Ken Chen in The New Republic:

Once, in my youth, I took a graduate philosophy seminar I thought would be about law and justice: Instead we discussed the semantic implications of punctuation marks. After class, I found myself venting to a friend who’d been a literature professor. I told her I was unsatiated by the course—it felt like when I had discovered poetry and found, in practice, this most lyric of arts often meant writing about flowers or describing an epiphany in the grocery store checkout line. My friend laughed. “You know your problem?” she said. “You thought that philosophy would be Truth and poetry would be Beauty.”

Apparently, this is Ben Lerner’s problem too. In his new book,The Hatred of Poetry, the poet, novelist, and MacArthur “genius” argues that if you love poetry’s promise of transcendence, you must also hate poems for their failure to keep up their end of the bargain. “Poetry,” Lerner writes, “arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine.” The only problem? Poems are ultimately human rather than divine in character. “As soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem,” he continues, “the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time… but when you wake… you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.” In other words, if you’re a poet, you may declare yourself the unacknowledged legislator of the world, but you’re really just a hobbyist in the verse game.

More here.

Bruce Bower in Science News:

Fierce combat erupted in February 2016 at the northern Iraqi village of Kudilah. A Western-backed coalition of Arab Sunni tribesmen, Kurds in the Iraqi army and Kurdish government forces advanced on Islamic State fighters who had taken over the dusty outpost.

Islamic State combatants, led by young men wearing explosive vests, fought back. The well-trained warriors scurried through battle lines until they reached their enemy. Then they blew themselves up along with a few coalition soldiers, setting the stage for an Islamic State victory. These suicide bombers are called inghamasi, meaning “those who dive in deep.”

The inghamasi’s determination and self-sacrifice inspires their comrades to fight to the death, says anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Outnumbered about 6-to-1, Islamic State fighters still retained control of Kudilah after two days of heavy fighting. Coalition forces retreated, unwilling to lose more soldiers.

Atran and colleagues arrived in northern Iraq a couple of weeks later. Their plan: study “the will to fight” among soldiers on both sides of the Kudilah clash, even as fighting in the area continued. Their goals: try to understand what motivates people to join brutal organizations such as the Islamic State, and describe the personal transformations that push people leading comfortable, peaceable lives to commit acts of incredible violence and self-destruction.

More here.

Bomani Jones in Playboy:

When did you realize you had become somebody?

When I came to The Atlantic I’d been writing for 12 years. The Atlantic is seen as this arbiter of sophisticated ideas, well ensconced in the mainstream consensus, and then they bring in this dude. I wasn’t making the case for reparations back then, but I was saying that sort of shit. I could see the reaction, and it built a little bit, and then when “The Case for Reparations” came out—holy shit. But even then it was like, “This is one story, and I’ll go back to my life.” I thought Between the World and Me would hit people who read shit. When we did BookExpo America, the book-trade joint, there was a line of people to get the galleys. I was like, “What the fuck?” And I knew it was some shit when somebody said to me on Twitter, “Oh, you’ve got to be a celebrity to get this book?” [laughs] Who the fuck wants a galley? And then when you’ve gotten love from Toni Morrison—it still didn’t hit me. When I started seeing the reaction to it I thought, Oh, this is different.

More here.

Naben Ruthnum at The Walrus:

King’s childhood in Connecticut and Maine was something of a blend of the lives he created for Lachance and Chambers in The Body. Like Lachance, King had a talent for storytelling. Like Chambers, he grew up without much money. King’s mother raised her two sons alone in the 1950s by taking on a series of low-paying jobs: shifts in a bakery and an industrial laundry, and housekeeping at a facility for the mentally ill. The strong women who populate King’s work—Wendy Torrance in The Shining (1977), a far cry from the trembling Shelley Duvall in the movie, and hardworking housekeeper Dolores Claiborne—reflect King’s admiration for his own mother’s efforts to get her boys a college education.

The stakes were high. In 1966, when King was in his last year of high school, the Vietnam war machine was at full throttle. Not being admitted into college would have meant getting drafted. To help with tuition, King got a job at a mill, a place he later described as “a dingy fuckhole overhanging the polluted Androscoggin River like a workhouse in a Charles Dickens novel.” Every day after school, he punched in for an eight-hour shift, went home to sleep for several hours, attended classes, then punched in again. His first notable story sale, in 1970, to a men’s magazine called Cavalier, was about the enormous rats under the mill. The grimy horror tale, “Graveyard Shift,” landed him the equivalent of a few weeks’ pay.

more here.

