Deborah Casewell in aeon:

The short life of Simone Weil, the French philosopher, Christian mystic and political activist, was one of unrelenting self-sacrifice from her childhood to her death. At a very young age, she expressed an aversion to luxury. In an action that prefigured her death, while still a child, she refused to move until she was given a heavier burden to carry than her brother’s. Her death in Ashford in England in 1943, at just 34, is attributed to her apparent refusal to eat – an act of self-denial, in solidarity with starving citizens of occupied France, which she carried out despite suffering from tuberculosis. For her uncompromising ethical commitments, Albert Camus described her as ‘the only great spirit of our time’.

This is certainly more complimentary than her university nicknames of ‘the Red Virgin’, ‘the Categorical Imperative in Skirts’, and even ‘the Martian’. Indeed, Weil’s reported interactions with the other great spirits of those times further underline the force of her personality. Simone de Beauvoir, who attended the Sorbonne at the same time, came across her during their student days and described a conversation with Weil sparked by her response to the famine in China:

she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped.

Despite this put-down, Beauvoir admired Weil and her ‘heart that could beat right across the world’.

Weil took no prisoners in any debate. Although Leon Trotsky had recently excoriated her critique of Marxism, Weil arranged for the Marxist revolutionary to stay in her parents’ apartment in December 1933 and host an illicit political gathering. This did, however, come at the expense of a night-long, intense discussion with Weil. While she always argued softly and clearly, that did not prevent the discussion from being punctuated by violent shouts.

More here.

Epitaph

When I die give what’s left of me away
to children and old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
cry for your brother walking the street beside you.
And when you need me, put your arms around anyone
and give them what you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
something better than words or sounds.
Look for me in the people I’ve known or loved,
and if you cannot give me away,
at least let me live on in your eyes and not your mind.

You can love me most by letting hands touch hands,
and by letting go of children that need to be free.
Love doesn’t die, people do.
So, when all that’s left of me is love,
give me away.

by Merrit Malloy
from Meditations Before Kaddish

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett in The Hedgehog Review:

You shall know them by their aspirations. Or so one might think, judging by the manifold ways in which Americans brand themselves by the things they seek to acquire and the ideals they seek to live by. Americans of all classes and identities aspire to various things, of course. The pursuit of happiness remains a central element of their national creed. But the meritocratic class has become the aspirational class par excellence. Aspiration connotes movement upward, and the meritocrat lives proudly and ostentatiously (some might even say overbearingly) in tireless pursuit of better. Little wonder that meritocrats come to think that what they and their offspring aspire to is manifestly and even morally superior to what others strive after.

For all of the well-intentioned idealism of today’s aspirational elite—their politically sensitive wokeness, their belief in hard work and education over birthright, their environmental awareness, their earnest suspicion of the excesses and injustices of capitalism—there is a dark side of meritocracy that is never fully concealed in the strivers’ displays and proclamations of goodwill. The simple fact is that most people—if we consider 90 percent of the country’s population “most”—do not learn piano from the age of five, do not attend private school, do not have SAT tutors (even if standardized tests are falling by the wayside), do not attend a “top twenty-five” school, or earn PhDs or MFAs. Laudable as these activities and achievements may be, they are underpinned by both wealth and cultural capital. While about 35 percent of Americans go to college, less than 0.5 percent graduate from Yale, Princeton, and their ilk. Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found that students whose parents are among the top one percent economically are seventy-seven times more likely to attend an Ivy League university than those with parents in the bottom quintile. In short, you have to have the money and, just as important, know what to spend it on.

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Razib Khan in Unsupervised Learning:

Now that Prometheus has basically granted every lowly lab tech superhuman powers, it’s like drinking from a data firehose if you love ancient DNA. And the more we know, the clearer it looks that genetically, all the humans on our planet group into basically three genetic types. You could think of them as 1. the very-diverse, 2. the not-very-diverse 3. the very-not-diverse (and if we’re being thorough: 4. a recent hybrid of 2 and 3.)

Do you know which you are? You don’t have to tell me anything else about you; by the very fact that you are reading this I can almost guarantee you are in group 2 or 3. Just based on the numbers, I’ll put my money on 3. Six to one odds. (And if you’re in group 1 and haven’t been genotyped but are interested in human genetics, DM me! I can help you get a spit kit. You’re genetically very unique!)

