Amanda Gefter in Nautilus:

Science has been missing something. Something central to its very existence, and yet somehow just out of view. It is written out of papers, shooed away, shoved into laboratory closets. And yet, it’s always there, behind the scenes, making science possible. “Lived experience is both the point of departure and the point of return for science,” astrophysicist Adam Frank, physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson write in their new book, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience.  We use the fruits of our experience—our perceptions and observations—to create models of the world, but then turn around and treat our experience as somehow less real than the models. Forgetting where our science comes from, we find ourselves wondering how anything like experience can exist at all.

The authors trace this “amnesia of experience” to a philosophical shift by the Greeks—later cemented in the 17th century with the rise of classical physics—which split reality in two: inner and outer, mind and body, subjective and objective. This rupture allowed science to make enormous progress; by dealing only with the second half, science could model the world as simple matter in motion, a mechanistic view that birthed industrialization, technology, modern life. That left the first half hanging—so scientists chalked it up to illusion or epiphenomenon; they tucked it away into our collective blind spot. In vision, it’s what’s in the blind spot (the optic nerve) that allows us to see. And the same, the authors argue, is true in science: It’s experience that allows science to function. It’s a fact we better remember, they urge, before it’s too late.

More here.

William Deresiewicz at Persuasion:

Higher ed is at an impasse. So much about it sucks, and nothing about it is likely to change. Colleges and universities do not seem inclined to reform themselves, and if they were, they wouldn’t know how, and if they did, they couldn’t. Between bureaucratic inertia, faculty resistance, and the conflicting agendas of a heterogenous array of stakeholders, concerted change appears to be impossible. Besides, business is good, at least at selective schools. The notion, floated now in certain quarters, that students and parents will turn from the Harvards and Yales in disgust is a fantasy. As long as elite institutions remain the principal pipeline to elite employers (and they will), the havers and strivers will crowd toward their gates. Everything else—the classes, the politics, the arts and sciences—is incidental.

Which is not to say that interesting things aren’t happening in post-secondary (and post-tertiary) education. They just aren’t happening, for the most part, on campus.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Genetic information usually travels down a one-way street: genes written in DNA serve as the template for making RNA molecules, which are then translated into proteins. That tidy textbook story got a bit complicated in 1970 when scientists discovered that some viruses have enzymes called reverse transcriptases, which transcribe RNA into DNA — the reverse of the usual traffic flow.

Now, scientists have discovered an even weirder twist¹. A bacterial version of reverse transcriptase reads RNA as a template to make completely new genes written in DNA. These genes are then transcribed back into RNA, which is translated into protective proteins when a bacterium is infected by a virus. By contrast, viral reverse transcriptases don’t make new genes; they merely transfer information from RNA to DNA.

“This is crazy molecular biology,” says Aude Bernheim, a bioinformatician at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who was not involved in the research. “I would have never guessed this type of mechanism existed.”

More here.

Matt Taibbi at Racket News:

Every generation of adults thinks the next is growing up in a broken world. “It is the story of humanity,” says Jonathan Haidt, author of a new book on a youth mental illness epidemic called The Anxious Generation.

Returning to his roots as a professor of moral psychology after a perhaps uncomfortable foray into the center of America’s culture wars, Haidt’s new work describes a “great rewiring” of childhood, whose most frightening feature is its alacrity. In less than ten years, Americans went from nearly 8 in 10 teens not having smartphones to the inverse. By 2022, 46% reported being “almost constantly” online, many steeped in digital addictions causing depression, dysphoria, suicidation. A parent reading The Anxious Generation will feel like a dental patient shown two hours of oral health disaster photos.

What makes this scare tale different?

More here.

Terence Killeen at The Dublin Review of Books:

Strangeness – estrangement – is very characteristic of this world – and a world it is, since all these prose works convey a very similar atmosphere and are largely set in the same locale – the Norwegian west coast, with its fjords, its islands, its fishing villages, the omnipresent sometimes threatening, sometimes comforting sea. (It’s rather piquant for an Irish reader to see the word ‘skerries’ coming up often in the English translation – it means of course reefs or rocky islands from Old Norse sker and is a reminder of our own Norse inheritance.)

Strangeness then is one of the most prevalent aspects of the Fosse world – that and intensity. How that intensity is conveyed is one of the most impressive aspects of this work. It is down to a certain quality of the prose, easier to experience than to describe. The style does differ to some extent from work to work, but it’s always very internal, very fixed in a consciousness, whether the first or the third person is used in the narration. In this respect and in many others Fosse’s major work to date, Septology, is exemplary.

more here.

