Michael Specter in The New Yorker:

Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died of the Spanish flu; smallpox may have killed half a billion during the twentieth century alone. Those viruses were highly infectious, yet their impact was limited by their ferocity: a virus may destroy an entire culture, but if we die it dies, too. As a result, not even smallpox possessed the evolutionary power to influence humans as a species—to alter our genetic structure. That would require an organism to insinuate itself into the critical cells we need in order to reproduce: our germ cells. Only retroviruses, which reverse the usual flow of genetic code from DNA to RNA, are capable of that. A retrovirus stores its genetic information in a single-stranded molecule of RNA, instead of the more common double-stranded DNA. When it infects a cell, the virus deploys a special enzyme, called reverse transcriptase, that enables it to copy itself and then paste its own genes into the new cell’s DNA. It then becomes part of that cell forever; when the cell divides, the virus goes with it. Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

When the sequence of the human genome was fully mapped, in 2003, researchers also discovered something they had not anticipated: our bodies are littered with the shards of such retroviruses, fragments of the chemical code from which all genetic material is made. It takes less than two per cent of our genome to create all the proteins necessary for us to live. Eight per cent, however, is composed of broken and disabled retroviruses, which, millions of years ago, managed to embed themselves in the DNA of our ancestors. They are called endogenous retroviruses, because once they infect the DNA of a species they become part of that species. One by one, though, after molecular battles that raged for thousands of generations, they have been defeated by evolution. Like dinosaur bones, these viral fragments are fossils. Instead of having been buried in sand, they reside within each of us, carrying a record that goes back millions of years. Because they no longer seem to serve a purpose or cause harm, these remnants have often been referred to as “junk DNA.” Many still manage to generate proteins, but scientists have never found one that functions properly in humans or that could make us sick.

Then, last year, Thierry Heidmann brought one back to life.

More here.

Matthew Cobb in Current Biology:

On May 13, 1961, two articles appeared in Nature, authored by a total of nine people, including Sydney Brenner, François Jacob and Jim Watson, announcing the isolation of messenger RNA (mRNA) 1, 2. In the same month, François Jacob and Jacques Monod published a review in Journal of Molecular Biology in which they put mRNA into a theoretical context, arguing for its role in gene regulation [3]. Aside from the technical prowess involved, these papers were feats of the imagination, for they represented an entirely new way of thinking about gene function.

Although insight and hard thinking played a decisive role in developing this new view of life, this work built upon over a decade of research by many groups in the US and Europe as they attempted to unravel how the genetic message gets from DNA to produce proteins. We can reconstruct what happened in these years not only by studying the papers that were produced, but also by examining the reminiscences of those who were involved, both in their memoirs 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and in oral histories [9], including talks by participants at the conference on the history of mRNA that took place in August 2014 as part of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Genentech Center Conferences on the History of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology.

The acceptance of the genetic role of DNA began in 1944 with the publication of Avery, McLeod and McCarty’s first paper on the identification of the ‘transforming principle’ in pneumococcal bacteria as DNA 10, 11. For much of the 1950s, the suggestion that DNA was the hereditary material in all organisms was accepted as a ‘working hypothesis’ but nothing more — as late as 1961 a paper in Nature left the door open to the possibility that genes were made of proteins, not DNA [12]. One of the continuous concerns throughout this period was that it remained unclear how genes functioned.

A key insight came in 1953, when Watson and Crick suggested that the sequence of bases on a DNA molecule contains ‘genetical information’ [13]. The issue then became how that information was turned into biological function — the nature of the genetic code and how it worked. The person initially responsible for focusing attention on this problem was the cosmologist George Gamow.

More here.

Charlie Tyson in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In Theory of the Gimmick (Harvard University Press, 2020), Ngai tracks the gimmick through a number of guises: stage props, wigs, stainless-steel banana slicers, temp agencies, fraudulent photographs, subprime loans, technological doodads, the novel of ideas. Across its many forms, the gimmick arouses our suspicion. When we say something is a gimmick, we mean it is overrated and deceptive, that you would have to be a sucker to fall for it. Yet gimmicks exert a strange hold on us. As with a magic show, we can enjoy the gimmick even while we know we are being tricked.

