Santiago Zabala and Claudio Gallo at Aljazeera:

The question that defined 2021 was perhaps the one Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, famously posed to Jesus in the Gospel of John: what is truth? Indeed, all the most debated issues of this dire year from vaccines to fake news were in the end about “verity”. Far beyond postmodernity, we appeared to have lost the shared set of values that constituted the mainframe of our societies in the past. This is not necessarily wrong. Philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger pointed out how traditional values systems are undermined by too-rigid structures for history. These structures, whether scientific or economical, are always shaped by epochs and societies that determine their outcomes. So as we enter a new year, the question about truth becomes: who can we trust in 2022?

We must put aside any pretence of immutability and search for an answer inside history. But in this effort, we cannot leave our lives in the hands of experts only, even though languages of techno-science do require in-depth knowledge of a hyper-specialised curriculum.

More here.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

One week ago, E. O. Wilson—the legendary naturalist and conservationist, and man who was universally acknowledged to know more about ants than anyone else in human history—passed away at age 92. A mere three days later, Scientific American—or more precisely, the zombie clickbait rag that now flaunts that name—published a shameful hit-piece, smearing Wilson for his “racist ideas” without, incredibly, so much as a single quote from Wilson, or any other attempt to substantiate its libel (see also this response by Jerry Coyne). SciAm‘s Pravda-like attack included the following extraordinary sentence, which I thought worthy of Alan Sokal’s Social Text hoax:

The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.

There are intellectually honest people who don’t know what the normal distribution is. There are no intellectually honest people who, not knowing what it is, figure that it must be something racist.

On Twitter, Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief now running SciAm into the ground, described her magazine’s calumny against Wilson as “insightful” (the replies, including from Richard Dawkins, are fun to read). I suppose it was as “insightful” as SciAm‘s disgraceful attack last year on Eric Lander, President Biden’s ultra-competent science advisor and a leader in the war on COVID, for … being a white male, which appears to have been E. O. Wilson’s crime as well. (Think I must be misrepresenting the “critique” of Lander? Read it!)

More here.

Noah Smith in his Substack newsletter, Noahpinion:

This blog started out a year ago as an explicitly techno-optimist blog, and I feel like I’ve gotten away from that a little bit. This isn’t because I’m less optimistic about technology, but because it’s very easy to get distracted by stuff like economic policy, social unrest, China’s economy, Covid, and so on. But it’s time to go back to my roots a little here.

It’s still too early to tell whether we’ll get the Roaring Twenties that some have predicted. There are certainly reasons for doubt. After a great first quarter, labor productivity is now actually falling, due mostly to supply chain snarls disrupting production, but also possibly due to Covid variants and the uncertain and chaotic process of workers partially returning to the office. Goldman Sachs, one of the early proponents of the Roaring Twenties thesis, is now forecasting anemic growth in the year ahead.

More here.

Esperanza of Manila

You, who rescued a boy-afflicted cat
from perishing in the gutters, toweling
its oiled pelt clean. Who rushed
a hound to the spigots to wash away
toad venom from its shocked mouth.
Who saved a blot of Dalmatians
from the chafe of pet store chains
and named them after pharaohs’ glittering
cities. Who tended to a canary in egg-
binding agony, careful not to crush
its juddered breast. Who released
a pigeon from its jailing grate, geckos
from dosed rooms. O holy steward,
minister to all living beings, pray for us
now as we tend to your feral body.

by Christina Loyd
from the Echotheo Review

Shilpi Suneja in Guernica:

My very first period came to me like a stranger on a train. My parents and I were taking an overnight sleeper from Delhi to Bombay to visit my paternal grandmother. Because of a feud between her and my mother, Dadi and I had never met, but the stories I’d heard had already caused me to fear her more than anyone else in the world. Perhaps it was the dread of seeing her that sent my organs into overdrive, but sometime around the break of dawn I felt the urge to pee, and even though using a toilet on an Indian train is an exercise in an extreme form of Buddhist tolerance, I had my mother rush me there. I lifted my shirt, and from the folds of my ochre salwar, a blossoming field of red stared back.

