Paper by Carole K. Hooven:

I teach in and co-direct the undergraduate program in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. During the promotion of my recent book on testosterone and sex differences, I appeared on “Fox and Friends,” a Fox News program, and explained that sex is binary and biological. In response, the director of my department’s Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging task force (a graduate student) accused me on Twitter of transphobia and harming undergraduates, and I responded. The tweets went viral, receiving international news coverage. The public attack by the task force director runs contrary to Harvard’s stated academic freedom principles, yet no disciplinary action was taken, nor did any university administrators publicly support my right to express my views in an environment free of harassment. Unfortunately, what happened to me is not unusual, and an increasing number of scholars face restrictions imposed by formal sanctions or the creation of hostile work environments. In this article, I describe what happened to me, discuss why clear talk about the science of sex and gender is increasingly met with hostility on college campuses, why administrators are largely failing in their responsibilities to protect scholars and their rights to express their views, and what we can do to remedy the situation.

More here.

Santiago Zabala at Al Jazeera:

With the centre-left divided and in perpetual crisis, none of its well-known leaders appears remotely capable of forming an effective opposition movement against the far-right government.

There is, however, one progressive in the new Italian parliament who has a real chance of reviving the long-flailing Italian left and forming an opposition movement that can actually pose a meaningful challenge to Meloni: migrant union leader Aboubakar Soumahoro.

Soumahoro, 42, is an Ivory Coast native who migrated to Italy in 1999, aged 19, with the dream of building a better life in the country. After sleeping rough on the streets of Rome for some time, he eventually managed to overcome the many obstacles to migrant success in Italy, became an Italian citizen and completed a degree in sociology at the University of Naples.

More here.

Nina Corcoran at Pitchfork:

Low never had a hit single, or even a definitive track. Over nearly three decades and 13 albums, the Duluth, Minnesota band wrote hundreds of songs, more than a dozen of which are probably considered the song, depending on whom you ask. But ask a fan if they remember the first time they heard a Low song, and they would likely recall the exact moment in vivid detail. For others, they might recall when Low’s music stirred their father out of a dementia-fueled silence or transformed into a last-ditch lifeline when living seemed futile. Whenever the husband-and-wife team of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker flicked on the recorder, the otherworldly power of their minimalist indie rock was captured for future generations to fall under its spell, instilling an appreciation of being alive—however kind or brutal existence may be. Their lack of commercial success, which Parker once claimed “saved our asses,” made space for experimentation and pushed Low to constantly evolve, from the whispered slowcore of 1994’s I Could Live in Hope to the aggressive electronics of 2021’s Hey What.

more here.

Stephen Kearse at Bookforum:

A MONTH BEFORE Atlanta hosted the first hip-hop-focused spinoff of the BET Awards in 2006, an executive at the cable network joked the event would likely not benefit the local economy. He was probably right. Rap dollars already coursed through the Southern city like its ceaseless traffic, bankrolling recording studios, propping up nightclubs and music-publishing companies, and sustaining a vast corps of DJs, strippers, bodyguards, and lawyers. After the inaugural BET Hip Hop Awards aired and nearly half the honors went to Atlantans, local rapper T. I.—who won four awards that night, the largest individual takeaway—described the show’s location as the city’s due: “We control and monopolize so much of this hip-hop industry, it’s only right that they start bringing these awards down here.”

BET’s programming choice followed a sea change happening across rap. Steadily in the 1990s and then decisively in the early 2000s, rap’s cultural and commercial axes shifted away from Los Angeles and New York City and toward the south.

more here.

Andy Carstens in The Scientist:

Case studies showing bone metastasis following dental implant surgeries, as well as epidemiological studies indicating the risk of bone metastasis increases after experiencing bone fractures, have led researchers to posit that the process of bone remodeling after an injury could jumpstart cancer cell division. In a study published October 26 in Cancer Discovery, Zhang and his colleagues find that after a bone fracture, DTCs in mice hitch a ride with perivascular stem cells that the body dispatches to injury sites to begin the healing process. Once they reach the fracture site, cancer cells appear to proliferate in tandem with bone remodeling, during which damaged bone is resorbed and new bone forms in its place.

“This is a very important study because it validates clinical data which show that increased bone resorption promotes tumor growth in bone, and it provides a mechanism by which this can occur,” Theresa A. Guise, a cancer researcher who studies mechanisms of bone metastasis at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and who was not involved in this work,  writes in an email to The Scientist. “These results advance our understanding of bone metastases and indicate a possible reason why patients with bone metastases do poorly when they have a fracture.”

More here.

They’re one and the same

They’re one and the same. They’re going to kill all of
us, Antígona. They’re one and the same. There’s no law
here. They’re one and the same. There’s no country here.
They’re one and the same. Don’t do anything. They’re
one and the same. Think of your nephews. They’re one
and the same. Keep quiet, Antígona. They’re one and
the same. Keep quiet. Don’t shout. Don’t think. Don’t
search. They’re one and the same. Keep quiet, Antígona.
Don’t go after the impossible.

