Niki Seth-Smith in New Humanist:

Davies’s new book shows how “managing our happiness” is becoming an increasingly lucrative and insidious industry. True to its subtitle, “How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being”, it exposes the powerful interests that benefit from our increased willingness to monitor and meddle with our mental states. But Davies takes us much further than this. It is not just that Hudson Yard will soon exist. It is the fact that this Panopticon project is being heralded as “social progress” and – most disturbingly – that people actually want to live there. The Happiness Industry is the story of how we got here. Davies guides us through a cast of characters who took us forward in this zigzag journey. We start, naturally enough, with the founder of utilitarianism. We know Jeremy Bentham for his principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number”. Davies presents him as a forefather of the happiness industry. His ideas about the state and the free market working to punish and reward, through pleasure and pain, set the stage for “the entangling of psychological research and capitalism” that was to shape twentieth-century business.

The “science of happiness”, then, has been around at least since the Enlightenment. From Wilhelm Wundt, who set up the first psych lab in 1879, through the post war Chicago School of Economics to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the pioneer “management consultant”, Davies’s book shows us that this thinking is nothing new. Then why are we worrying? Google’s “chief happiness officers”, the opening up of official happiness statistics agencies around the globe: these are simply the latest developments in a trend ongoing since the eighteenth century. Not so fast. Yes, Davies’s book argues that the current science is “simply the latest iteration of an ongoing project which assumes the relationship between mind and world is amenable to mathematical scrutiny”. Yet the tools with which we are able to scrutinise ourselves are sharpening at a scarily exponential rate.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

The human body turns its proteins on and off (to alter their function and activity in cells) using “phosphorylation” — the reversible attachment of phosphate groups to proteins. These “decorations” on proteins provide an enormous variety of functions and are essential to all forms of life. Little is known, however, about how this important dynamic process works in humans.

Phosphorylation: a hallmark of disease

Using a special strain of E. coli bacteria, the researchers built a cell-free protein synthesis platform technology that can manufacture large quantities of these human phosphoproteins for scientific study. The goal is to enable scientists to learn more about the function and structure of phosphoproteins and identify which ones are involved in disease. The study was published Sept. 9 in an open-access paper by the journal Nature Communications. Trouble in the phosphorylation process can be a hallmark of disease, such as cancer, inflammation and Alzheimer’s disease. The human proteome (the entire set of expressed proteins) is estimated to be phosphorylated at more than 100,000 unique sites, making study of phosphorylated proteins and their role in disease a daunting task. “Our technology begins to make this a tractable problem,” said Michael C. Jewett, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering who led the Northwestern team. “We now can make these special proteins at unprecedented yields, with a freedom of design that is not possible in living organisms. The consequence of this innovative strategy is enormous.”

A “plug-and-play” protein expression platform

Jewett and his colleagues combined state-of-the-art genome engineering tools and engineered biological “parts” into a “plug-and-play” protein expression platform that is cell-free. Cell-free systems activate complex biological systems without using living intact cells. Crude cell lysates, or extracts, are employed instead.

More here.

Parade

Peter says if you’re going to talk about suffering
you have to mention pleasure too.
Like the way, on the day of the parade, on Forbes Avenue,
one hundred parking tickets flutter
under the windshield wipers of one hundred parked cars.
The accordion band will be along soon,
and the famous Flying Pittsburgettes,
and it’s summer and the sun is shining on the inevitable flags—
Something weird to admire this week on TV:
the handsome face of the white supremacist on trial.
How he looks right back at the lawyers, day after day
—never objecting, never making an apology.
I look at his calm, untroubled face
and think, That motherfucker is going to die white and right,
disappointing everyone like me
who thinks that punishment should be a kind of education.
My attitude is like what God says in the Bible:
Love your brother, or be destroyed.
Then Moses or somebody says back to God,
If I love you,
will you destroy my enemies?
and God says—this is in translation—, No Problemo.
Here, everyone is talking about the price of freedom,
and about how we as a people are united in our down payment.
about how we will fight to the very bottom of our bank account.
And the sky is so blue it looks like it may last forever
and the skinny tuba player goes oompahpah
and everybody cheers.
In the big store window of the travel agency downtown,
a ten-foot sign says, WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
The letters have been cut with scissors out of blue construction paper
and pasted carefully to the sign by someone’s hand.
What I want to know is, who will issue the ticket
for improper use of the collective pronoun?
What I want to know is, who will find and punish the maker
of these impossible promises?
.

