Shelley Fan in Singularity Hub:

The first time I heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I thought it was a bad joke.

My incredulity soon turned to horror when I realized it’s real. The garbage patch, also known as the Pacific trash vortex, is a massive collection of debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Although made up of all sorts of human-generated waste, the main components are tiny pieces of microplastic. From straws to trash bags, we use an astonishing amount of plastic—which often ends up in delicate ocean (and other) ecosystems. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization for protecting endangered species based in Arizona, at current rates plastic is set to outweigh all fish in the ocean by 2050.

A new study wants to turn the tide with synthetic biology. By engineering genetic circuits into a bacterial “consortium,” the team reprogrammed two strains to not only destroy polluting plastics—but to also transform the toxic waste into useful biodegradable material. Environmentally friendly and versatile, these upcycled plastics can be used to manufacture foams, adhesives, or even nylon—all without further taxing the environment. The strategy isn’t just limited to the polyethylene terephthalate (PET)—one of the most common types of plastics—tested in the study, said the authors. “The underlying concept and strategies are potentially applicable…to other types of plastics” and could begin lighting the way toward  “a sustainable bioeconomy.”

More here.

Wiam El-Tamami in Granta:

Cairo. From my parents’ seventh-floor balcony I watch pigeons swoop and dive, as frantic as the city below them. Cairo is a relentless roar. A barrage of car horns, motors rushing and rumbling. Gangs of street dogs, barking, snarling, stalking the neighborhood. Scraping, drilling, grinding, vendors yelling out their wares, planes cleaving low through the sky. The air is an acrid haze, almost gritty, tinged with smoke.

There is a song about Cairo that my mother loves. It begins: ‘This is Cairo: the sorceress, the enchantress; the uproarious, the sleepless; the sheltering, the shameless.’ The whole song is an unfolding of love, of twisted tenderness, of impossibility – and all of it is true.

More here.

Patrick Honner in Quanta:

There’s a fun math problem here about how much space you need to turn your car around, and mathematicians have been working on an idealized version of it for over 100 years. It started in 1917 when the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed a problem that sounds a little like our traffic jam. Suppose you’ve got an infinitely thin needle of length 1. What’s the area of the smallest region in which you can turn the needle 180 degrees and return it to its original position? This is known as Kakeya’s needle problem, and mathematicians are still studying variations of it. Let’s take a look at the simple geometry that makes Kakeya’s needle problem so interesting and surprising.

More here.

Yi Fuxian at Project Syndicate:

China’s property sector is the largest asset class in the world – larger even than the US equity or bond market. But there are growing fears that it is a bubble poised to burst. Already, the heavily indebted Chinese property giant Evergrande has filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States, and the real-estate developer Country Garden is battling a liquidity crisis. The failure of either, or both, could well trigger a financial crisis.

But why did a property bubble emerge in the first place? Like so many other problems in China today, this one can be traced back to the one-child policy that the government adopted in 1980 – a decision that would fundamentally reshape the country’s economic, political, and diplomatic trajectory.

More here.

Elizabeth Corey in First Things:

Conservative commentators have long bemoaned the proliferation of “studies” fields in the university. Women’s and gender studies are well known, but now students can take courses in topics as unusual as “surf studies” and “fat studies.” Given all the boring lectures that undergraduates have endured throughout the ages, it’s amusing to note that this list now includes “boredom studies,” for which there is even a journal—the Journal of Boredom Studies. Anyone who has ever attended an academic conference will find some humor in its call for papers: “Submit a proposal for the 5^th boredom conference.”

Much of this literature runs to the mundane or quantitative, but Kevin Hood Gary’s insightful book reflects his immersion in theology, philosophy, and literature. This is really a book about liberal education, as indicated by its subtitle: “Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life.” If boredom is the problem, Gary argues, then the solution is learning how to be leisurely, in the classical sense.

More here.

Aparna Nathan in The Scientist:

Brain development is a carefully choreographed dance. Neurons develop specialized functions and, in small hops, move through the brain to get into the correct position. The chemical signals coursing through the resulting network allow animals to think, feel, and live. In neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), however, hundreds of mutations in the DNA can interrupt this process. But scientists still do not know how each of these mutations interrupts the neurons’ precise differentiation or migration patterns. Studying these defects directly in embryos or newborns is too dangerous, and other animal models may deviate from human development.

In a new study published in Nature, Sergiu Pașca, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, and his team combined assembloid technology with CRISPR gene editing to determine the role of neurodevelopmental disease genes during typical brain development and the mayhem that ensues when they are missing.

