R Douglas Fields in Scientific American:

Will we be surprised again this November the way Americans were on Nov. 9, 2016 when they awoke to learn that reality TV star Donald Trump had been elected president? That outcome defied prognosticators and polls, and even Trump’s own expectation. “Oh, this is gonna be embarrassing,” Trump later recalled he had said at the time, anticipating defeat.

Another surprise victory is unlikely to happen again if this election is looked at from the same perspective of neuroscience that I used to account for the surprising outcome in 2016. Briefly, that article explained how our brain provides two different mechanisms of decision-making; one is conscious and deliberative, and the other is automatic, driven by emotion and especially by fear. Trump’s strategy does not target the neural circuitry of reason in the cerebral cortex; it provokes the limbic system. In the 2016 election, undecided voters were influenced by the brain’s fear-driven impulses—more simply, gut instinct—once they arrived inside the voting booth, even though they were unable to explain their decision to pre-election pollsters in a carefully reasoned manner.

In 2020, Trump continues to use the same strategy of appealing to the brain’s threat-detection circuitry and emotion-based decision process to attract votes and vilify opponents. “Biden wants to surrender our country to the violent left-wing mob…. If Biden wins, very simple, China wins. If Biden wins, the mob wins. If Biden wins, the rioters, anarchists, arsonists and flag-burners, they win,” Trump declared at his Wisconsin campaign rally on September 17, 2020, offering new alleged threats to our nation as his 2016 bogeymen of rapist immigrants and foreign terrorists have lost potency.

More here.

Ashish Ghadiali in The Guardian:

Arundhati Roy’s literary career has been one of a kind. Thrust into the limelight of the global publishing industry back in 1997 when her debut novel, The God of Small Things, won an advance of half a million pounds and then the Booker prize, she might have gone on to become a household name of cosmopolitan novel writing in the way that Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro had in the decades before. Instead, she steered clear of the form altogether for the next 20 years (until the 2017 publication of her follow-up novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness), devoting her attention and profile in the meantime to prose nonfiction that has energetically uncovered skeletons in the closet of India’s economic growth story: the nuclear arms race with Pakistan; the thousands of indigenous people displaced by the Narmada dam project; the Maoist insurrection across the country’s tribal heartlands; and the issue of Kashmir’s longstanding and brutal military occupation.

…In spite of what she describes in Azadi, her latest collection of essays, as an atmosphere of “continuous, unceasing threat”, Roy has refused to back down and this volume, which takes its title from the Urdu word for “freedom” – azadi is the chant of Kashmiri protesters against the Indian government – serves to keep the Kashmiri situation in the minds of her global readership. “What India has done in Kashmir over the last 30 years,” she writes in the essay The Silence Is the Loudest Sound, “is unforgivable. An estimated 70,000 people – civilians, militants and security forces – have been killed in the conflict. Thousands have been ‘disappeared’, and tens of thousands have passed through torture chambers that dot the valley like a network of small-scale Abu Ghraibs.” Azadi, which builds on the 1,000-page edition of Roy’s collected nonfiction, My Seditious Heart (published in 2019), consists of nine stand-alone essays, written between early 2018 and early 2020 and originally delivered either as lectures or long-form print pieces, often in Britain or the US. Roy writes repeatedly in response to Hindu fundamentalism’s new hegemony in India, exemplified by the second electoral victory of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

More here.

Sasha Frere-Jones at Bookforum:

Urban Legends is a parabolic dish microphone pointed at history, collecting the waves that outsiders have bounced off the South Bronx. L’Official gathers representations of the South Bronx found in fiction, like Don DeLillo’s description of urban tourism in Underworld, and the ways it has been filtered through journalistic language. He proposes that classifications like “inner city” and the “ghetto” are also “versions of urban legends as well.” L’Official presents these ideas as euphemisms and “coded spatial signifiers for race,” which they are. In fact, the focus of Urban Legends is squarely on the views of those who never lived in the neighborhood. Very little of it touches on how the residents of the South Bronx represented themselves, and L’Official acknowledges this several times, best of all in the conclusion: “Though Urban Legends falls short of discussing ‘all kinds’ of artists, its aims were, and are, aligned with those of the Fort Apache Band, as articulated by Andy González: showing that art can, and does, emerge from an imperiled environment.” L’Official seems to know that hip-hop and graffiti don’t need his help at this point. He writes that graffiti artists in the South Bronx—“most of whom pointedly referred to themselves as writers—would no doubt tell you, graffiti was Bronx literature, and a populist form at that, which hardly required an agent or a publishing contract to reach an audience.”

more here.

