Kirsten A. Hall at The New Atlantis:

When Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe three hundred years ago in 1719, it was an instant bestseller, and since that time it has not given up its hold on our imagination. The story of a man and his companion Friday, cast away on a Caribbean island, is as familiar to us as any fairy tale, even if we haven’t read the book. Like its footprint in the sand, Robinson Crusoe has left a sign on the cultural landscape, even giving its name to an entire genre known as the “Robinsonade” that includes novels like Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Lord of the Flies, and TV shows and films like Gilligan’s Island, Cast Away, and Lost.

So what is it about Robinson Crusoe? Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed Defoe’s castaway was representative of “universal humanity.” Edgar Allan Poe wrote that the appeal of the novel lay in its power of our identification with its hero. Virginia Woolf wrote “there is no escaping him,” in the same way as there is no escaping the “cardinal points of perspective — God, man, Nature.” Others have explained the novel’s enduring popularity by pointing out how it sustains multiple interpretations.

more here.

Mairead Small Staid at Cabinet Magazine:

On display at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan—amid the lacquered black metal of Model Ts and the hanging flanks of the first planes to fly over the poles, just feet from Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House and the bus seat made famous by Rosa Parks, mere yards from the chair in which Abraham Lincoln was shot and the limousine in which John Fitzgerald Kennedy was also, yes, shot—is a small, clear, and seemingly empty test tube, once rumored to contain the last breath of Thomas Edison.

This rumor has, largely, been put to rest. When the object was discovered among the late Henry Ford’s belongings in 1950, curators speculated that Ford’s interest in spiritualism may have spurred him to try to capture the soul of his mentor. An early placard attached to the museum’s display read: “It is alleged that Henry Ford asked Thomas A. Edison’s son, Charles, to collect an exhaled breath from the lungs of Ford’s dying hero and friend.”

more here.

Chantel Tattoli at The Paris Review:

This goes to the center of it. Until the election of Donald Trump, the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was titled The Radical Mister Rogers. The filmmaker (owing much to Long’s book) realized that billing “would turn off people who needed to see it.” Joanne told me the premiere at Sundance was attended by cross-party politicians; in fact, she’d heard it “pleased both sides.” In the outright sense, she allowed, Rogers did not behave politically. “Many parents wouldn’t have let their kids watch.” (The national broadcast of Neighborhood was sponsored by the Sears-Roebuck Foundation, and “Sears would not have wanted to lose people.”) “But if both sides were pleased with the doc,” held Long, “either one side wasn’t paying close attention or its treatment of Rogers’s leftist politics was insufficient.”

“Rogers sure as hell was political—the Neighborhood messaged countercultural values like diplomacy over militancy—and he himself got vocal when the wellbeing of children was at stake,” Long added. (The housemothers letter I found archived at Rollins is a precocious example of that.) He was close to Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, and lobbied for Heinz’s bill to exempt one parent of military couples or single parents from deployment during the Gulf War.

more here.

Nat Segnit in MIL:

Brian is telling a young Asian-American woman about the five-day workshop he’s here to attend. “It’s called ‘Bio-hacking the Language of Intimacy’,” he says. “Uh-huh,” says the Asian-American woman. She directs this less at Brian than at the kelp forest floating offshore. Brian presses on. What he particularly appreciates is the ability to talk about stuff he can’t talk about at work. Relationships and so forth. “You know,” he says, “really make that human connection.” The Asian-American woman gives him the sort of bright, dead-eyed smile Californians deploy when they’re about to violently disagree with you. “I find I can make human connections in lots of different contexts.” Brian goes quiet. In all but one sense it’s a typically, even touchingly American courtship ritual: the clean-cut young man, no less diffident nor deferential than his grandfather might have been; the young woman off-handedly wielding her power over him, yet to be impressed. The crucial difference is that both parties are naked – not only naked, in the woman’s case, but standing up in the water, exposing herself in full-frontal immodesty to Brian and the cool Pacific breezes. We are in the outdoor sulphur springs that cling to the cliffside at the Esalen Institute, a spiritual retreat centre in Big Sur, California. Here naked sharing is commonplace and as sapped of erotic charge as it would be in a naturist campsite – which is just as well, as I’m naked too, the gooseberry in the hot tub, desperately aiming for an air of easygoing self-composure as I try not to look at Brian’s thighs.

