Ewen Callaway in Nature:

The discovery of yet another period of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals is adding to the growing sense that sexual encounters among different ancient human species were commonplace throughout their history. “As more early modern humans and archaic humans are found and sequenced, we’re going to see many more instances of interbreeding,” says Sergi Castellano, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His team discovered the latest example, which they believe occurred around 100,000 years ago, by analysing traces of Homo sapiens DNA in a Neanderthal genome extracted from a toe bone found in a cave in Siberia.

“There is this joke in the population genetics community — there’s always one more interbreeding event,” Castellano says. So before researchers discover the next one, here’s a rundown of the interbreeding episodes that they have already deduced from studies of ancient DNA.

More here.

Douglas Fox in Nature:

In the modern world, it's easy to forget that complex animals are relative newcomers to Earth. Since life first emerged more than 3 billion years ago, single-celled organisms have dominated the planet for most of its history. Thriving in environments that lacked oxygen, they relied on compounds such as carbon dioxide, sulfur-containing molecules or iron minerals that act as oxidizing agents to break down food. Much of Earth's microbial biosphere still survives on these anaerobic pathways.

Animals, however, depend on oxygen — a much richer way to make a living. The process of metabolizing food in the presence of oxygen releases much more energy than most anaerobic pathways. Animals rely on this potent, controlled combustion to drive such energy-hungry innovations as muscles, nervous systems and the tools of defence and carnivory — mineralized shells, exoskeletons and teeth.

Given the importance of oxygen for animals, researchers suspected that a sudden increase in the gas to near-modern levels in the ocean could have spurred the Cambrian explosion. To test that idea, they have studied ancient ocean sediments laid down during the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods, which together ran from about 635 million to 485 million years ago.

In Namibia, China and other spots around the world, researchers have collected rocks that were once ancient seabeds, and analysed the amounts of iron, molybdenum and other metals in them. The metals' solubility depends strongly on the amount of oxygen present, so the amount and type of those metals in ancient sedimentary rocks reflect how much oxygen was in the water long ago, when the sediments formed.

These proxies seemed to indicate that oxygen concentrations in the oceans rose in several steps, approaching today's sea-surface concentrations at the start of the Cambrian, around 541 million years ago — just before more-modern animals suddenly appeared and diversified. This supported the idea of oxygen as a key trigger for the evolutionary explosion.

But last year, a major study¹ of ancient sea-floor sediments challenged that view. Erik Sperling, a palaeontologist at Stanford University in California, compiled a database of 4,700 iron measurements taken from rocks around the world, spanning the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods. He and his colleagues did not find a statistically significant increase in the proportion of oxic to anoxic water at the boundary between the Ediacaran and the Cambrian.

“Any oxygenation event must have been far, far smaller than what people normally considered,” concludes Sperling. Most people assume “that the oxygenation event essentially raised oxygen to essentially modern-day levels. And that probably wasn't the case”, he says.

More here.

Thomas Piketty in The Guardian:

How can we interpret the incredible success of the “socialist” candidate Bernie Sanders in the US primaries? The Vermont senator is now ahead of Hillary Clinton among Democratic-leaning voters below the age of 50, and it’s only thanks to the older generation that Clinton has managed to stay ahead in the polls.

Because he is facing the Clinton machine, as well as the conservatism of mainstream media, Sanders might not win the race. But it has now been demonstrated that another Sanders – possibly younger and less white – could one day soon win the US presidential elections and change the face of the country. In many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections.

Let’s glance back for an instant. From the 1930s until the 1970s, the US were at the forefront of an ambitious set of policies aiming to reduce social inequalities. Partly to avoid any resemblance with Old Europe, seen then as extremely unequal and contrary to the American democratic spirit, in the inter-war years the country invented a highly progressive income and estate tax and set up levels of fiscal progressiveness never used on our side of the Atlantic. From 1930 to 1980 – for half a century – the rate for the highest US income (over $1m per year) was on average 82%, with peaks of 91% from the 1940s to 1960s (from Roosevelt to Kennedy), and still as high as 70% during Reagan’s election in 1980.

This policy in no way affected the strong growth of the post-war American economy, doubtless because there is not much point in paying super-managers $10m when $1m will do.

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Alan Yuhas in The Guardian:

Scientists are claiming “extraordinary” success with engineering immune cells to target a specific type of blood cancer in their first clinical trials.

