Hannah Ongley in Document:

Entering Red Bull Arts Detroit, housed in the cavernous basement of the old Eckhardt & Becker Brewery in Eastern Market, you’re lured toward the main exhibition space by a pink fluorescent glow. The curious light emanates from a neon sign by the multidisciplinary Detroit artist Tiff Massey, one of Red Bull’s three artists in residence for the program’s first cycle of 2019, reading, “Bitch don’t touch MY HAIR!!” Written in cursive font and followed by exactly two exclamation points, it’s both foreboding and inviting, an entryway into Massey’s world. Massey, who holds an MFA in metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art, has exhibited in international galleries across Europe, but she’s adamant about who she creates for: black women. The centerpiece of her Red Bull Arts Detroit exhibition is a shrine-like display of 22 hairstyles, each braided and beaded in the same splendid shade of gold, and walled in on either side by distorted black-and-white photographs from an African-American hair salon, which feature primarily caucasian models. On an adjacent wall is a row of oversized pink barrettes repurposing another aspect of Detroit’s history: big manufacturing. “Craftsmanship is first,” Massey tells curator Laura Raicovich in the following conversation. “I want you to be seduced by the work. Whether it’s the colors, or the form, or whatever.”

Raicovich, through her work as a curator and author, is also a fearless advocate for equity in the historically exclusive art world. She resigned from her position as director of the Queens Museum at the beginning of last year, after riling more conservative board members with progressive initiatives including increased access for the local immigrant community.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

If you ever take a visit to the physical site of CERN, where the Large Hadron Collider is located, you’ll immediately notice something wonderful about the streets. They’re all named after influential, important figures in the history of physics. Titans such as Max Planck, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein have all been honored, along with many others.

One of the more interesting surprises you might find, if you look hard enough, is a street honoring the physicist Wolfgang Paul. You might immediately think, “oh, someone vandalized the street of Wolfgang Pauli,” the famous physicist whose exclusion principle describes the behavior of all the normal matter in our Universe. But no; Pauli has his own street, and Wolfgang Paul is entirely his own Nobel-winning physicist. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.

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Samanth Subramanian in The New Yorker:

Nine months can make a person, or remake her. In October, 1997, Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her first novel, “The God of Small Things.” India had just turned fifty, and the country needed symbols to celebrate itself. Roy became one of them. Then, in July of 1998, she published an essay about another such symbol: a series of five nuclear-bomb tests conducted by the government in the sands of Rajasthan. The essay, which eviscerated India’s nuclear policy for placing the lives of millions in danger, wasn’t so much written as breathed out in a stream of fire. Roy’s fall from darling to dissident was swift, and her landing rough. In India, she never attained the heights of adulation again.

Not that she sought them. Through the decades since, Roy has continued to produce incendiary essays, and a new book, “My Seditious Heart,” collects them in a volume that spans nearly nine hundred pages. The book opens with her piece from 1998, “The End of Imagination,” but India’s nuclear tests were not Roy’s first infuriation. In fact, in 1994—after she had graduated from architecture school, and around the time that she was acting in indie films, teaching aerobics, and working on her novel—she wrote two livid articles about a Bollywood movie’s unscrupulous depiction of the rape of a real, living woman. That tone has never faltered. Every one of the essays in “My Seditious Heart” was composed in the key of rage.

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Jon Kelvey in Smithsonian:

Why organisms began having sex, rather than simply reproducing asexually as life did for billions of years—and still does, in the case of single-celled organisms and some plants and fungi—is a bit of a mystery. Sexual reproduction evolved around a billion years ago or more, despite the additional energy required and the seeming hinderance of needing to find a suitable mate. Prevailing theories hold that sex became the dominant form of reproduction due to the benefits of greater genetic diversity, allowing offspring to adapt to changing environments and keeping species one step ahead of parasites that evolved to plague the parents.

