by Jalees Rehman

Lingulodinium polyedrum is a unicellular marine organism which belongs to the dinoflagellate group of algae. Its genome is among the largest found in any species on this planet, estimated to contain around 165 billion DNA base pairs – roughly fifty times larger than the size of the human genome. Encased in magnificent polyhedral shells, these bioluminescent algae became important organisms to study biological rhythms. Each Lingulodinium polyedrum cell contains not one but at least two internal clocks which keep track of time by oscillating at a frequency of approximately 24 hours. Algae maintained in continuous light for weeks continue to emit a bluish-green glow at what they perceive as night-time and swim up to the water surface during day-time hours – despite the absence of any external time cues. When I began studying how nutrients affect the circadian rhythms of these algae as a student at the University of Munich, I marveled at the intricacy and beauty of these complex time-keeping mechanisms that had evolved over hundreds of millions of years.

Lingulodinium polyedrum (scanning electron micrograph Image Credit: FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, via Flickr)

Over the course of a quarter of a century, I have worked in a variety of biological fields, from these initial experiments in marine algae to how stem cells help build human blood vessels and how mitochondria in a cell fragment and reconnect as cells divide. Each project required its own set of research methods and techniques, each project came with its own failures and successes. But with each project, my sense of awe for the beauty of nature has grown. Evolution has bestowed this planet with such an amazing diversity of life-forms and biological mechanisms, allowing organisms to cope with the unique challenges that they face in their respective habitats. But it is only recently that I have become aware of the fact that my sense of biological beauty was a post hoc phenomenon: Beauty was what I perceived after reviewing the experimental findings; I was not guided by a quest for beauty while designing experiments. In fact, I would have been worried that such an approach might bias the design and interpretation of experiments. Might a desire for seeing Beauty in cell biology lead one to consciously or subconsciously discard results that might seem too messy?

I was prompted to revisit the role of Beauty in biology while reading a masterpiece of scientific writing, “Dreams of a Final Theory” by the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg in which he describes how the search for Beauty has guided him and many fellow theoretical physicists to search for an ultimate theory of the fundamental forces of nature. Weinberg explains that it is quite difficult to precisely define what constitutes Beauty in physics but a physicist would nevertheless recognize it when she sees it.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

At an Australian cricket club in Manhattan so dimly lit that I lift the nearest tea light so I can see the menu, I feel oddly at home; it is likely the haze of cultural nostalgia in these surroundings. As a Pakistani I grew up with cricket though I’m not much of a cricket fan and have had little direct exposure to it apart from a single visit to Lord’s Cricket Ground in London where I chose to talk to the gardener about the oldest trees on the premises instead of taking the famous cricket tour with my family, but here in New York, in the company of the Kashmiri-American poet Rafiq Kathwari, in the midst of cricket paraphernalia, framed action shots and lived-in colonial furniture, I’m on an unexpected bridge to a familiar time and place. I’m struck by the complexity of this nostalgia as I talk about life in our other countries, countries of birth, countries awaiting a rebirth, with the author of “In Another Country:” a collection of poems.

We talk about the personal-political in poetry. Cricket as a post-raj cultural idiom becomes even more poignant when I’m reminded of the traumas of Kashmir tied to the partition of India and Pakistan and of the intense political friction between the two countries that manifests itself every time the two countries are engaged in a cricket match against each other. Kashmir doesn’t play. It is played. And the political game is the ghost of the “great game” that the British began and that the Indian and Pakistani governments continue to play.

In South Asia, we know Kashmir as the land of immense natural beauty, mystics and poets, and a culture of great aesthetic delicacy and depth. In the West, Kashmir is synonymous with wool; not many know or care about the place or its long history of conflict.

As a voice of Kashmir and of the Kashmiri diaspora, Rafiq Kathwari’s most phenomenal gesture in this book of narrative poems that probe into psycho-social, historical and political, is his “protagonist” of sorts— the most haunting, fierce and charming persona in the book: his mother.

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by Paul Braterman

Glen Roy is a valley in the Western Scottish Highlands, just south of the Great Glen (home to Loch Ness), and draining through Glen Spean to Loch Linnhe, an inlet of the Atlantic. It is remarkable for the presence of the Roads, a series of parallel, almost horizontal, grooves in the hills on the sides of the glen. Clearly shorelines; but of what body of water? And why are there more than one of them?

