Stephen Hsu in Nautilus:

In Daniel Keyes’ novel Flowers for Algernon, a mentally challenged adult called Charlie Gordon receives an experimental treatment to raise his IQ from 60 to somewhere in the neighborhood of 200. He is transformed from a bakery worker who is taken advantage of by his friends, to a genius with an effortless perception of the world’s hidden connections. “I’m living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed,” Charlie writes. “There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem… This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy.” The contrast between a super-intelligence and today’s average IQ of 100 would be greater still. The possibility of super-intelligence follows directly from the genetic basis of intelligence. Characteristics like height and cognitive ability are controlled by thousands of genes, each of small effect. A rough lower bound on the number of common genetic variants affecting each trait can be deduced from the positive or negative effect on the trait (measured in inches of height or IQ points) of already discovered gene variants, called alleles.

The Social Science Genome Association Consortium, an international collaboration involving dozens of university labs, has identified a handful of regions of human DNA that affect cognitive ability. They have shown that a handful of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in human DNA are statistically correlated with intelligence, even after correction for multiple testing of 1 million independent DNA regions, in a sample of over 100,000 individuals. If only a small number of genes controlled cognition, then each of the gene variants should have altered IQ by a large chunk—about 15 points of variation between two individuals. But the largest effect size researchers have been able to detect thus far is less than a single point of IQ. Larger effect sizes would have been much easier to detect, but have not been seen. This means that there must be at least thousands of IQ alleles to account for the actual variation seen in the general population. A more sophisticated analysis (with large error bars) yields an estimate of perhaps 10,000 in total.¹ Each genetic variant slightly increases or decreases cognitive ability. Because it is determined by many small additive effects, cognitive ability is normally distributed, following the familiar bell-shaped curve, with more people in the middle than in the tails. A person with more than the average number of positive (IQ-increasing) variants will be above average in ability. The number of positive alleles above the population average required to raise the trait value by a standard deviation—that is, 15 points—is proportional to the square root of the number of variants, or about 100. In a nutshell, 100 or so additional positive variants could raise IQ by 15 points. Given that there are many thousands of potential positive variants, the implication is clear: If a human being could be engineered to have the positive version of each causal variant, they might exhibit cognitive ability which is roughly 100 standard deviations above average. This corresponds to more than 1,000 IQ points.

More here.

Nathaniel Popkin at The Millions:

Reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, or perhaps any masterwork of its scope, like War and Peace, one experiences a sequence of intellectual, emotional, and bodily responses. They are, at least in part:

Wonder at the impossible genius of the author, who can sense, with panopticon vision, the authentic truths of many worlds, and give voice to them, as if a ventriloquist or an interpreter of dreams;

Thirst for more of those worlds and the words to describe them, words swallowed as quickly and desperately as they can be provided;

Laughter at the absurdity of human desire and failure, rendered in deadpan brilliance and sly humor; and

Melancholy that settles in as sweet sickness of mind and body, the very pain of conscious life, the splendor and the terror.

“Few other contemporary novels had ever involved me so completely,” says director Robert Falls, a Tony Award-winner who is artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. He read 2666 inNatasha Wimmer’s English translation as soon as FSG put it out in 2008 and, seduced, began working on a stage adaptation.

Eight years later, the play 2666, which Falls adapted and directed with Goodman’s playwright-in-residence, Seth Bockley, is on stage in Goodman’s blackbox, in a five-and-a-half hour production. The play thrills — indeed producing wonder, thirst, laughter, and melancholy — when Falls and Bockley trust themselves as interpreters, like Bolaño, of conflicted and contradictory reality. When they forget, pigeonholing characters into cartoons Bolaño never intended, the show becomes exhausting. By the end, after almost a quarter day, one is merely thrilled to move again and then to consider sleep.

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Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times:

Liebling was drawn to boxing, but so were Joyce Carol Oates and William Hazlitt, neither of whom is easily pictured doing high-speed pad work amid buckets of bloodied spit in a basement gym. George Bernard Shaw wrote a novel about the sport (Cashel Byron’s Profession, 1882). James Baldwin covered Floyd Patterson’s 1962 fight with Sonny Liston. Current New Yorker editor David Remnick published a book about Muhammad Ali (King of the World, 1999) in between lighter subjects such as Barack Obama and Russia. All but one or two of Norman Mailer’s novels cringe with inadequacy next to The Fight, his account of Ali’s 1974 showdown with George Foreman in Zaire. Gay Talese, George Plimpton, Hunter Thompson: all thrived at the intersection of professionalised violence and literary journalism.

