From Phys.Org:

Researchers from MIT, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have developed a new way to deliver molecular therapies to cells. The system, called SEND, can be programmed to encapsulate and deliver different RNA cargoes. SEND harnesses natural proteins in the body that form virus-like particles and bind RNA, and it may provoke less of an immune response than other delivery approaches.

…Reporting in Science, the team describes how SEND (Selective Endogenous eNcapsidation for cellular Delivery) takes advantage of molecules made by human cells. At the center of SEND is a protein called PEG10, which normally binds to its own mRNA and forms a spherical protective capsule around it. In their study, the team engineered PEG10 to selectively package and deliver other RNA. The scientists used SEND to deliver the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system to mouse and human cells to edit targeted genes.

First author Michael Segel, a postdoctoral researcher in Zhang’s lab, and Blake Lash, second author and a graduate student also in the group, said PEG10 is not unique in its ability to transfer RNA. “That’s what’s so exciting,” said Segel. “This study shows that there are probably other RNA transfer systems in the human body that can also be harnessed for therapeutic purposes. It also raises some really fascinating questions about what the natural roles of these proteins might be.”

More here.

My Sister Teaches Me How to Ululate

Yallah habibti, move your tongue like the sea
easy. My big sister teaches me to ululate, rolls
her tongue in waves. Dips thin fingers inside
my mouth to pull out mine, stretches it long
and pinches the tip. Watch, we move tongues
like this. I see the walls of our father’s house
collapse and we swim free leleleleleleleleleee

On the ferry to Tangier I shriek across the sea.
Practice how to sound like a real woman. Old
aunties grab my buttocks, smush their breasts
against my back and sing
…leleleleleleleleleleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Don’t cover your mouth habibti! Only women
on the upper deck, only sea. We move tongues
like this to tell the waves stay back, tell men

stay back, tell the dead stay gone, tell runaway
wives stay gone. They turn me into wisteria
woman, limbs wrapped around poles and thighs
as they guide me. Throw back your head, epiglottis
to the breeze. Salt air burns my hot membranes,
scratches at the tight knots of my chords.
All my life I was told

women must swallow sand
unless we are sounding
a warning.

by Seema Yasmin
from Foundry

Robin Pogrebin and Jennifer Schuessler at The New York Times:

Whatever museums ultimately decide to do about Mr. Close, some say they can no longer afford to simply present art without addressing the issues that surround the artist — that institutions must play a more active role in educating the public about the human beings behind the work.

“The typical ‘we don’t judge, we don’t endorse, we just put it up for people to experience and decide’ falls very flat in this political and cultural moment,” said James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, which has Close works in its collection. “We must be keenly aware of the responsibility and consequences of our decisions within this context.”

“The question is,” he added, “what are the decisions that place us on the right side of history?”

more here.

Elizabeth Cantalamessa in Aeon:

Something is amiss with democracy. Ask people from any or no political persuasion and they’re likely to give a similar story: contemporary politics has gone haywire because one side (or both) has lost touch with reality. We are living in a ‘post-truth’ partisan news hellscape that prioritises ‘feelings over facts’ and disregards the natural authority of the truth. But all sides seem to agree that there is a ‘truth’ that explains what really makes someone a woman, or an institution racist, or a politician fascist, in a way that compels acceptance from those who otherwise disagree. What we need to do is further emphasise the importance of science and reason, and perhaps sanction the overtly partisan media outlets that mislead otherwise good-natured people, then everyone will come to their senses and agree on things because they are true, because they reflect reality. Humans are rational, remember? Surely, Immanuel Kant wouldn’t lie.

But I don’t think the truth will, in fact, set us free. Our current ‘post-truth’ political landscape in fact calls for a pragmatist therapy to rid us of the belief that ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ deserve a special place in our public justificatory practices altogether. A pragmatist ethics calls for prioritising feelings instead of facts, because a truly humanist democracy is sentimentalist rather than rationalist.

More here.

Fiona Harvey and Giles Tremlett in The Guardian:

Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years, coal and gas-fired power plants must close in the next decade and lifestyle and behavioural changes will be needed to avoid climate breakdown, according to the leaked draft of a report from the world’s leading authority on climate science.

Rich people in every country are overwhelmingly more responsible for global heating than the poor, with SUVs and meat-eating singled out for blame, and the high-carbon basis for future economic growth is also questioned.