Glen Newey at The London Review of Books:

What will happen now? Precise predictions at this stage would be rash. The immediate upshot has already been position-staking by interest groups, notably from Scotland and Northern Ireland, both of which backed Remain in the poll. Sinn Fein has already called for a referendum on sovereignty. It’s unlikely that Nicola Sturgeon will be too quick to follow suit on Scotland’s behalf, first because in the short term the oil price collapse undermines an independent Scotland’s viability, and because a Scexit from the UK won’t quickly lead to Scotland’s reabsorption into the EU – existing members can veto accession, and Spain (and the Commission) will be loath to bless a precedent for secession, specifically of Catalonia.

If Scotland or Northern Ireland or both do peel off, the immediate prospects are fairly grim for people in what – the term is obsolete – used to be called Labour’s ‘heartlands’ in Rump UK. The kingdom of England and Wales would become, still more than it already is, Londonia, the capital a city-state as dominant over the rest as ancient Athens was over the surrounding demes. National politics is likely to be steered by the political wing of the Faragist falange, almost certainly with Johnson as premier. Its payroll vote skewed the Tory parliamentary party’s public stance in the referendum towards Remain; now it’s free to become what it is, an English nationalist party figureheaded by Johnson. Europhile Tories will be isolated. It’s not impossible that a major reconfiguration will occur, as happened with the Peelite Tories after Corn Law Repeal in 1846 or with anti-coupon liberals after the 1918 election, which eventually put paid to the Liberals as a single party of government.

more here.

at The Onion:

FOR

• First step in returning Britain to its pre-1970s glory as an economically languishing failed colonial empire
• In the face of a resurgent Russia and increased threats from ISIS, leaving E.U. would be the best strategy for letting someone else deal with that shit
• Britons could once again refocus their hatred on internal class divisions
• One less goddamn flag everyone has to hang up
• Won’t have to take part in awkward process of denying Bosnia and Herzegovina’s E.U. membership request
• Throughout its history, Britain has always been a valiant defender of the right of smaller territories to separate from larger, oppressive governments
• Pretty airtight way for citizens to mask racism as concern for national autonomy
• more here

Brian Handwerk in Smithsonian:

Slammed. Swamped. Flat out. Buried. No matter how it's said, the refrain is all too familiar—people are just too busy. But there's good news for the harried and hectic, new research shows that busy lifestyles may be good for your brain. “There hasn't been much scientific research on busyness itself, although it's something that we talk about so often,” explains Sara Festini, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas Center for Vital Longevity, a co-author of the new research published this week in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. “So we wanted to look at the relationship of a generally very busy lifestyle to cognition.” Festini and colleagues found that middle-aged and older Americans who keep themselves busy test better across a whole range of different cognitive functions like brain processing speeds, reasoning and vocabulary. The memory of specific events from the past, or episodic memory, is especially enhanced among busy people, they report. Psychologist Brent Small, director of the University of South Florida's School of Aging Studies, said the results are “in line with a large body of research suggesting that older adults who are actively engaged in cognitive stimulating activities are more likely to perform better on standard cognitive tasks.”

“This paper extends that work by examining the concept of busyness,” adds Small, who wasn't involved in the new research. But the strong correlation shown between busyness and brain function also raises an intriguing chicken-and-egg question: Does busyness boost the brain, or might people with better cognitive powers be more likely to keep themselves busy?

More here.

From PhysOrg:

A team of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) and Illumina, Inc., has completed the first large-scale assessment of single neuronal “transcriptomes.” Their research reveals a surprising diversity in the molecules that human brain cells use in transcribing genetic information from DNA to RNA and producing proteins. The researchers accomplished this feat by isolating and analyzing single-neuronal nuclei from the human brain, allowing classification of 16 neuronal subtypes in the brain's cerebral cortex, the “gray matter” involved in thought, cognition and many other functions. “Through a wonderful scientific collaboration, we found an enormous amount of transcriptomic diversity from cell to cell that will be relevant to understanding the normal brain and its diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS and depression,” said TSRI Professor and neuroscientist Jerold Chun, who co-led the study with bioengineers Kun Zhang and Wei Wang of UC San Diego and Jian-Bing Fan of Illumina. The study was published on June 24 in the journal Science.

