Matias Slavov in Aeon:

In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, who had recently composed an article on the theory of relativity. Einstein praised it: ‘From the philosophical perspective, nothing nearly as clear seems to have been written on the topic.’ Then he went on to express his intellectual debt to ‘Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature I had studied avidly and with admiration shortly before discovering the theory of relativity. It is very possible that without these philosophical studies I would not have arrived at the solution.’

More than 30 years later, his opinion hadn’t changed, as he recounted in a letter to his friend, the engineer Michele Besso: ‘In so far as I can be aware, the immediate influence of D Hume on me was greater. I read him with Konrad Habicht and Solovine in Bern.’ We know that Einstein studied Hume’s Treatise (1738-40) in a reading circle with the mathematician Conrad Habicht and the philosophy student Maurice Solovine around 1902-03. This was in the process of devising the special theory of relativity, which Einstein eventually published in 1905. It is not clear, however, what it was in Hume’s philosophy that Einstein found useful to his physics. We should therefore take a closer look.

More here.

Nour Malas in Guernica:

Women in loose robes dragged toddlers, babies propped upon their hips. Men carrying parents and grandparents on their shoulders stepped ahead, calling back for assurances as women collapsed in the heat. Flimsy plastic bags, crammed with clothes and other belongings, dangled off shoulders and wrists. In the midday glaze, as light shimmered off the desert like water droplets, the scene at the Syrian-Iraqi border seemed almost biblical. My Iraqi colleague Ali, who had already tasted the wrath of displacement from his own country, squatted in the shade of our car and cried.

I, too, had watched this scene many times already, in Syria and on its borders. Recently, at another crossing into Iraq, thousands of Syrians had trampled over a bridge that all but collapsed into a river, capturing the media’s waning attention of the then three-year-old refugee crisis. From Iraq, I went to Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, aiming to report on the refugee crisis from every border of Syria that I could. I was determined to see every dimension of this war so that I could better understand it. But not just for my reporting. This was a deeply personal assignment for me, and yet one that never quite felt personal enough.

Syria: never the country I called home, but certainly my homeland. I would untangle the many shades of this identity at the very moment the country was coming undone.

More here.

Fifty years ago, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounced on the moon’s surface below, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins briefly disappeared behind the lunar disk, becoming the first person to experience space entirely alone. As we set our sights on the stars, space travelers will need to cope with ever longer stretches—months, years, and beyond—in the lonely environs of the cosmos. What will that take? What will that be like? How will it affect who we are? Join Michael Collins and fellow astronauts for a whirlwind journey boldly going where only a handful of humans have gone before.

PARTICIPANTS: Michael Collins, Leland Melvin, Scott Kelly, and Ariane Cornell

Wesley Hill at Marginalia Review:

To put it mildly, Christianity has a complicated relationship with flesh. The same Paul who declared the Lord’s ownership of the body also bequeathed to subsequent Christian history a disdain for physicality through his—misunderstood, as most interpreters now think, but no less influential for being so—sharp contrast between the life of the flesh and the new life bestowed by and in the Spirit of Jesus. Stark affirmations such as the one he wrote to the Corinthians—“flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God”—at minimum lent confidence to later Christian denigrators of the body who imagined salvation as an escape from fleshly imprisonment and, at maximum, convinced generations of Christians that following Jesus ought to entail hating the body.

So it should come as no surprise that one of our most brilliantly creative theologians currently writing in English has turned his attention to the topic of the flesh. That phrase “writing in English” is one I’m intentionally foregrounding, because Paul Griffiths in Christian Flesh tells us at the outset that that is his aim. “Most Catholic theologians,” he laments, “aren’t very good at theology and aren’t very good at English.”

more here.

David Parkinson at BFI:

For a brief moment, Peter Fonda was one of the most important people in American cinema. Not because he was the son of Hollywood stalwart Henry Fonda or the younger brother of activist actress Jane Fonda. But because he had made $60 million on a $384,000 road movie. Moreover, in producing, co-writing and starring in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider(1969), Fonda had shattered the studio system’s shackles and made himself a countercultural icon in the process. His performance as Wyatt (aka Captain America) prompted the Village Voice to declare him “a combination of Clint Eastwood and James Dean”. Yet, somehow, to paraphrase his famous campfire line, he blew it.

Having impressed with his directorial debut, The Hired Hand (1971), Fonda drew less praise for Idaho Transfer (1973) and Wanda Nevada (1979), the only film in which he appeared with his famous father, whose distant strictness after the 10-year-old’s mother had committed suicide shaped an unhappy childhood that included a near fatal incident with an antique gun (mention of which during a 1965 LSD party prompted John Lennon to write ‘She Said She Said’).

