Amartya Sen in The Guardian:

The British empire in India was in effect established at the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757. The battle was swift, beginning at dawn and ending close to sunset. It was a normal monsoon day, with occasional rain in the mango groves at the town of Plassey, which is between Calcutta, where the British were based, and Murshidabad, the capital of the kingdom of Bengal. It was in those mango groves that the British forces faced the Nawab Siraj-ud-Doula’s army and convincingly defeated it.

British rule ended nearly 200 years later with Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech on India’s “tryst with destiny” at midnight on 14 August 1947. Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?

During my days as a student at a progressive school in West Bengal in the 1940s, these questions came into our discussion constantly. They remain important even today, not least because the British empire is often invoked in discussions about successful global governance. It has also been invoked to try to persuade the US to acknowledge its role as the pre-eminent imperial power in the world today: “Should the United States seek to shed – or to shoulder – the imperial load it has inherited?” the historian Niall Ferguson has asked. It is certainly an interesting question, and Ferguson is right to argue that it cannot be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell – and what it managed to do.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2spt7SELhw

Amanda Lee Koe at The Current:

The first real lesbian kiss in a film is an honor that rightfully belongs to Mädchen in Uniform. It’s true that a year earlier, in 1930, Marlene Dietrich played a tux-clad chanteuse who snogs a woman in a nightclub audience in Morocco, but Dietrich has no further contact with this female extra, and the kiss is cynically if efficaciously played to the star’s male love interest, a legionnaire (Gary Cooper) who’s watching her saucy performance intently. Unlike in Morocco, there are no titillated men to be found in Mädchen in Uniform. It is the schoolgirls who are jacked and lusty, the schoolmarms who are patriarchal and tyrannical. The kiss, which takes place behind the closed doors of a dorm, isn’t about who’s performing for whom. It’s about what it feels like for a girl.

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Wouter Klein at JSTOR Daily:

When European naturalists explored the plants of the New World in the sixteenth century, they tended to relate new species to better-known plants whenever they could. Sarsaparilla is a case in point. Smilax species found in America were recognized as variants of Smilax aspera and therefore also began to be called sarsaparilla. Nicolás Monardes (1493–1588) described different kinds of American sarsaparilla in his work Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (1565). His descriptions carried a commercial touch. For instance, he tried to convince his readers that the whitish sarsaparilla from Honduras was better than the black variety from Mexico. Similarly, he aimed to embed the new American kinds of sarsaparilla in the traditional framework of European medicine. When American sarsaparilla began to be used in European medicine around 1545, physicians first administered it as a broth to be taken in the morning, the same way as it was used by Native Americans at the time. Monardes, however, argued that it should be given in a syrup, a conventional mode of administration for his European readers.

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Seth Stern in The Christian Science Monitor:

A painful pattern repeats itself throughout America: A Black person is killed by police officers, protests ensue, and police are brought in to stifle the demonstrations. Most of the time, the protests against racial injustice are peaceful, but occasionally violence breaks out. Meanwhile, politicians do little to prevent the cycle from continuing.

The language surrounding that cycle is highly politicized. Elizabeth Hinton, a professor of history, African American studies, and law at Yale, drills down on the term “riot,” which she argues is a misnomer. In her book, “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s,” she suggests instead that violent protests are political acts best described as rebellions – “a sustained insurgency” against “an unjust and repressive society.”

This is a sequel of sorts to Hinton’s 2016 book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.” There, Hinton showed how fears of violence prompted federal policymakers to build punitive, militarized urban police forces that filled prisons with Black inmates. In this equally impressive followup, Hinton chronicles how attempts to quell protests in American cities actually spawned more unrest.

More here.

Laura Quinn in Phys.Org:

Proteins have been quietly taking over our lives since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We’ve been living at the whim of the virus’s so-called “spike” protein, which has mutated dozens of times to create increasingly deadly variants. But the truth is, we have always been ruled by proteins. At the cellular level, they’re responsible for pretty much everything.

Proteins are so fundamental that DNA—the genetic material that makes each of us unique—is essentially just a long sequence of protein blueprints. That’s true for animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, archaea, and even viruses. And just as those groups of organisms evolve and change over time, so too do proteins and their component parts.

A new study from University of Illinois researchers, published in Scientific Reports, maps the evolutionary history and interrelationships of protein domains, the subunits of protein molecules, over 3.8 billion years. “Knowing how and why domains combine in proteins during evolution could help scientists understand and engineer the activity of proteins for medicine and bioengineering applications. For example, these insights could guide disease management, such as making better vaccines from the spike protein of COVID-19 viruses,” says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences, affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois, and senior author on the paper.

