Jacob Mchangama in Persuasion:

In 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt, serving as the first Chairperson of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, was involved in a bitter dispute about the limits of free speech. Stalin’s Soviet Union fought tooth and nail to ensure that states should not only be permitted, but obliged to prohibit “hate speech” under international human rights law. Roosevelt issued a stark warning, as she found the Soviet proposal “extremely dangerous.” It would “only encourage Governments to punish all criticisms in the name of protection against religious or national hostility,” and she warned the commission “not to include… any provision likely to be exploited by totalitarian States for the purpose of rendering the other articles null and void.”

Fast forward to July 12, 2023, and a majority of the United Nations Human Rights Council proved Roosevelt prophetic. It did so by adopting a resolution that drives a stake through Roosevelt’s vision of an international human rights system that protects oppressed citizens against their oppressive governments.

More here.

Joy Williams at Bookforum:

The Quick and the Dead, which is not set in Florida but in the West, is one of the weirdest, funniest, darkest novels you’ll ever read. It lost the 2001 Pulitzer Prize to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, thus fulfilling the promise of Luke 4:24. Williams’s new novel, Harrow, is Quick’s spiritual successor, perhaps even sequel, taking up that novel’s concerns and amplifying them by the full twenty years it took her to write it. Harrow reminds me very much of Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but, with apologies to the boys, it’s better than both of their novels put together. Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction, even as it refuses the basic premise (human survival is important) and the sentimental rays of hope (another world is possible!) that are the hallmarks of the genre. This novel doesn’t care who you vote for or if you recycle. It’s not bullish on green tech jobs or sustainable meat. It would leave Steven “Things Are Getting Better” Pinker and Matthew “One Billion Americans” Yglesias writhing in shame if guys like them were capable of reading novels or feeling shame. Harrow is a crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of uncompromised originality and vision. For all of its fragmentation and deliberate strategies of estrangement, Harrow feels coherent and complete, like a single long-form thought or a religious epiphany. It’s also funny as hell.

more here.

Holly Root-Gutteridge at Aeon Magazine:

After hundreds of hours listening to thousands of wolves for my PhD, the difference between howls was obvious. The voice of a Russian wolf was nothing like that of a Canadian, and a jackal was so utterly different again that it was like listening to Farsi and French. I believed that there must be geographic and subspecies distinctions. Other researchers had made this proposition before, but no one had put together a large enough collection of howls to test it properly. A few years later, my degree finished, I told my Dracula story to the zoologist Arik Kershenbaum at the University of Cambridge. He promptly suggested we explore how attuned to wolves I really am. Are there differences between canid species and subspecies and, if so, could these reflect diverging cultures?

When animals call to each other, they are communicating in a single stream of information from caller to listener. Until modern recording technology was invented, any acoustic communication lasted only as long as the echo.

more here.

Lilly Tozer in Nature:

A study that followed thousands of people over 25 years has identified proteins linked to the development of dementia if their levels are unbalanced during middle age. The findings, published in Science Translational Medicine on 19 July¹, could contribute to the development of new diagnostic tests, or even treatments, for dementia-causing diseases. Most of the proteins have functions unrelated to the brain.

“We’re seeing so much involvement of the peripheral biology decades before the typical onset of dementia,” says study author Keenan Walker, a neuroscientist at the US National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland. Equipped with blood samples from more than 10,000 participants, Walker and his colleagues questioned whether they could find predictors of dementia years before its onset by looking at a person’s proteome — the collection of all the proteins expressed throughout the body. They searched for any signs of dysregulation — when proteins are at levels much higher or lower than normal.

The samples were collected as part of an ongoing study that began in 1987. Participants returned for examination six times over three decades, and during this time, around 1 in 5 of them developed dementia. The researchers found 32 proteins that, if dysregulated in people aged 45 to 60, were strongly associated with an elevated chance of developing dementia in later life. It is unclear how exactly these proteins might be involved in the disease, but the link is “highly unlikely to be due to just chance alone”, says Walker.

More here.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Life finds a way.