All the Same

While parts of the cerebral cortex look different under a microscope—with different cell shapes and densities that form cortical layers and larger regions having functional roles called “Brodmann Areas”—most researchers treat neurons as a fairly uniform group in their studies. “From a tiny brain sample, researchers often make assumptions that obtained information is true for the entire brain,” said Chun. But the brain isn't like other organs, Chun explained. There's a growing understanding that individual brain cells are unique, and a possibility has been that the microscopic differences among cerebral cortical areas may also reflect unique transcriptomic differences—i.e., differences in the expressed genes, or messenger RNAs (mRNAs), which carry copies of the DNA code outside the nucleus and determine which proteins the cell makes. To better understand this diversity, the researchers in the new study analyzed more than 3,200 single human neurons—more than 10-fold greater than prior publications—in six Brodmann Areas of one human cerebral cortex. With the help of newly developed tools to isolate and sequence individual cell nuclei (where genetic material is housed in a cell), the researchers deciphered the minute quantities of mRNA within each nucleus, revealing that various combinations of the 16 subtypes tended to cluster in cortical layers and Brodmann Areas, helping explain why these regions look and function differently.

More here.

Ariel Sabar in The Atlantic:

On a humid afternoon this past November, I pulled off Interstate 75 into a stretch of Florida pine forest tangled with runaway vines. My GPS was homing in on the house of a man I thought might hold the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a 1,300-year-old scrap of papyrus that bore the phrase “Jesus said to them, My wife.” The fragment, written in the ancient language of Coptic, had set off shock waves when an eminent Harvard historian of early Christianity, Karen L. King, presented it in September 2012 at a conference in Rome.

Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus’s being married. The papyrus’s lines were incomplete, but they seemed to describe a dialogue between Jesus and the apostles over whether his “wife”—possibly Mary Magdalene—was “worthy” of discipleship. Its main point, King argued, was that “women who are wives and mothers can be Jesus’s disciples.” She thought the passage likely figured into ancient debates over whether “marriage or celibacy [was] the ideal mode of Christian life” and, ultimately, whether a person could be both sexual and holy.

King called the business-card-size papyrus “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” But even without that provocative title, it would have shaken the world of biblical scholarship. Centuries of Christian tradition are bound up in whether the scrap is authentic or, as a growing group of scholars contends, an outrageous modern fake: Jesus’s bachelorhood helps form the basis for priestly celibacy, and his all-male cast of apostles has long been cited to justify limits on women’s religious leadership.

More here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

The skin comes out in goosebumps and tingles run up the spine. But how particular pieces of music can induce such rapturous effects in people has stumped researchers for centuries.

With the passing of time comes new technology though, and suitably equipped with modern brain scanning equipment, scientists may now have made some headway.

In the latest effort to understand “the chills”, researchers in the US put out a call for music fans who either consistently experienced euphoric sensations on hearing certain tracks, or who hardly ever felt them at all.

“It stemmed from a deep interest in intense, profound emotional responses, in particular those that come from music,” said Matthew Sachs, a graduate student at the University of Southern California who conducted the experiments at Harvard University. “I’ve always been fascinated by how a collection of tones changing over time has the ability to evoke these very strong sensations.”

More than 200 people responded to the call and filled out online personality questionnaires. From these, Sachs and others at Harvard and Wesleyan University in Connecticut selected 10 to form a “chill group” and another 10 to form a “no chill” group.

Before having their brains scanned, the 20 volunteers went into the lab with playlists of music they found most pleasurable.

More here. [Thanks to Marko Ahtisaari.]

From The Guardian:

David Cameron, along with the Treasury, the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund and others have been attacked by the leave campaign for exaggerating the economic risks of Brexit. This criticism has been widely accepted by the British media and many financial analysts. As a result, British voters are now grossly underestimating the true costs of leaving.

Too many believe that a vote to leave the EU will have no effect on their personal financial position. This is wishful thinking. It would have at least one very clear and immediate effect that will touch every household: the value of the pound would decline precipitously. It would also have an immediate and dramatic impact on financial markets, investment, prices and jobs.

