Margaret Wertheim at Cabinet Magazine:

In the 1980s, zoologists were thus astonished to discover that Salticidae, or jumping spiders, a family of the arachnids that contains more than five hundred genera and over five thousand separate species, had vision systems on par with cats, mammals famous for their acute eyesight. With around six hundred thousand neurons in its brain (roughly half that of a fly or a honeybee), a jumping spider can recognize images on a television screen and is the only invertebrate known to be capable of such a sophisticated feat of visual processing. “How does this speck of dust of a brain achieve such a complicated task?” asks Simon Pollard, curator of invertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand. “We need to look deep into these unblinking eyes.”

more here.

From The Guardian:

There were 38 minutes left when eight very disparate Israeli opposition parties announced, just before midnight on Wednesday, that they could form a government to eject Benjamin Netanyahu from the prime ministership he has held for 12 bitter years. This last-minute outcome underscores two things. First, it says the eight-party grouping, which ranges from the leftwing Meretz to the small and ultra-nationalist Yamina of the prospective prime minister Naftali Bennett, and which will be supported by the Arab Islamist Ra’am party, is an exceptionally fragile coalition even by modern Israeli standards. Second, it shows that, in spite of Israel’s successful Covid campaign and the heightened national feeling arising from its recent conflict with Hamas, a very wide range of political groups from very different traditions nevertheless believe they have an overriding shared interest in ousting the country’s longest-serving and still ruthless leader.

This is not surprising. Mr Netanyahu may have dominated Israeli politics for a generation. But his militant divisiveness at home and abroad, and his stridently anti-Palestinian policies, have taken the country into a political blind alley. The defeat of Donald Trump has left Mr Netanyahu without his strongest international backer. He is also currently on trial for corruption, facing bribery and fraud charges arising out of three different cases of trading political favours for cash. Each of the last four general elections has ended in stalemate or something very close, most recently in March 2021. If the country was not to waste another few months under yet another unsuccessful Netanyahu regime, there had to be some sort of break. The March election has provided that opportunity – just.

More here.

From Scientific American:

It has been said that “the eyes are the window to the soul,” but new research suggests that they may be a window to the brain as well.

Our pupils respond to more than just the light. They indicate arousal, interest or mental exhaustion. Pupil dilation is even used by the FBI to detect deception. Now work conducted in our laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that baseline pupil size is closely related to individual differences in intelligence. The larger the pupils, the higher the intelligence, as measured by tests of reasoning, attention and memory. In fact, across three studies, we found that the difference in baseline pupil size between people who scored the highest on the cognitive tests and those who scored the lowest was large enough to be detected by the unaided eye.

We first uncovered this surprising relationship while studying differences in the amount of mental effort people used to complete memory tasks. We used pupil dilations as an indicator of effort, a technique psychologist Daniel Kahneman popularized in the 1960s and 1970s. When we discovered a relationship between baseline pupil size and intelligence, we weren’t sure if it was real or what it meant.

More here.

Self-Portrait as Pop Culture Reference

I was born in 1993, the year Regie Cabico became the first
Asian American to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam.

I want these facts to mean something to each other,
the way a room is just a room until love or its inverse

tells me what to do with the person standing in it.
Once, I stood on a street corner & a white woman, stunned

by the horizon I passed through to be here, put her hands
on my face to relearn history. I was named after a movie star

who died by drowning, A Streetcar Named Desire gone now
to water, & split an ocean every year to see my mother again.

The first man I loved named me after a dead American
& crushed childhood into a flock of hands.

The women I loved taught me that water cures anything
that ails, given enough thirst. I speak thirst,

sharpen the tongue that slithered through continents
& taught my ancestors to pray its name. I pray its name

& so undertake the undertaker, it preys my Mandarin name
so I watch Chinese dramas with bright-eyed bodies

Read more »

Sharon Steel in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

WHEN WRITERS BEGIN to learn our craft, we’re told to write for ourselves. As one becomes further embedded in the creative process, it can be difficult to work with this pure impulse in mind. Write for ourselves, yes, but if the work never finds readers, what does that say about us? Do stories that exist in a one-sided conversation with their authors have as much value as stories that take on a life of their own?