Among several dozen patients who would typically have only had months to live, early experimental trials that used the immune system’s T-cells to target cancers had “extraordinary results”.

In one study, 94% of participants with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) saw symptoms vanish completely. Patients with other blood cancers had response rates greater than 80%, and more than half experienced complete remission.

Speaking at the annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement for Science (AAAS), researcher Stanley Riddell said: “This is unprecedented in medicine, to be honest, to get response rates in this range in these very advanced patients.”

More here.

This is from three years ago but an interesting perspective from an interesting legal mind, Richard A. Posner, in The New Republic:

Judges like to say that all they do when they interpret a constitutional or statutory provision is apply, to the facts of the particular case, law that has been given to them. They do not make law: that is the job of legislators, and for the authors and ratifiers of constitutions. They are not Apollo; they are his oracle. They are passive interpreters. Their role is semantic.

The passive view of the judicial role is aggressively defended in a new book by Justice Antonin Scalia and the legal lexicographer Bryan Garner (Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, 2012). They advocate what is best described as textual originalism, because they want judges to “look for meaning in the governing text, ascribe to that text the meaning that it has borne from its inception, and reject judicial speculation about both the drafters’ extra-textually derived purposes and the desirability of the fair reading’s anticipated consequences.” This austere interpretive method leads to a heavy emphasis on dictionary meanings, in disregard of a wise warning issued by Judge Frank Easterbrook, who though himself a self-declared textualist advises that “the choice among meanings [of words in statutes] must have a footing more solid than a dictionary—which is a museum of words, an historical catalog rather than a means to decode the work of legislatures.”

Scalia and Garner reject (before they later accept) Easterbrook’s warning. Does an ordinance that says that “no person may bring a vehicle into the park” apply to an ambulance that enters the park to save a person’s life? For Scalia and Garner, the answer is yes.

More here.

James Harkin at The Smithsonian:

The souk is within the walls of Aleppo’s historic city center, one of six locations in Syria listed as World Heritage Sites by Unesco. Before largely peaceful protests in 2011 against the autocratic Syrian president Bashar al-Assad were met with government violence and devolved into a devastating civil war, killing at least a quarter of a million people and displacing millions so far, the country was one of the most beautiful on earth. Much of its enchantment came from its plentiful antiquity, which wasn’t fenced off as in European capitals but lay unceremoniously around—part of the living, breathing texture of everyday life. The country, at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and Asia, boasts tens of thousands of sites of archaeological interest, from the ruins of our earliest civilizations to Crusader-era fortifications and wonders of Islamic worship and art.

Now these antiquities are under large-scale and imminent threat. Already some of the most valuable have been destroyed as collateral damage in the shelling and crossfire between government forces and various rebel factions; others have been sold off, bit by valuable bit, to buy guns or, just as likely, food or a way to escape the chaos. Satellite images of treasured historical sites show the soil so completely pocked by holes, the result of thousands of illicit excavations, that it resembles the surface of the moon—destruction and looting, as Unesco director general Irina Bokova put it last fall, on “an industrial scale.”

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Simon Tait at The London Magazine:

When Frank Auerbach first came to public notice – emerged rather than burst – in the 1950s he was noted as a “British Expressionist” in the white hot enthusiasm for the American abstract colourists Clement Greenberg (not to mention the American government) was punting around the world with spectacular success.

Maria Bustillos at The New Yorker:

It’s sometimes said, nowadays, that lifetime employment is a thing of the past, that rising through the ranks in a company is over, that publishing is a doomed enterprise, that the novel is dead (was it ever really alive?), and that poetry is deader still. By this reckoning, Barbara Epler’s career should not exist. But for more than thirty years, Epler, the president and publisher of the storied experimental publishing house New Directions, has been advancing the vision of James Laughlin, the poet, skier, and heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune who founded the company when he was twenty-two and ran it, for a time, from his aunt’s barn in Norfolk, Connecticut. His inaugural publication, in 1936, was an anthology featuring the work of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Henry Miller, among others: far-out stuff, back then. In time, New Directions would go on to become the first U.S. publisher of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Roberto Bolaño, Anne Carson, W. G. Sebald, and László Krasznahorkai—a staggering list.

