From Phys.Org:

Brain organoids—three-dimensional balls of brain-like tissue grown in the lab, often from human stem cells—have been touted for their potential to let scientists study the formation of the brain’s complex circuitry in controlled laboratory conditions. The discussion surrounding brain organoids has been effusive, with some scientists suggesting they will make it possible to rapidly develop treatments for devastating brain diseases and others warning that organoids may soon attain some form of consciousness. But a new UC San Francisco study offers a more restrained perspective, by showing that widely used organoid models fail to replicate even basic features of brain development and organization, much less the complex circuitry needed to model complex brain diseases or normal cognition.

“Some people have branded organoids as ‘brains in a dish’ but our data suggest this is a huge exaggeration at this point,” said Arnold Kriegstein, MD, Ph.D., a professor of neurology in the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, John G. Bowes Distinguished Professor in Stem Cell and Tissue Biology, and director of the UCSF Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, whose lab has been a leader in the development of cerebral organoid models (see prior studies here, here and here.) “We find that organoids do not develop the distinctive cell subtypes or regional circuit organization that characterize normal human brain circuits. Since most human brain diseases are highly specific to particular cell types and circuits in the brain, this presents a grave challenge to efforts to use organoids to accurately model these complex conditions.”

More here.

Adam Tooze in the New York Review of Books:

“There is an estate in the realm more powerful than either your Lordship or the other House of Parliament,” one Lord Campbell proclaimed to the peers in the House of Lords, in 1851, “and that [is] the country solicitors.” It was the lawyers, in other words, who kept England’s landed elite so very, well, elite: who shielded and extended the wealth of the landowners, even granting them legal protection against their own creditors. How did they pull off this trick? Through a nimble tangle of contracts, carefully and complicatedly applied, as Katharina Pistor explains in her lucid new book, The Code of Capital: by mixing “modern notions of individual property rights with feudalist restrictions on alienability”; by employing trusts “to protect family estates, but then [turning] around and [using] the trust again to set aside assets for creditors so that they would roll over the debt of the life tenant one more time”; and by settling the rights to the estate among family members in line for inheritance. Solicitors maximized their clients’ profits and worth through strategic applications of the central institutions at their disposal: “contract, property, collateral, trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law,” what Pistor calls an “empire of law.”

The landowners themselves may not have understood this morass of legal relationships, this web, in Pistor’s words, of “claims and counterclaims, rights and restrictions on these rights.” No matter: by lawyers’ legal codifications, their wealth was increasing. The sort of legal logic applied in nineteenth-century England grows only more complicated, and more profit-generating, when the asset in question is not a hectare of country land but stocks and bonds and shares—when an entire organization is coded as a legal person (who can own assets and who can sue) through incorporation.

More here.

This bedroom has a nook with a small skylight. The nook is curtained off by a linen screen, embroidered with probably Slovak patterns. It is where Madla has her bed and she is already asleep. On the table she left a letter she wrote this afternoon to the schoolmistress.

“I’ve just started a fortnight’s holiday. We’ve shifted to Dobřichovice, because the cherries, currants and raspberries are now ripe. (…) There was excitement all round last week. Martin wrote to us that they’re expecting a baby, and it’s due in January. So they’re getting married in July, and at the end of July or the beginning of August Isabelle will come on a visit. So we all started to rejoice straight away. Friday evening L. and I went to the post office to phone them, so as to talk to Isabelle as soon as possible. But Martin informed us that she was in hospital, that she had a miscarriage.

more here.

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis at the NYRB:

An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden by Mary Schmidt Campbell, the distinguished art historian, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and president of Spelman College, tells the captivating story of how Bearden’s heritage, education, community, and politics informed the evolution of his artistic career. It addresses a foundational question: What is the role of the artist in the history of race and rights in this country? Campbell opens with a brief reflection on the work of Frederick Douglass. Before the New Negro Movement and the civil rights movement, it was Douglass who argued that images—specifically, the new medium of photography—had the potential to help America see itself more critically and capaciously. In lectures delivered during the Civil War, Douglass argued that pictures and images could help America out of its democratic crisis. As the most photographed American man in the nineteenth century, Douglass knew that photographs could inaugurate counternarratives that expand our notion of who counts, who belongs in society. His was a new argument about the power of representational justice—he asserted that being represented justly was a crucial tenet of democracy.

more here.

Hannah Devlin in The Guardian:

Cosmologists don’t enter their profession to tackle the easy questions, but there is one paradox that has reached staggering proportions.

