Mark Mordue at The Sydney Review of Books:

‘One of the many things I regret about writing And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) was that I didn’t set it in Australia. It could just as easily be set in Wangaratta rather than an imaginary part of the American South. I don’t know why I didn’t do that. I wish I had. For sure that book comes from growing up in the country, from living a life in country Australia. It’s not from listening to murder ballads. The river was the sacred place of my childhood and everything happened down there.

‘On the edge of the river there’s willow trees, just like it says in “Sad Waters”. The plaiting of the willow vines – that happened. So a song like “Sad Waters” is a remembrance of that childhood scenario. The tree roots all torn out of the ground.

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Maddie Stone in The Atlantic:

In the biological wonderland of Puerto Rico’s Luquillo Mountains, slinky boasand emerald anoles hang out in lowland tabonuco trees, delicate bromeliads decorate the mountaintop cloud forests, and the island’s eponymous parrotsforage in the canopy. At dawn, the rain forest swells with the mating calls of thousands of coquí frogs. Underpinning this ecological tapestry is a world teeming with arthropods—which is why, when a pair of scientists reported last fall that Luquillo’s arthropod populations were crashing due to climate change, the internet reacted with horror. The Guardian called the research “deeply worrying”; one scientist told The Washington Post that the collapse was “hyper-alarming.” The study, conducted by the biologists Brad Lister of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Andres Garcia of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was picked up all overthe web (including by me) and has been cited in more than 75 academic papers since its publication. The work stuck out as a particularly worrying data point in a growing pile of evidence that Earth’s insects might be speeding toward some sort of apocalypse.

But the process of scientific knowledge-gathering can be messy, and scientists with Luquillo’s Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program—which furnished much of the data underpinning Lister and Garcia’s conclusions—now believe many of those conclusions are false. These researchers aren’t disputing the fact that climate change is occuring in Puerto Rico, or that insect declines are a serious issue. They just don’t see evidence for a simple link between the two in this particular ecosystem. Instead, they see a rain forest experiencing profound boom-and-bust cycles in response to disturbances such as hurricanes.

More here.

Emma Yasinski in The Scientist:

Genes play a role in—but cannot alone predict—same-sex sexual behaviors, according to a study published today (August 29) in Science. Using genetic data from nearly half a million participants who consented to be surveyed about their sexual experiences, the authors find that at most, genetics accounts for 8–25 percent of the variation in sexual behaviors and only some of the genes involved are shared between men and women. “The strength of the paper is that it used a very large dataset,” says Jacqueline Vink, a behavioral geneticist at Radbound University who was not part of the study but has worked with some of the researchers before. The methods allowed the researchers to “find novel genes associated with same-sex sexual behavior and learn more about possible biological pathways.”

Joel Gelernter, a psychiatrist and geneticist at the Yale School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, agrees. “This study included the largest sample to date for this kind of trait, and meticulously careful analyses,” he says. “There is a high level of support here that the genetics of same-sex sexual behavior is similar to that of other complex traits,” in that many genes are involved, each of which only has a very minor effect on its own. Previous studies of families had suggested that about one-third of the variation in sexual behaviors could be explained by genetics. Others have attempted to study the genetic underpinnings of these behaviors but have only been able to analyze data from limited numbers of participants.

The researchers gathered genetic information from people who had submitted DNA to the UK Biobank and 23andMe and asked them to answer questions about their sexual experiences and to what degree they were with partners of the same sex or other sex. “One of the top requests that we got from our customers as a topic to study is sexual orientation/sexual behavior,” says 23andMe’s Fah Sathirapongsasuti in a press conference.

The authors found two genes that were significantly associated with having engaged in same-sex sexual behaviors. Then, when the team separated the data by the individual’s sex, they found two more genes associated with same-sex sexual behaviors in men and one gene associated with the behaviors in women. These differences identified in men and women suggest that some of the variation in behavior may be related to hormonal influences, the authors say. One of the genes, for example, is tied to balding in men, which is affected by hormone levels.

More here.

Each Form of Bringing Death Brings Forth a Song

From my blood you wish to build an Empire
to wipe out whole jungles risen from waterfalls that sing in mother tongues
waterfalls of women
waterfalls of men

you long to open fire with Constitution in hand
other ways of “loving” “giving birth” “making fire”

to hush an ache that has been drawn out hundreds of years
in the name of gods that came from other seas
in the name of Gospels from another world

in the name of Progress
you want to make the god that lives inside me wither
but i am everlasting
the deathless blood that lifespan to lifespan
has lived on
even without land
even without food
even in the worst hardship
i am my earth
i am my own fatherland
i am the seed of myself man and of myself woman
love lives in me
and also wrath
in this thirst for bloodshed is born a god
who dies in the same breath
i breathe out holiness
it’s in my tears
and in the almighty strength of all the mother tongues of this world
and other worlds
i curse you from the womb to your last gasp
i curse your laws
i curse your flag
i curse your mouth

sunk in your most fearsome blackness you hold up a Nation
born in hate
suckled by Governments with golden teeth to bite us
Letters drawn from my blood