Andrew Shenker at the LARB:

IN HER 2007 BOOK, Awkward: A Detour, Mary Cappello posits the title state as a natural response to a world indifferent to our comfort or desires. “Awkwardness could be an effect of the rough handling of reality over which one has no control,” she proposes, and over the course of her wide-ranging, digressive, book-length essay, Cappello approaches the question of awkwardness from a variety of different angles. Melding memoir, literary and film criticism, etymological study, and many other modes, her book offers up a range of perspectives on and definitions of the state of awkwardness, all of which speak to the gap between our natural inclinations and the ways we are forced to adjust these inclinations to fit both a physical world and a social environment that routinely refutes them. “Each day on earth,” Cappello writes, “is at base an endless adjustment to there being too much or not enough, to there being something missing or something extra,” and it’s in this adjustment that awkwardness occurs.

more here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

There are two dead babies sitting in a medical pan inside a nondescript room. These babies face one another. Are they conjoined twins? There are tubes connected to the twin cadavers. A Chinese couple, a man and a woman, sit in chairs on either side of the babies. The tubes from the babies are connected to the arms of the couple. They are feeding their own blood into the mouths of the dead babies, who receive the elixir without discernible effect as the blood dribbles down their faces. It is a horrendous scene, made all the more horrendous by the fact that it is so compelling to look at, so fascinating to think about. Are these people trying to help the babies, connect with them somehow? Are they making fun of these dead babies or of the situation? Are we meant to laugh, cry, recoil in horror? What is this disturbing scene and why are we being subjected to it?

Well, we are in Shanghai in the year 2000. The millennium is upon us. We’re at an art exhibit. The couple feeding blood to the dead babies are Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. The show has been curated and organized by two Chinese artists who will go on to become international art stars. They are Feng Boyi and Ai Weiwei. They have created a show called “Fuck Off.” It is neither, like most exhibits of Chinese art at the time, sponsored by the Chinese government nor by any Western government or institution. The show was an epochal moment in Chinese contemporary art and will, I’d wager, become recognized more and more over time as one of the crucial moments in the history of art in general, like the famous and era-shifting Armory Show in New York City 1913.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

In the service of seeking truth, there would seem to be value in intellectual diversity, both in keeping ourselves honest and in the possibility of new ideas coming from unexpected quarters. That’s true in the natural sciences, but even more so in the humanities and social sciences, where the right/wrong distinction is sometimes less clear. But academia isn’t always diverse; as an empirical fact, there are a lot more liberals on university faculties than there are conservatives. I talk with Musa al-Gharbi about why this is true — self-selection? discrimination? — the extent to which it’s a real problem, and how we should better think about the value of diverse viewpoints.

More here.

James Bandler, Patricia Callahan, Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg in ProPublica:

At 7:47 a.m. on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, Dr. Jay Butler pounded out a grim email to colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Butler, then the head of the agency’s coronavirus response, and his team had been trying to craft guidance to help Americans return safely to worship amid worries that two of its greatest comforts — the chanting of prayers and singing of hymns — could launch a deadly virus into the air with each breath.

The week before, the CDC had published its investigation of an outbreak at an Arkansas church that had resulted in four deaths. The agency’s scientific journal recently had detailed a superspreader event in which 52 of the 61 singers at a 2½-hour choir practice developed COVID-19. Two died.

More here.

