Editor’s Note: I never met Frans in person but we exchanged scores of emails and he even wrote for 3QD for a while. He was, in addition to being one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, a brilliant writer and explicator of difficult science. He will be very much missed by many, including me. I had no idea he was ill and was shocked to hear of his death at the young age of 75. His writings for 3QD can be seen here.

From Phys.org:

The Netherlands-born scientist spent decades studying chimpanzees and apes, and his biological research eventually helped debunk the theory that primates including humans were naturally “nasty” and aggressive competitors.

“De Waal shattered long-held ideas about what it means to be an animal and a human,” Emory, based in Atlanta in the US state of Georgia, said in its statement.

“He demonstrated the roots of human nature in our closest living relatives through his studies of conflict resolution, reconciliation, cooperation, empathy, fairness, morality, social learning and culture in chimpanzees, bonobos and capuchin monkeys.”

Lynne Nygaard, chair of Emory’s Department of Psychology, remembered de Waal as “an extraordinarily deep thinker” who could offer “insights that cut across disciplines.”

More here.

Portrait of a Romantic

He is in love with the land that is always over
The next hill and the next, with the bird that is never
Caught, with the room beyond the looking-glass.

He likes the half-hid, the half-heard, the half-lit,
The man in the fog, the road without an ending,
Stray pieces of torn words to piece together.

He is well aware that man is always lonely,
Listening for an echo of his cry, crying for the moon,
Making the moon his mirror, weeping in the night.

He often dives in the deep-sea undertow
Of the dark and dreaming mind.  He turns at corners,
Twists on his heel to trap his following shadow.

He is haunted by the face behind the face.
He searches for last frontiers and lost doors.
He tries to climb the wall around the world.

by: A. S. J. Tessimond
from Poetic Outlaws

Jamie Ducharme in Time:

Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound are already extremely popular: by 2030, about 10% of the U.S. population will be on one of these drugs and the category’s sales will surpass $100 billion, according to some projections. On March 18, they got another major cultural boost from Oprah Winfrey, who shared her own experience with—and support for—these medications in an ABC special called “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution.”

During the special, Winfrey talked about how using one of these weight-loss drugs (she did not say which) changed her life and opened her eyes to the reality that obesity is a disease, rather than a choice. “All these years, I thought all of the people who never had to diet were just using their willpower, and they were for some reason stronger than me,” Winfrey said.

More here.

Jeffrey McDonnell in Science:

As a Ph.D. student, I spent many days and nights standing on a steep forested slope in the rain, measuring how water drops move into the soil. I loved the outdoors, and it was more like play than work. Many nights, I would dream about my research. I was endlessly curious about what I saw in the field and thrilled when I could connect it to what I read. My ideas seemed to flow like the stream I was trying to understand. But when I became a professor, I was inundated with responsibilities and my creative stream slowed to a trickle. It took me decades to figure out how to revive it.

When I started my first faculty position, I no longer had the freedom to focus solely on research or think deeply about any given topic. I was consumed by pressing demands—staying one class ahead in my teaching, completing reviews for journals, the constant drum beat of proposal writing. As my lab grew, I became more of a research manager than a researcher. I let grant opportunities guide decisions about what research to pursue. I was like a scientific dilettante—flitting from one project to the next.

More here.

Elaine Velie at Hyperallergic:

A new documentary delves into the scandals that plagued the 1964 Venice Biennale, where Robert Rauschenberg became the first American to earn the Golden Lion grand prize amid allegations of a rigged jury. Critic and director Amei Wallach’s film Taking Venice (2023) delves into the sensationalized victory, illuminating the United States government’s obsession with its international image; the mid-century art world that launched the careers of artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol; and the ultimate triumph of Pop art at the eurocentric Venice Biennale. The film will screen for the public at New York’s IFC Center on May 17 and at Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles on May 24.

As Taking Venice recounts it, Rauschenberg’s win solidified the US as the center of the art market, and Europeans were not happy. Newspaper headlines flash throughout the film, bearing declarations that the Americans were “colonizing Europe,” among other claims.

more here.