That’s the conclusion of a new study in Nature, which pitted synthetic bacterial cells against the force of evolution. Stripped down to a skeletal genetic blueprint, the artificial cells started with a losing hand for survival. Yet they thrived, evolving at a rate nearly 40 percent faster than their non-minimal counterparts. Over 2,000 generations, the streamlined cells regained their evolutionary fitness—the ability to survive, grow, and reproduce—that was initially lost after removing a large portion of their genes. The results could herald a next generation of synthetic bacteria that pump out insulin and other life-saving medications, produce biofuels, or bio-degrade hazardous chemicals—by tapping into, rather than fighting against, the power of evolution.

The crux was landing on a set of mutated genes that gave the minimal cell an advantage. The same technique might further refine artificial cells by guiding how next generations develop. Practical uses aside, we can now peek into natural selection itself. “It appears there’s something about life that’s really robust,” said study author Dr. Jay Lennon at Indiana University Bloomington. “We can simplify it down to just the bare essentials, but that doesn’t stop evolution from going to work.”

More here.

Listening to the Harvest

Harvest sounds hearty, sounds sure of itself — sounds like the record, sounds like “Heart of Gold,” but even then, Neil sings that it’s the searching for the heart of gold, and the more I harvest the more I realize I am searching, it is work: it is being harvested by insects, poked by thorny leaves, discerning the green of a bean from the green of a leaf, determining the shine on the skin of a jeweled eggplant — it’s finding everything in its exact time, plucking it from this into that; playing god, obeying God; in service of the harvest, on my knees, leaning into the garden, really prostrate before the growth, in adoration of the land — I learn to reap without violence; listen without taking; I yield in more and more colors. Eat with the salt of each season.
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by Lauren Turner
from The Ecotheo Review

Başak Çandar in Literary Hub:

“The problem that troubles the novelist [is] how to justify a concern with morally dubious people in a contemptible activity,” notes South African writer J. M. Coetzee, “ … how to treat something that, in truth, because it is offered like the Gorgon’s head to terrorize the populace and paralyze resistance, deserves to be ignored.” Here, in the essay “Into the Dark Chamber,” Coetzee points out that literature exposing political terror—in this case, torture, the existence of which is repeatedly denied by repressive regimes—can actually become an inadvertent tool of that terror.

We might assume that literature can be mobilized to resist oppression by exposing it. But, what Coetzee emphasizes is that, in exposing the crimes, literature can also replicate the terms of the “game” and intensify fear, quashing the possibility of resistance—in part what torture is designed to do. For Coetzee, then, the “true challenge” for the novelist becomes “how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one’s own terms.”

More here.

Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker:

“How does this indictment affect his candidacy?” Bill Hemmer, of Fox News, asked the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley last week. The candidacy in question was, of course, that of former President Donald Trump. The indictment being discussed was one that Trump, in a Truth Social post last week, said he expected any day after receiving a so-called target letter from the special counsel Jack Smith, on charges related to Trump’s actions in the prelude to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. It would be his third criminal indictment in about four months. And, Haley told Hemmer, “it’s going to keep on going. I mean, the rest of this primary election is going to be in reference to Trump, it’s going to be about lawsuits, it’s going to be about legal fees, it’s going to be about judges, and it’s just going to continue to be a further and further distraction.”

Haley is herself running for the Republican nomination, so perhaps what she means is that Trump’s legal troubles are a distraction from her own campaign, or from the picture she wishes voters had of the Republican Party. “We can’t keep dealing with this drama, we can’t keep dealing with the negativity,” she said. (One wonders how she managed to spend almost two years in Trump’s Cabinet, as the Ambassador to the United Nations.) And yet, in a crowded primary field, Trump is polling around fifty per cent, while his closest competitor, Ron DeSantis, comes in at roughly twenty. Haley is hovering at about five per cent, somewhere between Senator Tim Scott and former Vice-President Mike Pence. Trump, for all his drama, isn’t a distraction from what the G.O.P. is; in many ways, he is the G.O.P. And the various cases against Trump aren’t a distraction preventing people from assessing him. Instead, they provide an almost encyclopedic guide to his political and personal character.

