April Austin in The Christian Science Monitor:

Behind the exquisite floral wallpaper lurks a social reformer. British designer William Morris (1834-96) is today best known for his lush, garden-inspired patterns for wall coverings, but his lifework encompassed far more than mere decoration. He sought nothing less than to overturn what he considered the deleterious effects of industrialization on Victorian society. And his artistic influence continues today, not only at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, an institution he helped shape, but also as inspiration to contemporary artists.

A gorgeously illustrated book, titled simply “William Morris,” edited by Anna Mason and released by the Victoria and Albert Museum, offers a detailed portrait of the man, his work, and the values that fueled both. Even the dust jacket is embellished with one of Morris’ elegant designs from the museum’s extensive archives of decorative art. The book, with essays by more than a dozen experts, lays out the varied aspects of Morris’ life as an artist, designer, poet, educator, entrepreneur, preservationist, and political activist. Each role fed the others, and nourished his restless and fertile mind.

Morris was considered an outlier by his contemporaries, who were busy either extolling Britain’s growing industrial might or profiting directly from it. Morris was dismayed by the increased mechanization that he felt robbed workers of their dignity and the potential for creativity in their work. He also believed that mass-produced goods were inherently inferior, that their manufacture led to waste and environmental degradation, and that their shoddiness reflected poorly on the household for which they were purchased. His best-known dictum was “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

More here.

Diana Kwon in Nature:

Underground creepy crawly state. Bosom malignancy. Sun oriented force. These might sound like expressions from a work of fiction, but they are actually strange translations, pulled from the scholarly literature, of scientific terms — ant colony, breast cancer and solar energy, respectively. Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, France, spots such bizarre phrases in academic papers every day.

This year, Cabanac and his colleagues found these tortured phrases, as they call them, in thousands of papers. A handful have been retracted; publishers are investigating many more. Cabanac has built a website to keep track of the mushrooming problem. “They found this whole new hornet’s nest of articles that appear to be completely fake,” says Elisabeth Bik, a research-integrity analyst in California. Weeding out these problems is related to Cabanac’s day job: he specializes in analysing the scholarly literature, and now devotes around two hours a day to finding tortured phrases. Some people might find them funny, but Cabanac takes the problem seriously. “This shouldn’t be happening,” he says.

Cabanac’s hunt for gibberish papers began in 2015, when he started collaborating with Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France. Labbé had developed a program to spot gibberish computer-science papers automatically generated using SCIgen, a piece of software created initially as a joke. Labbé’s work led journals to withdraw more than 120 manuscripts. Cabanac helped to update Labbé’s program to find papers only partially written by SCIgen, and to locate them using Dimensions, a search engine for scholarly literature. This year, they reported finding hundreds more papers containing nonsense text, published in journals and conference proceedings and as preprints.

More here.

Kelly Liu at Pitchfork:

About 30 minutes into his new concert film Blackalachia, Moses Sumney takes off into the air. He is singing “Plastic” while floating a few feet off the ground, a lone, weightless figure against the sky at dusk. Then, midway through the song, the ropes holding him up suddenly become visible, as though we’re catching behind-the-scenes footage from a movie set. “My wings are made up,” Sumney croons, “and so am I.”

It’s a dizzying effect, one that exposes the structures that constitute our self-presentation—the things that we show, the things that we don’t. In a way, the scene feels like a natural continuation of themes Sumney explored in his most recent album, 2020’s grae: Masculinity, gender, race, the multiplicity of identities that comprise who we are and how we are seen by the world.

more here.

Susan Orlean at The New Yorker:

Of course, he was looking for love. Aren’t we all? And he seemed to be looking for it in all the right places—namely, the southern coastal counties of California, where he was, literally, the lone wolf, with seemingly no male competitors at all. In fact, OR-93 (2019-2021) was the first gray wolf to appear in the region for two or three hundred years. The absence of rivals was good news for him, but the rest of the equation was hopeless, because there were apparently no female counterparts for him to encounter there, either—no one to meet and mate with. To be honest, OR-93’s journey from his birthplace, in Oregon, to California was reproductively doomed from the start. He could have crossed party lines with a wayward labradoodle or a lusty mountain coyote, but he showed no inclination in that direction. Still, it was thrilling just that he had made the trip, signifying, or at least suggesting, the return of the species to an area where it had once thrived.

more here.