Philippa Snow at the Paris Review:

“There isn’t really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does,” the artist Richard Phillips observed in 2012. “Something happens when she steps in front of the camera … She is very aware of the way that an icon is constructed, and that’s something that is unique.” Phillips, who has long used famous people as his muses, was promoting a new short film he had made with the then-twenty-five-year-old actress. Standing in a fulgid ocean in a silvery-white bathing suit, her eyeliner and false lashes dark as a depressive mood, she is meant to look healthily Californian, but her beauty is a little rumpled, and even in close-up she cannot quite meet the camera’s gaze. The impression left by Lindsay Lohan (2011), Phillips’s film, is that of an artist’s model who is incapable of behaving like one, having been cursed with the roiling interior life of a consummate actress. Most traditional print models can successfully empty out their eyes for fashion films and photoshoots, easily signifying nothing, but Lohan looks fearful, guarded, as if somewhere just beyond the camera she can see the terrible future. Unlike her heroine Marilyn Monroe, Phillips also observed in a promotional interview, Lohan is “still alive, and she’s more powerful than ever.”

more here.

Dolores McElroy in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

When I read that Barbra Streisand’s memoir, My Name Is Barbra (2023), would be 970 pages long, a devilish chuckle bubbled up from deep within me. There was something ecstatic about this moment—How pharaonic the ambition! What an absolute thrill that a woman famous for show business—and not, say, the Nobel Peace Prize—believes her life story worthy of such an expansive word count. I am grateful that someone, somewhere, isn’t endlessly struggling to feign correct attitudes, that someone believes there is time and space to read 970 pages about the life and times of Barbra Streisand, one of those someones being Barbra Streisand.

Streisand knows that there is something socially “tone deaf” about her. She talks about this at length in her book. Throughout her life, she just can’t seem to tell the public what they want to hear. Early on, the press would ask if she was thrilled with her success, implicitly demanding a “golly gee whiz, I sure am” response. She just couldn’t give it.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

Voisin is a senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. There, she studies algebraic varieties, which can be thought of as shapes defined by sets of polynomial equations, the way a circle is defined by the polynomial x² + y² = 1. She is one of the world’s foremost experts in Hodge theory, a toolkit that mathematicians use to study key properties of algebraic varieties.

Voisin has won a litany of awards for her work, including the Clay Research Award in 2008, the Heinz Hopf Prize in 2015, and the Shaw Prize for mathematics in 2017. In January, she became the first woman to be awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics.

Quanta spoke with Voisin about the creative nature of mathematics. The interview has been  condensed and edited for clarity.

More here.

Zaid Jilani in Persuasion:

Imagine you’re a middle-class, middle-aged mom in any number of American suburbs outside Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, or Phoenix—the kind of civic-minded, active voter that both parties chase every election.

Since October, you’ve been paying more and more attention to the conflict in the Middle East. At first, you found yourself deeply sympathetic to the Israeli response to the October 7th Hamas-led terror attacks.

You’ve heard that Israel has treated the Palestinians unfairly for years, but how could that justify such a gruesome slaughter of civilians? You decide that Israel has a right to defend itself and tell your friends and coworkers that the country should do what it has to do in order to destroy Hamas and other militant groups.

More here.

Gideon Lasco in Sapiens:

As an anthropologist, this intimacy with cats fascinates me because they represent another instance of how “human culture” is in fact made up of our relationships with nonhumans. Globally, cats have accompanied humans since ancient times, beginning in Western Asia almost 10,000 years ago. Humans initially welcomed them in their nascent settlements for their ability to control rodents; today cats can be found anywhere there’s a human presence—including in cyberspace.

But what makes cats especially loved in Turkey, and what can we learn from this special relationship in one particular country?

More here.

Sonia Faleiro in The New York Times:

Rihanna, Mark Zuckerberg, bejeweled elephants and 5,500 drones. Those were some of the highlights of what is likely the most ostentatious “pre-wedding” ceremony the modern world has ever seen.

On a long weekend in early March, members of the global elite gathered to celebrate the impending nuptials of the billionaire business titan Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son, Anant, and Radhika Merchant. Monarchs, politicians and the ultrawealthy, including Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump, descended on an oil refinery city in the western Indian state of Gujarat for an event so extravagant you’d be forgiven for thinking it was, well, a wedding. But that will take place in July. For the long windup to the big day, some of Bollywood’s biggest stars, though invited as guests, took to the stage to sing and dance in what amounted to a bending of the knee to India’s most powerful family.

Watching the event, I couldn’t help thinking of the 1911 durbar, or royal reception, when King George V was proclaimed emperor of India. Once India won its independence from Britain in 1947, it committed itself to becoming a democratic welfare state — an audacious experiment that resulted in what is now the world’s largest democracy. But in advance of this year’s general election, expected to begin in April, the Ambani-Merchant matrimonial extravaganza shows us where true power in India now lies: with a handful of people whose untrammeled wealth and influence has elevated them to the position of India’s shadow leaders.

More here.

