Helen Santoro in Science:

You are what you eat. And when you eat a lot of dirt, the makeup of your gut will change—at least, if you’re a baboon. A new study shows local soils, not genetics, may be the primary determinant of baboons’ gut microbiota, the vast ecosystem of microorganisms that live in the gut, digesting food, fighting infections, and breaking down toxins. Past research has shown that the gut microbiota of baboons varies across different populations. Scientists wanted to know the cause: Is it the genes they share with other relatives, the distance between populations, or the environment that creates these internal changes? To find out, the researchers gathered poop from 14 different baboon populations in Kenya’s primate hybrid zone—an area where yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus) and anubis baboons (P. anubis) mingle and interbreed (above). Along with analyzing the baboons’ DNA, researchers looked at 13 different characteristics of the environment where the stool was collected, including vegetation, elevation, climate, and soil.

The clear winner was soil. Its impact, as measured by the difference in microbiota makeup, was stronger than all other environmental factors. It was three times better at predicting differences than the physical distance between populations and 15 times better at predicting differences than genetic factors. The researchers also found that baboons living in areas with salty soil (which has a smaller selection of microbes) have less diverse gut microbiotas. The findings, published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are the first to show that the environment may have a stronger influence over baboons’ gut microbiota than their genes.

More here.

Acceptance

In many people’s eyes
absence is a fault or crime.
However hard you try to make amends,
they will still condemn you.
So you can’t go home anymore
and will drift on the wind of chance—
wherever you land
you will be an outsider.

Then accept the role of a wanderer.
At least you can stand alone
and become one of those
who live and die on their own.

You must learn to be content
to inhabit your own space—
any news from far away
can no longer disturb you.
If necessary, turn your back on the past
and let all the slander and praise
vanish from your mind.

by Ha Jin
from The Distant Center
Copper Canyon Press, 2018

Kate Stanley in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

CAN POEMS TEACH US how to live? What does it mean to approach poetry as a source of self-help? It’s not hard to call to mind examples of poetry that rouse or soothe or refocus a reader, lifting or quieting the mind like a deep breath. Yet much of the poetry encountered in literature classrooms and canonical anthologies may not readily reflect the self that is reading it, and therefore may not readily become a tool of self-improvement. The work of many modernist poets in particular is placed under the banner of “art for art’s sake,” a motto meant to explicitly free such poetry from the responsibility of serving a didactic or utilitarian function. The poems of Wallace Stevens, for instance, are frequently taken to epitomize the kind of high modernist difficulty that in its slippery symbology and ambiguous affect would seemingly resist being reliably employed for any useful purpose.

But Joan Richardson’s How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens emphatically asserts the practical use-value of poetic difficulty. As is suggested by Richardson’s title (which borrows from a Stevens poem), Stevens is in fact concerned above all with improving the daily lives of his readers. However, unlike the literature of self-help, these poems seem to offer very little by way of straightforward advice or therapeutic instruction.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Some people never drink wine; for others, it’s an indispensable part of an enjoyable meal. Whatever your personal feelings might be, wine seems to exhibit a degree of complexity and nuance that can be intimidating to the non-expert. Where does that complexity come from, and how can we best approach wine? To answer these questions, we talk to Matthew Luczy, sommelier and wine director at Mélisse, one of the top fine-dining restaurants in the Los Angeles area. Matthew insisted that we actually drink wine rather than just talking about it, so drink we do. Therefore, in a Mindscape first, I recruited a third party to join us and add her own impressions of the tasting: science writer Jennifer Ouellette, who I knew would be available because we’re married to each other. We talk about what makes different wines distinct, the effects of aging, and what’s the right bottle to have with pizza. You are free to drink along at home, with exactly these wines or some other choices, but I think the podcast will be enjoyable whether you do or not.

More here.

Natalie Angier in the New York Review of Books:

Alytes obstetricans, the common midwife toad, may be as small as a bar of hotel soap with skin as drab as leaf litter, yet its life story is, quite simply, one for the ages. The job that lends the toads their informal name is done by the male. Come breeding season, a female toad will solicit the services of a male, who mounts her from behind, gripping her torso with his front legs while angling his rear toes to stimulate her genitals. A few minutes pass, he gives her midriff a firm squeeze, and out pops the “baby”: a glistening mass of toad eggs, linked together like pearls on a string, which the male promptly fertilizes with a shot of sperm. As the female hops away—her task is through—midwife becomes nursemaid: the male carefully untangles the inseminated strands of eggs and wraps them around his body. He will carry this cargo everywhere for the next month or two, cleaning and hydrating the eggs until they’re ready to hatch. Yes, he’s a model modern father.