I was convinced that sometime during the night, while we were sleeping, a man had snuck into our compartment on the train, entered my body, and punctured my delicate innards. I was thirteen and obsessed with Nancy Drew; I believed I could solve the mystery of my body’s behavior like my auburn-haired hero, by making a list of all possible suspects. By then I’d already been molested more times than I had fingers on my hands. Strange men had offered me their penises behind bushes, watchmen at chai stalls had aimed stones at my breasts with remarkable precision, and a family friend, a boy just a few years older, had explored my vagina with his teeth. What if the man came back to finish the job? I’d have to make sure I wasn’t alone for the rest of the journey.

More here.

Sara Harrison in Wired:

JUST AS MEDICAL care has evolved from bloodletting to germ theory, the medical spaces patients inhabit have transformed too. Today, architects and designers are trying to find ways to make hospitals more comfortable, in the hopes that relaxing spaces will lead to better recovery. But building for healing involves just as much empathy as it does synthesizing cold, hard data. “Part of the best care might be keeping people calm, giving them space to be alone—things that might seem frivolous but are really important,” says Annmarie Adams, a professor at McGill University who studies the history of hospital architecture.

In the 19th century, famed nurse Florence Nightingale popularized the pavilion plan, which featured wards: big rooms with long rows of beds, large windows, lots of natural light, and plenty of cross-ventilation. These designs were informed by the theory that dank indoor spaces spread disease. But wards offered almost no privacy for patients and required plenty of space, something that became difficult to find in increasingly dense cities. They also meant a lot of walking for nurses, who had to trudge up and down the aisles.

Over the next century, that focus on natural light faded in favor of prioritizing sterile spaces that would limit the spread of germs and accommodate a growing raft of medical equipment. After World War I, the new norm was to cluster patients’ rooms around a nurses’ station. These designs were easier on nurses, who no longer had to trek long corridors, and they were cheaper to heat and build. But they retained some of the trappings of older-style residential treatment facilities, like sanatoria where patients would convalesce for long periods of time; both mimicked fancy hotels with ornate lobbies and fine food, measures intended to convince middle-class people that “they were better off in hospitals than at home when seriously ill,” Adams wrote in a 2016 article on hospital architecture for the Canadian Medical Association Journal. This design, she argued, was meant to give people faith in the institution: “a tool of persuasion, rather than healing.”

In the late 1940s and 1950s, hospitals transformed again, this time becoming office-like buildings without frills or many features meant to improve the experience of being there. “It was really designed to be operational and efficient,” says Jessie Reich, director of patient experience and magnet programs for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Many of these rooms had no windows at all, she points out.

More here.

contributors at Atlas Obscura:

In 1995, world-famous Russian mathematician Vladimir Igorevich Arnold proposed that a class of convex, homogeneous bodies, which, when resting on a flat surface have only one stable and only one unstable point of equilibrium, must exist. (In unstable equilibrium, the body will fall out of equilibrium no matter how you push it). A few years later in 2006, his idea was proven by Hungarian scientists, Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi, by constructing a physical example. Meet Gömböc.

Gömböc is basically one of the cutest superstars of mathematics. Its name comes from gömb, which means “sphere” in Hungarian.

more here.

Alastair Wilson at berfrois:

Suppose we ask: where did spacetime itself arise from? Then we can go on turning the clock yet further back, into the truly ancient “Planck epoch” – a period so early in the universe’s history that our best theories of physics break down. This era occurred only one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. At this point, space and time themselves became subject to quantum fluctuations. Physicists ordinarily work separately with quantum mechanics, which rules the microworld of particles, and with general relativity, which applies on large, cosmic scales. But to truly understand the Planck epoch, we need a complete theory of quantum gravity, merging the two.

We still don’t have a perfect theory of quantum gravity, but there are attempts – like string theory and loop quantum gravity. In these attempts, ordinary space and time are typically seen as emergent, like the waves on the surface of a deep ocean.

more here.