But how could I not search for my brother? Tell me, all of
you. How could I not demand his body even if just to
bury it? How could I sleep peacefully thinking it might
be in some ravine, in some abandoned lot, on some
back road?

by Sara Uribe
from: Antígone González
Translation: 2016, Tanya Huntington, J.D. Pluecker
Publisher: Les Figues Press, , 2016

Susan Glasser in The New York Times:

The day after the midterm election of 2022 that both parties had agreed was the most consequential ever—except for the previous election, and the next one, of course—one thing was clear: the Democrats had defied both history and expectations. There had been no red wave, never mind Donald Trump’s promised “great red wave.” Was it a red ripple or merely a red drizzle? A blue escape? Purple rain? Even Fox News decreed the results to be no more than a pro-Republican “trickle.” Whatever it was called, President Biden and his Democrats, by limiting their losses in the House to less than the average for such elections and likely keeping the Senate as well, scored an against-the-odds political upset that suggests the country remains deeply skeptical of handing too much national power to the Trumpified Republican Party.

From his exile at Mar-a-Lago, the sore loser of an ex-President had envisioned the election as both a revenge play and a prelude to his triumphal return to the campaign trail next week as an official 2024 candidate. He spent the days and hours leading up to the vote threatening his main presumptive rival for the Republican nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and claiming that, should the Republicans win midterm contests, the glory should be his and his alone. “If they win, I should get all the credit, and if they lose, I should not be blamed at all,” Trump said. “But it will probably be just the opposite.” His son Don, Jr., suggested where the family thought things were headed when he tweeted, soon after 8 p.m., “Bloodbath!!!”

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

This is a point I keep seeing people miss in the debate about social media.

Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product. If a customer doesn’t want to receive harassing messages, or to be exposed to disinformation, then a business can provide them the service of a harassment-and-disinformation-free platform.

Censorship is the abnormal activity of ensuring that people in power approve of the information on your platform, regardless of what your customers want. If the sender wants to send a message and the receiver wants to receive it, but some third party bans the exchange of information, that’s censorship.

The racket works by pretending these are the same imperative. “Well, lots of people will be unhappy if they see offensive content, so in order to keep the platform safe for those people, we’ve got to remove it for everybody.”

This is not true at all. A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they’re doing now – remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts – but have an opt-in setting, “see banned posts”. If you personally choose to see harassing and offensive content, you can toggle that setting, and everything bad will reappear.

More here.

David S. Richeson in Quanta:

Knot theory began as an attempt to understand the fundamental makeup of the universe. In 1867, when scientists were eagerly trying to figure out what could possibly account for all the different kinds of matter, the Scottish mathematician and physicist Peter Guthrie Tait showed his friend and compatriot Sir William Thomson his device for generating smoke rings. Thomson — later to become Lord Kelvin (namesake of the temperature scale) — was captivated by the rings’ beguiling shapes, their stability and their interactions. His inspiration led him in a surprising direction: Perhaps, he thought, just as the smoke rings were vortices in the air, atoms were knotted vortex rings in the luminiferous ether, an invisible medium through which, physicists believed, light propagated.

Although this Victorian-era idea may now sound ridiculous, it was not a frivolous investigation. This vortex theory had a lot to recommend it: The sheer diversity of knots, each slightly different, seemed to mirror the different properties of the many chemical elements. The stability of vortex rings might also provide the permanence that atoms required.

More here.

Timothy J. Moore in The Common Reader:

This book is as much a manifesto as a work of history. The manifesto is timely, important, and utterly persuasive. The history is a bit more complicated, but nevertheless offers an eloquent explanation of much that happened in the long history of Rome and its empire.

Watts follows a long series of modern thinkers in using the history of Rome, especially the end of its empire, to demonstrate an understanding of politics (see Watts’s excellent assessments of Bruni, Biondo, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Gibbon [227-233]). Responding explicitly to the rhetoric of decline and renewal used by contemporary conservatives, Watts argues that from the second century BCE through the fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE, and even beyond, Roman rhetoric of decline and restoration caused massive suffering and often brought about the very decline it professed to combat; for the attempts at restoration almost always brought victims, as the alleged restorers blamed others for the alleged decline. In responding to crises and challenges, Watts argues, states need not to seek scapegoats, but rather to “take credit for what we restore as part of a collaborative process that rebuilds and renews, bringing society together rather than tearing it apart through recrimination and violence.”

More here.