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Sarah Cole at Public Books:

The eminent art historian Michael Fried has set out, in his own energetic and independent style, to answer this question—what was literary impressionism?—and to do so unencumbered by the general principles that have so far cohered around the term in the work of literary critics and art historians. This may bother some readers who expect a more direct engagement with the critical history of the term. Fried’s approach is to start the inquiry afresh, using detailed readings of passages in individual works to derive his own answer to his title’s question. “If my specific readings and my overall argument cumulatively gain traction on their own terms,” he writes, “I shall consider this book a success.”

Included in Fried’s analyses, in addition to books by the novelists listed above, are works by W. H. Hudson, Rudyard Kipling, Frank Norris, H. G. Wells, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Jack London, Erskine Childers, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of the Tarzan books), among others. His list, made up both of well-studied writers and those almost never discussed by literary critics, is refreshing, cutting across categories of canonicity and style.

more here.

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian:

It consists of nothing more than an intermittent correspondence between two friends. Yet the epistolary form is deceptively efficient, supplying backstory, plot, character, dialogue and more than one narrative voice before a conventional novel might have cleared its throat. Within a page or two, we are in the world of Martin and Max, both German, the latter a Jew now living in San Francisco, the former now back in Munich – two men who have been business partners, friends and whose families have, as we shall discover, been intimately connected.

Their exchange, spanning just 16 months between 1932 and 1934, illuminates not just the specific texture of the early Nazi period, but something more timeless. It serves as a guide to the way any politics of identity – especially one that invokes “the people”, rooting that idea in blood and soil – eventually, and often very rapidly, divides and polarises. Max and Martin have shared “the fireside”, there finding “warmth and understanding, where small selfishnesses are impossible and where wine and books and talk give a different meaning to existence”. But even the very best of friends can be rent apart. Once a dividing line is drawn, it’s astonishing how swiftly people can break from those who stand on the other side of it. In that sense, Address Unknown is a warning. We tell ourselves, as these characters do, that friendship is eternal, that some bonds will never be broken. This short story warns us that ideology, once it has turned to fever, is stronger than friendship.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Is there anything CRISPR can’t do? Scientists have wielded the gene-editing tool to make scores of genetically modified organisms, as well as to track animal development, detect diseases and control pests. Now, they have found yet another application for it: using CRISPR to create smart materials that change their form on command. The shape-shifting materials could be used to deliver drugs, and to create sentinels for almost any biological signal, researchers report in Science on 22 August¹. The study was led by James Collins, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Collins’ team worked with water-filled polymers that are held together by strands of DNA, known as DNA hydrogels. To alter the properties of these materials, Collins and his team turned to a form of CRISPR that uses a DNA-snipping enzyme called Cas12a. (The gene-editor CRISPR–Cas9 uses the Cas9 enzyme to snip a DNA sequence at the desired point.) The Cas12a enzyme can be programmed to recognize a specific DNA sequence. The enzyme cuts its target DNA strand, then severs single strands of DNA nearby. This property allowed the researchers to build a series of CRISPR-controlled hydrogels containing a target DNA sequence and single strands of DNA, which break up after Cas12a recognizes the target sequence in a stimulus. The break-up of the single DNA strands triggers the hydrogels to change shape or, in some cases, completely dissolve, releasing a payload (see ‘CRISPR-controlled gels’).

More here.

Master Class, Tosca

Charles King in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

A living room in Grantwood, N.J., has a good claim to being the birthplace, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, of a new science of humankind. Amid the demands of advising and fund-raising, the chair of the Columbia University anthropology department, Franz Boas, had decided to host regular Tuesday evening seminars at his suburban home. His students, passing plates of oatmeal cookies, were elaborating a way of seeing the world. They called it cultural relativity. Their essential finding was that societies did not come rank-ordered as civilized or primitive, moral or deviant. Each culture was only a sampling taken from the vast inventory of possible human beliefs and practices.

Graduate students, established scholars, and visiting academics exchanged reports from the field. Ruth Benedict, a junior professor, had been recasting her earlier work on the American Southwest and editing articles for the Journal of American Folklore. Most of a recent issue had been taken up with a hundred-page study of folk religion on the Gulf Coast, written by the Boas student — and sometime novelist — Zora Neale Hurston. Margaret Mead, another of Boas’s advisees, was going through the field notes on the Omaha nation that she had compiled with her husband, Reo Fortune. Her Coming of Age in Samoa, a publishing phenomenon when it appeared in 1928, was still selling briskly in Manhattan bookshops.

The venerable Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founders of modern fieldwork methods, would occasionally make an appearance on a visit from London, perhaps angling for a job were Boas ever to vacate his professorship.

More here.

James DeGregori in Stat News:

Just about everything we know that decreases the risk of developing cancer — exercise, healthful eating, not smoking, and the like — is associated with healthier tissues, which favor normal cell types.

