Susan Pedersen at the LRB:

Selina Todd’s biography of Delaney does two things well. It helps us understand how someone the press insisted on calling a ‘Salford teenager’ was able to create this remarkable work – and it shows how hard the people who brought the play to stage and screen worked to shift the spotlight away from that intense mother-daughter dynamic. There was a script, too, for ‘new writers’ in the late 1950s and 1960s: they were to be young, authentic and, if possible, working class; they were to be masculine, rebellious and shocking. When, in April 1958, Delaney sent her play to Joan Littlewood, the director of the avant-garde Theatre Workshop in East London, she adopted a naive, Northern persona that was more than a little misleading. ‘A fortnight ago I didn’t know the theatre existed,’ she gushed to Littlewood – but then a friend had taken her to see a play and she had discovered ‘something that meant more to me than myself’. She now knew she wanted to write plays, and in two weeks had produced the enclosed ‘epic’. ‘Please can you help me? I’m willing enough to help myself.’ Christened plain ‘Sheila’, she signed the letter ‘Shelagh Delaney’, the name by which she would be known from then on.

more here.

Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:

On Sunday, on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, President Donald Trump accused the TV talk-show host Joe Scarborough of murder. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, he attacked the integrity of America’s forthcoming “rigged” election. When he woke up on Wednesday, he alleged that the Obama Administration had “spied, in an unprecedented manner, on the Trump Campaign, and beyond, and even on the United States Senate.” By midnight Wednesday, a few hours after the number of U.S. deaths in the coronavirus pandemic officially exceeded a hundred thousand, the President of the United States retweeted a video that says, “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

This is not the first time when the tweets emanating from the man in the White House have featured baseless accusations of murder, vote fraud, and his predecessor’s “illegality and corruption.” It’s not even the first time this month. So many of the things that Trump does and says are inconceivable for an American President, and yet he does and says them anyway. The Trump era has been a seemingly endless series of such moments. From the start of his Administration, his tweets have been an open-source intelligence boon, a window directly into the President’s needy id, and a real-time guide to his obsessions and intentions. Misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies were always central to his politics. In recent months, however, his tweeting appears to have taken an even darker, more manic, and more mendacious turn, as Trump struggles to manage the convergence of a massive public-health crisis and a simultaneous economic collapse while running for reëlection. He is tweeting more frequently, and more frantically, as events have closed in on him. Trailing in the polls and desperate to change the subject from the coronavirus, mid-pandemic Trump has a Twitter feed that is meaner, angrier, and more partisan than ever before, as he amplifies conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and media enemies such as Scarborough while seeking to exacerbate divisions in an already divided country.

Strikingly, this dark turn with the President’s tweets comes as he is using his Twitter feed as an even more potent vehicle for telling his Republican followers what to do—and they are listening.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Bacteria have a cunning ability to survive in unfriendly environments. For example, through a complicated series of interactions, they can identify—and then build resistance to—toxic chemicals and metals, such as silver and copper. Bacteria rely on a similar mechanism for defending against antibiotics. In E. coli bacterium, the inner membrane sensor protein CusS mobilizes from a clustered form upon sensing copper ions in the environment. CusS recruits the transcription regulator protein CusR and then breaks down ATP to phosphorylate CusR, which then proceeds to activate gene expression to help the cell defend against the toxic copper ions. Cornell researchers combined genetic engineering, single-molecule tracking and protein quantitation to get a closer look at this mechanism and understand how it functions. The knowledge could lead to the development of more effective antibacterial treatments. The team’s paper, “Metal-Induced Sensor Mobilization Turns on Affinity to Activate Regulator for Metal Detoxification in Live Bacteria,” published May 28 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We were really interested in the fundamental mechanism,” said Peng Chen, the Peter J.W. Debye Professor of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences and the paper’s senior author. “The broader concept is that once we know the mechanism, then perhaps we can come up with better or alternative ways to compromise bacteria’s ability in defending against toxic chemicals. That will hopefully contribute to designing new ways of taming bacterial drug resistance.” The bacteria’s resistance is actually a tag-team operation, with two proteins working together inside the cell.

More here.