The first rule of fight club is that you write about fight club, a lot. No sport has been chronicled in greater depth or quality than boxing. There is some famous baseball prose by Don DeLillo, among others. Cricket yielded a great book (CLR James’s Beyond a Boundary, 1963) and tennis a great essay (David Foster Wallace’s “Federer as Religious Experience”, 2006). Football has amassed something of a canon over the past 20 years but nothing commensurate with the game’s imperial presence in the world.

Boxing does not vie for the attention of writers with other sports, but is on another plane with war and romance. It is clear that just one exponent of ringcraft — Ali, nowadays forced by Parkinson’s disease to let others tell his story — has inspired a more distinguished bibliography than entire human pursuits.

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From The Economist:

Guilt-free intercourse may, as Philip Larkin wrote, have begun in 1963, but sexual reproduction has been around a good deal longer than that. Single-celled organisms began exchanging and mixing up genetic information in ways modern biologists recognise as rudimentary forms of sex about two billion years ago. Yet the question of why sex exists at all remains troublesome. A creature which reproduces asexually passes on all of its genes to each of its progeny. One that mates with another, by contrast, passes on only half of them. On the face of things that is a huge selective disadvantage. There must therefore, evolutionary biologists believe, be equally huge compensating benefits.

Two ideas exist about what these might be. One is that the constantly changing genetic variety sex creates stops parasites and pathogens evolving stable techniques for exploiting a host species. This is the “Red Queen” hypothesis, an allusion to a character in “Through the Looking-Glass” who had to run as fast as she could to stay in the same place. The other idea is that the continual mixing of genes from generation to generation separates good and bad mutations, permitting the bad ones to be purged by natural selection without taking the good ones along for the ride. This process was described by Joel Peck, one of its progenitors, as plucking rubies from rubbish.

“Plucking rubies” and the “Red Queen” are not mutually exclusive. Both could be true. But, while the queen has experimental evidence to back her up, rubies have had little such validation. Until now.

More here.

Elizabeth Karp-Evans in Guernica:

Last September, I found myself in a packed auditorium at The New School in New York for the launch of Freeman’s, a biannual literary journal conceived by the editor, writer, and critic John Freeman. On the cover of this issue, the names of Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, and Haruki Murakami appeared between newer authors such as Ishion Hutchinson and Laura van den Berg; at the event, Hutchinson’s unassumingly elegant recital of Windfall and van den Berg’s uncontrollably funny reading of The Dog made their places clear among confirmed champions. The launch was spirited, informed, and generous in a uniquely Freeman way. He speaks—often at length—in the enthused yet not overbearing manner of a city organizer or a weekend volunteer encouraging you to vote. It’s no surprise that Freeman has spent most of his career organizing and advocating for some of the most vital literary voices of the last two decades.

“Very little in the world that is interesting happens without risk, movement, and wonder,” Freeman writes in his first letter to the reader. This notion is at once his prevailing professional ideology and personal mantra. Freeman grew up in the Midwest, Long Island, Pennsylvania, and then, California. He has worked at a bank, an advertising agency, as an editor of children’s books, and as president of the National Book Critics Circle. This might account for some of his interest in finding and addressing others of the same pension—those who float on the margins—and his preoccupation with the complexities and contradictions of the social world, specifically in America.

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Sophia Nguyen in Harvard Magazine:

The Dark Room Collective began with loss. As the members tell it: on December 8, 1987, Strange, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and their two housemates piled into a car to make it to Harlem by noon, for the funeral of James Baldwin. More than 4,000 paid their respects at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, William Styron, and Amiri Baraka spoke at the service. Strange and Ellis, aspiring writers who first met Baraka at a reading at Tufts University, came at his invitation (“It was probably very clear that we needed a lesson in Who We Owed,” Ellis later reflected in an essay) and his eulogy may have left the deepest impression. Baldwin’s spirit “will be with us as long as we remember ourselves,” Baraka told the attendees. “For his is the spirit of life thrilling to its own consciousness.” Strange had stood in the same room as Baldwin once. He had come to Harvard for a tea, and, as she later wrote in the literary magazine Mosaic, she felt “too shy to break through the thick clot of fans around him and offer the admiration he had been accustomed to for decades.” She and Ellis, their mourning amplified and made vague by distance, felt their hero’s absence as a double negative; having never known him in person, they missed him twice over. The funeral filled them with new urgency about honoring their literary ancestors while they were still alive. They began planning the following spring.

