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Molly Crabapple in the New York Review of Books:

After, when the sea will curl violently
They will say: “it is the fatal conscience of that girl,
She had many sins because she always lived in verse
And what you do on earth, on earth you pay for.”

—From “After,” by Julia de Burgos

In 1928, when Julia de Burgos was fourteen, Hurricane San Felipe devastated Puerto Rico. The Category Five storm left not a single building unscathed, least of all the wood casita in a mountain barrio in Carolina where De Burgos was born. Three hundred people died in what would be, for the next ninety years, the most violent storm in the island’s history. Julia de Burgos did not record her experience.

Puerto Rico’s most famous poet and greatest literary figure, De Burgos is as significant a cultural icon for the island commonwealth as the artist Frida Kahlo is for Mexico. Every line of De Burgos’s verse is imbued with passion, feminist self-assertion, and love of homeland. As with many female artists, De Burgos’s life story added to her legend, though her romantic life and untimely death threatened to overshadow her work by turning her into an allegorical figure for the patria’s humiliations. Yet, outside of Puerto Rican communities, she is largely unknown despite the fact that her poetry, while firmly rooted in place, addresses the universal human subjects of love, war, and self-creation.

De Burgos’s life spanned Puerto Rico’s full entrenchment as a colony of the United States, while her public life as a writer took place against the backdrop of the twentieth-century’s global conflict between fascism and democracy. The problems Puerto Ricans face today, as their impoverished island fights for survival in an era when the international order seems to be coming apart, are the legacy of the struggles De Burgos faced. In January, I traveled to Puerto Rico with my father, carrying a copy of Julia de Burgos’s letters, visiting the places she had lived, trying to hear her voice.

More here.

Matt Ridley in Human Progress:

Easter Monday bank holiday feels like a good moment to put aside politics and consider something far more portentous: evolution. Recently I was walking alongside a canal in central London, surrounded by concrete, glass, steel and tarmac, when I heard the call of a grey wagtail. Looking to my right I saw this bold, fast, yellow-bottomed bird, which I associate with wild rocky rivers in the north, flitting into a canal tunnel. Later that week I stared up at two peregrine falcons circling high above parliament — and got funny looks from passers-by.

Like other cities, London is increasingly home to exotic wildlife and is as biodiverse as some wildernesses. Mumbai has leopards, Boston turkeys, Chicago coyotes and Newcastle kittiwakes. Suburbs are already richer in wildlife than most arable fields in the so-called green belt, making environmental objections to housing development perverse. Gardens, ledges, drains, walls, trees and roofs are full of niches for everything from foxes to flowers and moths.

Two Czech scientists counted the species of plants in the city of Plzen compared with a similar area of surrounding countryside. In the city the number of species had risen from 478 in the late 19th century to 773 today. In the countryside it had fallen from 1,112 to 745.

Since most animals have shorter lifespans than us and no welfare state, they are genetically adapting faster to the concrete world than we are. A fascinating book by a Dutch biologist, Menno Schilthuizen, called Darwin Comes to Town, documents just how wide and deep this urban wildlife evolutionary pulse is. We have unleashed an unprecedented burst of natural selection.

More here.

Lee Drutman in Vox:

There was a time, several decades ago, when America’s two-party system was praised for its moderation. Unlike European parliamentary democracies where “dogmatic ideological parties” of Europe thrived, America’s winner-take-all electoral system seemed to reward and therefore encourage parties and candidates with broad national appeal. No party, it was argued, could simply give up on half of the electorate. Similarly, no party could convincingly win a majority by putting forward extremist anti-system candidates far outside the mainstream.

Obviously something has gone wrong with this theory. Instead of being rejected as outside the mainstream, Donald Trump, an extremist anti-system candidate, simply redefined what “mainstream” is for almost half of the electorate.

And today, both American parties regularly forsake about half the electorate. Or even more than half, really.

Consider some basic numbers: Trump was the choice of 14 million people who voted in the Republican primaries. But in a nation where 230.6 million Americans are eligible to vote, that’s 6 percent of eligible voters. In the 2017 German election, the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 5.9 million votes. In a nation of 61.5 eligible voters, that’s almost 10 percent.

In short, when voters in both countries were given the full range of options, Donald Trump was less popular in the United States than the AfD was in Germany.

But in the German system, AfD can be kept out of power by other parties forming a coalition. In the United States, Trump’s 6 percent support gave him a major party’s nomination, which gave him instant legitimacy. And because he was a Republican candidate and because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton, 63 million Americans cast a vote for him — enough to catapult him to the presidency.

More here.

Martin Parker in The Guardian:

Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how to make profits.

Business schools have huge influence, yet they are also widely regarded to be intellectually fraudulent places, fostering a culture of short-termism and greed. (There is a whole genre of jokes about what MBA – Master of Business Administration – really stands for: “Mediocre But Arrogant”, “Management by Accident”, “More Bad Advice”, “Master Bullshit Artist” and so on.) Critics of business schools come in many shapes and sizes: employers complain that graduates lack practical skills, conservative voices scorn the arriviste MBA, Europeans moan about Americanisation, radicals wail about the concentration of power in the hands of the running dogs of capital. Since 2008, many commentators have also suggested that business schools were complicit in producing the crash.

Having taught in business schools for 20 years, I have come to believe that the best solution to these problems is to shut down business schools altogether. This is not a typical view among my colleagues. Even so, it is remarkable just how much criticism of business schools over the past decade has come from inside the schools themselves. Many business school professors, particularly in north America, have argued that their institutions have gone horribly astray. B-schools have been corrupted, they say, by deans following the money, teachers giving the punters what they want, researchers pumping out paint-by-numbers papers for journals that no one reads and students expecting a qualification in return for their cash (or, more likely, their parents’ cash). At the end of it all, most business-school graduates won’t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks.

More here.

Megan Molteni in Wired:

For the dozen years between 1974 and 1986, he rained down terror across the state of California. He went by many names: the East Side Rapist, the Visalia Ransacker, the Original Night Stalker, the Golden State Killer. And on Wednesday, law enforcement officials announced they think they finally have his real name: Joseph James DeAngelo. Police arrested the 72-year-old Tuesday; he’s accused of committing more than 50 rapes and 12 murders.

In the end, it wasn’t stakeouts or fingerprints or cell phone records that got him. It was a genealogy website.

Lead investigator Paul Holes, a retired Contra Costa County District Attorney inspector, told the Mercury News late Thursday night that his team used GEDmatch, a no-frills Florida-based website that pools raw genetic profiles shared publicly by their owners, to find the man believed to be one of California’s most notorious criminals. A spokeswoman for the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office reached Friday morning would not comment or confirm the report.

GEDmatch—a reference to the data file format GEDCOM, developed by the Mormon church to share genealogical information—caters to curious folks searching for missing relatives or filling in family trees. The mostly volunteer-run platform exists “to provide DNA and genealogy tools for comparison and research services,” the site’s policy page states. Most of its tools for tracking down matches are free; users just have to register and upload copies of their raw DNA files exported from genetic testing services like 23andMe and Ancestry. These two companies don’t allow law enforcement to access their customer databases unless they get a court order. Neither 23andMe nor Ancestry was approached by investigators in this case, according to spokespeople for the companies.

But no court order would be needed to mine GEDmatch’s open-source database of more than 650,000 genetically connected profiles.

More here.