From Smithsonian:

Coppery like a penny, thick like bad molasses, even a little gamey like a possum.

The white conductor’s blood in her mouth probably didn’t taste good, but it probably didn’t taste bad, either. Ida B. Wells sat firmly while the Memphis streetcar man gripped her body and tried to forcibly remove her from the first-class ladies car on a train from the Poplar Station to northern Shelby County in Tennessee. Wells—a prominent Black journalist and activist—took a bite out of the guy until he “bled freely,” he would later testify in court. After the conductor successfully dragged Wells off the train, she sued the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad Company for failing to provide “separate but equal” accommodations for Black and white passengers. She won the case and received a $500 settlement, but the ruling was ultimately overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Wells occupied that seat on September 15, 1883. Born about an hour southeast in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, she’d lost her parents and young brother to the devastating 1878 yellow fever epidemic. Her parents were involved with Reconstruction-era politics and the democratization of education; their daughter would carry on that mantle as a radical teacher in her own right. She studied at the historically Black Shaw University (now Rust College), then took summer classes at Fisk University in Nashville and LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Science:

We all need sleep, but no one really knows why. For the past 10 years, a prevailing theory has been that a key function of sleep is to wash waste products and toxins from the brain via a series of tiny channels called the glymphatic system. Sleep problems can disrupt this process, the theory’s proponents say, perhaps raising the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other brain disorders. Mouse experiments seem to support the idea. But in recent years, several groups of scientists have challenged some aspects of the theory. Now, a new study has found that the mouse brain clears small dye molecules more efficiently while the animal is awake than when it is asleep or under anesthesia. A glymphatic system might still cleanse the brain, the researchers say, but sleep actually slows this cleansing down.

Other researchers are stumped as to how to explain the opposing results, and several declined to comment on the record for fear of entering a heated debate. A few see the new findings as a serious blow to the sleep clearance theory, but others say the new paper’s methods are too different from those of the earlier work to credibly challenge it. “When you criticize a concept that has been there for some time, then your design should be even better,” says Per Kristian Eide of the University of Oslo.

More here.

Rachel Shteir at The American Scholar:

Cocktails with George and Martha is a dishy, process-heavy appreciation of a cinematic masterpiece. Gefter shows how, after almost 60 years, the kitchen-sink savagery of the movie—and Edward Albee’s 1962 play, on which it is based—still shatters. The film portrays a long, cocktail-infused Saturday night at the home of middle-aged history professor George (played by Richard Burton in the movie) and his wife, Martha (Elizabeth Taylor). Martha has invited another couple over for drinks, with whom they begin to bicker, then flirt, then wage war. Their heaviest weapon is their imaginary child (they are, in fact, childless), whom they use as a punching bag and a life raft. Gefter locates Albee’s genius in the creation of the child and his poetic language, but also in the tender ending, which suggests that for George and Martha, at least, the sparring has been play-acting, albeit of the most serious kind.

As fun as that is, is it enough for a book? After all, many of the characters involved are already well known. Mark Harris’s 688-page biography of Mike Nichols, the director of the film, was published only three years ago. Nonetheless, the answer is yes—and for two reasons.

more here.

Seeking the Hook

with its barbed point digging
into the soft palate behind my lower teeth
I am dragged along the mud and rock strewn
bottom for forty feet, then pulled up
drawn toward the light as I twist and
yank my head side to side and the hook
lodges deeper in my mouth I taste
the blood a silent cry goes up through
my skull and it is all so quick I see
the surface a hand the light overwhelms
me, and I lunge a last time with the hook
ripping across my lips and I’m free
suddenly falling back gasping through
air then slipping beneath the surface
into the dim, green sweetness and
the flesh of my mouth throbbing water
flowing through me and yet slowly.
beyond thought or even he will
to survive, I feel myself turn and
go back, seeking the hook and it
is there again, waiting for me,
rigged and tiny, the hidden barb
like a beautiful lie, too powerful
for me to resist, so that later when
they lift me, strip me, tear my guts
out and present me cooked and
spread open, I will believe I am being
honored like a new king

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books 1997

Garriy Shteynberg, Jodi Halpern, Amir Sadovnik, Jon Garthoff, Anat Perry, Jessica Hay, Carlos Montemayor, Michael A. Olson, Tim L. Hulsey & Abrol Fairweather, in Nature Machine Intelligence:

Imagine a machine that provides a simulation of any experience a person might want, but once the machine is activated, the person is unable to tell that the experience isn’t real. When Robert Nozick formulated this thought experiment in 1974, it was meant to be obvious that people in otherwise ordinary circumstances would be making a horrible mistake if they hooked themselves up to such a machine permanently. During the intervening decades, however, cultural commitment to that core value — the value of being in contact with reality as it is — has become more tenuous, and the empathic use of AI, in which people seek to be understood, cared for and even loved by a large language model (LLM), is on the rise.

