Alison Flood in The Guardian:

Leading Indian authors Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy have spoken out against Penguin Random House India’s decision to publish and promote a book by Narendra Modi during the country’s coronavirus crisis, with Mishra accusing PRH India of “enlist[ing] in a flailing politician’s propaganda campaign”. In a letter published in the London Review of Books blog, Mishra wrote to the chief executive of PRH India, Gaurav Shrinagesh, after the publisher announced it would be reissuing Modi’s book Exam Warriors while, in Mishra’s words, “smoke from mass funeral pyres rose across India”. India suffered a world record one-day death toll from Covid-19 on Wednesday – 4,529 – with the overall figure believed to be much higher than the official death toll of 283,248. Calling Modi “an inspirational leader for the youth”, PRH India describes the 2018 guide as an “inspiring book for students” that will “be a friend in acing exams and facing life”. Advice from Modi includes: “Do not merely dream of becoming a doctor, engineer or lawyer. Think of how best you can make a difference to society and let that ideal guide you”; and: “Proper feedback is one that makes the other person reflect, and not feel repulsed.”

…“Publishing Modi’s Exam Warriors is a similar form of self-abasement, made more ridiculous by the unresolved mystery about Modi’s degrees – a BA by correspondence taken at the age of 28 and an MA in ‘Entire Political Science’ from a university in Gujarat that never offered such a course,” said Roy. “Every effort to verify the authenticity of these claims about his degrees that he has made on oath before he stood for the 2014 elections has been blocked by the universities, the election commission and the courts. So we don’t know what (if any) exams this Exam Warrior took.”

More here.

Peter Mundy in Scientific American:

Since the modern era of research on autism began in the 1980s, questions about social cognition and social brain development have been of central interest to researchers. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), and it is evident in this year’s meeting that the growth of social-cognitive neuroscience over the past two decades has significantly enriched autism science. For those unfamiliar with the term, social-cognitive neuroscience is the study of the brain systems that are involved in the causes and effects of social behaviors and social interaction. Some of these involve brain systems involved in thinking about other people’s thoughts or intentions, empathizing, social motivation and the impact of social attention on an individual’s thinking and emotions.

At the same time, research with and for autistic people has also enriched social-cognitive neuroscience and the understanding of how our social minds develop. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex and heterogeneous part of the human condition, or neurodiversity. It is associated with a wide range of life outcomes, from “disorder” or the profound challenges that encumber about 30 percent of affected individuals with minimal language and intellectual disability, to “differences” among people who have well-above-average abilities and accomplishments.

More here.

Sean Illing in Vox:

It’s hard to understand the culture of policing in America from the outside.

There’s an informal code among police officers, “the blue wall of silence,” that encourages them not to talk to outsiders. There have been good attempts to study the police — who they are, what they believe in, what makes them tick — but if you really want to know how they see the world and their role in it, you almost have to become one.

And that’s exactly what Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University, did in 2015. Brooks has spent much of her career in the national security world, focusing on human rights and the expanding role of the military in government, but she decided to become a sworn reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. After graduating from the police academy, Brooks worked part time as a patrol officer from 2016 to 2020 and eventually wrote a book about her experiences called Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City.

More here.

David Guaspari in The New Atlantis:

One pillar of the modern world was the project to transform science from a discipline for contemplating nature into a tool for mastering it. Queen among the new sciences was mathematical physics, made possible by a corresponding transformation of mathematics. Ancient mathematicians, said René Descartes, had misunderstood their subject. They offered a procession of dazzling spectacles, but mathematics properly understood is not the presentation of beautiful chance discoveries. It must instead provide a systematic method for solving problems.

True and oft-heard though this story is, it is also easily taken for granted. Harvey Flaumenhaft’s new book Insights and Manipulations seeks to remedy that with a hands-on guide to this momentous change. To understand that change, he says, and to understand it as progress, “we need to know what it was a step from as well as what it was a step toward.” He presents it as a movement from the Conics of Apollonius of Perga, a brilliant and difficult triumph of ancient mathematics written in the third century b.c., to Descartes’s 1637 Geometry, a decisive stride into modernity. For Apollonius, mathematics was a way of gaining insights into the nature of geometrical forms by envisioning them in the mind; Descartes made mathematics into an activity of manipulation — hence the title of Flaumenhaft’s book.

More here.

Steven Brill in the New York Times:

In a study of the effectiveness of putting calorie counts on menu items, consumers were more likely to make lower-calorie choices if the labels were placed to the left of the food item rather than the right.