Since the big bang, the universe has been expanding, but the known laws of physics suggest that the inward tug of gravity should be slowing down this expansion. In reality, though, the universe is ballooning at an accelerating rate.

Scientists have come up with a name – dark energy – for the mysterious agent that is allowing the cosmos to expand so rapidly and which is estimated to account for 70% of the contents of the universe. But ultimately nobody knows what the stuff actually is.

“It’s the big elephant in the room,” says Prof Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College. “It’s very frustrating.”

Change could be afoot.

More here.

The Editors at The Paris Review:

The artist Jack Whitten, who died in 2018, approached his practice with the curiosity of a scientist and the playfulness of a jazz musician. Many of his paintings are the result of a careful aesthetic hypothesis unleashed upon the canvas and then transformed by improvisation. The works at the center of “Jack Whitten. Transitional Space. A Drawing Survey.” (on view at Hauser & Wirth through April 4) display a delightful agnosticism regarding medium and material. In one, he splashes a paper collage with calligrapher’s ink and acrylic paint; in another, he seems to conjure the farthest reaches of space on a single sheet of blotter. A selection of images from the show appears below.

more here.

Tina Hassannia in Hyperallergic:

In 1953, the overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh set a historic, chilling precedent. The coup d’état, orchestrated by the CIA and MI6, irrevocably shaped the subsequent 67 years and counting of US interventionism for the worse. Mosaddegh’s fight for Iranian autonomy in nationalizing the oil industry — built and exploited by the British — was undermined by his ousting and the West’s installation of a puppet leader, the Shah.

Director Taghi Amirani’s decade of research into the subject brings us Coup 53, a documentary that turns the analysis of declassified intelligence documents into a suspense thriller. (He’s aided by Hollywood veteran Walter Murch, who not only edited but also co-wrote the film — his first script work since Return to Oz, of all things.) The movie lays out the calculating logic of Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s oil-hungry foreign policy measures, and how they were influenced by Red Scare paranoia (they feared Mosaddegh would go communist). Experts, including Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men (a definitive English-language guide to the event), contextualize the history and political maneuvers leading up to the coup.

More here.

Ann Neumann in The Baffler:

ON OCTOBER 16, 2018, fifty-five-year-old Gary Giles noticed pain in his back and neck. He sought treatment from a chiropractor but the pain persisted. He developed flu-like symptoms along with numbness, tingling, and spasms. Giles was hospitalized on October 20; an MRI showed that his brain was experiencing seizures—as many as sixteen per hour. A mysterious neurological disease, doctors suspected, was attacking his body. He then began to have difficulty swallowing; he refused water. His daughter, Crystal, mopped a continuous stream of saliva from his chin. Still his health deteriorated. More than two dozen bewildered, devastated family members crowded into Giles’s room to say goodbye. On November 4, he died.

His wife, Juanita, was at their home south of Salt Lake City, Utah, two days later when state health officials—alarm in their voices—called to tell her the results of her husband’s autopsy: the cause of Gary’s death was rabies. Anyone in contact with Gary in his last days needed to immediately receive rabies shots—or experience the same fate. Juanita and twenty-five members of the family immediately got the shots. Weeks later, they were shocked to receive a $50,000 bill for the inoculations. Giles was the first Utahn to die of rabies since 1944.

The Giles family witnessed a rare event—less than a handful of Americans die each year from rabies—but their financial devastation from medical expenses is absurdly common. When journalist Sarah Kliff gathered data about emergency room bills in 2018, she discovered that rabies shots were a frequent charge contributing to consumer medical debt. In a piece for Vox in February, 2018, she wrote that prices ran as high as $10,000 (the same shots cost approximately $1,600 in the UK). People who are uninsured or underinsured and potentially infected with rabies face a grim choice: fatal disease or crippling debt.

More here.

Peter Waldman in Bloomberg News:

The dossier on cancer researcher Xifeng Wu was thick with intrigue, if hardly the stuff of a spy thriller. It contained findings that she’d improperly shared confidential information and accepted a half-dozen advisory roles at medical institutions in China. She might have weathered those allegations, but for a larger aspersion that was far more problematic: She was branded an oncological double agent. In recent decades, cancer research has become increasingly globalized, with scientists around the world pooling data and ideas to jointly study a disease that kills almost 10 million people a year. International collaborations are an intrinsic part of the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Moonshot program, the government’s $1 billion blitz to double the pace of treatment discoveries by 2022. One of the program’s tag lines: “Cancer knows no borders.”

