Michael Schulson in Undark:

If DNA is the code of life, then outfits like GeneArt are printshops — they synthesize custom strands of DNA and ship them to scientists, who can use the DNA to make a yeast cell glow in the dark, or to create a plastic-eating bacterium, or to build a virus from scratch. Today there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of companies selling genes, offering DNA at increasingly low prices. (If DNA resembles a long piece of text, rates today are often lower than 10 cents per letter; at this rate, the genetic material necessary to begin constructing an influenza virus would cost less than $1,500.) And new benchtop technologies — essentially, portable gene printers — promise to make synthetic DNA even more widely available.

But, since at least the 2000s, the field has been shadowed by fears that someone will use these services to cause harm — in particular, to manufacture a deadly virus and use it to commit an act of bioterrorism.

Meanwhile, the United States imposes few security regulations on synthetic DNA providers. It’s perfectly legal to make a batch of genes from Ebola or smallpox and ship it to a U.S. address, no questions asked — although actually creating the virus from that genetic material may be illegal under laws governing the possession of certain pathogens.

More here.

Noura Erakat in the Boston Review:

Vivien Sansour is excited about wheat. More than 10,000 years ago, she explains, visionaries in the fertile crescent domesticated it and began to transform it into the croissants, pitas, and baguettes that feed the world today. Sansour studies seeds as a way to “design new things the way that [her] ancestors did.” In 2014 she founded the Heirloom Seed Library and then spent the next four years searching for heirloom varieties for preservation and propagation. Many of these seeds, all indigenous to Palestine, are threatened because of colonial regulation of Palestinian lands and lives. Israel has forced other species onto Palestinian farmers for the sake of efficiency and scale, though it maintains one of the largest heirloom seed libraries at the Arava Institute. While the institute maintains an experimental orchard, the seeds themselves are off-limits to farmers. Sansour insists that while the settler sovereign “took our seeds away from us, they don’t have the story and the system of knowledge associated with the seed.”

More here.

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — I had always been a bah humbug sort of person about Christmas.

It seemed like a season of stress, as my parents scrambled to find the money to buy presents for five kids and have a big feast. I didn’t like the materialism or the mawkishness. Why should there be one week of the year when we were all supposed to be Hallmark happy? “You’re weird,” my mother told me.

Then I took a course on Charles Dickens at Columbia University with the estimable Prof. James Eli Adams, and I began to fathom the magic. As Dickens said in his sketch, “A Christmas Tree,” published in his journal “Household Words” in 1850, “Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me.” His biographer Peter Ackroyd wrote that “Dickens can be said to have almost single-handedly created the modern idea of Christmas.” Christmas morally radicalized Dickens. The disparity between the circumstances and fates of different people offended Dickens in the Christmas season. For him, it was a time to think about what we owe one another, how we live with one another; a time to have a proper sense of outrage about inequality and injustice, and to think about the past, present and future and how much they have to do with each other; a time to consider the good values we’ve thrown away and the bad values — selfishness, egotism, social snobbery, condescension and the worship of money — that infiltrate the heart. Dickens became an outsider looking in when his middle-class life got disrupted by cold, grinding reality: His father went to debtors’ prison and, at 12, Dickens had to leave school to work in a bootblacking factory in London.

…As Mitch Glazer, who co-wrote “Scrooged,” the hilarious 1988 movie with Bill Murray, put it: “Dickens hits us with the setup: regret, loss, mistakes, missed love, wasted life, and then the punchline: ‘It’s not too late!’ In every version from his novella to Mr. Magoo to ours, I always get emotional when Scrooge is reborn.” Dickens has taught me that it’s not too late to focus on the sweet memories, like the time my mom somehow bought me a doll’s kitchen I longed for that my parents couldn’t afford, or the way she would be aghast if we didn’t wear red and green.

The magic is there, if you look. So on this Christmas, as Tiny Tim said, God bless us, every one!

More here.