Today’s visitor to New Directions’ elegantly shabby offices, in Chelsea, may stand on the nineteenth-floor balcony beside Epler, who is in her fifties and has a big, throaty laugh, under a pair of carved stone lions silently roaring high above, downtown and the Hudson River spread out beneath, and be forgiven for thinking that he has somehow stepped into a lovely and improbable alternate universe.

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Diksha Madhok in Quartz:

Indian taxpayers seem to be a self-righteous lot. Beneficiaries of subsidies, according to them, must display adequate gratitude and the right colour of patriotism. Else, they go for the jugular. These days, a vocal section of them wants India to stop funding Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of South Asia’s top-ranked institutions of higher learning. The reason for their outrage is an alleged anti-India protest that took place on the campus in Delhi on Tuesday (Feb. 09).

At the event, some students chanted divisive slogans and questioned the execution of Afzal Guru, who was hanged for the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament.

Since Tuesday, the police have raided university hostels and arrested the president of the students union, charging him with sedition—even though he did not raise any controversial slogans. This is the first time that a JNU president has been arrested since the Emergency of 1975-77.

But this grossly disproportionate and high-handed response by the state to an alleged offence caused by a tiny section of the university’s students has not stopped the taxpayers’ sanctimonious blustering and thundering on Twitter.

Even the voluble TV anchor Arnab Goswami upbraided a JNU student for not exhibiting proper patriotism, despite being a “beneficiary of a subsidized Indian education.”

“Parasite” is a word frequently thrown at JNU students over the last two days.

“It is an institution that has produced some of the most famous economists, lawyers and politicians in India, including the current commerce minister (Nirmala Sitharaman) and the Intelligence Bureau chief till recently (Syed Asif Ibrahim),” Dipankar Gupta, director, Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, told Quartz.

“Such vilification will only prove to be counter-productive,” Gupta, a sociologist, said.
The sheer hypocrisy

Such resentment, though, is not new. It surfaces every time students of liberal universities such as JNU or the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) go against what is perceived as mainstream opinion.
Yet, most Indians have no problems with the government funding the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), even though many of their graduates end up on greener foreign shores. These IIT-NRIs are often put on a pedestal and worshipped as real Indian role models.

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Sumantra Bose in Open the Magazine:

I have never written anything on or about Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, my grand-uncle. The reason is twofold. First, I have plenty of other interests and pursuits that keep me happily occupied. Second, I do not believe that being a ‘family member’ automatically entitles, or obligates, me to comment on him. In any case, born a quarter-century after Netaji’s martyrdom in 1945, I do not really regard him as a family member per se, but rather as a national leader and historical figure. I have an aversion to being tagged as ‘Netaji’s descendant’. I react to such labelling, almost always by well- meaning people unaware of my aversion, with weariness bordering on irritation—‘Oh no, not again, will I never escape this?’—and give curt, monosyllabic replies to excited questions. And I stay strictly aloof from public discussions and debates about him, including the national media scrum that has been ongoing since last year and, unusually for an Indian news story, drawing some attention in the international media too.

This does not mean that I am indifferent to Netaji’s significance to the making of contemporary India, or to the very special place he holds in Indian hearts. Far from it. In recent months, I have edited and arranged for the publication of the most authentic and illuminating account of Netaji and the Bose family during India’s freedom struggle. Titled Subhas and Sarat: An Intimate Memoir of India’s Bose Brothers, it was written by my late father, Dr Sisir Kumar Bose, prior to his death 15 years ago, based on a bestselling Bengali version he wrote in the 1980s. It narrates the dramatic struggles in the cause of India’s freedom of Subhas and his elder brother Sarat Chandra Bose (my grandfather), the eminent barrister and political leader who was Netaji’s lifelong confidant and most resolute supporter and with whom Netaji had a unique bond and partnership.

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Maggie Koerth-Baker in Aeon:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. On 19 December 1984, The New York Times ran a story about parents who feared the risks of routine vaccinations. The parent quoted in the article was a lawyer who blamed vaccines for the death of his daughter. The story was framed as a conflict between parents such as him and medical experts, who pointed out that serious side-effects of vaccines were extremely rare, and that the diseases vaccines prevented were far worse. We have to be careful, the scientists said, or these fears could result in fewer people getting vaccinated and more people getting sick.

On 27 April 1999, The New York Times ran a story about parents who feared the risks of routine vaccinations. The parent quoted in the article was college-educated, an author and professional activist, who blamed vaccines for her son’s brain damage. The story was framed as a conflict between parents such as her and medical experts, who worried that the internet was spreading false information and unwarranted fears. Parents today just haven’t seen the devastation vaccine-preventable diseases can cause, the scientists said.

