Banksy Emerges in New York and Calls Attention to ... · Scientists discover evidence of early human innovation, pushing back evolutionary timeline 3 Banksy Emerges in New York and

Scientists discover evidence of early human innovation, pushing back evolutionary timeline 3

Banksy Emerges in New York and Calls Attention to Imprisoned Turkish Artist Zehra Doğan 7

Photographer Jonathan Higbee Discovers a World of Coincidence on the Streets of New York 10

The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Narrative as the Pillar of Identity 16

I am a knife 20

Letting Slum Residents Control Their Own Destiny 35

Color Palettes of Historic Paintings Subdivided with Algorithms by Dimitris Ladopoulos 40

Museum Visitors Invited to Crawl and Slide Inside Massive Suspended Tape Structure 46

Accurate simulation of aqueous-based electrochemical setups 51

Permian carbo-loading: How starchy treats helped build an ancient world 54

Santorini: an archetypal Greek island fantasy 56

Walking as Creative Fuel 64

How Ikea has changed the way we shop 68

“A Wrinkle in Time” Author Madeleine L’Engle on Self-Consciousness and the Wellspring of Creativity 72

Alberto Bustos’ Paperlike Ceramics Imitate Sprouting Blades of Grass 76

How your social media betrays your mood 86

Hubble observes exoplanet atmos94phere in more detail than ever before 91

Self-Driving Pizza Just Hit Miami 94

A grisly photo of a Saigon execution 50 years ago shocked the world and helped end the war 97

Soaring Murals of Plants on Urban Walls by Mona Caron 103

Feathered, Furred or Coloured 111

Vitamin D receptor, a powerful weapon against colorectal cancer 118

The Star Wars posters of Soviet Europe 123

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 436 april 2018

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Dancing Dwarf Galaxies Deepen Dark Matter Mystery 134

Holding hands can sync brainwaves, ease pain, study shows 137

Beyond ‘The Scream,’ painter Edvard Munch experimented with photography 140

Pittsburgh's Black Renaissance Started in Its Schools 149

Researchers Cryopreserve Coral Sperm 157

Radically Unusual Caterpillars Captured by Photographer Igor Siwanowicz 160

The insect that painted Europe red 166

Besides, I’ll be dead 174

This Japanese Concept of Happiness Could Help You Live a More Meaningful Life 179

Gravity doesn’t leak into large, hidden dimensions 182

What if you never saw your colleagues in person again? 185

The rise of the superbugs 190

Crowdsourced family tree yields new insights about humanity 193

Amanda Parer’s Giant Inflatable Rabbits Invade Public Spaces Around the World 197



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Scientists discover evidence of early human innovation, pushing back evolutionary timeline

Evidence of innovation dates to a period when humans faced an unpredictable and uncertain environment,

according to three new studies

Source:

Smithsonian

Scientists discovered that early humans in East Africa had -- by about 320,000 years ago -- begun trading with

distant groups, using color pigments and manufacturing more sophisticated tools than those of the Early Stone

Age, tens of thousands of years earlier than previous evidence has shown in eastern Africa. As earthquakes

remodeled the landscape and climate fluctuated between wet and dry conditions, technological and social

innovation would have helped early humans survive unpredictable conditions.

FULL STORY



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The first evidence of human life in the Olorgesailie Basin comes from about 1.2 million years ago. For

hundreds of the thousands of years, people living there made and used large stone-cutting tools called

handaxes (left). According to three new studies published in Science, early humans in East Africa had--by

about 320,000 years ago--begun using color pigments and manufacturing more sophisticated tools (right) than

those of the Early Stone Age handaxes, tens of thousands of years earlier than previous evidence has shown in

eastern Africa. The sophisticated tools (right) were carefully crafted and more specialized than the large, all-

purpose handaxes (left). Many were points designed to be attached to a shaft and potentially used as projectile

weapons, while others were shaped as scrapers or awls. The National Museums of Kenya loaned the artifacts

pictured above to conduct the analyses published in Science.

Credit: Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

Anthropologists at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and an international team of

collaborators have discovered that early humans in East Africa had -- by about 320,000 years ago -- begun

trading with distant groups, using color pigments and manufacturing more sophisticated tools than those of

the Early Stone Age. These newly discovered activities approximately date to the oldest known fossil record

of Homo sapiens and occur tens of thousands of years earlier than previous evidence has shown in eastern

Africa. These behaviors, which are characteristic of humans who lived during the Middle Stone Age, replaced

technologies and ways of life that had been in place for hundreds of thousands of years.

Evidence for these milestones in humans' evolutionary past comes from the Olorgesailie Basin in southern

Kenya, which holds an archeological record of early human life spanning more than a million years. The new

discoveries, reported in three studies published March 15 in the journal Science, indicate that these behaviors

emerged during a period of tremendous environmental variability in the region. As earthquakes remodeled the

landscape and climate fluctuated between wet and dry conditions, technological innovation, social exchange

networks and early symbolic communication would have helped early humans survive and obtain the

resources they needed despite unpredictable conditions, the scientists say.

"This change to a very sophisticated set of behaviors that involved greater mental abilities and more complex

social lives may have been the leading edge that distinguished our lineage from other early humans," said

Rick Potts, director of the National Museum of Natural History's Human Origins Program.

Potts has been leading the Human Origin Program's research in Olorgesailie for more than 30 years in

collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya. He is the lead author on one of the

three Science publications that describe the adaptive challenges that early humans faced during this phase of

evolution. Alison Brooks, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University's Center for the

Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology and an associate of the museum's Human Origins Program, is lead

author on the paper that focuses on the evidence of early resource exchange and use of coloring materials in

the Olorgesailie Basin. A third paper, by Alan Deino at the Berkeley Geochronology Center and colleagues,

details the chronology of the Middle Stone Age discoveries.

