Yuval Noah Harari in the New York Times:

Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, but perhaps the most common form is the Global Cabal theory. A recent survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries asked respondents whether they believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”

Thirty seven percent of Americans replied that this is “definitely or probably true.” So did 45 percent of Italians, 55 percent of Spaniards and 78 percent of Nigerians.

Conspiracy theories, of course, weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years. Some of them have even had a huge impact on history. Take Nazism, for example. We normally don’t think about Nazism as a conspiracy theory. Since it managed to take over an entire country and launch World War II, we usually consider Nazism an “ideology,” albeit an evil one.

But at its heart, Nazism was a Global Cabal theory based on this anti-Semitic lie: “A cabal of Jewish financiers secretly dominates the world and are plotting to destroy the Aryan race. They engineered the Bolshevik Revolution, run Western democracies, and control the media and the banks. Only Hitler has managed to see through all their nefarious tricks — and only he can stop them and save humanity.”

Understanding the common structure of such Global Cabal theories can explain both their attractiveness — and their inherent falsehood.

More here.

Joshua Sokol in Quanta:

On a mild autumn day in 2016, the Hungarian mathematician Gábor Domokos arrived on the geophysicist Douglas Jerolmack’s doorstep in Philadelphia. Domokos carried with him his suitcases, a bad cold and a burning secret.

The two men walked across a gravel lot behind the house, where Jerolmack’s wife ran a taco cart. Their feet crunched over crushed limestone. Domokos pointed down.

“How many facets do each of these gravel pieces have?” he said. Then he grinned. “What if I told you that the number was always somewhere around six?” Then he asked a bigger question, one that he hoped would worm its way into his colleague’s brain. What if the world is made of cubes?

More here.

Rana Dasgupta in Harper’s Magazine:

Concern about American democracy is often expressed as a parable of the Thirties: We must prevent another Hitler. The word “fascism” has appeared frequently in denunciations of Donald Trump; many have accused him of a führer-like contempt for the American system. But it is time to ask whether the system itself is not thereby too conveniently excused. Mass political participation has come only recently and reluctantly to America; voter suppression is the more traditional American way. And for reasons that have nothing to do with fascism, even that partial efflorescence may be coming to an end. Trump’s baleful theatrics have distracted us, in fact, from the broader disintegration of the twentieth-century interregnum, of which he is only a symptom. That process has much further to go, and will produce dangers greater than he.

More here.

“A constitution’s only as good as those
who swear to honor it.” —Roshi Bob

Home to Roost

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small—
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

by Kay Ryan
from Niagara River
Grove Press, 2005

Ross Lincoln in The Wrap:

On Thursday’s episode of “The Daily Show,” Trevor Noah took a look at the absolutely appalling press conference the Trump campaign held earlier in the day. But Noah didn’t forget to give special attention to the most memorable moment: When Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, humiliated himself by sweating so much he caused his badly done hair dye to leak down the sides of his face.

…Back to Trevor Noah: “Ok. I know that this could be the end of American democracy, ” Noah said after playing a clip of the excruciatingly cringe moment. “But guys, this s— is hilarious. I mean, Trump always said that he had leakers in his administration, but I didn’t know it was this bad.” Then Noah came at Giuliani with a flurry of really funny jokes. “What the hell was going on with Rudy? Honest question. Was his hair dye dripping? Was his brain s—ing itself? Honestly, I didn’t even know that sideburns got periods. You know your legal strategy is really f—ed up when your hair starts crying about it. It was going down both his cheeks! Dude was growing a chin strap beard in real time.”

“And look, I’m not gonna lie, part of me feels bad for Rudy,” Noah continued, while visibly starting to crack up while saying “feels bad for Rudy.” “‘Cause this was the biggest press conference of his life, his big chance to get Donald Trump another term as president. And his hair ruined the entire moment.”

More here.

Esther Allen at Poetry Magazine:

Individual poems by Vilariño have occasionally appeared in anthologies of Latin American poetry in the United States, but not until now, more than a decade after her death and in the centennial year of her birth, has one of her books appeared in English translation. Unsurprisingly, it is her best-known work, Poemas de amor / Love Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), in a translation by the poet Jesse Lee Kercheval. The literary scholar Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a Yale professor who wrote influential treatises on Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, also cofounded a magazine with Vilariño in his younger years and co-translated a number of works with her. “One day we’ll all be remembered as the contemporaries of Idea Vilariño,” Monegal is often quoted as having said. For the English-speaking world, that day begins now.

more here.