Not my prayer

Not my prayer but
the daffodils’ for sun and bees intoning
in such numbers their fevered mantra
of the morning

not mine but the thousand
prayers of tuna sleek
and silver bursting through the ocean
breach in fear of no net

nor mine the prayers
of dozing lions on the safe road
warming their heaving bodies
sans the unmistakable
scent of hunting humans

all the unkilled bear
deer and song-dog orisons
breathed on roads suddenly still
no speed-of-headlight
death hurtling at them now

all the birdsong more varied
more prayerful than ever
with the chattering of finches common
to our hearing woven
through the calls of species thought
too shy too rare to venture near but here
they are

all the open hemisphere of sky once azure
now azure once again a blue
too blue to fathom except as earth’s
petition for just another day
without us

all prayers theirs
for a break from history from this
cult of progress from the unstoppable
momentum of human toil from all this doing and making
from the churning madness of us

praying for a world precipitously devoid
of us long enough for us to grasp
how to their uncomprehending senses
we are the virus itself.

by Octavio Solis
from 3ViewsTheater

Awais Aftab in Metapsychology:

There continues to be an impressive appetite for conceptual and philosophical explorations of psychiatry. The publishing field is now populated by a diverse array of backgrounds and perspectives. The general public seems mostly interested in decrying the medicalization of normal and the transformation of our woes into neatly packaged mental disorders. The academic literature is dominated by philosophers and philosophically-trained professionals; while the intellectual discourse is of high caliber, it unfortunately remains largely inaccessible to mental health professionals and much of the general public, and resultantly it has had little influence outside the academic community. There is also a cohort of individuals with a critical interest in the subject but whose philosophical focus remains stuck on classical critical figures such as Thomas Szasz, Michel Foucault and R.D. Laing, with little engagement with contemporary philosophy of science. The philosophical work of Kenneth Kendler and his various collaborators (John Campbell, Carl Craver, Kenneth Schaffner, Erik Engstrom, Rodrigo Munoz, George Murphy, and Peter Zachar) assembled in a specially curated volume occupies a unique and special position in this contemporary landscape and there is much to be said in its favor.

More here.

Rob Toews in Forbes:

Last month during ESPN’s hit documentary series The Last Dance, State Farm debuted a TV commercial that has become one of the most widely discussed ads in recent memory. It appeared to show footage from 1998 of an ESPN analyst making shockingly accurate predictions about the year 2020.

As it turned out, the clip was not genuine: it was generated using cutting-edge AI. The commercial surprised, amused and delighted viewers.

What viewers should have felt, though, was deep concern.

The State Farm ad was a benign example of an important and dangerous new phenomenon in AI: deepfakes. Deepfake technology enables anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to create realistic-looking photos and videos of people saying and doing things that they did not actually say or do.

More here.

David Dayen in The Intercept:

What would become known as the CARES Act became law on March 27, and the investor class has never looked back. While Americans struggle to file unemployment claims and extract stimulus checks from their banks, while small businesses face extinction amid a meager and under-baked federal grant program, the Fed has, at least temporarily, propped up every equity and credit market in America. And in a testament to its strength, it did so without spending a single cent.

The mere announcement of future spending heartened investors, who have relied on Fed support since the last financial crisis. This explains the shocking dissonance between collapsing economic conditions and the relative comfort on Wall Street. Between March 23 and April 30, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rocketed nearly 6,000 points, a jump of nearly 31 percent, creating over $7 trillion in capital wealth. The April gains were the biggest in one month since 1987.

The same month, 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs.

More here.

Andrew Russeth at Artnews:

In an interview a few years ago, artist Susan Rothenberg said she had just read that a group of ravens is called an unkindness. She thought it an unfair characterization because ravens, to her mind, were “great. They do somersaults in the air. They play. They chase hawks away. They do so many things.” She and her husband, artist Bruce Nauman, regularly saw those famously fickle creatures at their ranch in Galisteo, New Mexico, and they’d earned enough of the birds’ trust to be able to walk up to them, though not to touch them. “It’s like having an unpettable pet around,” she said.

Rothenberg, who died earlier this week at 75, spent her life making raven-like paintings: rugged and raw, they beguile but never let you cozy up. She channeled animals (a category that includes humans) with a gimlet eye and without judgment, transmuting them into psychic and symbolic forces.

more here.