But in a new paper in PLOS Biology, a team of scientists led by the University of Montpellier in France and Deakin University in Australia suggest another reason life started and kept having sex: the threat of transmissible, cancerous freeloaders. “We suggest that sexual reproduction evolves to prevent invasion by transmissible selfish neoplastic cheater cells, henceforth referred to as transmissible cancer cells,” Frederic Thomas, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montpellier and lead author of the study, says in an email. “To our knowledge, this selective scenario for the initial evolution of sex across the tree of life is novel.”

Cancer wasn’t a problem for the earliest life forms, prokaryotes, or single-celled organisms that lack a cell nucleus, such as bacteria and archaea. These creatures reproduce asexually, making a copy of their singular chromosome and essentially cloning themselves. But things changed with the evolution of eukaryotes more than 2.5 billion years ago. These organisms contain central nuclei encompassing their genomes in a set of chromosomes. Groups of eukaryotes joined together to form the first multicellular organisms—the predecessors of all complex life on Earth, from plants to insects and reptiles to mammals. When these organisms reproduce, genetic material is contributed from two mates, creating genetically unique offspring.

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James Poulos in The New Atlantis:

The discourse about digital discourse betrays a fundamental misunderstanding. Focused almost entirely on social media and its pathologies, it fails to grasp that social media itself isn’t digital at all, properly seen, but is really just television pushed to its limit. Social media is imagination, exaggeration, and appearance on a mass scale, thriving on crisis, shock, and fear. From this standpoint, what went wrong with social media is what has always been wrong with television — only taken to the extreme by putting the production technology into everyone’s hands. Social media was built on TV culture’s fantasy that ever-greater “connectivity” would perfect democracy and bring harmony. This fantasy is now dashed to pieces. But casting our current crisis as one of “digital discourse,” or of social media betraying democracy, risks that we obscure both the nature of social media and of the threats the digital era will pose.

To understand televisual technology, we have to consider it in light of the culture it helped to produce. Televisual tech shaped a psychological and social environment where the starting point for personal and political agency was imagination. Those who could best imagine the future, and relay the right images to the world, could best change the world. In its mass production and broadcast of ever more images that heightened, exaggerated, exceeded, or supplanted reality, television brought to the masses this imaginary power in a hypnotic new way. Television was democratic in its reach, although not in its use. Those who could master the new form of communication — elite broadcasters, advertisers, campaigners, activists, gurus, “leaders” — wielded tremendous power and gained new wealth. Those on the receiving end had their perceptions, feelings, and ideas decisively shaped and filtered by the new “imagineers,” to borrow Disney’s name for its theme park engineers.

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…. “The first projectile hit the sea wall of Gaza City’s little harbour a little after four o’clock. As the smoke from the explosion thinned, four figures could be seen running, ragged silhouettes, legs pumping furiously along the wall. Even from a distance of 200 metres, it was obvious that three of them were children.
…. “Jumping off the harbour wall, they turned on to the beach, attempting to cross the short distance to the safety of the Al-Deira hotel, base for many of the journalists covering the Gaza conflict.
…. “They waved and shouted at the watching journalists as they passed a little collection of brightly coloured beach tents, used by bathers in peacetime.
…. “It was there that the second shell hit the beach, those firing apparently adjusting their fire to target the fleeing survivors.
…. “As it exploded, journalists standing by the terrace wall shouted: “They are only children.” In the space of 40 seconds, four boys who had been playing hide and seek among the fishermen’s shacks built on the wall were dead.” — Peter Beaumont in Gaza City, The Guardian, 16 July 2014

For Mohammed Zeid, Age 15

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.

The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October’s breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

So don’t gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying — friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.

by Naomi Shihab Nye
from Tender Spot: Selected Poems
Bloodaxe, 2008

Ed Park at The Believer:

Something unsettling resides at the heart of the most beloved books for very young children—that is, the literature for illiterates. This note is a belated attempt to grapple with the horror of infinite regression as it manifests in certain of these works, and perhaps to sound the alarm for parent-caretaker voice-over providers who are too sleep-deprived to notice what’s actually going on.

