Michele Solis in Scientific American:

What makes the human brain special? That question is not easy to answer—and will occupy neuroscientists for generations to come. But a few tentative responses can already be mustered. The organ is certainly bigger than expected for our body size. And it has its own specialized areas—one of which is devoted to processing language. In recent years, brain scans have started to show that the particular way neurons connect to one another is also part of the story. A key tool in these studies is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)—in particular, a version known as diffusion tensor imaging. This technique can visualize the long fibers that extend out from neurons and link brain regions without having to remove a piece of skull. Like wires, these connections carry electrical information between neurons. And the aggregate of all these links, also known as a connectome, can provide clues about how the brain processes information.

A persistent question about connectomes has to do with what, if anything, distinctive wiring patterns have to do with the evident cognitive differences in a mouse, a monkey or a human. A new methodology called comparative connectomics has identified some general rules of brain wiring across species that may help provide answers. In the meantime, it has also found some unique facets of the human connectome and discovered changes in the cells charged with the upkeep of brain wiring. Together these evolutionary innovations seem to keep information flowing efficiently through a large human brain. And when they are disrupted, they may give rise to psychiatric disorders.

More here.

Vancouver Island

The hummingbird beak-deep in fireweed makes
clumsy the worming robin, but that brown
orangey breast brightens the greens of the lawn
so the bluish green blacks of the firs are deepened.   How
many greens there are – grass, fern, cedar, each has a thousand.

Now I can see the grays of the sea – silver to not-quite
black, and now the blue-gray, white-gray, gray-gray clouds,
and now the spoor of an invisible wind moving   up
the Juan de Fuca Strait – out towards a vast shining.

by Nils Peterson

Rob Doyle at The Guardian:

When the first volume in the punk-feminist writer Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy appeared in English in 2015, it was a cause for excitement. Here was a big, brash, enjoyable slab of French recession fiction, a social novel full of ageing rockers and party-worn broads who drink cans of lager, DJ in scuzzy clubs and kip on their mates’ couches – the sort of crowd usually refused entry to Parisian literature. Despentes, whose inaugural notoriety was the spree-killing road novel Baise-Moi (she also directed the banned film adaptation), appeared to have matured into a more expansive view of class, gender relations and power dynamics. Vernon Subutex looked as though it might become the kind of generational group portrait that Roberto Bolaño gave us of Mexican youth in The Savage Detectives. The question was whether Despentes, accustomed to snarling her truths over the fictive equivalent of three distorted power-chords, could sustain a project that, by the trilogy’s end, would amass 1,000 pages.

more here.

Nicholson Baker at Columbia Journalism Review:

When I first started watching YouTube—in 2006, just before it was bought by Google—it was a fairly intimate place. Renetto (a/k/a Paul Robinett) made a clip with “EXTREME GRAPHIC CONTENT,” in which he chewed a mouthful of Mentos and drank Diet Coke and feigned a gastric explosion. Suddenly he was famous. Boh3m3 (a/k/a Ben Going), a voluble young man with an appealingly crooked smile, was one of the first to reach ten thousand subscribers; he shaved his head for the camcorder and made funny sounds with compressed air. Janemcwhir (a/k/a Jane), a Canadian teenager with a pierced lower lip, talked about her friends’ phobias and celebrated her mild crush on a fellow video-uploader named lightrayface. In one of Jane’s videos from the time, “Sneeze,” she suddenly sneezes. Nothing had ever existed like this. Everyone was talking to everyone else about their lives. We had all become diarists. It was tremendously new and fun and confessional: first-person journalism.

more here.

Sanjay G. Reddy over at Reddy to Read:

My academic institution, like many others in the world, forecasts a severe financial crisis as a result of the response to COVID-19. It has, as a result, preemptively announced job furloughs and other severe measures, including pay cuts to faculty and staff. Many members of the community have, however, perceived the institution as having become top heavy with highly paid administrators, and of having made bad prior choices which limit current options (see this excellent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the debate at Johns Hopkins, which applies to many other universities too). It has meanwhile become one of the more expensive institutions to attend in the US, and therefore in the world, limiting the scope to raise revenue through tuition increases. Students, and families, have helped to pay for the “top heavy” university.