Haley is right that the cases, criminal and civil, are going to keep on coming.

More here.

Lindsey Liles in Garden & Gun:

The bird has many names, often divinely inspired: the Lord God Bird, the Lazarus Bird, the Ghost Bird, the Grail Bird. Bobby Harrison is a religious man, but he doesn’t like any of them. He prefers to call it what it is: an ivory-billed woodpecker. “Well,” he says with a shrug, “it is just a bird, after all.”

That might seem like an undersell for someone who on this steaming August day is preparing to shove off into the humid, murky shade of an Arkansas swamp on his two-thousandth-plus search for the ivorybill, whose last-agreed-upon sighting in the United States occurred in 1944. But Harrison’s undersell has the ring of the believer: To him, the ivorybill is, like any other bird, made of hollow bones, feathers, a bill. It doesn’t have celestial powers; it’s not a messenger from on high. Instead, it’s still out in the Southern wilds, doing bird things, flying around as it always has. Harrison will tell you all this because he’s seen one. Other people will tell you, very firmly, that he has not—and the clock is now ticking for him to persuade them otherwise.

More here.

Nilanjana S Roy at her own website:

I have learned much about your world in the three months since my form changed. That you swim in an ocean of language. Words pour from your mouths, your screens. Your cities are brightly lit and never silent, but you speak so much and so often, you have forgotten what it is to rest in quietness. The moon’s passage across the skies means nothing to you, carries no messages of comfort or danger. The earth’s speech, its invitations and enchantments, its tremors and its warnings, the whispers of tree roots snaking underneath the surface of your roads and apartments, these are lost to most of you. I have learned that you fear darkness and never seek to explore its many gifts. You can see, hear, feel, speak, but you do not live in your senses. You live like so many leaves in the storm, blown here, blown there.

I am a service provider, to use your language.

I provide a service, a rare and merciful one, to those who are too exhausted to run, whose blood has already grown cold in their veins, who have become too deadened to live.

More here.

Mary Retta at Teen Vogue:

The president of Stanford University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, recently announced his impending resignation after the university’s board of trustees found data manipulations in academic papers he co-authored. Though there reportedly were rumors of manipulated information in those papers, Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, officially broke the story in November 2022. Then, on July 17, a report from the university’s board of trustees that reviewed 12 papers — five where Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author — concluded that while he “did not have any knowledge of any manipulation of research data” and either “was not in a position where a reasonable scientist would be expected to have detected any such misconduct” or “was not reckless in failing to identify such manipulation prior to publication,” he also “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record.” The report also mentioned that Tessier-Lavigne “has not been able to provide an adequate explanation” for why he did not correct the scientific record on multiple occasions after concerns were raised.

More here.

David Shariatmadari in The Guardian:

Professor Russell Foster CBE, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford, has some relationship advice. One of the things he’s asked most often at public talks is what to do if your partner snores. First, check with your doctor if a serious condition like sleep apnoea might be to blame. Second, get some ear plugs. Third: “If you have an alternative sleeping space, then use it. It’s not a reflection of the quality of your relationship. I would say that in many cases, it’s the beginning of a better one. You’ll be more rested, you’ll be less irritated with your partner, you’ll probably have a better sense of humour, you’ll have more empathy. You’ll have more fun.”

Is he speaking from personal experience? “Perhaps … ” Who’s the snorer in his marriage? “We’ll gloss over that,” he says with a chuckle. And what about so-called chronotypes – whether you’re a lark or an owl. Can a mixed marriage work? Oh yes, he says, again drawing from personal experience (he’s an “evening type”, while his wife, Lizzie, likes to get up early). The data actually suggests that these kinds of partnerships tend to last longer. “Now my cynical colleagues say that’s because you don’t see much of each other. I prefer the explanation that if you can accommodate your partner’s sleep habits, then actually, it shows you have a reasonably flexible disposition. And then all the other crap that is thrown at you in a relationship can be [dealt with] appropriately.”

More here.

