To a Stranger

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I
…. look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking,
…. (it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid,
…. affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl
…. with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has
…. become not yours only nor left my body mine
…. only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as
…. we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in
…. return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when
…. I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

by Walt Whitman

Chris Fields at the Institute for Art and Ideas:

The idea that we have evolved to see reality ‘as it is’ is commonplace. While it might seem irresponsible, in this age of ‘fake news’ and ubiquitous political and commercial propaganda, to argue that we are not evolved to see reality as it is, I believe it’s worth doing, not least for what it reveals about our notions of ‘reality’ and ‘evolution’.

Pioneering vision scientist David Marr, for example, explained in his 1982 book Vision that ‘one interesting aspect of the evolution of visual systems is the gradual movement toward the difficult task of representing progressively more objective aspects of the visual world’.  Almost every textbook agrees. Seeing the world as it is, objectively, is widely assumed to make organisms better able to find food, avoid predators or other dangers, fend off rivals, and mate successfully; it is, in other words, widely assumed to render organisms better adapted to their environments.

Evolution favors better-adapted organisms, so evolution should favor an ability to see the world objectively. What, after all, could be the advantage in not seeing – in general, sensing – the world correctly? Evolution must make organisms progressively better at sensing their worlds. How could anyone disagree?

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

We’ve talked a lot recently about the Many Worlds of quantum mechanics. That’s one kind of multiverse that physicists often contemplate. There is also the cosmological multiverse, which we talked about with Brian Greene. Today’s guest, Max Tegmark, has thought a great deal about both of those ideas, as well as a more ambitious and speculative one: the Mathematical Multiverse, in which we imagine that every mathematical structure is real, and the universe we perceive is just one such mathematical structure. And there’s yet another possibility, that what we experience as “reality” is just a simulation inside computers operated by some advanced civilization. Max has thought about all of these possibilities at a deep level, as his research has ranged from physical cosmology to foundations of quantum mechanics and now to applied artificial intelligence. Strap in and be ready for a wild ride.

More here.

Joseph Cirincione in the Washington Post:

Impeachment has a way of bringing out a president’s worst instincts — and the world could end up paying the price.

As impeachment hearings intensified, an increasingly erratic president appeared to finally snap. “I can go into my office and pick up the telephone,” he told visiting lawmakers, “and in 25 minutes, 70 million people will be dead.”

It was 1974, and the president was Richard Nixon. He was right. U.S. policy, then and now, gives the president absolute authority to launch nuclear weapons whenever they want, for whatever reason. No consensus is required. No one else need approve.

Indeed, no other official even need know. The president, on their own, can simply summon the “nuclear football,” open binders of attack options and relay orders to the National Military Command Center. The orders would be sent down to missile control officers — where intercontinental ballistic missiles are primed on “hair-trigger” alert — and 30 minutes later you’d have nuclear explosions over the targets, just as Nixon claimed.

More here.

Oscar Mardell at 3:AM Magazine:

In Darkly, Leila Taylor offers a racially-minded revision of the Gothic canon, from Walpole to the present, with a particular focus on its American incarnations. But two things make this compendium a vital addition to the existing commentary. First is the fact that Taylor is no reductionist, and isn’t tempted, say, to dismiss the entire Gothic canon as irredeemably racist. Instead, Darkly makes a compelling and subtle argument: on the one hand, that the American Gothic is not simply a transplanting of an inherently European aesthetic, but a symptom of America’s (ongoing) legacy of racial oppression; on the other, that the American Gothic also promises a cure, a means of resisting that very oppression — that by allowing ourselves to be haunted by its texts, we can hope to terminate the legacy which produced them. Second is Taylor’s unapologetic use of the first person, her extensive reference to her subjective experience. That experience is directly related to the book’s argument: as Darkly makes clear, the legacy of racial oppression in America is something which Taylor has encountered — and continues to encounter — on a daily basis. But the inclusion of Taylor’s “I” here lends more than, say, credibility to her case (that case is already so tight, it would stand irrespective of who made it); it also ensures that Darkly, like the 43rd Capricho, is a self-portrait. By discussing how it feels for her to watch, say, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead — with its appropriations of Haitian folklore, and with the indiscriminate slaughter of the Black protagonist in its final scenes — Taylor forces us to participate in her experience. Darkly, then, to paraphrase something that Beckett once said of Joyce, is not just about the uncanny, it is uncanny.

more here.

