Terry Hartle in The Christian Science Monitor:

As his armies conquered most of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte demonstrated an insatiable desire to steal art. These were not smash-and-grab operations. According to Cynthia Saltzman’s marvelous book, “Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast,” he sought out experts to advise him on which cultural treasures to ship back to Paris. Napoleon wanted to expand the art collection in the Louvre palace. He wrote to France’s five-member governing committee to “send three or four known artists” to choose the best paintings and sculptures.

The peace treaties Napoleon imposed on defeated foes usually required artworks to be forfeited. A 1796 treaty with Pope Pius VI, for example, was worded: “The Pope shall deliver to the French Republic one hundred paintings, busts, vases or statues at the choice of the Commissioners who will be sent to Rome.” At one point he even boasted to the governing committee, “we have everything that is a work of art in Italy, save for a small number of objects in Turin and Naples.”

The French justified this theft not only as part of the spoils of war but also as a way of demonstrating the French Republic’s dominant position in Europe’s new military, political, and cultural order, Saltzman writes. Possessing these objects would demonstrate “their passion for knowledge, their respect for history, their discipline, rationality, and expertise in the fine arts.”

Saltzman tells this story by focusing on the fate of one particular masterpiece: Paolo Veronese’s “The Wedding Feast at Cana.” Painted for the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice in 1563, the painting recounts Jesus’ first miracle, the changing of water into wine. The giant canvas measures 22 feet by 33 feet and includes 130 life-size figures arranged across a richly colored and beautifully painted canvas.

More here.

Helena Miton in Nautilus:

Something about me must remind people of a blind 17th-century poet. My last name, Miton, is French, yet people outside of France invariably misspell it as “Milton”—as in the famed English author, John Milton, of the epic poem Paradise Lost. It is not uncommon for people to misspell an unfamiliar name—yet 99 times out of 100 people misspell mine as “Milton.” That is the name that shows up on everything from my university gym card to emails from colleagues. It might seem trivial, yet this misspelling actually illustrates a key feature of how cultural practices emerge and stabilize.

When studying culture, one of the key questions scientists ask is about continuity: Why do people do the same things, in roughly similar ways, over long periods of time? Consider how traditional food recipes, say tamales, have maintained a stable core definition over generations—corn-based dough cooked in corn husks.

Cognitive anthropologists such as myself try to answer this scientific question by studying how human minds interact with culture. One approach, known as cultural evolution, draws from Darwinian theory to view the evolution in longstanding cultural practices as akin to the evolution of biological species.

Most cultural evolution theorists assume that these traditions are maintained through generations by faithful transmission, or what’s known as “cultural fidelity.” Because humans are considered to be particularly adept at acquiring information through imitation, it stands to reason, they say, that we’d copy our models without mistakes. Humans, these researchers assert, inherit cultural information in the same way DNA sustains genetic information, with low rates of random mutations. Considering cultural change in this way has led cultural evolutionists to rely heavily on the subfield of population genetics—and to use models that assume cultural continuity works solely through inheritance.

Yet cultural information is not actually passed on through generations with the same degree of fidelity as genetic information.

More here.

Seamus Heaney at Salmagundi:

Neruda’s declaration that “the reality of the world … should not be underprized” implies that we can and often do underprize it. We grow away from our primary relish of the phenomena. The rooms where we come to consciousness, the cupboards we open as toddlers, the shelves we climb up to, the boxes and albums we explore in reserved places in the house, the spots we discover for ourselves in those first solitudes out of doors, the haunts of those explorations at the verge of our security—in such places and at such moments “the reality of the world” first wakens in us. It is also at such moments that we have our first inkling of pastness and find our physical surroundings invested with a wider and deeper dimension than we can, just then, account for.

What I am talking about is at the time an unconscious process. It is neither sentimental nor literary, since it happens during the pre-reflective stage of our existence.

more here.

