From the website of the Nobel Prizes:

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.

Our ability to sense heat, cold and touch is essential for survival and underpins our interaction with the world around us. In our daily lives we take these sensations for granted, but how are nerve impulses initiated so that temperature and pressure can be perceived? This question has been solved by this year’s Nobel Prize laureates.

More here.

John Mueller in Responsible Statecraft:

Postmortems on the war in Afghanistan stress errors of execution during the two decades of occupation. However, the greatest error may have been to invade at all.

Rather than launching a war that proved to be disastrous, an alternative reaction to 9/11 might have been to expand police and intelligence operations and to work with sympathetic allies to pressure the Taliban, which had little or nothing to do with 9/11, to dismember al-Qaida and to turn over its top members.

Several conditions were favorable to such an approach.

First, Taliban rule in Afghanistan was quite unpopular and far from secure. After its takeover in 1996, it had afforded peace and a degree of coherent government to Afghanistan after a horrific civil war. However, by 2001 its popularity had declined due to its chaotic and sometimes brutal rule — and perhaps due to its successful effort to crush the lucrative opium trade in the year previous.

More here.

Carole Angier at The Paris Review:

Readers of Sebald increasingly agree that it is wrong to see the Jewish and German tragedy of the Holocaust as the sole focus of his work: the darkness of his vision extends much further, to the whole of human history, to nature itself. That is true. But here is my limitation: I am the daughter of Jewish refugees from Nazism. It was the fact that Sebald was the German writer who most deeply took on the burden of German responsibility for the Holocaust that first drew me to him, and it is still one of the things that most amaze and move me about his work. He didn’t want to be labeled a “Holocaust writer” and I don’t call him one here. But though the Holocaust was far from the only tragedy he perceived, it was his tragedy, as a German, the son of a father who had fought in Hitler’s army without question. It was also my tragedy, as the daughter of Viennese Jews who had barely escaped with their lives. I think it is right to see the Holocaust as central to his work. But if I make it too central, that is why.

more here.

Frances Wilson at Literary Review:

‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ said Joan Didion. Scheherazade told her husband stories in order that she might live, thus turning herself into what Maria Tatar calls ‘a storytelling transvaluation machine’. Having been cuckolded by his first wife, Sultan Shahryar resolved to marry a fresh virgin every day and enjoy with his bride a single night of pleasure before having her executed the following morning. Volunteering as his next victim, Scheherazade read all the works of all the poets and all the legends of all the antique races and monarchs. She then told the sultan a story so long and compelling that he begged her to finish it the following night. One thousand and one nights later, Shahryar’s misogyny was cured and he had learned the power of stories.

The Heroine with 1,001 Faces is written as a corrective to Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), a book once so revered that it was used by Hollywood directors as a guide to archetypal plot structures. ‘Nowhere does the rigidity of archetypal thinking emerge more clearly’, writes Tatar, a professor of folklore at Harvard, ‘than in the binary model of the male and female principal as it surfaced in Campbell’s study.’ 

more here.

Peter Conrad in The Guardian:

Except for Donald Trump, who believes only in himself, American politicians are inveterate God-botherers, sure that they were elected by their creator, not just by their constituents. While re-traversing the transfer of power between Trump and Joe Biden, Bob Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Robert Costa often pause as the wheelers and dealers they are tracking pray, text scriptural citations or glance sanctimoniously skywards. Biden fingers his rosary beads before debating Trump, and when Mike Pence performs his constitutional duty by ratifying the outcome of the presidential election, an aide congratulates him for fighting the good fight and keeping the faith. Later, Nancy Pelosi summarises her scheme for raising the minimum wage as “the gospel of Matthew”.

Yet despite such homages to the soul, what truly matters in the showdowns and face-offs that Peril documents is the chunky body and its thuggish heft. Among Trump’s enforcers, only the anti-immigrant ideologue Stephen Miller, whose skinny frame and slick fitted suits are noted by Woodward and Costa, has a lean and hungry look. Otherwise, power is exhibited by a swollen paunch. Bill Barr becomes attorney general because Melania thinks his “extraordinarily large belly” is a guarantee of gravitas. Mike Pompeo is “heavy and gregarious”, which implies that he has “little tolerance for liberals”. Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, qualifies for his job because “at six foot eight and bearded, he looked like a professional wrestler”. Given this huddle of heavyweights, it amused me to learn that Biden’s entourage includes a “gut check” – no, not a dietician but a crony who offers a second opinion when the new president wants to act on instinct.

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

Every person, every mouse, every dog, has one unmistakable sign of aging: hair loss. But why does that happen? Rui Yi, a professor of pathology at Northwestern University, set out to answer the question.