Barbara Graziosi at the TLS:

Children ask “why” – and so does Herodotus (484–25 BCE). The “father of history”, often strikes readers as a little childish, particularly in comparison with his younger contemporary Thucydides (460–395 BCE), whose History of the Peloponnesian War offers a disenchanted account of human conflict. But, even leaving aside that much-rehearsed comparison, there are features of Herodotus’ work that can make it sound naive. For one thing, he seems interested in everything – not just why the Greeks and the Persians “came to war with one another” (the avowed subject of his Histories), but also “why the people of Libya are the most healthy known to us”; “why the most timid animals are the most prolific”; “why the Nile floods in summer … contrary to the nature of all other rivers”; “why, concerning the bones strewn on the battlefield … the skulls of Persian casualties are so brittle they can be broken with a pebble, whereas Egyptian skulls are so tough they can hardly be cracked with a big stone”; or again why, on a particular night, “a pride of lions attacked only the camels, and none of the other beasts of burden or the men or the provisions”.

more here.

Beggar to Beggar Cried

“Time to put off the world and go somewhere
And find my health in the sea air,”
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy struck,
“And make my soul before my pate is bare;

“And get a comfortable wife and house
To rid me of the devil in my shoes,”
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy struck,
“and the worse devil that is between my thighs.

“And though I’d marry with a comely lass,
She need not be too comely—let it pass,”
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy struck,
“But there’s a devil in the looking glass.

“Nor should she be too rich, because the rich
are driven by wealth as beggars by the itch,”
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy struck,
“And cannot have a humorous happy speech.

“And there I’ll grow respected at my ease,
And hear among the garden’s nightly peace,”
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy struck,
“the wind-blown clamor of the barnacle-geese.”

by W.B Yeats

Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker:

Two incidents separated by twelve hours and twelve hundred miles have taken on the appearance of the control and the variable in a grotesque experiment about race in America. On Monday morning, in New York City’s Central Park, a white woman named Amy Cooper called 911 and told the dispatcher that an African-American man was threatening her. The man she was talking about, Christian Cooper, who is no relation, filmed the call on his phone. They were in the Ramble, a part of the park favored by bird-watchers, including Christian Cooper, and he had simply requested that she leash her dog—something that is required in the area. In the video, before making the call, Ms. Cooper warns Mr. Cooper that she is “going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.” Her needless inclusion of the race of the man she fears serves only to summon the ancient impulse to protect white womanhood from the threats posed by black men. For anyone with a long enough memory or a recent enough viewing of the series “When They See Us,” the locale of this altercation becomes part of the story: we know what happened to five young black and brown men who were falsely accused of attacking a white woman in Central Park.

On Monday evening, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a forty-six-year-old black man named George Floyd died in a way that highlighted the implications that calls such as the one Amy Cooper placed can have; George Floyd is who Christian Cooper might have been. (The police made no arrests and filed no summons in Central Park. Amy Cooper has apologized for her actions; she was also fired from her job.) Police responding to a call from a shopkeeper, about someone trying to pass a potentially counterfeit bill, arrested Floyd. Surveillance video shows a compliant man being led away in handcuffs. But cellphone video later shows a white police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for seven minutes, despite protests from onlookers that his life is in jeopardy. In an echo of the police killing of Eric Garner, in 2014, Floyd repeatedly says, “I can’t breathe,” and then, “I’m about to die.” When the officer eventually removes his knee, Floyd’s body is limp and unresponsive. A person nearby can be heard saying, “They just killed him.” Floyd was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. A police statement saids that Floyd appeared to be in “medical distress,” but made no mention of his being pinned to the ground with the weight of a police officer compressing his airway.

The video of Floyd’s death is horrific but not surprising; terrible but not unusual, depicting a kind of incident that is periodically reënacted in the United States. It’s both necessary and, at this point, pedestrian to observe that policing in this country is mediated by race.

More here.

Clare Watson in Nature:

As many countries emerge from lockdowns, researchers are poised to use genome sequencing to avoid an expected second wave of COVID-19 infections. Since the first whole-genome sequence of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was shared online on 11 January, scientists have sequenced and shared some 32,000 viral genomes from around the world. Such a vast amount of data has allowed researchers to trace the origin of COVID-19 outbreaks in their countries and pinpoint when community transmission occurred². Now, countries that have successfully suppressed infections are entering the next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic — where there’s a risk of new cases appearing as social restrictions ease. Researchers say that genomics will be crucial to quickly track and control these outbreaks. Studies already show that outbreaks tend to be shorter and smaller when genomics is used to help contact tracing¹. “When there are few cases, genomics can very quickly tell you what you’’re dealing with and therefore guide precision interventions,” says Gytis Dudas, a consulting bioinformatician at the Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre in Sweden.