Ngai, a 48-year-old professor of English at the University of Chicago, has slowly been building a reputation as one of America’s most original and penetrating cultural theorists. She has done so by revitalizing the field of aesthetic theory. To some critics, this domain of philosophical inquiry has long seemed fusty and archaic, overly beholden to 18th-century debates. The categories of the sublime and the beautiful, as theorized by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, continue to shape how we make sense of aesthetic experience.

Ngai’s contribution has been to take marginal, nonprestigious aesthetic categories, such as “cuteness,” and treat them with the same seriousness traditionally afforded to the sublime and the beautiful.

More here.

Romeo Vitelli in Providentia:

Rome’s Museo Criminologico [Criminological Museum] may not be to everybody’s taste,  but it’s definitely worth seeing (alas, it’s now closed though, hopefully, that will change in future).  The museum’s collection features photographs and memorabilia from some of the most gruesome forensic cases in the long history of Italy. From Renaissance murders to the Mafia, this museum has it all.

It was there that I first learned about Leonarda Cianciulli, a.k.a. the “Soap Maker of Corregio” and her bizarre criminal career. While almost unknown outside of Italy, Leonarda’s career as a serial killer is still unparalleled in many ways, both for her unique method of concealing bodies and her rather odd motive for killing.

More here.

Matt Taibbi at Substack:

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory.

More here.

Jessica Bruder at Harper’s Magazine:

On Thanksgiving Day of 2010, Linda May sat alone in a trailer in New River, Arizona. At sixty, the silver-haired grandmother lacked electricity and running water. She couldn’t find work. Her unemployment benefits had run out, and her daughter’s family, with whom she had lived for many years while holding a series of low-wage jobs, had recently downsized to a smaller apartment. There wasn’t enough room to move back in with them.

“I’m going to drink all the booze. I’m going to turn on the propane. I’m going to pass out and that’ll be it,” she told herself. “And if I wake up, I’m going to light a cigarette and blow us all to hell.”

more here.

John Banville at Literary Review:

William James in turn experienced a vastation of his own. In Varieties of Religious Experience he provides a report by a ‘French correspondent’ – in reality, himself – that describes how on an ordinary evening, at twilight, ‘suddenly there fell upon me without warning, just as if it came out of darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence’. His terror became embodied in the image of an epileptic patient he had seen in an asylum, ‘like a sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes … That shape am I.’

Despite all this, or because of it, James was a remarkably bright and affirmative character, not naturally, but as a result of hard work. Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’ And indeed James’s brand of philosophy – pragmatism – has features in common with Berlin’s own thinking on liberty and pluralism.

more here.

Veronique Greenwood and Quanta in The Atlantic:

The millimeter-long roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans has about 20,000 genes—and so do you. Of course, only the human in this comparison is capable of creating either a circulatory system or a sonnet, a state of affairs that made this genetic equivalence one of the most confusing insights to come out of the Human Genome Project. But there are ways of accounting for some of our complexity beyond the level of genes, and as one new study shows, they may matter far more than people have assumed.

For a long time, one thing seemed fairly solid in biologists’ minds: Each gene in the genome made one protein. The gene’s code was the recipe for one molecule that would go forth into the cell and do the work that needed doing, whether that was generating energy, disposing of waste, or any other necessary task. The idea, which dates to a 1941 paper by two geneticists who later won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work, even has a pithy name: “one gene, one protein.”

Over the years, biologists realized that the rules weren’t quite that simple. Some genes, it turned out, were being used to make multiple products. In the process of going from gene to protein, the recipe was not always interpreted the same way. Some of the resulting proteins looked a little different from others. And sometimes those changes mattered a great deal. There is one gene, famous in certain biologists’ circles, whose two proteins do completely opposite things. One will force a cell to commit suicide, while the other will stop the process. And in one of the most extreme examples known to science, a single fruit fly gene provides the recipe for more than 38,000 different proteins.