Alytes is also more European than a pack of Gauloises cigarettes. As Tim Flannery explains in Europe: A Natural History, his deeply satisfying and splendidly written survey of the geological, zoological, climatological, and biophilosophical roots of that heavyweight set of coordinates we call Europe, midwife toads are among the only animals that survive from the dawn of the European project 100 million years ago. That is when the European subcontinent, then a tropical archipelago, began to consolidate and take the shape it more or less has today, and when Europe as a biologically distinct landscape emerged.

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Ingrid D. Rowland at the NYRB:

There are several reasons why Antonello is not as well known today as artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, or Caravaggio, though he is undoubtedly their equal. First of all, a frustratingly small sample of his work still exists, for his beautiful city, founded by Greeks in Homer’s time (circa 730 BCE), sits on one of the Mediterranean’s major fault lines and has paid the price for that precarious location many times over. Since Caravaggio’s visit in 1608, Messina has been leveled by two catastrophic earthquakes, one in 1783 and another in 1908, when thirty seconds of seismic shaking toppled more than nine tenths of the city’s buildings. Ten minutes later, a forty-foot tsunami crashed down on the devastated port, while a pelting rain continued off and on for miserable weeks, complicating rescue efforts and destroying many of the books, documents, and works of art that had survived the quake, the wave, and the aftershocks (almost three hundred of them).

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Mark Edmundson at The Atlantic:

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman told a friend. “Emerson brought me to a boil.” Whitman understood that he was a part of one of the greatest experiments since the beginning of time: the revival of democracy in the modern world. The wise believed that it probably could not be done. The people were too ignorant, too crude, too grasping and greedy to come together and from their many create one. Who were we, after all? A nation of castoffs, a collection of crooks and failures, flawed daughters and second sons of second sons, unquestionable losers and highly dubious winners. Up to now, our betters had kept us in line: The aristocracies of Massachusetts and Virginia had shown us the enlightened path and dragged us along behind them. Whitman knew (and Emerson did too) that this could not last forever. By sheer force of numbers, or force plain and simple, outcasts and ne’er-do-wells were eventually going to take over the nation.

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Dan Chiasson at The New Yorker:

Because his genius was untethered to his misery, and because he often handed his ideas off to others, Gropius is a tricky subject for a biographer. Following his lead, we focus on his colorful and eccentric supporting players. As MacCarthy suggests, he had none of the puffery we associate with great architects. He was more a technocrat than a shaman. In a sense, therefore, MacCarthy’s book is a biography of the Bauhaus itself. It’s a story that she presents with a distinctly human-seeming arc. Its childhood unfolded in Weimar, where Itten impressed the students with his mantra, “Play becomes party—party becomes work—work becomes play,” and Gropius read the Christmas story aloud every year. But by early adolescence, in the mid-twenties, the Bauhaus had outstayed its welcome. In 1924, a new provincial government threatened to cut off the school’s subsidies. Nazi factions in the region supposed that all those foreign-looking students were Jews or Jewish sympathizers. The following year, Gropius moved the school to Dessau, an engineering and manufacturing center, southwest of Berlin. There, for the first time, the Bauhaus built itself a campus.

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Patrick Iber in The Nation:

Literature is fire,” Mario Vargas Llosa declared in 1967, when he accepted a prize commemorating Rómulo Gallegos, the esteemed Venezuelan novelist and former president. Gallegos represented the center-left tradition in Latin America, and Vargas Llosa was determined to challenge his audience from the left. Literature, the Peruvian novelist continued, “means nonconformism and rebellion…. Within ten, twenty or fifty years, the hour of social justice will arrive in our countries, as it has in Cuba, and the whole of Latin America will have freed itself from the order that despoils it, from the castes that exploit it, from the forces that now insult and repress it.” Nearly 40 years later, in 2005, Vargas Llosa received a very different sort of prize and delivered a very different kind of speech. Accepting the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute, he denounced the Cuban government and called Fidel Castro an “authoritarian fossil,” praised the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises as a “great liberal thinker,” and defended calls for privatizing pensions. It was quite a remarkable transformation. In the opening paragraph of Vargas Llosa’s 1969 novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, the protagonist asks: “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” It is a question that many people have asked as well of Peru’s greatest novelist.