Darwin thought the Roads represented vanished marine shorelines, one above the other as the result of vertical movement. Agassiz explained them, rather, as successive shorelines of a glacial lake, now vanished because the retaining glacier has melted away. If so, and if global warming is real, we might expect to see vanishing lakes today, as the glaciers retreat. We can, and we do, as my friend Peter Hess explains.

Roads of Glenroy, L., from Darwin, C. R., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 129: 39-81, 1839. Observations on the parallel roads of Glen Roy, and of other parts of Lochaber in Scotland, with an attempt to prove that they are of marine origin

Charles Darwin visited the Glenroy area in 1838, two years after his return from his round the world voyage on the Beagle. During that voyage, he had examined the geology as well as the plants and animals of the places he visited, and among them was the coastal area of Chile. This is marked by raised beaches inland where once had been shoreline, and Darwin correctly described these as the effects of uplift, which we now know to be driven by plate tectonics. So it was natural that Darwin should have applied a similar explanation to the Roads, suggesting that the Cairngorms, like the Andes, were a zone of uplift, and that the Roads were ancient beaches of the Atlantic, now some ten miles away. The alternative theory, that they represented shorelines of an ancient lake, ran up against a seemingly conclusive objection; such a lake could only have formed if there had been a barrier across the valley, but there was no trace of this.

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by Elise Hempel

Almost in my late fifties now (and possibly having a touch of ADHD), I've grown impatient with the whole glacial process of getting a poem published, which can sometimes mean more than a year between submitting a poem and seeing it in print. I no longer submit to journals who accept only snail-mail submissions, and I'm submitting more and more to online journals, for their overall speediness. You can't beat having your poem published within a month or week, or even a single day, of having submitted it. There are exceptions, of course: One particular online journal took longer than any print or online journal I've ever submitted to over the last 30 years, and one recently took the time to send me paper proofs (go figure).

One of the online journals my poems have recently appeared in (on?) posts a new poem every day, with rejection or acceptance occurring within one week. Though I don't always agree with the editor's choices, I like the journal very much. I like the editor. All the more reason for me to dislike what this editor says in the “About” section of the website: “Poems are selected on the whim of the editor and are not indicative of quality (a subjective concept).” The editor means to say, of course, that his/her acceptance or rejection of a poem is no indication of its quality or lack thereof, but you get the drift. When I first read this “disclaimer” I actually went to my dictionary and looked up the word “whim,” just to be sure my annoyance/amazement was founded. Whim: “1. A sudden or capricious idea; a fancy. 2. Arbitrary thought or impulse.” I'd rather this editor actually meant definition number 3: “A vertical horse-powered drum used as a hoist in a mine.” (What would this journal's slush pile be called?)

What's wrong with standards, with being someone who has them?

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by Katrin Trüstedt

Faced with a looming terrorist threat from the self-proclaimed Islamic State, attempts throughout Europe are being made to reclaim one's 'own identity.' While the conception of war between equal nation states is questioned by the structure of international terrorism, the dynamic of national identity experiences a comeback. A desire for given group identities is growing all over, regarding nation states with their supposed German, French or Polish identity, alliances of states such as Europe, or even more extended coalitions such as 'the West' or 'the Occident.' This desire is situated within a struggle for the dominance of one's own given 'values' and 'identities' against an antagonist: 'We' defend our way of life against those who attack it. Such claims become especially prevalent in the aftermath of attacks like the ones in Paris and Brussels. But what this form of self-assertion serves, is above all the goals of ISIS. Their terror seems not to be directed primarily at an opponent whose identity is already fixed, and who must be overwhelmed because of it. Instead, the specific form of ISIS terror should be understood as one of provocation, intended to prompt the formation of opposing identities, to evoke antagonism. From this perspective, the highly staged terrorist acts are the attempt to force a complex and diverse world into a framework of unambiguously opposed fronts.

Even before the proclamation of an “Islamic State,” a textbook was published with the telling title The Management of Savagery/Chaos, which openly stated its political objective: to force America, or 'the West,' out of its latent opposition to Islam and into the position of an active and identifiable foe (“Force America to abandon its war against Islam by proxy and force it to attack directly.”) The strategic management of chaos was aimed initially at the immediate sphere of influence of ISIS, the 'Muslim gray zone' in the Middle East, whose shattered condition was to provide the basis for a progressive polarization by violence (“dragging the masses into battle such that polarization is created between all of the people.”) Invoking the alleged original battle of the pioneers for the establishment of Islam, violence is conceived as a means of creating opposing fronts (“This was the policy of battle for the pioneers: to transform society into two opposing groups, igniting a violent battle.”) The particular brutality of such acts of terror thus should be attributed less to an existing antagonism and more to forcing and creating enmity. The violence aims at tearing apart a murky gray zone by establishing a front line across which two warring parties can confront each other. The supposed 'hardliners' who promote a 'relentless crackdown' on ISIS are actually following ISIS' script in executing the role ascribed to them.