More here.

Sam Knight in The New Yorker:

In October, 2010, an Italian religious historian named Alberto Melloni stood over a small cherrywood box in the reading room of the Laurentian Library, in Florence. The box was old and slightly scuffed, and inked in places with words in Latin. It had been stored for several centuries inside one of the library’s distinctive sloping reading desks, which were designed by Michelangelo. Melloni slid the lid off the box. Inside was a yellow silk scarf, and wrapped in the scarf was a thirteenth-century Bible, no larger than the palm of his hand, which was falling to pieces. The Bible was “a very poor one,” Melloni told me recently. “Very dark. Very nothing.” But it had a singular history. In 1685, a Jesuit priest who had travelled to China gave the Bible to the Medici family, suggesting that it had belonged to Marco Polo, the medieval explorer who reached the court of Kublai Khan around 1275. Although the story was unlikely, the book had almost certainly been carried by an early missionary to China and spent several centuries there, being handled by scholars and mandarins—making it a remarkable object in the history of Christianity in Asia.

Melloni is the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences, an institute in Bologna dedicated to the history of the Church. He had heard of the Marco Polo Bible, but he was unaware of its poor condition until a colleague spotted the crumbling book at an exhibition at the library, in 2008, and pitched a project to restore it and find out more about its past. “It was like a sort of Cinderella among the beautiful sisters,” Melloni said. Like other people accustomed to handling old texts or precious historical objects, Melloni has a special regard for what Walter Benjamin called their aura: “a strange weave of space and time” that allows for an intimation of the world in which they were made. “You have in your hand the manuscript,” Melloni said. “But also the stories that the manuscript is carrying.”

The restoration took eighteen months. Ten thousand pieces of the Bible were reassembled. In the process, Melloni was determined to subject the document to the latest scientific analysis. “We should do on this Bible the type of thing that would be done on the ‘Mona Lisa,’ ” Melloni told his colleagues. He contacted the cultural-heritage center at the Polytechnic University of Milan, the largest scientific school in Italy, to ask advice. In addition to standard conservation tools, like ultraviolet photography and infrared spectroscopy, which is used to study pigments, the experts there suggested proteomics. “It was the first time I heard the word ‘proteomic’ in my life,” Melloni recalled.

Proteomics is the study of the interaction of proteins in living things.

More here.

Color Theory

a political statement walks into an art classroom. could be the walls, or her bones, either way she know some white structure will betray her soon. she takes narrative off her body like a coat. her skin the only negative space in the room. they put her here for contrast. they call it diversity. it just look good, you know? makes the lighter colors gunshow pop. you wouldn’t even see her in the dark if not for her teeth. you feel bitten into even though she hasn’t opened her mouth. all the eyes passing over her right now. dissecting her body like a corpse. eyes look just like she did. black center surrounded on all sides by white. a dominant gene. she the center of attention. takes a seat on top of the quota she just filled and gets comfortable. she’ll be here awhile. scribble in the corner of your eye. she pays you no mind. she’s painting entire canvases Black now. tells the teacher she’s making mirrors. she could look at anything Black and call it a mirror. this what Black art mean. catching yourself redhanded. not knowing if it’s from paint or blood. not knowing if basquiat broke the silence or became it. it’s the double take when you realize she’s been painting with bullets. wonder how she got all the color to stick to them like that. where she got all that color in the first place. whose mouth it fell out of. it coats the teachers throat. he says that’s not what art looks like/you can’t sharpen its fangs like that/who knows what might happen if you leave that in a gallery, it could eat everyone alive/and they wouldn’t even know how to hang that up without a noose anyway/a Black body of work is still a Black body. she smiles, like her bones have abandoned her, and breaks how she’s supposed to. you make sure to get every drop of her blood on canvas. it’s not erasure, it’s performance art. watch them photograph her chalk outline and have the nerve to sell it on t-shirts. a Black body of work is still a Black body. and you won’t even let her die properly. you got red paint in your teeth. red paint on every whitewhite wall.