by Tony Hoagland
from What Narcissism Means to Me
Graywold Press, 2003

John Waters in The Guardian:

I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn’t speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, “What? That’s your son.” I was really creating a character for myself and I always had a secret world. When the song I Ain’t Got No Home by Clarence Frogman Henry came out, he sang like a girl and a frog and I thought, “God, I’m trisexual.” But hey; I was a premature baby. I was overly baptised. That’s what happened.

All a parent has to do is make their kid feel safe and mine did. I heard my parents talking about me one day when I was at the top of the steps listening, like all children do, and my mother just said, “Yeah, he’s an odd duck” and then I thought, “OK, all right; they did their best to understand.” My father was horrified by my movies yet he lent me the money to make the early ones. And I paid him back with interest.

My mother’s brother became the undersecretary of the interior for Nixon, which did cause a little drama in my family because I was going to riots and everything, but he turned out great and gave us a nice cheque for an Aids benefit we had for the Serial Mom premiere.

More here.

Ewan Birney in The Guardian:

Recently, the Guardian published a story based on a scientific paper that claimed the stress experienced by Holocaust survivors somehow was detectable in their children through a process known as epigenetics. The paper was riddled with flaws: the scientists studied blood, which is a mixture of cell types, meaning there are any number of causes for the changes reported. The scientists only looked at a tiny subset of genes. They had an absurdly small sample size of 32 people, a tiny eight-person control group, who didn’t really look like good controls, and produced a contorted argument for why their data supported their original hypothesis. The paper probably shouldn’t have made it through to the scientific literature, and it certainly shouldn’t have made it to your Saturday breakfast reading. I don’t believe it and I’ll outline some reasons why below.

The scientific paper and newspaper story point to a rising interest in epigenetics. This is a seductive but rather slippery word that has come to mean a variety of things in relation to how molecular structures close to DNA work, in particular modification of DNA bases by methylation. It is certainly exciting, and has become a leading mechanism to explain how the environment communicates with our genes. But it’s also easy to oversimplify, and has been set up by some people as an inaccurate alternative to genetics.

David Patrikarakos in Politico:

Yanis Varoufakis lives in understated elegance. His apartment is spacious and pleasing to the eye. Shelves bulge with books on politics and economics, unsurprising for a university professor who was, until July, Greece’s finance minister.

Varoufakis is welcoming. He makes us coffee and puts a box of chocolates on the table, next to Joseph Stiglitz’s book on inequality, “The Great Divide.” He’s dressed in a dark red T-shirt and dark trousers, and pads around in his socks. When we arranged this meeting, he told me he didn’t want to talk about Greece’s election because he thought it a sad affair. After Sunday’s vote, though, he’s willing to speak.

I ask why he found it so depressing. After all, the voters didn’t punish his former government colleagues in Syriza or Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister. “I don’t want to reduce the significance of Alexis’ triumph,” he says, “but compared to the referendum, we had 1.6 million people who abstained. The party lost 363,000 votes since January. The democratic deficit has grown substantially. Even those who voted for [Tsipras], did so with sorrow and apprehension in their hearts. It was just a very sad election.”

“The great winners of this election,” he continues, “besides Alexis, were the Troika [the IMF, European Commission and ECB].”

More here.