Stephanos Papadopoulos in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

On the acknowledgments page at the end of Homero Aridjis’s recently translated novel, Smyrna in Flames, the author admits:

“Almost a hundred years after the atrocities committed by Kemalist forces against Christians; before the demented pyromania of those who reduced Smyrna, the City of Tolerance, to ashes, along with its inhabitants; before the delirium of destruction that possessed the Turks during those days in September 1922, I still cannot find the words to explain, to myself or to others, the Turkish genocide of Asia Minor.”

Aridjis is not alone in this predicament, even after more than 100 pages of prose, the tragedy of the Greek Genocide (1914–’22) remains inexplicable. Few have been able to fully grasp the murderous scale of the events, paired with modern Turkey’s blanket denial, and the complete indifference of much of the rest of the world. But the facts remain: in the early century, Atatürk’s plan to unify the fractured Ottoman Empire under a modern Turkish regime resulted in the systematic extermination of its indigenous Pontic Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian citizens, whose people had lived in Asia Minor for millennia. What began as the Armenian Genocide in 1915 culminated in the forced deportations and final massacre of Pontic Greeks during the burning of Smyrna in 1922.

More here.

David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters in The Guardian:

Individual experiences and suffering are, of course, at the heart of the pandemic. But one way to understand what has happened is through putting those experiences together – and statistics are those personal stories writ large. And this pandemic has brought unprecedented demand to explain all the numbers that have been flying around.

This has not been without its problems and we’ve had to learn some hard lessons, such as the journalistic skill of brevity. Since January 2021, we’ve been writing a weekly column in this paper about Covid numbers, covering everything from infections to deaths, vaccines to mental health, masks to lockdowns.

It can be frustrating not being able to show all the graphs, but the same holds for radio and TV interviews and More or Less on Radio 4 has shown how much can be done to explain statistics without visual aids. Mathematical formulae and technical jargon need to be avoided, but we have also had to be sparing with numbers, which is harder when they are so precious to us.

More here.

Robert B. Talisse in The Conversation:

Polarization looms large in many diagnoses of America’s current political struggles. Some researchers warn of an approaching “tipping point” of irreversible polarization. Suggested remedies are available from across the partisan spectrum.

There are two types of polarization, as I discuss in my book “Sustaining Democracy.” One isn’t inherently dangerous; the other can be. And together, they can be extremely destructive of democratic societies.

More here.

My Mother

My mother writes from Trenton,
a comedian to the bone
but underneath, serious
and all heart. “Honey,” she says
“be a mensch and Mary too,
it’s no good to worry, you
are doing the best you can
your Dad and everyone
thinks you turned out very well
as long as you pay your bills
nobody can say a word
you can tell them to drop dead
so save a dollar it can’t
hurt—remember Frank you went
to highschool with? he still lives
with his wife’s mother, his wife
works while he writes his books and
did he ever sell a one
the four kids run around naked
36 and he’s never had,
you’ll forgive my expression,
even a pot to piss in
or a window to throw it,
such a smart boy he couldn’t
read the footprints on the wall
honey you think you know all
the answers you don’t, please try
to put some money away
believe me it wouldn’t hurt
artist shmartist life’s too short
for that kind of, forgive me,
horseshit, I know what you want
better than you, all that counts
is to make a good living
and the best of everything,
as Sholem Aleichem said
he was a great writer did
you ever read his books dear,
you should make what he makes a year
anyway he says someplace
Poverty is no disgrace
but it’s no honor either
that’s what I say,
…………………..love,
…………………………..Mother”

by Robert Mezey
from Naked Poetry
Bobbs-Merrill, 1969

Theresa Barger in Discover:

During her first year of college, Elaina Cosentino bought a fitness band and began walking 10,000 steps a day. Through a friendly competition with friends, she kept it up for four years. But during her first semester of graduate school, her routine changed and she fell out of the habit. Then her mother passed away between her first and second semesters, and it “truly took everything out of me to just get up and go to class,” says Cosentino, a physical therapist.  “I did go for an occasional mind-clearing walk every now and then during that time, as walking was something familiar to me and I always loved the way I felt afterwards.” 