Geraldine DeRuiter in The Everywhereist:

There is something to be said about a truly disastrous meal, a meal forever indelible in your memory because it’s so uniquely bad, it can only be deemed an achievement. The sort of meal where everyone involved was definitely trying to do something; it’s just not entirely clear what.

I’m not talking about a meal that’s poorly cooked, or a server who might be planning your murder—that sort of thing happens in the fat lump of the bell curve of bad. Instead, I’m talking about the long tail stuff – the sort of meals that make you feel as though the fabric of reality is unraveling. The ones that cause you to reassess the fundamentals of capitalism, and whether or not you’re living in a simulation in which someone failed to properly program this particular restaurant. The ones where you just know somebody’s going to lift a metal dome off a tray and reveal a single blue or red pill.

More here.

Bruce Bower in Science News:

A long-standing argument that Homo sapiens originated in East Africa before moving elsewhere and replacing Eurasian Homo species such as Neandertals has come under increasing fire over the last decade. Research this year supported an alternative scenario in which H. sapiens evolved across vast geographic expanses, first within Africa and later outside it.

The process would have worked as follows: Many Homo groups lived during a period known as the Middle Pleistocene, about 789,000 to 130,000 years ago, and were too closely related to have been distinct species. These groups would have occasionally mated with each other while traveling through Africa, Asia and Europe. A variety of skeletal variations on a human theme emerged among far-flung communities. Human anatomy and DNA today include remnants of that complex networking legacy, proponents of this scenario say.

More here.

Kanti Bajpai in This Week in Asia:

India and Pakistan have an impressive record of cooperation and peace initiatives. Virtually every bilateral problem they had before 1964 – except Kashmir – was solved diplomatically, including a landmark 1960 agreement on sharing the waters of the Indus River that both have since honoured, even in wartime.

The two even came close to reaching a solution on Kashmir through bilateral talks and the United Nations, but negotiations that involved prominent Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah were abandoned following the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, in 1964.

Since then, India and Pakistan have gone to war three times – in 1965, 1971, and 1999 – and had several more scares: in 1986-87, 1990, 2001-2, 2008, and most recently, after 2019’s Pulwama terrorist attack in Kashmir that prompted Indian air strikes on Balakot in retaliation. However, the two sides have also signed peace treaties and agreements: in Tashkent, after the 1965 war; and in Simla, after the 1971 war. When tensions ran high after their respective nuclear tests in 1998, the two signed the Lahore Declaration, which included understandings on nuclear controls, in February 1999.

More here.

Atlantis

… Everything that has been said for several centuries
is swept away by my hands and hurled through high windows
into a big hole my father calls heaven but I call the sky.
He looked angrily at me because I swore the human soul
was smaller and forlorn as any 8 oz. tin you pay
half-price for at the Railroad Salvage Grocery Store.

… That was the night I thought he’d never learn
and I made foolish jokes about the boulevard in Minneapolis
where we both sat in darkness, watching yards where shadows
crawled between the bungalows like creatures from another world
and all the mothers who would never learn hung loads
of white shirts and nighties like ghosts who are waiting

… for Christ to return. I was 21 years old.
Already I had said too much: an immigrant from Norway, Michigan,
my father often spoke about another Norway where the sun
rose once but never set. This world couldn’t be your first,
he said, and by calling my ideas “wise” he shut me up. Age
21, my father thought that what his father thought

… was ridiculous, and railroaded here
to find another Michigan where he was sure silence had
the last word. Where he and his son could sit in darkness
swapping silences until between us we produced a third and final
silence big enough to house the wild inhabitants and keep alive
the kingdom of a sunken island we could swim to, should it rise.

by John Engman

Alexandra Witze in Nature:

A NASA spacecraft has entered a previously unexplored region of the Solar System — the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The long-awaited milestone, which happened in April but was announced on 14 December, is a major accomplishment for the Parker Solar Probe, a craft that is flying closer to the Sun than any mission in history. “We have finally arrived,” said Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, located at the agency’s headquarters in Washington DC. “Humanity has touched the Sun.”