The first evidence of human life in the Olorgesailie Basin comes from about 1.2 million years ago. For

hundreds of the thousands of years, people living there made and used large stone-cutting tools called

handaxes. Beginning in 2002, Potts, Brooks and their team discovered a variety of smaller, more carefully

shaped tools in the Olorgesailie Basin. Isotopic dating by Deino and collaborators revealed that the tools were

surprisingly old -- made between 320,000 and 305,000 years ago. These tools were carefully crafted and more

specialized than the large, all-purpose handaxes. Many were points designed to be attached to a shaft and

potentially used as projectile weapons, while others were shaped as scrapers or awls.



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While the handaxes of the earlier era were manufactured using local stones, the Smithsonian team found small

stone points made of non-local obsidian at their Middle Stone Age sites. The team also found larger, unshaped

pieces of the sharp-edged volcanic stone at Olorgesailie, which has no obsidian source of its own. The diverse

chemical composition of the artifacts matches that of a wide range of obsidian sources in multiple directions

15 to 55 miles away, suggesting exchange networks were in place to move the valuable stone across the

ancient landscape.

The team also discovered black and red rocks -- manganese and ocher -- at the sites, along with evidence that

the rocks had been processed for use as coloring material. "We don't know what the coloring was used on, but

coloring is often taken by archeologists as the root of complex symbolic communication," Potts said. "Just as

color is used today in clothing or flags to express identity, these pigments may have helped people

communicate membership in alliances and maintain ties with distant groups."

Hoping to understand what might have driven such fundamental changes in human behavior, the research

team integrated data from a variety of sources to assess and reconstruct the ancient environment in which the

users of these artifacts lived. Their findings suggest that the period when these behaviors emerged was one of

changing landscapes and climate, in which the availability of resources would have been unreliable.

Geological, geochemical, paleobotanical and faunal evidence indicates that an extended period of climate

instability affected the region beginning around 360,000 years ago, at the same time earthquakes were

continually altering the landscape. Although some researchers have proposed that early humans evolved

gradually in response to an arid environment, Potts says his team's findings support an alternative idea.

Environmental fluctuations would have presented significant challenges to inhabitants of the Olorgesailie

Basin, prompting changes in technology and social structures that improved the likelihood of securing

resources during times of scarcity.

The research teams for the three studies published in Scienceinclude collaborators from the following

institutions: the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museums of Kenya, George Washington University, the

Berkeley Geochronology Center, the National Science Foundation, the University of Illinois at Urbana-

Champaign, the University of Missouri, the University of Bordeaux (Centre National de la Recherche

Scientifique), the University of Utah, Harvard University, Santa Monica College, the University of Michigan,

the University of Connecticut, Emory University, the University of Bergen, Hong Kong Baptist University

and the University of Saskatchewan.

Funding for this research was provided by the Smithsonian, the National Science Foundation and George

Washington University.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Smithsonian. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

https://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/scientists-discover-evidence-early-human-innovation-pushing-back-evolutionary-timeline

http://www.si.edu/



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1. Richard Potts, Anna K. Behrensmeyer, J. Tyler Faith, Christian A. Tryon, Alison S. Brooks, John E.

Yellen, Alan L. Deino, Rahab Kinyanjui, Jennifer B. Clark, Catherine Haradon, Naomi E. Levin,

Hanneke J. M. Meijer, Elizabeth G. Veatch, R. Bernhart Owen, Robin W. Renaut. Environmental

dynamics during the onset of the Middle Stone Age in eastern Africa. Science, 2018

DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2200

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180315140733.htm

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aao2200



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Banksy Emerges in New York and Calls Attention to Imprisoned Turkish Artist Zehra Doğan

LAURA STAUGAITIS

Banksy (previously) has emerged this week on the streets of New York, creating at least two new artworks,

his first pieces in the city since his ‘residency’ five years ago. In one large work spanning the length of the

famed mural space at the corner of Houston Street and Bowery in Manhattan, tally marks form prison bars,

symbolically counting the days of imprisonment for artist Zehra Doğan. The Turkish painter is currently

serving a nearly three year prison sentence for the creation of a single painting. The mural is a collaboration

between Banksy and street artist Borf.

Doğan, who also worked as a reporter for the now defunct Dicle news agency, created the painting in 2016

which depicts operations carried out by Turkish security forces against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The artwork, derived from a photograph, shows buildings reduced to rubble, plumes of smoke, and gathered

military trucks, all part of a multi-year effort in Turkey’s southeastern towns and cities to clear out PKK

militants.

The aspect that the Mardin 2nd High Criminal Court deemed a crime are the Turkish flags that Doğan

included, draped over the facades of some of the standing buildings, elements that also appear in the original

photo.

As a result of her artistic rendering of the destruction in Mardin province Doğan may the only person in the

world imprisoned for the act of painting. In Instagram posts about his depiction of Doğan’s sentencing,

Banksy is encouraging people to repost her work and tag Turkey’s president, who is also active on Instagram.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/about/#laura

http://www.banksy.co.uk/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/?s=%22banksy%22

https://hyperallergic.com/432645/banksy-returns-new-york-14th-street-rat/

https://www.instagram.com/jinhazehradogan/?hl=en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borf

https://www.instagram.com/banksy/

https://www.instagram.com/rterdogan/



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Zehra Doğan’s painting

The photograph that Doğan’s painting is based on

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/03/banksy-zehra-dogan-nyc/?mc_cid=d47919b3d3&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f



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Photographer Jonathan Higbee Discovers a World of Coincidence on the Streets of New York

JANUARY 29, 2018

CHRISTOPHER JOBSON

All images © Jonathan Higbee.

For over a decade, photographer Jonathan Higbee has walked the streets of New York with a camera in-hand,

spotting extraordinary juxtapositions and unusual moments when the world aligns for a split second in front

of his lens. At times he manages to completely erase the boundaries between manufactured imagery found in

billboards or signage that pollute the city streets and captures anonymous passersby who seem to live in an

alternate reality.

