Philip Ball at Marginalia Review:

The term “soft matter” was coined in 1970, and has become common currency in science only in the past two or three decades. Yet the substances to which it refers – such as honey, glue, flesh, soap, leather, starch, bitumen, milk, pastes and gels – have been familiar components of our material world since antiquity. The phrase, incidentally, was coined by French scientist Madeleine Veyssié, a collaborator of physics Nobel laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, one of the foremost pioneers of the field. The French term, matière molle, is something of a double entendre, which would doubtless have appealed to the suave and charismatic de Gennes, well known for his almost stereotypically Gallic romantic liaisons.

Modern theories that describe the molecular-scale nature of gases, simple liquids and solids were all taking shape by the end of the nineteenth century. But the sticky, viscous, rubbery or bendy fabrics of soft matter were not properly tackled until researchers such as de Gennes and Cambridge physicist Sam Edwards gave them serious attention in the 1970s and 80s; for many centuries they had been all but excluded from the conventional trio of the states of matter.

more here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Should Cambridge University academics and students “tolerate” or “respect” the views of others with which they might disagree? Should we tolerate Millwall fans booing players taking the knee? Should gender-critical feminists who argue for the importance of female biology and reproduction in defining a “woman” be tolerated, or are such views themselves intolerant of trans women?

These are all very different discussions and debates. Underlying all of them, however, is the question of how we should understand “tolerance” and “respect”, issues that run through virtually all “free speech” and “culture wars” discussions. Too often, though, we fail to recognise how far their meanings have changed in recent years.

Tolerance as a concept has a long history and many slippery meanings. But, from 17th-century debates about religious freedom to recent discussions about mass immigration, a key understanding of tolerance is the willingness to accept ideas or practices that we might despise or disagree with but recognise are important to others. These might include the right to practise a minority faith or to possess beliefs contrary to the social consensus.

Today, however, many regard tolerance not as the willingness to allow views that some may find offensive but the restraining of unacceptable views so as to protect people from being outraged.

More here.

Liam Heneghan in Aeon:

It is our sad lot that we love perishable things: our friends, our parents, our mentors, our partners, our pets. Those of us who incline to nature draw this consolation: most lovely natural things – the forests, the lakes, the oceans, the reefs – endure at scales remote from individual human ones. One meaning of the Anthropocene is that we must witness the unravelling of these things too. A tree we loved in childhood is gone; a favourite woodlot is felled; a local nature preserve invaded, eroded and its diversity diminished; this planet is haemorrhaging species.

When a rare Panamanian frog was named in 2005 for George Rabb, an eminent herpetologist and friend to many in the Chicago conservation community, we celebrated this newly named animal. By the time he died in 2017, Rabb’s fringe-limbed frog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum) was assumed extinct in the wild.

There are two types of charisma: the charisma of the lit stage and that of the lambent sanctuary. Rabb’s charisma was the latter, softer, form. One of the most influential conservation biologists of his generation, he directed the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago from 1976 until 2003. He was involved in the protection of species and habitats around the globe. I first met him in the late-1990s at a meeting of the Midwestern regional conservation alliance, Chicago Wilderness. What I learned from George – who knew keenly what it is to endure loss – is that repair is possible.

More here.

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Anjan Basu in The Wire:

A couple of days before he was scheduled to discuss, on the platform of the Tata Literary Festival 2020, his recent book Internationalism or Extinction, a group of India’s social and political activists wrote an open letter to Noam Chomsky in which they suggested that he boycott the festival. They cited the less-than-wholesome credentials of the festival’s sponsors, the Tatas, in the matter of human rights and apropos of how they ran their businesses. The activists reminded Chomsky that the Tatas’ business empire had expanded over the years by ruthlessly displacing – with active help from the Indian state, and often with brute force – vast tribal communities from their traditional habitats in several Indian provinces. They also talked about open-cast mining and other deleterious business practices the Tatas continued to pursue in flagrant disregard of environmental concerns. By lending his formidable name and his enormous prestige to the festival, the activists believed, Chomsky would only help “erase their (the Tatas’) crimes from public consciousness”.

Noam Chomsky responded by telling the activists that he wanted to go ahead with the programme he had committed to, but that he and his interlocutor, Vijay Prashad, would begin the proceedings by reading out a prepared statement in which they would spell out their views on big business including the Tatas. Obviously they were not going to present a particularly edifying picture of the business conglomerate’s activities. Expectedly, therefore, when the festival organisers got wind of Chomsky’s intentions, they cancelled the programme, without, of course, telling him why.