Ed Simon at The Baffler:

The carnivalesque has always been at its core a theological construct, a method of religious critique. Knowing which faiths deserve our opprobrium makes all the difference in how effective such a rebellion shall be. When Medieval society crowned an Abbot of Unreason, that daring act of blasphemy paradoxically depended on an acknowledgment of the sacred; heresy and the divine mutually reinforcing and always dependent on one another. To similarly mock Christianity today is toothless because even with the dangerous rise of fascistic Christian Nationalism, we must take stock of who the real gods of this world are. Adam Kotsko in Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital writes that our contemporary normative economic thinking “Aspires to be a complete way of life and a holistic worldview . . . [a] combination of policy agenda and moral ethos.” Just as the Roman Catholic Church was the overreaching and dominant ideology of Western Christendom in the era when the Lord of Misrule poked at the pieties of both pope and prince, now our hegemonic faith is deregulated, privatized, free-market absolutist capitalism. If secularism means anything at all it’s not the demise of religion, but rather the replacement of that previous total system with a new one in the form of neoliberal capitalism.

more here.

Jarrett Earnest at Artforum:

It takes a particularly agile intelligence to continue coming to terms with several generations of new art, as regularly, and for as long, as Peter did. Things change and so must arguments, though without losing credibility. One way Peter maintained that trust was by narrating his own inner process, attending to ambivalence and contradiction in print. Changing your mind was not a failure, but a freedom to be carefully guarded. Once, he described this to me as his willingness to entertain the thought that anything, no matter how sacred or unimpeachable, might just be bullshit after all. Then what? Could you trace it backward back into meaning? In conversation Peter often evoked the fourteenth-century spiritual tract The Cloud of Unknowing, which teaches a method of contemplation for willfully releasing all prior conceptions of life on this earth and pushing into this great “unknowing” where God finds you. Acclimate to being uncomfortable and just stay there until the miraculous appears. It lent a theological framework to the techniques he’d developed for encountering art.

more here.

Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

Last week, in a much heralded-speech at Union Station in Washington, D.C., President Joe Biden reminded voters that in the upcoming midterm elections, “democracy is on the ballot,” and that they should punish those who engage in “political violence and voter intimidation.” Evoking Lincoln, he warned that “what we’re doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure.”

Call it the Cringe Gettysburg Address. The rhetoric of political extinction, originally written for those hallowed Pennsylvania pastures, was now repurposed to energize voters in a contest whose stakes are somewhat lower. The election is important, but for every voter who swoons at the Lincolnian rhetoric, there will be more who notice, even subconsciously, the mismatch, and react with skepticism. The setting alone is enough to make one wonder. Lincoln said the dead Union soldiers had sanctified the blood-soaked battlefield beyond presidential oratory’s “poor power to add or detract.” Anyone who has slumped against a sticky wall in Union Station while eating a Filet-O-Fish and waiting for a delayed train will certainly feel powerless to detract from that experience. Rhetoric should soar, but it should take care not to invite the wrong comparisons.

More here.

Matthew Yglesias in The Guardian:

Many known unknowns remain in the US congressional elections, including the critical question of who will hold the majority in the Senate.

But it’s already clear that Republicans are going to perform far worse than the typical out-party in a midterm election. Democrats appear to be on track for a result that, while certainly not spectacular if viewed in isolation, is the best midterm performance for any incumbent party since 2002. There’s nothing like the massive “wave” elections of 1994, 2006, 2010 or 2018 here, or the steady opposition gains of 2014. In 1998, Democrats did break with precedent and actually gain seats in the House and Senate, despite holding the White House. But that was a question of shrinking existing Republican majorities.

…But outside of the Sunshine State, Republicans have mostly been less cautious, and it has generated results for Democrats that are almost shockingly good given the state of the economy. That’s a testament to Democrats’ tactical savvy, and also a reminder of the huge political risks Republicans are running if inflation subsides over the next couple of years.

More here.

Like a Mist

I have in me like a mist
that is and contains nothing
nostalgia for nothing at all,
the desire for something fine.
I am enveloped by it
as if by a fog
and I see the last star glowing
above the stub in my ashtray
I smoked life away. How uncertain
all I saw or read!
And the whole world, a vast open book,
smiles at me in an unknown language.

by Fernando Pessoa
from Poetic Outlaws

Sean J Patrick Carney at Art In America:

It’s more colorful on the high desert plains of western New Mexico’s remote Catron County than most Americans probably think: a rainbow of gold, sanguine, and umber, blotted with shocks of assertive teals and jades, and accents of muted violet. A dozen miles east of the Continental Divide, at an elevation of 7,200 feet, the sky is inescapable, glowing so blue that it borders on the psychedelic. Here, in 1977, Walter De Maria, along with a small army of surveyors, engineers, contractors, patrons, and local high school students, installed the artist’s best-known work, The Lightning Field. Four hundred stainless steel poles, one placed every 220 feet, mark a precise rectangular grid that measures one mile by one kilometer. Each pole is machined to two inches in diameter, though, to account for the uneven terrain, their heights vary—between 15 feet and close to 27 feet—such that their tips reach an effectively level plane.

As the sun rises and relaxes from its midday meridian, the poles reflect the surrounding earth and sky, creating the illusion that they have disappeared.

more here.