Peter Bloom at 3:AM Magazine:

The contemporary age is marked by what appears a definite contradiction. On the one hand, public and social institutions tasked with meeting human needs are struggling under the weight of a continued recession and an economic order that increasingly prioritizes profit at the expense of general welfare. On the other hand, popular discourse and private organizations are progressively emphasizing the centrality of “wellness” for citizens and employees. The Wellness Syndrome by Carl Cederström and André Spicer provides an important and sophisticated critical understanding of this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon. Their book reveals concisely and accessibly—without sacrificing theoretical subtlety—how our current age is marked by a pathological and dangerous fixation with “health” and “wellness,” an obsession that effectively targets individuals with its market-based rhetoric of personal and professional well-being, while strategically masking deeper contradictions of modern neo-liberal capitalism.

Overall, The Wellness Syndrome is a comprehensive but readable account of the rise of this titular “syndrome.” It takes aim simultaneously at the “wellness” industry and at the growing common sense assumptions that are fueling this lucrative trend. It can be found in places as diverse as innovative tech companies like Google to American evangelical congregations. Further, even where it is not being implemented, it remains a tantalizing desire for many twenty-first-century citizens—a dream of “work/life balance” that may be reserved only for the privileged few but can one day also be their own

more here.

Christian Lorentzen at the London Review of Books:

Just about everybody who doesn’t beat or rape Jude loves him: his friends; his pro-bono physician, Andy, who despite his better judgment never has Jude committed for his self-harm; and his law professor, Harold, who introduces him to the wonders of contract law, gets him a clerkship with a judge, and adopts him as an adult to make him his heir, as well as to fill the gap left by his own son, who died of a neurodegenerative disease. In proper melodramatic manner, Jude goes from the pits straight to, if not the top, the upper middle class. The ghastly litany of his childhood sufferings is at least coherent. Jude, an adult player in a melodramatic lifestyle novel, in which the point is to observe the way the passing of time affects the cast of characters, is static. This is the formula: insert a case of arrested development into a contemporary male version of The Group. The one question that remains is whether Jude will enter into an adult sexual relationship. On his first try, at around the age of forty, he takes up with Caleb, a fashion executive who proves to be another abuser and winds up invading his apartment and beating him senseless. The episode eventually drives Jude to a suicide attempt. In its aftermath, as anyone might have guessed from the start, he and Willem, now a major motion picture star, recognise that they’re more than friends. It’s not unheartwarming, but Jude’s issues remain the same as they were two decades earlier: he won’t divulge his past and he still cuts himself. By now the narration has degenerated into a series of repetitive contemplations of the scenario, alternating between Jude and Willem’s points of view. The middle-aged Jude has become a corporate lawyer who harasses whistleblowers on the stand on behalf of big pharma.

more here.

Terry Eagleton at Bookforum:

Nations, like political creeds, can be upbeat or downbeat. Along with North Korea, the United States is one of the few countries on earth in which optimism is almost a state ideology. For large sectors of the nation, to be bullish is to be patriotic, while negativity is a species of thought crime. Pessimism is thought to be vaguely subversive. Even in the most despondent of times, a collective fantasy of omnipotence and infinity continues to haunt the national unconscious. It would be almost as impossible to elect a US president who advised the nation that its best days were behind it as it would be to elect a chimpanzee, though as far as that goes there have been one or two near misses. Any such leader would be a prime target for assassination. An American historian remarked recently that “presidential inaugural speeches are always optimistic whatever the times.” The comment was not intended as a criticism. There is a compulsive cheeriness about some aspects of American culture, an I-can-do-anything-I-want rhetoric which betrays a quasi-pathological fear of failure.

In an excruciatingly styleless study entitled The Biology of Hope, the American scholar Lionel Tiger, anxious to place his country’s ideology of hope on a scientific basis, is much preoccupied with drugged monkeys, mood-altering substances, and chemical changes found in the excretion of parents grieving for their dead children. If only one could search out the physiological basis of joviality, it might be possible to eradicate political disaffection and ensure a permanently ecstatic citizenry. Hope is a politically useful stimulant. “The possibility exists,” Tiger comments, “that it is a common human obligation to augment optimism.” Stalin and Mao seem to have held much the same view. It is our moral duty to insist that all is well, even when it self-evidently isn’t.

more here.

