Steven M. Phelps in Nature:

One of the most pressing questions facing biologists is how variation in the genome is translated into variation in complex traits. Perhaps no trait is more complex or more interesting than social behaviour. How do genomic differences influence aggression, courtship or bonding? Few studies have asked. In a paper online in Nature, Bendesky et al.¹ combine genetic crosses, detailed behavioural assays and the latest neuroscience tools to understand species differences in parental care in mice of the genus Peromyscus.

Peromyscus is a diverse North American genus, whose habitats range from arid deserts to montane cloud forests². Along with these tremendously disparate habitats come comparably variable behaviours. For example, sharing of parental care and social monogamy are rare traits in mammals, but they have evolved at least twice in Peromyscus³. Oldfield mice (P. polionotus), for instance, live in sandy habitats at low population densities, and seem to have adapted to their sparse environments by forming pair bonds, with both sexes providing ample parental care (Fig. 1). By contrast, the deer mouse (P. maniculatus) is tremendously widespread and has a promiscuous mating system similar to that found in many other rodents³. Deer mice provide less parental care than do oldfield mice, with this difference being particularly pronounced in fathers.

More here.

Robert Alter in the New York Review of Books:

Jeffrey Saks has undertaken a heroic task in assembling the Agnon Library, using existing translations, which generally have been revised, and commissioning English versions of previously untranslated books. It is not quite a complete works because some books could not be included for reasons of copyright or on other grounds. The most unfortunate omission is Agnon’s modernist masterpiece, Only Yesterday (1945), a wrenching and richly inventive novel about a naive young Zionist’s failed attempt to take root in the land, which unfolds in Jaffa and Jerusalem in the early years of the twentieth century.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (his original family name was Czaczkes) was born in Buczacz, a town of about 15,000, over half of whom were Jews, that at one time belonged to Poland, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the late eighteenth century until the end of World War I, and is now in western Ukraine. In an Orthodox home, under the supervision of his learned father, he was given a thorough education in the classic Jewish texts, from the Bible with its medieval Hebrew exegetes to the Talmud, and he would draw on this background extensively throughout his career. But his family also engaged a German tutor for him, and he read Goethe, Schiller, and other German writers with his mother. The adolescent Agnon was drawn to Zionism, a movement then less than ten years old, and in 1908, when he was nineteen, he immigrated to Palestine.

More here.

From Phys.org:

Researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have developed biodegradable nanoparticles that can be used to genetically program immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells—while the immune cells are still inside the body.

In a proof-of-principle study to be published April 17 in Nature Nanotechnology, the team showed that nanoparticle-programmed immune cells, known as T cells, can rapidly clear or slow the progression of leukemia in a mouse model.

"Our technology is the first that we know of to quickly program tumor-recognizing capabilities into T cells without extracting them for laboratory manipulation," said Fred Hutch's Dr. Matthias Stephan, the study's senior author. "The reprogrammed cells begin to work within 24 to 48 hours and continue to produce these receptors for weeks. This suggests that our technology has the potential to allow the immune system to quickly mount a strong enough response to destroy cancerous cells before the disease becomes fatal."

Cellular immunotherapies have shown promise in clinical trials, but challenges remain to making them more widely available and to being able to deploy them quickly.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Eric Alterman in The Nation:

I haven’t seen much discussion of Daniel Drezner’s new book, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas—which is weird, because it’s the kind of book that is written more to be reviewed and argued about, as opposed to actually purchased.

Drezner’s book is the latest investigation into the state of America’s public intellectuals and the “debate” they conduct with their patrons and their public, and, especially, among themselves. He joins a distinguished procession of thinkers who have tackled the subject, including Walter Lippmann, Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, Edward Shills, Irving Howe, Russell Jacoby, Edward Said, and, most recently, Richard Posner. (See my “Judging the Wise Guys,” The Nation, January 10, 2002.) Drezner is a reliable and intelligent guide to the current state of play. But while focusing on the trees, he doesn’t always pay proper attention to the forest, which in this case is the power of money to corrupt and control literally everything with which it comes into contact—most particularly intellectual culture.

Drezner by no means ignores the issue. Early on, he makes a crucial distinction between old-fashioned “public intellectuals” and the now-trendy “thought leaders.” The latter model is one that sells itself less to an identifiable “public”—something that has become increasingly difficult to define in a society continually segmenting itself according to ever-more-narrow criteria—than to plutocratic patrons. Once upon a time, we relied on intellectuals to “speak truth to power,” as the saying goes.

More here.