Jhumpa Lahiri’s creative approach begins and ends with her own desires. She’s spoken of this many times over the years, from her love of filling notebooks no one else will read to her insatiable need to understand herself through language. Many other writers say similar things, but Lahiri is the rare writer who actually means them. Having an audience, a platform, and thousands of admiring readers are consequences, not goals, of her practice.

More here.

Veronique Greenwood in Quanta:

The hydra is a simple creature. Less than half an inch long, its tubular body has a foot at one end and a mouth at the other. The foot clings to a surface underwater — a plant or a rock, perhaps — and the mouth, ringed with tentacles, ensnares passing water fleas. It does not have a brain, or even much of a nervous system.

And yet, new research shows, it sleeps. Studies by a team in South Korea and Japan showed that the hydra periodically drops into a rest state that meets the essential criteria for sleep.

On the face of it, that might seem improbable. For more than a century, researchers who study sleep have looked for its purpose and structure in the brain. They have explored sleep’s connections to memory and learning. They have numbered the neural circuits that push us down into oblivious slumber and pull us back out of it. They have recorded the telltale changes in brain waves that mark our passage through different stages of sleep and tried to understand what drives them. Mountains of research and people’s daily experience attest to human sleep’s connection to the brain.

But a counterpoint to this brain-centric view of sleep has emerged.

More here.

Jeffrey Sachs in Project Syndicate:

Israel’s attempt to justify its latest brutal assault on Gaza rings hollow to anybody familiar with events in Israel, where the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, backed by anti-Arab racists, has systematically, cruelly, and persistently violated the basic human rights of the Arab population. Human Rights Watch, a global NGO with many Jewish leaders, has recently condemned Israel for crimes against humanity.

Israel’s behavior puts US President Joe Biden’s administration, which professes a foreign policy based on human rights, under the spotlight. If that commitment is genuine, the administration should support an independent UN investigation of Israeli human rights violations against the Arab population and suspend military aid to Israel until the inquiry is completed and the human rights of the Palestinians are secured.

The antecedents of Israel’s recent airstrikes and artillery attacks on Gaza were Israeli threats to expel Palestinians from their home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem and Israeli-provoked violence at the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Right-wing Israelis marched through East Jerusalem chanting “death to Arabs.”

More here.

Peter Lamarque at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Few would dispute that, all things considered, some exposure to works of imaginative literature (novels, plays, poems) as part of a rounded education is better than no such exposure. Beyond that, disagreements are rife. Culture wars loom, with anxieties over curriculum choice, gender and racial bias, elitism, contested pedagogic methods, and a disconcerting vagueness about aims sought.

In this important and polemical book, Gregory Currie sidesteps direct engagement with these heated controversies at the frontline of educational policy but nevertheless shines a penetrating, for some disturbing, light on one of the most prominent lines of defence for a humanistic, literary education, the thought that we can learn from works of fiction in substantial ways: that reading fiction can make us better people, more wise, more morally astute, more empathetic, more knowledgeable about human follies and aspirations. Currie does not deny outright that such benefits can accrue, but warns that our confidence that this is so is often misplaced and ill-grounded.

more here.

Rachel Kushner at n+1:

As we traveled from Nabi Saleh to Ramallah by bus, we engaged in a vigorous discussion about the military occupation of the West Bank and whether it resembled apartheid. Yehuda Shaul of BtS told us he had escorted Barbara Hogan, an ANC member and former South African political prisoner, around the occupied territories. Hogan had declared after her tour that apartheid was in fact not an appropriate comparison, because what Hogan saw of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank was so much more extreme than what she knew of apartheid South Africa. Whatever the correct descriptor might be, the military occupation of the West Bank is hard to understand until you see it. You might be surprised at your own intolerance of the idea of a democracy maintaining an open-air prison for 2.7 million people. Before going there myself, I had heard this phrase, open-air prison, and figured it was not literally a prison. (As someone who spends a fair amount of time in prisons, I’m sensitive to its use as a metaphor.) But everywhere I went I saw guard towers and concrete barriers and razor wire—truly an open-air prison—except where there were settlements, which featured posh, Beverly Hills–style landscaping: little blooming flowers, fragile and bright, the guard towers in the far distance.

more here.

Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

Peter Turchin, one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I needed to know. But he had to leave his office sometime. (“One way you know I am Russian is that I cannot think sitting down,” he told me. “I have to go for a walk.”) Neither of us had seen much of anyone since the pandemic had closed the country several months before. The campus was quiet. “A week ago, it was even more like a neutron bomb hit,” Turchin said. Animals were timidly reclaiming the campus, he said: squirrels, woodchucks, deer, even an occasional red-tailed hawk. During our walk, groundskeepers and a few kids on skateboards were the only other representatives of the human population in sight.

The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

More here.

Erika Milam in Nautilus:

Elaine Morgan had sass. In Descent of Woman, published in 1972, she asked her readers to take science into their own hands. “Try a bit of fieldwork,” she suggested. “Go out of your front door and try to spot some live specimens of Homo sapiens in his natural habitat. It shouldn’t be difficult because the species is protected by law and in no immediate danger of extinction.” After completing observations of 20 random people, she suggested, substitute them when you are reading statements about universal human nature. The result?

“That window cleaner is one of the most sophisticated predators the world has ever seen.”

“The weapon is my grocer’s principal [sic] means of expression, and his only means of resolving differences.”

“The postman’s aggressive drive has acquired a paranoid potential because his young remain dependent for a prolonged period.”

Morgan added that you might imagine you were observing the wrong species and urged her readers to trust their experiences. “Remember,” she wrote, “you have been living among thousands of these large carnivores all your life, on more intimate terms than those on which Jane Goodall lived among the chimpanzees.”

In positing such a scenario, Morgan was engaged in serious work. All popular theories of human evolution to date, she insisted, were based on a male-centered notion of human evolution. Where were the evolutionary scenarios that began, “When the first ancestor of the human race descended from the trees, she had not yet developed the mighty brain that was to distinguish her so sharply from all the other species…”? This formed one of two major points Morgan wished to make in Descent of Woman.

The second was to advance a theory of aquatic adaptation that preceded life on the savannah. In semi-adaptation to a watery world, she imagined, humanity’s ancestors may have lost their body hair, gained a layer of subcutaneous fat to keep them warm, learned to walk upright (keeping their heads above water while foraging for tasty snacks in the shallows), came to use stones and manufacture tools for breaking open shells, and developed the ability to control their breathing when diving beneath the surface—a precondition for true spoken language and an obvious boon to any individual trying to communicate with most of her body submerged. In short, Morgan suggested humans acquired precisely those traits that distinguish them from the rest of the animal world while living around water, not in the arid grasslands. These activities, she noted, were associated with gathering, not hunting, an activity in which women’s contributions were widely acknowledged.

More here.

Lao Tzu

Evan Narcisse in Polygon:

Coates made his name as a journalist and commentator at The Atlantic, writing articles and essays that explored how America’s history of systemic racism continues to affect politics, housing, and other aspects of American life. Marvel reached out to him with the opportunity to write Black Panther in 2015, and those initial scripts would become the first fictional work he’d publish. (He’d been working on his novel, The Water Dancer, for years, but it wouldn’t come out until 2019.) In the time that’s passed, T’Challa and the idea of Wakanda enthralled audiences around the world in a billion-dollar hit movie. How did writing his final Black Panther comic make him feel? “It made me tear up,” Coates says.

I spoke with Coates over Zoom as he was going over lettering proofs for his farewell issue to ask him to look back at the five years he’s spent in Wakanda. (Disclosure: Ta-Nehisi and I are friends, and he served as a consultant on the Rise of the Black Panther series I wrote for Marvel.) In the interview that follows, he talks about what he’s learned about writing comics, what he would’ve done differently in his first issue, and whether T’Challa really wants to be a king.

More here.

Michael Blanding at the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge website:

A co-worker accuses you of lying during an important client meeting, and you’re furious because you didn’t lie. Expressing that anger, however, isn’t the best way to prove your innocence, according to new research.