On 21 March 2008, The New York Times ran a story about parents who feared the risks of routine vaccinations. The article noted that parents who refused vaccines for their children were often ‘well-educated and financially stable’. The story was framed as a conflict between those parents and medical experts, who worried that geographical pockets of vaccine refusal could help spread preventable diseases, such as measles. Parents today just haven’t seen the devastation vaccine-preventable diseases can cause, the scientists said.

For more than 30 years now, we journalists have been telling the same story, with the same actors, playing the same roles, and speaking the same lines. The authors change, but the news doesn’t. It barely even counts as ‘new’.

There are two groups of people you can blame for this pattern of repetitive storytelling. Maybe it’s them: maybe the problem is parents whose anti-science proclivities have carried them so far away from the facts that journalists have no choice but to repeat ourselves ad nauseum. The story doesn’t change because the story hasn’t changed.

That could be true. But there’s also another option. Maybe it’s us: maybe journalists aren’t listening. The story never changes because we stopped looking for the other stories we could tell.

If that’s true, it’s a big deal. And not just for journalists. Vaccination is a deeply important part of public health. Whether to vaccinate or not isn’t simply a decision you make for yourself or your family, independent of the choices of everyone else. Vaccines work in two ways. They decrease your personal risk of contracting a disease, and they reduce the number of potential hosts and carriers in the population. That means the more vaccinated people there are, the harder it is for a disease to spread. Vaccines can stop an outbreak before it happens. This so-called ‘herd immunity’ protects children who are too young to get a vaccine, people who are too sick to get one, and anybody whose vaccination isn’t working as well as it should.

More here.

Talal Asad in Immanent Frame:

In Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Saba Mahmood has produced a valuable account both of how the idea of separating religion from politics came to be central to the development of the “religiously neutral” state in Europe (beginning with the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century and culminating in the new nations after the First World War) and of how that idea became politically important in the postcolonial Middle East. In particular, she describes how in constituting religious identities, the state in modern Egypt creates unexpected opportunities for political power and social confrontation among those who seek to regulate, as well as those who claim to represent, religious minorities. Her detailed analysis of the rich historical and ethnographic material she has assembled reinforces the conclusion that instead of regarding the secular state as the solution to discrimination against religious minorities, it must itself be understood as part of the problem. So I offer a few reflections prompted by her excellent study, first on liberal ideals that are commonly said to promote equal treatment for minorities, and then about the secular anxiety that preceded the 2013 coup against the elected president Mohamed Morsi.

Secularism can, of course, exist in authoritarian states, but liberal democracies cannot exist without secularism because state neutrality is regarded as essential to the flourishing of liberal values (freedom, equality, tolerance, and dignity). One might, therefore, press the following question: In what way, precisely, does secularism express these values?

Thus Jürgen Habermas has argued, as a liberal, that the principle of equality should be extended to religious believers in their political discourse and behavior:

The understanding of tolerance in pluralistic societies with a liberal constitution demands that in their dealings with unbelievers and those of different faiths, believers should grasp that they must reasonably expect that the dissent they encounter will go on existing; at the same time, however, a liberal political culture expects that unbelievers, too, will grasp the same point in their dealings with believers.

But does it follow as a practical matter that the state treat citizens holding diverse beliefs equally because there can be no rational defeat of one proponent by another? Or is it simply a liberal sensibility that treats all citizens, regardless of religious beliefs, with equal concern and respect by other citizens, the government, the law, and the constitution?

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Paula Span in The New York Times:

Last year, when an oncologist advised that Betty Chin might benefit frompalliative care, her son Kevin balked. Mrs. Chin, a retired nurse’s aide who lives in Manhattan’s Chinatown, was undergoing treatment for a recurrence of colorectal cancer. Her family understood that radiation and chemotherapy wouldn’t cure her, but they hoped doctors could keep the cancer at bay, perhaps shrinking her tumor enough to allow surgery or simply buying her more time. Mrs. Chin, 84, was in pain, fatigued and depressed. The radiation had led to diarrhea, and she needed a urinary catheter; her chemotherapy drugs caused nausea, vomiting and appetite loss. Palliative care, which focuses on relieving the discomfort and distress of serious illness, might have helped. But Mr. Chin, 50, his mother’s primary caregiver, initially resisted the suggestion.