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Adrian Tinniswood at Literary Review:

Historians have a bad habit of glossing over the Protectorate. It just isn’t interesting: no drama, no battles, all those drab Puritans cancelling Christmas. Traditionalists tend to lump the four and a half years of Oliver Cromwell’s reign as Lord Protector in with the rest of the Interregnum, just another stage in that embarrassing aberrant gap between one Charles and another. Radicals dismiss it as a betrayal of the revolution and prefer to focus with longing on the Diggers, the Ranters and the Fifth Monarchy Men.

These attitudes have been challenged over the past decade. One thinks of Little and Smith’s Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007), or Blair Worden’s important essay ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Protectorate’ (2010). Now, in The English Conquest of Jamaica, Carla Gardina Pestana has taken a single event in the life of the Protectorate and produced a gripping study that sheds light not only on governmental thinking in the 1650s but also on the birth of the British Empire itself.

Pestana’s previous book The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution(2004) was a landmark in the relatively new field of Atlantic studies. Here she takes as her starting point the ‘Western Design’, Cromwell’s ambitious plan, hatched early in 1654, to send an invasion force to the West Indies with the aim of conquering Spanish colonies in the region and establishing a permanent English presence there.

more here.

Patrick Blanchfield at n+1:

In the past few months we have witnessed the emergence of what we might call a hystericization of American politics. The structure of hysteria, as classical psychoanalysis has it, involves a consuming orientation toward a powerful Other, a state of erratic toggling between paranoia and attraction, fears of persecution, and demands for love. America has had its political hysterias and various histrionic politicians in the past, but as a symptom of our current collective pathologies and miserable cultural institutions, Trump is of another order entirely. It’s perhaps fitting that the 21st-century version of the fin-de-siècle Viennese hysteric—the marginalized woman succumbing to her mythical “wandering womb” by going into spasms on a chaise longue—is a sexually abusive reality TV star happy to spend precious minutes of televised debate time bragging about the size of his dick.

Yet the real hysteria hasn’t been Trump’s—it’s been the American media’s. “What Does Trump Really Want?” has become the great question of our time—the center of an entire cottage industry. Everything Trump says and tweets, no matter how trivial or unthinking (and very little of it is anything but), is instantly transformed into an utterance of major import: fodder for endless, breathless speculation and feverish interpretation. To whom was he sending a message with that tweet? While we’re playing checkers, he’s playing 4-dimensional chess—what’s his next play? What Does Trump’s Refusal to Shake Angela Merkel’s Hand Reveal About His Foreign Policy? Are his desires really the desires of some Other (Putin, Bannon, and in recent days, Kushner)?

more here.

Samuel Earle at the London Review of Books:

His radical, fearless economic programme has resonated with the public – and left the markets in a panic. He has promised to tax incomes above €400,000 at 100 per cent, increase public spending by €250 billion a year, drop the retirement age, and cut the working week from 35 hours to 32 (Macron wants to increase it to 37). ‘The rich are living beyond our means,’ he says. If they want to leave, ‘let them.’

Investors have sold off French bonds and the euro has dropped against the dollar. The ‘nightmare scenario’ for the finance sector – a second round that sees Le Pen pitted against Mélenchon – is possible. Pierre Gattaz, the head of France’s biggest pro-business organisation (MEDEF), says it would be a ‘catastrophe’: a choice ‘between economic disaster and economic chaos’. The Economist called the choice ‘unpalatable’. Le Figarocompared Mélenchon to Chávez, Castro and Robespierre, ‘en passant par Lenin’. Slate recently released a ‘survival guide’ for Le Pen v. Mélenchon: leaving France is apparently the most ‘rational’ option.

Parts of the left are uneasy, too. It’s possible Mélenchon would take France out of the EU – or at least hold a referendum on the question – and he is committed to leaving Nato. His hostility towards supranational institutions has led to comparisons with Le Pen, but there is a complete absence of xenophobia in Mélenchon’s campaign, and he has refused to join in with her migrant-bashing. Towards the beginning of his rally in Marseille, he held a moment’s silence for all those who have died in the ‘mass grave’ behind him, the Mediterranean Sea.

more here.

Brenden O'Neill in Sp!ked:

The most curious thing about the political class’s war in defence of truth is that it coexists with a war against freedom of speech. In one breath, our betters, whether it’s the technocrats of the EU or broadsheet thinkers, bemoan a crisis of truth, claiming that a combination of demagoguery and populist myth-making has propelled the modern West into a ‘post-truth’ era. Yet in the next they express disdain for the ideal of unfettered free thought and debate. Whether they’re instituting laws against ‘hate speech’ or enforcing social stigma against such things as ‘climate-change denial’ or ‘Europhobia’, they exhibit a palpable discomfort with the idea of a fully open public sphere in which nothing is unsayable.