Alia Ahmed at The Hudson Review:

Today I am in Saddar, the former colonial center, clamorous and poetically falling to bits. Pakistan is a particularly loud country (“Well, yes,” a famous doctor once countered, rolling his eyes, “there are people here,” yet I stand by it), and Saddar is no different. Once a pedestrian zone crisscrossed by tram lines, it is now clogged by technicolor buses and auto-rickshaws, dusty vans, beat-up cars, or the tinted 4 x 4 of a Very Important Person, complete with armed bodyguards limply hanging off the side like party streamers. Traffic cops, elegant in starched white uniforms, stand bravely amidst the chaos to direct it with waving arms and screeching whistles. Saddar is home to the Karachi Press Club, the Cotton Exchange, the City Railway Station and, of course, the experiment in human ingenuity that is the parking lot outside the National Bank. Cars are parked in tight rows, squeezed into whatever available space, no sensible way to vacate. A smattering of biryani restaurants lines the far end of the lot. Dilawar (a young Pushtun with green eyes, a migrant from the cold north) hollers for the other “valets” and, consolidating their manpower, lift stationary cars out of the way, hooting encouragement, so I can reverse.

more here.

Gary Saul Morson at The American Scholar:

Austria between the world wars fostered an extraordinary number of talents in diverse fields: Sigmund Freud in psychology, Arnold Schoenberg in music, Karl Kraus in journalism, Robert Musil in literature, Gustav Klimt in art, the Bauhaus in architecture, and the “Austrian school” in economics. In some of these areas, the overriding ethos was hostility to what the Bauhaus called “ornament.” The Vienna Circle of philosophers, led by Moritz Schlick, hoped to cleanse philosophy of anything vague or, to use their favorite term of abuse, “metaphysical.” Some members also aspired to provide firm foundations for knowledge, an ambition that can be traced back to Descartes and the 17th-century rationalists.

They hoped to realize this ambition by rethinking the bases of mathematics and science. As British philosopher David Edmonds points out in this informative and well-written account, by “science” the Circle philosophers meant physics because, surprisingly enough, they were ignorant of recent major innovations in biology.

more here.

From Scientia:

Cancer is a global health concern. There are over 100 types of cancer, which taken together, kill more than 10 million people across the world each year. Although localised cancers can be treated successfully through excision or localised radiotherapy, metastatic cancers spread throughout the body and are incurable, eventually leading to death. Once cancer cells have metastasised, they grow aggressively and are resistant to virtually all treatments. Despite enormous funds and dedicated efforts put into cancer research over the last half-century, half of all people diagnosed with cancer still die from their disease.

Traditional thinking in cancer therapy accepts that cancer is incurable once it spreads. There are billions of cells in a tumour and it only takes one cell to randomly mutate into a form with increased tolerance to survive treatment and then to clone itself. Cancer therapies have focussed on multi-drug chemotherapies to tackle the progression of new cancers as they occur, or to develop drugs that target resistance-associated mutations. However, cancer cells have proven resistant to all high-tech medical innovations to date. Researchers have not understood exactly what cells or mechanisms that cause this remarkable resilience amongst cancer cells. Dr Kenneth Pienta at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, USA, is leading an amazing and bold line of discovery in cancer research. Critically, his team now believes that polyaneuploid cancer cells (PACCs) are the master mediators of this resilience and provide an adaptive way for tumours to survive almost any type of stress.

…Two key questions across all types of cancer research are, why do some cancer cells become immune to treatment and why do they metastasise? Returning to thinking about cancer cells as an ecosystem paradigm, discussions with cancer biologist Dr Sarah Amend and ecologist Dr Joel Brown turned to the example of short-horned grasshoppers. When food is abundant, grasshoppers are typically green and healthy solitary specimens, but in times of nutritional stress, the next generation becomes yellow locusts, growing wings and changing their behaviour to become more gregarious, swarm-forming animals that travel to seek new food sources. Once resources are again abundant, the next generation once again transmogrifies back to the grasshopper morph.

More here.

Tara Wu in The Smithsonian:

On a chilly morning in February, about a thousand Chinese immigrants, Chinese Americans and others filled the streets of San Francisco’s historic Chinatown. They marched down Grant Avenue led by a bright red banner emblazoned with the words “Fight the Virus, NOT the People,” followed by Chinese text encouraging global collaboration to fight Covid-19 and condemning discrimination. Other signs carried by the crowd read: “Time For Science, Not Rumors” and “Reject Fear and Racism.” They were responding to incidents of bias and reported significant drops in revenue in Chinatown and other local Asian American-owned businesses, even at a time when the city had not yet experienced any Covid-19 cases. The rally banner is soon to join the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for the story it tells of America’s history of associating its immigrants with disease.