It’s so easy to wash off.

by Imani Davis
from Split this Rock

Brandon Bloch in the Boston Review:

“No one in the world feels the weakness of general characterizing more than I.” So lamented Johann Gottfried von Herder, towering figure of the German Enlightenment, in his 1774 treatise This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity. “One draws together peoples and periods of time that follow one another in an eternal succession like waves of the sea,” Herder wrote. “Whom has one painted? Whom has the depicting word captured?” For Herder, the Enlightenment dream of grasping human history as a seamless whole came up against the irreducible particularity of individuals and cultures.

The German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, among the most influential thinkers of our time, grapples with much the same problem in his new work, the title of which reverses the order of Herder’s terms: This Too a History of Philosophy. Published in German last September, Habermas’s History spans over 3,000 years and 1,700 pages. It marks the apogee of a singular career. Like his eighteenth-century precursor, Habermas seeks a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the sweep of human history. “Philosophical problems,” he writes, are distinctive from merely “scientific” ones in their “synthetic force.” For Habermas, the fragmentation of modern life has hardly exhausted philosophy’s capacity for bold questions and architectonic structure.

More here.

Chad Orzel at the IAI:

In September 1991, a pair of German hikers in the Ötztal Alps, near the border between Austria and Italy, spotted something brown and human-shaped sticking out of a glacier. They immediately reported this to the authorities, thinking they had discovered the body of someone who had died while hiking. While they were correct about it being a dead body, they were a little off on the timing: what they found turned out to be the mummified corpse of a man who had died sometime before 3100 BCE.

The mummy, quickly nicknamed “Ötzi” after the mountains where he was found, was a middle-aged man from the Copper Age, who had been killed by an arrow in the back. His body was quickly frozen into the glacier, along with his clothes and other possessions, leaving it incredibly well preserved. Over the last 29 years, he has been the subject of intense scientific investigation by a wide range of techniques, down to DNA sequencing to determine the species of the hides used to make his clothing, and isotopic analysis to determine the source of the copper ore for his axe. From all these studies, scientists have been able to reconstruct his final days in considerable detail: he was killed in early summer, having been wounded in a fight a few days earlier. His last two meals consisted of ibex meat and grains, one eaten at a much lower altitude than where he was found, suggesting a vivid narrative of battle and pursuit.

More here.

Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times:

Since it emerged seven years ago in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matter movement has produced a sea change in attitudes, politics and policy.

In 2016, 43 percent of Americans supported Black Lives Matter and its claims about the criminal justice system; now, it’s up to 67 percent, with 60 percent support among white Americans, compared with 40 percent four years ago. Whereas Democratic politicians once stumbled over the issue, now even Republicans are falling over themselves to say that “black lives matter.” And where the policy conversation was formerly focused on body cameras and chokehold bans, now mainstream outlets are debating and taking seriously calls to demilitarize and defund police departments or to abolish them outright.

But the Black Lives Matter platform isn’t just about criminal justice. From the start, activists have articulated a broad, inclusive vision for the entire country. This, in fact, has been true of each of the nation’s major movements for racial equality. Among black Americans and their Radical Republican allies, Reconstruction — which was still ongoing as of 150 years ago — was as much a fight to fundamentally reorder Southern economic life as it was a struggle for political inclusion. The struggle against Jim Crow, likewise, was also a struggle for economic equality and the transformation of society.

More here.