The faculty and students are increasingly concerned with identifying an alternative to the “scorched earth” approach to crisis management currently proposed by the institution, including a more effective and just scheme of revenue raising and burden sharing.  Recently, I have been analyzing (see latest version of presentation) the finances of the  institution with the aid of a couple of motivated graduate students, by assembling and analyzing diverse public data from multiple sources (all collected here, along with the supporting calculations). The faculty have, despite a charade of budget transparency, had little by way of a comprehensive view of university finances with which meaningful consultation and deliberation could take place.  The institution’s finances have been perennially and universally viewed as opaque, even though the financial condition of the university has often – not only this year – been referred to by top administrators as the reason for decisions. Although it is true that relevant information has been available in various nooks and crannies, it has been difficult to put together and to make sense of as a whole.

The exercise in budgetary transparency, which I report on here, although a work in progress, is a small contribution in the direction of a more rational discussion of effective and fair options before the institution.

More here.

Ragnar Fjelland in Nature:

Göran Therborn in The Conversation:

The possibilities of flourishing as a human are shaped by processes of (in)equality. Differences are either given – by God or by Nature – or chosen as lifestyles.

Unlike difference, inequality is a historical social construction.

The three-dimensionality of humanity gives us three kinds of human inequality. These are vital, existential and resource.

The three kinds of human inequality

Vital inequality refers to socially determined distributions of health and ill health and of your lifespan. It can be measured in life expectancy and in health expectancy or your years without serious illness. Where demographic life tables are missing, infant and child mortality are more accessible indicators.

Existential inequality sums up the unequal social treatment of persons. On one end of the spectrum resides denial of recognition, autonomy, existential security, dignity and respect. These can be achieved through acts of neglect, bullying, degradation and humiliation. The ultimate result is a denial of their humanness. At the opposite end are selective attention, freedom, emotional security, encouragement, respect and admiration.

Existential inequality is structured and processed by categories and lenses of othering – such as sex, race, ethnicity, caste or religion. It is arguably the most hurtful and wounding of inequalities.

More here.

Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic:

Food, at its essence, is sustenance; that much is simple. Where things get complicated is in all the manifold ways it sustains us. Consider the burrito. In the first episode of Padma Lakshmi’s new Hulu show, Taste the Nation, the food writer and longtime Top Chef host travels to El Paso, Texas, where she attempts to isolate all the different ingredients in one of America’s favorite dishes. At the Jalisco Cafe, a chef griddling oozy eggs with beans on a stovetop tells her that the perfect burrito comes down to an attention to detail. The dish, another interviewee tells Lakshmi, is pure practical convenience: It’s quick to assemble and eat on the way to work. It can also signify a mother’s love, a whole meal swaddled in a pillowy tortilla and tucked into a child’s pocket before the day begins. And, in a city where the hum of helicopters surveying the border adds ambient foreboding to every interaction, burritos also represent the essence of American food: cuisine from one culture cloaked in the imposed ingredients of another (in this case, wheat flour). “A burrito,” Lakshmi observes, “is tradition wrapped in colonization.”

More here.

Martha Jones in Smithsonian:

The 19th Amendment, ratified in August 1920, paved the way for American women to vote, but the educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune knew the work had only just begun: The amendment alone would not guarantee political power to black women. Thanks to Bethune’s work that year to register and mobilize black voters in her hometown of Daytona, Florida, new black voters soon outnumbered new white voters in the city. But a reign of terror followed. That fall, the Ku Klux Klan marched on Bethune’s boarding school for black girls; two years later, ahead of the 1922 elections, the Klan paid another threatening visit, as over 100 robed figures carrying banners emblazoned with the words “white supremacy” marched on the school in retaliation against Bethune’s continued efforts to get black women to the polls. Informed of the incoming nightriders, Bethune took charge: “Get the students into the dormitory,” she told the teachers, “get them into bed, do not share what is happening right now.” The students safely tucked in, Bethune directed her faculty: “The Ku Klux Klan is marching on our campus, and they intend to burn some buildings.”

The faculty fanned out across the campus; Bethune stood in the center of the quadrangle and held her head high as the parade entered the campus by one entrance—and promptly exited by another. The Klansmen were on campus for just a few minutes. Perhaps they knew an armed cadre of local black men had decided to lie in wait nearby, ready to fight back if the Klansmen turned violent. Perhaps they assumed the sight of a procession would be enough to keep black citizens from voting.

More here.