More here.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun at n+1:

I WAS AMONG MANY THAIS who celebrated the outcome of the federal elections this May, in which the Move Forward Party won the most seats in the House of Representatives—151 out of a possible 500 contested. My happiness was political, but also personal. The verdict made it seem that I could return to my home country, from which I’ve been banned since the 2014 coup, when the military and monarchy combined to overthrow Thailand’s last democratically elected government, led by Yingluck Shinawatra. My crime then was violating Article 112 of the Criminal Code, also known as lèse-majesté law, which stipulates that anyone defaming the monarchy could be imprisoned for up to fifteen years. I have long been a critic of the Thai conservative establishment, in particular the monarchy. As my following on social media grew, my writing and public statements struck the establishment as a threat. In the aftermath of the 2014 coup, the junta summoned me twice for “attitude adjustment.” I rejected the summons. Then they issued a warrant for my arrest and revoked my passport, forcing me to apply for a refugee status with Japan, where I have since been residing and teaching at Kyoto University. One of the Move Forward Party’s main campaign promises was to reform Article 112. For a few months this summer, then, it seemed my exile was set to end.

more here.

Jeff Dolven at Cabinet Magazine:

Consider how you hold a piece of chalk. Not by the handle: it doesn’t have one. Or, if it does, that handle is of the chalk’s own substance, flesh of its flesh, distinguishable only because it is the bit left in your hand when you can’t write anymore. A useless nub, or stub, or butt. Its persistence is a faint embarrassment, a remainder you don’t know what to do with—maybe you should stuff it in your pocket, or leave it in the tray with the erasers, or drop it on the floor and grind it into dust with your heel. It’s a waste, surely, just to throw it out. But it cannot be grafted onto another piece of chalk, not without gratuitous ingenuity, nor can it be used to hold anything else. It’s like the end of a pencil or of a filterless cigarette. Life is a midden of such abandoned handles. You didn’t even know they were handles, until they lost their grip and you were left holding them in a pinch, a pinch that can narrow, without your noticing, to contempt.

more here.

Poem

and greenhouse and topsoil and basil greens
and cowshit and snowfall and spinach knife
and woodsmoke and watering can and common thistle

and potato digger and peach trees
and poison parsnip and romaine hearts
and rockpiles and spring trilliums and ramp circles

what song of grassblade
what creak of dark rustle tree
and blueblack wind from the north

this vetch this grapevine
this waterhose this mosspatch

sunflower gardens in the lowland
dog graves between the apple trees

this fistfull of onion tops
this garlic laid silent in the barn
this green this green this green

sweet cucumber leaf
sweet yellow bean

and all this I try to make a human shape
the darkness regenerating a shadow of a limb

my tongue embraces the snap pea
and so it is sweet

how does the rusted golfcart in the chickweed
inform my daily breath

I’m sorry I want to say
to the unhearing spaces
between the dogwood trees

for my tiny little life
I have pressed into
your bruising green skin

by Lucy Walker
from Pank Magazine

Sandra Newman in The Guardian:

AK Blakemore’s second novel is inspired by the real life story of Tarare, a showman in 18th-century France who made his living by demonstrating a prodigious ability to devour things: heaps of fruit, corks, stones, live animals, offal. Born to a peasant family, by his teens he was able to eat his own weight in meat in a day and was driven from home lest he ruin his parents. He became a street performer in Paris during the revolutionary period, and in the wars that followed he was a soldier and briefly a spy.

This is clearly a tale that begs to be fictionalised, and it’s hard to think of a better writer to do it than Blakemore. Her debut, The Manningtree Witches, about the witch-hunts of 17th-century England, won the Desmond Elliott prize and was shortlisted for the Costa. It was lauded for the extravagant beauty of its language, full of wild wordplay and precise imagery, and her vision of the period felt both accurate and vividly new, in the manner of the greatest historical fiction. Blakemore and Tarare seem like an unbeatable combination.

Indeed, The Glutton is remarkable for its beautiful language, for its hallucinatory imagery, and for its ability to mingle these things with the world of 18th-century poor folk.

More here.

Malmesbury at Telescopic Turnip:

It’s pretty clear that, on a direct one-v-one cage match, an asexual organism would have much better fitness than a similarly-shaped sexual organism. And yet, all the macroscopic species, including ourselves, do it. What gives?

Here is the secret: yes, sex is indeed bad for reproduction. It does not improve an individual’s reproductive fitness. The reason it still took over the macroscopic world is that evolution does not simply select for reproductive fitness.