“When calories are on the left, consumers receive that information first and evidently think ‘a lot of calories!’ or ‘not so many calories!’ before they see the item,” Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein explain in this tour de force of scholarship and clear writing. “By contrast, when people see the food item first, they apparently think ‘delicious!’ or ‘not so great!’ before they see the calorie label. Here again, their initial reaction greatly affects their choices.” This hypothesis is supported, the authors write in a typically clever aside, by the “finding that for Hebrew speakers, who read right to left, the calorie label has a significantly larger impact if it is on the right rather than the left.”

These inconsistencies are all about noise, which Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein define as “unwanted variability in judgments.”

More here.

Bird

I set my alarm by an inner dove,
wake to crows.

Wherever the jay flies
my sparrows come after.

But above the jittery sandpiper,
a petrel with a beach of wing

is an intimate of the sun, single robin on the skylawn,
never flocking with the starlings,

singular and steady—planet light, hawk gaze,
heron waiting on the fishrise.

Within that silence find love even for the carrion birds—
vulture, raven, gull.

by Kim Garcia
from The Brooklyn Quarterly

Colette Davidson in The Christian Science Monitor:

France’s literary institutions have long struggled with a diversity problem. Though France doesn’t collect statistics on race and ethnicity, a majority of top editors and authors have historically been white. Its literary awards heavily favor men: Since France’s top literature prize, the Prix Goncourt, began in 1903, only 12 women have won. The integration of marginalized literary voices, especially those of second-generation French or people of color, has come in fits and starts. Until the 1990s, literature written by children of immigrant parents of Maghrebis descent was categorized using a pejorative term for Arab. The publication of a 1999 novel by Rachid Djaïdani, which described daily life in France’s housing projects where many immigrants live, was a landmark in breaking the mold. Another was the publication in 2007 of a controversial literary collection by second-generation French writers about their complex relationship with France.

But progress has been incremental. Publishers still gravitate to books by people of color from Francophone Africa or the United States, rather than minority writers who grew up in France. “I’ve always been struck by the lack of representation in French literature of my reality: what it means to be Black in France,” says Gladys Marivat, a Paris-based literary journalist. In 2015, she interviewed all of the major publishing houses in Paris as part of an investigation into the lack of diversity in French literature; her report went unpublished. “When I asked [publishers] why this was the case,” says Ms. Marivat, “the answer was always the same: a total incomprehension of my question. They said, ‘But we publish authors from Francophone Africa.’ But that’s not the same thing.”

More here.

From 1843 Magazine:

The malevolence of cybercrime often seems all the worse for the impenetrable jargon used to describe attacks. Perhaps a “time bomb” blew up your computer, or malicious software turned your smartphone into a “zombie”? Even lower-tech crimes get strange labels: “shoulder-surfing” refers to when scammers nab your passwords by literally looking over your shoulder as you type (sometimes with binoculars). “Catfishing” is when you’re tricked into thinking you’re in an online relationship and unknowingly send cash to scammers using a fake profile (the supermodel who claims to have the hots for you may in fact be a 52-year-old man called Steve).

Confusing you is exactly what these cyber-attackers want. And they’re worryingly successful: in America the amount of money lost to cybercrime increased threefold from 2015 to 2019. And that was before the pandemic pushed more criminals to focus on internet crime – just as many of us started living our entire lives online. Online criminals are often dubbed “hackers”. The term itself is controversial: many geeks use it to describe anyone with an advanced understanding of computers, and prefer the term “malicious hacker” for someone who uses their skills for nefarious purposes. They point out that hackers can also use their knowledge for good, to fight the bad guys. If you want to know the difference between online outlaws and angels, start by learning the language they speak.

More here.

Alex Kong at n+1:

THE CHARACTERS in Éric Rohmer’s films seem to be perpetually vacationing—an activity they elevate into an art form. A Rohmer holiday is languorous and leisurely, stretching on until it’s described in terms that barely make sense. The vacationers compute how much time is left not in days, but in entire months. They often run out of things to do. Sometimes they complain that their vacations are too long—which to an American sensibility can only register as a category mistake, like trying to claim the number 3 is red. This exquisitely dilated temporality seems like a dispatch from an alien planet—but if we were pressed to attach a name to it, a good one might be: social democracy. There’s a morbid anthropological interest in observing this vanished, inaccessible system, which in my more pessimistic moments strikes me as more fantastical than anything out of Buñuel.

more here.