Unfortunately, youthful, healthy tissues aren’t maintained forever. Aging and various behaviors or external insults, think cigarette smoking or radiation, modify tissues, and rarely for the better. Such changes favor cells with genetic changes that foster their ability to adapt to the altered environment. Damaged or degraded tissue favors undesirable (at least from our point of view) cell types — deviant cells that no longer play by the rules.

My lab has shown that the combination of changes in tissue environments and cells’ evolutionary responses to them can promote cancer.

This evolution-based theory doesn’t apply only to the origin of cancer. It is also relevant to treatment: Anti-cancer therapies that damage healthy tissues, like chemotherapy and radiation therapy, can promote the emergence of more aggressive cancer cells and even new types of cancer.

More here.

Ken Roth and Maya Wang in the New York Review of Books:

Classical totalitarianism, in which the state controls all institutions and most aspects of public life, largely died with the Soviet Union, apart from a few holdouts such as North Korea. The Chinese Communist Party retained a state monopoly in the political realm but allowed a significant private economy to flourish. Yet today, in Xinjiang, a region in China’s northwest, a new totalitarianism is emerging—one built not on state ownership of enterprises or property but on the state’s intrusive collection and analysis of information about the people there. Xinjiang shows us what a surveillance state looks like under a government that brooks no dissent and seeks to preclude the ability to fight back. And it demonstrates the power of personal information as a tool of social control.

Xinjiang covers 16 percent of China’s landmass but includes only a tiny fraction of its population—22 million people, roughly 13 million of whom are Uighur and other Turkic Muslims, out of nearly 1.4 billion people in China. Hardly lax about security anywhere in the country, the Chinese government is especially preoccupied with it in Xinjiang, justifying the resulting repression as a fight against the “Three Evils” of “separatism, terrorism, and extremism.”

Yet far from targeting bona fide criminals, Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang have been extraordinarily indiscriminate. As is now generally known, Chinese authorities have detained one million or more Turkic Muslims for political “re-education.”

More here.

Lewis Hodder at Art Critical:

Academic, stuffy, German – Theodor W. Adorno has become emblematic of a certain sense of unfeeling in art. He was critical of TV, partial to Schoenberg, and aggrieved by the crassness of life in exile in 1940s America. Some of his students, infatuated with the youthful spontaneity of 1968, supposed that Adorno represented the old institutions that continued into post-war Europe, seeing his criticisms of mass culture being ‘pre-digested’ as identical to the conservative dismissal of contemporary art, culture, and even values. Determined to take action, they scrawled ‘If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease’ on the blackboard. Three of them surrounded him and exposed their breasts as others handed out leaflets proclaiming, ‘Adorno as an institution is dead.’ Adorno would confide in Max Horkheimer, writing: ‘To have picked me of all people, I who have always spoken out against every type of erotic repression and sexual taboo!’

It is here, then, that we arrive at Aesthetics, a book that immediately appears to confirm this suspicion of conservatism; with lectures on Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics, the enlightenment, Bach, beauty, ‘sensual immediacy’, Jugendstil, they hardly relay the sense of urgency felt in Europe in 1968.

more here.

Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

And yet the issues on which Boas and Mead made their interventions, issues around race and gender, are now at the center of public life, and they bring all the nature-nurture confusion back with them. The focus of the conversation today is identity, and identity seems to be a concept that lies beyond both culture and biology. Is identity innate, or is it socially constructed? Is it fated, or can it be chosen or performed? Are our identities defined by the existing state of social relations, or do we carry them with us wherever we go?

These questions suggest that the nature-culture debate was always misconceived. As Geertz pointed out years ago, it is human nature to have culture. Other species are programmed to “know” how to cope with the world, but our biological endowment evolved to allow us to choose how to respond to our environment. We can’t rely on our instincts; we need an instruction manual. And culture is the manual.

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Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

As far as painting goes, Katz attributes his awareness of an uptown/downtown dichotomy to Edwin Denby, the great dance critic and poet and friend of painters, who wrote that downtown was where “everybody drank coffee and nobody had shows.” In the 1940s, Katz recalls, Surrealism (with its tony European pedigree) was the uptown choice in new painting, and Denby would have agreed: “Tchelitchev was the uptown master,” he wrote. The soon-to-be Abstract Expressionists—Pollock, de Kooning, and company—were still haunting the coffee shops and automats of the Village; their successors of the 1950s and early ’60s were recently chronicled in a 2017 exhibition at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965,” in which Katz was, of course, also featured.

The latitude with which Katz employs the uptown/downtown distinction eludes geography. Several of the artists in the show were never associated with any part of New York or even with urban life in general. For instance, Marsden Hartley, who is more easily associated with his native Maine, was represented in “Downtown Painting” by New England Sea View—Fish House, 1934, one of only two works on view from before the 1950s.