In a third-floor room of their house used for storing old photographic equipment, they’d been building a library they christened “The Dark Room: A Collection of Black Writing.” At the time, 31 Inman was alreadya communal house for artists and activists. Strange worked as a community organizer in Roxbury and as a prisoner advocate through Cambridge’s American Friends Service Committee; Ellis was a projectionist at the Harvard Film Archive and a clerk at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop. As Ellis recalls in his 2007 poem “Spike Lee at Harvard,” the bookshop experience was fraught, and in that way, instructive: “I got my first glimpse/of the life of poetry/(through the Grolier’s/cinematic glass window).” The life on display was orderly and monochromatic: the faces in the portraits above the shelves were nearly all white. At some point, his employer wondered if the black poets should be shelved separately so customers might more easily find their work; Ellis said he didn’t think so. (An intervening line, dry but not unkind, adds: “Well, at least she asked.”) This homogeneity reflected the shop’s surrounding scene.

Literary events in Cambridge rarely featured artists of color, though a number of prominent black writers taught in the Boston area.

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Michael J. Lewis at The New Criterion:

It is one of history’s cheekier pranks that the first architect ever to appear on television was that thirty-year-old prodigy with the movie-star face, Albert Speer. Nazi Germany was the first country to introduce television broadcasting, just in time to cover the 1935 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. If you search for it, you can watch a short clip as Speer drives his convertible into his newly enlarged rally grounds, banters with a reporter, and then speeds off with a jaunty Hitler salute.

Of course the world knows Speer from an entirely different media appearance. This was his testimony at the Nuremberg trials, where he dramatically accepted full personal responsibility for Nazi war crimes, the only one of the accused to do so. His subdued, humble demeanor could not have contrasted more with the evasiveness, self-justification, and unconcealed haughtiness of his co-defendants. It was literally the performance of his life, and it saved him from certain execution. Having stepped into the role of “the good Nazi,” Speer never relinquished it. Upon serving his twenty-year sentence, he published a series of fascinating though self-serving memoirs, beginning with Inside the Third Reich (1970). Through it all he played the part of the naïve and innocent artist, who was guilty of nothing more than letting his childlike eagerness to build overwhelm his good judgment and moral sensibility.

That pose is no longer tenable. Archival finds in Germany and elsewhere have shown that Speer could not have been ignorant of the Nazi extermination camps, as he claimed, but was involved in finicky detail with their construction and operation.

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Siddhartha Mahanta at The New Yorker:

In the summer of 1964, Samuel Beckett arrived in New York City for his first and only trip to the United States, to oversee production on what would be his first and only film. Titled “Film,” it was commissioned by the avant-garde publisher Barney Rosset as part of a triptych; the other two pieces were written by Harold Pinter and Eugène Ionesco (both of whom, like Beckett, were published by Rosset’s Grove Press), though Rosset was unable to bring those to fruition. Beckett, by the mid-nineteen-sixties, had cemented his global reputation with the successes of “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” and he and Rosset marshalled a remarkable collection of talent for their movie: celebrated theater director Alan Schneider; cinematographer Boris Kaufman, who had worked on “12 Angry Men” and “On the Waterfront,” among other films; and, most notably, the silent-screen legend Buster Keaton.

The plot of “Film” is, not surprisingly, scarce. “O” (Keaton) a dilapidated figure who wears an oversized trench coat and a flattened white Stetson, is pursued by “E” (the camera, essentially—and, by proxy, you, the viewer). O scurries along Pearl Street, in the bombed-out area beneath the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. He collides with an old couple who are dressed in quaint Victorian style, and whose perturbed stares slowly twist into horror. When E then confronts them, they shrink in the “agony of perceivedness,” according to the script.

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Laura Kehoe at the New Statesman:

I spent many months in the field, along with many other researchers, trying to figure out what these chimps are up to. So far we have two main theories. The behaviour could be part of a male display, where the loud bang made when a rock hits a hollow tree adds to the impressive nature of a display. This could be especially likely in areas where there are not many trees with large roots that chimps would normally drum on with their powerful hands and feet. If some trees produce an impressive bang, this could accompany or replace feet drumming in a display and trees with particularly good acoustics could become popular spots for revisits.

On the other hand, it could be more symbolic than that – and more reminiscent of our own past. Marking pathways and territories with signposts such as piles of rocks is an important step in human history. Figuring out where chimps' territories are in relation to rock throwing sites could give us insights into whether this is the case here.