David Gilmour in delanceyplace:

In 1861, when the Italian peninsula was finally united into a single political entity, only 2.5 percent of “Italians” spoke the Italian language. In fact, the citizens of every major Italian city — Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan, and others — each spoke a different language. The situation was similar in the other countries of Europe: “The posthumous role of Dante Alighieri in the development of Italian has long been treated with reverence and solemnity. The great Florentine poet was, according to one scholar, not only 'the father of the Italian language' but also 'the father of the nation and the symbol of national greatness through the centuries'. It is doubtful that Dante would have thought the second part of the description applicable to him, especially as he believed Italy should be part of the Holy Roman Empire and not a nation by itself. Yet he did write The Divine Comedy (or, as he himself called it, simply La Commedia) in Italian and extolled the virtues of the vernacular, the 'new sun' that would put Latin in the shade, in De vulgari eloquentia, a book he wrote in Latin.

“The works of Dante, like those of his younger fellow Tuscans Petrarch and Boccaccio, advanced the cause of the Florentine vernacular in the later Middle Ages, even though Petrarch usually wrote in Latin and Dante thought bolognese a more beautiful language. By the sixteenth century it was widely felt that the peninsula's literary language should be close to theirs, a feeling which suggests that, if the great trio had been born in Sicily, the island's dialect would have been adopted as Italian, which foreigners would have had great difficulty in understanding. Pietro Bembo, the Venetian scholar and cardinal, argued that, if writers in Latin imitated Cicero and Virgil, then writers in the vernacular should model themselves on Petrarch and Boccaccio. … Later, around 1600, another towering Tuscan, the Pisan astronomer Galilee, demanded that scientific work also should be conducted in the vernacular, arguing that more people would then be able to understand his work — an argument which the papacy failed to appreciate. …

More here. (Note: For Margit and Abbas)

Garry Hamilton in Nature:

In February, the UK government approved mitochondrial replacement therapy, a technique that would allow a woman with a mitochondrial disorder to give birth to healthy children by pairing her nuclear DNA with the healthy mitochondria from a donor's egg. The approval came after a 3.5-year effort to review the safety and ethics of creating individuals with DNA from three people (what some refer to as three-parent babies). And although many scientists lauded the decision, some worry that it is premature. “They're not looking at the bigger picture,” says Ted Morrow, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, who is arguing for more-rigorous safety testing. “The standards for a shampoo seem to be harsher.” A common refrain in favour of the therapy is that the genetic contribution from mitochondria is very small. And against the 3 billion base pairs of DNA and 20,000 genes found in the human nucleus, the mitochondrial genome can seem pretty insignificant (see 'A complicated relationship'). Inherited solely through a mother's egg, it comprises fewer than 17,000 base pairs and just 37 genes. But one cell can have thousands of copies of the mitochondrial genome, compared with just two of the nuclear genome — one from mum and one from dad. Mitochondrial DNA also accumulates mutations incredibly fast, at about ten times the rate of nuclear DNA — and geneticists can use the resulting variation as a sort of molecular clock.

…One way to examine whether mitochondria in one population work differently from those in another is to swap them. Such experiments would be unethical in people and impractical in many other animals, so Rand turned to fruit flies. He cross-bred two fly strains with different mitochondria and then repeatedly back-crossed them until the mitochondria from one were neatly paired with the nucleus of the other. He then put fruit flies with similar nuclear genomes but different mitochondria together in a cage, and found that flies with specific mitochondrial genomes would quickly come to dominate the population². Something in the mitochondria was giving them a survival advantage. Subsequent work by Rand, Dowling and others has shown that it is not just the mitochondrial genome, but rather its interaction with the nuclear one that seems to be affecting a range of traits, including lifespan, reproductive success, rate of development, ageing, growth, movement, morphology and behaviour.

More here.

Morning at the Window

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

by T.S. Elliot
1917

Isaac Butler in Slate:

More here.