Here is how the groups break down:

1. 1. 1. 1. Scarcely half a million of us are very-diverse.
         2. 1.14 billion of us are not-very-diverse.
         3. 6.42 billion of us are very-not-diverse.

Alone on our planet today, those maybe half a million very-diverse souls hint at our species’ one-time amazing levels of genetic diversity. In our DNA, we all contain multitudes. But once, we all contained mega-multitudes. Only the very-diverse retain much of it today.

More here.

Mir Ali Hosseini in The Philosophical Salon:

As a refugee from the war-stricken Old World, where ethnic homogeneity had remained the defining principle of every citizenry, Arendt saw in the American republic the promise of a body politic, which absorbed newcomers without forcing them to adapt to a pre-determined homogeneity—even though she became increasingly critical of the cultural conformity of American “mass society.”

In 1973, two years before her passing, when Arendt was asked in an interview with French television about her impression dominante of America as a European, she replied in English:

“Mon impression dominante…Well, see, this is not a nation-state. America is not a nation-state, and Europeans have a hell of a time to understand this simple fact which, after all, they could know theoretically. This country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language, nor by origin from the same. There are no natives here. The natives were the Indians. , and these citizens are united only by one thing—and that is a lot. That is, you become a citizen of the United States by simple consent to the Constitution.”

As Robert Bernasconi has argued, this idealized picture of the American republic is deeply problematic.

More here.

#Film4Climate 1st Prize Short Film Winner – “Three Seconds” from Connect4Climate on Vimeo.

NCI Staff in Cancer.gov:

At the heart of all cancers is a fundamental problem: a cell—and eventually innumerable cells—that won’t stop dividing. This runaway growth is what forms a tumor, and the abnormal cellular processes that drive this growth can help tumors withstand the cancer treatments intended to kill them. Despite more than six decades of research into the mechanisms that cells use to divide, some of the nuts and bolts of the process remain a mystery. Scientists want to better understand these mechanisms in hopes of targeting them and potentially shutting down the uncontrolled growth of some tumors. New research from three collaborating teams of scientists in the United States and Europe appears to have found one of these mechanisms, uncovering a previously unknown check on dividing cells: a protein called AMBRA1. By limiting tumor growth, the researchers showed, AMBRA1 serves as an important tumor suppressor—as these types of molecules are often called—in healthy cells.

The new work shows that AMBRA1 marks other proteins involved in helping cells divide (known as cyclins) for destruction when cell division isn’t needed. When the gene that produces AMBRA1 is damaged and the protein is missing or doesn’t work properly, the cell cycle loses one of its main brakes, potentially letting cell division spiral out of control. The loss of the AMBRA1 protein, the researchers found, can drive tumor formation in mice and is linked with worse outcomes in some human tumors. They also reported that a lack of AMBRA1 may make some tumors resistant to drugs called CDK4/6 inhibitors, which are a promising new class of cancer treatments. The new research may point to potential strategies for blocking the runaway cell division caused by loss of AMBRA1 and for re-sensitizing cancer cells to CDK4/6 inhibitors. The results from all three studies were published on April 14 in Nature.

More here.

Laura Hercher in Scientific American:

For better or worse, genetic testing of embryos offers a potential gateway into a new era of human control over reproduction. Couples at risk of having a child with a severe or life-limiting disease such as cystic fibrosis or Duchenne muscular dystrophy have used preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) for decades to select among embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) for those that do not carry the disease-causing gene. But what new iteration of genetic testing could tempt healthy, fertile couples to reject our traditional time-tested and wildly popular process of baby making in favor of hormone shots, egg extractions and DNA analysis?

A California-based start-up called Orchid Biosciences claims it has an answer to that question. The company offers prospective parents genetic testing prior to conception to calculate risk scores estimating their own likelihood of confronting common illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, and schizophrenia and the likelihood that they will pass such risks along to a future child. Parents-to-be can then use IVF, along with Orchid’s upcoming embryo screening package, to identify the healthiest of their embryos for a pregnancy.

Orchid aims to use PGT and IVF to expand what is already a thriving marketplace in screening tests for prospective parents. Initially, the only people offered tests to prevent genetic disease in the next generation were those whose ancestry put them at higher risk for a specific condition, such as Tay-Sachs disease in the Ashkenazi Jewish population. The first genetic screen intended for universal use and covering a wide range of diseases was introduced by Counsyl (now part of Myriad Genetics) in 2010. Today carrier screening is a $1.7-billion industry. These tests search for genetic problems that otherwise come to light only after the birth of an affected child. But diseases caused by a single gene are rare. Most children are born healthy, and most couples who do carrier screening come away reassured.