Stephen Kearse at The Nation:

The modern study of the intersection of race and technology has its roots in the 1990s, when tech utopianism clashed with the racism of tech culture. As the Internet grew into a massive nexus for commerce and leisure and became the heart of modern industry, the ills of tech workplaces manifested themselves online in chat rooms, message boards, and multiplayer video games that were rife with harassment and hate speech. Documenting these instances, a range of scholars, activists, and politicians attempted to combat these ills, but with little success. When the Simon Wiesenthal Center sent letters to Internet providers in 1996 protesting the rise of neo-Nazi websites, for example, the reply it received from a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a prominent tech lobby, channeled a now commonplace mantra: “The best response is always to answer bad speech with more speech.” Similarly, media studies researcher Lisa Nakamura documented a dismissive comment in a study of the online game LambdaMOO. In response to a failed community petition to curb racial harassment, a detractor countered, “Well, who knows my race unless I tell them? If race isn’t important [then] why mention it? If you want to get in somebody’s face with your race then perhaps you deserve a bit of flak.”

more here.

Leo Robson at The New Yorker:

Oates’s friend the novelist John Gardner once suggested that she try writing a story “in which things go well, for a change.” That hasn’t happened yet. Her latest book, the enormous and frequently brilliant “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.” (Ecco)—the forty-ninth novel she has published, if you exclude the ones she has written under pseudonyms—is a characteristic work. It begins with an act of police brutality, and proceeds to document the multifarious consequences for the victim’s wife and children: alcoholism, low-level criminality, marital breakdown, incipient nervous collapse. In a 1977 journal entry, Oates acknowledged that her work turns instinctively toward what she called “the central, centralizing act of violence that seems to symbolize something beyond itself.” Perhaps the most heavily ironic statement in her œuvre comes in her second novel, “A Garden of Earthly Delights” (1967), when a woman says, “Nobody killed nobody, this is the United States,” while the most characteristic piece of exposition may be found in “Little Bird of Heaven” (2009): “Daddy was bringing me home on that November evening not long before his death-by-firing-squad to a house from which he’d been banished by my mother.”

more here.

Nils-Bertin Wallin in YaleGlobal Online:

The Sumerians were the first to develop a counting system to keep an account of their stock of goods – cattle, horses, and donkeys, for example. The Sumerian system was positional; that is, the placement of a particular symbol relative to others denoted its value. The Sumerian system was handed down to the Akkadians around 2500 BC and then to the Babylonians in 2000 BC. It was the Babylonians who first conceived of a mark to signify that a number was absent from a column; just as 0 in 1025 signifies that there are no hundreds in that number. Although zero’s Babylonian ancestor was a good start, it would still be centuries before the symbol as we know it appeared.

The renowned mathematicians among the Ancient Greeks, who learned the fundamentals of their math from the Egyptians, did not have a name for zero, nor did their system feature a placeholder as did the Babylonian. They may have pondered it, but there is no conclusive evidence to say the symbol even existed in their language. It was the Indians who began to understand zero both as a symbol and as an idea.

Brahmagupta, around 650 AD, was the first to formalize arithmetic operations using zero. He used dots underneath numbers to indicate a zero. These dots were alternately referred to as ‘sunya’, which means empty, or ‘kha’, which means place. Brahmagupta wrote standard rules for reaching zero through addition and subtraction as well as the results of operations with zero. The only error in his rules was division by zero, which would have to wait for Isaac Newton and G.W. Leibniz to tackle.

But it would still be a few centuries before zero reached Europe. First, the great Arabian voyagers would bring the texts of Brahmagupta and his colleagues back from India along with spices and other exotic items. Zero reached Baghdad by 773 AD and would be developed in the Middle East by Arabian mathematicians who would base their numbers on the Indian system. In the ninth century, Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi was the first to work on equations that equaled zero, or algebra as it has come to be known. He also developed quick methods for multiplying and dividing numbers known as algorithms (a corruption of his name). Al-Khowarizmi called zero ‘sifr’, from which our cipher is derived. By 879 AD, zero was written almost as we now know it, an oval – but in this case smaller than the other numbers. And thanks to the conquest of Spain by the Moors, zero finally reached Europe; by the middle of the twelfth century, translations of Al-Khowarizmi’s work had weaved their way to England.

More here.