Instead, the evolution of sexual dimorphism is a long sequence of strange traps, ratchets and outer-world eldritch cosmic forces that made it somehow inevitable. So let’s talk about those things your parents never told you about.

More here.

Yascha Mounk in the New York Times:

Mr. Trump and others on the right deride the new norms as “woke,” a term with strongly pejorative connotations. I prefer a more neutral phrase, which emphasizes that this ideology focuses on the role that groups play in society and draws on a variety of intellectual influences such as postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory: the “identity synthesis.”

Does it make sense to speak out against the well-intentioned, if wrongheaded, ideas that are circulating in progressive circles at a time when Mr. Trump retains a serious chance of winning back the White House? Is there a way to oppose such practices without turning a blind eye to genuine discrimination or falling for conspiracy theories? In short: Is it possible to argue against the identity synthesis without falling into the reactionary trap?

Yes, yes and yes.

More here.

Charon Collier in Newsweek:

In the quiet corner of a dimly lit hospice room, I stood beside my friend Diane and her son Hans, also one of my dearest friends, who was journeying home. I told Diane to rest as she moved over, and I continued holding Hans’ hand, as I watched Diane rest. The room was filled with a sense of peace and acceptance. At this moment, I realized I was no longer a hospice volunteer. I was living my purpose as a death doula, accompanying souls as they gracefully depart this world. My death doula journey began several years ago when I started as a hospice volunteer. I had no experience in end-of-life care, but I did possess a strong desire to become a better human being.

I recognized that there were people in the world facing much greater challenges than I was. I was young, healthy, educated, and had a decent income. It was in this moment of reflection that I realized how grateful I was for my life and how I could contribute to making the world a better place while shifting the focus away from myself.

More here.

Benji Jones in Vox:

With giant pincers and rough, spider-like legs, Caribbean king crabs don’t look like your typical heroes. Yet these crustaceans may be key to solving one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems: the decline of coral reefs. In recent decades, warming seas, diseases, and other threats have wiped out half of the world’s corals and 90 percent of those in Florida. And this past summer, the problem accelerated. A devastating heat wave struck the Caribbean, pushing the reef in the Florida Keys — the largest in the continental US — closer to the brink of collapse. The decline of coral reefs is an enormous problem for wildlife and human communities. Reefs not only provide habitat for as much as a quarter of all marine life, including commercial fish, but they also help safeguard coastal communities during severe storms. Simply put, we need coral reefs.

Coral reefs, meanwhile, need crabs.

Lucky for them, help is on the way. Scientists are in the process of building a crab army — hundreds of thousands of crustaceans strong — that they’ll unleash on Florida’s reefs, giving this ailing ecosystem a tool to fight back.

More here.

Charlotte Shane at Bookforum:

BRIAN WILSON HAS BEEN DEAF IN HIS RIGHT EAR since childhood. He mixed the Beach Boys’ albums, including Pet Sounds, in mono because he couldn’t hear them any other way. “It was sort of like being robbed of something, some pleasure of life,” he said in 1976. “I’m not complaining, but it’s a little bit of a setback.” I think the deafness might explain why the left side of his mouth reaches up when he speaks, like he’s addressing his good ear. (The affect has become more pronounced with age, but it’s visible in footage from the 1960s.) “I got one ear left and your big loud voice is killin’ it,” Brian yelled at his father and former band manager, Murry Wilson, during 1965’s “Help Me, Rhonda” recording session. Murry, drunk but not untrue to his sober form, had been berating the guys for almost forty minutes as they tried to get down the vocals.

While Brian’s hearing loss is undisputed, its cause has never been confirmed. In his second, most recent autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, Brian says another kid hit him in the head with a lead pipe.

more here.

Anthony Cummins at Literary Review:

Zadie Smith’s first historical novel spins a tangled web around the knotty case of the Tichborne claimant, a long-running legal saga that divided Victorian Britain. The book’s title, The Fraud, ostensibly refers to Arthur Orton, a butcher who, in 1866, claimed (falsely, in the eyes of the law) that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, an aristocratic heir long presumed lost at sea. Yet in Smith’s crowded narrative – crafted to imply that the much-debated phenomena of polarisation and disinformation are hardly new – the frauds multiply, the titular slur clinging to everything from writing novels (for Smith, always a suspicious enterprise) to neoliberal economics.

Orton’s case serves largely as a backdrop for emotional drama in the household of another real-life figure, William Harrison Ainsworth, a contemporaneous author of bestselling potboilers who is now forgotten and, the novel shows, fell into neglect in his own lifetime, overshadowed by Charles Dickens and even reckoned by one of his publishers to have died before he actually did.

more here.