As opinion polls on the referendum result fluctuate, I want to offer a clear set of facts, based on my six decades of experience in financial markets, to help voters understand the very real consequences of a vote to leave the EU.

More here.

David Noonan in Smithsonian:

Two hundred and thirty-five years after the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani reported that dismembered frog legs twitch in response to a static charge applied to a nerve, we are still exploring the mysteries of what he called “animal electricity,” especially in the brain. That the brain generates a bit of its own electricity, which can be detected by an electroencephalogram, or EEG, is well established, as is the fact that some neurosurgeons today sometimes use hair-thin electrodes to stimulate deep brain structures and stop Parkinson’s tremors. But scientists are now exploring a question that is, well, mind-boggling: Can low-voltage doses of electricity, transmitted through hair, skin and skull directly into particular regions of the brain, make already healthy people sharper and more alert?

Aron Barbey, a 39-year-old neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, is a leader in this research, though he is excruciatingly cautious about its prospects. He resists the idea that tomorrow’s malls and airports will feature commercial brain-charging stations, updated versions of today’s massage stops, but if that future (or something like it) comes to pass, his work will have played a critical role in bringing it about. Barbey is the director of the UI’s Decision Neuroscience Laboratory at the university’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and his experiments appear to point to a time when students, soldiers, executives and the elderly could all benefit from a treatment called transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS).

More here.

Hearing Parker for the First Time

The blue notes spiraling up from the transistor radio
tuned to WNOE, New Orleans, lifted me out of bed
in Seward County, Kansas, where the plains wind riffed
telephone wires in tones less strange than the bird songs
of Charlie Parker. I played high school tenor sax the way,
I thought, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young might have
if they were, like me, untalented and white, but Ornithology
came winding up from the dark delta of blues and dixieland
into my room on the treeless and hymn-ridden high plains
like a dust devil spinning me into the Eleusinian mysteries
of the jazz gods though later I would learn that his long
apprenticeship in Kansas City and an eremite’s devotion
to the hard rule of craft gave him the hands that held
the reins of the white horse that carried him to New York
and 52nd Street, farther from wheat fields and dry creek beds
than I would ever travel, and then carried him away.

by B.H. Fairchild
from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
W.W. Norton, 2003
.

From KurzweilAI:

Australian researchers have discovered that an existing medication could have promise in preventing breast cancer in women carrying a faulty BRCA1 gene, who are at high risk of developing aggressive breast cancer. Currently, many women with this mutation choose surgical removal of breast tissue and ovaries to reduce their chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Notably, in May 2013, actress Angelina Jolie, who reportedly had with an estimated 87 per cent risk of breast cancer and 50 per cent risk of ovarian cancer, chose to have d2ouble mastectomy with breast reconstruction. Women with mutation have an approximately 65% cumulative risk of developing breast cancer by age 70, the researchers note, based on a 2003 combined analysis of 22 studies.

A drug option

But now, another option may be be possible, as 16 scientists (most in Australia) report in an advance online paper in Nature Medicine this week. The researchers discovered that pre-cancerous cells could be identified by a marker protein called RANK. A concurrent study led by an Austrian group had also identified the importance of RANK. This was an important breakthrough, they said, because an inhibitor of the RANK signalling pathway was already in clinical use: the drug denosumab. The researchers suggest the drug may have potential to prevent breast cancer from developing. If confirmed in clinical studies, this would provide a non-surgical option to prevent breast cancer in women with elevated genetic risk.

More here.

Sumayya Kassamali in Caravan:

“AND WERE YOU POLITICALLY INVOLVED in Beirut?” an interviewer once asked Faiz Ahmed Faiz, arguably the greatest Urdu poet of the last century. “I was, indeed, yes!” he replied. “You had to be, if you were part of the suffering of the place and of the people.”