It is thought that the hot springs on this rocky but beautiful stretch of the central Californian coast have been in ritual or therapeutic use, in one form or another, for at least 6,000 years, when the Esselen, the Native American tribe that inspired the institute’s name, migrated south from the Bay Area. They saw in the confluence of waters a fitting place to worship and bury their dead. In 1962 a local landowner, “Bunnie” MacDonald Murphy, agreed to lease the property – by then a down-at-heel resort frequented by gay men from San Francisco – to her grandson Michael Murphy. With his fellow Stanford psychology graduate, Dick Price, Murphy founded the Esalen Institute as a centre for the new “Human Potential Movement”. Their intention was to hold a series of gently countercultural seminars and “experiential sessions”. The gentleness was short-lived.

More here.

Claudia Wallis in Scientific American:

For more than 25 years one idea has dominated scientific thinking about Alzheimer’s disease: the amyloid cascade hypothesis. It holds that the disorder, which afflicts about one in 10 Americans age 65 or older, is caused by a buildup in the brain of abnormal amyloid-beta protein, which eventually destroys neurons and synapses, producing the tragic symptoms of dementia. There’s plenty of evidence for this. First, the presence of sticky clumps or “plaques” containing amyloid is a classic hallmark of the disease (along with tangles of a protein called tau). It was what Alois Alzheimer saw in the autopsied brain of patient zero in 1906. Second, families with inherited defects in amyloid precursor protein (APP) or in genes encoding proteins that process APP are plagued by early-onset Alzheimer’s. Third, mice genetically engineered to churn out excess amyloid tend to develop memory problems and do better when the amyloid pileup is stopped.

This evidence and more has led grant makers and drug companies to pour billions of dollars into amyloid-targeting therapies. More than a dozen have been tested, and one by one they have flopped. One of the biggest heartbreaks came last March, when a promising antibody to amyloid, called aducanumab, performed no better than placebo in patients with very early Alzheimer’s. Meanwhile researchers pursuing nonamyloid approaches were often left out in the cold, struggling to get grants and to have their work published. Science journalist Sharon Begley spent more than a year reporting on the lost opportunities in an article for the Web site Stat entitled “The Maddening Saga of How an Alzheimer’s ‘Cabal’ Thwarted Progress toward a Cure for Decades.” Begley notes that the amyloid crowd was “neither organized nor nefarious,” but its outsized influence stifled other avenues of investigation.

And there are so many avenues! Genetic and other evidence points to inflammation and immune dysregulation as big contributors to the disease—and likely targets for therapy.

More here.

To a Stranger

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I
…. look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking,
…. (it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid,
…. affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl
…. with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has
…. become not yours only nor left my body mine
…. only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as
…. we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in
…. return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when
…. I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

by Walt Whitman

Chris Fields at the Institute for Art and Ideas:

The idea that we have evolved to see reality ‘as it is’ is commonplace. While it might seem irresponsible, in this age of ‘fake news’ and ubiquitous political and commercial propaganda, to argue that we are not evolved to see reality as it is, I believe it’s worth doing, not least for what it reveals about our notions of ‘reality’ and ‘evolution’.

Pioneering vision scientist David Marr, for example, explained in his 1982 book Vision that ‘one interesting aspect of the evolution of visual systems is the gradual movement toward the difficult task of representing progressively more objective aspects of the visual world’.  Almost every textbook agrees. Seeing the world as it is, objectively, is widely assumed to make organisms better able to find food, avoid predators or other dangers, fend off rivals, and mate successfully; it is, in other words, widely assumed to render organisms better adapted to their environments.

Evolution favors better-adapted organisms, so evolution should favor an ability to see the world objectively. What, after all, could be the advantage in not seeing – in general, sensing – the world correctly? Evolution must make organisms progressively better at sensing their worlds. How could anyone disagree?