“There have been long-standing messages about disease being particularly something that Chinese immigrants, Chinese spaces incubate, that Chinese people spread, either because of their unsanitary living conditions or especially the weird, exotic food that Asians allegedly eat,” says Erika Lee, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.

…On the cover of an 1899 issue of another mainstream magazine, Judge, U.S. President William McKinley is depicted bathing a Filipino native baby in the “waters of civilization.” In the background, two figures dressing themselves in clothes made from the Puerto Rican flag have presumably just been freshly washed with the same “brush of education” that McKinley holds in his hand. Published during the Spanish-American War just after the U.S. colonized the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the illustration vividly visualizes the racist ideas of the period, according to Theodore Gonzalves, a curator at the museum who specializes in Asian American and performing arts history.

More here.

Blue Heron

The startled blue heron erupts out of its long-legged
inwardness and flies low to the pond over its
shadow. My eye flickers between its great sweep

of wings and its blurred mirror motion almost white
in the pond’s sky-shine. At the end of each wingbeat,
the long body dips toward its rising shadow. Now

the heron settles back down onto itself as far away
from me as the pond allows and I finish my walk half gangly,
half graceful thinking if I were a bird, this is how I’d fly.

by Nils Peterson
from All the Marvelous Stuff ,
Caesura Editions, 2019
—winner for poetry, San Francisco Book Festival 2020

Jan Mieszkowski at Public Books:

“No one,” declared James Thurber, “can write a sentence like E. B. White.” Throughout his six-decade career, White was widely celebrated for his mastery of “the plain style.” His columns and anecdotes for the New Yorker, his longer essays, and his immensely popular trio of children’s books (Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan) were invariably praised for their clarity and unadorned directness, not to mention their pithy gestures of tasteful irreverence.

In addition to being an acclaimed essayist and children’s author, White had the curious fate to have written the book on how to write, or at least part of it, when he updated and expanded a pamphlet his former teacher William Strunk Jr. had created for his students at Cornell. The result was the most successful composition guide of all time. The Elements of Style—“Strunk and White”—has sold more than 10 million copies and is still a staple of higher-education syllabuses, although it is assigned far more often than it is read.

It might seem self-evident that White the author practiced what Strunk and White the style gurus preached, but the truth is more complicated.

More here.

Eve Driver in Undark:

WHILE FOR DECADES there has been scientific consensus that the climate is changing, only in the past few years has it become possible for scientists to link that change to particular weather events. Even as it advances, however, attribution science, also called probabilistic extreme event attribution, has uncertainties built into it. Broadly speaking, it’s done by comparing two computer models — one that reflects the world as it is, and another that reflects the world as it would have been without global warming — to determine whether the probability of a weather event was affected by climate change and, if so, by how much.

But the results come with caveats. For instance, attribution science doesn’t determine whether climate change made an event possible, but rather if it made the event more likely. The method is also difficult to apply in locales that have little historical data on weather patterns. And certain kinds of events — hurricanes and droughts, for instance — are harder to model than others. Hard evidence of climate change’s influence on Hurricane Sandy, which battered the northeastern U.S. in 2012, didn’t come until years after the fact.

But for wildfires like the ones currently burning in the West, the links with climate change are relatively easy to model and affirm.

More here.

More, from The Guardian, here.

Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books:

“Is Machiavelli good, then, or is he evil?” asks the French scholar Patrick Boucheron in his discussion of The Prince, a book whose “whole program is to uncouple political action from conventional morality.” Is he advising political leaders to be treacherous, violent, and dishonest (as Diderot believed), or revealing to ordinary people the mechanisms behind their leaders’ dishonesty, violence, and treachery (as Rousseau believed)? “We would like to have an answer,” Boucheron writes, but the matter is better “set aside.” Machiavelli was simply saying “the truth about things.” Still, the question hangs in the air, if only because Boucheron’s anxiety over the deteriorating morality of politics today has him turning to the Italian for guidance.

More here.