Vargas Llosa is unquestionably one of the most important writers of his generation. He has written 18 novels, at least five of them considered by critics to be of great literary significance. His first, The Time of the Hero, was published in 1963. It dramatizes an act of rebellion by the cadets at Peru’s Leoncio Prado military academy, which led to copies of the book being burned on the school’s parade ground. His next novel, The Green House, was published in 1966 and proved to be a difficult modernist work which depicted Peruvian reality as a confluence of the Catholic Church, the military, indigenous culture, and the brothel that gives the novel its name. A powerful experiment in form, The Green House has usually been read as a critique of capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy, and it helped cement Vargas Llosa’s reputation as one of the key writers of the “boom” generation in Latin American letters.

More here.

Paris Martineau in Wired:

IT WAS A Facebook ad that propelled Ashleigh Griffin to act. She had heard about egg donation from her mother, a nurse, but never thought of it as anything more than an esoteric medical procedure. The ad in her Facebook feed in 2011 told a different story. It intrigued Griffin, promising her thousands of dollars for something her body produced on its own, with the bonus of helping another family. It even specified that the opportunity was tailor-made for young cash-strapped women in college, as she was. She clicked through, and only grew more curious. She tried to sign up, but quickly hit a wall. Griffin was 18, and the agency required donors be at least 21. Just before her 21st birthday, she typed “egg donation” into Google, and off she went. Over the next four years, Griffin donated her eggs six times at three different clinics. Four of those times, her ovaries became painfully swollen and she experienced weight gain, abdominal pain, severe nausea, and had trouble urinating; once she was hospitalized. For her efforts, she was paid $61,000.

Egg donation is designed to help families who are having trouble conceiving. The process involves taking eggs from one woman, fertilizing the viable ones, and then transferring them either to the aspiring mother, or a surrogate, in the hope of achieving pregnancy. In practice, it’s often more complicated. The first US child conceived from a donated egg was born in 1984. Since then, the procedure has grown into a thriving industry. Demand from aspiring parents, and a dearth of regulations, have spawned matchmaking agencies that offer to help parents find the perfect young woman whose eggs will result in the equally perfect child. Donating eggs can be lucrative, with agencies paying as much as $50,000 per cycle in some cases.

More here.

Beyond Recall

Nothing matters
to the dead,
that’s what’s hard

for the rest of us
to take in—
their complete indifference

to our enticements,
our attempts to get in touch—
they aren’t observing us

from a discreet distance,
they aren’t listening
to a word we say—

you know that,
but you don’t believe it,
even deep in a cave

you don’t believe
in total darkness,
you keep waiting

for your eyes to adjust
and reveal your hand
in front of your face—

so how long a silence
will it take to convince us
that we’re the ones

who no longer exist,
as far as X is concerned,
and Y, that they’ve forgotten

every little thing
they knew about us,
what we told them

and what we didn’t
have to, even our names
mean nothing to them

now—our throats ache
with all we might have said
the next time we saw them.

by Sharon Bryan
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Stephen Marche in The Guardian:

The great surprise of this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the Canadian identity politics refusenik had.

One hated communism. The other hated communism but thought that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. The first one agreed that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. And that was basically it. They both wanted the same thing: capitalism with regulation, which is what every sane person wants. The Peterson-Žižek encounter was the ultra-rare case of a debate in 2019 that was perhaps too civil.

They needed enemies, needed combat, because in their solitudes, they had so little to offer. Peterson is neither a racist nor a misogynist. He is a conservative. He seemed, in person, quite gentle. But when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. Somehow hectoring mobs have managed to turn him into an icon of all they are not. Remove him from his enemies and he is a very poor example of a very old thing – the type of writer whom, from Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, have promised simple answers to complex problems. Rules for Life, as if there were such things.

The mere dumb presence of the celebrities on the stage mattered vastly more than anything they said, naturally. But there was one truly fascinating moment in the evening. It came right at the end of Žižek’s opening 30-minute remarks.

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Keith Harary in Aeon:

You might find your car dying on the freeway while other vehicles around you lose control and crash. You might see the lights going out in your city, or glimpse an airplane falling out of the sky. You’ve been in a blackout before but this one is different.

In critical facilities across the country, experts predict that it is only a matter of time before the electrical infrastructure holding society together undergoes catastrophic failure. According to the most recent report of the United States Congressional Commission appointed to assess the risk, published July 2017, we face the threat of ‘long-lasting disruption and damage’ to everything from power and clean water to electronic banking, first-responder services and functioning hospitals. Until now, such a dire prediction has typically been associated with only the most extreme doomsday true believers but William Graham, the former chairman of the Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Commission, says that in this case they could be right.