This uncanny talent for observation has made the Missouri-born photographer a rising name in street

photography where he won the World Street Photography grand prize in 2015 and a LensCulture 2016 Street

Photography Award. Higbee’s work has been exhibited in group shows around the world and his photos were

recently included in World Street Photography 4. You can follow more of his photography on Instagram.

(via LensCulture)

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/jonathan-higbee-street-photography-new-york/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/about/#christopher

http://www.jonathanhigbee.com/

https://world-street.photography/en/

https://www.lensculture.com/

http://streetphotography.today/

https://www.instagram.com/aliveisthecity/

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/jonathan-higbee-all-colors-agree-in-the-dark-voyeurism-and-observation-on-the-street



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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/jonathan-higbee-street-photography-new-

york/?utm_source=Colossal+Weekly+Highlights&utm_campaign=aa83e5bcd7-

EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_986f15c4a6-aa83e5bcd7-

79550057&mc_cid=aa83e5bcd7&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/jonathan-higbee-street-photography-new-york/?utm_source=Colossal+Weekly+Highlights&utm_campaign=aa83e5bcd7-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_986f15c4a6-aa83e5bcd7-79550057&mc_cid=aa83e5bcd7&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f






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The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Narrative as the Pillar of Identity

“Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are

each of us unique.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote in his brilliant treatise on personhood, “is like a pattern drawn on

a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react,

the whole drum will sound.” In thinking about how identity politics frays that parchment and fragments the

essential wholeness of our personhood, I was reminded of a poignant passage by neurologist Oliver

Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015), the poet laureate of the mind, from his 1985 classic The Man Who

Mistook His Wife For A Hat (public library).

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/20/amin-maalouf-identity/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/01/john-o-donohue-walking-on-the-pastures-of-wonder/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/01/john-o-donohue-walking-on-the-pastures-of-wonder/

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684853949/braipick-20


http://www.worldcat.org/title/man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a-hat/oclc/927499163&referer=brief_results




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In the twelfth chapter, titled “A Matter of Identity,” Dr. Sacks recounts the case of a patient with a memory

disorder that rendered him unable to recognize not only others but himself — unable, that is, to retain the

autobiographical facts which a person constellates into a selfhood. To compensate for this amnesiac anomaly,

the man unconsciously invented countless phantasmagorical narratives about who he was and what he had

done in his life, crowding the void of his identity with imagined selves and experiences he fully believed were

real, were his own, far surpassing what any one person could compress into a single lifetime. It was as though

he had taken Emily Dickinson’s famous verse “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” and turned it on himself to

answer with a resounding “I’m Everybody!”

But just as depression can be seen as melancholy in the complex clinical extreme and bipolar disorder as

moodiness in the complex clinical extreme, every pathological malady of the mind is a complex clinical

extreme of a core human tendency that inheres in each of our minds in tamer degrees. By magnifying basic

tendencies to such extraordinary extremes, clinical cases offer a singular lens on how the ordinary mind works

— and that, of course, is the great gift of Oliver Sacks, who wrests from his particular patient case studies

uncommon insight into the universals of human nature.

Oliver Sacks (Photograph: Adam Scourfield)

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/im-nobody-who-are-you-260




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“Such a patient,” Sacks writes of the inventive amnesiac man, “must literally make himself (and his world) up

every moment.” And yet that is precisely what we are all doing in a certain sense, to a certain degree, as we

continually make ourselves and our world up through the stories we tell ourselves and others.

Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

A decade after philosopher Amelie Rorty observed that “humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret

and modify their agency through their conception of themselves,” Sacks examines the building blocks of that

self-conception and how narrative becomes the pillar of our identity:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/09/hope-cynicism/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/27/ulysses-mimmo-paladino/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/02/amelie-rorty-the-identities-of-persons/


https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/27/ulysses-mimmo-paladino/



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We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be

said that each of us constructs and lives, a “narrative,” and that this narrative is us, our identities.

If we wish to know about a man, we ask “what is his story — his real, inmost story?” — for each of us is a

biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by,

through, and in us — through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our

discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other;

historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique.

Sacks considers the basic existential responsibility that stems from our narrative uniqueness:

To be ourselves we must have ourselves — possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must

“recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a

continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat remains a classic of uncommon illumination. Complement this

particular portion with Rorty on the seven layers of personhood and Borges on the nothingness of the self,

then revisit Dr. Sacks on the three essential elements of creativity, the paradoxical power of music, what a

Pacific island taught him about treating ill people as whole people, and his stunning memoir of a life fully

lived.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/15/oliver-sacks-identity-self-

narrative/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=96b0c99109-

EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-96b0c99109-

234059117&mc_cid=96b0c99109&mc_eid=d1c16ac662



https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/03/the-nothingness-of-personality-borges/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/11/09/oliver-sacks-the-river-of-consciousness-the-creative-self/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/11/oliver-sacks-musicophilia/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/06/oliver-sacks-island-of-the-colorblind-illness/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/06/oliver-sacks-island-of-the-colorblind-illness/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/18/oliver-sacks-on-the-move/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/18/oliver-sacks-on-the-move/



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I am a knife

Jacqueline Rose

Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campusby Vanessa Grigoriadis

Houghton Mifflin, 332 pp, £20.00, September 2017, ISBN 978 0 544 70255 4

Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus by Laura Kipnis

HarperCollins, 245 pp, £20.00, April 2017, ISBN 978 0 06 265786 2

BUYLiving a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed

Duke, 312 pp, £20.99, February 2017, ISBN 978 0 8223 6319 4

BUYHunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Corsair, 288 pp, £13.99, July 2017, ISBN 978 1 4721 5111 7

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

Corsair, 272 pp, £13.99, January 2017, ISBN 978 1 4721 5277 0

At the very least we need to ask why it took the fall of Harvey Weinstein to turn the sexual harassment of

women into front page news, and whether the endless photo spreads of his female targets weren’t so much

designed to provoke outrage or a cry for justice as to grant the voyeur his pleasure. That of course is a

pleasure on which the cinema industry thrives and which made these women vulnerable in the first place.