Ivan Krastev at Eurozine:

On the European level, a new paradox has also emerged as a result of both the European crisis and the situation in Ukraine. In recent years we have witnessed the Europeanization of broad policies while we see an emergence of a renewed national sentiment on the nation-state level. Citizens across Europe are beginning to feel frustrated with the EU. You can see how solidarity and borders can be redrawn. Germans are not ready to do for the Greeks what they did for East Germans in the 1990s. What is more, Germany's approach to Greece was not a decision of one government or one party; there was a general consensus in Germany towards Greece. And this sentiment is not limited to Germany, but most of the EU states as well.

In his 1992 book The European Rescue of the Nation State, British economic historian Alan Milward argued against the thesis that European integration would break up the nation-state. Indeed, European integration re-legitimized the nation-states. Since one of the outcomes of the Second World War was the collapse of the nation-state, integration brought back legitimacy to these nation-states. This was generally the case since about ten years ago with the success of European integration in Central Europe, which highlights the fact that many of the problems that we face today are not a result of failure, but a result of success. This is why it is so difficult to respond to these problems.

more here.

Joan DeJean at Lapham's Quarterly:

Today, to the extent to which the fashion industry is regulated, the process is managed principally by multinational luxury-goods conglomerates that control many of the most prestigious fashion houses, and to some extent by national professional organizations such as the Council of Fashion Designers of America and the Fédération Française de la Couture. Prior to the French Revolution, the right to produce luxury garments was far more tightly controlled: each European country had a guild system; to make garments for the rich, it was necessary to be accepted into a prominent guild. In England men vied for admission to the Merchant Tailors Company; in France they sought positions as maîtres tailleurs, master tailors. These tailors worked for an elite and tiny clientele of nobles, who followed the fashions of the day. When Louis XIV appeared in a striking new outfit, for example, master tailors were sure to be asked to create a line-by-line copy.

In order to maintain the economic value of an appointment as master tailor, guild leaders controlled the number of positions. As part of this effort, for centuries, guilds in all countries fought off any attempt by women to win access to the highest ranks of fashion design. Officially, there were only tailors—and never seamstresses.

more here.

J. P. Smith at The Millions:

Unlike Marcel Proust’s great novel, and unlike the romans fleuves of the last century, such as Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, Modiano’s work, including his most recent novel, Pour Que Tu Ne Te Perdes Pas Dans Le Quartier (So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood), released in France just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, is more a series of incremental epiphanies on the past, on lost opportunities, on lost people, on the small gaps in memory that leave his narrators and protagonists in a world from which they are one step removed. The language in the later books is uncomplicated, and what the author leaves out is as important as what he puts on the page.

What readers find most audacious about La Place de l’Étoile is how intimate the writing is. To deal with a period in which one never lived, to make a leap of imagination and bring the voice of the past vividly and credibly to life, is very much a part of what being a novelist is. But the difference between the historical novelist — who, in adding facts and details and color in hoping to contextualize the fiction, inevitably distances the readers — and what Modiano does in this trilogy is to lend an immediacy and an intimacy to the muddy tide of those years, catching the language, the flow, the Zeitgeist of the period without once having to step back to situate us in the narrative. SinceLa Place de l’Étoile I haven’t stopped following Modiano, reading each new volume as it’s released, and celebrating his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. My apologies, monsieur. My rancor was entirely misplaced.

more here.

Eliza Griswold at the website of The Poetry Foundation:

I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.

The teenage poet who uttered this folk poem called herself Rahila Muska. She lived in Helmand, a Taliban stronghold and one of the most restive of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces since the U.S. invasion began on October 7, 2001. Muska, like many young and rural Afghan women, wasn’t allowed to leave her home. Fearing that she’d be kidnapped or raped by warlords, her father pulled her out of school after the fifth grade. Poetry, which she learned from other women and on the radio, became her only form of education.

In Afghan culture, poetry is revered, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet — a landay — an oral and often anonymous scrap of song created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than twenty million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Traditionally, landays are sung aloud, often to the beat of a hand drum, which, along with other kinds of music, was banned by the Taliban from 1996 to 2001, and in some places, still is.

A landay has only a few formal properties. Each has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second. The poem ends with the sound “ma” or “na.” Sometimes they rhyme, but more often not. In Pashto, they lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love.

More here. [Thanks to Zara Houshmand.]