Mairead Small Staid in The Paris Review:

“I read books to read myself,” Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Birkerts’s book, which turns twenty-five this year, is composed of fifteen essays on reading, the self, the convergence of the two, and the ways both are threatened by the encroachment of modern technology. As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” he wrote. “It is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and surficiality, into the realm of duration.”

Writing in 1994, Birkerts worried that distractedness and surficiality would win out. The “duration state” we enter through a turned page would be lost in a world of increasing speed and relentless connectivity, and with it our ability to make meaning out of narratives, both fictional and lived. The diminishment of literature—of sustained reading, of writing as the product of a single focused mind—would diminish the self in turn, rendering us less and less able to grasp both the breadth of our world and the depth of our own consciousness. For Birkerts, as for many a reader, the thought of such a loss devastates.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 1909, the Japanese scientist Kuniomi Ishimori collected spinal fluid from sleep-deprived dogs and injected it into active, rested pooches. Within hours, the latter fell into a deep sleep. By coincidence, a pair of French researchers did the same experiments a few years later and got the same results. These studies, and others like them, suggested that the blood of sleepy animals contains some kind of soporific secret sauce of chemicals. Ishimori called these “hypogenic substances.” Others labeled them “somnogens.”

The sources of these sleep-inducing chemicals have proved surprisingly elusive, and scientists have found only a few that fit the bill. Now Hirofumi Toda from the University of Pennsylvania has discovered another—a gene called nemuri that triggers sleep, at least in fruit flies. Unexpectedly, it alsobecomes active during infections and acts to kill incoming microbes. It seems to be part of a self-regulating system, analogous enough to an internal thermostat that we might call it a sleep-o-stat. It can send animals to sleep when they most need shut-eye, whether because they’re sick or because they just haven’t slept enough.

This sleep-o-stat works separately from the daily body clocks that make us feel more tired at night.

More here.

Jipson John and Jitheesh P.M. in The Wire:

British scholar David Harvey is one of the most renowned Marxist scholars in the world today. His course on Karl Marx’s Capital is highly popular and has even been turned into a series on YouTube. Harvey is known for his support of student activism, community and labour movements.

In an interview with The Wire, he talks about the problems arising out of the neo-liberal project, the resulting surge of populist politics and right-wing movements. He also talks about the relevance of Marx’s critique of capitalism in the present context and the threat to labour from automation.

Could you trace the origin of neo-liberalism? What were the structural reasons for its emergence?

The idealist interpretation of liberalism rests on a utopian vision of a world of individual freedom and liberty for all guaranteed by an economy based on private property rights, self-regulating free markets and free trade, designed to foster technological progress and rising labour productivity to satisfy the wants and needs of all.

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Sarah Lyall in the New York Times:

With his finely tuned editing ear, Benjamin Dreyer often encounters things so personally horrifying that they register as a kind of torture, the way you might feel if you were an epicure and saw someone standing over the sink, slurping mayonnaise directly from the jar.

There is “manoeuvre,” the British spelling of “maneuver,” for example, whose unpleasant extraneous vowels evoke the sound of “a cat coughing up a hairball,” Dreyer says. There is “reside,” with its unnecessary stuffiness. (“You mean ‘live’?”) There is the use of quotation marks after the term “so-called,” as in “the so-called ‘expert,’” which just looks stupid.

And there are the words Dreyer currently dislikes most, even more than he dislikes “munch” and “nosh” and other distasteful eating-adjacent terms. Sitting recently in his book-crammed office at Penguin Random House, where he is vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief for Random House — a division within the larger company — Dreyer scribbled “smelly” and “stinky” on a card and slid it speedily across the desk, as if the card itself was emitting a foul stench. “I can’t say them out loud,” he said.

More here.

Adam Tooze at his own website:

Davos 2019 was a downbeat affair. That at least is how regulars described it To a newcomer it did not seem that way. Indeed, that gloomy assessment would seem to call for a reality check. Most thoughtful people are a lot gloomier than the folks you bump into at Davos. The 2019 meeting may not have had heroes to celebrate. The luster may have come off crypto. But if Davos lacked pizzazz, neither was it overshadowed by the sense of fundamental crisis that should surely color any realistic assessment of the current world situation.

It may sound paradoxical, but is it not the case that our sense of what is realistic is as much defined by mood (Stimmung) as it is by specific empirical facts?

In this sense the mood of Davos is profoundly unrealistic. What sets the tone is a Vegas-style festival of corporate PR and self-presentation, adorned with a barrage of exhortatory slogans worthy of a Mao-era pep rally.

More here.

Adam Waters and EJ Dionne, Jr. in Dissent:

Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency and continues to govern as a man who is anti-intellectual, as well as anti-fact and anti-truth. “The experts are terrible,” Trump said while discussing foreign policy during the 2016 campaign. “Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts that we have.” But Trump belongs to a long U.S. tradition of skepticism about the role and motivations of intellectuals in political life. And his particularly toxic version of this tradition raises provocative and difficult questions: Are there occasions when anti-intellectualism is defensible or justified? Should we always dismiss charges that intellectuals are out of touch or too protective of established ways of thinking? In 1963 the historian Richard Hofstadter published Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, in which he traced a recurring mode of thought prevalent, as he saw it, in U.S. religion, business, education, and politics. “There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed,” he wrote. “[F]or this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies.” On the list of widely hated groups were Masons, abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, black Americans, immigrants, international bankers—and intellectuals.