Pictures from the archive of Weinstein with one smiling actress after another, his arm proprietorially around

various parts of their bodies, deepened the offence – and undermined scattered accounts of resistance to his

behaviour, since everyone looked as if they were having such a good time. More institutions and public

figures were to follow – from news anchors and comedians to MPs, publishers, schoolteachers and

Benedictine monks – but they had less screen potential. I couldn’t help feeling that the actresses were once

again being asked to audition for their part. Or being paraded across the red carpet on Oscar night.

This is just one reason why celebrations of the present moment as a historic breakthrough should be met with

caution. Remember the images of Angelina Jolie walking across the stage, hand outstretched to greet William

Hague at their ‘summit’ on rape as a war crime in London in 2014? It struck me then that she was being

offered as a trade-off or collateral damage in the effort to bring such violence to an end. The initiative is now

seen as a costly failure; the number of rapes recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo, on which their

attention was focused, rose in the following year and hasn’t significantly decreased since. It is just one facet

of this ugly reality – one more thing to contend with – that while attention to violence against women may be

sparked by anger and a desire for redress, it might also be feeding vicariously off the forms of perversion that

fuel the violence in the first place.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Grigoriadis,+Vanessa

https://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Kipnis,+Laura

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9780822363194/living-a-feminist-life?utm_source=LRB&utm_medium=BNbutton&utm_campaign=BuyNow

https://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Ahmed,+Sara

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9781472151117/hunger-a-memoir-of-my-body?utm_source=LRB&utm_medium=BNbutton&utm_campaign=BuyNow

https://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Gay,+Roxane

https://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Gay,+Roxane



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As feminists have long insisted, sexual harassment occurs whenever women find themselves in the vicinity of

men in positions of power. It also takes place on the street. Vanessa Grigoriadis, a writer at the New York

Times Magazine, had often been whistled at and cat-called as she walked through the city, but when

researching her book on sexual harassment on campus in 2016, she noticed that men seemed to be stopping

and harassing her even more than usual. Her father was dying at the time. It wasn’t exactly that men could

read her thoughts, but certainly she felt that they were picking up on her vulnerability, seizing their moment to

probe an open wound. They were excited by her distress (one target of Weinstein’s advances said he was

clearly roused by her fear). The aim of harassment, this suggests, isn’t just to control women’s bodies but also

to invade their minds. Grigoriadis’s experience is telling. However scarred the modern city, it can be a place

of relative freedom where a woman can muse and fantasise. Harassment is always a sexual demand, but it

also carries a more sinister and pathetic injunction: ‘You will think about me.’ Harassment brings mental life

to a standstill. It destroys the mind’s capacity for reverie.

As far back as 1984, in their pamphlet Sexual Harassment at Work,the National Council for Civil Liberties –

the antecedent of Liberty – described harassment as an ‘intentional assault on an individual’s innermost

privacy’. Ironically, in the light of recent developments, it also noted that a ‘moral complaints bureau’ had

been set up by the Screen Actors’ Guild to deal with ‘casting couch complaints’. We must hope the newly

proposed Hollywood-led US Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace,

to be chaired by Anita Hill (who brought charges of harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence

Thomas in 1991), is more effective.

In the past few months, our understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment has been put under

considerable strain. For all the remonstrations of the accused – ‘You’re making a fuss about nothing’; ‘Things

were different back then’ – the reality is crystal clear. Sexual harassment consists of unwelcome sexual

advances which – pace the mostly, though not exclusively, male protests – are never innocent, or a mere trifle,

playful, or a ‘joke’. And that is because however minimal the gesture, it nearly always contains the barely

concealed message: ‘This is something which I, as a man, have the right to do to you.’ (Women of course can

also harass, but the phenomenon is comparatively rare. The glee with which such instances are seized on by

those wanting to diminish harassment as a feminist issue is notable.) Sexual harassment, we might then say, is

the great male performative, the act through which a man aims to convince his target, not only that he is the

one with the power – which is true – but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing. As

Judith Butler has argued, the performative is always melancholic, since the performer knows the role they are

enacting is no more than skin deep (‘melancholic’ also because of all the other buried and unconsciously

grieved sexual lives one might have led).

To this extent, a feminism that takes harassment as the unadulterated expression of male power and authority

is in danger of colluding with the image of masculinity it is protesting against. These men may hold the

power, but they do what they do precisely because they are anything but cock-sure. ‘Combine male fragility

with white fragility,’ Dayna Tortorici writes, ‘and you end up with something lethal, potentially.’ The idea of

the phallus is a delusion, psychoanalysts tell us, sustained not least by any man who claims to own or embody

it. There is after all no such thing as an ever-ready penis, permanently erect (a truly uncomfortable prospect,

I’m told). Harassment is ruthless, but it also has a desperation about it, as if the harasser knows at some level

that his cruelty, like all human cruelty, has its source in a fraudulent boast. Not that this makes it any less of a

threat. As Hannah Arendt argued, it is illegitimate and/or waning power that turns most readily to violence.