Lincoln Caplan at The American Scholar:

Last June, I interviewed Wardlow at a maximum-security prison called the Polunsky Unit, located 80 miles northeast of Houston, where he is waiting for his execution on death row. He has been incarcerated for a quarter of a century, but the state has now set a date for his death: April 29, 2020. His lawyers, Richard Burr and Mandy Welch, having gotten to know him well in the 23 years that they have represented him, told me they are convinced that time has shown the jury to have been wrong in determining Wardlow posed a future danger. The more I have read about his case and his life, the more I think they are right. Wardlow stands out as someone the legal system has wronged repeatedly, especially in deciding his punishment.

In 1972, the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as states then applied it because juries were imposing it arbitrarily and unpredictably, for crimes such as robbery as well as for murder. In 1976, when the Court reinstated the penalty, it upheld new state laws said to address those defects.

more here.

Paul Theroux at Literary Review:

It was at this point I discovered Nathanael West. Although all his books had been published in the 1930s, they seemed to anticipate the America that was throbbing all around me, with its violence and disappointments, its spiritual emptiness, its foolishness and its freaks.

I had come across Miss Lonelyhearts as a paperback, and then found the New Directions edition of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, and then, around 1960, an omnibus edition of his novels, which also included The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million. The introduction to this edition was by the English writer and publisher Alan Ross. His note of special pleading (‘West’s slightness of reputation is not easy to understand’) resonated with my feeling of being marginal, like West, if not entirely overlooked.

more here.

Tomorrow Tanka

Yesterday, I looked
back, shaving. A moth crawled through
the fog of my face
in the mirror. An open
window unmakes a wall, the house.

Last night, I pointed
my son to the climbing moon,
the moon dragging its blue
mane behind. Our knees were wet.
Our knees were whipped red by grass.

Today, I barred his arms
as the nurse placed her needle.
However softly
I whispered, he bled. What cuts
him is the love in my voice.

Tonight, a mantis
will fish moths from the porchlight.
We’ll watch as she folds
wing and body into her
pinhole mouth. Then we’ll pray.

by Micah Chatterton
from Ecotheo Review

_____________________

Tanka: a Japanese poem consisting of five lines, the first and third of which have five syllables and the other seven, making 31 syllables in all and giving a complete picture of an event or mood.

Langdon Hammer in The New York Review of Books:

What are a writer’s letters worth? The question, posed bluntly in dollars, plays out in one of the tangled subplots of The Dolphin Letters.

In 1970 Robert Lowell was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and Elizabeth Hardwick was at home in New York with their thirteen-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick felt overwhelmed trying to manage the family’s affairs. “Cal,” she wrote to Lowell, “I can’t cope. I have gotten so that I simply cannot bear it. Each day’s mail and effort grows greater and greater.” Seeing the chance to simplify “a life that has become too weighty, detailed, heavy—for me,” Hardwick undertook to sell Lowell’s papers. SUNY Stony Brook was “wildly interested,” but she favored Harvard because of Lowell’s ties there. He agreed that Stony Brook was second choice, but they were offering more money, and he needed money. Hardwick told Harvard about the Stony Brook offer, the university raised its bid, and after much back and forth, in 1973, Harvard purchased Lowell’s papers dating from his childhood to 1970.

Too much had happened in the meantime for Hardwick to celebrate. When she had first looked into Lowell’s crammed file cabinets, she expected him to come home soon. But he didn’t. He fell in love with the Anglo-Irish writer Caroline Blackwood and remained in England with her, even after he was hospitalized following a manic breakdown in July 1970, and Hardwick came to him while Blackwood fled to Ireland. In 1971 Blackwood and Lowell’s son, Sheridan, was born. A year later, Lowell divorced Hardwick and married Blackwood. Throughout this time, he was writing about being torn between Blackwood and Hardwick in poems that would be published in 1973 as a sonnet sequence called The Dolphin.

