Peter Gowan in Jacobin:

Earlier this month, Univision announced it was selling Gizmodo Media Group (a digital media company comprising former Gawker sites such as Gizmodo, Kotaku, Splinter, Jezebel, and The Root) as well as the Onion (including its eponymous site, The A.V. Club, Clickhole, and The Takeout) to a private equity firm, Great Hill Partners.

No further layoffs have been announced for the 233 unionized employees at the two properties. But workers and contributors are probably right to worry that some or all of the sites will see mass layoffs or closure as Green Hill seeks to strip the companies for their most profitable parts while burning the rest. This is the private equity business model, after all, and it would be naive to expect anything else.

But what if there was an alternative? Wouldn’t it be better if the workers at the Gizmodo Media Group and the Onion had the right to block the Great Hill sale and buy the company themselves, turning it into a worker-owned business, with financial and technical assistance from the government?

More here.

After a deadly aerial engagement, a cup of tea

Past the news of war, you sleep in a litter of cacophony
knowing the dead will forever bind their miasma to your hair

knot their shrouds to every hook in the house,
hem the sound of sirens to your head

Between tonight’s brocade sky, inked textile of tomorrow,
and tomorrow, there will be an hour of war, creeping like a reptile

across the fields where two countries grow rice with their backs
to each other and fly kites this time of the year to welcome spring

The sort of night an emperor could create from the shudder of mortality
a marble mausoleum to house his love after death— moonbeams

sewing the lips of loss, light swirling through filigrees, carved tulips and fruit buds,
turning time to flesh — it is early spring, you too feel a tingle in your fingertips,

tremble a moment like a Shalimar cypress, but the masonry of your body
is recalled when warplanes approach, when all around you are loved ones

asleep, and what the newscasters will later call aerial engagement
has been the chase all along— the flute song in your dream chased

by steam engines, swooped up by MiG-21s, chased by surface-to-air missiles
The air as sharp, the trees as majestic this side of the border, the pilot

of the downed plane asks hysterically which country he is in. Which way
should he run? As a prisoner of war, he is recorded saying, between sips

of tea, the officers of the Pakistani Army are thorough gentlemen.
He is nervous. The cup he holds is Raj-white, with a pale green bough,

vaguely Mughal in its vegetal flourish. The temperature in Islamabad is 11 degrees
Celsius, in Delhi it is 16. Yellow trumpet daffodils are blooming. It is early spring.
.

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
from Poethead, 4/16/19

Alexis Harley at The Sydney Review of Books:

As Nicholas Money puts it in Mushrooms: A Natural and Cultural History, thinking of the mushroom in place of the whole mushroom-forming organism is ‘a bit like using a photograph of a large pair of testicles to represent an elephant’. (The flaw in this memorable comparison is that the spore inside a mushroom is ready to grow into next-generation fungus, so long as it’s launched into congenial conditions, whereas an elephant sperm cell only contains half the chromosomes needed to begin a baby elephant.) Like the testicle, the mushroom is just one component of an organism, relatively peripheral to the organism’s viability, if essential to the continuation of its species. Unlike the elephant testicle (and hence the force of Money’s comparison), it is the part of the organism to which human cultures have in general paid the most attention. It’s this spore-disperser, not the hard-working mycelium, that we might consider dining on, illustrating, ingesting for hallucinatory or medicinal purposes, founding a taxonomic system around, deploying in the assassination of an unlikeable Roman emperor, or photographing on our nature rambles. It’s what appears in the field guides, the cookbooks, and the mythologies.

more here.

Kevin Le Gendre at the TLS:

Yet Coltrane’s commercial clout, transient or permanent, should not detract from his huge artistic stature. Next to Miles Davis, he is the post-war jazz musician most likely to be on the radar of those who do not consider themselves jazz fans. His allure as a figure entirely dedicated to, if not consumed by, his work (to the point where he was often seen in public with theory books such as Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus Of Scales And Melodic Patterns), makes him a role model for all students of “serious” music. Coltrane is the archetypal creative obsessive intent on finding unheard approaches to the building blocks of music, from the arc of his melodies to the rhythmic drive of his solos to the harmonic framework for his songs.

A trawl through the vast body of work he left behind (he died of liver cancer at the age of forty) reveals several signature pieces that typify his ability continually to break new musical ground. First, there is “Giant Steps”, a composition with a dizzying, spiral staircase of chord changes set to a vaulting high tempo that makes substantial demands on any rhythm section worth its salt.

more here.

Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

There is something awesomely confounding about the music of Tyshawn Sorey, the thirty-eight-year-old Newark-born composer, percussionist, pianist, and trombonist. As a critic, I feel obliged to describe what I hear, and description usually begins with categorization. Sorey’s work eludes the pinging radar of genre and style. Is it jazz? New classical music? Composition? Improvisation? Tonal? Atonal? Minimal? Maximal? Each term captures a part of what Sorey does, but far from all of it. At the same time, he is not one of those crossover artists who indiscriminately mash genres together. Even as his music shifts shape, it retains an obdurate purity of voice. T. S. Eliot’s advice seems apt: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.”

Last month, Miller Theatre, at Columbia University, featured Sorey in its indispensable Composer Portraits series. He was joined by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ice) and the jack Quartet. After intermission, the flutist Claire Chase, a co-founder of ice, interviewed him onstage about his origins and his aims.

more here.

Morgan Meis in The Porch Magazine:

“I’ve never cried for a building, until now,” I wrote to my aunt Lou Ann. Then I had a moment’s hesitation. Did I not cry for the World Trade Center back in 2001? I was living in New York, after all. We watched the Towers fall from a roof in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I know that I shed some tears that day. Tears of shock and grief and loss. But I was not, in truth, crying for the Towers themselves. I don’t think anyone cried for the Towers themselves. Because they were not loved. I remember a Greek friend of mine once commenting that he found the Towers ridiculous in their doubleness. He put it like this: “It is absurd that there are two of them.” One giant monstrous imposing monolith would have been enough. But to make two of them? It is like, my friend said, a couple of guys who are bragging and competing about who has the largest schlong. And then a third guy walks up and says, “I’ve got you both beat. I’ve got two of them.” But has he really won? Did he even understand the game? The Twin Towers were like that. They won the giant building game. But at what cost?

Notre Dame was, like the Twin Towers, a braggadocious type of building. It was constructed during the high medieval days of cathedral battles. What city will have the grandest cathedral of them all? It was also built for the glory of God, yes, I suppose. But it was an arrogant building, a building that flaunted its beauty, its embodied wealth and power, a worldly triumph over the forces of gravity and weight, and the sheer heaviness of stone.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

The brain, supposedly, cannot long survive without blood. Within seconds, oxygen supplies deplete, electrical activity fades, and unconsciousness sets in. If blood flow is not restored, within minutes, neurons start to die in a rapid, irreversible, and ultimately fatal wave. But maybe not? According to a team of scientists led by Nenad Sestan at Yale School of Medicine, this process might play out over a much longer time frame, and perhaps isn’t as inevitable or irreparable as commonly believed. Sestan and his colleagues showed this in dramatic fashion—by preserving and restoring signs of activity in the isolated brains of pigs that had been decapitated four hours earlier.

The team sourced 32 pig brains from a slaughterhouse, placed them in spherical chambers, and infused them with nutrients and protective chemicals, using pumps that mimicked the beats of a heart. This system, dubbed BrainEx, preserved the overall architecture of the brains, preventing them from degrading. It restored flow in their blood vessels, which once again became sensitive to dilating drugs. It stopped many neurons and other cells from dying, and reinstated their ability to consume sugar and oxygen. Some of these rescued neurons even started to fire. “Everything was surprising,” says Zvonimir Vrselja, who performed most of the experiments along with Stefano Daniele.

More here.

Jon Cohen in Science:

When researchers first reported 3 years ago that they had created base editors, a version of the powerful genome-editing tool CRISPR, excitement swirled around their distinct powers to more subtly alter DNA compared with CRISPR itself. But the weaknesses of base editors have become increasingly apparent, and a new study shows they can also accidentally mutate the strands of RNA that help build proteins or perform other key cellular tasks. Researchers say this could complicate developing safe therapies with the technology and hamper other research applications.

Human diseases from sickle cell to Tay-Sachs are caused by a single mutation to one of the four DNA bases—adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine—and CRISPR has often had difficulty swapping out the bad actors. That’s in part because CRISPR cuts double-stranded DNA at targeted places and then relies on finicky cell repair mechanisms to do the heavy lifting of inserting a corrected DNA sequence for a mutation. Base editors, in contrast, chemically change one DNA base into another with enzymes called deaminases, which doesn’t require a cut or help from the cell.

Base editors, which adapt key components of CRISPR to reach targeted places in the genome, have been shown to have many off-target effects on DNA. But until now, its effects on RNA, which contains three of the same bases as DNA, had escaped scrutiny. So J. Keith Joung, a pathologist and molecular biologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, led a team that put base editors into human liver and kidney cells. Their finding: Deaminases can also alter RNA, the group reports today in Nature. Joung, a pioneering developer of base editors, was startled by the RNA changes, which had cytosines being converted to uracil, an RNA base that’s related to thymine. “When a postdoc first showed me the results and we saw tens of thousands of RNA cytosines being edited, I was like, ‘Wait a minute, what are we looking at here?’”