Is harassment a form of violence? I have lost count of the number of times people have expressed outrage at

the mere suggestion of a proximity, on the grounds that it tars the innocent (at worst, thoughtless) and the



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guilty (at worst, serial predators) with the same brush. It’s true that the two should not be equated, but they are

surely connected, like siblings or bedfellows. At the very least, they belong on a sliding scale, since both are

underpinned by a sense of entitlement ready to turn nasty (Weinstein appears to have moved effortlessly back

and forth along the spectrum). Towards the end of her tribute to Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo (‘Khwezi’), who

brought rape charges against Jacob Zuma, Redi Tlhabi writes:

She fought for every one of us – every woman who has been too afraid to say, ‘I was raped,’ too afraid to say,

‘That man groped me’ or ‘He demanded sex in exchange for the job, the lift, the favour.’ She fought for all

the women whose bodies have been appropriated by men, known and unknown, through lurid descriptions

and graphic imagery, men who whistle and undress women with their eyes in public and private spaces.

Uncles who wink at them when their parents are not looking, the managers and senior colleagues who, in a

handshake, quickly turn their index finger to circle their palms, knowing that they will not call them out. They

are too paralysed to react. That, even when they are being disrespected, they will pull away quietly and carry

on as if nothing had happened.

Khwezi was eventually driven into exile after her case had been mangled in the courts and her house burned

down.＊

*

In April 2011, during Obama’s first term, the assistant secretary at the Department of Education issued a

‘Dear Colleague’ letter about sexual harassment on campus which became a policy-defining document in the

US. The letter is a directive to institutions of higher education on how to implement Title IX, originally part

of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sexual discrimination in education. Harassment is

seen as a form of discrimination because by creating a hostile environment it impedes a student’s educational

progress. Colleges are required ‘to take immediate action to eliminate the harassment, prevent its recurrence,

and address its effects’: investigate the complaint, appoint at least one Title IX co-ordinator, provide training

for all campus law enforcement employees, publish grievance procedures, and issue guidelines on what

constitutes sexual harassment (a college where students are deemed to be in ignorance on this matter is

automatically in violation of Title IX).

Sexual violence is upfront from the first page: rape, sexual assault, sexual battery and sexual coercion are all

included in the same category (‘All such acts of sexual violence are forms of sexual harassment under Title

IX’), although the use of conjunctions – ‘harassment and violence’ here, ‘harassment or violence’ later on in

the letter – suggests a less steady link. This has been decisive. During her interviews with student activists,

Grigoriadis found that the refusal to define ‘assault’ as ‘sexual violence’ was seen as a cop-out, immediately

identifying the speaker as not aligned with ‘the radical cause’ (although clearly on the activists’ side, she

chooses to use ‘assault’ throughout her book). ‘It’s all violence,’ one of them told her. Calling out harassment

as violence, they felt, was the only way to ensure that harassment wouldn’t be dismissed as petty interference

or minor assault, and that it would be taken seriously as a safety issue: ‘The Department is committed to

ensuring that all students feel safe in their school,’ the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter says; in the 1984 pamphlet, the

NCCL too defined harassment as a health and safety concern. Any university in ‘violation’ of the Department

directive will be considered ‘non-compliant’ and faces the possibility of losing its federal funding, a

potentially catastrophic financial penalty (which, it should be said, hasn’t yet been imposed).

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/jacqueline-rose/i-am-a-knife#fn-asterisk



23

Title IX was a breakthrough, but it is flawed. Legal critics have claimed it abuses ‘due process’ by acting as a

court of law while neglecting protections such as the right to an attorney, or full advance notification of

charges. They also disapprove of the standard of proof used in sexual misconduct cases: a ‘preponderance of

evidence’ – 51 per cent, as it were – rather than the higher standard, ‘clear and convincing evidence’. It is also

sometimes unclear in these cases who is acting on behalf of whom. In one of its most striking clauses, the

letter states that a college must take ‘all reasonable steps to investigate and respond to the complaint,

consistent with the request for confidentiality or request not to pursue an investigation’. This is a rare moment

when the possible human cost of assault, how it might silence someone who has been its target, shows

through the legalese. Anti-rape activists have long insisted that no woman should feel obliged to make a

formal complaint: ‘What if she doesn’t want to tell her story?’ Roxane Gay asks in Bad Feminist.

Look back over the objections to the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter and you can see that in each instance it was

trying to smooth the path for women plaintiffs whom the system notoriously lets down whenever they bring

legal charges or try to press a case. What, for example, would count as ‘clear and convincing evidence’: that

the woman wrote it in her diary? That she told her best friend? Or perhaps that she went straight to the police

or the hospital for a medical test? One of the main difficulties is that the letter obliges universities to

adjudicate disputes and impose penalties even though they have no legal power to summon witnesses – who

in any case are not to be found, since the only witnesses in such cases tend to be the plaintiff and the accused.

This is just one reason women who report harassment and assault have historically been so vulnerable: ‘Your

word against his,’ as one UK college adviser said recently to a young undergraduate who’d been raped by a

student, to discourage her from going to the police (the student turned out to be a serial rapist). To say the

absence of witnesses can be abused is an understatement. In December, four women in the US revived sexual

allegations against Donald Trump first made during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump immediately

tweeted that they were part of a Democrat conspiracy. Pressed to produce evidence, Sarah Huckabee Sanders,

the White House press secretary, said: ‘The president has first-hand knowledge of what he did and didn’t do’

– as if the women did not. As Grigoriadis puts it, sexual assault is at once ‘the problem from hell’ and ‘the

perfect crime’.