A generally accepted hypothesis about stem cells says they replenish tissues and organs, including hair, but they will eventually be exhausted and then die in place. This process is seen as an integral part of aging. Instead Dr. Yi and his colleagues made a surprising discovery that, at least in the hair of aging animals, stem cells escape from the structures that house them. “It’s a new way of thinking about aging,” said Dr. Cheng-Ming Chuong, a skin cell researcher and professor of pathology at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in Dr. Yi’s study, which was published on Monday in the journal Nature Aging.

The study also identifies two genes involved in the aging of hair, opening up new possibilities for stopping the process by preventing stem cells from escaping. Charles K.F. Chan, a stem cell researcher at Stanford University, called the paper “very important,” noting that “in science, everything about aging seems so complicated we don’t know where to start.” By showing a pathway and a mechanism for explaining aging hair, Dr. Yi and colleagues may have provided a toehold. Stem cells play a crucial role in the growth of hair in mice and in humans. Hair follicles, the tunnel-shaped miniature organs from which hairs grow, go through cyclical periods of growth in which a population of stem cells living in a specialized region called the bulge divide and become rapidly growing hair cells.

More here.

Selection

I have seen a deer with antlers tipped in gold,
and it was the most beautiful thing that I can imagine.
By daylight the antler’s branches burned like tallow candles
burning in darkness. In darkness they burned like branching stars.

It could be that somewhere near there’s a river of running gold,
where the deer, stooping its head to drink, was gilt by chance.
But I have been looking for that river all my life,
and though the sun throws coins, they sink out of sight in the water.

You might think this was a dream, but no: here is the dream.
The deer stood constellated above me as I slept,
and said, with its golden tongue, I grow the gold from inside,
according to the laws of natural selection.

The gold draws hunters to me, drawn to me above all,
and meek as I am, I am the first and most readily martyred.
The rewards due to the martyr are greater than you can imagine,
and so I thrive, and so I am selected for.

I would have thought endurance in this world, I said,
is what selection means, and whatever comes afterward
cannot flow backward to favor any living things.
That shows what you know, said the deer, and I awoke.

by Jeff Dolven
from The Yale Review

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter Hinternet:

Social media have gutted institutions: journalism, education, and increasingly the halls of government too. When Marjorie Taylor Greene displays some dumb-as-hell anti-communist Scooby-Doo meme before congress, blown up on poster-board and held by some hapless staffer, and declares “This meme is very real”, she is channeling words far, far wiser than the mind that produced them. We’re all just sharing memes now, and those of us who hope to succeed out there in “reality”, in congress and classrooms and so on, momentarily removed from our screens and feeds, must learn how to keep the memes going even then. “Real-world” events, in other words, are staged by the victors in our society principally with an eye to the potential virality of their online uptake. And when virality is the desired outcome, clicks effected in support or in disgust are all the same. Thus the naive idea that AOC wore her “Tax the Rich” gown to a particular event attended by a select crowd within a well-defined physical space completely distorts the motivation behind the gesture, which was, obviously, to make waves not during, but immediately after, the event, not for the people at the event, but for all the people who were not invited.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

Topologists study the properties of general versions of shapes, called manifolds. Their animating goal is to classify them. In that effort, there are a few key distinctions. What exactly are manifolds, and what notion of sameness do we have in mind when we compare them?

Here are the basic differences.

Manifolds can be shapes of any dimension, from zero-dimensional points to one-dimensional lines to two-dimensional surfaces (like the surface of a ball) to 100-dimensional spaces (and beyond) that are hard to picture but as mathematically real as anything else. Mathematicians study them because, among other reasons, three- and four-dimensional manifolds provide the setting of our lives.

More here.

Keith P. Mankin (and also Ed Simon, Erik J. Larson, and Angus Fletcher) in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

There is great emotional weight in literature. Anyone who has cried for the death of Old Yeller, laughed at the antics of Lucky Jim, or been thrilled by the adventures of Simon Templar can attest to that simple fact. What has never been simple is understanding why a string of written words can create such an emotional response, or possibly more important, why some strings achieve it so much more effectively than others.

Angus Fletcher’s breathtaking book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature attempts to explain that very thing. With degrees in both English Literature and Neuroscience, Dr. Fletcher explores the intersection of two fields that, on their face, have little overlap. His book follows a linear and roughly chronological narrative of literary innovation from the standpoint of a reader’s emotional response. At the same time, he peers into the central nervous system at each milepost to find out what biological and biochemical action may be governing those emotions. Intriguingly, he has also found a parallel and almost linear narrative of our knowledge of the way the brain works, furthering his argument that the two functions are intertwined.

More here.