More here.

William Lycan at the Institute of Art and Ideas:

A creature that does perceive the external world to any significant degree can be called a conscious being.  Could there be conscious beings other than those of earth’s animal kingdom?  Perhaps there are some outside our solar system. Could a robot be a conscious being, just in this modest sense of perceiving its environment?  I don’t see why not.  Despite appearances, a robot can amass information through its sensors and build a representation of the external world.  Granted, there are plenty of arguments purporting to show that no mere robot could be conscious in any much stronger sense.

Of course we can also ask whether a conscious creature in that sense is ‘conscious’ at a particular time, say at this moment, meaning roughly, is it awake, actually doing some perceiving, and in control of its actions?  Even that ‘normal waking state’ admits some degrees, since we speak of accident victims and seriously ill patients as ‘semi-conscious.’

A much rarer form of consciousness is what we refer to when we speak of a ‘conscious memory’ or a ‘conscious decision’—we mean not only being in a mental state but being aware of that very mental state from the inside. A conscious memory is a memory we are directly aware of.  The same goes for a conscious emotion, desire, intention, or bodily sensation such as pain.  It’s assumed that there are memories, emotions, desires, intentions, perceptions, and even pains that we are unaware of, at least at times.

More here.

Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review:

Now scientists in southern China report that they’ve tried to narrow the evolutionary gap, creating several transgenic macaque monkeys with extra copies of a human gene suspected of playing a role in shaping human intelligence.

“This was the first attempt to understand the evolution of human cognition using a transgenic monkey model,” says Bing Su, the geneticist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology who led the effort.

According to their findings, the modified monkeys did better on a memory test involving colors and block pictures, and their brains also took longer to develop—as those of human children do. There wasn’t a difference in brain size.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The space age officially began in 1957 with the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite. But recent years have seen the beginning of a boom in the number of objects orbiting Earth, as satellite tracking and communications have assumed enormous importance in the modern world. This raises obvious concerns for the control and eventual fate of these orbiting artifacts. Natalya Bailey is pioneering a novel approach to satellite propulsion, building tiny ion engines at her company Accion Systems. We talk about how satellite technology is rapidly changing, and what that means for the future of space travel inside and outside the Solar System.

More here.

Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books:

‘The problem with Israel,’ Tony Judt wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2003,

is not – as is sometimes suggested – that it is a European ‘enclave’ in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ – a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are for ever excluded – is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

Today, it is Judt’s liberal internationalist certainty that seems like an anachronism, while Israel – a ‘hybrid society of ancient phobias and high-tech hope, a combination of tribalism and globalism’, in the words of the journalist Anshel Pfeffer – looks increasingly like the embryo of a new world governed by atavistic fears, whose most malign symptom is the presidency of Donald Trump.

Pfeffer, a correspondent for Haaretz, has written a biography of Benjamin Netanyahu as a way of explaining today’s Israel – by no means an enviable task. Say what you will about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival skills denied.

More here.

Anis Shivani in Medium:

Bernie is in, and if anything, compared to his run three years ago, he finds himself in much more favorable territory, based on any number of measures, not least because of the alternative narrative he himself, and through prominent disciples who have picked the baton from him, has created and spread far and wide in the body politic. The heresies and unorthodoxies of his last run are mere commonplaces now (wealth tax, Medicare-for-all, $15 living wage, free college), to the extent that the media should find it easy to depict his policy prescriptions as so much ho-hum, not much different than, oh, say, Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.

But make no mistake about it, Bernie is the only candidate on the Democratic side with a radical agenda that takes on the perversions of capitalism, while all the rest of them — every one of them, to some extent or other — continue to offer, in the best Clintonian tradition, paeans to American exceptionalism. It was precisely this obeisance to exceptionalism — America is already great, in the words of Michelle Obama, or Hillary Clinton, whoever said it — that crashed the political system last time around, and it is precisely this naïve, faithless, robotic, uninspired, spectacular ode to exceptionalism, whether it comes from the mouth of Cory Booker or Julian Castro or Beto O’Rourke or Kirsten Gillibrand, that would guarantee Trump another four years.

More here.