Lauren Masceranhas in CNN:

Cajas/Boxes with Zero Tolerance

…….. -excerpts

In 1930, my tatarabuela still spoke Rarámuri.
Detribalized now as we’ve been from Turtle Island,
south and north of the río grande, west and east
it’s no surprise that we’re still writing about
our identities, brown women regarded
as brown women, they’d say equally as if
a consolation for any. What does it mean

to be Mexican living in Tejas,
singing in English? I blend in. U.S.
citizenship privilege—check. Education—check.
Job security, check. Chingona propensity, check.

Trauma half-lives (half-līves).
I thought music touches us first
and then the words.

If they built the wall near you,
you’d think music left for rhetoric too.

***

If they built walls and migrant kennels near you,
you’d think music left for rhetoric too.

Jefferson Che Pop, six, stolen from his papá
Hermelindo, in El Paso, a day after crossing.

Weeks later, by phone, in Mayan Q’eqchi
Papá, I thought they killed you. You separated from me.
Where are you? You don’t love me anymore?

How can I sing a song in this English
when this country urges many to sign
this and that form in this English?

Have it all end with a form in English?

Why would any parent crossing countries
seeking asylum agree, deport me, childless?

***

Jefferson doesn’t ask You don’t love me
anymore? He doesn’t say anything.

Hermelindo says, My son has come back
to me sick. Limp. Rash. Bruised.

LA Times does not report their
favorite songs from home.

I’m dreaming of a song, one I can never write,
one I have never heard. I’m dreaming
that Hermelindo will sing it to Jefferson,
that Jefferson’s mother will sing it by phone
and he will remember he is loved.

by Emmy Pérez
from Split This Rock

Note: Italicized quotes are from an LA Times article

Katrin Redfern and Richard Whatmore in The Conversation:

Identity politics has become a secular religion and, like any strict sect, apostates are severely punished.

This can lead to a “purity spiral”, with the more extreme opinion the more rewarded in a pattern of increasing escalation. Nuance and debate are the casualties, and a kind of moral feeding frenzy results.

Are purity spirals inevitable? It is natural for humans to form “in” and “out” groups. Identifying a common enemy is often the key to group solidarity. Nationalist politicians and the marketing teams who serve them know how effective such strategies can be with ill-informed electorates. Equally, if an individual can manifest virtues valued by the group, this fosters a sense of self-worth and belonging.

Unsurprisingly, we have been here before. History demonstrates the ease with which ordinary people commit atrocious acts, particularly during crises. When you believe you are morally superior, when you dehumanise those you disagree with, you can justify almost anything.

More here.

Stephen Ornes in Quanta:

Here’s a deceptively simple exercise: Come up with a random phone number. Seven digits in a sequence, chosen so that every digit is equally likely, and so that your choice of one digit doesn’t affect the next. Odds are, you can’t. (But don’t take my word for it: Studies dating back to the 1950s reveal how mathematically nonrandom we are, even if we don’t recognize it.)

Don’t take it to heart. Computers don’t generate randomness well, either. They’re not supposed to: Computer software and hardware run on Boolean logic, not probability. “The culture of computing is centered on determinism,” said Vikash Mansinghka, who runs the Probabilistic Computing Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “and that shows up at pretty much every level.”

But computer scientists want programs that can handle randomness because sometimes that’s what a problem requires.

More here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction:

Sadly, you know that your side is losing the war of ideas when they start handing propaganda victories to the side you despise on a platter. Three years ago, in the context of a Lee statue that was going to be taken down, after that terrible anti-Semitic Charlottesville rally by white supremacists, Trump made a loathsome remark about there being “fine people” on all sides and also asked a journalist that if it was Lee today, would it be Jefferson or Washington next? I of course dismissed Trump’s remark as racist and ignorant; he would not be able to recite the Declaration of Independence if it came wafting down at him in a MAGA hat. But now I am horrified that liberals are providing him with ample ammunition by validating his words. A protest in San Francisco toppled a statue of Ulysses S. Grant – literally the man who defeated the Confederacy and destroyed the first KKK – and defaced a statue of Cervantes, a man who as far as we know did not write “Don Quixote” while he was relaxing from a day’s fighting for the Confederacy or abusing slaves. University of Wisconsin students recently asked for a statue of Lincoln to be removed because he had once said some uncomplimentary words about black people. And, since it was just a matter of time, the paper of record just published an op-ed calling for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington to be taken down. Three years ago, if you had asked me if my fellow liberals would go from Robert E. Lee to Jefferson and Washington and Grant so quickly, I would have expressed deep skepticism. But here we are, and based on recent events it won’t be paranoid at all to ask that if Washington statues are next, would streets or schools named after Washington also be added to the list? How about statues of Plato and Aristotle who supported slavery as a natural state of man? And don’t even get me started on Gandhi who said some very unflattering words about Africans. The coefficient of friction on the slippery slope is rapidly going to zero.

