Alice Gribbin in Tablet:

Artworks are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the visual art world’s many arenas, the relationship between art and the viewer has come to be framed in this way. An artwork communicates a message, and comprehending that message is the work of its audience. Paintings are their images; physically encountering an original is nice, yes, but it’s not as if any essence resides there. Even a verbal description of a painting provides enough information for its message to be clear.

This vulgar and impoverishing approach to art denigrates the human mind, spirit, and senses. From where did the approach originate, and how did it come to such prominence? Historians a century from now will know better than we do. What can be stated with some certainty is the debasement is nearly complete: The institutions tasked with the promotion and preservation of art have determined that the artwork is a message-delivery system. More important than tracing the origins of this soul-denying formula is to refuse it—to insist on experiences that elevate aesthetics and thereby affirm both life and art.

More here.

Liza Vertinsky and Yaniv Heled in The Conversation:

Every so often stories of genetic theft, or extreme precautions taken to avoid it, make headline news. So it was with a picture of French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin sitting at opposite ends of a very long table after Macron declined to take a Russian PCR COVID-19 test. Many speculated that Macron refused due to security concerns that the Russians would take and use his DNA for nefarious purposes. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz similarly refused to take a Russian PCR COVID-19 test.

While these concerns may seem relatively new, pop star celebrity Madonna has been raising alarm bells about the potential for nonconsensual, surreptitious collection and testing of DNA for over a decade. She has hired cleaning crews to sterilize her dressing rooms after concerts and requires her own new toilet seats at each stop of her tours.

At first, Madonna was ridiculed for having DNA paranoia. But as more advanced, faster and cheaper genetic technologies have reached the consumer realm, these concerns seem not only reasonable, but justified.

More here.

Yascha Mounk in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: You’ve been writing and talking a lot about free speech and the threats to it on campus, but also in American public life more broadly. How would you describe the current situation and why should we care about it?

Robert P. George: The current situation is one in which people in general—including people on college campuses, not only students, but faculty, not only untenured (and therefore, in a certain sense, insecure) faculty, but tenured faculty who are secure—are censoring themselves. All the studies that have been done on this subject reveal that people are not saying what they truly believe, or not raising certain questions they’d like to ask, because they fear the social or professional consequences of “saying the wrong thing,” or saying the right thing in “the wrong” way. Well, this, in my opinion, is terrible for institutions of higher learning, colleges and universities. It makes it impossible for us to prosecute our fundamental mission, the mission of pursuing knowledge of truth, but it’s also terrible for a democratic republic.

More here.

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Raghavendra Gadagkar in Inference:

I SPENT THE SECOND HALF of the 1970s at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru immersed in studying the lysogenic mycobacteriophage I3.¹ One floor below my laboratory, a close friend, Arun Srivastava, was studying the Rous sarcoma virus (RSV).² We were both fascinated by animal and bacterial viruses, and spent our spare time reading every publication we could find about λ, T4, ΦX174, rinderpest, and Newcastle disease. We came to believe that we knew nearly everything there was to know about them.

We were wrong.

In A Tale of Two Viruses, Neeraja Sankaran draws parallels between the stories of the bacteriophages, a group of viruses that infect bacteria, and RSV, which infects chickens. At first glance, this might seem an odd pairing for a work of comparative history. The two viruses behave very differently: phages induce lysis, which destroys bacterial cells, while RSV builds tumors. “[T]he pairing of these two viruses might seem rather arbitrary,” she writes, but “they have shared strangely parallel histories from the time of their respective discoveries in the early decades of the twentieth century until the early 1960s.”³

In 1910, Peyton Rous, an American pathologist working at Rockefeller University in New York, observed that a highly filtered sarcoma extract from one test subject—a chicken, of course—could induce a sarcoma in a second test subject. He concluded correctly that, given the size of his filters, whatever the substance inducing the sarcoma, it could not have been a bacterium. It was for this work that he won the Nobel Prize almost half a century later. In 1915, Frederick Twort, a medical researcher in London, arrived at a similar conclusion with respect to substances that seemed to infect bacteria; in 1917, Félix d’Hérelle, a self-taught scientist working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, announced the discovery of “an invisible, antagonistic microbe of the dysentery bacillus.” Both men had discovered the bacteriophages.

