Jim Kozubek in Nautilus:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th-century poet and philosopher, believed life was hardwired with archetypes, or models, which instructed its development. Yet he was fascinated with how life could, at the same time, be so malleable. One day, while meditating on a leaf, the poet had what you might call a proto-evolutionary thought: Plants were never created “and then locked into the given form” but have instead been given, he later wrote, a “felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.” A rediscovery of principles of genetic inheritance in the early 20th century showed that organisms could not learn or acquire heritable traits by interacting with their environment, but they did not yet explain how life could undergo such shapeshifting tricks—the plasticity that fascinated Goethe.

A polymathic and pioneering British biologist proposed such a mechanism for how organisms could adapt to their environment, upending the early field of evolutionary biology. For this, Conrad Hal Waddington became recognized as the last Renaissance biologist. This largely had to do with his idea of an “epigenetic landscape”—a metaphor he coined in 1940 to illustrate a theory for how organisms might regulate which of their genes get expressed in response to environmental cues or pressures, leading them down different developmental pathways. It turned out he was onto something: Just a few years after coining the term, it was found that methyl groups—a small molecule made of carbon and hydrogen—could attach to DNA, or to the proteins that house it, and alter gene expression. Changing how a gene is expressed can have drastic consequences: Every cell in our body has the same genes but looks and functions differently only due to the epigenetics that controls when and how genes get turned on. In 2002, one development biologist wondered whether Waddington’s provocative “ideas are relevant tools for understanding the biological problems of today.”

More here.

Kootai, the Beautiful Rag-picker

There are some women in life who inspire you.
They need not always be the successful women,
Those who belong to high society or status, or
Those who have risen to the top rank in their career.

Success can never be measured by achievements alone,
Success is like an intoxication,
The more you have – the more you want,
It is like an opium that you cannot get rid of.

Some years back, I began to take notice of a woman,
Who walked around the premises of my residence,
Picking up rags, papers, sticks from the ground, and
Putting them into a large sack that she carried.

At first, I suspected her as a petty thief.
Then I realized, that she was just a scavenger,
I began to watch her from my window every morning.
There was something about her that was unique and charming.

One day, I just beckoned to her from my window
And asked her name and as to what she was doing.
She said her name was Kootai- named after a Goddess.
And then, addressing me as ‘Amma’ she flashed a beautiful smile.

Read more »

From Delancy Place:

Today’s selection — from Zora and Langston by Yuval Taylor. Zora Neale Hurston started out her career as an anthropologist recording black folklore with the encouragement of Franz Boas, but her real passion was hybrid — a genre that fused fiction and folk, which symbolized “every aspect of daily life”:

“Zora had begun studying anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia in the fall of 1925, which involved a momentous shift of perspective. All her life Zora had been immersed in black folkways and had never even thought of separating her identity from those of the folk. She used to tell this story: when a policeman stopped her from crossing on a red light, she told him that since she saw all the white people crossing on green, she thought the red light was for colored folks. Here, as she often did, she was taking a common black folktale and applying it to herself. Zora defined folklore as ‘the arts of the people before they find out that there is any such thing as art, and they make it out of whatever they find at hand’; as a corollary, the folklore that Zora had always drawn on was suddenly art to her: it had changed its nature.

“Therefore, now that she was embarking on a course of studying the folk, she could no longer be one of them. As she would write at the beginning of Mules and Men, ‘From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that.’ Suddenly African American culture was a thing to research rather than to roll around in and play with.

“In this new endeavor she could not have asked for a better guide than Franz Boas, whom she idolized, calling him ‘the greatest anthropologist alive’ and ‘the king of kings.’ She even convinced Bruce Nugent, who hated schools, to attend Boas’s classes. Boas was sixty-seven at the time and had been at Columbia since 1899. He was without a doubt America’s preeminent anthropologist, almost singlehandedly responsible for debunking scientific racism, defining cultural relativism, and establishing folklore as a subject worthy of scientific study. He unflaggingly encouraged Zora’s work, and urged her to become a professional anthropologist herself; undoubtedly he recognized that Zora could well become America’s foremost authority on black folkways.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Jenny Turner at the LRB:

Butler was 58 when Fledgling was published, and barely a year later, she fell and hit her head on an icy pavement and died. Her papers arrived at the Huntington in 2008: two filing cabinets and 35 large cardboard boxes, containing drafts, notes, sums, receipts and bills, an order form for men’s-size Star Trek jerseys; to-do lists and to-get lists – ‘Potatoes ... Wiener ... Fish Sticks ... T Paper’. ‘The archive is vast and frankly, imposing,’ Lynell George reports in the book she made from her exploration of it, a sensitive combination of facsimile scraps, biographical fragments and indirect-discourse speculation. George herself is Black and Los Angelena, and first came to know of Butler as a local author, a public character in the Jane Jacobs sense, signing books at readings, seen around the place in the sidewalk ballet. ‘Don’t you need a car in LA?’ George asks of Butler – a committed pedestrian – in her book. ‘She will smash this canard ... [on] each long walk she takes ... It slows the city down to moments and voices ... The city itself is a story, a seed.’

more here.

Hua Hsu at The New Yorker:

Madlib has always seemed more concerned with making music than with the question of what to do with it. The forty-seven-year-old producer and multi-instrumentalist has estimated that he makes hundreds of beats a week, many of which he never shares with anyone. His beats are a form of homage. He listens carefully to an old record, trying to squeeze every musical possibility out of it, to follow every path not taken. Sometimes it’s therapeutic. The week that Prince died, Madlib mourned by making tracks built on Prince samples. Following the death of his collaborator J Dilla, and then that of MF DOOM, he stayed awake for days, making hundreds of hours of music. Since the nineties, Madlib has essentially been building a private, ever-expanding library of beats, which spans everything from hip-hop, jazz, and soul to German rock, industrial music, Brazilian funk, and Bollywood. He has released dozens of albums under just as many aliases. Sometimes the aliases splinter off to form side projects. For Madlib, making music is as elemental as eating or sleeping, though he claims to do very little of the latter.

more here.

Ian Buruma in Project Syndicate:

The Democratic Party’s repudiation of these voters’ views as “deplorable” or “racist” stoked resentment of urban elites, driving many in search of a new political home. When Donald Trump appeared before workers and farmers in his red baseball cap, he articulated their antipathies coarsely but effectively. A louche product of a milieu in which shady real-estate deals skirted the world of organized crime, Trump shared some of the class resentment of people who could only dream of his wealth. Trump became their savior, and tied the Republican Party firmly to hard-right populism. Even without Trump as president, the GOP will remain his party for a long time.

The question is whether the Republicans would have gone that way anyway. Has Trump been a driver of political and social changes, or was he simply an unscrupulous opportunist who manipulated forces that were ready to be exploited? Is Trump simply the snarling face of a rotten political order stripped of its façade of “decency” and “civility”? Or did he cause a great deal of the rot?

More here.

Alizeh Kohari in Rest of World:

By the time Mudassir Azeemi wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2014, he’d tried everything he could think of to make it easier to type in his native language, Urdu. In 2010, the now 42-year-old Pakistani-American developed a keyboard app you could use on iOS devices; within two years, it had been downloaded over 165,000 times. But even with an Urdu-language keyboard, the characters appeared on the screen in an entirely different font.

“Dear Mr Tim Cook,” he wrote. “Urdu language’s beauty lies in the typeface.”

Spoken by nearly 170 million people in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, Urdu is written in an alphabet derived from Arabic. But while Arabic is written in a script called naskh, simpler and more linear in its appearance, many other people — including Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, Urdu-speakers in India, and Uighur-speakers in parts of China — employ an ornate style of writing that originated in 14th-century Persia called nastaʿlīq. When Azeemi sat down to write his letter to Cook, nastaʿlīq was almost nowhere to be found online. To communicate in Urdu, you either had to type in naskh or spell words phonetically in Latin script.

More here.

John McWhorter in Persuasion:

Third Wave Antiracism is losing innocent people jobs. It is coloring, detouring and sometimes strangling academic inquiry. It forces us to render a great deal of our public discussion of urgent issues in doubletalk any 10-year-old can see through. It forces us to start teaching our actual 10-year-olds, in order to hold them off from spoiling the show in that way, to believe in sophistry in the name of enlightenment. On that, Third Wave Antiracism guru Ibram X. Kendi has written a book on how to raise antiracist children called Antiracist Baby. You couldn’t imagine it better: Are we in a Christopher Guest movie? This and so much else is a sign that Third Wave Antiracism forces us to pretend that performance art is politics. It forces us to spend endless amounts of time listening to nonsense presented as wisdom, and pretend to like it.