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by Aasem Bakhshi

Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? ‘None of these is the cause. They only make up the combination of conditions under which every living process of organic nature fulfills itself. In the same way the historian who declares that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, will be just as right and wrong as the man who says that a mass weighing thousands of tons, tottering and undetermined, fell in consequence of the last blow of the pickaxe wielded by the last navy. In historical events great men – so-called – are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free-will, is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.

―Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Wouldn't you visualize Livia Drusila ― the wife of Roman emperor Augustus ― as a cunning and venomous political mastermind if your sole introduction to ancient Roman history is Robert Graves' engrossing autobiographical tale of emperor Claudius? Haven't you always visualized the last Roman emperor of Julio-Claudian dynasty, the infamous Nero, playing fiddle while Rome was burning in 64 AD? Can anyone have a more predominant image of Abu Sufyan's wife Hind Bint Utbah than the one represented by Irene Papas through her revengeful eyes and blood-dripping lips in the film The Message (1976) when she was shown chewing the liver of Prophet Muhammad's uncle Hamza after the Battle of Uhud?

These are all overpowering images, sustained over time, and hard to erase from the slate of our memories. It doesn't matter much if we argue, for instance, that it was not Hind but the black slave Wahshi who actually gouged out Hamza's liver according to a traditional Muslim historian Ibn Kathir's narrative or else that the earliest recording of the incident by the historian Ibn Ishaq is a dubious attribution because of broken chains of narration. Similarly, does it matter that fiddles were non-existent in first-century Rome and it is probably an anciently preserved metaphor, as Nero was famous for his love of extraordinary indulgence in music and play? It would not transform these images the least if we juxtapose the contradicting accounts of Suetonius, Cassius and Tacitus and present evidence that Nero even returned immediately from Antium and organized a great relief effort from his own funds, even opening his palaces for the survivors. And it is pretty much futile to argue ― after BBC popularized Graves' autobiographical account of Claudius by adapting it into a TV series ― that Livia might not be a such a thorough Machiavellian character, and in fact it was not her favorite pastime to scheme political upheavals and poison every other claimant to Roman throne.

Thus after centuries of dust settling over innumerable layers of narratives, the quest for historical certainty, for that which actually happened, is overpowered by popular images that refuse to erase themselves from collective memory.

And this, of course, is also the single most important contribution of British-American psychologist Lesley Hazleton's narrative history of Shia-Sunni split: refreshing and reinforcing some already held soppy images.

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by Max Sirak

It's happened to us all. Maybe it was a meet-and-greet cocktail hour. Perhaps a dinner party at your neighbors. Or, the dreaded first family holiday at your new boyfriend's or girlfriend's place…

“Oh, Max…it's so nice to finally meet you. We've heard so much about you. I'm Sara,” your girlfriend's sister says. Then, with her glass of rose′ as a pointer, she continues around the room. “That's my husband, Bill. Over there, chasing Monk, the dog, around the table are Eva, Clara, Jack, and Charlie. Playing cards in the living room are Jeff, Lindsay, Carl and Kate. Our other sister, Caitlyn, should be here with her husband, Will, and their two kids, John and Jim, any minute now. Please, come in. Get a drink. Make yourself at home.”

Two thoughts race across your mind: “There's no way in hell I'm going to remember all these people's names…”

And: “That poor dog.”

Now – remember – this is your new significant other's family you're meeting here. You've never seen any of them before. And, let's assume you're really into the person you're dating. You can see building a future with him or her. You want to make a good first impression on the family.

What do you do?

You go in, grab a drink, insinuate yourself into a conversation (or run around and chase Monk with the kids), be yourself, and have a good time – just like Sara said. That's a no-brainer, right?

How do you remember the names and faces of all these people in hopes of not making a complete ass of yourself at the next family get-together?