More here.

Dennis Zhou at Art in America:

In the early 1980s, the painter, sculptor, and all-around technological savant Tishan Hsu landed a night job as a “word processor” at a Wall Street law firm. Encountering early computers before they entered widespread use, Hsu spent his shifts engrossed in a now mundane task: staring at a screen. Entranced by the symbiosis between user and machine, Hsu has continued to probe the interstices between the virtual and the physical over the past four decades, blending elements of architecture, medicine, and computer processing into inimitable hybrid objects. Following a debut at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in January, “Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit,” his first museum survey, was scheduled to arrive at SculptureCenter in New York in May. Delayed due to the pandemic, the exhibition opened in September in an interlinked, computer-dependent world Hsu prophesied. Encompassing paintings, sculptures, drawings, and videos, the show traces an arc from the dawn of personal computing to the advent of social media.

more here.

Sam O’Brien at Atlas Obscura:

In the winter of 1984, Timothy Tangherlini worked on a dairy farm on the Danish island of Funen. One day, while brushing cattle in the barn, he spotted a tiny man in a hat sitting on the back of one of the cows. When Tangherlini tried to speak to the stranger, the little man jumped out the barn window. Assuming it was a trick, he told the couple that owned the farm about the encounter. They both shrugged. “That was the nisse,” they explained.

Tangherlini is now a professor of Scandinavian folklore at UC Berkeley. Whether or not one truly believes the tales, the barn-dwelling “house elves” often known as nisse have been figures in folklore across the Nordic region since at least the late Middle Ages. Farmers believed that surviving a hard winter depended on the nisse’s whims, which were mercurial. Keep your farm’s nisse happy, and he’d make sure your milk stayed fresh and your livestock remained healthy. Disrespect him, and you might find your cow dead in the morning.

more here.

Revisions

Before the poet was a poet
nothing was reworked:

not the smudge of ink on twelve sets of clothes
not the fearsome top berth on the train
not a room full of boxes and dull windows
not the cat that left its kittens and afterbirth in a pair of jeans
not doubt.

Before the poet was a poet
everything had a place:

six years were six years …………parallel lines followed rules
like obedient children
[the Dewey Decimal System]
…………………………………….………..homes remained where they’d
been left.

Before the poet was a poet
many things went unseen:

clouds sometimes wheedled a ray out of the sun| parents kept photographs under
their pillows| letters never said everything they wanted to| lectures were interrupted
by a commotion of leaves|  ………… | every step was upon a blind spot.

by Sridala Swami
from Escape Artist
Aleph Book Co., New Delhi,© 2014,  

Jeff Sharlet in Bookforum:

I REMEMBER BETTER THAN MOST where I was when I knew Donald Trump would win. Not just that he would win but that “the office” would not subdue him, that he was coming because he was the crest of a wave, a force made unstoppable by its mostly unseen mass. It was October 9, 2016, I was forty-four, and I was having a heart attack. On the TV above my hospital bed, at his second debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump loomed over Clinton’s shoulder. My nurse, a Trump supporter, gave me a drip of nitroglycerin. It was a slow-moving heart attack. It’d gathered strength across days, at first fooling the ER doctors, who’d told me tests made them “95 percent certain” my heart was fine, which happens to be about the same certainty with which most pundits spoke of the imminent Clinton victory. The ER doctors had sent me home, they’d told me I could bet on those odds. But a heart is not a nation. Mine was just unlucky. Or maybe lucky, because a friend who understood the odds, or pain, better than I did insisted I return to the hospital.

I didn’t want to miss the debate. That’s how I thought then, as if hate was something you had to see, over and over, something from which you couldn’t look away. Trump’s words didn’t matter. Neither did Clinton’s. It was too late, I realized. I’d prided myself on calling him a contender from the day he’d descended the golden escalator. “Wow, whoa,” he’d said. And, “They’re not sending their best”—Mexico, remember. And “They’re rapists”—the people “they” were sending. That’ll play, I’d thought. I knew how to think ugly then. I’d been looking at hate for a long time. It’d become my beat, my livelihood. I listened. I learned the vernacular. Love languages? My specialty was discerning hate languages, the hate that claimed its name was “love” and the hate that flattered itself as “tradition,” the hate that declared itself a “right” and the hate that cried—like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, a big movie across the American hate spectrum—“Fr-e-e-e-e-dom!”