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Tom Boggioni in Salon:

In an interview with the Guardian, filmmaker John Waters — creator of cult classics “Pink Flamingoes” and “Female Trouble” — lamented the rise of Donald Trump by claiming he ruined “bad taste,” a hallmark of Waters’s storied filmmaking career.

Reflecting on his career during which he has been called “the Pope of Trash, the Sultan of Sleaze, the Duke of Dirt, the Baron of Bad Taste, the King of Puke and Queer Confucius,” Waters was asked about his influence on “camp” in the arts and why it has faded away as a cultural touchstone. As the Guardian’s Catherine Bray wrote, Waters’ demeanor took a serious turn when he brought up the former president. According to Bray, “at a moment when fashion’s elite seem to be bringing back some of the ugliest looks ever to grace a millennium-era runway,” she pressed Waters about the zeitgeist when it comes to campiness and bad taste.

“Trump ruined it, ” Waters replied. “As soon as Trump was president, it just ended the humor of it. He was the nail in the coffin. He’s the first person that had accidental bad taste that wasn’t funny.”

More here.

Liza Featherstone in The New Republic:

Voters don’t care enough about climate, according to conventional wisdom. The best way to address climate change is for Democrats to win elections by talking about other subjects, consultants say. The problem with this political advice is that Democratic politicians, acting on the insight that voters don’t care, get into office and then don’t set a high priority on climate policy—because they want to be reelected.

Put this way, it sounds like we have an almost unsolvable problem on our hands, one that could lead us to believe that representative democracy was incompatible with human survival. Conversations with liberals and progressives these days, especially those engaged in climate issues, are unfailingly gloomy. The right seems to be on a winning streak; relatedly, we’re all doomed. But what if there was a way out of this existential cul-de-sac?

The data nerds and activists behind the Environmental Voter Project, or EVP, think there is. They’ve got extensive research and proven results to support this crazy bit of optimism, and they’re using it to try to sway the midterms, a looming political event that most liberals are hailing with unqualified despair.

More here.

Colin Burrow on Stanley Cavell’s Here and There in the LRB:

When​ I was small we were sometimes visited by a moral philosopher. He always outstayed his welcome, and did many things which non-philosophers might regard as immoral or selfish, some of them more forgivable than others (I have forgiven him for confiscating the rubber ball that I enjoyed bouncing around the hall, but not for destroying it). Whenever my mother went to rebuke him for his misdeeds she would find him standing on his head, with his feet clad in purple socks, reciting over and over again the mantra: ‘Only I can feel my pain.’ It was, she would say, hard to address a pair of purple socks as though they were a moral agent.

Our unwelcome guest was one of the many enthusiastic followers of Wittgenstein in the 1960s and 1970s, and his meditations were no doubt intended to draw him into a deeper understanding of the discussions of pain and private language in the Philosophical Investigations. In the 1980s at Cambridge I was taught by a generation of critics who had developed a radically conservative aesthetics from a fusion of Wittgenstein’s writing on language and J.L. Austin’s on speech acts. Wittgenstein suggested that we could only say someone had grasped the rules of chess when they could offer a ‘criterion’ of having done so, by being able to make the right moves. In lectures I heard that claim developed into an argument to the effect that there were no mute inglorious Miltons out there, because the only criterion of having a beautifully complex thought was the ability to write in a beautiful and complex way.