She and other team members spoke during a press conference at this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. A paper describing the findings appears in Physical Review Letters¹.

In many ways the Parker Solar Probe is a counterpoint to NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft. In 2012, Voyager 1 travelled so far from the Sun that it became the first mission to leave behind the region of space dominated by the solar wind — the energetic flood of particles coming from the Sun. By contrast, the Parker probe is flying ever closer towards the heart of the Solar System, head-on into the solar wind and into our star’s atmosphere. With this new front-row seat scientists can explore some of the biggest unanswered questions about the Sun, such as how it generates the solar wind and how its corona gets heated to temperatures more extreme than those on the Sun’s surface.

“This is a huge milestone,” says Craig DeForest, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who is not involved with the mission. Flying into the solar corona represents “one of the last great unknowns”, he says.

More here.

David Robson in BBC:

“A happy family,” so the saying goes, “is but an earlier heaven” – which must surely make an unhappy family a living hell. As we enter the holiday season, many of us will be steeling ourselves for potential tension and argument. Whether it’s quiet disapproval over the quality of the cooking, a simmering resentment over alleged favouritism, or a fierce argument about our political and social values, family gatherings often bring out the worst in us. That’s if we choose to see our families at all – for many, there is no choice but to spend the holidays apart.

While family strife may be a source of entertainment in dramas like Succession, the real-life consequences are no joke. “A really common consequence of estrangement is feeling isolated,” in addition to feelings of shame and being judged, says Lucy Blake, a developmental psychologist at the University of the West of England and author of the forthcoming book No Family Is Perfect: A Guide to Embracing the Messy Reality. There is no easy cure to heal fractured relationships. But a better understanding of our family dynamics can help prepare us for the inevitable flashpoints and reveal ways to cope with the stress.

More here.

Stan Carey in Sentence first:

For much of the previous millennium, a pidgin language was used around the Mediterranean for trading, diplomatic, and military purposes. Based originally on Italian and Occitano-Romance languages, it had indirect ties to the Germanic Franks and thus gained the term lingua franca.

Nowadays that phrase tends to be applied to Latin or English. Latin’s time as the default international language of learning ended long ago; English’s status as a lingua franca is still broader but very much in flux – and politically fraught, simultaneously uniting and dividing the world.

Tackling this topic is a new book, The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language, by Rosemary Salomone, a linguist and law professor in New York. Her impressive book (sent to me by OUP for review) does much to clarify the forces behind English’s position as a lingua franca and what the future might hold.

Having a lingua franca brings great benefits for travel, business, politics, and research: witness the speed at which Covid-19 vaccines were developed through international scientific collaboration. But English’s primacy rests on centuries of violence and exploitation. The power dynamics have shifted but remain unbalanced and entangled with complex threads of post-colonial identity.

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

There’s been a lot of great coverage of Omicron so far, but with the data we have, we can’t change our behavior at all. It’s not actionable. We’re missing one fundamental piece of information. It’s the Omicron question. This article will look at what we know so far to zero in on that big question.

There are two numbers that matter in epidemiology: the transmission rate and the fatality rate. The transmission rate tells you how many people are likely going to catch a virus, and how hard it will be to fight it. Once you catch it, the fatality rate tells you how bad it will be.

There’s an additional factor that matters: The Scary Virus Paradox. There’s an interaction between these two: a virus with high transmission rates but low fatality rates might end up killing more people than if the virus has higher fatality rates.

More here.

Matthew Herper in Stat:

Paxlovid, Pfizer’s pill to treat Covid-19, retained its 89% efficacy at preventing hospitalization and death in the full results of a study of 2,246 high-risk patients, the company said Tuesday.

In early November, Pfizer had released interim results from the first 1,219 patients in the study. But another oral antiviral targeting Covid, from Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, had seen estimates of its efficacy at preventing hospitalization drop from 50% to 30% between an interim result and a final one. A panel of experts advising the Food and Drug Administration on Nov. 30 recommended 13-11 that the Merck pill, molnupiravir, should be authorized for emergency use. The FDA has not announced a decision.

The oral medicines are seen as important because they could be much easier to deliver to infected people than existing drugs like monoclonal antibodies, which must be infused intravenously or injected.

