Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Since the 1950s, scientists have had a pretty good idea of how muscles work. The protein at the centre of the action is myosin, a molecular motor that ratchets itself along rope-like strands of actin proteins — grasping, pulling, releasing and grasping again — to make muscle cells contract.

The basics were first explained in a pair of landmark papers in Nature^1,2, and they have been confirmed and elaborated on by detailed molecular maps of myosin and its partners. Researchers think that myosin generates force by cocking back the long lever-like arm that is attached to the motor portion of the protein.

The only hitch is that scientists had never seen this fleeting pre-stroke state — until now.

In a preprint published in January³, researchers used a cutting-edge structural biology technique to record this moment, which lasts just milliseconds in living cells.

More here.

Lawrence Weschler and Rich Blint at Wondercabinet:

Weschler: It’s interesting in this context, you mentioned a second ago Giovanni’s Room, where part of the story is clearly about a deeply closeted white figure, an American in Paris, who gets involved with somebody who is clearly much more at ease with his sexuality. The relationship just curdles and he destroys both himself and his lover through his inability to be free. And he’s not only talking about gayness in that situation.

Blint: It’s all about American innocence. What Baldwin does in that novel that I find so compelling—and to put in a quick little plug here, a panel that Bill T. Jones and I have been working on for the festival called “After Giovanni’s Room: Baldwin and Queer Futurity,” will be held at NYLA—is precisely to this point. {For a video of the eventual panel, see here.} David, the lead character in that novel, is just part of what Baldwin calls the “ignorant armies”: these white men who take their position, life, trajectory in the world for granted, in a white patriarchal society. {It’s perhaps worth noting in this context that Giovanni’s Room came out within a few months, in 1955-56, of Graham Greene’s prescient Vietnam novel The Quiet American.—LW} It’s a story of innocence, of the refusal to be sullied by the contradictions of history, which is partly why Giovanni is there as a foil.

more here.

Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

It is one of the great love stories of history and therefore inherently interesting because who isn’t interested in a great love story? Actually, it is a terrible love story as well. That is also what makes it interesting. The love part of the love story only lasted about a year in the early twelfth century. That’s when the great philosopher Peter Abelard was in Paris teaching and making fools of the other great minds to be found in Paris at the time, at least as he tells it, but other sources seem to confirm that Abelard was indeed just sharper and more witty and quicker on his feet than anyone else, plus he was a damn good poet and wrote wonderful popular songs and was handsome as hell.

Also in Paris was Heloise, a somewhat mysterious person (from whence did she spring?) who  managed to become a great Latinist and though a young woman perhaps in her late teens or early twenties was known to be amongst the more learned people of her age, especially when it came to those much revered classical authors like Cicero and Seneca and the like. Also she was beautiful of course.

More here.

John Horgan at his own website:

I interviewed de Waal in 2007 while researching my book The End of War. At the time, high-profile scientists were promoting the notion that humans are genetically predisposed to war. As evidence, they cited the violence of our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees. In his influential 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, anthropologist Richard Wrangham declared: “Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression.” This hypothesis, which I call the deep-roots theory of war, was embraced by public intellectuals like Steven Pinker and Francis Fukuyama.

I discussed the deep-roots theory with de Waal on June 12, 2007, at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Georgia, which houses chimpanzees and monkeys. De Waal was tall with sandy-colored hair. He still spoke with a faint Dutch accent, although he left his native Holland in the 1980s. We chatted in a watchtower overlooking a yard where three male chimps and a dozen females lolled, lazily nitpicking and sniffing each other.

Against this backdrop, de Waal heatedly rejected the widespread belief in “some sort of blind aggressive drive that makes us go to war.”

More here.

Editor’s Note: I never met Frans in person but we exchanged scores of emails and he even wrote for 3QD for a while. He was, in addition to being one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, a brilliant writer and explicator of difficult science. He will be very much missed by many, including me. I had no idea he was ill and was shocked to hear of his death at the young age of 75. His writings for 3QD can be seen here.

From Phys.org:

The Netherlands-born scientist spent decades studying chimpanzees and apes, and his biological research eventually helped debunk the theory that primates including humans were naturally “nasty” and aggressive competitors.

“De Waal shattered long-held ideas about what it means to be an animal and a human,” Emory, based in Atlanta in the US state of Georgia, said in its statement.

“He demonstrated the roots of human nature in our closest living relatives through his studies of conflict resolution, reconciliation, cooperation, empathy, fairness, morality, social learning and culture in chimpanzees, bonobos and capuchin monkeys.”

Lynne Nygaard, chair of Emory’s Department of Psychology, remembered de Waal as “an extraordinarily deep thinker” who could offer “insights that cut across disciplines.”