In Margaret Wise Brown’s Little Fur Family (1946, illustrated by Garth Williams), a small, hirsute child of indeterminate species spends a day in the woods. This gentle narrative of forest exploration appears completely anodyne. But at one point, the Little Fur Child meets another hairy biped, a fraction of his size. If we were to follow this second child (call it the Littler Fur Child), would he come across a third one, even smaller? There would be a fourth, a fifth… Maybe that speck on the edge of your page is not a bit of grime but the furry creature’s 17^th or 717^th iteration. Illustration has no limit. You could show a picture of the inside of an atom if you wanted. Maybe the 10^756th LFC is dancing, invisible, on the tip of your knuckle as you read this sentence.

more here.

Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

In 1990, using the name Smog, the singer and songwriter Bill Callahan released his début album, “Sewn to the Sky.” It’s a discordant, inscrutable, and periodically frustrating collection of mostly instrumental, low-fidelity noise, and contains few hints of the lucid and tender folk music that he would be making almost thirty years later. In 1991, Callahan signed with Drag City, a Chicago-based independent record label that specializes in oddball rock and roll. He began collaborating with the producers Jim O’Rourke, who was later a member of Sonic Youth, and John McEntire, of the band Tortoise. His music became progressively more melodic, though it never stopped being deeply idiosyncratic. Callahan just turned fifty-three. His new double album, “Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest,” is a powerful meditation on home and its comforts, a collection of stirring songs that suggest that family can be a kind of salvation.

more here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

There is no concise answer to the question ‘what is Bauhaus?’ First it was a school with a specific curriculum in art and design. Later, it became a style and a movement and a look (geometric, elegant, spare, modern) that could be found to greater and lesser degrees in art, craft and architecture all over the world. But in retrospect, I think it is fair to say that Bauhaus was always an attempt to fuse the craft and aesthetic ideas of a pre-modern age with the realities of 20th century industry and technology. Bauhaus wanted to find out how materials like concrete and steel and glass could be beautiful and could be shaped and designed in such a way as to serve the aesthetic needs of humankind. In this, Bauhaus was very much in the spirit of the movements that preceded it, like Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau. But Bauhaus went further than any of those movements in its embrace of what we now think of as the Modern with a big ‘M’. Some would say it went too far.

The history of Bauhaus is the history of this debate – what is the proper relationship of art and design to industry and technology?

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

Israeli physicists think they have confirmed one of the late Stephen Hawking’s most famous predictions by creating the sonic equivalent of a black hole out of an exotic superfluid of ultra-cold atoms. Jeff Steinhauer and colleagues at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) described these intriguing experimental results in a new paper in Nature.

The standard description of a black hole is an object with such a strong gravitational force that light can’t even escape once it moves behind a point of no return known as the event horizon. But in the 1970s, Hawking demonstrated that—theoretically, at least—black holes should emit tiny amounts of radiation and gradually evaporate over time.

Blame the intricacies of quantum mechanics for this Hawking radiation. From a quantum perspective, the vacuum of space continually produces pairs of virtual particles (matter and antimatter) that pop into existence and just as quickly annihilate away. Hawking proposed that a virtual particle pair, if it popped up at the event horizon of a black hole, might have different fates: one might fall in, but the other could escape, making it seem as if the black hole were emitting radiation. The black hole would lose a bit of its mass in the process. The bigger the black hole, the longer it takes to evaporate. (Mini-black holes the size of a subatomic particle would wink out of existence almost instantaneously.)

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Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times:

The debate over meritocracy has been intensifying. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Do we want it or don’t we?

The worldwide demand for talent and the accelerated use of standardized testing (and cognitive ability testing in particular) are driving this debate. Who gets to decide who has merit? And even more fundamentally, what is merit?

One thing is clear: The dispute is splitting the ranks of both the political left and the political right.

From a positive vantage point, meritocracy is “a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people on the basis of talent, effort and achievement.”

