Noam Chomsky at the website of the Eqbal Ahmad Center for Public Education:

We are living in a remarkable moment, in fact a moment unique in human history. It is a moment of confluence of severe crises, at least four, which threaten the survival of organized human life on earth, not in the distant future.

The least ominous of the four is the ongoing pandemic. It is having a severe toll, though not everywhere. Governments with some concern for their populations have managed to keep it under control. Others have not. The worst is the most powerful state in the world, with extraordinary advantages, but suffering under leadership of unusual malevolence: the United States. The most successful are the countries of Asia and Oceania. It is important to understand how this happened if we hope to escape the next and probably worse pandemic, and also to understand – and to extirpate – the roots of today’s disaster.

Right now scientists are issuing warning quite similar to those of 2003, after the SARS epidemic was contained. Again, they are spelling out what must be done to contain the likely coming pandemic. But it is not enough to have knowledge; someone must act on it.

More here.

Annalena McAfee at Lit Hub:

There are two types of women, Picasso said: “goddesses and doormats.” His ideal muse—helpmeet and source of creative inspiration—was a hybrid; decorative enough to hold the artist’s eye, and meek enough, as patient unpaid model, to maintain whatever pose he required of her without complaint. Ideally, she should be a biddable lover and accept that great artists had great appetites and she could not claim exclusivity in her role. If she also bore his children, kept house, cooked and took on secretarial duties, so much the better.

Picasso did not, of course, invent the arrangement. The history of western art can be read as a story of male genius, tortured and often truculent as it strove to make one pure, truth-telling mark on an imperfect world, supported by a legion of handmaidens whose self-abnegating silence was immortalized on canvas and in bronze—from Benvenuto Cellini’s abused Nymph Caterina, through the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s evanescent Lizzie Siddal to Picasso’s Weeping Woman, Dora Maar. Genius required it, exempting the artist from the normal rules of human relationships. Decency was for the mediocre.

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Elizabeth Lowry at the TLS:

Oeke Hoogendijk’s riveting documentary highlights the peculiar tendency among private collectors and public curators of Rembrandt’s portraits to talk about his canvases as if they were living people. For the serious devotee Rembrandt appears to be a sort of Rorschach test, revealing a capacity for ardour, or envy; for candour, or duplicity – or for ecstatic belief. In Amsterdam, the boyish art dealer Jan Six – a direct descendant of the seventeenth-century cloth merchant immortalized by Rembrandt – is convinced that he’s spotted not just one, but two undiscovered works by the painter. Six has been trying all his life to live up to his family legacy. The Sixes are part of Amsterdam’s aristocracy; in every generation so far since Rembrandt painted them, a Jan Six has been produced to be the keeper of the family flame and the custodian of its priceless art collection. The tenth Jan Six, the rather dour Baron Jan Six van Hillegom, still presides over the Six house on the Herengracht with its treasure trove, but the eleventh Six is snapping at his heels. He has an art historian’s training, and a relentless desire to prove himself.

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Gayathri Vaidyanathan in Nature:

As scientists edge closer to creating a vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, Indian pharmaceutical companies are front and centre in the race to supply the world with an effective product. But researchers worry that, even with India’s experience as a vaccine manufacturer, its companies will struggle to produce enough doses sufficiently fast to bring its own huge outbreak under control. On top of that, it will be an immense logistical challenge to distribute the doses to people in rural and remote regions.

Indian drug companies are major manufacturers of vaccines distributed worldwide, particularly those for low-income countries, supplying more than 60% of vaccines supplied to the developing world. Because of this, they are likely to gain early access to any COVID-19 vaccine that works, says Sahil Deo, co-founder of India’s CPC Analytics in Pune, which is studying vaccine distribution in the country. Several Indian vaccine makers already have agreements to manufacture coronavirus immunizations that are being developed by international drug companies, or are working on their own vaccines. The government has said that these manufacturers can export some of their supplies as long as a proportion remain in the country.

Without India, there won’t be enough vaccines to save the world, said Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, during an online vaccine symposium organized by the Indian government in July.

More here.

Nayanah Siva in Nautilus:

The scientists crowded around Yuanchao Xue’s petri dish. They couldn’t identify the cells that they were seeing. “We saw a lot of cells with spikes growing out of the cell surface,” said Xiang-Dong Fu, the research team’s leader at the University of California, San Diego. “None of us really knew that much about neuroscience, and we asked around and someone said that these were neurons.” The team, who were made up of basic cellular and molecular scientists, were utterly puzzled. Where had these neurons come from? Xue had left a failed experiment, a dish full of human tumor cells, in the incubator, and when he looked two weeks later, he found a dish full of neurons.

It’s not often an unexpected cell type appears in a petri dish, as if from nowhere. Scientists all over the world have spent a lot of time and money actively trying to generate neurons in the lab—the implications for neurodegenerative disease would be massive. And yet this research team, who were actually studying the RNA-binding protein PTB, had unknowingly generated a whole dish of neurons.