I write this viscerally driven by the fact that all of this supposed wisdom is founded in an ideology under which white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special.

More here.

B D McClay in The New Yorker:

Sophie Blind is dead. Her head was cut clean off her shoulders as she made a dash for a taxi and was hit by a car. She doesn’t seem to mind, though it is a little awkward. “I knew I was dead when I came,” she admits, “but I didn’t want to be the first to say it.” Besides, the event didn’t leave much of a mark: “in less than half an hour,” she informs us, “normal traffic was resumed.” Though death and decapitation seem like straightforward facts, Sophie is the heroine of a novel: “Divorcing,” by Susan Taubes. And in a novel both of these things, it turns out, can be meant in different ways.

“Divorcing” is the only published book by Taubes, who shortly after its release, in 1969, drowned herself “in a ski jacket and slacks,” as the East Hampton Star would report when her body was found. She was forty-one. She left behind letters, some of which have been published; some unpublished writing; some scattered academic articles; and a dissertation still sitting in Harvard’s archives. She is doomed, it would seem, to always appear in the shadow of her longer-lived, more prolific husband, Jacob Taubes, as interesting in her own right, no elaboration. Interesting—but not that interesting. After her death, as she’d say, normal traffic resumed.

Susan Taubes and Sophie Blind share certain biographical traits: psychoanalyst fathers, intellectual husbands, needy mothers, Hungarian childhoods, a conflicted and sometimes even disdainful relationship with their own Jewishness. Nonetheless, “Divorcing,” which was recently reissued by New York Review Books, does not read like a roman à clef. It does engage, as many of those books do, with the collapse of a marriage and a subsequent search for meaning. But while the sort of novels dropped in its blurbs—Renata Adler’s “Speedboat” and Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights”—occupy a cool, collected “I” that remains untouched, “Divorcing” is a much more unsettled affair. From its opening pages, which unspool in both first and third persons, from a heroine who may or may not have a head, the book does not even attempt stability. Sophie’s death is a case in point; Taubes has no interest in establishing whether it is metaphorical or literal. The book goes on to include dreams, letters, therapy sessions, and a widening study of Sophie’s family history. There are conversational fragments that could be taking place at almost any time within the narrative. And in the final pages, Sophie emerges from a nap and from a sensory deprivation chamber. Was all of the preceding a dream? Does it matter? Sophie Blind is dead. She isn’t here. She isn’t, at all.

More here.

Rosa Parks

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said
they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago
Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would
know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who
helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight
the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because
even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth-
place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The
Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the
Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both
the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would
know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954
when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa-
rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in
1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a
doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood
why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer
when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps
and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways
when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the
Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while
the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to
St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept
him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all
summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly
lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand-
children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the
rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money,
Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac-
Read more »

Peter Dreier in Boston Review:

Robin DiAngelo’s book, White Fragility, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for over two years, much of that time ranked number one. The book is assigned frequently in college courses, and DiAngelo is in great demand as a “diversity” consultant to help corporations, universities, government agencies, and other institutions purge themselves of their white privilege. DiAngelo’s core message is that white Americans need to acknowledge their unconscious racial biases which make them, unwittingly in most cases, complicit in what she deems the U.S. racial caste system.

In her book DiAngelo uses Jackie Robinson as an example of her point. Most are familiar with Robinson’s story: in 1947, at the age of twenty-eight, he became the first Black ballplayer to play in the modern major leagues. DiAngelo claims that “the story of Jackie Robinson is a classic example of how whiteness obscures racism by rendering whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible.” She continues:

While Robinson was certainly an amazing baseball player, [the] story line depicts him as racially special, a Black man who broke the color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong enough to compete at that level. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this: ‘Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major league baseball.’ This version makes a critical distinction because no matter how fantastic a player Robinson was, he simply could not play in the major leagues if whites—who controlled the institution—did not allow it.