I’d spent that spring traveling to Trump rallies. I told people Trump was an orator. They didn’t believe me. Not like Obama, I said. I’d pull up a video and hit mute. What do you see? I’d ask. They’d watch the chopping hands. “Mussolini,” they’d say. Right, now look again. Sometimes they saw what I saw: his timing. “Oh my God,” they’d say, “he’s like a comedian!” I’d turn on the sound. “Now listen.”

More here.

Blake Belden in Phys.Org:

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, but many immunotherapies have had limited success in treating aggressive forms of the disease. “A deeper understanding of the immunobiology of breast cancer is critical to the success in harnessing immunotherapeutic approaches to improve breast cancer survival,” said Paula Bos, Ph.D., member of the Cancer Biology research program at VCU Massey Cancer Center and assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at the VCU School of Medicine. New research findings from Bos, published in Cell Reports, identified a type of immune cells that acts as a major driver of breast cancer growth by preventing the accumulation of a specific protein that induces anti-tumor responses. This new knowledge could be utilized for the development of novel immunotherapeutic approaches to treat the disease.

Regulatory T cells (Treg cells) are a special class of immune cells that possess a unique ability to suppress the function of other immune cells. This function serves to protect the organism from overreacting to certain molecules created within the body; however, in many cases it subdues the immune system’s ability to attack cancer cells. Therefore, Treg cells are often abundant in solid tumors, particularly breast cancers, and are commonly associated with worse outcomes.

In previous research, Bos demonstrated that targeting Treg cells in breast cancer models significantly reduced tumor growth and metastasis; however, it remained unclear on a molecular level why this tumor reduction was happening. There is a specific protein called interferon gamma (IFN-?) that has powerful anti-tumor properties, including the activation of macrophages, which are cells that can initiate inflammation and prevent cancer growth. Bos’ latest study suggests that Treg cells suppress IFN-g production by CD4 T lymphocytes (a type of white blood cells), further instigating disease progression. After analyzing breast cancer models in which Treg cells had been targeted and destroyed, Bos discovered an increased presence of IFN-g and functional reprogramming of macrophages into tumor-fighting cells.

More here.

Amit Chaudhuri in n + 1:

The title of this talk seems to suggest that I know the answer to the “why,” and that I’m about to share it with you. I began writing my first novel in 1986, in what I elected to be my gap year: so, if I’ve been trying my hand at fiction for about thirty-four years now, I should definitely have some idea why I write novels. The truth is that the title has a misleading sound. It should have been, “Why Do I Write Novels?”, with the emphasis on the “do”: because I’ve grown increasingly, rather than less, puzzled by this part of my existence—a part that, to those who know my work from afar, may even seem definitive of my existence.

Of course, in order for me to be confident of that title, “Why I Write Novels,” I have to assume that the reader knows enough of my fiction to want to learn of its backstory and provenance. I’m not making such an assumption. What I’m hoping is that the spectacle of a person who’s published seven novels over three decades without knowing exactly why he’s chosen that genre to write in will be a matter of curiosity to others.

People have pointed out to me from the start that I have been writing about my life. I have been at pains to point out to them that I’m interested in “life,” not “my life,” and that there’s a subtle difference between my understanding of the first and the second.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Many characteristics go into making human beings special — brain size, opposable thumbs, etc. Surely one of the most important is language, and in particular the ability to learn new sounds and use them for communication. Many other species communicate through sound, but only a very few — humans, elephants, bats, cetaceans, and a handful of bird species — learn new sounds in order to do so. Erich Jarvis has been shedding enormous light on the process of vocal learning, by studying birds and comparing them to humans. He argues that there is a particular mental circuit in the brains of parrots (for example) responsible for vocal learning, and that it corresponds to similar circuits in the human brain. This has implications for the development of intelligence and other important human characteristics.

More here.

David French in The French Press:

This is a grievous and dangerous time for American Christianity. The frenzy and the fury of the post-election period has laid bare the sheer idolatry and fanaticism of Christian Trumpism.

A significant segment of the Christian public has fallen for conspiracy theories, has mixed nationalism with the Christian gospel, has substituted a bizarre mysticism for reason and evidence, and rages in fear and anger against their political opponents—all in the name of preserving Donald Trump’s power.

