Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian:

Jeanette Winterson is not usually considered a science-fiction writer, yet her novels have always been concerned with alternative realities, and for more than two decades she has drawn on the imaginative possibilities offered by technological and digital advances. Her 2000 novel, The Powerbook, was an early exploration of the fluid identities and connections offered by virtual personae; The Stone Gods (2007) combined history with interplanetary dystopias and featured a relationship between a robot and a human. Her most recent fiction, Frankisstein, reworked Mary Shelley’s story of an artificially created intelligence into a modern novel of ideas about the present and future limits of AI and the implications for art, love, sex and biology.

Now, in 12 Bytes, her first collection of essays since 1996’s Art Objects, Winterson examines all these preoccupations without the mediation of fiction, though the narrative style is as conversational and erudite as you’d expect from her, peppered with irreverent asides and mischievous flashes of wit (“Dry as dust I don’t do,” she has said of the previous collection). The 12 essays here are grouped into four “zones”, loosely covering the past, the imagination, relationships and the future, and together offer an eclectic odyssey through the history of technological progress – a history that for too long sidelined some of its most influential figures because they were inconveniently women or gay, and has only recently begun to restore their reputations. Winterson pays tribute here to the contributions of Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing, along with women such as Stephanie Shirley, the founder of all-female company Freelance Programmers, and the forgotten teams of female programmers during the second world war, their work unacknowledged for decades because it didn’t suit a narrative of male expertise.

Winterson explains in her introduction that the essays are the product of a longstanding fascination with advances in machine intelligence, and that she approaches the subject as “a storyteller” with a modest aim: “I want readers who imagine they are not much interested in AI, or bio-tech, or big tech, or data-tech, to find that the stories are engaging, sometimes frightening, always connected.” Her primary interest is in what she calls “the bigger picture”: the metaphysical implications of our transhuman future, about which she appears surprisingly optimistic.

More here.

Bianca Nogrady in Nature:

Ever since 1796, when English scientist and physician Edward Jenner successfully inoculated an eight-year-old boy with cowpox to protect him from smallpox, vaccines have been a key tool for preventing disease. From smallpox to polio, diphtheria to COVID-19, vaccines have prevented more deaths from infectious disease than any other medical treatment.

But the concept of vaccinating against disease is evolving beyond the original goal of training the immune system to be ready to fight off infectious pathogens. Nanotechnology is helping to reinvent vaccines, and use them to target cancer, as well as a host of autoimmune conditions including multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes and even food allergies.

Ten years ago, Jeffrey Hubbell, a chemical engineer, was working with nanomaterials for cancer-drug delivery when he saw that these materials tended to get filtered into the lymph nodes, which contain immune cells. “We thought if these can drain to lymph nodes, we should be able to engineer them to be immunologically active to control what goes on in [the nodes],” says Hubbell, from the Pritzker School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Chicago.

That started a shift from nanomaterials for drug delivery to nanomaterials for immune drug delivery, or nano immuno-engineering. The idea is that the nanomaterial itself is immunologically active. Rather than using a biologically inert nanoscale structure engineered to deliver a drug to a particular target in the body, the nanomaterial is biologically active and engineered to trigger an immune response to the payload it carries.

More here.

Untitled

Were you born looking
or did you hone that ’cause you had to?
Did your eyes tire of all they saw,
from the center of beauty to the soul of hell?

Many of your words,
born by looking,
even more than by feeling
Looking, looking,
seeing, noting
looking harder,
over and under

Were you born with a single eye,
focused on everything being there
side-by-side with everything else?
You, ever on the inside,
often, always on the outside
looking

Poet, carrying the burden of vision
the chore of having to reveal
exhilaration or complication,
tragedy or imagination,
courage, irony, deep despair
everything out there
Poet, never without an assignment
never off the hook
from looking

But there’d be so much less to see
if you did not do what you certainly must
if you did not trust that what you saw
was so much more, so very much more
than any image your open eyes took
as you moved through life
having a look

Galen Kelly
8/1/2021

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

The show will be airing once a month, and I already have several episodes recorded. I am always interested in hearing pitches for new episodes, with guests who either have some weighty credentials in a given area (e.g., a biochemist who wants to address with me the question “What is life?”), or who have some demonstrable ability to speak about a topic in a compelling way (e.g., I’m recording an episode on friendship with someone whose credentials in this area are that he is my old old friend and I know him to be an excellent raconteur). [3QD Editor’s Note: the friend mentioned here happens to be yours truly—S. Abbas Raza]

I could say a great deal more about this project, but I think it’s enough to state that it is really fun and weird and a departure from the persona you might think you know through my writing. I’m not saying I can do anything like a good Terri Gross, but my goal in each of the dialogues is, to the extent possible, to “passer la parole”, to let the other person speak —ideally at least two-thirds of the time—, and otherwise just to enjoy the art of conversation while also leaving a record of it. The show will no doubt evolve in unexpected ways, and the first episodes will surely have a rough quality to them (that’s me playing the opening line on guitar, for example). But I gather no one listens to podcasts for their production value —if you want that you can listen to Rachel Maddow or whatever—, and I think I read somewhere that the number of “umms” and “uhhs” in a person’s speech is directly proportional to their intelligence. So I hope you will be generous in your listening. And please, do tell a friend. And please, again, listen to my first episode with the great Agnes Callard talking about philosophy!