Jamie Friedlander in Medium:

When Brenda Hurwood was in her thirties, she had an accident that left her with a partial disability: She worked in home care support with elderly patients, and she injured her shoulder and neck while helping a client get out of a chair. The injury left her with decreased stamina and constant pain, Hurwood says, and she found it difficult to continue working. “It eroded away my self-confidence as a person,” she says. Hurwood, 63, who lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, says she developed generalized anxiety disorder, which persisted for decades. She tried different forms of therapy and various medications, but nothing worked — until 15 years ago, when a therapist introduced her to acceptance and commitment therapy.

ACT (pronounced like “act”) is a relatively new form of therapy centered on accepting that pain and suffering are an inevitable part of life, and using that acceptance to manage negative thoughts and feelings. In addition to anxiety, it’s been used as a treatment for depression, chronic pain, anger, phobias, and a host of other issues. Its primary conceit is that instead of trying to control or push away your negative emotions, you should focus on learning to live with them. For some people, more traditional ways of coping with those thoughts and feelings can have the opposite of their intended effect, says Jenna LeJeune, PhD, a therapist and ACT practitioner based in Portland, Oregon: “Paradoxically, the more we focus on trying to get rid of painful thoughts or feelings, the more those things become the center of our lives.”

More here.

Schneider and Fatemi in Scientific American:

As the bitter strife between left and right, citizen and noncitizen, white and non-white attest, the greatest threat to humanity today goes beyond political and religious divides, economics, and psychiatric diagnoses. It goes beyond cultural conflicts and even the degradation of the environment—and yet it includes all of these. As psychologists concerned with the social and psychological bases of human destructiveness, and as dedicated observers of history, we have arrived at the conclusion that so much of what we call human depravity (“evil”) seems to be based on a principle termed “the polarized mind.” The polarized mind is the fixation on a single point of view to the utter exclusion of competing points of view, and it has caused more human torment and misery than virtually any other factor.

As citizens of very different and sometimes clashing civilizations, the United States and Iran respectively, we also have a unique vantage point on the polarized mind. While so many theories of human destructiveness are associated with regional customs, mores and histories, we have observed the polarized mind at work in widely divergent cultural, ethnic and economic circumstances.

Moreover, we are in complete agreement that the polarized mind is one of the major threats to humanity, not just isolated parts of the world. Our empirically based studies, for example, have indicated that mindlessness—a condition of narrowed perception and reactivity—is a chief and cross-cultural feature of the polarized mind; while (Langerian) mindfulness, an attitude of heightened awareness or presence, is a cardinal feature of the depolarized mind, associated with capacity for discovery, creativity and well-being. It is also associated with a radical transformation of consciousness, but this consciousness cannot flourish until it counterbalances and, to the extent possible, supersedes the polarized mind.

More here.

Career Counseling

You can be whatever you set your mind to,
my teachers were fond of saying.
Sit down, son.
The counselor pointed to a chair,
pulling out brochures like a travel agent.
Where are you headed?
As if no destination were outside the realm of possibility;
we just had to plug it into the computer,
check flights,
book tickets far enough in advance.
You can be whatever you wish,
my father said — meaning, lawyer, teacher, engineer, MD,
RN, CPA — speaking in that voice
parents use, knowing
they’re being more understanding
than their parents were. Tell me,
what do you really want to do?

What could I say? I want to be a boy
adopted by vultures. Or a blind girl
who lives in a cave.
Or a hermit who speaks to lizards.
I wanted to be washed up,
a castaway searching
for the crew I’d been separated from,
shipwrecked on this planet,
marooned in a human body.
Maybe that was why I touched myself so often —
to see if I could feel a fragment
of who I really was, a piece of light
buried in me, broken off from the star
I spent so much energy trying to get back to.
Maybe that’s why I lit matches
and pressed the flames into my palms,
as if pain held the answer
folded up in its petals.
Maybe the only way back
was to hurt, to rub against broken glass.

What’s on your mind?
asked the doctor. Don’t be afraid. You can
tell me anything. I was thinking
of what I’d have to give up,
what every young man or woman
serious about making a living has to give up:
gazing at leaves, those elegant distractions,
or the creek’s long, run-on sentences,
its exclamations, its
parentheses, its tireless questions.

What if we made graduation a little more honest,
held a ceremony
where every eighteen-year-old dragged onto the field
all he’d hidden in his closets,
all that could prove embarrassing,
all she loved but had no excuse to hold on to anymore?
Final exams would require every student
to write down the idle thoughts
she’d promised never
to think again, every word
it excited a boy just to write:
wastrel, changeling, maelstrom, cataclysm, galaxy,
alien, naked, vampire, crucible, relic.