Except, it turns out, the borders around China. In January, Wu, an award-winning epidemiologist and naturalized American citizen, quietly stepped down as director of the Center for Public Health and Translational Genomics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center after a three-month investigation into her professional ties in China. Her resignation, and the departures in recent months of three other top Chinese American scientists from Houston-based MD Anderson, stem from a Trump administration drive to counter Chinese influence at U.S. research institutions. The aim is to stanch China’s well-documented and costly theft of U.S. innovation and know-how. The collateral effect, however, is to stymie basic science, the foundational research that underlies new medical treatments. Everything is commodified in the economic cold war with China, including the struggle to find a cure for cancer.

Behind the investigation that led to Wu’s exit—and other such probes across the country—is the National Institutes of Health, in coordination with the FBI. “Even something that is in the fundamental research space, that’s absolutely not classified, has an intrinsic value,” says Lawrence Tabak, principal deputy director of the NIH, explaining his approach. “This pre-patented material is the antecedent to creating intellectual property. In essence, what you’re doing is stealing other people’s ideas.”

More here.

Song of Myself

…. —an excerpt

48

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

by Walt Whitman
from Song of Myself

Stephen Asma at the Heterodox Academy:

The song “I Walk the Line” is about the sacrifices and the devotions of love –the profound lengths to which we will go for our favorites. The bonds of favoritism create moral gravity and contour the way we treat people inside and outside the gravitational field. I don’t walk the line for just anybody. Johnny Cash wrote that famous song about his first wife in 1956, when he was touring on the road and struggling to stay faithful. Cash refers to the “tie that binds” and celebrates his own willingness to be constrained by the heart. This is not the realm of fairness, or equality, or impartiality. But it is a moral realm of value and action, all the same.

The fact that Cash couldn’t make this noble fidelity last is slightly amusing, but tolerable, I suppose, when viewed from a mature perspective on romance. He famously took a new favorite, June Carter, and the rest is history as they say. But, it also reveals the obvious human flexibility of the “tie that binds.” Some of our privileged favorites are automatically given (e.g., mothers, fathers, children, siblings, ethnic tribes), and some of them are more freely chosen (e.g., spouses, friends, aesthetic and political tribes).

The relationship between freedom and favoritism is complicated.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

People have always disagreed about politics, passionately and sometimes even violently. But in certain historical moments these disagreements were distributed without strong correlations, so that any one political party would contain a variety of views. In a representative democracy, that kind of distribution makes it easier to accomplish things. In contrast, today we see strong political polarization: members of any one party tend to line up with each other on a range of issues, and correspondingly view the other party with deep distrust. Political commentator Ezra Klein has seen this shift in action, and has studied it carefully in his new book Why We’re Polarized (out Jan. 28). We talk about the extent to which the apparent polarization is real, how we can trace its causes, and whether there’s anything we can do about it.

More here.

Mark Decambre in Market Watch:

Scientist and scholar Eric Toner, quoted above in an excerpt from a Friday interview with the business-news channel CNBC, explained that China’s efforts to contain the current outbreak of a fast-moving upper-respiratory illness are “unlikely to be effective.”

Cases of the illness, which is related to SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, and MERS, Middle East respirator syndrome, have now turned up in a number of countries beyond China, where the illness originated in Wuhan City.

The number of infections of coronavirus, or CoV, in China has risen to nearly 4,500, according to the Wall Street Journal. On top of that, the official death toll has climbed to 106, from 56 as of Tuesday. The Journal reported that the outbreak was overwhelming Wuhan-area resources and hospitals.

Beijing has shut down parts of the Great Wall, as well as more than a dozen cities, restricting the movement of tens of millions of people, and canceling events related to the Lunar New Year, one of the busiest periods of travel and consumerism in the country.

More here.

Luke Carman at n+1:

To those living in nations not yet consumed by fire, flood, or frost, we can report that for the most part, life seems to go on pretty much as it always has. There are some slight adjustments to be made. The morning routine now begins by checking the news to see which of the hundred or so fires raging out of control across the coast have joined forces to become super-fires, and which of these super-fires have united to become mega-fires. Time between breakfast and the daily commute might well be put aside to send text messages to friends and relatives closest to the hundred or so blazes lately listed as “out of control,” or whose last known location is in danger of immolation. Keeping tabs on where the destruction is taking place is made easier by an app called “Fires Near Me” which sends you an alert when any major fires are moving into your preselected “Watch Zones.” It has become commonplace for social gatherings to end with someone glancing down at their phone and exclaiming “Oh dear, the fires are coming round my place, I better be off.”

more here.