The leak is from the forthcoming third part of the landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the first part of which was published on Monday, warning of unprecedented changes to the climate, some of them irreversible. The document, called the sixth assessment report, is divided into three parts: the physical science of climate change; the impacts and ways of reducing human influence on the climate.

More here.

Martin O’Neill in the Boston Review:

Ed Miliband, now freed from the burden of party leadership, has at last resolved the tension between centrist caution and radical ambition firmly in favor of the radical option. In his funny and self-deprecating new book, GO BIG: How To Fix Our World, Miliband makes the case that the only way forward now for center-left parties is to embrace a radical platform of institutional innovation. The book is therefore addressed not only to a British audience, but to parties and activists in the social democratic tradition elsewhere. It has strong resonances for those, such as partisans of the French Parti Socialiste or the German SPD, who face the dangerous prospect of their parties being beached by the tides of history. As its title suggests, GO BIG is a sustained argument for a level of political ambition that would cast the Labour Party’s Blairite era deep into the dustbin of history.

More here.

Sadok BenAbdallah in Huffington Post:

Ashura, the tenth day of the month of Muharram in the Islamic calendar. A time of rejoicing and deliverance, yet a time of grief and sorrow. From both the Sunni and Shi’a traditions, this day holds very significant to many.

Daniel Oppenheimer at Bookforum:

The argument was this: America at its most distinctive wasn’t Judeo-Christian or capitalist or even democratic in a simple way. It was pagan. Not an earth spirit paganism of the moors and glens, but a polytheistic, commercial, cosmopolitan paganism of the bazaar and the agora. We invested objects, people, and performances with the power of our dreams and fears, and then we organized ourselves around those idols in “non-exclusive communities of desire,” arguing about them, buying and selling pieces and images of them on the open market, trying to woo others into our camp and score points over rival camps. We were a democratic people, but to see American democracy clearly was to understand that our democracy renewed itself on a substratum of pagan devotions to movie stars, rock stars, oil paintings, charismatic political figures, football teams, ingenues, mystery novels, muscle cars, runway shows, action movies, and action painters.

more here.

Martin Padgett at The Paris Review:

What is drag, anyway?

Drag intersects with impersonation but goes beyond it. Impersonation is nonthreatening mimicry: Jonathan Winters as Maude Frickert, Flip Wilson as Geraldine. They’re men in dresses, no more. Their brilliant comedy derives not from the assumption of gender but from the assumption that the only punch line is in the contrast between their feminine look and their masculine selves.

But a gay man in a dress, or a lesbian in short hair and men’s clothes, is an altogether different being. Their images course with the electric knowledge that the performers have voluntarily given up citizenship in their presumed gender. Drag decimates presumptions of sexual identity—​male, female, and all the points on the spectrum between those labels.

more here.

Sidney Perkowitz in Nautilus:

When I was about 6, my mind did something wondrous, although it felt perfectly natural at the time. When I encountered the name of any day of the week, I automatically associated it with a color or a pattern, always the same one, as if the word embodied the shade. Sunday was dark maroon, Wednesday a sunshiny golden yellow, and Friday a deep green. Saturday was interestingly different. That day evoked in my mind’s eye a pattern of shifting and overlapping circular forms in shades of silver and gray, like bubbles in a glass of sparkling water.

Without knowing it, I was living the unusual mental state called synesthesia, aptly described by synesthesia researcher Julia Simner as a “condition in which ordinary activities trigger extraordinary experiences.” More exactly, it is a neurological event where excitation of one of the five senses arouses a simultaneous reaction in another sense or senses (the Greek roots for “synesthesia,” also spelled “synaesthesia,” translate as “joined perception”). Some 4 percent of the population experiences this kind of cross-sensory linking, and studies have shown it’s more prevalent in creative people. Artists who’ve reported extraordinary experiences of synesthesia range from 19th-century composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov to contemporary artist David Hockney to pop music star Lady Gaga.

For me, the words “Sunday,” “Monday,” and so on, generated internal visions of color and pattern. Most synesthetic reactions also involve color in response to lexical stimuli—words written or spoken (“word-color” synesthesia), and letters, numbers, and symbols (“grapheme-color” synesthesia)—or to music and sound (“colored-hearing” synesthesia). Researchers have also observed dozens of other types of stimulus-reaction combinations: taste evoking a visual image, such as the flavor of chicken producing a 3-D shape; physical touch inducing the sensation of smell; and somehow the most extraordinary pairing, words generating the sensation of taste, such as “jail” creating the flavor of bacon.

More here.