More here.

My Friends the Pigeons

The American Experiment has entered
yet another critical phase.
My friends the pigeons, who rent
a ledge in the nine hundred block
of St. Louis, seem painfully aware of this.
I hope I am not merely projecting
my own dread onto them, but if I am
I do so with trepidation,
for pigeons are, by their very nature,
conduits of urban grief, though if
studied with an open, critical mind,
refract anemic sentiments. Oh sage
pigeons of the nine hundred block
of St. Louis Street . . . Will the crowds
cease to laugh at them?
A blight on the day the happy crowds
no longer laugh at them!
A blight on the idiocy of the Christian Right!
I have watched them on television
and shivered with grief.
They are forcing me to embrace
what otherwise I might shun,
such as ugly, mite-infested pigeons,
surrogate angels for those
never told their bodies were evil.
I thank my sweet, dead mother
for never telling me my body was evil,
and for laying a big, dirty feather
on my pillow one Christmas Eve.

by Richard Katrovas
from New American Poets of the ‘90s
publisher, David R. Godine, 1991

Eleanor Cummins in Vox:

At 13, Arnie got a paper route. The work troubled him, however — and not in the usual way a kid might worry about their first adult responsibility. He could never be sure the papers had actually been delivered. “After Arnie had finished a block, he had to go back to be sure that there was a paper on each and every doorstop,” Judith L. Rapoport wrote in The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing, her 1989 bestseller about treating people with obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. “As soon as he had checked it, and turned to face the new work, the feeling came over him: ‘I had better make sure.’” Around and around he’d go, unable to break the cycle.

Arnie’s case was one of dozens of stories that Rapoport, a child psychiatrist, recounted in her book, one of the first accessible accounts of the disorder written from a doctor’s perspective. As Arnie grew older, his preoccupations began to morph. He never felt as though he could shower or dress “right.” His days were disrupted by violent thoughts about hurting his family members. In his 20s, he got a job in a shoe store but felt compelled, when sorting shoes by size and style, to never repeat any action six or 13 times. On some level, Arnie probably knew the papers had been delivered successfully, that he wasn’t going to kill his family, and that the storeroom was sufficiently ordered. But, on another level, Rapoport wrote, he just couldn’t be sure.

For most of the 20th century, OCD — defined by obsessive thoughts, compulsive rituals, or a combination of the two — was considered a rare and incurable illness. But starting in the 1980s, researchers like Rapoport began to find that the “doubting disease,” as some patients called it, was much more common and more responsive to treatment than previously imagined. Today, studies indicate about 2.3 percent of American adults have had or currently have OCD. For many, the disorder can severely affect quality of life: About half of those with OCD experience serious impairment as obsessions and compulsions take time away from work, relationships, and even more basic functions like dressing and eating.

More here.

Devika Girish at The Nation:

When does a life become a story, a narrative legible to those outside it? This question trills at the heart of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019) and the new The Souvenir Part II, a two-part film à clef constructed like a precarious house of cards: memories, texts, and ephemera from a life, stacked carefully one upon another in the hope that they hold their shape. The films take their names from Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s rococo 18th-century painting The Souvenir, which shows a woman in a lustrous pink gown carving an initial into a tree; a letter, presumably from her lover, lies on the ground by her feet. It’s an image of willful alchemy—of turning a memory, a feeling, into an object and event in the exterior world. The painting itself reifies a scene in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s epistolary 1761 novel Julie; or, The New Heloise, about the mercurial passions between a married woman and her former flame—which in turn draws on the medieval tale of the French nun Héloïse d’Argenteuil and, likely, Rousseau’s own romantic entanglements. To this series of artistic transfigurations, Hogg adds her own, constellating personal references as she reconstructs her youth: the 1938 song “A Souvenir of Love” by Jessie Matthews, the films of Powell and Pressburger, period fashion from Manolo Blahnik and Yohji Yamamoto, letters from Hogg’s former lover, 16-millimeter pictures she took in the 1980s. Together, all these objects and invocations comprise a life of the mind, an intellectual history assembled in the hope that it might represent something more than just that: the haphazard accumulations of one’s time on earth.

more here.