Katy Waldman at The New Yorker:

“Everybody” ’s central character is the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, and perhaps it’s no accident that Laing presents him as a man in pieces. This is a formal description—fragments of Reich’s story are woven throughout—and a thematic one: the doctor, whom Laing praises as a “connector,” emerges as a teetering amalgam of brilliance, delusion, empathy, and prejudice. Born in 1897, Reich was one of Freud’s most famous protégés. He treated mostly working-class patients and believed that they were “carrying their past experiences around in their bodies, storing their emotional pain as a kind of tension,” which he called “character armor.” Therapy could help, as could Marxism, but what was really needed, Reich thought, was a revolution in sex, the liberatory potential of which had been warped by an extractive economic system. Reich and Freud fell out over their differing views on repression and Hitler—Freud wanted to remain neutral, while Reich urged resistance—and after Reich fled to the United States, in 1939, he grew paranoid and grandiose. He invented the orgone accumulator, a freestanding closet designed to collect orgasmic energy, and the Cloudbuster, the better to wage war on the weather. He eventually died in prison, after the Food and Drug Administration ordered him to stop selling orgone accumulators. (He didn’t.)

more here.

Jonathan Birch in The Guardian:

An insect’s brain is organised completely differently from a mammal’s. It is also much smaller (a bee has about 1m neurons, compared with our 100bn). Could insects be robot-like evolved machines with absolutely no experience or feeling? Or are we underestimating what a small brain can do?

New laws to impose some consistency in this area have been needed for a while. So the animal welfare (sentience) bill, introduced to parliament on Thursday, is a welcome development, as is the creation of an animal sentience committee. The bill includes vertebrates by default, but explicitly allows invertebrates to be added through statutory instruments. I can see the rationale for such an approach in an area where the science is moving quickly.

For instance, on the question of insect sentience, scientists are divided, partly because there has been no serious attempt to look for sentience in insects.

More here.

Venkata-Viswanadh Edara and others at bioRxiv:

SARS-CoV-2 has caused a devastating global pandemic. The recent emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants that are less sensitive to neutralization by convalescent sera or vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody responses has raised concerns. A second wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections in India is leading to the expansion of SARS-CoV-2 variants. The B.1.617.1 variant has rapidly spread throughout India and to several countries throughout the world. In this study, using a live virus assay, we describe the neutralizing antibody response to the B.1.617.1 variant in serum from infected and vaccinated individuals. We found that the B.1.617.1 variant is 6.8-fold more resistant to neutralization by sera from COVID-19 convalescent and Moderna and Pfizer vaccinated individuals. Despite this, a majority of the sera from convalescent individuals and all sera from vaccinated individuals were still able to neutralize the B.1.617.1 variant. This suggests that protective immunity by the mRNA vaccines tested here are likely retained against the B.1.617.1 variant. As the B.1.617.1 variant continues to evolve, it will be important to monitor how additional mutations within the spike impact antibody resistance, viral transmission and vaccine efficacy.

More here.

Justin H. Vassallo in the Boston Review:

The start of Joe Biden’s presidency has prompted an unlikely reassessment of the direction of American capitalism. Announcing a “paradigm shift” away from a policy regime that for decades has ruthlessly favored the very wealthy, Biden has invoked the New Deal to capture his vision for activist government. Alongside the expansion of the welfare state, he has promised an ambitious developmental agenda that links together infrastructure, industrial policy, and an energy transition to fight climate change. Though Biden’s resolve to execute his vision remains untested, the prospects for aggressive state intervention now seem far greater than during the Great Recession, when austerity quickly became a transatlantic phenomenon.

The most salient difference between then and now is that Biden has identified long-term investment as critical to the very preservation of democracy. Breaking from the neoliberal economists who held sway over Democratic policymaking for a generation, Biden’s vision is also a quiet disavowal of Hillary Clinton’s boast three years ago that, despite losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, she “won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product”—the parts of the country “that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” The pandemic has only further illustrated how even the country’s most prosperous cities, once the drivers of growth in the age of globalization, are in acute need of state-led projects and egalitarian distribution.

More here.

Shlomo Ben-Ami (former Israeli foreign minister) in Project Syndicate:

The sudden eruption of war outside and inside Israel’s borders has shocked a complacent nation. Throughout Binyamin Netanyahu’s 12-year premiership, the Palestinian problem was buried and forgotten. The recent Abraham Accords, establishing diplomatic relations with four Arab states, seemed to weaken the Palestinian cause further. Now it has re-emerged with a vengeance.