Read more »

Jamie Mackay in Aeon:

A woman rests in a field surrounded by apple trees. Savouring the sounds and smells of the shaded grove, she muses on the ‘sacred recess’ of her idyllic surroundings, and surrenders herself to fantasy. The wind is ‘honey sweet’, the air perfumed with ‘musk roses’. She is waiting for a lover. ‘Come to me from Crete,’ our narrator calls out to an anonymous and distant figure. Her words are charged with desire. ‘Ice-water babbles’ among ‘flickering leafage’ while ‘horses’ – a traditional symbol of masculine virility – ‘graze knee-deep in flowers’. What has triggered this outpour of erotic yearning? Are these the daydreams of a hot summer’s day? Is the subject drunk, as her eulogising of the local ‘nectar’ might suggest? Might she even, as some critics have speculated, be masturbating?

For all the distractions of our contemporary lives, reading Sappho today remains just as exhilarating as it was 2,000 years ago when, as one of the foremost poets of the ancient world, her poems were widely anthologised. Her delicate style, her withholding of details and delaying of pleasure, has drawn admiration from such canonical figures as Charles Baudelaire and A C Swinburne, even Oscar Wilde, who trilled ‘never had Love such a singer’.

Sappho’s restraint remains strangely gratifying today, when sexuality is so intensely visual, imposed top-down through the peculiar marriage of pornography and pop culture.

More here.

John Pavlus in Quanta:

“I was good friends with Iain Couzin, one of the world’s foremost animal behaviorists,” Rahwan said, “and I thought, ‘Why isn’t he studying online bots? Why is it only computer scientists who are studying AI algorithms?’

“All of a sudden,” he continued, “it clicked: We’re studying behavior in a new ecosystem.”

Two years later, Rahwan, who now directs the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, has gathered 22 colleagues — from disciplines as diverse as robotics, computer science, sociology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, anthropology and economics — to publish a paper in Nature calling for the inauguration of a new field of science called “machine behavior.”

Directly inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen’s four questions — which analyzed animal behavior in terms of its function, mechanisms, biological development and evolutionary history — machine behavior aims to empirically investigate how artificial agents interact “in the wild” with human beings, their environments and each other.

More here.

Peter Aldhous in Buzzfeed:

Jeffrey Epstein gave more money to science after his conviction than previously acknowledged, including to famous researchers, leading universities, an independent artificial-intelligence pioneer, and even a far-right YouTuber who took Epstein’s money to make videos on neuroscience.

An extensive BuzzFeed News review of Epstein’s donations, public acknowledgments of funding, and meetings that happened after his release from jail shows that his links to top scientists continued after he was convicted for sex crimes in 2008.

Epstein’s scientific friends, including Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak and celebrity physicist Lawrence Krauss, introduced him to other leading scientists after his release from jail. The full extent of Epstein’s largesse may be millions of dollars higher than the sums recorded by his foundations in filings to the IRS because Epstein’s philanthropy is entangled with that of his billionaire associate Leon Black.

More here.

John McWhorter in The Atlantic:

Laurie Sheck is a professor of creative writing at the New School in New York, a decades-long veteran of the classroom, a widely published novelist and essayist, and a Pulitzer nominee. She’s also spent the summer in trouble with her bosses for possibly being a racist.

Her offense? You may not have known that despite the resonance of the title of the renowned 2016 documentary on James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin’s actual statement, during a 1963 appearance on public television, was “I’m not a nigger.” Early last spring semester, Sheck, who is white, was teaching a graduate seminar on Baldwin, and one of the questions she posed for discussion was why the documentary title had substituted “Negro” for “nigger.”

That’s good teaching. She was evoking a word with one of the richest, nastiest, and most complex ranges of meaning in the English language. What did Baldwin mean by summoning it in 1963? Why, today, did the creators of that documentary substitute “Negro”? And having answered those questions, then we might examine the particular resonances of that word.

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Mersiha Bruncevic at Tablet:

Along with the idea of writing very modern poetry in Yiddish, Vogel also had a specific idea regarding the aesthetics of her work—she wanted the poems to be visual experiences, like paintings. To achieve this effect, instead of relying on the traditional building blocks of poetry which are form and meter, she chose methods derived from painting (mostly cubism), photography (primarily montage) and advertisements (evoking bold colors, catch phrases and kitsch). The most prominent characteristic of the poems in all three collections is repetition. The imagery employed repeats continuously and is used with intention in order to reduce, as Vogel asserted, “the chaos of events to its most basic ordinary properties.”

