Think Trump is an authoritarian? Look at his actions, not his words

Corey Robin in The Guardian:

ScreenHunter_2690 May. 05 11.01A wise psychoanalyst once told me: “Stop looking at what you’re saying, look at what you’re doing.” If only journalists applied the same rule to Donald Trump.

On Friday night, Trump complained that he was being stymied by “archaic rules” in the House of Representatives and the Senate and warned “maybe at some point we’re going to have to take those rules on”.

Aaron Blake, a journalist at the Washington Post, was quick to diagnose the statement:

Now Trump is talking about consolidating his power … Whether this is just him [Trump] blowing off steam or signaling what lies ahead, it’s significant. Because it suggests a president, yet again, who doesn’t agree with his own powers being limited or even questioned. Remember when senior policy adviser Stephen Miller declared “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned?” This is more of that kind of attitude. He wants more power – and he wants it quickly. It’s not difficult to connect this to his past admiration for authoritarian leaders, and these comments are likely to give Democrats (and even some in the GOP establishment) plenty of heartburn. This is a demonstrated pattern for him, for all the reasons listed at the top of this post.

This kind of narrative of Trump the authoritarian is popular among journalists such as Vox’s Ezra Klein and academics such as Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It’s the background mood music of a lot of liberal commentary in the US. But it depends on paying almost exclusive attention to what Trump says rather than what he does.

If Trump were actually serious about consolidating his power, he might start by, oh, I don’t know, consolidating his power.

More here.

There’s No Science Behind Denying Climate Change

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

ScreenHunter_2691 May. 05 11.10If you didn't know anything about climate science, about the Earth's temperature, about carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases, but you wanted to, how would you go about doing it? You'd begin by constructing a plan for how you'd accurately scientifically investigate the problem. You'd think about the data you'd need to collect and how you'd gather it. You'd think about the measurements you'd want to make and how to make them. You'd think about the sources of error and how to account for them: how to properly calibrate your data from all over the world and from many different time periods. And then you'd bring it together, under one enormous framework, to try and draw a scientifically robust conclusion.

Your first step would be to go out and try to measure the heat content of the planet. You'd measure the temperature of the air where you are, and you'd attempt to do it all over the world. The continents would be the easiest, and then you'd go after the oceans. The sea-level temperature would be low-hanging fruit, and then you'd have to go beyond the obvious to measure the heat trapped in the upper atmosphere and in the deeper waters of the seas. You'd try and measure it everywhere today, but also to reconstruct what it was in the past, going as far back as you can.

Because you can't go back in time and take measurements that you weren't there to take, you'd then look for proxies, or things you can measure directly that can give you information about past temperature. You'd discover that the science of dendroclimatology — or inferring past climates and temperatures from the properties of trees that were growing at the time — can give you lots of robust information.

More here.

on Leonora Carrington

4bcc9280-2fcb-11e7-aef5-2d8dbd8d80b5Lorna Scott Fox at the Times Literary Supplement:

The artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) broke her ties so thoroughly with Britain that, until recently, only a cult following in the country knew her name. Two years ago, however, Tate Liverpool brought her playful, arcane visions back to the land she bolted from in 1937, and among the celebratory offerings of this centenary year are a new biography, a new edition of her short stories, and a volume of scholarly essays. And yet much remains unknown about a woman whose life was like a comet, with its bright early flare, tailing off into mystery. Critics pore over the same handful of statements and one letter. It is usually claimed that she lived in Mexico from 1943 onwards, but inThe Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington Joanna Moorhead locates her in the United States from 1968 to the mid-1990s. There are few recorded sightings over those twenty-five years; she hid like one of her imaginary creatures in the shadowy symbolic spaces of her art. Marina Warner first met her in a basement burrow in 1980s New York. The Mexican home Carrington eventually returned to was, belying its exotic surroundings, chill and dark. Back in 1945 she had described herself as “an old Mole who swims beneath the cemeteries”. Whether a surrealist or a pataphysical priestess, she was subterranean rather than celestial.

The misfit daughter of a Lancashire textile magnate, Carrington fed her imagination with words and pictures early on. The sumptuous world of Victorian storybooks is reflected in her teenage paintings of fairies, demons and Sisters of the Moon.

more here.

Ritual Protest and the Theater of Dissent

HqVO6dGlVirginia Hotchkiss at nonsite:

The most preferable time to do an action is either first thing in the morning when participants can stand in the street long enough to block rush hour traffic, which ups the chances of arrest and news coverage, or at 11am after the press have concluded their morning staff meetings and are ready to head out of the office. Weekend actions make it possible to draw more participants, but make it more difficult to draw the media. These are generally the key concerns around which we plan a demonstration.