More here.

Uncollected Poems -71

Every time I think about a thing, I betray it.
I should only think about what is there in front of me.
Not thinking, but seeing.
Not with the mind, but with the eyes.
Anything that is visible exists in order to be seen.
And what exists for the eyes has no reason to exist in the mind;
It exists purely for the eyes and not for the mind.

I look and things exist.
I think and only I exist.

by Fernando Pessoa
from The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro
Translation from The Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

Paul J. D’Ambrosio in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Academia puts scholars through the wringer. Few — very few, in fact — come out willing or even able to express complex ideas in ways appealing to non-academics. John Gray is one of those rare intellectuals.

Professors tend to scoff at books written for more general audiences. Anything that becomes popular is taken as potentially not serious. But the truth is, most professors simply cannot write, talk, and perhaps even think in a manner which can engage non-academics. Having gone through years of rigorous, specialized training, scholars find it hard to communicate their insights to anyone outside their narrow fields. Gray does not. Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life is broadly appealing. Even more impressive, it has readers seriously consider radical ideas.

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Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein in the Boston Review:

The most basic tenet undergirding neoliberal economics is that free market capitalism—or at least some close approximation to it—is the only effective framework for delivering widely shared economic well-being. On this view, only free markets can increase productivity and average living standards while delivering high levels of individual freedom and fair social outcomes: big government spending and heavy regulations are simply less effective.

These neoliberal premises have dominated economic policymaking both in the United States and around the world for the past forty years, beginning with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the States. Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism became a rallying cry, supplanting what had been, since the end of World War II, the dominance of Keynesianism in global economic policymaking, which instead viewed large-scale government interventions as necessary for stability and a reasonable degree of fairness under capitalism. This neoliberal ascendency has been undergirded by the full-throated support of the overwhelming majority of professional economists, including such luminaries as Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas.

In reality neoliberalism has depended on huge levels of government support for its entire existence.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hv4HfLQGlw

Louis Bury at Art in America:

The most haunting thing about Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest is how ordinary it appears. On the central “Oval Lawn” in New York City’s well-trafficked Madison Square Park, the celebrated architect and sculptor has installed a stand of forty-nine bare cedar trees, resembling a dying woodland. The tall, toothpick-like conifers, pruned of branches at human height and entirely devoid of leaves, are meant to serve as portents of environmental devastation. But the quotidian park-going activities—sunbathing, picnicking, dog walking—taking place within and around these symbols of apocalypse suggest how easily people can adjust their baseline sense of normalcy.

The bare trees were relocated from private land in the New Jersey Pine Barrens that was set to be cleared owing to saltwater inundation; their pocked and stripped bark is encrusted with pale gray lichen, which thrives in moist areas.

more here.

Everglades

—After “Eclipse” by Rose Marie Cromwell

God holds my baby by her ankle
Dangles her from a cloud.

She is a thickened fawn
Contorting in his grip
Taut and winding over the scrubby trees below.

My baby came to me from the forest.
As she fell I think I caught her.
Yes, I caught her as she fell
Through the pines
And low-lying fever palm.

Dusk settled like a fog around our ankles.

God let go and I caught her.

A door opened in the forest ceiling.

She pushed it aside easily

All round arms
And brown curls
Still wet from the clouds.

The door crinkled like a brown tarp
In the wind.
She hovered there for a moment
Then her wings failed

And I dove.

We stand here now, darkness up to our chins.
I’m wading through the night forest
With her on my shoulders
Blinking at the starlight.

by Annik Adey-Babinski
from Poetry, June 2021

Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker:

In his new book, “Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal,” George Packer writes that the United States is in a state of disrepair, brought about primarily by the fact that “inequality undermined the common faith that Americans need to create a successful multi-everything democracy.” The book opens with an essay on the state of the U.S. during the pandemic, and then offers sketches of four different visions of the country: Free America, of Reaganism; Smart America, of Silicon Valley and other professional élites; Real America, of Trumpist reaction; and Just America, of a new generation of leftists. “I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them,” Packer writes. He proposes a different vision, which he thinks offers brighter possibilities, centered around the concept of equality and non-demagogic appeals to patriotism.

I recently spoke by phone with Packer, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic and was previously a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is also the author of the books “The Assassins’ Gate” and “The Unwinding.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Barack Obama failed to change the direction of the country, whether a more progressive form of patriotism is possible, and whether the cultural controversies roiling American institutions are an inevitable result of inequality.