Two main patterns emerge from Vogel’s repetition of images and vocabulary: unreality and disproportion. Everything is fragile and perishable.

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Colin Grant at The Spectator:

I wonder what the Rasta-loving Europeans make of Boothe when he appears on stage dressed, typically, to a point beyond distinction, in an evening jacket. ‘But I am a Rasta man,’ he objects, affronted by my ignorance. ‘Look here, what is Rasta? You don’t have to be dreadlocks to be a Rasta. It’s not a fashion; it’s a way of life.’

All are committed to the notion of music as a tool for healing. Kiddus I, aka ‘Dr Feelgood’ after his reputation for sourcing the best marijuana on the island, famously joined Bob Marley on stage for the 1978 ‘One Love Peace Concert’. Back then musicians united to try to bring about an end to hostilities between rival gunmen of Jamaica’s political parties trapped in a near civil war. It was a time, recalls the regal Judy Mowatt in the film, when music bore witness to the urgency and jeopardy of life: ‘Reggae music was people’s news. If a man get shot the singers would make a song of it.’

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Summer Song

wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—

a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer’s smile,—
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?

by William Carlos Williams
from Al Que Quiere!

Sameer Rahim in The Guardian:

Like many recent years, 2013 saw Richard Dawkins tweet a summary judgment about Islam. “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” The coarse implication in his first statement is hardly softened by the condescending allusion to the “great things” done by past Muslims. Still, it was only a tweet. Islamic Empires, Justin Marozzi’s new work, is a 464-page elaboration of the same argument, with additional bloodshed and sleaze.

Marozzi opens by quoting a Tunisian friend who is “embarrassed to be an Arab these days”, distressed as he is by the “chaos, fighting, bloodshed, dictatorship, corruption, injustice, unemployment” plaguing the Middle East. The Tunisian certainly has a point, but it’s one that Marozzi misconstrues. Marozzi advises his friend to think back to a time when “for an Arab Muslim, pride in occupying the very summit of the global pecking order, rather than shame and embarrassment at languishing in its nether regions, was the order of the day”. But Arab spring protesters, just like this Tunisian, were complaining about their corrupt rulers and calling for a fairer society, not the restoration of what Marozzi calls a “famed” and “feared” caliphate in order to satisfy their “pride”.

The author offers potted histories of 15 mainly Arab cities across the 15 centuries of Islam. He picks them during their most opulent eras: Baghdad in the ninth century; Cairo in the 12th; Constantinople in the 15th; Isfahan in the 17th; ending with Doha in the 21st. As a journalist, he has visited nearly all the cities he describes, and begins his chapters by speaking to interlocutors often depressed about the state of their country. Then he swiftly whisks us back into a glorious past, emphasising the most lurid tales.

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Colin Barras in Nature:

An ancient face is shedding new light on our earliest ancestors. Archaeologists have discovered a 3.8-million-year-old hominin skull in Ethiopia — a rare and remarkably complete specimen that could change what we know about the origins of one of humanity’s most famous ancestors, Lucy. The researchers who discovered the skull say it belongs to a species called Australopithecus anamensis, and it gives researchers their first good look at the face of this hominin. This species was thought to precede Lucy’s species,Australopithecus afarensis. But features of the latest find now suggest that A. anamensis shared the prehistoric Ethiopian landscape with Lucy’s species, for at least 100,000 years, the researchers say. This hints that the early hominin evolutionary tree was more complicated than scientists had thought — but other researchers say the evidence isn’t yet conclusive.

“Fossil hominin crania are exceptionally rare treasures,” says Carol Ward, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia who wasn’t involved in the analysis. “This to me is the specimen we have been waiting for.” An analysis of the skull is published in Nature¹ . A. afarensis lived in East Africa between about 4 million and 3 million years ago. It is important to the understanding of human evolution because it might have been the ape-like species from which the ‘true’ human genus, Homo, evolved about 2.8 million years ago. Over the past few decades, researchers have discovered dozens of fragments of australopithecine fossils in Ethiopia and Kenya that date back more than 4 million years. Most researchers think these older fossils belong to the earlier species, A. anamensis. It’s generally thought that A. anamensisgradually morphed into A. afarensis, implying that the two species never coexisted.