Alexa Hazel at The Point:

Simone Weil was difficult for those who knew her in life and no less difficult for those who encounter her now, through the writings that survived her death at the age of 34 in 1943. Robert Zaretsky’s new intellectual biography, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (2021), evokes several difficulties in its epilogue. Weil’s character was “extreme.” Her ideas were largely impractical (“at worst inhuman”). He calls her attitude “merciless.” And yet, “I cannot resist returning time and again to this remarkable individual,” Zaretsky writes. She led an “exemplary” life. “For many of her readers,” he suggests, “Weil’s life has all the trappings of secular sainthood.”

Some do take a strong stance on Weil (saint, insane). Many more find themselves in what Zaretsky calls an “untenable position.” T.S. Eliot alludes to Weil’s “great soul” several times in his preface to the English translation of The Need for Roots. Eliot echoes Albert Camus, who collected and published much of Weil’s work after her death, and once called her “the only great spirit of our time.”

more here.

John Rapley in Aeon:

Neo-Malthusians credited environmental feedback loops, not moral failings, for regime collapse. In the 1960s and ’70s, works by Paul Ehrlich and Donella Meadows et al argued that the world’s population was growing so fast it would soon outstrip resource supplies, leading to (among other things) widespread food shortages. More recently, Jared Diamond wrote of the role that environmental depletion and diseases played in the fall of civilisations, and his theory that the collapse of Easter Island resulted from overexploitation of the natural environment has enjoyed particular resonance. For its part, the COVID-19 pandemic revived old theories about the role that diseases played in regime collapse, and we were reminded that plagues had laid low the Roman Empire and destroyed European feudalism.

Except, that wasn’t what happened. At least, not quite the way supposed.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

Practically every animal that scientists have studied — insects and cephalopods, amphibians and reptiles, birds and mammals — can distinguish between different numbers of objects in a set or sounds in a sequence. They don’t just have a sense of “greater than” or “less than,” but an approximate sense of quantity: that two is distinct from three, that 15 is distinct from 20. This mental representation of set size, called numerosity, seems to be “a general ability,” and an ancient one, said Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trento in Italy.

Now, researchers are uncovering increasingly more complex numerical abilities in their animal subjects. Many species have displayed a capacity for abstraction that extends to performing simple arithmetic, while a select few have even demonstrated a grasp of the quantitative concept of “zero” — an idea so paradoxical that very young children sometimes struggle with it.

More here.

Trita Parsi and Matthew Petti in The American Prospect:

Reviewing all of the region’s military interventions between 2010 and 2020, our research shows that several powerful states in the region intervene militarily in the affairs of their neighbors to roughly the same degree, defying the idea that the region’s instability can be blamed on a single pariah state.

Among these states—Iran, Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates—there is no outlier. While Washington has fixated on Tehran’s interventions, the data shows that the UAE and Turkey have of late outdone Iran in terms of military meddling in the affairs of their neighbors. Iran’s support for militias in Iraq and Lebanon has grabbed headlines in the American media, but the UAE has quietly been building its own international mercenary army with the help of contractors like Erik Prince, and Turkey has shuttled fighters from Syria to Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh.

More here.

Matt Davenport in Science:

For decades, scientists suspected that bacteria known as Geobacter could clean up radioactive uranium waste, but it wasn’t clear how the microbes did it.

“The biological mechanism of how they were doing this remained elusive for 20 years,” said Gemma Reguera, the Spartan microbiologist whose team solved that mystery 10 years ago. Well, three-quarters of the mystery. She’s now cracked the rest of the case. What Reguera discovered in 2011 was that, on one side of their cells, the Geobacter make protein filaments that act like little wires to literally zap uranium. This does two things. For one, the jolt triggers chemical reactions that give the bacteria energy. Secondly, that chemistry traps the uranium in a mineral form, preventing the radioactive material from spreading through the environment. But those protein wires accounted for just about 75% of the uranium that the Geobacter were cleaning up.

“We always knew we were missing something,” said Reguera, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics in the College of Natural Science. “What we didn’t know was what was happening at the cell surface, particularly on the side of the cell that had no wires to immobilize the uranium.”

Now, Reguera’s team has the answer. Molecules called lipopolysaccharides coat the cell surface and soak up the uranium like a sponge.

More here.