More here.

Anna Nowogrodzki in Nature:

When Adam Siepel was building algorithms for evolutionary genomics as part of his PhD, he wasn’t thinking about visualization. But, as a graduate student in the laboratory of computational biologist David Haussler, at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), he happened to sit next to the software engineers who were building and maintaining a tool called the UCSC Genome Browser. These engineers helped Siepel to make his algorithms publicly available as a track, or data overlay, that anyone could explore. Genome browsers are graphical tools that display the genome sequence, usually as a horizontal line. Other sequence-associated data are aligned and stacked above and below that line in ‘tracks’, for instance to illustrate the relationship between gene expression, DNA modification and protein-binding sites.

Siepel’s track identifies sequences that have been retained over evolutionary time; when a user applies it while viewing the alignment of genomic data from two or more species, the track highlights regions that are evolutionarily conserved. Allowing others to use the algorithm to highlight regions of interest in their own data was “probably the single most important thing I did during my PhD”, says Siepel, who is now a computational biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Other researchers have used it, for instance, to find mutations associated with diseases and to pinpoint functionally important regions of noncoding RNA molecules.

More here.

William Davies in the London Review of Books:

Justin Smith’s Irrationality is one of many books provoked by the political eruptions of 2016. Trump is a recurring preoccupation, but so is the internet and the carnival of quickfire nonsense it hosts. Taking these two themes together – the absurd liar in the White House, and the sarcastic meme culture that helped put him there – suggests that something distinctly new and dangerous has arisen. Trump, it seems, outstrips any previous conspiracy theorist or demagogue. His election means ‘the near-total disappearance of a shared space of common presuppositions from which we might argue through our differences’. In 2016, we saw ‘the definitive transformation of the internet, from vehicle of light to vehicle of darkness’. Trump’s pre-eminence forces us to defend principles and institutions we shouldn’t have to defend. We find ourselves having to assert that good reasons are better than bad reasons, that rational government policies are better than irrational ones. Distinctions between scientific fact and conspiracy theory now have to be explained and justified. These are tasks that many rationalists, in the ‘new atheist’ tradition of Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, have been happy to pursue. Arguing as much with (what they perceive as) the relativism of the left as with the dogmatism of the right, these bombastic defenders of Western reason exhibit a spirit of hostility towards anyone daring to question the benefits and rectitude of the natural sciences. Dawkins in particular has converted a defence of scientific method into a defence of cultural hierarchy, with ‘the West’ at the top. Pinker clings to a form of Benthamism, in which statistical data prove that modernity is still on the right track, regardless of what political or cultural anguish might be at large.

Faced with a choice between a world governed by brute Pinker-esque reason and the Dadaist nightmare of fantasy and propaganda emanating from the White House, Smith seems in no doubt where he stands. Yet Irrationality is unique among recent paeans to Enlightenment and liberalism in marrying a resolute defence of reason with a recognition of how futile such defences tend to be. What troubles Smith is that ‘rationality’ means nothing without some ‘irrationality’ from which to distinguish itself, yet the precise nature of this distinction is impossible to establish.

More here.

Peter Essick in Undark:

On the evening of Jan. 10, 1957, Harold Edgerton set a 4,000-volt electronic flash of his own design to the right of a small, shallow pool of milk in his “Strobe Lab” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Edgerton, an electrical engineering professor, then released a drop of milk from a funnel 8 inches above the pool, reflecting a bright red background. A motion trigger was delayed a fraction of a second in order for the powerful flash to record the thumbnail-sized crown of the drop’s splash a few milliseconds after it hit the pool’s surface.