Viewed negatively, such a system discriminates against the less highly educated and those who perform less well on ability tests. At the same time, meritocracy privileges an arrogant, complacent and entrenched elite — largely white, increasingly Asian — with the money, resources and connections to jump to the head of the line.

More here.

Susan Schneider in the New York Times:

Editors’ note: This is the third installment in a new series, “Op-Eds From the Future,” in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years from now. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.

As artificial intelligence creates large-scale unemployment, some professionals are attempting to maintain intellectual parity by adding microchips to their brains. Even aside from career worries, it’s not difficult to understand the appeal of merging with A.I. After all, if enhancement leads to superintelligence and extreme longevity, isn’t it better than the alternative — the inevitable degeneration of the brain and body?

At the Center for Mind Design in Manhattan, customers will soon be able to choose from a variety of brain enhancements: Human Calculator promises to give you savant-level mathematical abilities; Zen Garden can make you calmer and more efficient.

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Mirza Waheed in The Guardian:

It’s a source of great irony and outrage that the Turkish authorities have decided to investigate Elif Shafak for writing about sexual violence just as her latest novel, a profound, humanising narrative about the victims of sexual violence, is being published in Turkey and elsewhere. It starts with an explosive premise, as we dive into the mind of sex worker “Tequila Leila”, who is dying in a rubbish bin on the outskirts of Istanbul. As her brain begins to shut down, Leila, assuming the roles of digressive raconteur and her own biographer, goes back in time to trace the story of the little girl from the provinces who ends up as a two-column crime story in the city’s newspapers. She recalled things she did not even know she was capable of remembering, things she had believed to be lost for ever. Time became fluid, a free flow of recollections seeping into one another, the past and the present inseparable.

Thus begins an extraordinary tale of a brutalised, broken but profoundly courageous woman who retains her humanity despite a world bent on crushing her at every turn. We see beautifully rendered, tender vignettes of her early life, as she remembers her birth and childhood in the house of well-to-do tailor Haroun, who has been waiting a long time for offspring from his two wives. As a free-spirited girl, Leila soon discovers that almost everythingin life is either forbidden to her or predetermined by age‑old familial codes.

Early in the novel, having captured the minutiae of domestic and social life in the eastern province of Van, Shafak recounts a hair-raising scene when Leila is six, during a family picnic at a beachside hotel. It’s this harrowing incident, almost unbearable to witness, that turns out to be the pivot around which young Leila’s life turns. We are then hurled into the brutal realities of life in the capital. “Istanbul was an illusion. A magician’s trick gone wrong.”

More here.

Ashley Yeager in The Scientist:

About a year ago, some—but not all—of the mice in Janelle Ayres’s lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, got really sick. Ayres and her colleagues had infected each of the animals with the pathogenic bacterium Citrobacter rodentium, and within a few days, some of the mice began losing weight. Their colons became severely inflamed, and the animals died not long after. But other mice that were also exposed to the bacterium looked perfectly healthy. All the mice were genetically identical. They were fed the same food, kept in the same kinds of cages, and had no notable differences in the composition of their microbiomes. “Yet half the animals died, and the other half survived,” exactly what she was aiming for, Ayres tells The Scientist.

…To try to understand what saved the survivors, Ayres and her colleagues examined the genes turned on in the mice’s livers, an organ that plays a major role in secreting signaling molecules to maintain homeostasis in the body. Compared with mice that died from the infection, the mice that survived expressed lots of genes linked with metabolizing iron. This indicated to Ayres that iron might help the animals cope with the infection, so she and her team decided to treat mice that were on the verge of dying from the C. rodentium infection with an iron supplement. The animals recovered. Intrigued, the team upped the stakes. They infected another set of mice with a dose of the bacterium that should kill all of the animals, not just half of them—then gave the animals iron. All of the mice survived. Still not satisfied, Ayres and her team infected a new set of mice with 1,000 times the lethal dose of the bacterium, followed by iron. “They were perfectly fine,” Ayres says, while infected mice not getting the iron supplement died within days.¹

Sequencing the genomes of C. rodentium in the control and iron-fortified mice revealed that the bacterium in the mice fed iron had accumulated mutations that tamped down expression of multiple genes for proteins in a virulence pathway, disabling its ability to cause disease. The bacteria, found in the colon, were, in essence, “just part of the [mice’s] microbiome now,” Ayres says.