“The word ‘palliative,’ I thought of it as synonymous with hospice,” he said, echoing a common misperception. “I didn’t want to face that possibility. I didn’t think it was time yet.” In the ensuing months, however, two more physicians recommended palliative care, so the Chins agreed to see the team at Mount Sinai Hospital. They have become converts. “It was quite a relief,” Mr. Chin said. “Our doctor listened to everything: the pain, the catheter, the vomiting, the tiredness. You can’t bring up issues like this with an oncologist.” Multiple prescriptions have made his mother more comfortable. A social worker helps the family grapple with home care schedules and insurance. Mr. Chin, who frequently translates for his Cantonese-speaking mother, can call nurses with questions at any hour. Challenges remain — Mrs. Chin still isn’t eating much — but her son now wishes the family had agreed to palliative care earlier.

More here.

Sameer Rahim at Prospect Magazine:

Of all the places to set a social comedy in the style of Jane Austen, perhaps the last would be a disco in early 1980s New York. But 18 years ago, the American writer-director Whit Stillman did exactly that with his wonderfully funny and acute The Last Days of Disco. Stillman’s first film Metropolitan (1990) followed the tangled love lives of a group of intelligent and idealistic New Yorkers. Filmed on a shoe-string, it was nominated for an Oscar. His next film Barcelona (1994) transplanted similar members of the self-described UHBs (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie) to Europe. The Last Days of Disco is the third in his trilogy of these “comedies of mannerlessness,” as Stillman has called them. On Saturday there was a showing at the Barbican, followed by a Q&A with Stillman and actor/director Richard Ayoyade.

Stillman has been characterised as a Wasp Woody Allen. There are some similarities between the directors. Stillman’s films are talkative and witty, like Allen’s, and are usually set in a closed milieux the director knows well—in Stillman’s case the Harvard-educated upper classes. But the moral texture of his films are quite different. Allen embraces a liberal, humanistic worldview in which the sexual revolution is a joyful—though complex—achievement. By contrast, Stillman is sceptical of the sexual revolution, is impatient with liberal pieties, and retains a faith in the power of grace. One critic has even called him a “Great Conservative Filmmaker.” That’s going too far: he is too subtle a filmmaker to advocate a political ideology. Yet it is undeniable that for his characters concepts such as “moral virtue,” “character,” “gentlemanliness” and “self-restraint” are far from outdated ideals.

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Charles Simic at Literary Hub:

The Book of Blam is the first of three novels about the Holocaust in Yugoslavia written by the Serbian writer Aleksandar Tišma, the other two being The Use of Man and Kapo. It was published in 1972 in Belgrade and was well received, as were the two books that followed. Tišma’s work was translated into 17 languages and he became internationally known. Although a child of a Serbian father and Jewish mother, who lost relatives on his mother’s side in the Holocaust, Tišma came to the subject of the camps late: He attributed this new interest of his to a trip he took to Poland in the 1960s and a visit he made to Auschwitz that reminded him of the horrors he registered as a boy but had learned not to think about in order to keep his sanity. The trip to Poland made him realize that he had a history he could not run away from. As Tišma’s compatriot Danilo Kiš noted, “One doesn’t become a writer accidentally, one’s biography is the first and the greatest cause.” Tišma would have agreed. In one of his journals he describes himself as a bug who had survived the bug spray and whose role now is to convey to the descendants of the killers the atrocities their fathers and grandfathers perpetrated on their millions of victims.

Tišma was born in 1928 in Horgoš, a town on the border of Serbia and Hungary, where thousands of Syrian war refugees lately have massed while waiting to be allowed passage to Western Europe. His father came from Lika, an impoverished region in western Croatia inhabited by many Serbs.

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Ed Yong at The Atlantic:

Paragraph

Record breaking Thriller
dance attempt.

*

Wolfman Jack style
dj in the video game says,
“This is Wasteland Radio

and we’re here for you”

*

You are here

maintaining détente
between the voices
in your head.

Immediacy is retro,
says Lytle.

*

Nostalgic/futuristic
scene in which

we can read the code—

green
flowing algorithms.

We can almost
slip right in.

by Rae Armantrout
from: Poetry, Vol. 196, No. 1, April
publisher: Poetry, Chicago, 2010
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