Marco Jost in Nature:

Our main goal is to begin deciphering the molecular communication between bacteria (and the small molecules they secrete) and host cells in the small intestine. We’re particularly interested in enteroendocrine cells — cells found in the lining of the small intestine and throughout the intestinal tract — and how the small-intestine microbiome prompts them to release hormones. We also want to explore how this communication allows gut bacteria to alter physiology throughout the body. We know that gut bacteria affect biological processes in distal places such as the brain and skeletal muscles. I believe that bacterial communication with enteroendocrine cells is a major mechanism. These cells secrete hormones and neurotransmitters, and they also talk to neurons, sending signals across the body. We know there are physical interactions, where bacteria adhere to host cells. There are also chemical-signaling interactions, where intestinal cells sense and react to small molecules produced by microbes. We don’t yet understand the full context or implications of this molecular language in the small intestine. We hope to begin probing which small molecules the enteroendocrine cells respond to, which bacteria produce these molecules, which receptors they bind to, and how that translates to changes in biological processes. Our hope is to provide valuable novel therapeutic targets, not just for metabolic disorders, but also for neuropsychiatric conditions, and disorders influenced by the microbiome.

What cells and molecules will you focus on?

The small intestine is an incredibly dynamic environment, and we know that diet is a key influence on small-intestine activity. We also know there is a rich diversity of enteroendocrine cells in the small intestine, and that the chemical landscape is very interesting. There are different types of enteroendocrine cells, each with its own specialized function. Most commonly, they each secrete a different hormone in response to external prompts such as diet.

More here.

Manic Screaming

We should make all spiritual talk
…. Simple today:

God is trying to sell you something,
…. But you don’t want to buy.

This is what your suffering is:

Your fantastic haggling,
…. Your manic screaming over the price!

by Hafiz
from I Heard God Laughing
Penguin Books, 2006

Morgan Meis in The Porch Magazine:

I’m not gonna say that Everybody Wants Some!!, the film by Richard Linklater, is a great movie. It is not. But it’s pretty good. We should also just appreciate a film that has not one but two!! exclamation marks in its official title. And yet, something nags at me about the title, that sentence, everybody wants some. What is it that everybody wants? Some. Some what? Well sex, of course, everbody wants some sex. And most of the people in the film are chasing after sex, especially the jocks on the baseball team, our ostensive heroes, the protagonists of the film if there are any protagonists in this film. They want to have as much sex as possible, those baseball jocks, and a few of them get just that. They also want something to do with baseball. They want to become baseball players of a professional sort. They want some fame, some glory, the glory of sport. Probably they want some money also, the money that goes along with the glory and that overlaps to at least some degree with the sex. Sex, glory, and money. That is what they want some of.

One amazing thing that Linklater achieves in the film, to my mind, dearest Porch, I don’t know if you had the same experience with the film, but I’ve noticed that many reviewers of the film say something along these same lines, they say that you can’t really dislike these jocks. It is a funny point but one I’d have to agree with.

More here.

From Phys.org:

The road from SARS-CoV-2’s “immunity shield” or “sheep’s clothing” to its Achilles’ heel involved several state-of-the-art research techniques. In collaboration with Peter Hinterdorfer of the Institute of Biophysics at the University of Linz, Austria, the team used high-tech biophysical methods to analyze how the lectin binding takes place in detail. For example, the researchers measured which binding forces and how many bonds occur between the lectins and the Spike protein. This also made it clear to which sugar structures Clec4g and CD209c attach.

More good news: The team found that the two lectins bind to the N-glycan site N343 of the Spike protein. This specific site is so crucial to the Spike that it can never be lost in any infectious variant. In fact, a deletion of this glycosylation site renders the Spike protein unstable. In addition, other groups have also shown that viruses with mutated N343 were non-infectious. “This means that our lectins bind to a glycan site that is essential for Spike function—it is therefore very unlikely that a mutant could ever arise that lacks this glycan,” explains Mereiter.

More here.  And see this too.

Steve Lagerfeld in The Hedgehog Review:

In the 1980s, I got to know a man who seemed to be the walking embodiment of privilege. He was an elderly but vigorous WASP, tall and lean, with ancestry in this country that reached back to the seventeenth century. A Princeton man, he had gone into finance and risen to become CEO and chairman of a major regional bank. He had one of those WASP names one can barely resist satirizing, but he had been known all his life by his childhood nickname, Curly.