The politics that inform these actions, where not entirely opaque, are based on a semi-spiritual belief that the right recipe of symbolism, passion, and powerful visuals will inspire significant political action that will alter the course of this or that unjust policy or state of affairs. Organizers want to inspire the people who view their protest images on their phones. To this end, they reach for clichéd tropes of earlier social movements to galvanize the imagination of onlookers. They sing the familiar songs, sometimes with their own lyrics added in, and steel themselves in the unimpeachable credentials of social justice saints of yore. In one characteristic overreach, an organizer told a crowd that they were the “Harriet Tubmans” of the environmental movement, freeing people from the slavery of fossil fuels. Historical inspiration belongs in these fights, but an equation with Tubman exposes the delusion of demonstrators who believe they are in the midst of a powerful social movement instead of a tired ritual.

more here.

France, Round One

1493063264BellMacronLHeritier666David A. Bell at Dissent:

And then there is the likely next president. Emmanuel Macron is what Americans would call a cultural liberal, who supports gay marriage and is willing to condemn his own country for its past imperialist ventures. But on economic matters he is much more of a technocrat and free-marketer (his resume includes the ultra-elite École Nationale d’Administration and the Rothschild Bank) who will do little to redress growing inequalities or guard against the effects of globalization. The presidential election will be followed in June by a parliamentary election, and while Macron has already gained the endorsement of leading Socialists (including former Prime Minister Manuel Valls), his economic positions will make it impossible for much of the left to support him. Much of the traditional Socialist base of teachers, civil servants, and union organizers frankly despises him. The result could well be a formal split in the Socialist Party created by François Mitterrand in 1971, with a centrist rump joining with Macron’s new En Marche movement and other centrists like François Bayrou to form some sort of new, Blairite “Third Way” party. Hamon’s miserable 6 percent showing (which more or less match Hollande’s miserable approval ratings) has already sounded a likely death knell for the Socialists, whose membership has fallen drastically over the past few years. But can its left-wing elements find common ground with Mélenchon, the Greens, and other, smaller left-wing parties? Can they form a substantial bloc that will support Macron on condition that he take seriously his professed admiration for Scandinavian social democracy? Nothing is less clear.

more here.

Thursday Poem

E: He should be here.
V: He didn't say for sure he'd come.
E: And if he doesn't come?
V: We'll come back tomorrow.
E: And then the day after tomorrow.
V: Possibly.
E: And so on.
—Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
.

The Experience

You go down the right turnings
just as it says in the guide,
and it isn't there.

You turn up at the right room
at the right time,
in the right month and moonlight;
and it isn't there.

You discover the right grove,
and you stand about on damp leaves.
And a man on a tractor passes
and thinks you are mad.

You have the paper and the time,
you have the lot,
and nothing comes.
.

John Fowles
from Poems John Fowles
The Ecco Press, 1973
.

SILICON VALLEY’S QUEST TO LIVE FOREVER

Tad Friend in The New Yorker:

AgeOn a velvety March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear’s living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the secrets of longevity. When the symposium’s first speaker asked how many people there wanted to live to two hundred, if they could remain healthy, almost every hand went up. Understandably, then, the Moroccan phyllo chicken puffs weren’t going fast. The venture capitalists were keeping slim to maintain their imposing vitality, the scientists were keeping slim because they’d read—and in some cases done—the research on caloric restriction, and the Hollywood stars were keeping slim because of course.

When Liz Blackburn, who won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics, took questions, Goldie Hawn, regal on a comfy sofa, purred, “I have a question about the mitochondria. I’ve been told about a molecule called glutathione that helps the health of the cell?” Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that protects cells and their mitochondria, which provide energy; some in Hollywood call it “the God molecule.” But taken in excess it can muffle a number of bodily repair mechanisms, leading to liver and kidney problems or even the rapid and potentially fatal sloughing of your skin. Blackburn gently suggested that a varied, healthy diet was best, and that no single molecule was the answer to the puzzle of aging. Yet the premise of the evening was that answers, and maybe even an encompassing solution, were just around the corner. The party was the kickoff event for the National Academy of Medicine’s Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity, which will award at least twenty-five million dollars for breakthroughs in the field. Victor Dzau, the academy’s president, stood to acknowledge several of the scientists in the room. He praised their work with enzymes that help regulate aging; with teasing out genes that control life span in various dog breeds; and with a technique by which an old mouse is surgically connected to a young mouse, shares its blood, and within weeks becomes younger.