“It puzzled me for quite a long time, and I didn’t know what was wrong with my cells,” said Xue, who is now a researcher at the Institute of Biophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing. Xue was attempting to deplete human tumor cells of PTB with small interference RNAs (siRNAs). He expected his cell lines, which are typically very proliferative, to keep growing, but they stopped, and so were cast aside for two weeks. Sure that the dish had become contaminated, Xue and colleagues tried the experiment again … and again … and again.

More here.

At the Beginning of Covid-19

Night, night, night. And the shadows
That wane talk to us. The music rounds
Up, exempt from history. It’s an endless
Canceling out of divinity, ready to speak

Again, saying, I am here. I’d call it endless,
Endless. What is stripped of its mortality
Goes on like a soldier to war. But we can’t
Do that, not really. Instead, we balance

On the head of a pin with the angels. I’ve
Spent hours lettering the borders of this
World. My cohorts, I don’t believe the laments
About leaving our lives, but I do believe it

That there is elegy, as green as grass. Nothing’s
Touching me anymore, and the spring rain Is peace.

by Noelle Kocott
from The National Poetry Library

Justin E. H. Smith in his newsletter:

Is the individual person a composite of a material body and an immaterial mind or soul? And if so, what is the relationship between these two ingredients?

This is the “mind-body problem” in its simplest formulation. But simplicity is not always a virtue, and in fact this formulation conceals a good deal of the historical complexity of the issue. Most philosophers are generally aware that the problem is part of our inheritance from early modern Europe, but when it is formulated in this concise way, we miss some of the important reasons why seventeenth-century Europeans were so anxious about apportioning and delimiting the respective powers of the mind and the body. And without understanding these, neither can we understand the nature of the problem we have inherited.

Anglo-American scholars have for the most part treated the problem as a timeless one, while continental scholars have tended to see its origins in early modern Europe as a result of the cultural transformations of the wars of religion. It became urgent, these latter maintain, to account for such questions as whether spirit is coextensive with body, or rather whether it should not be said to have any locus at all, in a cultural setting in which entire populations were being massacred over disagreements about the composition of the Eucharist. But what both the historically ignorant Anglo-Americans and the historically sensitive but terribly ethnocentric Europeans miss is the crucial role of global encounters, in what used to be called the “age of exploration”, for the shaping of a distinctly modern set of philosophical problems, among them, importantly, that of the relationship between mind and body.

More here.

Wilfred M. McClay at Hedgehog Review:

The work of cultural criticism never ends. A hundred years ago, Thomas R. Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, proclaimed that “what this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.” But who would say that now? Times have changed, tobacco has become an evil weed, and anyway, what the country needs now is a really good four-letter word.

No, I’m not talking about love, although that would be a decent guess, since love is highly desirable and always in short supply. I’m talking about the primordial human need for the genuinely dirty word, or, better yet, a few of them, a finite but reliable stock of good old-fashioned profanities—racy, pungent, transgressive, maybe even a bit radioactive. Words that can shock, provoke, even lead to a barroom brawl.

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John Spurr at HistoryExtra:

In Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare’s Hotspur turns on his prissy wife: “Heart! You swear like a comfit-maker’s wife. ‘Not you in good sooth!’ and ‘as true as I live!’”. Instead Hotspur demanded a good mouth-filling oath. Something like his own “By God’s heart” was more suited to a lady of rank.

The oaths of the Tudor and Stuart centuries, the era of Shakespeare (1564–1616), still jump out at modern readers from plays, courtroom testimonies and countless other sources. And they strike us as very different from our own bad language. Swearing – solemn or profane – was a religious issue: an oath called on God to guarantee the truth of a statement, just as profane swearing took God’s name in vain.

Swearing supposedly ran along the lines of social status and gender. And swearing was always something of a performance.

more here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

For nearly three full centuries, the most accurate way that humanity kept track of time was through the pendulum clock. From its initial development in the 17th century until the invention of quartz timepieces in the 1920s, pendulum clocks became staples of household life, enabling people to organize their schedules according to a universally agreed upon standard. Initially invented in the Netherlands by Christian Huygens all the way back in 1656, their early designs were quickly refined to greatly increase their precision.

But when the first pendulum clock was brought to the Americas, something bizarre happened. The clock, which had worked perfectly well at keeping accurate time in Europe, could be synchronized with known astronomical phenomena, like sunset/sunrise and moonset/moonrise. But after only a week or two in the Americas, it was clear that the clock wasn’t keeping time properly. The first clock in America was a complete failure, but that’s only the beginning of a story that would revolutionize our understanding of the physics of planet Earth.

More here.

Brad Evans interviews James Martel in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

BRAD EVANS:For those of us who remain deeply concerned with understanding the worst episodes in human history, the life and work of Walter Benjamin still appear all too resonant. This in part has something to do with the tragedy of what he came to represent, along with the undoubted brilliance of his insight and challenges to political dogmatism. What is it about Benjamin that captures your attention as an author and critic?