In the broadest sense, an EMP is a sudden burst of extreme electromagnetic interference that causes systems using electricity – especially devices controlled by chips or computers – to fail when the load gets too high. EMPs come in three basic varieties, including a ground-level or high-altitude EMP (HEMP) released by a nuclear burst that could potentially impact power lines, transformers and other critical devices; drive-by EMPs created by high-powered microwave weapons that could silently incapacitate equipment from hundreds of yards away; and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) resulting from solar storms that could interfere with the magnetic sphere surrounding the Earth, bringing down the grid that powers the electronic devices defining our contemporary way of life. According to the 2017 report, Russia, China and North Korea could already have these weapons under wraps.

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Jonathan Kirshner in the Boston Review:

“Has economics failed us?” Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard and economic adviser for presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, recently asked in an op-ed for the Washington Post. “Hardly.” On the contrary, he declares, “textbook macro . . . has stood up very well.” Dismissing the notion that economists ought to have seen the financial crisis coming with a hand-waving “market breaks are inherently unpredictable,” Summers conveniently forgets that the economic theories he championed in the Clinton administration provided crucial intellectual succor for the deregulation of the financial sector—policy blunders that made something like the global financial crisis an accident waiting to happen.

Summers’s self-confidence is legendary, but he is hardly alone—his sentiments reflect a broad consensus among mainstream economists. In the unhappy 1970s, academic battles were pitched over macroeconomic theory as Keynesians, stumbling over stagflation (high unemployment and high inflation at the same time), were challenged by those who would return economic theory to its pre-Keynesian days under the banner of “new classical economics.” By the 1990s the Keynesians were chased from the scene, and in macroeconomics at least, everybody pretty much agreed on everything important—that is, with modest variations to taste on how to model and manage the aggregate economy.

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Ian McEwan at Edge:

What’s been preoccupying me the last two or three years is what it would be like to live with a fully embodied artificial consciousness, which means leaping over every difficulty that we’ve heard described this morning by Rod Brooks. The building of such a thing is probably scientifically useless, much like putting a man on the moon when you could put a machine there, but it has an ancient history.

Then of course you had Frankenstein’s monster, which shifted the debate into what it means to conjure up a version of ourselves. Now, you have the contemporary TV series of Westworld and movies like Blade Runner specifically addressing the notion of what it would be like to have an artificial being aware of its own mortality.In medieval churches or cathedrals, you will find wax effigies of the Virgin Mary that, on certain occasions, weep or shed blood. As anyone who’s been on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin will know, there’s a Virgin Mary that bleeds. Throughout the 18^th century you had water-powered android figures, figures driven by levers and cogs, and as clockwork got more sophisticated in the 18^th century, such figures remained a matter of profound interest and fascination.

I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to live alongside someone we made who is artificial and who claims to have consciousness, about which we’d be very skeptical and to which we’d be applying a constant form of Turing tests.

More here.

Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

WHEN JAL MEHTA and Sarah Fine embarked on a six-year study of 30 of the most effective public high schools in the United States, what they found among students was largely “bored, disengaged compliance,” Mehta recalls. The dominant pattern of instruction is rote transmission: worksheets, multiple-choice questions, and teachers lecturing. Objective comparisons to other countries confirm the mediocrity of this model: U.S. high-school students score near the bottom in math, and are just middling in reading and science. “Not surprisingly,” he says, students consistently called lectures a “very disengaging mode.” But there were bright spots: classrooms where “teachers had moved away from that by dint of their own skill and inventiveness.”

In every school, the researchers found at least one or two settings where students were engaged and inspired by what they were learning—often in activities outside the classroom. By the end of their study’s first year, Mehta, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Fine, who began the project as Mehta’s doctoral student (and is now director of a teacher preparation program associated with a network of schools in San Diego), decided to focus on the bright spots. Their book about the project, In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School (Harvard), weaves analysis and richly descriptive vignettes together in the most comprehensive assessment of the topic since the 1980s.

The authors offer a thoughtful critique of three of the most successful schools, pseudonymously named Dewey High, No Excuses High, and I.B. High. The first, which follows the pedagogical philosophy of John Dewey, LL.D. ’32, is characterized by project-based learning that works because it actively engages students in their own education. No Excuses High is strict, demanding, and goal-oriented.

More here.