More here.

Computer scientists have created the most accurate digital model of a human face. Here’s what it can do

Matthew Hutson in Science:

FaceIf you’ve used the smartphone application Snapchat, you may have turned a photo of yourself into a disco bear or melded your face with someone else’s. Now, a group of researchers has created the most advanced technique yet for building 3D facial models on the computer. The system could improve personalized avatars in video games, facial recognition for security, and—of course—Snapchat filters. When computers process faces, they sometimes rely on a so-called 3D morphable model (3DMM). The model represents an average face, but also contains information on common patterns of deviation from that average. For example, if you have a long nose, you’re also likely to have a long chin. Given such correlations, a computer can then characterize your unique face not by storing every point in a 3D scan, but by listing just a couple hundred numbers describing your deviation from an average face, including parameters that roughly correspond to age, gender, and length of face.

There’s a catch, however. To account for all the ways faces can vary, a 3DMM needs to integrate information on many faces. Until now that has required scanning lots of people and then painstakingly labeling all of their features. Consequently, the current best models are based on only a couple hundred people—mostly white adults—and have limited ability to model people of different ages and races. Now, James Booth, a computer scientist at Imperial College London (ICL), and colleagues have developed a new method that automates the construction of 3DMMs and enables them to incorporate a wider spectrum of humanity. The method has three main steps. First, an algorithm automatically landmarks facial scans—labeling the tip of the nose and other points. Second, another algorithm lines up all the scans according to their landmarks and combines them into a model. Third, an algorithm detects and removes bad scans. “The really big contribution in this work is they show how to fully automate this process,” says William Smith, who studies computer vision at the University of York in the United Kingdom and was not involved in the study. Labeling dozens of facial features on many faces is “pretty tedious,” says Alan Brunton, a computer scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research in Darmstadt, Germany, who was also uninvolved. “You think it’s relatively easy to click a point, but it’s not always obvious where the corner of the mouth really is, so even when you do this manually you have some error.” But Booth and colleagues didn’t stop there. They applied their method to a set of nearly 10,000 demographically diverse facial scans. The scans were done at a science museum in London by the plastic surgeons Allan Ponniah and David Dunaway, who hoped to improve reconstructive surgery. They approached Stefanos Zafeiriou, a computer scientist at ICL for help analyzing the data. Applying the algorithm to those scans created what they call the “large scale facial model,” or LSFM. In tests against existing models, the LSFM much more accurately represented faces, the authors report in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Computer Vision. In one comparison, they created a model of a child’s face from a photograph. Using the LSFM, the model looked like the child. Using one of the most popular existing morphable models—which is based completely on adults—it looked like an unrelated grown-up. Booth and his colleagues even had enough scans to create more-specific morphable models for different races and ages. And their model can automatically classify faces into age groups based on shape.

More here.

‘My body shall be all yours’: the startling sex letters of Joyce, Kahlo and O’Keeffe

Holly Williams in The Guardian:

2112“I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter.” He might be celebrated for his epic and allusive novels, but James Joyce came straight to the point when writing to his partner, Nora Barnacle. This was the opening salvo of a letter from 1908 and is just one of scores of explicit missives he sent her.

A new stage show is celebrating such letters of desire sent by famous figures through the centuries, whether explicit or coded, erotic or romantic. Theatre-maker Rachel Mars is curating a selection to be read aloud in the performance which is part of the Hotbed “festival of sex” at Camden People’s theatre in London. These will be interspersed with anonymised modern messages: texts, tweets and dating app sexts.

If emails have done away with the fine art of correspondence, then what future is there for the sex letter compared with the instant gratification offered by a flurry of Tinder messages? There’s a certain sensuality that is surely lost when long-awaited love letters are replaced by auto-destructing Snapchat messages.

“The form of sexting is so immediate,” says Mars. “I am nostalgic for letters. There’s a craft that’s been lost in expressing some kind of desire or passion or bodily experience for someone else.”

More here.

The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

ScreenHunter_2689 May. 03 20.46In his 1824 book, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, the 28-year-old French engineer Sadi Carnot worked out a formula for how efficiently steam engines can convert heat — now known to be a random, diffuse kind of energy — into work, an orderly kind of energy that might push a piston or turn a wheel. To Carnot’s surprise, he discovered that a perfect engine’s efficiency depends only on the difference in temperature between the engine’s heat source (typically a fire) and its heat sink (typically the outside air). Work is a byproduct, Carnot realized, of heat naturally passing to a colder body from a warmer one.