Michael Schulman in The New Yorker:

To revisit “The Dick Cavett Show,” which ran late night on ABC from 1969 to 1975 (and in various other incarnations before and after), is to enter a time capsule—not just because of Cavett’s guests, who included aging Hollywood doyennes (Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn), rock legends in their chaotic prime (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix), and squabbling intellectuals (Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer), but because Cavett’s free-flowing yet informed interviewing style is all but absent from contemporary television. Late-night shows are now tightly scripted affairs, where celebrities can plug a new movie, tell a rehearsed anecdote, and maybe get roped into a lip-synch battle. But Cavett gently prodded his subjects into revealing themselves. Though he was pegged as the “intellectual” late-night host, he resisted the label. He was a creature of show business: spontaneous, witty, and interested in everything.

Cavett’s interviews with the likes of George Harrison, Orson Welles, Lily Tomlin, and Richard Pryor have racked up millions of views on YouTube, providing a unique window into a raw, freewheeling, contentious time. A Nebraska native who went to Yale and got his start writing for the late-night hosts Jack Paar and Johnny Carson (before becoming Carson’s competition), Cavett presided over an era split between culture and counterculture, squares and hippies. He wasn’t quite either, but he was somehow at home with both. Two of his most frequent guests, each of whom became a close friend, were Groucho Marx and Muhammad Ali—who represented either pole. On December 27th, American Masters will air a documentary about the former, “Groucho & Cavett,” the filmmaker Robert S. Bader’s follow-up to “Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes.”

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6xgiBLEhms&ab_channel=AmericanArtForumwithRichardLove

Geneva Abdul at The Guardian:

Fleur Jaeggy would like to see herself as something of a mystic.

It’s something she aspires to, she admitted in an interview last year. The word mystic derives from the Greek mustē, an “initiated person”. When re-reading Sweet Days of Discipline, arguably the Swiss Italian author’s most famous work, it’s evident that she is such a person. Jaeggy is in on a secret, reaching at something beyond our understanding.

The novel from 1989, both slim and surreal, is centred around friendship at a boarding school. Set in postwar Switzerland, it follows the curious dynamics of the narrator who desires her schoolgirl companion Frédérique.

more here.

George Saunders in The New Yorker:

At twenty-six, at the embarrassing end of a series of attempts at channelling Kerouac, I was beyond broke, back in my home town, living in my aunt and uncle’s basement. Having courted and won a girl I had courted but never come close to winning in high school, I was now losing her via my pathetically dwindling prospects. One night she said, “I’m not saying I’m great or anything, but still I think I deserve better than this.”

That fall, my uncle called in a favor and soon I was on a roofing crew, one of three grunts riding from job to job in the freezing open back of a truck. My fellow-grunts, Leon and John, were the only black guys on the crew, and hence I was known as the Great White Hope. Once everyone had seen me work, I became the Great White Dope. Our job was to move the hot tar from a vat on the ground to the place on the roof where the real roofing was done. Leon had a thick Mississippi accent and no top teeth. He stayed on the ground, pulleying the smoking buckets up to us, muttering obscenities at passing grannies and schoolgirls. John was forty-two, gentle-voiced, and dignified, with a salt-and-pepper beard and his own roofing tools, which he brought to work every day, even though he was never allowed to do anything but lug tar. John had roofed all his adult life, and claimed to have virtuosoed his way into this job by appearing on the job site one day and outshingling the best white shingler.

More here.

Miriam Naddaf in Nature:

Stimulating neurons that are linked to alertness helps rats with cochlear implants learn to quickly recognize tunes, researchers have found. The results suggest that activity in a brain region called the locus coeruleus (LC) improves hearing perception in deaf rodents. Researchers say the insights are important for understanding how the brain processes sound, but caution that the approach is a long way from helping people. “It’s like we gave them a cup of coffee,” says Robert Froemke, an otolaryngologist at New York University School of Medicine and a co-author of the study, published in Nature on 21 December¹. Cochlear implants use electrodes in the inner-ear region called the cochlea, which is damaged in people who have severe or total hearing loss. The device converts acoustic sounds into electrical signals that stimulate the auditory nerve, and the brain learns to process these signals to make sense of the auditory world.