Tina Rivers Ryan at Artforum:

Similar to Tony Conrad—who reflected in one of his final interviews, “You don’t know who I am, but somehow, indirectly, you’ve been affected by things I did”—Tambellini has yet to receive the recognition he deserves for prognosticating the future we now inhabit. For example, in 1969, he made a modified television set called Black Spiral, which distorts live broadcasts into churning abstractions, highlighting the transformation of information into electronic flows. He then used this hacked appliance (made with the help of Bell Labs) to produce a single-channel tape and cameraless photographs he called “videograms,” presaging the infinite commutability of digital data. Notably, these related projects were included in the first major exhibitions of video art: “TV as a Creative Medium” at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969, and “Vision and Television” at the Rose Art Museum in 1970. He also produced the multimedia happening Black for “The Medium Is the Medium,” the groundbreaking program of video art that aired on WGBH Boston in 1969. By that time, he and Otto Piene of Group Zero had already cofounded the Black Gate—a pioneering “electromedia” venue in Manhattan’s East Village that hosted future luminaries like Nam June Paik—and coproduced the first work of video art made for broadcast, 1968’s Black Gate Cologne. With these and other activities over just a few short years, Tambellini helped put the now-gridlocked “intersection of art and technology” on the map, defining its boundaries in ways that could not be more relevant to our contemporary moment.

more here.

Illumina in Nature:

There are more than 120 biobanks worldwide, having evolved over the past 30 years. They range from small, predominantly university-based repositories, to large, government-supported resources. As well as collecting and storing samples, they also provide clinical, pathological, molecular and radiological information for research into personalized medicine. Biobanks allow researchers to explore the causes of disease by helping them link genotypes to phenotypes. This is a process that has been underway for years through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), but it has proved far from straightforward. “What we have learned from GWAS over the last 15 to 20 years is that there are many variants, they have small effect sizes and, even if you total most of the common variants throughout the genome, they account for only a small fraction of phenotypic variance,” says Judy Cho, a translational geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York.

Biobanks are speeding up progress. They allow researchers to easily analyse increasing numbers of biological samples and associated clinical data to characterize disease mechanisms, find novel drug targets, and identify patients most likely to benefit from a particular treatment approach. “Embedding genomic information in electronic health-care records, so it can be used through the course of life, is an appealing vision,” says Dan Roden, a clinical pharmacologist and Director of the BioVU Biobank at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Tennessee. “But it’s one that is hard to realise; there are lots of logistical problems in creating an infrastructure like that.” BioVU’s step towards achieving this vision is to store DNA extracted from discarded blood, collected during routine clinical testing, linked to de-identified medical records. Around 250,000 DNA samples are now available for Vanderbilt investigators.

But going big isn’t the only solution: insights into common diseases can also be found by analysing smaller disease- and/or ethnic-specific cohorts, which concentrate on important genomic signals. Advances in genetic technologies and increased efforts to capture genetic diversity in biobanks are helping researchers to make robust geno-pheno associations in a cost-effective manner (see ‘Biobanks and geno-pheno associations’).

More here.

Jordan Elgrably in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

IF YOU’VE ALREADY READ Camus’s The Plague and have been searching for the perfect pre-apocalyptic fiction work to help you navigate our current affairs, this book may be just the provocation. I opened it knowing little about the author, other than having seen him act in the independent feature The War Within and perused his play Disgraced. Neither had prepared me for Homeland Elegies, which turns out to be masterful storytelling for these disturbing times.

Just as a playwright may be tempted to break the fourth wall and talk directly to you in the audience, a novelist wants you to believe that the tales s/he’s weaving are the honest-to-God’s truth — and maybe they are, even if they’re woven whole cloth, because as the ancient Greeks like to shout back at Socrates, “What is truth?” Thespians are first about the performance, always, but one hopes to glean nuggets of vérité, and in this first-person confession about a prize-winning playwright and sometime-actor named Ayad Akhtar, it’s the performance that counts.

More here.

Laura Spinney in The Guardian:

Letting the virus that causes Covid-19 circulate more-or-less freely is dangerous not only because it risks overwhelming hospitals and so endangering lives unnecessarily, but also because it could delay the evolution of the virus to a more benign form and potentially even make it more lethal.

Though the data is still sketchy and the measures crude, this effect may already be influencing the difference in death rates between Sweden – which took a relaxed approach to containment until recently – and Norway, whose measures have been much stricter. Sweden has more than three times as many deaths per 100 cases as its neighbour.

The explanation for this startling gap may lie partly in natural selection, and the biological arms race between a pathogen and its host. Within any population, there is genetic variation. Viruses are no different. Some versions of the virus will be very slightly more dangerous to human health – more virulent – others less so. If the conditions are right, the slightly more virulent ones will begin to predominate and cause more damage.

More here.

Erin Brockovich in The Guardian:

As picks for President-elect Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team were announced, I felt concerned and disheartened about a chemical industry insider being on the list. Are you kidding me?

Michael McCabe, a former employee of Biden and a former deputy Environmental Protection Agency administrator, later jumped ship to work as a consultant on communication strategy for DuPont during a time when the chemical company was looking to fight regulations of their star chemical perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) also known as C8. The toxic manmade chemical is used in everything from waterproof clothes, stain-resistant textiles and food packaging to non-stick pans. The compound has been linked to lowered fertility, cancer and liver damage. The Guardian reported this week that Harvard school of public health professor Philippe Grandjean, who studies environmental health, warns that PFAS chemicals, of which PFOA is one, might reduce the efficacy of a Covid-19 vaccine.