Even more intriguing than this, maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees. Indigenous West African people have stone collections at“sacred” trees and such man-made stone collections arecommonly observed across the world and look eerily similar to what we have discovered here.

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Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Gigantic mimiviruses fend off invaders using defences similar to the CRISPR system deployed by bacteria and other microorganisms, French researchers report¹.

…Like prokaryotes, mimiviruses are plagued by viruses known as virophages, Raoult, La Scola and their colleagues reported in 2008². Six years later, in 2014, they found a virophage — named Zamilon — that infects some kinds of mimivirus but not others³. Raoult hypothesized that these infections, which sap a mimivirus’s capacity to copy itself, could have led to the evolution of a defence system much like CRISPR. In bacteria and another kind of prokaryote, called archaea, CRISPR systems store a library of short DNA sequences that match those of phages and other invading DNA. When a foreign DNA sequence with matching sequences in this library attacks a cell, specialized ‘Cas’ enzymes unwind the intruder DNA and chop it into pieces, stopping an infection. Biologists have now repurposed CRISPR as a technology to edit genomes. To determine whether mimiviruses have a similar defence system, Raoult’s team analysed the genomes of 60 mimivirus strains and looked for sequences that match those of the Zamilon virophage. Mimiviruses that were resistant to Zamilon also harboured a short stretch of DNA that matched that of the phage. Adjacent to these sequences, Raoult’s team found genes encoding enzymes that can degrade and unwind DNA. In CRISPR immunity, too, the genes encoding the Cas enzymes sit beside the sequences that recognize the virus. Blocking activity of different components of the system made the mimiviruses susceptible to Zamilon virophage attack.

More here.

Katalin Balog in the New York Times:

Art is often the subject of philosophy. But every now and then, a work of art — something other than a lecture or words on a page — can function as philosophy. “Son of Saul,” a film set in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust, is such a work of art. It engages with a profound set of problems that also occupied the 19^th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

Written and directed by the Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes, “Son of Saul” won awards at Cannes, the Golden Globes and elsewhere before making its way to the Oscars to win the award for best foreign language film. It follows a day in the life of Saul, a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of mostly Jewish prisoners the Nazis forced to assist with herding people to the gas chambers, burning the bodies and collecting gold and valuables from the corpses. The film creates a direct, experiential and visceral engagement with these events by maintaining a relentless focus on the minute-to-minute unfolding of Saul’s world.

In long, unbroken shots, we see the reality of the death camp revealed, its textures made tangible. By using close-ups and shallow focus images throughout, Nemes gives viewers no opportunity to disengage from Saul’s point of view. It is as though we are shadowing him in hell.

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Sean B. Carroll in Quanta:

I have spent all of my adult life working in or running a biology research lab. It has been a very fulfilling, full-time pursuit. So when colleagues discover that I wrote a book that’s set in Paris and delves into such topics as the French Resistance, the Cold War and the author Albert Camus, they’re somewhat baffled. The looks on their faces seem to say: “Why the heck did you do that?”

I understand their concern. Perhaps they worry that I have abandoned the rigors of science.

So I try to reassure them. I first tell them that one of the principal characters in the story is a biologist — Jacques Monod, a well-known, Nobel Prize-winning co-founder of the field of molecular biology. Then I explain that Monod resisted the Nazi occupation during World War II, effectively criticized Soviet-style communism, and was friends with Camus. That seems to satisfy most.

But what I really want to tell them is how laboratory science and nonfiction writing have a lot more in common than they might think. Indeed, my experience in science helped to train me for writing. The process of researching a question — of testing hunches and digging for concrete evidence — is similar. And even better, the thrill of discovery is just as gratifying.

A good example unfolded one December morning in Paris in 2011. I made my way to the Prefecture of Police just a few blocks south of Notre Dame Cathedral on the Left Bank. After showing the guard my passport, she pointed me upstairs to their archives. I introduced myself to the receptionist and was offered a seat at a large, wooden table in a small reading room.

What was I, a biologist from Wisconsin, doing at the Paris Police Archives? I was playing a hunch — a hunch that those archives might hold documents that could help me fill a gap in the story I was writing.

More here.

David Swanson in Alternet:

If you've just seen Michael Moore's movie and are wondering how in the world the United States got diverted into the slow lane to hell, go watch Noam Chomsky's movie. If you've just seen Noam Chomsky's movie and are wondering whether the human species is really worth saving, go see Michael Moore's movie. If you haven't seen either of these movies, please tell me that you haven't been watching presidential debates. As either of these movies would be glad to point out to you, that's not how you change anything.