We might even say that in 2017, there are two things that really animate the political and cultural elites of the West: first, their self-styled urge to defend truth, their pose as warriors for honesty against the misinformation of the new populists; and secondly, their agitation with unfettered discussion and with the expression of what they consider to be hateful or outré views. This is striking, because truth without freedom, without the freest possible space in which to debate and doubt and blaspheme, is not truth at all. It is dogma. It represents an assumption of intellectual and moral infallibility rather than a winning and proving of it in the only way that counts: through free public contestation. That our rulers both claim to love truth and fear freedom of speech utterly explodes the pretensions of their moral panic about a ‘post-truth’ era. It’s not truth they want to protect – it’s the authority of their prejudice.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Neuroscientists observed a sustained increase in neural signal diversity – a measure of the complexity of brain activity – of people under the influence of psychedelic drugs, compared with when they were in a normal waking state. The diversity of brain signals provides a mathematical index of the level of consciousness. For example, people who are awake have been shown to have more diverse neural activity using this scale than those who are asleep. This, however, is the first study to show brain-signal diversity that is higher than baseline, that is higher than in someone who is simply 'awake and aware'. Previous studies have tended to focus on lowered states of consciousness, such as sleep, anaesthesia, or the so-called 'vegetative' state. The team say that more research is needed using more sophisticated and varied models to confirm the results but they are cautiously excited.

Professor Anil Seth, Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, said: "This finding shows that the brain-on-psychedelics behaves very differently from normal. "During the psychedelic state, the electrical activity of the brain is less predictable and less 'integrated' than during normal conscious wakefulness – as measured by 'global signal diversity'. "Since this measure has already shown its value as a measure of 'conscious level', we can say that the psychedelic state appears as a higher 'level' of consciousness than normal – but only with respect to this specific mathematical measure." For the study, Michael Schartner, Adam Barrett and Professor Seth of the Sackler Centre reanalysed data that had previously been collected by Imperial College London and the University of Cardiff in which healthy volunteers were given one of three drugs known to induce a psychedelic state: psilocybin, ketamine and LSD. Using brain imaging technology, they measured the tiny magnetic fields produced in the brain and found that, across all three drugs, this measure of conscious level – the neural signal diversity – was reliably higher.

More here.

Manveena Suri at CNN:

With a budget of $155 million, India is set to make the longest poem ever written into its most expensive film ever.

Olivia Laing in the New Statesman:

There’s something kind of hot about monsters. They’re so dumb and hungry, with their big hairy mitts and gleaming fangs, leaving a trail of gore in their wake. And they’re soulful, too: Cocteau’s melancholy Bête, a tear spangling his fur; Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s lonesome Creature, mumbling, “Alone: bad. Friend, good!” Monsters plunder unconscious terrors about dangerous homes and unsettling bodies; hardly any wonder we’re all fixated on what Charlie Fox calls “monstrous entertainments”, from zombie parades to Stranger Things to the 2015 exhibition of Alexander McQueen’s spectral waifs and hybrids at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

“A monster is a fear assuming a form” is a pretty neat definition with which to embark on a whizzy cultural history of fiends and ghouls in the contemporary imagination. The beast, the freak, the oddity has provided many artists with inspirational material, from Diane Arbus to John Carpenter and David Lynch, but isn’t the artist also a type of monster: a vampire or del­inquent, like Arthur Rimbaud loaded on absinthe, stabbing Verlaine in a lesbian bar? The monster’s stock-in-trade of transformation, catharsis, revenge, is, as Fox notes, “something like art’s task”.

More here.

Michael Price in Science:

Do the anatomical differences between men and women—sex organs, facial hair, and the like—extend to our brains? The question has been as difficult to answer as it has been controversial. Now, the largest brain-imaging study of its kind indeed finds some sex-specific patterns, but overall more similarities than differences. The work raises new questions about how brain differences between the sexes may influence intelligence and behavior.

For decades, brain scientists have noticed that on average, male brains tend to have slightly higher total brain volume than female ones, even when corrected for males’ larger average body size. But it has proved notoriously tricky to pin down exactly which substructures within the brain are more or less voluminous. Most studies have looked at relatively small sample sizes—typically fewer than 100 brains—making large-scale conclusions impossible.

In the new study, a team of researchers led by psychologist Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, turned to data from UK Biobank, an ongoing, long-term biomedical study of people living in the United Kingdom with 500,000 enrollees. A subset of those enrolled in the study underwent brain scans using MRI. In 2750 women and 2466 men aged 44–77, Ritchie and his colleagues examined the volumes of 68 regions within the brain, as well as the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the brain’s wrinkly outer layer thought to be important in consciousness, language, memory, perception, and other functions.

More here.

Jason Dana in the New York Times:

A friend of mine once had a curious experience with a job interview. Excited about the possible position, she arrived five minutes early and was immediately ushered into the interview by the receptionist. Following an amicable discussion with a panel of interviewers, she was offered the job.