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Nina Eichacker in Phenomenal World:

In 2022, the audience for books about John Maynard Keynes is probably as large as it has ever been. With two global economic crises followed by widespread use of government interventions, debates recently relegated to history books and academic journals have acquired new urgency. The curious reader can pick from a wealth of recent books. Geoff Mann’s In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution (2017) and heterodox economist James Crotty’s Keynes Against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism (2019) offer perspectives from critical political economy, while Zach Carter’s The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (2020) presents a detailed biography. But until now, there has been nothing quite like Stephen Marglin’s Raising Keynes, which subtly promises no less than A Twenty-first Century General Theory. The text runs to more than 896 pages, weighs four pounds in hardcover, and, as Marglin acknowledges, is not an easy read. But the result is truly original.

Marglin is uniquely positioned to carry forward the trajectory of the Keynesian tradition. Like Keynes, Marglin’s early career saw him transform from the star pupil of the reigning economic theories of his training—neoclassical economics—into a sort of a radical economist of his own category after receiving tenure. And, like Keynes, Marglin argues that it was his observation of the world around him that forced him to shed his allegiance to neoclassical theories and their claim to represent how the world works.

More here.

Olga Khazan in The Atlantic:

SAN FRANCISCO—Michael Shellenberger was more excited to tour the Tenderloin than I was, even though it was my idea. I was nervous about provoking desperate people in various states of disrepair. Shellenberger, meanwhile, seemed intent on showing that many homeless people are addicted to drugs. (If that seems callous to you, Shellenberger would say you’re in thrall to liberal “victim ideology.”) He told me not to worry. “You seem like a tough Russian chick, right?” he said as we walked up narrow sidewalks where hundreds of humans sleep at night, passing people sitting on wheelchairs, under tarps, and in tents. Many were slumped over or nodding off—from fentanyl, Shellenberger said. One man walked down the street hooting repeatedly to no one.

As we talked with people, Shellenberger kept introducing himself as a “reporter,” even though he’s running for governor of California. His candidacy has indeed involved a lot of interviewing: He often films himself asking homeless people about their lives and tweets about it. He has also written several books, including last year’s San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, which makes the argument that has become a central plank of his candidacy: What most homeless people need is not, in his words, “namby pamby” TLC from lefty nonprofits but a firm hand and a stint in rehab. He’s essentially a single-issue candidate running against homelessness and its consequences. Fortunately for him, that’s an issue Californians feel strongly about. And thanks to California’s top-two “jungle” primary system, there’s a chance he could make it past the June 7 primary and face off against California Governor Gavin Newsom in the general election.

More here.

Harry Clarke-Ezzidio in New Stateman:

Ira Glass worked through and missed our scheduled Zoom interview. “It’s really just been like a normal work week, but I just didn’t manage it as ideally as I could have,” he told me, apologetically, when we chat a few days later. He missed the call because that week’s episode of This American Life, the podcast and radio show he founded in 1995 and still hosts today, had to be completely re-edited and recorded. “Stuff just has to get done… it gets very complicated.”

Glass seems to be spinning a number of plates at any given time. This American Life has a wide remit and, despite its name, a global focus; telling stories in “acts” centred around a weekly theme, the show covers everything from the most inane and granular aspects of life to more existential issues including elections and protests. The programme attracts around four million listeners every week.

We spoke a few weeks after Glass, who lives in New York, came to London’s Southbank Centre in March to perform Seven Things I’ve Learned, his one-man show, delayed due to the pandemic. “I have Covid that I got in London,” he declared at the beginning of the call. “Nobody here wears a mask at all!” he previously joked to the London audience. “A British friend and I talked about this before my girlfriend and I came, and I was like, ‘OK, so what are our chances of me getting some mild case of Covid? Are they 100 per cent or 90 per cent?’”