More here.

Portrait of a Romantic

He is in love with the land that is always over
The next hill and the next, with the bird that is never
Caught, with the room beyond the looking-glass.

He likes the half-hid, the half-heard, the half-lit,
The man in the fog, the road without an ending,
Stray pieces of torn words to piece together.

He is well aware that man is always lonely,
Listening for an echo of his cry, crying for the moon,
Making the moon his mirror, weeping in the night.

He often dives in the deep-sea undertow
Of the dark and dreaming mind.  He turns at corners,
Twists on his heel to trap his following shadow.

He is haunted by the face behind the face.
He searches for last frontiers and lost doors.
He tries to climb the wall around the world.

by: A. S. J. Tessimond
from Poetic Outlaws

Jamie Ducharme in Time:

Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound are already extremely popular: by 2030, about 10% of the U.S. population will be on one of these drugs and the category’s sales will surpass $100 billion, according to some projections. On March 18, they got another major cultural boost from Oprah Winfrey, who shared her own experience with—and support for—these medications in an ABC special called “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution.”

During the special, Winfrey talked about how using one of these weight-loss drugs (she did not say which) changed her life and opened her eyes to the reality that obesity is a disease, rather than a choice. “All these years, I thought all of the people who never had to diet were just using their willpower, and they were for some reason stronger than me,” Winfrey said.

More here.

Jeffrey McDonnell in Science:

As a Ph.D. student, I spent many days and nights standing on a steep forested slope in the rain, measuring how water drops move into the soil. I loved the outdoors, and it was more like play than work. Many nights, I would dream about my research. I was endlessly curious about what I saw in the field and thrilled when I could connect it to what I read. My ideas seemed to flow like the stream I was trying to understand. But when I became a professor, I was inundated with responsibilities and my creative stream slowed to a trickle. It took me decades to figure out how to revive it.

When I started my first faculty position, I no longer had the freedom to focus solely on research or think deeply about any given topic. I was consumed by pressing demands—staying one class ahead in my teaching, completing reviews for journals, the constant drum beat of proposal writing. As my lab grew, I became more of a research manager than a researcher. I let grant opportunities guide decisions about what research to pursue. I was like a scientific dilettante—flitting from one project to the next.

More here.

Elaine Velie at Hyperallergic:

A new documentary delves into the scandals that plagued the 1964 Venice Biennale, where Robert Rauschenberg became the first American to earn the Golden Lion grand prize amid allegations of a rigged jury. Critic and director Amei Wallach’s film Taking Venice (2023) delves into the sensationalized victory, illuminating the United States government’s obsession with its international image; the mid-century art world that launched the careers of artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol; and the ultimate triumph of Pop art at the eurocentric Venice Biennale. The film will screen for the public at New York’s IFC Center on May 17 and at Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles on May 24.

As Taking Venice recounts it, Rauschenberg’s win solidified the US as the center of the art market, and Europeans were not happy. Newspaper headlines flash throughout the film, bearing declarations that the Americans were “colonizing Europe,” among other claims.

more here.

Philippa Snow at the Paris Review:

“There isn’t really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does,” the artist Richard Phillips observed in 2012. “Something happens when she steps in front of the camera … She is very aware of the way that an icon is constructed, and that’s something that is unique.” Phillips, who has long used famous people as his muses, was promoting a new short film he had made with the then-twenty-five-year-old actress. Standing in a fulgid ocean in a silvery-white bathing suit, her eyeliner and false lashes dark as a depressive mood, she is meant to look healthily Californian, but her beauty is a little rumpled, and even in close-up she cannot quite meet the camera’s gaze. The impression left by Lindsay Lohan (2011), Phillips’s film, is that of an artist’s model who is incapable of behaving like one, having been cursed with the roiling interior life of a consummate actress. Most traditional print models can successfully empty out their eyes for fashion films and photoshoots, easily signifying nothing, but Lohan looks fearful, guarded, as if somewhere just beyond the camera she can see the terrible future. Unlike her heroine Marilyn Monroe, Phillips also observed in a promotional interview, Lohan is “still alive, and she’s more powerful than ever.”

more here.

Dolores McElroy in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

When I read that Barbra Streisand’s memoir, My Name Is Barbra (2023), would be 970 pages long, a devilish chuckle bubbled up from deep within me. There was something ecstatic about this moment—How pharaonic the ambition! What an absolute thrill that a woman famous for show business—and not, say, the Nobel Peace Prize—believes her life story worthy of such an expansive word count. I am grateful that someone, somewhere, isn’t endlessly struggling to feign correct attitudes, that someone believes there is time and space to read 970 pages about the life and times of Barbra Streisand, one of those someones being Barbra Streisand.