More here.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

By Seamus Heaney
from The Spirit Level
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

With a title like that, obviously I will be making a nitpicky technical point. I’ll start by making the point, then explain why I think it matters.

The point is: the media rarely lies explicitly and directly. Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false. When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.

Let me give a few examples from both the alternative and establishment medias.

More here.

Vinay Prasad in Tablet:

The main federal agency guiding America’s pandemic policy is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which sets widely adopted policies on masking, vaccination, distancing, and other mitigation efforts to slow the spread of COVID and ensure the virus is less morbid when it leads to infection. The CDC is, in part, a scientific agency—they use facts and principles of science to guide policy—but they are also fundamentally a political agency: The director is appointed by the president of the United States, and the CDC’s guidance often balances public health and welfare with other priorities of the executive branch.

…Ultimately, science is not a political sport. It is a method to ascertain truth in a chaotic, uncertain universe. Science itself is transcendent, and will outlast our current challenges no matter what we choose to believe. But the more it becomes subordinate to politics—the more it becomes a slogan rather than a method of discovery and understanding—the more impoverished we all become. The next decade will be critical as we face an increasingly existential question: Is science autonomous and sacred, or a branch of politics? I hope we choose wisely, but I fear the die is already cast.

More here.

Corryn Wetzel in New Scientist:

Glass frogs can boost their transparency by up to 61 per cent by storing most of their blood in their liver while they sleep. Researchers hope that understanding how the frogs manage to pool their blood this way without experiencing blood clots could provide new insights into preventing dangerous clots in other animals, including humans.

The tropical, marshmallow-sized amphibians spend their days sleeping on bright green leaves and foraging for food under the cover of dark. Being semi-see-through helps glass frogs avoid being spotted by predators, but it’s a challenging biological task, as most animals need to continuously pump red blood cells throughout their body to deliver oxygen to their tissues.

More here.

David McAllister at Prospect Magazine:

A novel, which is fiction, can never be classified as nonfiction—indeed, a “nonfiction novel” sounds like a contradiction in terms. This is because when we use these two categories, we are not talking about form or content—as we might with more granular terms, such as autofiction, memoir or biography—but making a judgement call. We are saying: these are the books that tell “the truth”, whereas these are the ones that do not.

Annie Ernaux, the latest recipient of the Nobel prize in literature, exposes the linguistic shallowness of these classifications. She is an author of novels that adopt only the most threadbare fictional guises; a deeply personal memoirist who looks back on her life, as she puts it, “like a historian with a character from the past”; and the writer of an experimental autobiography, The Years, that wound up on the shortlist for an international prize in fiction. Any contradiction or category error here is a quirk of translation. In Ernaux’s native France, the concept of la non-fiction is virtually non-existent; she is at greater liberty than we are to dismiss such poor attempts at labelling. “Our experience of the world cannot be subject to classification,” she writes in Exteriors.

more here.

Kenneth L. Woodward and Jean-Luc Marion at Commonweal:

KW: Many philosophers have said that a certain attitude is required in order to philosophize. For example, the neo-Thomist Josef Pieper said a philosopher had to have a sense of wonder. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said “radical amazement” is required. You have said the capacity to be astonished is essential. What do you mean by astonishment?

JLM: Good question. If I may be a bit polemical, I would say that the greatest possible failure for a professional philosopher is never to be astonished. And many philosophers are in that situation. They philosophize using a set of concepts or tools that protect them against encountering anything new. They have enough ways to make any question lead to a (pre-determined) answer, or even to disappear. But my experience of philosophy—and it’s why people like Descartes or Heidegger were so important—is that philosophy begins when you have this gift of a question that resists an answer. By “answer,” I mean one that is based on what was known before that question was asked. A new question opens up a new landscape that you cannot walk through unless you get a new pair of shoes.

more here.