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

We’ve talked a lot recently about the Many Worlds of quantum mechanics. That’s one kind of multiverse that physicists often contemplate. There is also the cosmological multiverse, which we talked about with Brian Greene. Today’s guest, Max Tegmark, has thought a great deal about both of those ideas, as well as a more ambitious and speculative one: the Mathematical Multiverse, in which we imagine that every mathematical structure is real, and the universe we perceive is just one such mathematical structure. And there’s yet another possibility, that what we experience as “reality” is just a simulation inside computers operated by some advanced civilization. Max has thought about all of these possibilities at a deep level, as his research has ranged from physical cosmology to foundations of quantum mechanics and now to applied artificial intelligence. Strap in and be ready for a wild ride.

More here.

Joseph Cirincione in the Washington Post:

Impeachment has a way of bringing out a president’s worst instincts — and the world could end up paying the price.

As impeachment hearings intensified, an increasingly erratic president appeared to finally snap. “I can go into my office and pick up the telephone,” he told visiting lawmakers, “and in 25 minutes, 70 million people will be dead.”

It was 1974, and the president was Richard Nixon. He was right. U.S. policy, then and now, gives the president absolute authority to launch nuclear weapons whenever they want, for whatever reason. No consensus is required. No one else need approve.

Indeed, no other official even need know. The president, on their own, can simply summon the “nuclear football,” open binders of attack options and relay orders to the National Military Command Center. The orders would be sent down to missile control officers — where intercontinental ballistic missiles are primed on “hair-trigger” alert — and 30 minutes later you’d have nuclear explosions over the targets, just as Nixon claimed.

More here.

Oscar Mardell at 3:AM Magazine:

In Darkly, Leila Taylor offers a racially-minded revision of the Gothic canon, from Walpole to the present, with a particular focus on its American incarnations. But two things make this compendium a vital addition to the existing commentary. First is the fact that Taylor is no reductionist, and isn’t tempted, say, to dismiss the entire Gothic canon as irredeemably racist. Instead, Darkly makes a compelling and subtle argument: on the one hand, that the American Gothic is not simply a transplanting of an inherently European aesthetic, but a symptom of America’s (ongoing) legacy of racial oppression; on the other, that the American Gothic also promises a cure, a means of resisting that very oppression — that by allowing ourselves to be haunted by its texts, we can hope to terminate the legacy which produced them. Second is Taylor’s unapologetic use of the first person, her extensive reference to her subjective experience. That experience is directly related to the book’s argument: as Darkly makes clear, the legacy of racial oppression in America is something which Taylor has encountered — and continues to encounter — on a daily basis. But the inclusion of Taylor’s “I” here lends more than, say, credibility to her case (that case is already so tight, it would stand irrespective of who made it); it also ensures that Darkly, like the 43rd Capricho, is a self-portrait. By discussing how it feels for her to watch, say, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead — with its appropriations of Haitian folklore, and with the indiscriminate slaughter of the Black protagonist in its final scenes — Taylor forces us to participate in her experience. Darkly, then, to paraphrase something that Beckett once said of Joyce, is not just about the uncanny, it is uncanny.

more here.

Lincoln Caplan at The American Scholar:

Last June, I interviewed Wardlow at a maximum-security prison called the Polunsky Unit, located 80 miles northeast of Houston, where he is waiting for his execution on death row. He has been incarcerated for a quarter of a century, but the state has now set a date for his death: April 29, 2020. His lawyers, Richard Burr and Mandy Welch, having gotten to know him well in the 23 years that they have represented him, told me they are convinced that time has shown the jury to have been wrong in determining Wardlow posed a future danger. The more I have read about his case and his life, the more I think they are right. Wardlow stands out as someone the legal system has wronged repeatedly, especially in deciding his punishment.

In 1972, the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as states then applied it because juries were imposing it arbitrarily and unpredictably, for crimes such as robbery as well as for murder. In 1976, when the Court reinstated the penalty, it upheld new state laws said to address those defects.

more here.

Paul Theroux at Literary Review:

It was at this point I discovered Nathanael West. Although all his books had been published in the 1930s, they seemed to anticipate the America that was throbbing all around me, with its violence and disappointments, its spiritual emptiness, its foolishness and its freaks.

I had come across Miss Lonelyhearts as a paperback, and then found the New Directions edition of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, and then, around 1960, an omnibus edition of his novels, which also included The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million. The introduction to this edition was by the English writer and publisher Alan Ross. His note of special pleading (‘West’s slightness of reputation is not easy to understand’) resonated with my feeling of being marginal, like West, if not entirely overlooked.

more here.