“Filmed over four years, these are his last long-form documentary interviews,” Chomsky's film, Requiem for the American Dream, says of him at the start, rather offensively. Why? He seems perfectly able to give interviews and apparently gave those in this film for four years. And of course he acquired the insights he conveys over many more years than that. They are not new insights to activists, but they would be like revelations from another world to a typical U.S. resident.

Chomsky explains how concentrated wealth creates concentrated power, which legislates further concentration of wealth, which then concentrates more power in a vicious cycle. He lists and elaborates on 10 principles of the concentration of wealth and power — principles that the wealthy of the United States have acted intensely on for 40 years or more.

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Joe Fassler in The Atlantic:

For Ethan Canin, the author of A Doubter’s Almanac, Saul Bellow’s short story “A Silver Dish” is a masterwork. The protagonist is a businessman named Woody Selbst who’s unsure of how to mourn his con artist father. Pop didn’t just abandon the family when Woody was a teenager. He tricked his son into becoming an accomplice in his escape—a cruel ruse that permanently thwarted Woody’s ambitions in the process. In our conversation for this series, Canin explained that his favorite part comes at the very end. As Pop pulls off one last con on his deathbed, Woody’s coming-to-terms is expressed in a simple final sentence: “That was how he was.” We discussed how Bellow infuses five ordinary words with such uncanny power; why endings should make us feel, not think; and what “A Silver Dish” teaches about dialogue, plot, and character.

…I think Bellow’s the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I’m in awe. One of my favorite works is the great short story “A Silver Dish,” a story not too many people seem to know. It ends with, for me, one of the most memorable lines in fiction:

That was how he was.

There are five words in that sentence, each one essentially meaningless: That was how he was. Two of them are the same word: “was” and “was.” Hardly any sounds even, in those words, there’s no tilt, no break, no angle to the rhythm—just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Of all those words, only “he” and perhaps “was” have any sort of meaning. “How” is technically an adverb the way it’s used here but feels more nounish to me, in the sense that I get a little visual spark when I read it, entirely from what has come before in the story. The whole sentence uses only seven distinct letters, and contains only 15 letters total: three a’s, three h’s, three w’s, two s’s, two t’s, an o, and an e. It’s an amazingly restrained line from Bellow, who was a poet of the first order. I think he was intentionally restricting his palette. Compare it to some of his other great sentences, like the famous first line of The Adventures of Augie March:

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

You can open that book up to page 400 and find the best sentence you’ve ever seen. It’s an astonishing, volcanic eruption of ideas and language.

More here.

Gretchen Reynolds in The New York Times:

The relationship between exercise and cancer has long both intrigued and puzzled oncologists and exercise physiologists. Exercise is strongly associated with lowered risks for many types of cancer. In epidemiological studies, people who regularly exercise generally prove to be much less likely to develop or die from the disease than people who do not. At the same time, exercise involves biological stress, which typically leads to a short-term increase in inflammation throughout the body. Inflammation can contribute to elevated risks for many cancers. Now, a new study in mice may offer some clues into the exercise-cancer paradox. It suggests that exercise may change how the immune system deals with cancer by boosting adrenaline, certain immune cells and other chemicals that, together, can reduce the severity of cancer or fight it off altogether. To try to better understand how exercise can both elevate inflammation and simultaneously protect the body against cancer, scientists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and other institutions decided to closely examine what happens inside mice at high risk for the disease. So, for the new study, which was published this month in Cell Metabolism, they began by gathering a group of adult lab mice. These animals generally like to run.

The scientists then implanted melanoma skin cancer cells into the mice before providing half of them with running wheels in their cages while the other animals remained sedentary. After four weeks, far fewer of the runners had developed full-blown melanoma than the sedentary mice and those that had been diagnosed with the disease showed fewer and smaller lesions. They also were less prone to metastases, even if scientists injected some of the cancer cells into their lungs to stimulate metastases.

In effect, running seemed to have at least partially inoculated the mice against the cancer.

More here.

The Clothes Shrine

It was a whole new sweetness
In the early days to find
Light white muslin blouses
On a see-through nylon line
Drip-drying in the bathroom
Or a nylon slip in the shine
Of its own electricity-
As if St. Brigid once more
Had rigged up a ray of sun
Like the one she’d strung on air
To dry her own cloak on
(Hard-pressed Brigid, so
Unstoppably on the go)-
The damp and slump and unfair
Drag of the workday
Made light of and got through
As usual, brilliantly.
.

by Seamus Heaney
from Electric Light
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001
.