Streisand knows that there is something socially “tone deaf” about her. She talks about this at length in her book. Throughout her life, she just can’t seem to tell the public what they want to hear. Early on, the press would ask if she was thrilled with her success, implicitly demanding a “golly gee whiz, I sure am” response. She just couldn’t give it.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

Voisin is a senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. There, she studies algebraic varieties, which can be thought of as shapes defined by sets of polynomial equations, the way a circle is defined by the polynomial x² + y² = 1. She is one of the world’s foremost experts in Hodge theory, a toolkit that mathematicians use to study key properties of algebraic varieties.

Voisin has won a litany of awards for her work, including the Clay Research Award in 2008, the Heinz Hopf Prize in 2015, and the Shaw Prize for mathematics in 2017. In January, she became the first woman to be awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics.

Quanta spoke with Voisin about the creative nature of mathematics. The interview has been  condensed and edited for clarity.

More here.

Zaid Jilani in Persuasion:

Imagine you’re a middle-class, middle-aged mom in any number of American suburbs outside Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, or Phoenix—the kind of civic-minded, active voter that both parties chase every election.

Since October, you’ve been paying more and more attention to the conflict in the Middle East. At first, you found yourself deeply sympathetic to the Israeli response to the October 7th Hamas-led terror attacks.

You’ve heard that Israel has treated the Palestinians unfairly for years, but how could that justify such a gruesome slaughter of civilians? You decide that Israel has a right to defend itself and tell your friends and coworkers that the country should do what it has to do in order to destroy Hamas and other militant groups.

More here.

Gideon Lasco in Sapiens:

As an anthropologist, this intimacy with cats fascinates me because they represent another instance of how “human culture” is in fact made up of our relationships with nonhumans. Globally, cats have accompanied humans since ancient times, beginning in Western Asia almost 10,000 years ago. Humans initially welcomed them in their nascent settlements for their ability to control rodents; today cats can be found anywhere there’s a human presence—including in cyberspace.

But what makes cats especially loved in Turkey, and what can we learn from this special relationship in one particular country?

More here.

Sonia Faleiro in The New York Times:

Rihanna, Mark Zuckerberg, bejeweled elephants and 5,500 drones. Those were some of the highlights of what is likely the most ostentatious “pre-wedding” ceremony the modern world has ever seen.

On a long weekend in early March, members of the global elite gathered to celebrate the impending nuptials of the billionaire business titan Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son, Anant, and Radhika Merchant. Monarchs, politicians and the ultrawealthy, including Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump, descended on an oil refinery city in the western Indian state of Gujarat for an event so extravagant you’d be forgiven for thinking it was, well, a wedding. But that will take place in July. For the long windup to the big day, some of Bollywood’s biggest stars, though invited as guests, took to the stage to sing and dance in what amounted to a bending of the knee to India’s most powerful family.

Watching the event, I couldn’t help thinking of the 1911 durbar, or royal reception, when King George V was proclaimed emperor of India. Once India won its independence from Britain in 1947, it committed itself to becoming a democratic welfare state — an audacious experiment that resulted in what is now the world’s largest democracy. But in advance of this year’s general election, expected to begin in April, the Ambani-Merchant matrimonial extravaganza shows us where true power in India now lies: with a handful of people whose untrammeled wealth and influence has elevated them to the position of India’s shadow leaders.

More here.

Michael Schulson in Undark:

IT’S A FAMILIAR pandemic story: In September 2020, Angela McLean and John Edmunds found themselves sitting in the same Zoom meeting, listening to a discussion they didn’t like. At some point during the meeting, McLean — professor of mathematical biology at the Oxford University, dame commander of the Order of the British Empire, fellow of the Royal Society of London, and then-chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense — sent Edmunds a message on WhatsApp.

“Who is this fuckwitt?” she asked.

The message was evidently referring to Carl Heneghan, director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford. He was on Zoom that day, along with McLean and Edmunds and two other experts, to advise the British prime minister on the Covid-19 pandemic. Their disagreement — recently made public as part of a British government inquiry into the Covid-19 response — is one small chapter in a long-running clash between two schools of thought within the world of health care. McLean and Edmunds are experts in infectious disease modeling; they build elaborate simulations of pandemics, which they use to predict how infections will spread and how best to slow them down. Often, during the Covid-19 pandemic, such models were used alongside other forms of evidence to urge more restrictions to slow the spread of the disease. Heneghan, meanwhile, is a prominent figure in the world of evidence-based medicine, or EBM. The movement aims to help doctors draw on the best available evidence when making decisions and advising patients. Over the past 30 years, EBM has transformed the practice of medicine worldwide.

More here.