease? This is an old, indeed timeless, insight. When Socrates was about to die, he asked one of his disciples, Crito, to perform a sacrifice, on his behalf, to Asklepios, the god of healing. In ancient Greece, you did that whenever you recovered from an illness. As Socrates was about to be cured of the sickness that had been his life, he felt grateful and wanted to thank the god of healing. A bit earlier, and in another part of the world, the Buddha had suggested something similar when he said that “to live is to suffer.” Indeed, life is no ordinary sickness, but a highly addictive one: the more of it we have, the more we want, and the more entangled in it we become.

More here.

Steven French at IAI News:

Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is widely regarded as both his most accessible and most influential work, written under the shadow of fascist ideology looming over Europe. Based on lectures given in 1935 at Charles University and the German University in Prague, Husserl opens by addressing the ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ question that many in the audience must have been asking themselves:

‘I expect that at this place, dedicated as it is to the sciences, the very title of these lectures … will incite controversy.’

Husserl was alluding to the fact that the German University had been the academic home of such notable scientists as Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein and that science was then enjoying a period of obvious and wide-ranging success. How, then, could he talk of the sciences undergoing a ‘crisis’? Husserl makes it clear that he is not referring to the ‘victorious struggle against the ideal of classical physics’ as represented by the rise of the theory of relativity and quantum physics.

More here.

Jeffrey Flier in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Disputes arising from geopolitical crises occur in numerous social settings, but colleges are especially vulnerable. First, campuses by their nature are (or should be) spaces for robust debate on contested topics, strongly protected by free-speech norms. Second, students and faculty represent diverse nationalities, religions, cultures, and belief systems. Third, college leaders are expected by many to express opinions on political and social issues on behalf of the institution.

This last practice is complex, and increasingly contested. The central mission of colleges is to serve as communities for discovery, improvement, and the transmission of knowledge. By fulfilling these roles, they play a critical role in the evolution of the social and political values of the societies in which they exist. Faculty are the key producers of this work, coordinated by administrative leaders who organize and facilitate the many complex activities required to carry out the mission. The extent to which college leaders should, in addition to their administrative roles, express institutional positions on contestable social and political issues is a matter of legitimate dispute.

More here.

Philip Elliott in Time Magazine:

In her prime, there was no one—no man or woman, no one wearing Team Red or Blue, no one brandishing centrist or progressive labels—who could rival Dianne Feinstein. She knew what it was like to lose; even before arriving in Washington, she had two failed bids for San Francisco mayor and one for California governor under her belt, not to mention the trauma of finding her friends immediately after a former colleague assassinated them in San Francisco City Hall back in 1978, all of which informed her desire to make the wins she did notch count all the more.

And did she ever win.

Feinstein, the longest-serving woman in the Senate, died Friday at the age of 90 and as the Upper Chamber’s oldest member. No cause was announced, but her health in recent months generated plenty of chatter in Washington and beyond about just how long was long enough for a powerful lawmaker to hang around the Capitol.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

ChatGPT, the AI language model capable of mirroring human conversation, may be better than a doctor at following recognized treatment standards for clinical depression, and without any of the gender or social class biases sometimes seen in the primary care doctor-patient relationship, finds research published in the open access journal Family Medicine and Community Health. However, further research is needed into how well this technology might manage severe cases as well as potential risks and ethical issues arising from its use, say the researchers.

Depression is very common, and many of those affected turn first to their family (primary care) doctors for help. The recommended course of treatment should largely be guided by evidence-based clinical guidelines, which usually suggest a tiered approach to care, in line with the severity of the depression.

More here.

Lessons from Mahler

In Sage Hall 5 at Smith, spring 1980, our music theory professor
places the needle on the final band of the album of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder.
The voice of mezzosoprano Janet Baker emerges from the orchestra:

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen…
I am lost to the world…

She weaves her way among the delicately orchestrated lines, answers the English horn,
sings of how the world may think she is dead because she has set aside its tumult
to rest in a quiet place. In serenity:

Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied. 
I live alone in my heaven,
in my love, in my song.

As the English horn resolves a suspension at the final cadence, I look up from my score
to see our professor weeping.

Analysis of
chromatic chords failed that day.
Tears taught me Mahler.

by Joanne Cory
from the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center