Afterward, one of the interviewers remarked how impressed she was that my friend could be so composed after showing up 25 minutes late to the interview. As it turned out, my friend had been told the wrong start time by half an hour; she had remained composed because she did not know she was late.

My friend is not the type of person who would have remained cool had she known she was late, but the interviewers reached the opposite conclusion. Of course, they also could have concluded that her calm reflected a flippant attitude, which is also not a trait of hers. Either way, they would have been wrong to assume that her behavior in the interview was indicative of her future performance at the job.

This is a widespread problem. Employers like to use free-form, unstructured interviews in an attempt to “get to know” a job candidate. Such interviews are also increasingly popular with admissions officers at universities looking to move away from test scores and other standardized measures of student quality. But as in my friend’s case, interviewers typically form strong but unwarranted impressions about interviewees, often revealing more about themselves than the candidates.

More here.

Catherine Young in Bitchmedia:

For as long as feminism has existed, feminists have been accused of hating men. Pleas for equal rights, franchise, and financial independence have been met with not just ardent and sometimes violent opposition, but the persistent, insidious untruth that feminists desire nothing more than to emasculate and eradicate the male sex and “take over.” While hating men isn’t a core tenet of feminist ideology, a curious trend has taken hold online over the past couple years: ironic misandry. Women attach #KillAllMen and #BanMen hashtags to news stories of male-perpetrated violence against women or legislation sponsored by male politicians designed to cut back on women’s rights. From the celebration of “Gleeful Mobs of Women Murdering Men in Western Art History” by the Toast to the bracelets proclaiming that “All Men Must Die” and mugs filled with “Male Tears” for sale on Etsy, the idea of telegraphing male hatred in public as a performance has really caught on. The thinking seems to be this: If men continue to insist that striving for gender equality is the same as hating them, why not lean into it?

In a Vice essay titled “The Year in Male Tears,” writer Chelsea Summers defined modern misandry not as a hatred of men, but as “a seething rage against patriarchal power” and declared 2014 “the year misandry became chic.” It was the year feminists agreed that “dick is abundant and low value” and that male tears made the best moisturizer. In 2015, #GiveYourMoneyToWomen emerged and grew in strength and visibility. In a piece titled “Give Your Money to Women: The End Game of Capitalism,” feminist activists Lauren Chief Elk, Yoeshin Lourdes, and Bardot Smith described the radical hashtag and movement as a “theory and practical framework of gender justice.” In short, gymtw is centered around the idea that women deserve to be directly compensated by men for the emotional labor they provide. “gymtw is a decolonial effort,” Chief Elk said in a 2016 tweet, and “Friday is payday.” Even celebrities got in on the fun. Gifs of Nicki Minaj cutting a banana in half in her “Anaconda” video were remixed with glitter “misandry” signs, and in her music video for “Bitch Better Have My Money,” Rihanna kidnapped and dismembered the trifling accountant who stole her money, then bathed in his blood. Misandry has gone mainstream, and unfortunately the irony seems to be lost on men. For the first time, the primary drivers of conversations around misandry are, in fact, the very feminists long-accused of not-so-secretly wanting to do away with men.

More here.

Hedda Hassel Morch in Nautilus:

The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation for how it arises from physical states of the brain, we are not even sure whether we ever will. Astronomers wonder what dark matter is, geologists seek the origins of life, and biologists try to understand cancer—all difficult problems, of course, yet at least we have some idea of how to go about investigating them and rough conceptions of what their solutions could look like. Our first-person experience, on the other hand, lies beyond the traditional methods of science. Following the philosopher David Chalmers, we call it the hard problem of consciousness. But perhaps consciousness is not uniquely troublesome. Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally hard, problem of matter. What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics? This problem, too, seems to lie beyond the traditional methods of science, because all we can observe is what matter does, not what it is in itself—the “software” of the universe but not its ultimate “hardware.” On the surface, these problems seem entirely separate. But a closer look reveals that they might be deeply connected.

Consciousness is a multifaceted phenomenon, but subjective experience is its most puzzling aspect. Our brains do not merely seem to gather and process information. They do not merely undergo biochemical processes. Rather, they create a vivid series of feelings and experiences, such as seeing red, feeling hungry, or being baffled about philosophy. There is something that it’s like to be you, and no one else can ever know that as directly as you do. Our own consciousness involves a complex array of sensations, emotions, desires, and thoughts. But, in principle, conscious experiences may be very simple. An animal that feels an immediate pain or an instinctive urge or desire, even without reflecting on it, would also be conscious. Our own consciousness is also usually consciousness of something—it involves awareness or contemplation of things in the world, abstract ideas, or the self. But someone who is dreaming an incoherent dream or hallucinating wildly would still be conscious in the sense of having some kind of subjective experience, even though they are not conscious of anything in particular.

More here.