Odometer

We glance always at this little
window of the slowest slot machine
to calendar our progress out.
The meter not ticking is active
just the same, summing up distance
toward the big question, the rollers
marking off ground and still counting.
We’re happy no matter how far
gone, to be clocking off the miles,
to keep on breaking our own record
of progress, to make the old wreck
go another revolution
of the thousand wheel, and the ten,
as one candy-size roll of our
numbers turns up another ten times
slower until they all turn up,
in the ode to travel, zero
zero zero zero zero
as it was in the beginning.

by Robert Morgan
from The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat
University of North Carolina Press, 1994

Alejandra Manjarrez in The Scientist:

Although they are rare, noninherited mutations can have a large impact. According to a new study published in Cell Genomics, somatic mutations occurring during early development of the human embryo may contribute to some cases of schizophrenia.¹ Specifically, the authors found recurrent mutations disrupting two genes, one of which previously linked to the disorder.

The mutations discovered by the research team are “rare variants that affect a few people but may have a very large effect size,” said Thomas Burne, a neuroscientist at the Queensland Brain Institute who did not participate in this study. Burne noted that this is not going to explain how people develop schizophrenia in general, but it might be important for precision medicine and for prompting future discoveries.

Somatic mutations contribute to other psychiatric disorders such as autism and focal epilepsy.^2,3 “It seemed like it was worth exploring whether something similar might be going on in schizophrenia,” said Christopher Walsh, a neurogeneticist at the Boston Children’s Hospital and coauthor of the paper. To test this hypothesis, Walsh and his colleagues analyzed the genomes of blood samples from 12,834 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and compared them with samples from 11,648 control individuals.

More here.

Grace Tyrrell in BBC:

Barbie can do it all. In Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film, she appears as a US president, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, a Supreme Court Justice and even a mermaid. The movie reflects the many roles the doll has had over the decades. One of her most famous is as a space explorer. In the 1960s, Astronaut Barbie was transporting children on space adventures even before Nasa’s own astronauts had taken their first steps on the Moon and 13 years before Nasa began accepting female astronauts into their programme.

Now Barbie has been helping space exploration for real. In recent experiments, scientists used the dolls to test methods of removing Moon dust from spacesuits. Wearing a tailor-made spacesuit, Barbie was coated in volcanic ash by a team from Washington State University and sprayed with liquid nitrogen. They found this technique is more effective than previous cleaning methods.

Why is lunar dust a problem? Moon dust is “ubiquitous, abrasive and electrically charged”, according to Ian Wells, a graduate researcher at Washington State University, who was speaking to the BBC World Service programme Unexpected Elements. These “annoyingly clingy” microscopic particles statically stick to the spacesuits of astronauts and are difficult to clean off. During the Apollo missions, astronauts were unable to remove the dust using standard brushes, resulting in damage to the seals on their spacesuits.

More here.

Arun Gupta in Dissent:

I lead food and history tours around New York City. On a recent tour, I was asked a simple question. Why might the same dish—a sandwich, a slice of pizza, a plate of dumplings—cost three or four times more in one restaurant than in another restaurant a block or two away, and the cheaper version tastes much better?

The question came up in Manhattan’s historic Chinatown while a group of us ate pork and chive, chicken and mushroom, and pork and cabbage dumplings. Everyone agreed they were superb. The skins were silky and gently chewy, the fillings juicy, well-seasoned, and packed with aromatics like chives and ginger. And they avoided the three fatal flaws of dumplings: thick and doughy wrappers, torn skins, and opening when boiled, all signs of poor craftsmanship.

The restaurant was bare bones and dingy. One person said, “I would normally never go into a place like this. How can the food be so good in such a dump?”

The spot, Shu Jiao Fu Zhou, a Fujianese joint on Grand Street near Eldridge, sells six dumplings for $3. Not far away, across Houston Street, lots of restaurants serve dumplings. But six dumplings can cost $15, and they won’t be as tasty as what we ate.

The reason for this divergence in price and quality comes down to how migration, labor and immigration laws, supply chains, and culture all interrelate.

More here.