Apparently DiAngelo is not a baseball fan, because, in an error that aligns perfectly with her ideology, she gets this episode of U.S. history all wrong.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Richard Hughes Gibson in The Hedgehog Review:

A graduate student recently posed this question to me: What is the most common mistake that scholars make when they try to write about contemporary issues? Questions like this usually make me nervous, since the offices of cultural commentator and public intellectual remain very mysterious to me. But in this case, I had a ready answer because we all make the same mistake when writing about contemporary issues: Our writing process lacks sufficient resistance, hesitation, reconsideration—in short, friction.

In calling this “friction,” I deliberately invoke—and challenge—one of the metaphors that has captivated (and inevitably spread beyond) the tech industry during the last decade: “frictionless” design. Ten years ago, Mark Zuckerberg made this metaphor an industry standard when he boasted that improvements at Facebook were ushering in a “frictionless experience” for users. Since then, all of the big tech companies (and companies in other industries) have made friction-reduction a high priority, whether friction is an extra click, an additional action, or another decision that slows a user down.

More here.

Adrian Cho in Science:

As early as March, the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) will report a new measurement of the magnetism of the muon, a heavier, short-lived cousin of the electron. The effort entails measuring a single frequency with exquisite precision. In tantalizing results dating back to 2001, g-2 found that the muon is slightly more magnetic than theory predicts. If confirmed, the excess would signal, for the first time in decades, the existence of novel massive particles that an atom smasher might be able to produce, says Aida El-Khadra, a theorist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “This would be a very clear sign of new physics, so it would be a huge deal.”

The measures that g-2 experimenters are taking to ensure they don’t fool themselves into claiming a false discovery are the stuff of spy novels, involving locked cabinets, sealed envelopes, and a second, secret frequency known to just two people, both outside the g-2 team. “My wife won’t pick me for responsible jobs like this, so I don’t know why an important experiment did,” says Joseph Lykken, Fermilab’s chief research officer, one of the keepers of the secret.

More here.

Adam Bulley in Psyche:

Countless academic articles and self-help books sing to the same tune – characterising immediate gratification as a short-sighted hitch while praising the virtues of long-term thinking as a means for overcoming temptation. Many people have heard of the marshmallow tests, where those children most willing to delay gratification for a second marshmallow did better in various domains in life, such as careers and health, when followed up even decades later. To the farsighted go the spoils, or so we’re frequently told.

Yet, for all its intuitive appeal, this story rests on what I think is a false dichotomy between foresight and impulsivity.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_CyntV0eqg&ab_channel=RomanticComputer

Petra Browne at The Believer:

Years ago, when my body simply was what it was, soft and long, before I had even contemplated changing it into anything else, I came across Martin Schoeller’s Female Bodybuilders on a bookstore display table. In it were studio-lit portraits of women whose faces had been reduced to bone and socket and vein, whose skin had been stained with spray tan and eyes outlined in shadow. Enormous muscles rose up to enclose their necks. They looked prehistoric, fossilized and eternal. I thought they had destroyed their chances at love. My mistake was to assume they were living under the star of sexual capital, as I was. After all, they wore the rhinestones and velvet of showgirls. What I didn’t yet understand was that bodybuilders are ruled by a different star, the same star that would later rule me, if only temporarily. It was dim and solitary, with enormous gravity. I still don’t have a name for it.

more here.

Will Noah at The Baffler:

IN 1527, THE VENETIAN EXPLORER Sebastian Cabot established the Sancti Spíritus fort at the mouth of the Carcarañá River, founding Spain’s first settlement in the territory that would become known as Argentina. In charge of an expedition bound for the Maluku islands in the Pacific, Cabot diverted course on hearing that the Paraná river led to mountains rich with silver and gold. Some historical accounts suggest that these rumors came from a sailor named Francisco del Puerto, who was part of Spanish navigator Juan Díaz de Solís’s previous expedition, brought to an end when the landing party were killed by Indigenous people within sight of the ships. The story goes that del Puerto was the only man spared, and that he lived for ten years among the natives. Cabot lived to return to Spain, but his ships carried back no precious metals, and his fort wasn’t fated to become the site of a major city—unlike Buenos Aires, first settled by the Spanish in 1536.

In his book-length reflection on the Río de la Plata and its tributaries, El río sin orillas (The Boundless River), Juan José Saer claims that, “almost without exaggeration,” Sancti Spiritus was founded across the street from his childhood home.

more here.