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Matt Dinan in The Hedgehog Review:

Teaching Augustine’s Confessions for the last five years or so, I’ve come to expect certain questions and objections: Isn’t he awfully hard on babies? (No.) Is it really a bad thing to cry when your mother dies? (Maybe not.) Was he really such a terrible sinner? (Who am I to judge?) But I was recently caught off guard when one of my students expressed uneasiness not with Augustine’s classical Christianity or his stringent understanding of morality but with his objections to the Roman practice of consulting astrologers. This student, it turned out, was one of many young people participating in what the New York Times somewhat antiseptically calls the “$2.1 billion mystic services market,” a market which, as one astrology app’s self-description puts it, “allows irrationality to invade our techno-rationalist ways of living.” In a follow-up conversation, my student suggested that his interest in astrology was “mostly ironic”—an observation in line with the wry tone adopted in many of the new online horoscopes.

What does it mean to like something “ironically”? To be sure, irony is often a form of negation that lets us hold ourselves separate from and above the world. To like something, but only ironically, is like being in on a joke you play on yourself. As David Foster Wallace famously put it, irony is an “existential poker face,” an attempt to “interdict the question without attending to its content.” Lately, however, I’ve been wondering whether our culture’s pervasively ironic bearing, readily observable in the myriad ways in which we relate to one another and our culture online, is really fooling anyone. My student maintained a certain plausible deniability about astrology but nevertheless felt compelled to defend it from Augustine’s critique. Online irony, moreover, has a troubling way of seeping into the way we conduct our lives, often with insidious results.

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Clayton Dalton in UnDark:

The emergency department where I see patients can get pretty crowded. Sometimes, when we run out of rooms, we examine patients in the hallways. It’s harder to deliver comprehensive medical care that way, but the patients need to be treated somewhere.

It seems like the answer to overcrowding in the emergency department should be simple: Build more beds. And many hospitals are. Years ago, when one facility was considering a $10 million expansion of its emergency department, Eugene Litvak, president of the non-profit Institute for Healthcare Optimization, shook his head. “How about you give me $5 million and you do nothing and both of us will benefit,” he recalled telling the hospital’s president.

It was more than an idle challenge, coming from Litvak. He’s done it before.

Litvak specializes in operations management, a branch of applied mathematics that uses statistical techniques to efficiently match resources with variable demand. In the late 1990s, he began looking for ways to apply his professional training to American health care.

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Paul Street in CounterPunch:

Among the suggestions I would have made to the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley had I been an editor of his important book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House, 2018), two seem particularly relevant in the present political juncture.

The first suggestion would have been for Stanley to explicitly call out the state-capitalist and corporate-captive Democratic Party in his perceptive discussion of how the fascist-style 2016 U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump got to come off as more “authentic” than his major party opponent while habitually telling untruths and “giving voice to shocking sentiments that were presumed to be unsuitable for public discourse.”

As Stanley rightly pointed out, Democratic candidates “must raise huge sums to run for office…As a result, they represent the interests of their large donors. However, because it is a democracy, they must also try to make the case that they represent the common interest. They must pretend that the best interests of the multinational corporations that fund their campaigns are also the common interest.”

I’m not sure why Stanley thought the United States is “a democracy” (it is no such thing), but he put his thumb on a basic and longstanding conundrum in bourgeois politics.

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Arjun Appadurai in The Wire:

The scrapping of Article 370 of the constitution and the dismemberment of the state of Jammu and Kashmir have been much commented upon in recent days. Some commentators have seen these frightening events as rehearsals of what is to come elsewhere in India while others regard them as extensions of state repression in Kashmir and elsewhere in India by all the ruling parties since 1947. The fate of ordinary Kashmiris looks dire and India’s claim to be a democracy is facing its most severe test.

What the Modi government has just done in Kashmir can surely be understood as a mix of xenophobia, anti-Muslim policy, political theatre, and cynical realpolitik. I offer two remarks that might further illuminate the timing and special malevolence revealed by the decision to strip Kashmir of the last vestiges of its special status.

The first is that for the Hindu Right, all of Kashmir, on both sides of the Line of Control, stands for Pakistan.

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Amelie Hastie at Film Quarterly:

If the experience of my viewing of the film was gently yet insistently altered over the space of two hours, upon its end I experienced a kind of revelation. As I stared at the final image—a still shot of the exterior staircase that Cleo has climbed, itself a return to the opening scene—a thought occurred to me: It is as if I have just seen cinema for the first time.

This idea came to me involuntarily, immediately followed by a sense of internal embarrassment over such unexpected pretentiousness. Yet as I left the crowded theater and walked down the street, slowly approaching the park in front of me, I could not shake this idea; again and again, with a sense that I could not even control it, I repeated it in my head. I wondered, too, if this sensation might have been what it felt like to see Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta, Roberto Rossellini, 1945) or The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu, Jean Renoir, 1939) when they first appeared on-screen.³ Its black-and-white stock and historical setting give Cuarón’s film the sense of belonging to another time, but it wasn’t just that which struck me. Roma has the breadth of these films, and at the same time, the intimacy of everyday (or sometimes singular) experience in the midst of political tumult.

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