This smells of the dawn of the same old. To quote the Who: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

More here.

Bob Yirka in Phys.Org:

A team of researchers from multiple departments at Stanford University has created a cellular atlas of the human lung that highlights the dozens of cell types that comprise parts of the lungs. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe their work (mostly involving single-cell RNA sequencing) and some of the things they learned about the lungs during their effort. To create the atlas, the researchers collected tissue samples from bronchiole, bronchi and alveolar regions of the lungs, along with associated blood samples. Each of the samples was broken down into its cellular components, which were then sorted by type: immune, epithelial, endothelia or stomal. The researchers generated transcriptomes for approximately 75,000 cells. Using markers, the team then clustered the cells to reveal 58 distinct cell populations. In so doing, they were able to generate expression profiles for 91 percent of lung types—and also found 14 lung cell types not previously known to science. They also found approximately 200 markers that could be used to identify the unknown types they found.

The team found they were able to use the resulting atlas to trace hormone targets in the lungs. In so doing, they found that some hormone receptors were expressed widely across different parts of the lungs, while others were not. And as part of this secondary effort, the researchers also identified areas where 233 genes are expressed that could be used by scientists working on understanding and curing a wide variety of lung diseases.

More here.

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker:

Donald Trump is not much of a note-taker, and he does not like his staff to take notes. He has a habit of tearing up documents at the close of meetings. (Records analysts, armed with Scotch Tape, have tried to put the pieces back together.) No real record exists for five meetings Trump had with Vladimir Putin during the first two years of his Presidency. Members of his staff have routinely used apps that automatically erase text messages, and Trump often deletes his own tweets, notwithstanding a warning from the National Archives and Records Administration that doing so contravenes the Presidential Records Act.

Trump cannot abide documentation for fear of disclosure, and cannot abide disclosure for fear of disparagement. For decades, in private life, he required people who worked with him, and with the Trump Organization, to sign nondisclosure agreements, pledging never to say a bad word about him, his family, or his businesses. He also extracted nondisclosure agreements from women with whom he had or is alleged to have had sex, including both of his ex-wives. In 2015 and 2016, he required these contracts from people involved in his campaign, including a distributor of his “Make America Great Again” hats. (Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign required N.D.A.s from some employees, too. In 2020, Joe Biden called on Michael Bloomberg to release his former employees from such agreements.) In 2017, Trump, unable to distinguish between private life and public service, carried his practice of requiring nondisclosure agreements into the Presidency, demanding that senior White House staff sign N.D.A.s. According to the Washington Post, at least one of them, in draft form, included this language: “I understand that the United States Government or, upon completion of the term(s) of Mr. Donald J. Trump, an authorized representative of Mr. Trump, may seek any remedy available to enforce this Agreement including, but not limited to, application for a court order prohibiting disclosure of information in breach of this Agreement.” Aides warned him that, for White House employees, such agreements are likely not legally enforceable. The White House counsel, Don McGahn, refused to distribute them; eventually, he relented, and the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, pressured employees to sign them.

More here.

Things I Didn’t Know I Loved

it’s 1962 March 28th
I’m sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain
I don’t like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn’t know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn’t worked the earth love it
I’ve never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

and here I’ve loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can’t wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you’ll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow
I know this has troubled people before
and will trouble those after me
I know all this has been said a thousand times before
and will be said after me

I didn’t know I loved the sky
cloudy or clear
the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino
in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish
I hear voices
not from the blue vault but from the yard
the guards are beating someone again
I didn’t know I loved trees
bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino
they come upon me in winter noble and modest
beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish
“the poplars of Izmir
losing their leaves. . .
they call me The Knife. . .
lover like a young tree. . .
I blow stately mansions sky-high”
in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief
to a pine bough for luck

Read more »

S. G. Belknap at The Point:

James never stopped short in an exploration or an argument—and for him that meant never stopping short of the biggest question: the religious one. His thinking of the late 1890s kept pushing in this direction, culminating in the Gifford Lectures delivered in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, the lectures known to posterity as The Varieties of Religious Experience. James felt that the question of this world and the other world was somehow decisive for all of us, whichever way we answered it. And that included a whole lot of answers for someone like William James—attender of séances, consulter of mediums and all-around junkie for experience. In “The Will to Believe,” James is mostly interested in leveling the playing field vis-à-vis his skeptical colleagues. When it comes down to it, he wonders, why can’t we just go ahead and will the belief in God? The stern-minded skeptic is happy to object: we have no evidence for it. James replies: we have no evidence against it. The skeptic concedes, and objects again: well, then, I’ll wait until we have decisive evidence one way or the other. William James: to spend a life in indecision is no different from choosing against it; for example, if you have no decisive evidence that a potential career is best for you, you can’t just delay your decision until you die. The skeptic: but religion is not like that. William James: why not?

more here.