This was just the first hint that this man was something of an anomaly. (Curly was also, inevitably, almost entirely bald.) Long retired by the time I met him, he had chalked up the expected array of civic and charitable activities during his career. But in retirement he was pursuing with characteristic energy an assortment of more hands-on volunteer jobs. One of them in particular struck me. He was a hospital orderly, pushing carts here and there, assisting patients’ families, and doing various tasks too small or tedious for the nursing staff. “A candy striper,” he joked. As far as I know, he was never asked to empty bedpans, but I’m pretty sure he would have done it.

Where, I have often wondered, does such a spirit of service come from? How could it be revived? Today’s elites are often generous givers of money, yet it’s hard to imagine, say, Bill Gates, a magnificently prolific philanthropist, pushing a cartful of sheets and towels down a hospital corridor.

More here.

Ben Libman at Poetry Magazine:

The 1980 reading—one of the few scenes etched in the history of Québécois literature—also marked the public debut of Marie Uguay, a 25-year-old poet with two published collections. Her brief appearance, halfway through the night’s program, proved the apex of her meteoric streak as a writer. It took all of four minutes—and it was audible. The third of four poems she recited, which begins “And yet oranges and apples do exist” and ends “Gently Cézanne claims his kinship with the earth’s suffering / with its structures / and all of summer’s vitality comes to wake me / comes gently passionately to bequeath its every fruit to me,” gave way to thunderous applause. It was as if a switch had been flipped, the suddenness with which a public epiphany descended palpably upon the room: This is a poet.

Yet, Uguay was not to enjoy the rites of a major artist. She did not have a long career punctuated by award ceremonies, readings, and frequent publications. The year after her reading at La nuit de la poésie, at age 26, she died of cancer, having just put together her third collection.

more here.

Skye Arundhati Thomas at Artforum:

“No one who saw the photo thought I would survive,” said Mohammad Zubair, describing an image, taken by Siddiqui, which came to define last year’s anti-Muslim pogrom in New Delhi. Zubair was beaten by a mob of Hindu men, many wearing bike helmets. “It was like a war zone,” Siddiqui said, recounting how he had walked over the rubble of broken bricks and batons. He stood about a yard away from the group, his mask flecked with Zubair’s blood. He was spotted, and the attackers paused, looking right at his camera. Siddiqui fled just as Zubair lost consciousness. A group of young Muslim boys found Zubair and asked the neighborhood doctor to perform emergency stitches on his head wounds. Siddiqui looked for him later, relieved to find him alive in a local hospital. He made a portrait against the pale blue wall of the intensive treatment wing, Zubair’s head wrapped in gauze, eyes bruised and swollen. Siddiqui often said that he photographed “the human face of a breaking story.”

more here.

Amy Sorkin in The New Yorker:

It was embarrassingly obvious that Governor Andrew Cuomo wanted the address, on Tuesday, in which he announced his resignation, in the face of allegations of sexual harassment, to stir up memories of his pandemic press conferences. Within a sentence or so, he was talking about “New York tough,” and he used the phrase—a rallying cry in the days when ambulance sirens were the signature sound of New York City—as the organizing rhetorical device for his speech. But it’s worth suggesting a different point of reference. Compare the image of Cuomo now with that of the Governor almost three years ago, on September 7, 2018, at the “grand opening” of a replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge, which he had managed to rename the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, after his father. To celebrate, he drove across the new span with one of his daughters, Cara, and his then partner, Sandra Lee, in a 1932 Packard convertible that had belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been the governor of New York before he became President.

Did Cuomo hope that he might follow in F.D.R.’s path? Almost certainly. Did the state pay more than ten thousand dollars to make F.D.R.’s Packard roadworthy so that the Governor could drive it on ceremonial occasions? It did. Did Cuomo also hope that people might eventually just start calling the bridge the Cuomo Bridge, and be surprised to learn that it was named for Mario, rather than Andrew? Possibly, unless he had a vision of the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge renamed for him. Does Cuomo have an issue with his father’s legacy that he seems to play out through political games in which he must be the center?

More here.