Like any good scientist, Edgerton recorded his data in his notebook. He had first done a successful milk drop photo two decades before in black and white, but kept trying to perfect the shot. His goal was to record equally spaced droplets around the ring. Working with color film that was less sensitive to light made matters more difficult, and when he first saw the color film version of the milk crown, he said it was merely “acceptable” because the droplets were not perfectly spaced. However, to viewers around the world the photo was stunning. In 2016, Time magazine selected “Milk Drop Coronet, 1957” as one of the 100 most influential images of all time, claiming that “the picture proved that photography could advance human understanding of the physical world, and the technology Edgerton used to take it laid the foundation for the modern electronic flash.”

It has been nearly three decades since the death of Edgerton, often called the father of high-speed flash photography. A fresh look at his pioneering work, “Harold Edgerton: Seeing the Unseen,” includes more than 100 photographs and newly released selections from his notebooks, accompanied by essays by former colleagues and curators of the Edgerton photo and strobe archive at the MIT Museum.

More here.

Ryu Spaeth in The New Republic:

There is a certain kind of liberally inclined writer who sees Donald Trump’s America as a nation in crisis. At every turn, in every tweet, she is confronted by the signs of an ongoing catastrophe, from which it may be too late to escape. An ugly, vicious intolerance spread on social media; the collapse of norms once considered sacred; a crass narrow-mindedness surreally celebrated by some of this country’s most powerful institutions—these are all elements in the gathering storm of a new, distinctly American fascism. The twist is that this crisis has its source, she contends, not in the person of Trump, but in his frothing-mouthed opposition: the left.

That, roughly speaking, is the thesis of a group of writers who, since Trump’s election in 2016, have chastised the left for its supposedly histrionic excesses. Their enemies extend well beyond the hashtag resistance, and their fire is aimed, like a Catherine wheel, in all directions, hitting social justice warriors, elite universities, millennials, #MeToo, pussy hat–wearing women, and columnists at Teen Vogue. Everyone from Ta-Nehisi Coates down to random Facebook commenters is taken to task, which makes for a sprawling, hard-to-define target. These writers might call their bugbear “woke culture”: a kind of vigilance against misogyny, racism, and other forms of inequality expressed in art, entertainment, and everyday life.

More here.

Thomas Moller Nielsen in The Philosophical Salon:

In the appendix to an article recently published on The Philosophical Salon website, Slavoj Žižek offers a response to the accusations of racism, repetition, reactionaryism and charlatanism that I made against him in an article published last month in the journal Current Affairs.

Arguably, what is most noteworthy about Žižek’s response is not what it says, but what it omits. In particular, Žižek offers no defense of – or apology for – his racist suggestion that pedophilia is “a key constituent of the very identity” of “Pakistani Muslim youth”; he offers no defense of his preposterous preference for “the worst of Stalinism [over] the best of the liberal-capitalist welfare state”; he provides no rationalization of his ridiculous claim that all forms of political Islam ultimately reduce to fascism or Wahhabi-Salafism; he offers no justification for his outrageous suggestion of the acceptability of Western state terrorism and the permissibility of “violat[ing] elementary moral norms”; he supplies no further buttressing of his flimsily-defended assertion of why he believes “right-wing chaos” is a necessary precursor to progressive political change; he offers no attempt to render consistent his belief that US President Donald Trump will provide such “right-wing chaos” with his view that Trump is also a “pretty ordinary centrist liberal”[i]; he provides no explanation for why he advocated abstention in the Macron vs Le Pen 2017 French Presidential election, given his (Žižek’s) professed belief that Le Pen is an “anti-immigrant populist” who represents “the principal threat to Europe”; he makes no admission of, or apology for, the fact that his 2018 book Like a Thief in Broad Daylight was deceptively marketed as a book about technology’s impact on human affairs, when in fact the book was largely about sex; he makes no attempt to clarify what he means by “dialectical materialism”, or to render the dozen or so (often amusingly) distinct definitions he has previously offered of the term consistent; he offers no defense or retraction of his ridiculous assertion that the world (according to quantum mechanics) is a “positively charged void, and that particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed”; and, finally – and perhaps somewhat forgivably – he offers no attempt to explain what on earth (e.g.) animal sex has to do with Hegelian interpretations of quantum mechanics.