That's a full-brainer. And, also what we're going to talk about today. With help from our friend, Joshua Foer, we're going to learn a five step process adapted from professional memoirists (yes, that's a thing) to help us better remember names.

But before we learn the five steps for remembering names and faces, let's take a look at why it's so difficult…

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Dear Shahid

Many thanks for your lively note concerning ghazals
Just what I need to write: heart-rending ghazals

Meant to call you but have been busy this fall at school
New assignments every week, none for mapping ghazals

Enrolled in Prosody with Alfred Corn; Poetics with Lucie
Madness with Howard; precious time for encoding ghazals

Grace Shulman read at the Prosody class last week
First poem in her new book is a life-affirming ghazal

Let’s try meet soon. You cook Kashmiri Rogan Josh
I’ll do the dishes while Begum Akhtar sings ghazals

Shahid, it’s finally happening! Rafiq is falling in love:
She’s Sephardic, raised in Paris, likes kibitzing ghazals

Rafiq Kathwari, September 1999.

Rafiq Kathwari is the first non-Irish poet to win the Patrick Kavanagh Award. His debut collection is available here.

by Chris Bacas

Like a county road crew, a bunch of guys performing repetitive tasks under a fixed hierarchy, we couldn't indulge in brinksmanship on management's dime. One-upping colleagues on the bandstand wasn't going raise your profile. How cocky could I feel about an 8-bar solo on “Swanee River?” Team sport took a special commitment to getting up early or giving up a day-off. Inertia usually won. Poker was the best outlet for competitive spirit. Card games made the hit and runs go faster, too. Small-stakes gambling had the additional benefit of revealing character. When you called a cat's bluff with twenty-two bucks in the pot, you learned stuff about them.

On the bus, while you knotted your tie, someone asked, quite casually, if you played poker. With a yes, he'd get back to you. Four or five guys made a quorum. Next hit-and-run, the game was met. We first played atop a large cooler sitting length-wise in the aisle. A cap served as pot. Three seats on each side were reserved for play. The deal rotated. You'd half-stand to deliver cards to distant players. The head in the back of the vehicle presented a special problem. On the way to relieve themselves, most guys could tightrope walk across the armrests without breaking up the game. Coach and Z couldn't. They either waited for a hand to finish or if nature's call was urgent, we suspended play to let them through.

Each of us had favorite games, betting protocols and a personal style. A colleague drank Crown Royal. Every bottle came in a purple drawstring bag. Once you'd been around, you got your own bag for coins. Welcome to the Iron Lung. To gin up interest in a game, you randomly shook the bag of change; someone shook in answer. Even guys who didn't play, cocked a snoot toward the action. Roomie didn't partake, though he had a brilliant idea for a better playing surface. He took a busser's tray, attached Velcro strips underneath and on the armrests. That made a stable surface at table height. The tray stored easily behind a suit rack.

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by Libby Bishop

In a speech in St Petersburg, Alexander von Humboldt called for the first large-scale research project across Russia to investigate the effects of deforestation on climate. The year was 1829. This project embodied the key features of Humboldt's methods: empirical, comparative and collaborative. He was part of the Republic of Letters, an international community of scholars that exchanged the scientific ideas. Earlier, he had made a five-year voyage to the Americas where he identified 2000 new species, discovered the magnetic equator, and explored live volcanoes. Hungry for yet more knowledge, he wanted comparative data from the East as well. Despite being nearly 60 years old, Humboldt travelled 10,000 miles in six months into Russia collecting data on the climate effects of deforestation, irrigation, and silver smelting. He was even expert at data visualisation, as his Naturgemälde (“painting of nature”) demonstrates by showing plant names and zones on Chimboraza, a peak in the Andes that he climbed. This diagram exemplified his approach: data-driven, fusing science and art. Doggedly, he sought to unify and connect, resisting the tendency of Enlightenment science to divide and classify (Wulf 2015). By sharing his data in the belief that knowledge should advance public, not private, interests, he was ahead of his time.