Jon Baskin at The Point:

Perhaps no figure better illustrates the style and stakes of the hatred of literature, as it has filtered from academia into contemporary literary culture, than the American author Ben Lerner. Lerner, recently described in the New York Times as “the most talented writer of his generation,” was known for advertising his suspicion of aesthetic experience even before he published a book called The Hatred of Poetry in 2016. “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art,” says Adam Gordon, the college-age narrator of Lerner’s 2011 debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, upon encountering a man crying before a painting at a museum in Madrid, “and I had trouble believing that anyone had. … I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music ‘changed their life.’”

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

In November 1942, the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann traveled to Vienna from his home in Munich to spend an intense week of study with Anton Webern. The 37-year-old Hartmann was hardly a novice, but the opportunity to work with one of the masters of Viennese modernism (and a highly sought after pedagogue, at that) was too good to let pass. Hartmann could not have imagined, however, prior to his journey, just what kind of an outcast Webern had become. The Nazis had branded him a degenerate and proscribed his music, his finances were a shambles, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to compose. Indeed, with the exception of a single piece, the luminous Cantata No. 2, which he had already begun but would not complete for another year, Webern had by that point completed everything that he ever would. Upon arriving at Webern’s apartment in the suburb of Maria Enzersdorf, Hartmann discovered, much to his surprise, that he happened to be the composer’s only pupil.

more here.

Robin Douglass in iai:

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that life in the state of nature – that is, our natural condition outside the authority of a political state – is ‘solitary, poore, nasty brutish, and short.’ Just over a century later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau countered that human nature is essentially good, and that we could have lived peaceful and happy lives well before the development of anything like the modern state. At first glance, then, Hobbes and Rousseau represent opposing poles in answer to one of the age-old questions of human nature: are we naturally good or evil? In fact, their actual positions are both more complicated and interesting than this stark dichotomy suggests. But why, if at all, should we even think about human nature in these terms, and what can returning to this philosophical debate tell us about how to evaluate the political world we inhabit today?

The question of whether humans are inherently good or evil might seem like a throwback to theological controversies about Original Sin, perhaps one that serious philosophers should leave aside. After all, humans are complex creatures capable of both good and evil. To come down unequivocally on one side of this debate might seem rather naïve, the mark of someone who has failed to grasp the messy reality of the human condition. Maybe so. But what Hobbes and Rousseau saw very clearly is that our judgements about the societies in which we live are greatly shaped by underlying visions of human nature and the political possibilities that these visions entail. As it happens, Hobbes didn’t really think that we’re naturally evil. His point, rather, is that we’re not hardwired to live together in large scale political societies. We’re not naturally political animals like bees or ants, who instinctively cooperate and work together for the common good. Instead, we’re naturally self-interested and look out for ourselves first and foremost. We care about our reputation, as well as our material wellbeing, and our desire for social standing drives us into conflict as much as competition over scarce resources. 

More here.

Robert F. Service in Science:

Science doesn’t usually take after fairy tales. But Rumpelstiltskin, the magical imp who spun straw into gold, would be impressed with the latest chemical wizardry. Researchers at Rice University report today in Nature that they can zap virtually any source of solid carbon, from food scraps to old car tires, and turn it into graphene—sheets of carbon atoms prized for applications ranging from high-strength plastic to flexible electronics. Current techniques yield tiny quantities of picture-perfect graphene or up to tons of less prized graphene chunks; the new method already produces grams per day of near-pristine graphene in the lab, and researchers are now scaling it up to kilograms per day.

“This work is pioneering from a scientific and practical standpoint” as it promises to make graphene cheap enough to use to strengthen asphalt or paint, says Ray Baughman, a chemist at the University of Texas, Dallas. “I wish I had thought of it.” The researchers have already founded a new startup company, Universal Matter, to commercialize their waste-to-graphene process.

With atom-thin sheets of carbon atoms arranged like chicken wire, graphene is stronger than steel, conducts electricity and heat better than copper, and can serve as an impermeable barrier preventing metals from rusting. But since its 2004 discovery, high-quality graphene—either single sheets or just a few stacked layers—has remained expensive to make and purify on an industrial scale. That’s not a problem for making diminutive devices such as high-speed transistors and efficient light-emitting diodes. But current techniques, which make graphene by depositing it from a vapor, are too costly for many high-volume applications. And higher throughput approaches, such as peeling graphene from chunks of the mineral graphite, produce flecks composed of up to 50 graphene layers that are not ideal for most applications.

More here.