Tomorrow Tanka

Yesterday, I looked
back, shaving. A moth crawled through
the fog of my face
in the mirror. An open
window unmakes a wall, the house.

Last night, I pointed
my son to the climbing moon,
the moon dragging its blue
mane behind. Our knees were wet.
Our knees were whipped red by grass.

Today, I barred his arms
as the nurse placed her needle.
However softly
I whispered, he bled. What cuts
him is the love in my voice.

Tonight, a mantis
will fish moths from the porchlight.
We’ll watch as she folds
wing and body into her
pinhole mouth. Then we’ll pray.

by Micah Chatterton
from Ecotheo Review

_____________________

Tanka: a Japanese poem consisting of five lines, the first and third of which have five syllables and the other seven, making 31 syllables in all and giving a complete picture of an event or mood.

Langdon Hammer in The New York Review of Books:

What are a writer’s letters worth? The question, posed bluntly in dollars, plays out in one of the tangled subplots of The Dolphin Letters.

In 1970 Robert Lowell was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and Elizabeth Hardwick was at home in New York with their thirteen-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick felt overwhelmed trying to manage the family’s affairs. “Cal,” she wrote to Lowell, “I can’t cope. I have gotten so that I simply cannot bear it. Each day’s mail and effort grows greater and greater.” Seeing the chance to simplify “a life that has become too weighty, detailed, heavy—for me,” Hardwick undertook to sell Lowell’s papers. SUNY Stony Brook was “wildly interested,” but she favored Harvard because of Lowell’s ties there. He agreed that Stony Brook was second choice, but they were offering more money, and he needed money. Hardwick told Harvard about the Stony Brook offer, the university raised its bid, and after much back and forth, in 1973, Harvard purchased Lowell’s papers dating from his childhood to 1970.

Too much had happened in the meantime for Hardwick to celebrate. When she had first looked into Lowell’s crammed file cabinets, she expected him to come home soon. But he didn’t. He fell in love with the Anglo-Irish writer Caroline Blackwood and remained in England with her, even after he was hospitalized following a manic breakdown in July 1970, and Hardwick came to him while Blackwood fled to Ireland. In 1971 Blackwood and Lowell’s son, Sheridan, was born. A year later, Lowell divorced Hardwick and married Blackwood. Throughout this time, he was writing about being torn between Blackwood and Hardwick in poems that would be published in 1973 as a sonnet sequence called The Dolphin.

More here.

Anna Nowogrodzki in Nature:

When Adam Siepel was building algorithms for evolutionary genomics as part of his PhD, he wasn’t thinking about visualization. But, as a graduate student in the laboratory of computational biologist David Haussler, at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), he happened to sit next to the software engineers who were building and maintaining a tool called the UCSC Genome Browser. These engineers helped Siepel to make his algorithms publicly available as a track, or data overlay, that anyone could explore. Genome browsers are graphical tools that display the genome sequence, usually as a horizontal line. Other sequence-associated data are aligned and stacked above and below that line in ‘tracks’, for instance to illustrate the relationship between gene expression, DNA modification and protein-binding sites.

Siepel’s track identifies sequences that have been retained over evolutionary time; when a user applies it while viewing the alignment of genomic data from two or more species, the track highlights regions that are evolutionarily conserved. Allowing others to use the algorithm to highlight regions of interest in their own data was “probably the single most important thing I did during my PhD”, says Siepel, who is now a computational biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Other researchers have used it, for instance, to find mutations associated with diseases and to pinpoint functionally important regions of noncoding RNA molecules.

More here.