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Rachel Syme in Bookforum:

One evening in early 1950, the film mogul Louis B. Mayer hosted a small dinner party for the actress Gloria Swanson. She was fifty-one years old, which was not considered an ancient, crone-like age, even in an industry that values youth above all else. Still, she was in need of a professional boost. Mayer’s small soiree was something of a ceremonial gesture. Here was one of the last tycoons of classic Hollywood extending his hand and his hospitality to an actress who was tottering, on marabou-covered heels, back into the business after a decade-long fermata.

Swanson was one of the highest-paid—and most dazzlingly famous—stars of the silent-film era, after signing with Cecil B. DeMille when she was only nineteen. If Mary Pickford was America’s Sweetheart, and Theda Bara its Goth Vamp Id, then Gloria Swanson was the Fashionable Cool Girl, gallivanting around Hollywood in peacock plumage and beaded tassels. She wore clothing from Paris and shoes from Italy and rarely appeared in public without being camera-ready, her saucer eyes rimmed with kohl. She was a proto-influencer, the kind of celebrity who could get thousands of women to buy a brand of soap simply by mentioning it in a sidebar in Photoplay.

She was also smart enough to know when her value had exceeded that of the men she was making money for.

More here.

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

Nicholas Christakis and I are on the same page: We would definitely sacrifice our lives to save a billion strangers, perhaps even several hundred million, plucked at random from Earth’s population. But, for sure, not a thousand strangers, or a million. Those numbers seem, somehow, too insignificant. Christakis, the director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, shared this thought experiment on Twitter a few days ago as a poll that garnered over 2,000 votes: 12 percent would sacrifice their life for one stranger, 31 percent for a thousand strangers, 21 percent for a million strangers, and 35 percent for a billion strangers. “That’s completely implausible. I don’t know what to make of that,” Christakis said of that 12 percent. “I also don’t know what to make of the non-monotonicity of the responses—a larger fraction would sacrifice their life for a thousand people than for a million people. Nevertheless, thousands of people have answered, and it’s interesting to see that quite a few would sacrifice their lives for large numbers of strangers.”

Just how self-sacrificial should we be, especially toward people we don’t know? That question is just one of an array of biological and psychological riddles that Christakis tackles in his latest book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. It is more wide-ranging than his previous book, Connected, co-authored with political scientist James Fowler, which explored the power of social networks in shaping our lives. In Blueprint, Christakis marshals, in engaging and colorful prose, copious amounts of data—much of it stemming from his own lab—to make, in the end, a philosophical point about the fundamental goodness of humanity.

He also relies on his personal experience as a hospice doctor to make his case. “I have held the hands of countless dying people from all sorts of backgrounds,” Christakis writes in Blueprint, “and I do not think that I have met a single person who didn’t share the exact same aspirations at the end of life: to make amends for mistakes, to be close to loved ones, to tell one’s story to someone who will listen, and to die free of pain.” When I spoke to him recently, Christakis told me, “What I’m attempting to do in Blueprint is very much in keeping with my liberal philosophy, which is to regard it as a book of sociodicy. I try to vindicate the existence of society, despite the evils and wrongs in society. It’s an account of why we live socially and why there is good in society, despite the manifest horrors.

More here.

Releasing the Sherpas

The last two Sherpas were the strongest,
faithful companions, their faces wind-peeled,
streaked with soot and glacier-light on the snowfield
below the summit where we stopped to rest.

The first was my body, snug in its cap of lynx
fur, smelling of yak butter and fine mineral dirt,
agile, impetuous, broad-shouldered,
alive to the frozen bite of oxygen in the larynx.

The second was my intellect, dour and thirsty,
furrowing its fox-like brow, my calculating brain
searching for some cairn or chasm to explain
my decision to send them back without me.

Looking down from the next, axe-cleft serac
I saw them turn and dwindle and felt unafraid.
Blind as a diamond, sun-pure and rarefied,
whatever I was then, there was no turning back.

by Campbell McGrath
from Nouns and Verbs
Harper Collins, 2019

Marina N. Bolotnikova in Harvard Magazine:

John Rawls is to modern political philosophy, perhaps, what John Maynard Keynes is to economics. Many Harvard students and graduates will remember his 1971 work A Theory of Justice, mandatory reading in Bass professor of government Michael Sandel’s “Justice,” and in a number of philosophy and intellectual-history courses. Rawls famously posed the “original position,” a thought experiment in which people must decide how they would organize their ideal society without knowing what social position they will hold in it: rich or poor, man or woman, majority or minority. The late Conant University Professor trained some of the most influential philosophers in the world today. But he, and the nuances of his work, are also widely misremembered, argues assistant professor of government and social studies Katrina Forrester. Her forthcoming book, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press), excavates the complex history of Rawlsian thought, showing how his work remade political philosophy, and how philosophers today grapple with contemporary problems in Rawls’s shadow.

To understand Rawls’s impact, it’s important to understand the state of political philosophy before him.

More here.