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Lisa Borst interviews Nell Zink at Bookforum:

I was reading the kinds of essays, in German, that academics write about the kinds of things that Peter is obsessed with. But my big reading event of that period was the diaries of Victor Klemperer—one of the great reading experiences of my life. It’s like if Proust were not about venal parties. It’s nonfiction, and takes place from 1933 to 1945 in Germany, from the point of view of a middle-age Jewish intellectual who survived it all out in the open, because he had a so-called Aryan wife who stood by him. He lived without having to go to a camp. And it’s so incredibly moving, because it’s a diary, so as he’s writing it, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. There are constant bits like, Hitler’s going to get voted out. He’s going to lose the war. Everybody secretly hates him, nobody takes this guy seriously. The Americans will be here next week. It’s the most magnificent book.

Because of that, I had it on the brain that it’s possible for a book to be truly good. And, not being Victor Klemperer, I thought—well, it’s not like he’s such a great writer, but he was unbelievably brave to do it at all, and his wife was unbelievably brave to smuggle his diary pages across town for safekeeping. Everybody was brave as shit to make this book exist. It makes you think writing books is not a complete waste of time, which is always a good starting point.

more here.

Robin McKie at The Guardian:

Once hailed as a source of electricity that would be too cheap to meter, atomic power has come a long way since the 1950s – mostly downhill. Far from being cost-free, nuclear-generated electricity is today more expensive than power produced by coal, gas, wind or solar plants while sites storing spent uranium and irradiated equipment litter the globe, a deadly radioactive legacy that will endure for hundreds of thousands of years. For good measure, most analysts now accept that the spread of atomic energy played a crucial role in driving nuclear weapon proliferation.

Then there are the disasters. Some of the world’s worst accidents have had nuclear origins and half a dozen especially egregious examples have been selected by Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy to support his thesis that atomic power is never going to be the energy saviour of our imperilled species.

more here.

Laura Spinney in The Guardian:

When the great library at Alexandria went up in flames, it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true. Exactly how the library met its end, and whether it even existed, have been subjects of speculation for more than 2,000 years. For two millennia, we’ve been haunted by the idea that what has been passed down to us might not be representative of the vast corpus of literature and knowledge that humans have created. It’s a fear that has only been confirmed by new methods for estimating the extent of the losses. 

The latest attempt was led by scholars Mike Kestemont and Folgert Karsdorp. The Ptolemies who created the library at Alexandria had a suitably pharaonic vision: to bring every book that had ever been written under one roof. Kestemont and Karsdorp had a more modest goal – to estimate the survival rate of manuscripts created in different parts of Europe during the middle ages.

Using a statistical method borrowed from ecology, called “unseen species” modelling, they extrapolated from what has survived to gauge how much hasn’t – working backwards from the distribution of manuscripts we have today in order to estimate what must have existed in the past. The numbers they published in Science magazine earlier this year don’t make for happy reading, but they corroborate figures arrived at by other methods. The researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd (also known as Siegfried) – have gone.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Digital stethoscopes provide better results compared to conventional methods to record and visualize modern auscultation. Current stethoscopes are bulky, non-conformal, and not suited for remote use, while motion artifacts can lead to inaccurate diagnosis. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Sung Hoon Lee and a research team in engineering, nanotechnology, and medicine at the Georgia Institute of Technology, U.S., and the Chungnam National University Hospital in the Republic of Korea described a class of methods to offer real-time, wireless, continuous auscultation. The devices are part of a soft wearable system for quantitative disease diagnosis across various pathologies. Using the soft device, Lee et al detected continuous cardiopulmonary sounds with minimal noise to characterize signal abnormalities in real-time.

The team conducted a clinical study with multiple patients and control subjects to understand the unique advantage of the wearable auscultation method, with integrated machine learning, to automate diagnoses of four types of disease in the lung, ranging from a crackle, to a wheeze, stridor and rhonchi, with 95% accuracy. The soft system is applicable for a sleep study to detect disordered breathing and to detect sleep apnea.

More here.

From The Point:

In this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith and Emily Thomas tackle the timely yet timeless question: “What is time?” Is time an external, objective fact, or is the flow and tempo of the world internal to us—in some sense, all in our head? Could a robot have consciousness even if it didn’t understand time?

More here.