William Davies in the London Review of Books:

Justin Smith’s Irrationality is one of many books provoked by the political eruptions of 2016. Trump is a recurring preoccupation, but so is the internet and the carnival of quickfire nonsense it hosts. Taking these two themes together – the absurd liar in the White House, and the sarcastic meme culture that helped put him there – suggests that something distinctly new and dangerous has arisen. Trump, it seems, outstrips any previous conspiracy theorist or demagogue. His election means ‘the near-total disappearance of a shared space of common presuppositions from which we might argue through our differences’. In 2016, we saw ‘the definitive transformation of the internet, from vehicle of light to vehicle of darkness’. Trump’s pre-eminence forces us to defend principles and institutions we shouldn’t have to defend. We find ourselves having to assert that good reasons are better than bad reasons, that rational government policies are better than irrational ones. Distinctions between scientific fact and conspiracy theory now have to be explained and justified. These are tasks that many rationalists, in the ‘new atheist’ tradition of Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, have been happy to pursue. Arguing as much with (what they perceive as) the relativism of the left as with the dogmatism of the right, these bombastic defenders of Western reason exhibit a spirit of hostility towards anyone daring to question the benefits and rectitude of the natural sciences. Dawkins in particular has converted a defence of scientific method into a defence of cultural hierarchy, with ‘the West’ at the top. Pinker clings to a form of Benthamism, in which statistical data prove that modernity is still on the right track, regardless of what political or cultural anguish might be at large.

Faced with a choice between a world governed by brute Pinker-esque reason and the Dadaist nightmare of fantasy and propaganda emanating from the White House, Smith seems in no doubt where he stands. Yet Irrationality is unique among recent paeans to Enlightenment and liberalism in marrying a resolute defence of reason with a recognition of how futile such defences tend to be. What troubles Smith is that ‘rationality’ means nothing without some ‘irrationality’ from which to distinguish itself, yet the precise nature of this distinction is impossible to establish.

More here.

Peter Essick in Undark:

On the evening of Jan. 10, 1957, Harold Edgerton set a 4,000-volt electronic flash of his own design to the right of a small, shallow pool of milk in his “Strobe Lab” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Edgerton, an electrical engineering professor, then released a drop of milk from a funnel 8 inches above the pool, reflecting a bright red background. A motion trigger was delayed a fraction of a second in order for the powerful flash to record the thumbnail-sized crown of the drop’s splash a few milliseconds after it hit the pool’s surface.

Like any good scientist, Edgerton recorded his data in his notebook. He had first done a successful milk drop photo two decades before in black and white, but kept trying to perfect the shot. His goal was to record equally spaced droplets around the ring. Working with color film that was less sensitive to light made matters more difficult, and when he first saw the color film version of the milk crown, he said it was merely “acceptable” because the droplets were not perfectly spaced. However, to viewers around the world the photo was stunning. In 2016, Time magazine selected “Milk Drop Coronet, 1957” as one of the 100 most influential images of all time, claiming that “the picture proved that photography could advance human understanding of the physical world, and the technology Edgerton used to take it laid the foundation for the modern electronic flash.”

It has been nearly three decades since the death of Edgerton, often called the father of high-speed flash photography. A fresh look at his pioneering work, “Harold Edgerton: Seeing the Unseen,” includes more than 100 photographs and newly released selections from his notebooks, accompanied by essays by former colleagues and curators of the Edgerton photo and strobe archive at the MIT Museum.

More here.

Ryu Spaeth in The New Republic:

There is a certain kind of liberally inclined writer who sees Donald Trump’s America as a nation in crisis. At every turn, in every tweet, she is confronted by the signs of an ongoing catastrophe, from which it may be too late to escape. An ugly, vicious intolerance spread on social media; the collapse of norms once considered sacred; a crass narrow-mindedness surreally celebrated by some of this country’s most powerful institutions—these are all elements in the gathering storm of a new, distinctly American fascism. The twist is that this crisis has its source, she contends, not in the person of Trump, but in his frothing-mouthed opposition: the left.

That, roughly speaking, is the thesis of a group of writers who, since Trump’s election in 2016, have chastised the left for its supposedly histrionic excesses. Their enemies extend well beyond the hashtag resistance, and their fire is aimed, like a Catherine wheel, in all directions, hitting social justice warriors, elite universities, millennials, #MeToo, pussy hat–wearing women, and columnists at Teen Vogue. Everyone from Ta-Nehisi Coates down to random Facebook commenters is taken to task, which makes for a sprawling, hard-to-define target. These writers might call their bugbear “woke culture”: a kind of vigilance against misogyny, racism, and other forms of inequality expressed in art, entertainment, and everyday life.

More here.