Today, the most visible signs of the subcontinent’s involvement in Beirut are the neon-green-uniformed South Asian men emptying plastic garbage bins into large green trucks on the street. Images of India abound in the city’s hip yoga culture, with Pakistan harder to find. The Arabic word for “Sri Lankan,” in its feminine adjectival form, is widely synonymous with “maid.” Diversity fares mildly better in elite liberal enclaves such as the American University of Beirut or the contemporary art scene, which are generally sprinkled with a few brown faces. There are moments, of course. An independent film festival recently screened the Indian filmmaker Anurag Kashyap’s crime drama Gangs of Wasseypur, a Palestinian refugee camp includes a grocery store stocked with imported ingredients for its Bangladeshi residents (cheap housing and limited state intervention attract the camp’s mixed occupants), and a Nepalese feminist organisation offers a stream of regular programming for its community of domestic workers. In Faiz’s day, Asians had just begun to enter Lebanon’s manual and domestic labour force. But for politically conscious intellectuals in Lahore or Delhi, the tiny Arab country bordered by Syria and Palestine was a closely followed news item in an era marked by the spirit of socialism and Third World solidarity.

In 1977, General Zia ul-Haq deposed Pakistan’s elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in a coup that would lead to over a decade of American-supported military rule. Soon afterwards, the 67-year-old Faiz—a former political prisoner, close associate of Bhutto and outspoken socialist—decided to leave his home in Karachi for Beirut. This seemed a curious choice.

More here.

Daniel Davies in Vox:

One big factor is that the character of a neighborhood is changed by the kind of people who move out just as much as by the kind of people who move in. And regional migration within the UK has been a big phenomenon over the past 20 years, as London and the Southeast have grown – economically and in population terms – much faster than the rest of the country.

Some of the most Euroskeptical areas have seen rapid declines in their population. In Stoke-on-Trent, for example, the local council has so many empty homes that it sometimes sells them for £1 each, in a publicity stunt aimed at attracting economically active people.

This depopulation has been driven by deindustrialization. While the UK has in general been good at creating jobs and keeping unemployment down, the northern and coastal towns where Brexit support is the highest tend to be home to either difficult and dangerous labor-intensive industries or low-level service industry employers like hotels and care homes. As the UK labor force has got more productive and better educated, on average, it’s unsurprising that workers have tended to migrate to the higher-paid new jobs being created in the growing regions around London.

Lopsided and London-centric development is a real problem. And of course, although it is an old cliché for miners and fishermen to hope that their children don’t follow them, that doesn’t make it any less painful to have your children (and now grandchildren) living on the other side of the country, in a world that’s culturally and economically even further away than its geographic distance.

It’s particularly challenging when the housing and employment vacuum created by their departure gets filled with new European immigrants, who act as very visible symbols of the underlying change when you interact with them in their service jobs, or at the doctor’s office.

More here.

Henry Farrell in Crooked Timber:

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s new book, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper does four things. First, it makes the case for the mixed economy – the effort to make the market and state work together. Second, it makes the case that mixed government existed. The US used not to be as divided as it is now, and business, rather than being committed to a virulently anti-state agenda was often relatively pragmatic. Third, it tries to explain how this went South – how mixed government, and indeed government, became a dirty word. Finally, it asks how mixed government can be resuscitated again.

Hacker and Pierson’s political argument, as I read it, has a lot in common with that of old-style liberals like J.K Galbraith and Charles Lindblom. Hacker and Pierson don’t want an overweeningly powerful state – instead, they want a state and market that work together. They borrow Lindblom’s analogy of markets working like the fingers of a hand to provide dexterity, while the state works like a thumb, to provide authority and to help grasp things that need to be grasped. This does not imply that the state and markets should be guided by a single will so much as that they work, when they work well, in complementary ways. Indeed, like both libertarians and many leftists they are highly suspicious of what might happen when the state and private industry build relations that are too congenial. As they describe it (p.5), “Democracy and the market – thumbs and fingers – have to work together, but they also need to be partly independent of each other, or the thumb will seek to provide effective counterpressure to the fingers.”

In a mixed economy, government provides services and goods that will be underprovided by the private sector, or perhaps not provided at all. It also regulates market actors, obliging them to behave more honestly towards the consumers of their products. As the economy becomes increasingly complex, it becomes increasingly easy for private sector interests to take advantage of ordinary people. Regulators can help restrain business through regulation and antitrust (Hacker and Pierson acknowledge Woodrow Wilson’s racism but have kind words for his efforts to build the institutions that would regulate market competition). Unless business is restrained by the state, it is liable to behave badly.

More here.