One perhaps unexpected consequence of Title IX has been that the university itself has started to feel under

threat: ‘Anxiety about legal exposure,’ Jennifer Doyle writes in Campus Sex, Campus Security(2015),

‘registers on every campus as a background hum.’ In response, administration and bureaucracy have swollen

in American universities (as have the salaries of investigators), while Title IX cases take on ‘a mind-numbing

fractal complexity’. At the same time, university management across the US has increasingly aligned itself

with campus security – hence the title of Doyle’s book, though she is careful to insist that there isn’t a

seamless line running between the two. At Arizona State University, a campus police officer was recorded

violently arresting a black woman faculty member, Professor Ersula Ore, who had refused to show her ID on

the street. In November 2011, at the time of Occupy, police pepper-sprayed students as they protested silently

against higher tuition fees at UC Davis. A subsequent investigation, forced on the authorities because a

student’s photo of the scene had gone viral, established that the police had been sent in by the university

chancellor, Linda Katehi. In a later statement, Katehi explained that she had acted out of concern that the

campus was under threat of infiltration from outside – an age-old ploy when trying to discredit political

protest. Note, in a different context, how effortlessly harassment – ‘groping’ – can slip into far-right discourse

about the threat posed by migrants: ‘Our authorities submit to imported, marauding, groping, beating, knife-

stabbing, migrant mobs,’ Alice Weidel, joint leader of the German AfD in the Bundestag, tweeted recently.

Katehi claimed she feared the consequences for the university if ‘anything happens to any student while we’re

in violation of policy’.



24

Who, we might ask, is violating whom? Who or what exactly is in danger? A student’s ‘experience of their

own vulnerability’, Doyle writes, has ‘translated into a sense of the university’s impending doom, to which it

responds with a militarisation of all of its processes’. It is scary, though common enough historically, to

witness the speed with which a progressive cause can become complicit with, or be co-opted by, a nasty

political agenda. Since ‘outsider’ usually means ‘foreigner’, danger to women is, not for the first time, being

sidelined by a perceived racial threat – another instance of the way in which women’s issues are only ever

allowed to be the main event for the briefest possible interval. There is an irony here. Obama himself saw the

issue of campus assault as belonging to the civil rights agenda. ‘There’s a reason the story of the civil rights

movement was written in our schools,’ he said at the NAACP centennial convention in 2009. ‘It’s because

there is no stronger weapon against inequality’ than education. Sexual harassment harms students. But I

wonder if that would matter so much if the issue weren’t also seen to be chipping away at national pride,

undermining what – for most US citizens and certainly for students burdened with crushing debt – has always

been, and is even more so today, the ever-retreating promise of the American dream.

*

Catherine MacKinnon was one of the earliest campaigners for the inclusion of sexual harassment under Title

IX. In her first book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), she argued that harassment was a form

of discrimination arising from inequality. Inequality rather than difference since – as case after collapsing

case in the courts had shown – if you start from pre-existing, God-given difference, discrimination, even in

cases of harassment, is much harder to prove (men are just behaving normally, even naturally, they can’t help

helping themselves). Instead she insisted, in what is for me one of her strongest arguments to date, that such

behaviour can be classified as illegal under discrimination law only if it is seen to be predicated on unequal

power relations. Forms of behaviour ‘that would not be seen as criminal because they are anything but

unusual may, in this context, be seen as discriminating for precisely the same reason’. The ‘usual’ – what

passes as the norm for men – is precisely what anti-harassment activists consider themselves to be fighting

against.

When in 1984 the NCCL published its pamphlet on sexual harassment, with specific reference to civil rights

legislation, it too defined harassment as unlawful discrimination and placed it firmly in the world of work, as

a trade-union matter. But, although it made reference to US legal recommendations, it wasn’t confident of the

success women would have in resorting to the law. MacKinnon, on the other hand, has spent much of her life

trying to bring sexuality within the remit of the law. If sexuality is separated from gender inequality, she

writes in her book’s final pages, the risk is that sexuality will ‘become a law unto itself’.

‘A law unto itself’ may, however, be a perfect description of what sexuality is. For psychoanalysis, sexuality

is lawless or it is nothing, not least because of its rootedness in our unconscious lives, where all sexual

certainties come to grief. In the unconscious we are not men or women but always, and in endlessly shifting

combinations, neither or both. This is where I have always parted ways with MacKinnon and, more generally,

with radical feminism, which, brooking no ambiguity on such matters, sees masculinity as perfectly and

violently in control of itself, whereas for me it is masculinity out of control – masculinity in a panic – that is

most likely to turn ugly. The writer and hip-hop artist Jordan Stephens remarked, apropos the Weinstein

revelations, that a ‘toxic notion of masculinity is being championed by men who are so terrified of

confronting any trauma experienced as children that they choose to project that torture’ onto others. Student-

on-student harassment can open a path for anxious young men to launch themselves into power, something

that might otherwise be beyond them. For a decade now, male students in the US have consistently been

getting lower grades than women.



25

This doesn’t exempt harassers in any way but it does allow (some) men a glimpse of their own imperfection.

It opens up a gap between men who won’t tolerate any challenge to their authority and those for whom such

authority is nothing to be proud of, not least because they understand that power is always exercised at

somebody else’s expense. If this were not the case, feminism would be on a hiding to nothing. The mind, with

no mercy, shuts down on itself (a feeling I always have when I read MacKinnon and her followers on these

matters). None of which is to underestimate how unremitting masculinity can be, even when a man is

convinced he is reformed or, to use the current term, ‘woke’. This is how a student at the University of

Austin, Texas described his new ethos to Grigoriadis: ‘Shave with the grain the first time, always buy tools

you don’t have to replace, don’t aim a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them. Don’t have sex with

anyone who doesn’t want to have sex with you.’

*

We need, then, to acknowledge the vagaries of human sexuality (which has always felt emancipatory to me);

recognise its stubbornness once it has been locked in place (what the feminist Juliet Mitchell has described as

the heavy undertow, the drag of sexual difference); insist that sexual harassment is unacceptable and must

cease. Holding these apparently contradictory ideas in mind at the same time, moving on more than one front:

for me this presents the greatest challenge raised by the present crisis. The tension between the various

components of the issue perhaps helps us to understand why legal attempts to curtail harassment, as they have

spread incrementally across campuses in the US, seem so often to be ineffective, to go awry, even to defeat

themselves. Grigoriadis cites statistics suggesting that attempts at legal redress over the past decade have not

reduced the incidence of harassment on campus. But even if Title IX hasn’t eliminated campus harassment or

resulted in a change in attitudes, Grigoriadis concludes that on balance it has been a good thing. The fact that

she has to spell this out indicates how far from certainty on this matter her journey has taken her.