As I type this newsletter, I am following along with a D.C. event called the Jericho March. Eric Metaxas, a prominent Christian radio host, former featured speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast, and the best-selling author of Bonhoeffer is the master of ceremonies; former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is a featured speaker. The event also includes a flyover from Marine One, the president’s helicopter.

More here.

Racists

Vas en Afrique! Back to Africa! The butcher we used to patronize in the
….. Rue Cadet market,
beside himself, shrieked at a black man in an argument the rest of the
….. import of which I missed
but that made me anyway for three years walk an extra street to a shop
….. of definitely lower quality
until I convinced myself that probably I’d misunderstood that other thing
….. and could come back.
Today another black man stopped, asking something that again I didn’t
….. catch, and the butcher,
who at the moment was unloading his rotisserie, slipping the chickens
….. off their heavy spit,
and he answered—how get this right?—casually but accurately brandished
….. the still-hot metal,
so the other, whatever he was there for, had subtly to lean away a little,
….. so as not to flinch.

by C.K. Williams
from Selected Poems
Noonday Press 1994

Ted Scheinman in Smithsonian:

In 1947, a 16-year-old David Cornwell left the British boarding school system where he’d spent many unhappy years and ended up in Switzerland, where he studied German at the University of Bern—and caught the attention of British intelligence. As the restless child of an estranged mother and a con-man father, and a precocious student of modern languages to boot, the young wayfarer was a natural recruitment target for the security services, which scooped him up in the late 1940s to be “a teenaged errand boy of British Intelligence,” as he put it in his 2016 memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. Over the next 15 years, those little errands would continue and grow, furnishing Cornwell with the material that would fill the whopping 25 spy novels he wrote under the pen name John le Carré. It would be true to say that he was the finest spy novelist of all time, but in fact he was one of the greatest novelists of the last century. In a blow to his millions of readers, le Carré died of pneumonia on Sunday, at the age of 89.

“I spend a lot of odd moments these days wondering what my life would have looked like if I hadn’t bolted from my public school, or if I had bolted in a different direction,” le Carré wrote in his memoir. “It strikes me now that everything that happened later in life was the consequence of that one impulsive adolescent decision to get out of England by the fastest available route and embrace the German muse as a substitute mother.”

During his parentless, wandering days in Switzerland and Germany, and indeed throughout his life, German was more than a mere second language to le Carré. He was fond of quoting the axiom, often attributed to Charlemagne, that “To possess another language is to possess another soul.”

More here.

Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic:

The doomsday machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is buried deep underground, but connected to a computer, which is in turn hooked up to sensors in cities and towns across the United States.

The sensors are designed to sniff out signs of the impending apocalypse—not to prevent the end of the world, but to complete it. If radiation levels suggest nuclear explosions in, say, three American cities simultaneously, the sensors notify the Doomsday Machine, which is programmed to detonate several nuclear warheads in response. At that point, there is no going back. The fission chain reaction that produces an atomic explosion is initiated enough times over to extinguish all life on Earth. There is a terrible flash of light, a great booming sound, then a sustained roar. We have a word for the scale of destruction that the Doomsday Machine would unleash: megadeath.

Nobody is pining for megadeath. But megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960  book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.

Kahn concluded that automating the extinction of all life on Earth would be immoral. Even an infinitesimal risk of error is too great to justify the Doomsday Machine’s existence. “And even if we give up the computer and make the Doomsday Machine reliably controllable by decision makers,” Kahn wrote, “it is still not controllable enough.” No machine should be that powerful by itself—but no one person should be either.

More here.

Karthik Purushothaman at The Baffler:

For much of his career, Metres has focused on American wars in the Arab world. In Shrapnel Maps, his new collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, he shifts his terrain to Palestine-Israel. Drawing on disparate sources, including 1948 memorabilia, maps and texts from centuries earlier, and testimonies of refugees, activists, and suicide bombers, Metres orchestrates a grand conversation of voices and perspectives across three nations. The book is broken into ten sections, resembling a binder containing a war correspondent’s notes. At a climactic moment, Metres turns “shrapnel” into a verb, referring to a “shrapneled map.” The phrase evokes the image of metal invading the body politic, calling to mind these lines from the Iraq veteran writer Kevin Powers: as if “war is just us / making little pieces of metal / pass through each other.”

more here.