Hofstadter’s skepticism of mass opinion—on both the left and the right—came through quite clearly. “[T]he heartland of America,” he wrote, “filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.” It is not an accident that these words sound familiar in the Trump era. A liberalism that viewed the heartland with skepticism was bound to encourage the heartland to return the favor.

More here.

William L. Katz in BlackPast.Org:

In January 1817 nearly 3,000 African American men met at the Bethel A.M.E. Church (popularly known as Mother Bethel AME) in Philadelphia and denounced the American Colonization Society’s plan to resettle free blacks in West Africa.  This gathering was the first black mass protest meeting in the United States. The black leaders who summoned the men to the church endorsed the ACS scheme and fully expected the black men who gathered there to follow their leadership.  Instead they rejected the scheme and forced the black leaders to embrace their position.

The genesis of this remarkable meeting can found in the early efforts of Captain Paul Cuffee, a wealthy black New Bedford ship owner.  After an 1811 visit to the British colony of Sierra Leone which had been established to receive free blacks and later recaptives — blacks freed by the British Navy from slaving vessels taking them from Africa to the New World — Cuffee envisioned a similar colony for African Americans somewhere in West Africa. To promote his vision, Cuffee, at great financial loss, brought 38 black volunteer settlers from the United States to Sierra Leone in 1815.

When he returned to the United States with news of the resettlement he persuaded many of the most influential black leaders of the era to support him in transporting larger numbers of African Americans to a yet to be determined colony on the West African coast.  Rev. Peter Williams of New York, Rev. Daniel Coker in Baltimore, and James Forten, Bishop Richard Allen, and Rev. Absalom Jones all of Philadelphia, who were the most important African American leaders in the United States at that time, enthusiastically endorsed the plan.

Given the dire situation faced by free blacks in the North during that era, their endorsement was understandable. The vote was denied to all but a handful of black men.  No black women could vote at the time.  Black workers were limited in the occupations they could pursue and the wages they could receive.  In Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other Northern cities they were subject to attack by white mobs and to the ever present threat of slavecatchers who kidnapped fugitive slaves and on occasion those who had never been enslaved. Thus to many leaders in the “free” North colonization seemed an attractive option.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)

David Robson in Aeon:

If you don’t speak Japanese but would like, momentarily, to feel like a linguistic genius, take a look at the following words. Try to guess their meaning from the two available options:

1. nurunuru (a) dry or (b) slimy?
2. pikapika (a) bright or (b) dark?
3. wakuwaku (a) excited or (b) bored?
4. iraira (a) happy or (b) angry?
5. guzuguzu (a) moving quickly or (b) moving slowly?
6. kurukuru (a) spinning around or (b) moving up and down?
7. kosokoso (a) walking quietly or (b) walking loudly?
8. gochagocha (a) tidy or (b) messy?
9. garagara (a) crowded or (b) empty?
10. tsurutsuru (a) smooth or (b) rough?

The answers are: 1(b); 2(a); 3(a); 4(b); 5(b); 6(a); 7(a); 8(b); 9(b) 10(a).

If you think this exercise is futile, you’re in tune with traditional linguistic thinking. One of the founding axioms of linguistic theory, articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 19th century, is that any particular linguistic sign – a sound, a mark on the page, a gesture – is arbitrary, and dictated solely by social convention. Save those rare exceptions such as onomatopoeias, where a word mimics a noise – eg, ‘cuckoo’, ‘achoo’ or ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ – there should be no inherent link between the way a word sounds and the concept it represents; unless we have been socialised to think so, nurunuru shouldn’t feel more ‘slimy’ any more than it feels ‘dry’.

Yet many world languages contain a separate set of words that defies this principle. Known as ideophones, they are considered to be especially vivid and evocative of sensual experiences.

More here.

Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic:

In the year 2514, some future scientist will arrive at the University of Edinburgh (assuming the university still exists), open a wooden box (assuming the box has not been lost), and break apart a set of glass vials in order to grow the 500-year-old dried bacteria inside. This all assumes the entire experiment has not been forgotten, the instructions have not been garbled, and science—or some version of it—still exists in 2514.

By then, the scientists who dreamed up this 500-year experiment—Charles Cockell at the University of Edinburgh and his German and U.S. collaborators—will be long dead. They’ll never know the answers to the questions that intrigued them back in 2014, about the longevity of bacteria. Cockell had once forgotten  about a dried petri dish of Chroococcidiopsis for 10 years, only to find the cells were still viable. Scientists have revived bacteria from 118-year-old cans of meat and, more controversially, from amber and salt crystals millions of years old.

All this suggests, according to Ralf Möller, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center and collaborator on the experiment, that “life on our planet is not limited by human standards.” Understanding what that means requires work that goes well beyond the human life span.

More here.