The use of LLMs for information, entertainment and even behavioural encouragement (such as encouragement to go for a walk or make a friend) can be constructive. Applications of LLM chatbots in certain therapeutic domains, from diagnosis to health advice, also seem promising. However, we, as a team of psychologists, philosophers and computer scientists, have concerns about LLMs as a source of empathic care.

More here.

Michael Eisenstein in Nature:

Some 60,000 years ago, Neanderthals in western Eurasia acquired strange new neighbours: a wave of Homo sapiens migrants making their way out of Africa, en route to future global dominance. Now, a study¹ of hundreds of ancient and modern genomes has pinpointed when the two species began pairing off — and has found that the genetic intermingling lasted for only a short time, at least on an evolutionary scale.

The high-resolution analysis also allowed the authors to track when certain Neanderthal DNA sequences appeared in the H. sapiens genome and determine whether they were retained.

More here.

Eric Hoel at The Intrinsic Perspective:

Imagine that in every business school students were told, in all seriousness, that they were in training for being a billionaire. Imagine it was heavily implied that the natural conclusion of their careers—what “making it” in business meant—was legit billionaire-status. Judged from the outside, such a situation would appear the enactment of a collective pathological delusion.

And yet an equivalent, at least of a kind, occurs every year in the arts, in writing, and in music. Functionally, at least. For when it comes to certain creative fields, while there are other tangential options than simply becoming very famous (like working for a non-profit, or teaching creative writing at a university) there is an incredibly steep, punishingly steep, impossibly steep, beyond-Pareto-distribution-steep curve wherein only a vanishingly small fraction of people make a living via their artistic efforts alone.

More here.

Kenneth Dillon at the LARB:

IN AN INFLUENTIAL essay on the aesthetic values of minimalism and maximalism in literature, the late John Barth jokes that “[t]he oracle at Delphi did not say, ‘Exhaustive analysis and comprehension of one’s own psyche may be prerequisite to an understanding of one’s behavior and of the world at large’; it said, ‘Know thyself.’” But Barth, whose own novels are often long and complex, isn’t handing a victory to his more frugal peers. Instead, his essay argues that both minimalist and maximalist works of art can be appreciated and judged on their own terms—that each form has merit.

Becca Rothfeld isn’t so sure. In a literary climate that seems to champion terse yet purportedly serious volumes like 2023 novels The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor and The Vegan by Andrew Lipstein—a world of words in which brevity has, ostensibly, come to represent the soul of lit—Rothfeld goes against the suddenly too-fine grain, issuing what The New York Times called a “plea for maximalism.”

more here.

Victor Brombert at the Hudson Review:

Friends called her Anna Vassilievna, according to the Russian custom of having the patronym follow the given name. As evening fell, I often lay in my child’s pyjamas, on the living room sofa, close to my grandmother, my Babushka. The sofa stood in our living room in the Leipzig apartment, close to the large window. Some light came from the outside.
 
Babushka would recite Russian poetry. She made me repeat the names of Pushkin and Lermontov, and sang to me snatches from the opera Eugene Onegin. “Why don’t you dance, Lenski, why don’t you kiss the ladies’ hands?” Onegin asks his close friend whom he will soon kill in a duel. I heard the story many times, as it appears in Pushkin’s verse novel and in Tchaikovsky’s operatic version.

more here.

From Nature:

Although chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T therapy — where a patient’s T cells are engineered to fight cancer — works well against blood cancers in young people, that success drops dramatically for older patients. The impact of ageing on an older patient’s T cells, so-called cell fitness, could be the problem.¹ “By measuring key markers of cell health and metabolic state it should be possible to determine whether CAR-T cells are developing correctly,” says James Cali, director of research for the assay design department at Promega, a biotechnology company in Madison, Wisconsin. “By providing assays for those markers, we hope to help scientists understand the fitness of CAR-T cells for their intended therapeutic purpose.”

For CAR-T cells and other applications, scientists would like to track the health of cells in real time. Most cell health assays are endpoint assays, often including a reagent that kills the cells. As a result, these assays provide just one reading, and tracking the time course of changes in cell health requires multiple experiments — say, one at 30 minutes after a treatment, another at 60 minutes, and so on. With a kinetic assay, cells stay alive, and scientists can continuously monitor their health over a single experiment, saving time and resources.

More here.