Her book, however grim, is a carnival of characters. There is no one she declined to talk to, no place she

wouldn’t go. Not altogether willingly – in tune, one might say, with her topic – she immerses herself in the

college fraternity scene, where male students in their first term at college set out to prove they have arrived by

grabbing as much sex as they can, their unbridled misogyny seemingly the source of most assaults. (‘Last

night I should’ve gone to jail’ is a popular response when she asks them about consent.) She traces such

behaviour to the 1950s, when GI Bill undergraduates who had returned from foreign wars ‘with notches on

their belts’ were unwilling to bend to ‘Eisenhower’s moral strictures at home’. In 2016, the North American

Interfraternity Conference joined with the National Panhellenic Conference and agreed to spend $300,000 on

lobbying against, among other things, fraternities going co-educational, as they had at Harvard and Wesleyan.

They were also calling for congressional withdrawal of Obama’s ‘Dear Colleague’ letter (on this they would

get their way).

Grigoriadis listens to young women who, while entering freely into a campus hook-up culture of casual sex,

also give accounts of falling into an alcoholic stupor and waking up to find they have had sex they knew

nothing about and certainly weren’t in any state to enjoy. Alcohol on campus plays a key role, but that fact is

most often turned against women, as if the problem were their being out of it, not that someone has taken

advantage of their state. That the woman was intoxicated is, of course, precisely what the accused and the

police will say in rape cases to discredit her evidence and get a case dismissed. In a recent survey, 7 per cent

of women students answered yes when asked whether they had been penetrated while asleep, unconscious or

incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.



26

Grigoriadis also talks to a group of young women whose casual attitude to sex extends to assault, the reality

of which they dismiss, even while rolling their eyes at male boorishness. Yet they too describe the ‘weird’

things that happened to them at the start of their freshman year, and wonder whether encounters meant to be

sex may in fact have been rape. She talks to the mothers of boys who say they have been wrongly accused.

Some of them have been sent down from college, their educational ambitions and future prospects in shreds.

She talks to one boy who seems genuinely to believe that he ‘accidentally’ had anal sex with his girlfriend.

She talks to abusers and rapists who demonstrate no shame over what they have done, and lists their sickening

comments about women, which I have chosen not to reproduce here. She listens as one student first

denounces Trump as likely to prove ‘terrible’ for his country, then triumphantly proclaims, ‘The bitch is

dead!’: ‘We’re back, we won, and we’re mad.’ She describes cases about which she felt, as she got deeper and

deeper into their complexity, that the facts had begun to ‘blow away’.

Hesitantly, Grigoriadis admits to not believing every student plaintiff, although she has no doubt that the call

to believe women has resulted in a welcome sea-change. She allows for mixed motives and confused

memories, for situations in which both plaintiff and accused may genuinely feel they are telling the truth, or

where what one student experiences as unwelcome may not ‘knowingly’ have been done with an intent to

harm. ‘Unknowingly’, again, brings us slap bang up against the unconscious, where all hues darken and blur.

The Blurred Lines of Grigoriadis’s title is an allusion to a notorious song by Robin Thicke, in which he

repeats the line ‘I know you want it’ at least six times. The song is also the basis of an essay by Roxane Gay;

one of the reasons she calls herself a ‘bad’ feminist is that she finds herself wanting to sing along.

Blurred Lines starts and ends with the case of Emma Sulkowicz, an art student who, having brought a failed

rape charge against a fellow undergraduate at Columbia University in 2015, politicised a generation of

students on the issue of sexual harassment with her Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), a work of

endurance art and political protest whose self-imposed ‘rules of engagement’ required her to carry a

dormitory mattress everywhere she went on campus for nine months. ‘That image,’ Hillary Clinton said in her

speech to the Democratic National Committee Women’s Leadership Forum in 2015, ‘should haunt all of us.’

By the end of the book, Grigoriadis believes Sulkowicz’s account of what happened, despite its having been

challenged down to the last detail by Paul Nungesser, the student she accused, who went on to file his own

complaint against the university for violating his Title IX rights by allowing Sulkowicz to continue with her

protest piece, for which she received academic credit. (Columbia settled with him out of court.) And

Grigoriadis continues to believe her when, in a gesture Grigoriadis sees as verging on a ‘retraction’,

Sulkowicz writes in a note accompanying a later piece based on her experience: ‘Everything that takes place

in the following video is consensual but may resemble rape. It is not a re-enactment but may seem like one. If

at any point you are triggered or upset, please proceed with caution and/or exit this website. However, I do

not mean to be prescriptive, for many people find pleasure in feeling upset.’

On one thing Grigoriadis is absolutely clear, and that is the energy, commitment and imagination of the

students who have launched and are struggling to keep up the anti-harassment campaign. As she was writing

her book, the alt-right were busy targeting universities. A culture of grievance, they claimed, was spreading

from colleges to the whole of the US, as if educational institutions were the cause and worst exemplar of the

‘nanny state’. In September 2017, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, announced that she was

rescinding Obama’s ‘Dear Colleague’ guidance on Title IX. The new guidance describes Obama’s letter as

‘well-intentioned’ but ‘stacked against the accused’; it makes no reference to the historical backdrop that

made the strongest possible support for the complainant seem essential. On the contrary: ‘In the 45 years

since the passage of Title IX,’ the new guidance asserts, ‘we have seen remarkable progress towards an

educational environment free of sex discrimination.’ Even before the election, it was clear that DeVos would

do ‘her damnedest’ – not, Grigoriadis adds, that she would use such language – to roll back measures which,



27

however flawed, young women see as progress. In their bid for ‘sexual empowerment’, Grigoriadis writes,

‘fierce, ruthless, determined’ anti-harassment activists have ‘cast off the old language of victimhood’. They

want a world in which rape will no longer be what historically it has been: ‘a property crime, the women’s

fault, or a man’s privilege’. They want to be listened to and believed, they want an end to sexual harassment.