Carnot died of cholera eight years later, before he could see his efficiency formula develop over the 19th century into the theory of thermodynamics: a set of universal laws dictating the interplay among temperature, heat, work, energy and entropy — a measure of energy’s incessant spreading from more- to less-energetic bodies. The laws of thermodynamics apply not only to steam engines but also to everything else: the sun, black holes, living beings and the entire universe. The theory is so simple and general that Albert Einstein deemed it likely to “never be overthrown.”

Yet since the beginning, thermodynamics has held a singularly strange status among the theories of nature.

“If physical theories were people, thermodynamics would be the village witch,” the physicist Lídia del Rio and co-authors wrote last year in Journal of Physics A. “The other theories find her somewhat odd, somehow different in nature from the rest, yet everyone comes to her for advice, and no one dares to contradict her.”

Unlike, say, the Standard Model of particle physics, which tries to get at what exists, the laws of thermodynamics only say what can and can’t be done. But one of the strangest things about the theory is that these rules seem subjective. A gas made of particles that in aggregate all appear to be the same temperature — and therefore unable to do work — might, upon closer inspection, have microscopic temperature differences that could be exploited after all. As the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”

In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems.

More here. [Thanks to Sean Carroll.]

The Arab Prince Standing Up to Trump

Kim Ghattas in Foreign Policy:

ZeidIf ever there were a sign that the world is upside down, it is that a Muslim prince from an Arab royal family is now one of the leading voices defending human rights on the global stage. At a time when the issue seems to be taking a back seat everywhere, Prince Zeid Raad al-Hussein of Jordan, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, has excoriated Western politicians for their xenophobia and requested an investigation into allegations of torture in Bahrain — even as the United States announced it is lifting human rights restrictions on arm sales to the kingdom.

Before the U.S. election, Zeid stood in front of the U.N. General Assembly in September and decried “race-baiting bigots who seek to gain, or retain, power by wielding prejudice and deceit at the expense of those most vulnerable.”

He explicitly called out Geert Wilders and Donald Trump in another speech, decrying Wilders’s “lies and half-truths, manipulations, and peddling of fear.” He added that his own personal background must be a nightmare for xenophobes everywhere, as a “Muslim, who is, confusingly to racists, also white-skinned; whose mother is European and father, Arab.” And since Trump’s ascension to the White House, Zeid has not shied way from criticizing him, calling the new administration’s travel ban “mean-spirited” and illegal under human rights law. In fact, he was the only prominent Arab voice on the world stage denouncing the ban and speaking out about the impact on Arab communities in the United States while Arab governments stayed mum.

More here. [Free registration may be required.]

The Book Beneath the Noise

Ht4-196x300Jennifer Helinek at Open Letters Monthly:

Forgive people for renewing their obsession with Margaret Atwood’s 1985 feminist dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale. Given the release of a special edition audiobook at the beginning of April, a Hulu TV adaptation premiering at the end of April, and the book’s anticipation of Trump-era surrealism, a glut of Handmaid’s Tale articles has been inevitable. The book’s narrator, Offred, tells the story of the first generation of a society called Gilead, built from the ashes of the state once known as America. In Gilead, absolute political, economic, and social misogyny becomes the law of the land, and each woman is given a specific role – housemaid, wife, or breeder. Like all breeders (called “handmaids”), Offred has been renamed for her owner; she now belongs to a powerful man named Fred (but whom the book refers to simply as “the Commander”), and her job is to provide the Commander and his barren wife with a baby.

Offred leads a regimented, tedious existence that barely distracts her from the bittersweet, tormenting influence of memory. She reflects on how Christian extremists massacred the president and Congress, froze women’s bank accounts, and outlawed female employment before completely remolding society. Her thoughts on the transition process offer some of the book’s most prescient lines, like, “They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time,” and, “The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipassses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful.”

more here.

Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

ImgresEugene McCarraher at The Hedgehog Review:

Marxists can be the very best theologians, especially when they stare, unbelieving, into the abyss of historical hopelessness. Writing in the wake of the Nazi Judeocide and the specter of nuclear holocaust, Theodor Adorno, for instance, enlisted the eschatological hope of biblical religion. “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair,” he mused in the finale ofMinima Moralia (1951), regards all things “from the standpoint of redemption.” Such a philosophy uncovers the world “with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” To be sure, Adorno was no believer: “The reality or unreality of redemption hardly matters,” he wrote. Thus, the vantage of redemption must be “wrested from what is,” not revealed from outside history; it must be torn from a reality marked “by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape.” Yet how could we elicit a promise of deliverance from a world so corrupt and misshapen? Mindful of the ancient Jewish prohibitions against soothsaying and graven images, Adorno insisted that our only purchase on the messianic future lay in “consummate negativity,” a relentless critique of the present that refused any glimpse or blueprint of utopia, a modern, secular surrogate for the prophetic iconoclasm of messianic faith.

Stuart Jeffries quotes this oft-cited passage in his “group biography” of the Frankfurt School, noting of the redemptive perspective only “how precarious it [is] to occupy it.” It’s a missed opportunity for insight. Adorno’s invocation of religion sheds invaluable light on the melancholy Marxism that so significantly informed the thought of the main thinkers among this congeries of dissident intellectuals who, in the 1920s, became informally associated with the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research. Returning to the inaugural moment in the history of the classical Marxist tradition—the repudiation of religion as a form of social criticism—Adorno contravened Marx in seeking to salvage and appropriate the moral authority of the sacred for critical purposes.

more here.

At the Galleries

Auguste_Rodin_1840-1917_Dance_Movement_A-e1484946567756Karen Wilkin at The Hudson Review:

Among the most notable of the past season’s exhibitions were revelations of studio practice in early twentieth-century Paris, the Dutch Golden Age, and seventeenth-century Spain. In London, for example, “Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement,” at the Courtauld Gallery, organized in collaboration with the Musée Rodin, Paris, surveyed the French master’s compelling late images of dancers. Made in the 1890s, when Auguste Rodin was in his 50s and 60s, these radically simplified drawings and sculptures bear witness to a private side of the celebrated artist. Exhibited with photographs that provided context, they docu­mented Rodin’s delight in vanguard dance, from a Cambodian troupe to Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller. Rodin attended perfor­mances and had dancers pose for him in the studio (one acrobatic model with an exceptionally flexible spine was a favorite), responding with rapid pencil drawings, many made, as was his frequent practice, without taking his eyes off the model to glance at the page. Some of these vigorous, pared-down images were embellished with watercolor, while others remained untouched—evidence of both Rodin’s methods and his ability to distill perception into economical, evocative shapes.

more here.

Wednesday Poem

Artemis

You are the triple goddess
the triple moon goddess
who engenders
visions in me.
From far off you shoot
and I ascend
and descend
you carry me from light
into shadows
and again toward light
and toward terror.
You are the good mother
the one with multiple breasts
who nurtures everything alive
the hunter virgin
who wants to cross the horizon
the voracious destroyer
the force that leads
and transforms me.
Out flight is nocturnal
and we fly and we fly
Artemis
and I drink your milk
and we cross galaxies
and I nurse serpents
in my flight
and I cradle death
between my breasts
and death is alive
it shines
and I follow the flight of your arrow
and I lose you

Artemis
and I descend into the abyss
and death shrinks
and becomes a mummy
and I am here again
with my eyes open
that saw darkness
in the stars
and they don't want to close
and there is earth in them
and there is stellar dust.
Help me Artemis
my eyelids weigh upon me:
a cradle song
or your sure arrow.
.

by Claribel Alegria
from Sorrow
Curbstone Press, 1999
.

Conflict at Work? Empathy Can Smooth Ruffled Feathers

Phyllis Korkkis in The New York Times:

ConflictThe workplace, like almost all places where people interact, can be a petri dish of conflict. Offensive remarks, unrealistic demands, people taking credit for others’ work, bullying — the transgressions that occur can take many forms. They also have the potential to escalate out of control and permanently damage relationships. Gabrielle S. Adams, an assistant professor at the London Business School and a visiting fellow at Harvard University, has examined the role that empathy and forgiveness can play in resolving these conflicts. In recent studies, Professor Adams found that misunderstandings often exist between the victims of harm and the people who committed the harm. In many cases, the transgressors did not intend a negative effect, whereas the victims tended to think that the damage was intentional. In addition, transgressors frequently felt guilty and wanted to be forgiven much more than their victims realized.