More here.

Michael Crowley in Spiked:

It’s the year of John Ruskin. 2019 is the bicentennial of his birth and there continues to be events to mark it. Perhaps the celebrations will prove to be a turning point for him. For though during his lifetime, and for a generation or so afterwards, Ruskin was hugely influential, his achievements have now been neglected for decades. His collected works run to 39 volumes; he wrote around 250 books during his long life. As an author he commanded international respect, attracting praise from figures as varied as Tolstoy, George Eliot, Proust and Ghandi. He was cited as an influence by Clement Atlee and the founders of the National Trust. His ideas helped found the Labour Party and the welfare state. Gladstone wanted to make him poet laureate. Yet most of his books are now out of print. While you might see books about him, you would be lucky to find his work even in secondhand bookshops. Few artists have experienced such a decline in reputation. There are many factors in this steep descent, both personal and professional, and they began mid-way through Ruskin’s career. Chief among the personal is Ruskin’s failed marriage to Effie Gray, which was annulled on the grounds of impotency. Effie subsequently married Ruskin’s friend, the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais, and the scandal at the time was injurious to both parties. The affair is dramatised in Emma Thompson’s 2014 film Effie Gray.

Four years after the annulment, at the age of 39, Ruskin became infatuated with one of his drawing pupils, 10-year-old Rose La Touche. When she was 18 and he 47, he proposed marriage and Rose refused. The situation was complicated because Rose’s mother had designs on Ruskin. Three years later, Rose died – possibly of anorexia – which broke Ruskin’s own vulnerable mental health. There was no suggestion of any impropriety and this second romantic disaster was not as public at the time as his annulled marriage, but both episodes have subsequently got in the way of his work to the degree that he is too neglected by some and completely dismissed by others. His work fell foul of censorious opprobrium 150 years ago, and is doing so again in an age when artists are rarely judged for their work alone.

More here.

Archa Fox in The Scientist:

I have a clear memory of presenting my initial results about a “failed” protein at a lab meeting with my postdoctoral advisor Angus Lamond at the University of Dundee in Scotland and the rest of his group. It was the summer of 2000, and for the first few months of my postdoc I had been fusing green fluorescent protein with novel proteins that had recently been identified by mass spectrometry as residing in the nucleolus. I engineered HeLa cells to produce copious amounts of these fusion proteins, and watched where they went. Most migrated to the nucleolus, as expected, but one protein steadfastly refused. Instead, it formed nuclear dots that were much smaller than the large and obvious nucleoli. I was really worried about the messiness of this result, but also intrigued. To my relief, instead of being disappointed that the protein was not doing what we had expected, Angus and my lab mates encouraged me to explore it further. The group had access to antibodies against many cellular structures, so I quickly established that these nuclear dots were different from any known nuclear bodies. But having generated much of my data with overexpressed protein, it was critical to make sure that the endogenous form of the protein also localized to the same nuclear dots, and that what I had seen were not simply artifacts of my approach.

We created an antibody against the protein and incubated it with HeLa cells. It was an incredibly nerve-wracking moment looking down the microscope to see what the antibody had stained. Thankfully, it worked. I was ecstatic when I saw that it had picked out the same small nuclear dots that I had identified with GFP. In 2002, I published a manuscript introducing the scientific community to paraspeckles— orbs of protein and nucleic acid 360 nanometers in diameter, squeezed next to the more famous and larger structures called nuclear speckles. Since then, paraspeckles have become an established part of cell biology; there are more than 250 articles on them, and they have already found their way into some textbooks. We now know they are membraneless organelles seeded by a long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), formed through a well-characterized physical phenomenon known as liquid-liquid phase separation, and composed of numerous proteins and RNA molecules. We also know that they can alter gene regulation when cells get stressed, an important mechanism for maintaining cell homeostasis and one that appears to be disrupted in many diseases.

More here.