Why did you decide to structure this book around four Americas?

We’ve all lived with the red-blue division for about twenty years. And it’s true. We are divided that way. Every passing year makes that clearer. But I felt that in the last few years, politically and culturally, things have happened that showed that there are divisions within, as well as between, those two big blocks of Americans. The basic division that I began to see begins with libertarianism, which I call Free America, which is Reagan’s America. And this is really the story of my adult life, from the late nineteen-seventies onward. It’s been the most dominant narrative in our society. And it says, “We’re all individuals.” We all have a chance to make it. The best way to make it is to get government out of the way and to cut taxes and deregulate and set us free in order to use our industry and talent to make something new. And that was a really potent story that Reagan told, and that the Republican Party lived by for decades, and to some extent still does.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Preliminary results from a landmark clinical trial suggest that CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing can be deployed directly into the body to treat disease. The study is the first to show that the technique can be safe and effective if the CRISPR–Cas9 components — in this case targeting a protein that is made mainly in the liver — are infused into the bloodstream. In the trial, six people with a rare and fatal condition called transthyretin amyloidosis received a single treatment with the gene-editing therapy. All experienced a drop in the level of a misshapen protein associated with the disease. Those who received the higher of two doses tested saw levels of the protein, called TTR, decline by an average of 87%.

The treatment was developed by Intellia Therapeutics of Cambridge, Massachusetts and Regeneron of Tarrytown, New York. They published the trial results in The New England Journal of Medicine¹ and presented them at an online meeting of the Peripheral Nerve Society on 26 June. Previous results from CRISPR–Cas9 clinical trials have suggested that the technique can be used in cells that have been removed from the body. The cells are edited and then reinfused back into study participants. But to be able to edit genes directly in the body would open the door to treating a wider range of diseases. “It’s an important moment for the field,” says Daniel Anderson, a biomedical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “It’s a whole new era of medicine.”

More here.

Chad Orzel in Forbes:

A long time ago, when I was around the age my kids are now— so if you were to ask them, that’d put it well after the dinosaurs but slightly before woolly mammoths— I had to write a book report about a biography. For whatever reason, I ended up picking Enrico Fermi, a scientist who was featured in exactly one book in the elementary school library, a choice that maybe foreshadowed my eventual career. A few details of that have stuck with me ever since: Fermi getting reprimanded by Oppenheimer for taking bets on whether the Trinity test would ignite the atmosphere, Fermi estimating the size of the blast by dropping pieces of paper, and, weirdly, Fermi mocking signs with Fascist slogans back in Italy by shouting “Burma Shave!” when driving past them (probably because I had to get my parents to explain the joke). I was a little hazy on what, exactly, he contributed to physics, but he definitely made an impression as both an important scientist and a colorful character.

Possibly because of that long-ago assignment, “Popular biography of Fermi” has long been on my mental list of potential future book projects. So I was mildly disappointed a few years ago when I learned that David Schwartz had written The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life And Times Of Enrico Fermi, Father Of The Nuclear Age (only mildly, because it’s a long list of potential projects).

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Depending on who you listen to, quantum computers are either the biggest technological change coming down the road or just another overhyped bubble. Today we’re talking with a good person to listen to: John Preskill, one of the leaders in modern quantum information science. We talk about what a quantum computer is and promising technologies for actually building them. John emphasizes that quantum computers are tailor-made for simulating the behavior of quantum systems like molecules and materials; whether they will lead to breakthroughs in cryptography or optimization problems is less clear. Then we relate the idea of quantum information back to gravity and the emergence of spacetime. (If you want to build and run your own quantum algorithm, try the IBM Quantum Experience.)

More here.

Elie Mystal in The Nation:

The law has failed Britney Spears. The nearly 40-year-old celebrity has been locked in a “conservatorship”—which is the state of California’s word for a “legal guardianship” designed for the very old, very young, or mentally incapacitated—for 13 years, against her will. That conservatorship, controlled by her father, again, against her will, has been allowed to control Spears’s life in minute detail—including allegedly forcing unwanted birth control upon her—and none of the lawyers or judges involved has done a damn thing to stop it. Spears appeared in court, via telephone, this week to voice her objections to her continued conservatorship, and her story should lead to immediate lawmaking and change.

Believe me, I’m as surprised as anybody to find myself on this particular hill.

I’ll admit that the #FreeBritney movement—the group of fans who have been reading Spears’s Instagram page and bringing attention to her conservatorship—looked more like frenzied celebrity worshipers than legal reformers to me. But I think that I was wrong.

More here.