More here.

The History of Poetry

Once the world was waiting for song
when along came this. Some said it was a joke
funny ha-ha but at the end too lachrymose
to last. Others that it was writ
holier than thou and should be catechized,
then set to turgid dirges, wept over
with gnashed fang, wrung palm.
The ancient declaimed it fad,
the young, old fogies play.
Almost everyone agreed, except the children,
who didn’t listen, it was kid’s stuff.

Centuries yawned and fell back, stuporous,
eons stretched out, soaking up beauty sleep.
Then one day a peasant, knowing he hurt too much,
remembered hurting too much, told his wife
he might have written it
if, in another life, he’d been born better,
at least literate.
And when the gods heard this
they hungered suddenly to become mortal
and join with us in lecherous praise.
Thus hereafter follows the story of their sins,
their cries made flesh by euphony and trope
they whispered to us that we take them down,
there great debauches, all made up
that we should emulate with our blood, pay in blood,
while they in the cheap seats, stomp the floor and clap—
all loss, all the fallible, all poetry.

by Peter Cooley
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Justin Erik Halldór Smith in his own blog:

Unlike talk of, say, badgers or ermine, talk of beavers seems always to be the overture to a joke. So powerful is the infection of the cloud of its strange humor that the beaver seems at least in part to blame for the widespread habit, among certain unkind Americans, of smirking at the mere mention of Canada. Nor is it the vulgar euphemism, common in North American English and immortalized in Les Claypool’s heartfelt ode, “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” (1995), that entirely explains this animal’s peculiar symbolic scent. The crude term for a woman’s genitals, “beaver”, itself builds on a long history in which the figure of the animal is held up as a mirror and a speculum of human venery, and also of the transcendence of this condition through virtue.

For most of its history the beaver, hunted for its medicinal castoreum, was sooner associated with male testicles, and with the horrible yet paradoxically emboldening prospect of their loss. Later, the beaver was taken up as the very model of the social animal, living in imagined New World dam communities built up through the ingenious collaborative labor of these hominoid rodents. Beavers, the “busy” American animals, embodied the work ethic so many thought necessary for the transformation of that wild continent.

It is worth considering the extent to which these two images of the beaver –the one focused upon its hind parts and their perceived virtues and vices, the other upon its industry– are but two acts in a single continuous history.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

It’s fun to spend time thinking about how other people should behave, but fortunately we also have an inner voice that keeps offering opinions about how we should behave ourselves: our conscience. Where did that come from? Today’s guest, Patricia Churchland, is a philosopher and neuroscientist, one of the founders of the subfield of “neurophilosophy.” We dig into the neuroscience of it all, especially how neurochemicals like oxytocin affect our attitudes and behaviors. But we also explore the philosophical ramifications of having a conscience, with an eye to understanding morality and ethics in a neurophilosophical context.

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Noam Chomsky and Scott Casleton in the Boston Review:

Scott Casleton: In the past you’ve suggested that the Democrats and Republicans aren’t too far apart where it counts, such as in their support for corporate power. Do you still think this, or is the small but growing shift in the younger wing of the Democratic Party a promising sign of change?

Noam Chomsky: There have been changes, even before the recent shift you mention. Both parties shifted to the right during the neoliberal years: the mainstream Democrats became something like the former moderate Republicans, and the Republicans drifted virtually off the spectrum. There’s merit, I think, in the observation by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that increasingly since the Newt Gingrich years—and strikingly in Mitch McConnell’s Senate—the Republican Party has become a “radical insurgency” that is largely abandoning normal parliamentary politics. That shift—which predates Donald Trump—has created a substantial gap between the two parties. In the media it’s often called “polarization,” but that’s hardly an accurate description.

More here.