JAMES MARTEL: I think that Benjamin has never been as relevant to questions of politics as he is today with the exception of his own lifetime. As I read him, Benjamin offers one of the best explanations both for the ongoing resilience of capitalism, despite all of its predations and all the instability that it creates, as well as the connection between fascism and liberalism that we are seeing being expressed today. He also offers, I think, the best way to understand how to address our contemporary moment and how to resist and upend capitalism, liberalism, and fascism all round.

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From Medical Xpress:

The BCG vaccine has a broad, stimulating effect on the immune system. This gives it an effective preventive action against various infections—possibly also against COVID-19. New studies are investigating that. BCG is frequently given to children, but a double-blind randomized clinical study, a collaboration between Radboud university medical center and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens shows that elderly people also benefit from it. The results are published in Cell. At Radboudumc, Professor of Experimental Internal Medicine Mihai Netea is conducting research into this protective effect against various infections by the BCG vaccine, an effect called “trained immunity.” Prof. Mihai Netea said, “Two years ago we started the ACTIVATE study, with the aim of showing whether BCG vaccination could protect against infections in vulnerable elderly people. Patients over 65 years of age who were admitted to hospital were randomized to receive BCG or placebo vaccination at their discharge. We followed them for a year to see if BCG could protect them against a broad range of infections.”

The ACTIVATE study had already started before the corona pandemic. 198 elderly people were given either a placebo or a BCG vaccine upon discharge from the hospital. The last follow-up was scheduled for August 2020, but due to the arrival of COVID-19, the researchers looked at the preliminary results, published today in Cell. There was a noticeable difference: in the placebo group, 42.3% of the elderly developed an infection, while this was the case in only 25% of the BCG group. It also took longer: the BCG-vaccinated participants had their first infection on average 16 weeks after vaccination, compared to 11 weeks for the placebo group. There was no difference in side effects.

More here.

Oreskes and Conway in Scientific American:

It is a truism among scientists that our enterprise benefits humanity because of the technological breakthroughs that follow in discovery’s wake. And it is a truism among historians that the relation between science and technology is far more complex and much less linear than people often assume. Before the 19th century, invention and innovation emerged primarily from craft traditions among people who were not scientists and who were typically unaware of pertinent scientific developments. The magnetic compass, gunpowder, the printing press, the chronometer, the cotton gin, the steam engine and the water wheel are among the many examples. In the late 1800s matters changed: craft traditions were reconstructed as “technology” that bore an important relation to science, and scientists began to take a deeper interest in applying theories to practical problems. A good example of the latter is the steam boiler explosion commission, appointed by Congress to investigate such accidents and discussed in Scientific American’s issue of March 23, 1878.

Still, technologists frequently worked more in parallel with contemporary science than in sequence. Technologists—soon to be known as engineers—were a different community of people with different goals, values, expectations and methodologies. Their accomplishments could not be understood simply as applied science. Even in the early 20th century the often loose link between scientific knowledge and technological advance was surprising; for example, aviation took off before scientists had a working theory of lift. Scientists said that flight by machines “heavier than air” was impossible, but nonetheless airplanes flew.

When we look back on the past 175 years, the manipulation of matter and energy stands out as a central domain of both scientific and technical advances. Techno-scientific innovations have sometimes delivered on their promises and sometimes not. Of the biggest advances, three really did change our lives—probably for the better—whereas two were far less consequential than people thought they would be. And one of the overarching impacts we now recognize in hindsight was only weakly anticipated: that by moving matter and energy, we would end up moving information and ideas.

More here.

I do not love you…

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

by Pablo Neruda
translation: Mark Eisner

Sulari Gentill in Crime Reads:

It is the nature of progress that what is now cutting-edge will, with the passing of time, become traditional. And it is the nature of human beings to remake and refine what has worked in the past, and call it new.

And so the term “traditional mystery” is from the outset somewhat difficult to define absolutely. It has an almost organic structure, with successive authors and generations adding their own extensions and renovations to the house built by the likes of Poe, Christie, James, Sayers and Conan Doyle.

That original house had a foundation built on the reassurance of the middle classes, and four recognizable walls: the amateur detective or private investigator with superior powers of deduction, violence and sex occurring largely off-stage and referenced rather than shown, an incompetent or indifferent police force and, above all, the restoration of social order.

Over the years, Hardboiled, Noir, Forensic and Suspense have moved into the street and Traditional crime has been influenced by the architecture of its neighbors. Its walls have been repainted, moved and even knocked down to improve both the view and street appeal for contemporary tenants.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Not too long ago nobody carried a mobile phone; now almost everybody does. That’s the kind of rate of rapid progress we’re seeing with our ability to directly edit genomes. With the use of CRISPR-Cas9 and other techniques, gene editing is becoming commonplace. How does that work — and perhaps more importantly, how are we going to put it to use? Fyodor Urnov has worked in this area from its beginning, having coined the term “gene editing.” We talk about how this new technology can be used to cure or prevent disease, as well as the pros and cons of designer babies.

More here.