“People may misinterpret that anger as a sign of guilt,” says Harvard Business School professor Leslie K. John, whose paper Anger Damns the Innocent is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. In a series of experiments, John and her colleagues—Katherine DeCelles of the University of Toronto, Gabrielle Adams of the University of Virginia, and Holly Howe of Duke University—found that anger can make a person come across as guilty even when they are not.

Too often, when an employee is accused of wrongdoing, people evaluating the situation can make snap judgments based on biases and hunches. This research shows how easy it is for others to make the wrong call about whether an accused person has committed the offense, based on the emotions he or she expresses.

More here.

Jeannette Cooperman in The Common Reader:

It is the oldest profession, I say. No, someone reminds me, hunting is the oldest profession. Exactly. But if the quarry is willing, is the hunt ethical? I cannot decide. Does a woman have the right to sell her body freely and legally? Models do. Lady Gaga sells her vocal cords. LeBron James sells his height. In a world that tells us to forge a personal brand and sell ourselves, surely a woman skilled in the art of physical pleasure ought to be able to use that talent to make a living?

Those appalled by that proposition say the act is too intimate. What innocence I have left wants to agree. But all told, I suspect such a transaction is less intimate than a hopeful first date or a thorough physical exam. Certainly, it is less intimate than writing a memoir. And with criminal penalties lifted, sex work would be cleaner and safer.

I want to approve. It seems cooler, more modern and relaxed. But like abortion, this issue renders me a hypocrite: I say yes for everybody else and breathe relief that it never had to be me. There but for the grace.

Feminist scholars, it turns out, are as ambivalent as I am.

More here.

Francine Prose in Harper’s:

What a glorious time it is to be an American woman novelist! Oprah Winfrey has only to say a writer’s name—so far, most of her book-club choices have been novels by women—and hundreds of thousands stampede the bookstores in search of the lucky author’s work. Most books are bought by women, who tend to read novels by female authors. One of our two living Nobel laureate novelists is an African-American woman. Women edit major magazines—The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Review of Books—aimed at readers of both sexes. Women are top decision makers at America’s ten biggest commercial publishing houses. And male editors, writers, and academics will be the first to tell you that they read and publish and teach writings by women as well as by men.

So only a few paranoids (readers with a genuine interest in good writing by either gender) may feel that the literary playing field is still off by a few degrees. Who else would even notice that in this past year—which saw the publication of important books by Deborah Eisenberg, Mary Gaitskill, Lydia Davis, and Diane Johnson—most of the book award contests had the aura of literary High Noons, publicized shoot-outs among the guys: Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, a sort of Civil War Platoon? Of course, not even the most curmudgeonly feminist believes that accolades or sales should be handed out in a strict fifty-fifty split, or that equal-opportunity concessions should be made to vile novels by women. But some of us can’t help noting how comparatively rarely stories by women seem to appear in the few major magazines that publish fiction, how rarely fiction by women is reviewed in serious literary journals, and how rarely work by women dominates short lists and year-end ten-best lists.

None of this, presumably, is a source of psychic—or financial—pain to a writer such as Danielle Steel, or to the authors of the mostly middlebrow books on which Oprah bestows her lucrative blessings.

More here.

Nicole Rust in Scientific American:

We’ve all felt the fog come over us when we mistake someone’s name right after being introduced, fail to remember where we left our car in the parking lot or tell a friend the same story twice. Our memory is rarely as reliable as we’d like. But at times, it also surprises us. We may somehow remember family stories told to us long ago, the names of our middle school teachers or trivia facts buried deep in back of our brain. Despite the standard glitches, our memory can retain far more than either experts or we expect. Conclusions about its reliability vary tremendously. Some studies conclude that memory is extremely accurate, whereas others conclude that it is not only faulty but utterly unreliable. Even memory experts can struggle to predict how accurate our recollections are. In a recent study at the University of Toronto, such experts were asked to predict the accuracy of memories of events that happened two days earlier. While recollections of these events were very good—more than 90 percent correct on average—the experts predicted they would be only 40 percent correct. Why is our memory so mysterious?

Studies that conclude memory is good typically test recollections of more recent events and emphasize the astounding accuracy of their details.

More here.