More here.

Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker:

Barbara Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, where her family had lived for generations, in 1941. Most of her male ancestors lost fingers working in nearby copper mines. But her father attended night school, then won a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon; the family moved to Pittsburgh and rose into the middle class. Ehrenreich studied physics in college, got a doctorate in cell biology, and, in the late sixties, alongside her husband at the time, John Ehrenreich, she became involved in health-care organizing and antiwar activism.

In the decades since, Ehrenreich has tried, as a writer and an activist, to forge a bridge between the working and middle classes. She published her first two books—one on chemistry and one, co-written with her husband, about student protest—in 1969, and started attracting a wide audience in the nineteen-seventies, when she began writing for the influential feminist magazine Ms. She’s now published more than twenty books, including the 2001 bestseller “Nickel and Dimed,” about the daily indignities of low-wage work, and “Natural Causes,” a 2018 polemic about the wellness industry and the illusion of control. Her latest, “Had I Known: Collected Essays,” which brings together work from the past four decades, examines health, the economy, feminism, “bourgeois blunders,” God, science, and joy.

I recently visited Ehrenreich at home, in her fifth-floor condo outside Washington, D.C. Like her, the place was no-nonsense but welcoming. There were magazines on side tables, and shelves piled with books. She had broken her arm the previous weekend—“attacked,” she said, “by a laundry basket,” which she’d tripped over in the dark—and had enlisted a publicist at Twelve Books to pick up sandwiches and drinks for us. She asked over e-mail if I had any dietary preferences or restrictions, and I said that I valued all sandwiches but preferred one without mayonnaise, a choice that later became the subject of discussion. After selecting a turkey sandwich with mustard—Ehrenreich had chicken salad—I sat down with her in a small sunroom overlooking the Potomac River, with a peaceful view of our nation’s stressful capital. Ehrenreich nestled into a wicker love seat, propping her feet up, her right arm balanced gingerly in a sling. Later, as the coronavirus began shutting down the country, we spoke again, over the phone. These two conversations have been combined and edited for length and clarity.

More here.

Dr. Saba Noor in Youlin:

Initially, the street was named after a British doctor/spy named James Burnes. Although the name was changed to Muhammad Bin Qasim Road Post-Partition, it is still known as Burns Road or more affectionately, “Buns Road”. But the neighborhoods around Burns Road are considered to have housed the earliest settlements in the city of Karachi, dating back to 1857.

Wealthy migrants from cities like Delhi settled in the Burns Road Area. Other migrants, ethnicities, and brotherhoods settled there, including the Punjabi Saudagaran-e-Delhi, a community of Punjabi Muslims who settled largely in the old parts of Delhi. Many of the food vendors trace their family linkage to this community of Muslims, and have wider associations with migrants from India. Some believe that food vendors started gathering on the road when migrants wanted to have the same culinary experiences they did in India.

This street has seen a lot of political turmoil and uncertainty, which affected how restaurants and vendors conducted their businesses, from Ayub’s 1964-65 campaign against Ms. Fatima Jinnah to the rise of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement Party (MQM). Even in times of instability, people would gather here for the comfort of great food, and a strong sense of community in the face of changing times. And at times in broad daylight, the structures of the old buildings on Burns Road, and the uniquely crafted balconies feel like the ghosts of a bustling, cosmopolitan era of Karachi. This place is known for its diverse, yet humble food that caters to a range of tastes and pockets. Customers visit late into the night, and Burns Road is perhaps best enjoyed with an empty stomach and an open mind. While people have their favorite restaurants, it is recommended to experiment with new tastes and make new favorites. The following are some of the oldest institutions on the street, which have been serving delicious signature dishes for generations.

More here.

Molly’s Soliloquy

O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the
figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue
and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and
cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put
the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how
he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and
then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to
say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him
down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like
mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

James Joyce
from Ulysses – excerpt.