An Answer

For days you have wondered
who is eating the leaves in the garden

broccoli, lettuce, beans,
ripped to the stem

you imagine it could be
slug, deer, raccoon, or earwig

then, sitting quietly and not thinking much,
you see the sparrows, smudged yellow on the forehead

they move from plant to plant,
break off tender leaves,
swallow with a quick pulse at the throat

and suddenly, you can’t begrudge them, any of them.
Not the birds or the slugs, not an errant earwig.

The rains are late again,
there is so little green to live on.

by Emilie Lygren
from the EchoTheo Review

Teresa Carr in Undark:

In explaining the rationale for approving female-libido drugs, the FDA often cites the “unmet medical need.” Yet researchers are fiercely divided over the question of just how many women lack libido and how best to help them. If you believe advertising for Vyleesi, American women suffer from an epidemic of insufficient horniness. More than 6 million premenopausal women — one in 10 — have low sexual desire, the website claims.

Research doesn’t support the notion that millions of women are sexually deficient, said Tiefer, whose long career includes more than three decades as an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. “There is no standard of what is ‘normal sexual desire,’” she said, noting that desire varies widely and depends heavily on a woman’s personal situation and culture. After all, she points out, in the 19th and early 20th centuries some doctors diagnosed nymphomania in women deemed to enjoy sex too much.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

This new surge brings a jarring sense of déjà vu. America has fallen prey to many of the same self-destructive but alluring instincts that I identified last year. It went all in on one countermeasure—vaccines—and traded it off against masks and other protective measures. It succumbed to magical thinking by acting as if a variant that had ravaged India would spare a country where half the population still hadn’t been vaccinated. It stumbled into the normality trap, craving a return to the carefree days of 2019; in May, after the CDC ended indoor masking for vaccinated people, President Joe Biden gave a speech that felt like a declaration of victory. Three months later, cases and hospitalizations are rising, indoor masking is back, and schools and universities are opening uneasily—again. “It’s the eighth month of 2021, and I can’t believe we’re still having these conversations,” Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me.

But something is different now—the virus. “The models in late spring were pretty consistent that we were going to have a ‘normal’ summer,” Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation, who studies infectious-disease dynamics, told me. “Obviously, that’s not where we are.”

More here.

Jeffrey D. Sachs at Project Syndicate:

The magnitude of the United States’ failure in Afghanistan is breathtaking. It is not a failure of Democrats or Republicans, but an abiding failure of American political culture, reflected in US policymakers’ lack of interest in understanding different societies. And it is all too typical.

Almost every modern US military intervention in the developing world has come to rot. It’s hard to think of an exception since the Korean War. In the 1960s and first half of the 1970s, the US fought in Indochina – Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia – eventually withdrawing in defeat after a decade of grotesque carnage. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, and his successor, the Republican Richard Nixon, share the blame.

In roughly the same years, the US installed dictators throughout Latin America and parts of Africa, with disastrous consequences that lasted decades.

More here.

Peter Grier in The Christian Science Monitor:

The two dozen Kalamazoo County Republicans are rapt. They sit shoulder to shoulder in foldout chairs as the guest speaker at their party meeting, who bills himself as an IT expert from the West Coast, details allegations of fraud he claims occurred in Michigan during the 2020 presidential election. No such fraud occurred, according to a report from a GOP-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee released in June. The panel’s eight-month inquiry produced no evidence to back up former President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the state’s vote failed to match the will of the voters. But this audience believes. For close to two hours they listen and ask questions about the purportedly manipulated data on sheets glued to trifold folders positioned around the room. They take notes and snap pictures of the numbers with their cellphones.

“How do we –,” a man wearing a shirt with a bald eagle laid over an American flag pauses his question, and brings his hands together in front of his lips, as if in prayer. “How do we deal with all of this when our politicians are talking about wanting to move forward?” A combination of laughter and groans rises from the crowd. “What we need to do is move backwards!” says another man in the front row.

The scene illustrates in miniature the larger dynamic of forces increasingly enveloping the U.S. Republican Party. The GOP congressional leadership keeps saying it’s focused on the future – specifically working toward taking back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. But many of the party’s grassroots voters and activists, and the former president who remains its dominant personality, are looking in another direction, dwelling to an extraordinary degree on the past.

For these Republicans the most important issue facing the party is what to do about their belief that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” They can seem much less focused on the usual tasks of preelection politics, such as recruiting candidates, raising money, and plotting how to turn out votes.

More here.