But the combined pressures of “the weight of the pandemic, not having family around, going through grad school virtually and still going through the grieving process” drove the Rhode Island resident to search for something more consistent. “When I went back to walking every day, reforming the habit was bringing myself back down to Earth. It’s the one thing I can control every day.”  The two major components necessary to start and stick to a habit are ease and reward, says research psychologist Wendy Wood, author of the book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, who has studied habits for three decades.  “If you’re trying to repeat a behavior, then willpower and motivation are not really the way to go. They’re what start you but they’re not going to help you persist,” she says. “Habits are not part of our conscious thought.”

By contrast, New Year’s resolutions are often touted by gyms or weight loss companies trying to sell memberships — and can be particularly tricky to adhere to. Starting a habit and sticking to it has to come from you, not external forces. We can’t fight human nature, but we change our behavior by understanding it. And while study results vary on how long it takes to form a habit, on average, according to research published in the British Journal of General Practice in 2012, forming a new habit takes 66 days.  So what’s the secret to getting through the months-long process and forging lasting, healthy habits?

More here.

From Nature:

It seemed like a very promising cancer immunotherapy lead. CHO Pharma, in Taiwan, had discovered that it was possible to target solid tumours with an antibody against a cell-surface glycolipid called SSEA-4.¹ This antigen is present during embryonic development, but not seen on human cells again — until they turn into cancer cells.² The company turned to Lan Bo Chen, a recently retired Harvard pathologist, to help develop this work into an anti-cancer therapy for solid tumours. “It is highly reasonable to imagine that we can use SSEA-4, overexpressed on cancer cells, as a target for CAR-T,” says Chen, now in his role as senior technology advisor for CHO Pharma.

CAR-T therapy works by genetically engineering a person’s own T cells in such a way that they recognize and attack cancer cells. This involves creating a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) from an antibody against a target on the cell. But CAR-T therapy was designed for blood cancers so it needs several adaptations to make it suitable for the treatment of solid tumours.³ The cells need to be directed to the site of the tumour, survive in the tumour’s local microenvironment, and act only on tumour cells, not on healthy cells nearby. But, when Chen tried to create CAR-T cells against SSEA-4, he hit a few obstacles. First it took him a long time to get his hands on a humanized SSEA-4 antibody suitable for adaptation. When he finally had one, he still had to find a way to turn that antibody into a CAR. And then to insert the CAR into a human T cell using lentiviral transduction.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmzVRe_JYws

Lisa Borst at n+1:

Eggers is hardly a systems novelist: his literary sensibilities, like his career, tend toward the monomaniacal. His writing in the past two decades has involved a suspiciously prolific series of smug morality tales fictionalizing or nonfictionalizing real people—a heroic Sudanese refugee, a heroic Yemeni coffee importer later accused of racketeering, Donald Trump—as well as novels about loners in perilous circumstances. He has also written children’s books, left-of-center comedic op-eds, and articles for the New Yorker about human rights and how much he loves wine. But evident throughout his literary output, as in his incoherent and self-congratulatory apparatus of publishing programs, bookselling platforms, and children’s literacy programs, is an ongoing fascination with epic, world-conquering ambition. The characters in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I was embarrassed to reread, are “sure that we are on to something epochal . . . sure that we speak for others, that we speak for millions”; in his 2006 foreword to Infinite Jest, Eggers lingers, enviously and, I think, not un-Bezosishly, on Wallace’s all-seeing book as an example of the “human possibility [for] leaps in science and athletics and art and thought.”

more here.

Ross Douthat at The New Statesman:

Over the Thanksgiving holiday the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh expressed a sentiment I hear from time to time among connoisseurs of punditry – that our era, the age of Trumpism and wokeness and Covid controversy, badly misses the words and wits of Christopher Hitchens, who was taken from the stage before his time. Ganesh offered a particularly interesting version of this take, because he went halfway to conceding something that Hitchens’ critics (I was one of them) might say has become more palpable since his passing in 2011: that his great talents were expended on causes that have not exactly stood the test of time. But Ganesh framed this reality as an indictment of the somewhat-empty – dare one say, decadent – times in which Hitch lived:

“The trouble is, the artist dwarfed his canvas. Hitchens had the misfortune to peak during one of world history’s blander interludes.

more here.