Fire would grade the papers,
and everybody would get the same mark,
flames correcting the notebooks
filled with spaceships
or Greek gods
or the names of sweethearts written over
and over in different scripts
or drawings of horses —
all a girl had to do was look at them, then close her eyes,
to feel the power ripping
under her, carrying her into the sky —
or pictures of dogs too important to die,
of movie stars or rock bands
into whose faces a young man or woman gazes
till afternoons open like doors
they’d thought shut tight.

You can be whatever you set your mind to.
But at what cost?
Sit down, son.
Tell me what you want to do with the rest of your life.

by Chris Bursk
from The Sun Magazine
September 1996

Leah Dworkin in Guernica:

For many writers, Sam Lipsyte’s readerly eyes are the most coveted. Hordes flock to the Columbia MFA Writing Program for the chance to take his fiction workshop, where he and I first met. On campus, revved up egos struggled under the weight of our grandiose dreams. We students all crossed our fingers in hopes that we’d be one of the lucky ones to gain access to The Great Lipsyte’s secrets.

His secret? No secrets. He pays attention. In an atmosphere that otherwise conditions writers to race towards the sparkliest “high-status” achievements, oh, there’s Sam with his stable vision.  He embraces time, urging his students to do the same, reintroducing the ancient notion that good work might require it.

I write this because I see something familiar in Lipsyte’s new novel Hark: aimless followers with luminous dreams, desperate for a goody bag of shortcuts. Its protagonist, Hark Morner, is a failed comedian turned spiritual guide, the founder of a technique called “mental archery.” Hark guides his disciples in doing the same thing Lipsyte teaches his students: to actually focus.

More here.

Alan Lightman in Nautilus:

One day at lunch in the Caltech cafeteria, I was with two graduate students, Bill Press and Saul Teukolsky, and Feynman. Bill and Saul were talking about a calculation they had just done. It was a theoretical calculation, purely mathematical, where they looked at what happens if you shine light on a rotating black hole. If you shine it at the right angle, the light will bounce off the black hole with more energy than it came in with. The classical analogue is a spinning top. If you throw a marble at the top at the right angle, the marble will bounce off the top with more velocity than it came in with. The top slows down and the energy, the increased energy of the marble, comes from the spin of the top. As Bill and Saul were talking, Feynman was listening.

We got up from the table and began walking back through the campus. Feynman said, “You know that process you’ve described? It sounds very much like stimulated emission.” That’s a quantum process in atomic physics where you have an electron orbiting an atom, and a light particle, a photon, comes in. The two particles are emitted and the electron goes to a lower energy state, so the light is amplified by the electron. The electron decreases energy and gives up that extra energy to sending out two photons. Feynman said, “What you’ve just described sounds like stimulated emission. According to Einstein, there’s a well-known relationship between stimulated emission and spontaneous emission.”

Spontaneous emission is when you have an electron orbiting an atom and it just emits a photon all by itself, without any light coming in, and goes to a lower energy state. Einstein had worked out this relationship between stimulated and spontaneous emission. Whenever you have one, you have the other, at the atomic level. That’s well known to graduate students of physics. Feynman said that what Bill and Saul were describing sounded like simulated emission, and so there should be a spontaneous emission process analogous to it.

We’d been wandering through the campus. We ended up in my office, a tiny little room, Bill, Saul, me, and Feynman. Feynman went to the blackboard and began working out the equations for spontaneous emission from black holes. Up to this point in history, it had been thought that all black holes were completely black, that a black hole could never emit on its own any kind of energy.

More here.

Laila Lalami in The Nation:

What are you looking for in a presidential candidate? I want someone with fresh proposals on health care or the environment, you might say. A track record that testifies to experience and effectiveness. Or you might say: Listen, I’m just looking for anyone who can defeat Donald Trump in 2020. Whatever your position, you’re likely to have already gotten into spirited conversations about it with family and friends. And as the race for the Democratic nomination heats up, the debate has become increasingly acrimonious. In fact, it’s threatening to turn into a search for a savior.

This search manifests itself in two ways. The first is the belief that electing the right person will result in immediate solutions to the multitude of systemic problems that plague the country. If only we had the perfect person in the Oval Office, the thinking goes, then we would finally be able to fix our disastrous health-care system, or take serious action on global warming, or counteract the rightward shift of the Supreme Court. But this thinking runs counter to the reality that each president inherits problems from the previous administration, as well as constraints or even obstruction from the legislative branch.

More here.

Britain is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, so why do so many feel short-changed? Labour MP and former minister Angela Eagle sees an urgent need to protect social cohesion and makes a case for radical economic reform, to trump inequality and create a fairer society.