More here.

Caroline Arscott at nonsite:

The systems featured in Morris’s designs often suggest conflict and attrition at the micro level along with harmony at the grander scale. Within the system of the design, principles of growth relate to his conception of the forces of nature and history. He constructed his designs to mirror and even exceed the powerful generative abilities of nature; he also intended them to be vectors for the energies of history.

Morris includes feeding rabbits in his textile print Brother Rabbit: he gives them as beneficiaries and examples of nature’s plenty (fig. 2). They feed, they grow, they multiply. He referenced natural forms, vegetal and animal, and sought to infuse these natural elements with a sense of life and growth—not for him the deathly display of elements technically “natural” but in some designers’ hands lacking the appearance of life. Like the biologists investigating cell structure and protoplasm he found a commonality in all living things. This allowed or obliged him to undo the fence around the domain of the design, to broaden the horizons, to allegorise and to visualise a macro-system. By the 1880s this system relates to history and society understood from the perspective of communist theory.

more here.

Dushko Petrovich at n+1:

I kept looking at the recently infamous—now half-forgotten—picture of the Bidens visiting the Carters. The photo was taken and passed around feverishly almost two months ago, when I saw it repeatedly on my scroll and dragged the file onto my desktop, and I haven’t been able to forget it since. Everyone else moved on to Joyce Carol Oates negging Mad Men, Elon Musk going on SNL, Bennifer 2.0, and a bunch of other things I’m forgetting, but here I am, late at night, still staring at little Rosalynn, little Jimmy, big Jill, and big Joe. Also the armchairs, the blue-green walls, the blue-blue carpeting, the “unfinished” cameo-style paintings of the Carters, the blank canvas keyed to the off-white upholstery of their chairs. I’ve reviewed the institutional sheen on those cabinets, zoomed in on the trio of mask-like ceramics facing up to the ceiling on the side table, pondered the bulbous bronze bookends holding a three-volume set of something important on that same table. But mostly I’ve been staring at the little Carters and the big Bidens, trying to understand what is so transfixing to me there. And I think I finally have an answer. So at the risk of disrespecting the immutable orientation of our media universe, I want to return to the topic that was on everyone’s minds on May 3, 2021. I want to turn and watch the sunset.

more here.

Maybe to you too

Alina Utrata in the Boston Review:

Having made enormous fortunes on Earth, billionaires are now racing each other to space. Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest person on the planet, recently announced that he will be one of four “space tourists” on his private space company Blue Origin’s inaugural human spaceflight scheduled for July 20, 2021, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The news caused Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson to speed up his own planned space trip and launch himself into space this weekend, nine days before Bezos.

Fellow tech billionaire, and third richest person on Earth, Elon Musk is often the most vocal about his space company, SpaceX, and his plans to make humans an “interplanetary species.” Bezos, however, is just as obsessed with outer space as the Tesla founder is. The billionaires concur that it is humanity’s destiny to settle the stars. And, without much real public debate, private space corporations appear to have settled the matter: space will be humanity’s next frontier.

The notion that private corporations ought to achieve something that states have been able to do since the 1960s—fly to space—is a peculiarly U.S. one. It combines domestic libertarianism and its idolatry of private individuals’ entrepreneurship with the more global ethos of neoliberalism and government outsourcing. However, despite these motivating philosophies, private companies have launched their schemes for space colonization using massive amounts of public money through government contracts.

More here.

Hatty Nestor at Granta:

Society loves courtroom dramas – they allow the viewer to consume the uncertainty of someone else’s life as opposed to fixating on their own. (I am as guilty of this as anyone: I’ve watched courtroom dramas every week religiously in the past, especially Primal Fear and The Lincoln Lawyer.) We get hooked on the interrelations of characters, the impending catastrophe, the emotional mind games played by the press, lawyers, and bogeymen criminals. The allure of the genre, I believe, has to do with the hidden nature of the legal scenario. Films, television shows, and podcasts purport to expose the mystery of the courtroom, and the private lives of those tangled up in its web.