Wars can be triggered by an isolated incident, but their cause is always deeper. In this case, the trigger, the eviction of Palestinians in favor of Israeli nationalists in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, touched all the sensitive nerves of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, its humiliating control of access to the Al-Aqsa mosque, the ever-present memory of the 1948 Nakba (the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians when Israel was founded), and the grievances of Israel’s Arab minority are all fueling the current flare-up.

It may be true that the contested real estate in Sheikh Jarrah did belong to a Jewish family before 1948. But Palestinians saw the incident as part of Israel’s unrelenting drive to “Judaize” Jerusalem, and a striking injustice, because the state of Israel was built partly on the abandoned properties of Palestinian refugees. While Jews are entitled to reclaim property they owned before Israel’s founding, Palestinians may not. Those facing eviction in Sheikh Jarrah cannot recover the homes in Jaffa and Haifa that they once owned.

More here.

Perhaps

Perhaps these thoughts of ours
…………………. will never find an audience
Perhaps the mistaken road
…………………. will end in a mistake
Perhaps the lamps we light one at a time
…………………. will be blown out, one at a time
Perhaps the candles of our lives will gutter out
…………………. without lighting a fire to warm us

Perhaps when all the tears have been shed
…………………. the earth will be more fertile
Perhaps when we sing praises to the sun
…………………. the sun will praise us in return
Perhaps these heavy burdens
…………………. will strengthen our philosophy
Perhaps when we weep for those in misery
…………………. we must be silent about the miseries of our own

Perhaps
Because of our irresistible sense of mission
We have no choice

by Shu Ting
from A Book of Luminous Things
translation from the Chinese, Carolyn Kizer

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker:

Burnout is generally said to date to 1973; at least, that’s around when it got its name. By the nineteen-eighties, everyone was burned out. In 1990, when the Princeton scholar Robert Fagles published a new English translation of the Iliad, he had Achilles tell Agamemnon that he doesn’t want people to think he’s “a worthless, burnt-out coward.” This expression, needless to say, was not in Homer’s original Greek. Still, the notion that people who fought in the Trojan War, in the twelfth or thirteenth century B.C., suffered from burnout is a good indication of the disorder’s claim to universality: people who write about burnout tend to argue that it exists everywhere and has existed forever, even if, somehow, it’s always getting worse. One Swiss psychotherapist, in a history of burnout published in 2013 that begins with the usual invocation of immediate emergency—“Burnout is increasingly serious and of widespread concern”—insists that he found it in the Old Testament. Moses was burned out, in Numbers 11:14, when he complained to God, “I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me.” And so was Elijah, in 1 Kings 19, when he “went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough.”

To be burned out is to be used up, like a battery so depleted that it can’t be recharged. In people, unlike batteries, it is said to produce the defining symptoms of “burnout syndrome”: exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of efficacy. Around the world, three out of five workers say they’re burned out. A 2020 U.S. study put that figure at three in four. A recent book claims that burnout afflicts an entire generation. In “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” the former BuzzFeed News reporter Anne Helen Petersen figures herself as a “pile of embers.” The earth itself suffers from burnout.

More here.

Amber Dance in Nature:

Evolutionary biologist David Baum was thrilled to flick through a preprint in August 2019 and come face-to-face — well, face-to-cell — with a distant cousin. Baum, who works at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was looking at an archaeon: a type of microorganism best known for living in extreme environments, such as deep-ocean vents and acid lakes. Archaea can look similar to bacteria, but have about as much in common with them as they do with a banana. The one in the bioRxiv preprint had tentacle-like projections, making the cells look like meatballs with some strands of spaghetti attached. Baum had spent a lot of time imagining what humans’ far-flung ancestors might look like, and this microbe was a perfect doppelgänger.

Archaea are more than just oddball lifeforms that thrive in unusual places — they turn out to be quite widespread. Moreover, they might hold the key to understanding how complex life evolved on Earth. Many scientists suspect that an ancient archaeon gave rise to the group of organisms known as eukaryotes, which include amoebae, mushrooms, plants and people — although it’s also possible that both eukaryotes and archaea arose from some more distant common ancestor.

Eukaryotic cells are palatial structures with complex internal features, including a nucleus to house genetic material and separate compartments to generate energy and build proteins. A popular theory about their evolution suggests that they descended from an archaeon that, somewhere along the way, merged with another microbe. But researchers have had trouble exploring this idea, in part because archaea can be hard to grow and study in the laboratory. The microbes have received so little attention that even the basics of their lifestyle — how they develop and divide, for example — remain largely mysterious

More here.