David Buchannan in Zocalo Public Square:

I’m an audiovisual translator, which means that I—and others like me—help you understand the languages spoken on screen: You just click that little speech bubble icon in the bottom-right corner of your preferred streaming service, select the subtitles or the dub, and away you go. These scripts are all written by someone like myself, sitting quietly at a computer and spending day after day trying to figure out, “What are they actually saying here?”

I decided to become an audiovisual translator because it allows me to combine cinema and French culture, my two favorite things. But there is also something about the anonymity of the work that appeals to me, which is the name of the game for our craft. As Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming at New York’s Film Forum, put it in The Art of Subtitling, “Good subtitles are designed to be inconspicuous, almost invisible.”

More here.

Philip Ball in The Guardian:

How many lives would have been saved in the pandemic if the UK government had truly “followed the science”? The question is unanswerable but hardly academic. We cannot accurately quantify how many lives were lost by the politically driven delays to lockdown in the first and second waves, but the number is not small. So would we have done better simply to put scientists in charge of pandemic policy? Might we hand over climate change policy to them, too? In fact, would their evidence-based methods make them better leaders all round? How much say scientists should have in running society has been debated since the dawn of science itself. Francis Bacon’s utopian Bensalem in his 1626 book New Atlantis is a techno-theocracy run by a caste of scientist-priests who manipulate nature for the benefit of their citizens. Enthusiasm for technocracies governed by scientists and rooted in rationalism flourished between the world wars, when HG Wells advocated their benefits in The Shape of Things to Come.

But while post-second world war issues such as nuclear power, telecommunications and environmental degradation heightened the demand for expert technical advice to inform policies, the UK government’s first official scientific adviser, Solly Zuckerman, appointed in 1964 by Harold Wilson, stressed the limits of his role. “Advisory bodies can only advise,” he said. “In our system of government, the power of decision must rest with the minister concerned or with the government as a whole. If scientists want more than this then they’d better become politicians.”

That remains the common view today: scientists advise, ministers decide.

More here.

Stephen Humphries in The Christian Science Monitor:

On the cover of her new album, Dar Williams stands on a floating platform in a lake. A breeze ripples the water so that it’s as wrinkled as elephant skin. As Ms. Williams gazes toward an unseen horizon, her scarlet shawl flutters behind her like a vapor trail. The atomistic image is metaphorical. Ms. Williams says the photo, taken by a drone, makes her look like a red dot destination marker on a map. The album, debuting Oct. 1, is titled “I’ll Meet You Here.” “Somehow we have to figure out how to continue to meet the moment and meet one another,” even when we seem to be stranded, explains the folk singer in a phone call.

Ms. Williams’ songs often illustrate how human connections can be a bridge across troubled waters. In 2017, the songwriter wrote a book about solving social problems by finding common ground. “What I Found in a Thousand Towns” examines local communities that have been revitalized by disparate citizens who’ve banded together in collective pursuits. Ms. Williams’ 10th album goes one step further. It posits that social connections can empower individuals to tackle global issues such as climate change. “The things I love about her songwriting are all on this album,” says songwriter Maia Sharp, who shares a similar literate, lyrical sensibility on her latest album, “Mercy Rising.” “I just thoroughly enjoyed it, from a thinker’s perspective, from an emotional perspective. She hits on familiar heartfelt subjects and themes, but operates in a completely unique way. … It’s very layered, and I always get a little more from it every time I hear it.”

More here.

Dothead

Well yes, I said, my mother wears a dot.
I know they said “third eye” in class, but it’s not
an eye eye, not like that. It’s not some freak
third eye that opens on your forehead like
on some Chernobyl baby. What it means
is, what it’s showing is, there’s this unseen
eye, on the inside. And she’s marking it.
It’s how the X that says where treasure’s at
is not the treasure, but as good as treasure.—
All right. What I said wasn’t half so measured.
In fact, I didn’t say a thing. Their laughter
had made my mouth go dry. Lunch was after
World History; that week was India—myths,

caste system, suttee, all the Greatest Hits.
The white kids I was sitting with were friends,
at least as I defined a friend back then.
So wait, said Nick, does your mom wear a dot?
I nodded, and I caught a smirk on Todd—
She wear it to the shower? And to bed?—
while Jesse sucked his chocolate milk and Brad
was getting ready for another stab.
I said, Hand me that ketchup packet there.
And Nick said, What? I snatched it, twitched the tear,
and squeezed a dollop on my thumb and worked
circles till the red planet entered the house of war
and on my forehead for the world to see
my third eye burned those schoolboys in their seats,
their flesh in little puddles underneath,
pale pools where Nataraja cooled his feet.

by Amit Majmudar
from Dothead
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhH41BunZZM

Edward Said Documentary on ‘The Battle of Algiers’ from The Eqbal Ahmad Project on Vimeo.