Michael Schulson in Undark:

IT’S A FAMILIAR pandemic story: In September 2020, Angela McLean and John Edmunds found themselves sitting in the same Zoom meeting, listening to a discussion they didn’t like. At some point during the meeting, McLean — professor of mathematical biology at the Oxford University, dame commander of the Order of the British Empire, fellow of the Royal Society of London, and then-chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense — sent Edmunds a message on WhatsApp.

“Who is this fuckwitt?” she asked.

The message was evidently referring to Carl Heneghan, director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford. He was on Zoom that day, along with McLean and Edmunds and two other experts, to advise the British prime minister on the Covid-19 pandemic. Their disagreement — recently made public as part of a British government inquiry into the Covid-19 response — is one small chapter in a long-running clash between two schools of thought within the world of health care. McLean and Edmunds are experts in infectious disease modeling; they build elaborate simulations of pandemics, which they use to predict how infections will spread and how best to slow them down. Often, during the Covid-19 pandemic, such models were used alongside other forms of evidence to urge more restrictions to slow the spread of the disease. Heneghan, meanwhile, is a prominent figure in the world of evidence-based medicine, or EBM. The movement aims to help doctors draw on the best available evidence when making decisions and advising patients. Over the past 30 years, EBM has transformed the practice of medicine worldwide.

More here.

River

The schooner slips from Portsmouth and the river
widens, a snake that opens sluggish jaws
to swallow the sea, and everything slides
past – bricks, the pared spire of the church,
wharves, chimneys, terraced plots of green,
that thin woman who bends to her basket and pegs
scraps of clothing on a line, that clump of elms,
a hearse meandering on its way, the boy
with the brown cap fishing from a pier, the silver
body of his catch twitching an arc that swings
from him as everything moves past without word
or protest and the ship glides unperturbed
into a world where nothing is left but water,
air, and the uncertain space between.

by Annie Boutelle
from Becoming Bone
University of Arkansas Press, 2005

Marco D’Eramo in Sidecar:

I realise that agricultural policy rarely sets hearts and minds racing. But the recent farmers’ protests in Europe provide fundamental lessons in contemporary political science. Their significance rests not only on the fact that they constitute one of the rare victorious protests of recent decades. Nor that the protesters represent one of the most protected classes on the planet (and perhaps the two are not unconnected). Nor because the victory consisted in reasserting their right to poison water, land and air (and perhaps the three are connected). Nor even because of the extraordinary submissiveness and munificence of both national governments and the European Union­ (and are these four things not connected?). The lessons go far beyond that. But let’s start with the facts.

The recent outbreak of farmers’ protests began in Germany on 18 December, when 8,000 to 10,000 demonstrators and at least 3,000 tractors descended on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Demonstrations continued in the capital and spread throughout the country in the weeks that followed, by which time French farmers were also in revolt, proclaiming a ‘siege of Paris’ on 29 January and blocking its motorways. Similar protests broke out across ten other EU countries, including Spain, Czechia, Romania, Italy and Greece. The initial unrest was triggered by Germany’s Constitutional Court, which had forbidden the governing ‘traffic light’ coalition from using unallocated Covid-19 funds to balance its budget. Forced to look elsewhere, the government curtailed subsidies and introduced new taxes affecting agricultural motor vehicles and diesel.

Hence the revolt of the farmers, who added further items to their cahier de doléances. This included the EU measure excluding those who do not set aside 4% of their land each year from subsidies.

More here.

Over at the Watson Institute at Brown University:

Hans Kundnani in Dissent:

In the five months since October 7, people around the world have looked on in horror as Germany has wielded the memory of the Holocaust to silence criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza. The German government’s response to the conflict itself has not been all that different from that of the United States: both have increased their supply of weapons to Israel and supported Israel against South Africa in the International Court of Justice. But Germany has gone much further than the United States in persecuting protesters, artists, and intellectuals expressing sympathy for and solidarity with the Palestinian people. It wields its responsibility for a barely distant genocide as a kind of moral authority.

This invocation of the Holocaust to police criticism of Israel is a far cry from the Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, that many international observers once celebrated as an exemplary form of reckoning with the past. Even philosopher Susan Neiman, who five years ago wrote a book celebrating Germany’s memory culture as a model for the United States, now thinks it has gone “haywire.” Neiman speaks of a particularly German “philosemitic McCarthyism”—though since it has often also been directed against Jews who are critical of Israel, like the New Yorker writer Masha Gessen and the artist Candice Breitz, it may be more accurate to call it “Zionist McCarthyism.”

Although much attention has rightly focused on these individual cases of persecution, the genesis and evolution of Germany’s memory culture is less often discussed.

More here.