Humboldt would have revelled in the volume and variety of big data available to us today. He faced dangers from jaguars, earthquakes, and altitude sickness; our challenges are of another kind. Humboldt collected data primarily about natural phenomena, and thus he did not have to worry about privacy and risks to research subjects from disclosing their data. Today, much of the data needed to further research in key areas, such as health, is about people. Protecting privacy is indeed a hard problem, but we can look to Humboldt's courage and ingenuity as a model for how to approach our data challenges. As he would have done, we must find and promote ways to deploy personal data for public good while protecting privacy. In Europe, this work will go forward under new rules recently announced governing the protection of personal data.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

I've lived in Massachusetts for 8 years now, and I've always been struck by the density and variety of trees here – maples, oaks, birches, beeches, chestnuts, hickories, white pines, pitch pines, hemlocks, firs. Look in any direction and your view is likely to be blocked by a tangle of trees: in the winter and early spring crisscrossing, leafless branches form a haze of brown and gray; in the summer, when the leaves have returned, there is a lush, impenetrable wall of green.

Apparently this wasn't always the case: in the mid 1800s, the naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden, was “able to look out of his back door in Concord [now on the outskirts of Boston] and see all the way to Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire because there were so few trees to block his view.” In Natural History of Western Massachusetts, Stan Freeman writes:

“in the early 1800s Massachusetts may have looked much like a farm state in the Midwest, such as Kansas and Indiana. Farm fields, barren of trees, stretched from horizon to horizon…”

Also consider this. In 1871, when the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) surveyed the stone fences that European farmers in the Northeast had constructed, they found 33,000 miles of such fences in Massachusetts alone! That number should make clear just how much land was put under the plough.

Things changed quickly, though. As the United States expanded westward in the 19th century, fulfilling its so called Manifest Destiny, the Midwest emerged as a major player in agriculture. Midwestern crops could be sent back east by railroad. The farmers of the New England, unable to compete, abandoned their lands. The forests grew back, hiding the thousands of miles of stone fences.

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by Richard King

‘If you want a vision of the future,' O'Brien tells a broken Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.'

Alternatively, you might consider this scenario, from the comedy sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Sound on BBC Radio 4 …

The time is about thirty years in the future; the place, the UK, where the actress and campaigner Joanna Lumley has just become a ‘benign dictator'. As her first act of office Lumley has instituted something called the ‘Old Lady Job Justification Hearings', a sort of soft Inquisition before which representatives of various occupations are obliged to appear in order to justify their existence – to prove they have ‘a proper job'. The hearings are run by elderly ladies, whose questions, though always sweetly expressed, are as kryptonite to the Man of Steel. (To a cosmetic surgeon: ‘Oh! A doctor, you say? That's lovely dear! So you make sick people feel better do you?') By the end of each session, the interviewee is reduced to a self-loathing mess, while the old ladies, not wanting to compound their distress, are all apologetic consolation – English tea and sympathy: ‘Don't worry, dear. Have another biscuit. Have you ever considered opening a little shop?'

Okay, it lacks the dystopian power of Orwell's post-atomic vision; but it's not without its interest …

Mitchell and Webb get one thing right, I think: the question of what constitutes meaningful work is about to become, if it hasn't already become, an inescapable modern theme. In capitalist democracies in particular high unemployment, wage stagnation and the expansion of the so-called ‘precariat' – the class of workers with low job security, low wages and no access to savings: the working poor, more or less – give an urgent edge to a more general feeling that the world of work is not as it should be, that it exists in spite of our wants and needs and not in order to facilitate them.

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by Mara Naselli

The Soviet writer Isaac Babel is well known for his relentless scrutiny in revision. He and his young wife retreated to the mountains to work on the stories that would become The Red Cavalry, published in 1926. “Achieving the form that he wanted was endless torture,” writes Nathalie Babel. “He would read my mother version after version; thirty years later she still knew the stories by heart.”

The writer Konstantin Paustovsky also recounts when he and Babel sat along the parapet of a cliff discussing the art of writing. Babel flung pebbles into the sea and then quashed his friend’s romantic notions.

“It’s all right for you other writers,” said Babel. “You can wrap things up in the dew of your imagination, as you put it! What an awful expression, by the way! But what would you do if you had no imagination? Like me? . . . I have to know everything, down to the last wrinkle, or I can’t even begin to write. ‘Authenticity,’ that’s the motto, and I’m stuck with it! That’s why I write so little and so slowly. Because it’s terribly hard.”

Babel explained his method: “I take out all the participles and adverbs I can. Participles are heavy, angular, they destroy the rhythm. They grate like tanks going over rubble. Three participles to one sentence, and you kill the language. . . . Adverbs are lighter. They can even lend you wings in a way. But too many of them make the language spineless. . . . A noun needs only one adjective, the choicest. Only a genius can afford two adjectives to one noun.”

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