More here.  [And click the link at the end of the paragraph above to listen to the first episode, “What is philosophy?”]

Megan Scudellari in Nature:

The coronavirus sports a luxurious sugar coat. “It’s striking,” thought Rommie Amaro, staring at her computer simulation of one of the trademark spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2, which stick out from the virus’s surface. It was swathed in sugar molecules, known as glycans.

“When you see it with all the glycans, it’s almost unrecognizable,” says Amaro, a computational biophysical chemist at the University of California, San Diego.

Many viruses have glycans covering their outer proteins, camouflaging them from the human immune system like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But last year, Amaro’s laboratory group and collaborators created the most detailed visualization yet of this coat, based on structural and genetic data and rendered atom-by-atom by a supercomputer. On 22 March 2020, she posted the simulation to Twitter. Within an hour, one researcher asked in a comment: what was the naked, uncoated loop sticking out of the top of the protein?

Amaro had no idea. But ten minutes later, structural biologist Jason McLellan at the University of Texas at Austin chimed in: the uncoated loop was a receptor binding domain (RBD), one of three sections of the spike that bind to receptors on human cells (see ‘A hidden spike’).

More here.

Ken Roth in Foreign Affairs:

Over the past decade, autocrats around the world have perfected the technique of “managed” or “guided” democracy. In Belarus, Egypt, Russia, Uganda, Venezuela, and elsewhere, authoritarian leaders have held periodic elections to enhance their legitimacy but monopolized the media, restricted civil society, and manipulated state institutions and resources to ensure that they remained in power.

Such methods are never foolproof, however, and their effectiveness has diminished as citizens have wised up and learned to operate within rigged systems. A growing number of autocrats have thus been forced to rely on ever starker forms of repression: they still hold periodic elections since their people have come to expect them, but they do not even pretend that these empty rituals are free or fair. The result has been the proliferation of what might be called “zombie democracies”—the living dead of electoral political systems, recognizable in form but devoid of any substance.

More here.

Sam Mills in Aeon:

The pack: that’s what they called it. A secret guide, discreetly passed to literary authors in need of money to sustain their ‘real’ art. Compiled by such an author, happy to share their experience of publishing erotica on Amazon, it offered advice to avant-garde writers keen to turn their hand to this lucrative genre. According to the pack, popular topics included:

ABDL /diaper stuff – if you’ve got the stomach for it, I would recommend writing things in this genre for immediate gratifying sales.

Gender swap/mind swap/transformation/etc – these are kind of like a teenage boy’s fantasy. Usually a man waking up in a woman’s body. These do really well.

Shifters – sort of the same as above, but more about people changing into bears/werewolves/etc – these do very well, but are quite story-led and you’d probably need to do a series to start getting some good sales.

Billionaire stuff – a dominant ridiculous billionaire and a trembling submissive hero or heroine.

Orgies/threesomes/ménage.

Historical – these sell like hot cakes! A strict baron or Lord, disciplining a servant girl or stable-hand.

The list was both reassuring and nerve-wracking. Which genre should I pick? I weighed up my own predilections versus the need to sell as many, as quickly, as I could. People tend to think authors are either loaded (with J K Rowling as the norm) or very poor. My income had been a rollercoaster over the years; now, in summer 2019, having enjoyed a luxurious view, I was zooming downwards, winds of warning hissing through me, stomach lurching with fear of the future.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times (2011):

Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies. He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and he collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.

Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. Last week in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.

“It’s really quite a marvel,” said Naomi Pierce of Harvard, a co-author of the paper.

Nabokov inherited his passion for butterflies from his parents. When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities, the 8-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift. As a teenager, Nabokov went on butterfly-hunting expeditions and carefully described the specimens he caught, imitating the scientific journals he read in his spare time. Had it not been for the Russian Revolution, which forced his family into exile in 1919, Nabokov said that he might have become a full-time lepidopterist.

In his European exile, Nabokov visited butterfly collections in museums. He used the proceeds of his second novel, “King, Queen, Knave,” to finance an expedition to the Pyrenees, where he and his wife, Vera, netted more than a hundred species. The rise of the Nazis drove Nabokov into exile once more in 1940, this time to the United States. It was there that Nabokov found his greatest fame as a novelist. It was also there that he delved deepest into the science of butterflies.

Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classifying the butterflies, based on differences in their genitalia. He argued that what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly related.

More here.

Ferris Jabr in The New York Times:

Imagine the Angels of Bread

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roof deck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
Read more »

Abhrajyoti Chakraborty at The Guardian:

“That all those who knew him should write about him,” Borges wrote of the protagonist Ireneo Funes in his story Funes the Memorious, “seems to me a felicitous idea.” Certainly those who knew Borges, even in passing, thought it was a felicitous idea to write about him. Fifty years ago, it seemed that a trip to Buenos Aires wasn’t complete without a stopover at his sixth-floor Calle Maipú apartment, which he shared with his mother. Both Alberto Manguel and Paul Theroux have written about reading to the blind genius in his living room. VS Naipaul, in The Return of Eva Peron, found Borges to be “curiously colonial”, insulated from the violence and disorder in his country. When Mario Vargas Llosa visited in 1981, he noticed that Borges had kept his mother’s bedroom intact, with a lilac dress ready on the bed, even though she had died six years before.

Jay Parini’s “encounter” happened far from Argentina.

more here.

Tim Stanley at Literary Review:

Does the world need another history of the Watergate scandal? If it’s this good, yes. Michael Dobbs’s tense facto-thriller covers the first hundred days of Richard Nixon’s second administration, from the triumph of re-election to the moment when things ‘fell apart’ in mid-1973. Dobbs stalks the president around the White House, watching and listening – much like the taping system Nixon installed to protect his reputation but that, in the end, destroyed it. We hear him make bigoted comments and plot to conceal the truth, as well as lie to the faces of men he professes to love – and to himself as well.

Tricky Dick probably didn’t order the burglary at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on 17 June 1972: responsibility lay with the Committee for the Re-election of the President, which was separate from the White House.

more here.

A discussion with Maya Adereth,  Stephanie Mudge, Adam Przeworski, and Wolfgang Streeck as part of the launch of the volume Market Economy, Market Society: Interviews and Essays on the Decline of European Social Democracy, which asks the questions: what motivated left-leaning social democratic governments to pursue neoliberal restructuring, and was there an alternative?

Cedric Durand in Sidecar:

The extent of the break with neoliberalism initiated by the Biden administration will depend upon both the unfolding of Washingtonian politics and the impact of mobilizations from below. Yet in the background, impersonal forces will continue to affect the metamorphosis of capitalism through its successive stages. It is from these structural constraints and opportunities that the fabric of the current conjuncture is woven. What can contemporary political economy tell us about them? Beyond the sphere of mainstream liberal thought, an array of recent theoretical contributions have tried to diagnose the current moment by situating it in the long-term rhythms of capitalist development. They offer a fresh light, if not a magic key, for understanding the systemic shift represented by Bidenomics.

Such forces of change are routinely ignored by liberal economists. Market exchange is viewed as a sphere of activity that depends solely on itself; conscious collective intervention must not interfere with the invisible hand or spontaneous order. However, it is increasingly clear that this faith in self-equilibrating market adjustment cannot provide a general theory of rapid socioeconomic change, nor a specific explanation of our present political turbulence. Recognizing this limitation, The Economist recently rejected neoclassical equilibrium modelling and Friedmanite instrumentalism in favour of evolutionary economics, which ‘seeks to explain real-world phenomena as the outcome of a process of continuous change’. ‘The past informs the present’, it declared. ‘Economic choices are made within and informed by historical, cultural and institutional contexts’.

This intervention signals the weakened grip of neoclassical economics on the profession as a whole. Yet the evolutionary schema nonetheless retains a deep loyalty to bourgeois ideology, premised on the belief that Natura non facit saltum, ‘nature does not make jumps’. For this school of thought, evolution is always incremental.

More here.

Adam Tooze in the New Statesman:

In the summer of 2021 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is marking its centenary. It has much to celebrate. The most powerful communist party and by far the most powerful political organisation in the world, it has presided over the largest surge of economic growth ever witnessed. For both the West and China’s immediate neighbours, this unsettling and unexpected fact defines the early 21st century.

China’s rise has undone any assumption that social and economic progress naturally leads to liberalism. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in 40 years by an authoritarian one-party regime, dedicated to what it calls “Marxism for the 21st century”.

Against the backdrop of this triumph, the CCP is planning its second century. In Europe, the US and Asia, the political classes are scrambling to keep up. American strategists have designated a newly minted world region, the Indo-Pacific, as the arena for a battle royal between democracy and authoritarianism.

Some influential voices on both sides of the Atlantic relish this confrontation. Others are suffering from a sense of shock. They hanker after the 1990s or early 2000s, when coexistence seemed assured – an era that contemporary hawks dismiss as a period of naivety when the China challenge was underestimated.

More here.