When someone feels wronged, it can help to actively empathize with the person who is perceived as the wrongdoer, according to a study that Professor Adams conducted along with M. Ena Inesi, also of the London Business School. That can enable the victim to realize that the transgressor may well wish to be forgiven, their study found. They came to these conclusions, in part, by having people record diaries, over a five-day period, of situations in which they thought they had harmed or offended other people, or been harmed by or offended by others. From these diaries, wide “miscalibrations” of other people’s perceptions became apparent, Professor Adams said. “We ask victims to think about what it would be like to be the transgressor, and you reduce that miscalibration,” she said. She also conducted a lab experiment in which people could select from a set of assignments. One of the assignments — testing out various juice flavors — was much more enjoyable than a different one: going through a set of nonsense words and crossing out the letter E. If given first choice of an assignment, people would almost always choose the fun juice test, which meant that the other participant was forced to take the tedious letter E assignment. As a result, the second person tended to be resentful of the first person — but the first people indicated that they hadn’t intended the harm and felt guilty about it. This is typical of many workplace conflicts, Professor Adams said. Think of bullying. Many people can cite instances in which they think they have been bullied. But how many people would say that they have bullied someone themselves? In a conflict, the people involved almost always have a different interpretation of events, Professor Adams said. This is partly because we have a built-in tendency as humans to think that we are good people, and also that we are right. By making it a point to resolve conflicts by encouraging empathy and forgiveness, workers and managers can improve workplace conditions, Professor Adams said.

More here.

Party drug’s power to fight depression puzzles scientists​

Sara Reardon in Nature:

WEB_AH6228The anaesthetic ketamine — a hallucinogenic club drug also known as Special K — has tantalized researchers who are seeking new ways to treat depression. The drug can lift a person’s mood in hours, even when depression is severe. But several ‘ketamine-like’ medications have failed to alleviate depression in clinical trials over the past decade. Now, some researchers think they know why. Emerging evidence suggests that scientists have misunderstood how ketamine fights depression. So they might have attempted to mimic the wrong biological mechanism when designing drugs to improve mood while avoiding the disorienting ketamine high. On 20 May, researchers at a meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry in San Diego, California, will present results suggesting that some of ketamine’s power comes from its ability to affect brain cells called glia, which support neurons. Their finding adds to recent studies contradicting a long-held idea that the drug works mainly by blocking proteins called NMDA receptors, on the surface of brain cells, which transmit signals between those cells.

At the upcoming meeting, a team led by neuroscientist Mark Rasenick of the University of Illinois at Chicago will report on tests of antidepressant drugs in cultured rat glial cells. All of the drugs that the researchers studied caused a cluster of proteins to shift position in the glial cells’ membranes, signalling to the cells to form new connections with their neighbours. But ketamine produced this effect in 15 minutes, as compared to 3 days for conventional antidepressants. Moreover, drugs that block NMDA receptors but are not antidepressants did not show the effect at all. This suggests that ketamine’s ability to bind to NMDA receptors might not be its primary weapon against depression. Rasenick’s team is not the first to suggest a different target for ketamine. A paper published in Nature in May 2016 concluded that one of ketamine’s breakdown products — not the drug itself — probably lifted depression in mice1. And this compound affected cell proteins called AMPA receptors, instead of NMDA receptors.

More here.

“Ghachar Ghochar” by Vivek Shanbhag – a masterful English-language debut

Review by Deborah Smith in The Guardian:

4134Ghachar Ghochar is the English-language debut of a writer already established as a leading figure in both the pan-Indian and Kannada-language literary scenes. Once again, reading beyond our tiny borders shows us what we’ve been missing, and proves the necessity of translation for a dynamic literary culture: Ghachar Ghochar is both fascinatingly different from much Indian writing in English, and provides a masterclass in crafting, particularly on the power of leaving things unsaid. In fewer than 28,000 words, Vivek Shanbhag weaves a web of suggestion and implication, to be read with a sense of mounting unease.

The opening chapter demonstrates how the short novel is the perfect form for Shanbhag’s particular talents: precise observations, accumulation of detail, narrative progression by way of oblique tangents. It opens in a Bangalore coffee shop, whose name hasn’t changed in a hundred years, andwhere the unnamed narrator unburdens himself to laconic waiter Vincent. The latter is splendidly outfitted in cummerbund and turban, and Coffee House’s tasteful oak-panelled walls are decorated with old photographs showing “just how beautiful this city was a century ago”. The narrator has no reason to be there, he confesses, “but who can admit to doing something for no reason in times like these, in a city as busy as this one?”

In a handful of deftly drawn strokes, we learn that Coffee House is his refuge from contemporary life, harking back as it does to a time before the bourgeois concerns of money-making had taken root.

More here.