Beyond courtroom dramas and ‘true crime’ stories of trials, such as Dateline, American Crime Story, Killing Fields, and my recent favourite, Netflix’s The Staircase, the courtroom sketch is a key example of how the goings-on at trial are represented and disseminated. Notable cases that have been illustrated include Amy Winehouse’s 2009 trial for assault after she was accused of hitting a woman at a charity ball. A drawing by sketch artist Priscilla Coleman shows Winehouse extending her leg and hitching up her dress, in order to demonstrate to the court her slight frame as evidence of her innocence.

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George Eaton at The New Statesman:

“Creep” was subsequently excised from the band’s set list – “Fuck off, we’re tired of it,” Yorke explained to a Montreal audience – and now, like a submarine, only surfaces at rare junctures (Reading Festival 2009, Glastonbury 2016). Now Radiohead have added a new chapter to the “Creep” chronicles. On 13 July, Yorke released a remixed version of the song “Creep (Very 2021 Rmx)” for “a world that is seemingly turning upside down”. The track, which was first used to soundtrack a Japanese fashion show in March of this year, sees an earlier acoustic version stretched from four minutes to nine by means of a radically slowed tempo. Faced with this, both admirers and detractors of “Creep” might reasonably ask: what the hell are they doing here? The first verse alone is two minutes long and, aside from some electronic burblings, is rather underwhelming (unless deathly slow strumming is your thing). 

more here.

Samira Asgari and Lionel A. Pousaz in Nature:

For more than a year now, scientists and clinicians have been trying to understand why some people develop severe COVID-19 whereas others barely show any symptoms. Risk factors such as age and underlying medical conditions¹, and environmental factors including socio-economic determinants of health², are known to have roles in determining disease severity. However, variations in the human genome are a less-investigated source of variability. Writing in Nature, members of the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative³ (www.covid19hg.org) report results of a large human genetic study of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The researchers identify 13 locations (or loci) in the human genome that affect COVID-19 susceptibility and severity.

More here.

Mark Blyth in The Guardian:

Thirty years ago, Albert O Hirschman published a short book that infuriated conservatives called The Rhetoric of Reaction. The book showed how conservative arguments across time and space fell into three rhetorical buckets: perversity – raising taxes means less revenue; futility – voting changes nothing; and jeopardy – if you give the vote to poor people, you get revolution (the opposite of futility, but who cares about consistency). As well as being a great summer read, Hirschman’s rhetoric continues to shed a useful light on the present conservative obsession (apart from critical race theory) with inflation.

Whenever inflation threatens, two versions of the perversity thesis are deployed. The first, usually opined by members of the investor class, argues that inflation mainly hits those on fixed incomes, older and poorer people, thereby proving their concern is born from a sense of care for society’s weakest. Oddly, that same class of folks seem utterly indifferent to older and poorer people until inflation threatens to either reduce their expected investment returns, or impact their leveraged financial strategies, as interest rates rise.

More here.

Catherine Nixy in 1843 Magazine:

Over the past year many of us have sat at home, confined to the same four walls for much of the day, contemplating the same view, munching the same lunch and wearing the same clothes (at least below waist level). While the key workers of the world actually kept everything running by going out to work, many of us have likened our privileged isolation to that of a monk confined in a monastery, world at bay. The word “monk” comes from a Greek word meaning “alone”, which is exactly how monks spent their earliest days, living and working anywhere from the sands of the Syrian desert to the banks of the River Nile. One particularly celebrated figure spent almost 40 years standing on a pillar in Syria until his feet exploded and his spine collapsed. (Those missing their ergonomic office chairs may sympathise.)

From the fourth century onwards, the great monkish wfh experiment fell out of fashion and monks flooded into monasteries – just as many employers hope their staff will do this summer, as life reverts to some semblance of its before-covid (bc) self.

A monastic life may sound surprisingly familiar. They put on drab work clothes each day to turn up for duty, same time, same place. They embraced the nine to five (or, to be precise, the 6am to 7pm. Tough boss). If going back to the office reminds you how annoying your colleagues are, spare a thought for the monks who had the same ones – and endured their same noxious habits – until the day they died (and, assuming they’d laid their bet in Pascal’s wager correctly, after it, too). If you hated the way your tablemate slurped his soup or sang evensong, you simply had to keep quiet and offer up your suffering to God.

Once monks gave up their flexi-work freedoms they had to find a way to get along with their brethren. Judging by the outpouring of literature spawned by this move, as soon as corporate monkish life began, brothers started to annoy each other.

More here.