Several places are particularly well placed to do that because they invested in genome sequencing early in the pandemic and have a relatively small numbers of cases. Researchers in New Zealand, and at least one state in Australia decided that they would aim to sequence most coronavirus genomes in their country or state. As SARS-CoV-2 spread around the world, distinct lineages began to form as viruses circulating in different regions gradually evolved. By comparing sequences, researchers can quickly rule out possible lines of transmission if two sequences don’t match, or link together cases that do.

More here.

Philip Coggan in Medium:

The combined total of inflation and unemployment used to be known as the “misery index”: Jimmy Carter cited it when he was campaigning in 1976 against Gerald Ford for the presidency. But the index was even higher in 1980, dooming Carter’s re-election bid. Barack Obama reduced the misery index during his two terms of office; indeed of all the Presidents since 1945, only Harry Truman left office with a lower misery index. But that didn’t seem to make voters happy; although Hillary Clinton (Obama’s party successor) won the popular vote, Donald Trump took enough key states to be elected. Similarly in 2016, British inflation was low and unemployment had been falling for years, yet voter anger resulted in Britain voting to leave the EU.

Clearly, then, something fundamental has changed about the global economy. Two conclusions are often drawn. First, “debt doesn’t matter”; governments seemingly can borrow without limit, as many on the left would now argue. Second, we have moved away from the idea that elections are settled by economics alone: cultural divides are more important.

A fascinating new book, Angrynomics, by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth, analyses what has been happening, and gives a highly plausible explanation.

More here.

David Lobina in Inference Review:

Consider these three lines:

—Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?
Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?
—Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering.¹

The text is Ulysses, and the author, of course, is James Joyce. The first line records direct speech. Someone is saying something. So, too, the third line. In interpreting the first and third line as readers, we accept the convention that what a character says expresses what he means. The second line is different. It represents, or depicts, an interior monologue. It is easy enough to paraphrase the monologue from the outside. Stephen thought or observed that the face was alarmed; he thought that it expressed a question; he wondered; he asked. The second line itself represents, depicts, or expresses Stephen’s point of view. That is why it is an interior monologue. Does the interior monologue express Stephen’s thoughts? If so, was he using these very words, and if these very words, are they his thoughts? Or is he, in fact, still another reader describing his thoughts by these particular words when, in fact, very many other words would do as well? These are not easy questions to address.

Opinions have been endlessly divided. In the Theaetetus, Plato described thinking as “a talk which the soul has with itself.”² If the soul is talking to itself, in what is it talking? Attic Greek? Do those interior voices admit of a still further interior monologue?

More here.

Jeannie Kever at the website of the University of Houston:

Julia Wellner and other crew members for this year’s Thwaites Glacier Offshore Research Project stepped onto the deck of the research vessel/icebreaker (RV/IB) Nathaniel B. Palmer in January, leaving from a crowded pier in Punta Arenas, Chile, and sailing to west coast of Antarctica.

They returned to a near-deserted port more than two months later, remaining offshore until it was time to travel directly to the airport and home. But while the rest of us were working from home and sheltering in place, Wellner, her fellow researchers and a group of students – 59 people in all – were in a quarantine of a different sort, surrounded by ice and gathering data to build more accurate models of future sea level rise and climate change.

They rescued a fishing boat trapped in the ice and discovered a previously unknown island, too.

More here.

Belen Fernandez in the New York Times:

When in mid-March “Quedate En Casa,” or “stay at home,” became the coronavirus rallying cry for the Spanish-speaking world, I had just arrived from El Salvador to the village of Zipolite on the coast of southeastern Oaxaca State in Mexico.

My plan was to continue on to Mexico City and then, over the course of the next couple of months, to Turkey, Spain, Greece, Lebanon and Madagascar.

I left the United States upon graduating college in 2003, after the giddy launch of the war on Iraq had convinced me that America was not any place I needed to be. I began hitchhiking, inaugurating a habit of haphazard and frenetic international movement that would characterize the next 17 years.

The itinerancy was, it seemed, because of a mix of acute commitment-phobia, an aspiration to omnipresence and a deep envy of people who possess more of a culture than our soul-crushing consumerism and military slaughter-fests.

More here.