*

Though it occupies the same territory, Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to

Campus feels as if it has arrived from another planet. It too was published in 2017. Grigoriadis refers to it just

once, in parenthesis, as an ‘anti-Title IX manifesto’. She is being measured: I would call it a tirade. Kipnis

sees herself as belonging on the side of freedom, which now has to fight back against a repressive, stultifying,

mollycoddling administrative world (she appears unaware that she is echoing the alt-right critique of Title

IX). There is a feminist backstory to this argument. Twenty years ago, in Feminist Accused of Sexual

Harassment, Jane Gallop made a plea for the erotics of teaching: a case made more effectively by bell hooks

in Teaching to Transgress, which had appeared three years before. All hooks’s teachers at a segregated school

in Kentucky had been black women who, although they never said it in so many words, were fired up by a

‘revolutionary pedagogy of resistance’. For these women, rousing their students was to transgress a racial

heritage that did everything it could to suppress black thought and desire. (Later, in her career as an academic,

hooks’s own ‘revolutionary pedagogy’ would include at least one sexual liaison with a student.) All this

changed with racial integration. Black children bused to white schools quickly discovered that their passionate

enthusiasm in the classroom was seen as a threat to white privilege. They were cut down to size. This, I think,

from Pema Chodron, could fairly be called a manifesto:

My models were the people who stepped outside of the conventional mind and who could actually stop my

mind and completely open it up and free it, even for a moment, from a conventional, habitual way of looking

at things … If you are really preparing for groundlessness, preparing for the reality of human existence, you

are living on the razor’s edge, and you must become used to the fact that things shift and change. Things are

not certain and they do not last and you do not know what is going to happen. My teachers have always

pushed me over a cliff.

Likewise – though not exactly – Kipnis is arguing for the myriad, uncontrollable and often sexual nature of

human behaviour and thought. So far so fair, though Grigoriadis is there to remind us that you can be on the

side of the complexity of life and mind without, as Kipnis does, turning against Title IX as the devil’s work (I

barely exaggerate).

Unwanted Advances opens with the moment Kipnis was charged under Title IX for writing an article in

which she opposed a new directive banning all sexual relations, even if consensual, between undergraduates

and faculty. She was seen as taking the wrong side, encouraging discrimination, betraying the progressive

cause. Gallop had been treading similar ground when she argued that all teaching relationships were in effect

‘consensual amorous relations’. As a student, she had seduced a number of her teachers and come to no harm;

she saw the experience as a conquest, which made her feel ‘cocky’ and in touch with her own ‘power’. She

was most excited by students who wanted to be like her (perhaps not something to boast about). She

announced at a conference that her ‘sexual preference’ was graduate students, which unsurprisingly didn’t go

down very well. A charge of harassment was brought against her after she passionately kissed one of her

students in a crowded room; she admits she got off on the spectacle.



28

Gallop, Kipnis and Jennifer Doyle have in common that they have all been embroiled in university statutes on

harassment, though in Doyle’s case the comparison stops there, as she was the one bringing a complaint under

Title IX against a student who had been harassing and stalking her. Sexual harassment comes mainly from

men to women, faculty to student. That doesn’t mean we should lose sight of the fact that neither women nor

men automatically pitch up in the most obvious place. Still, as I read Unwanted Advances, I couldn’t help

wondering about Kipnis, not for the first time: whose side does she think she is on? She would probably take

that as a compliment.

This is by no means Kipnis’s first foray into sexual politics. Her previous book, Men: Notes from an Ongoing

Investigation (2014), opens with a paean to Larry Flynt, the editor of Hustler, a magazine she considers

disgusting – ‘It grossed me out’ – but celebrates nonetheless for its pornographic assault on American prudery

and social hypocrisy. She puts it in the tradition of Rabelais. When she meets Flynt, he is in a gold-plated

wheelchair, the result of an assassination attempt years earlier by a white supremacist enraged by Hustler’s

interracial slant. She isn’t wrong that there is a progressive stripe running through this monstrous magazine,

though you have to dig deep to find it. Kipnis is open about the pleasure she gets as a woman writing about

men: ‘potency’, ‘a bit of lead in your pencil’. Another of her earlier books, Bound and Gagged: Pornography

and the Politics of Fantasy in America (1996), opens with the case of Daniel DePew, stung by a San Jose

undercover police officer who lured him to a hotel room and got him to engage with the idea of making a

snuff movie that would involve the kidnapping and murder of a child. As Kipnis saw it, DePew, who was

sentenced to 33 years in prison, had been arrested for a fantasy, ‘a crime that never happened’. It sounded to

me more as if he had been caught making a plan.

Whether today’s focus on harassment is making people afraid of their own thoughts seems to me a fair

question. But already, in these remarks about DePew from twenty years ago, Kipnis strikes me as having

made an odd use, or misuse, of fantasy. For psychoanalysis, unconscious fantasy, as distinct from conscious

fantasy or daydream, is not something you want to happen; indeed it is something that would horrify you if it

happened in real life. This is an easier distinction to grasp than it might first appear. One student told

Grigoriadis he understood that women’s rape fantasies weren’t real: ‘Men don’t want their penises cut off but

dream about it anyway.’ You cannot and should not be punished for any such fantasy: most often the voice

chastising you in your head is punishment enough. But men in a hotel room discussing how to murder a child

would not make the cut.

This may seem far from Title IX, but I think it is central. By her own account, Kipnis’s strongest

identifications are with men – on the first page of Men she describes herself as a ‘daddy’s girl’ – and

especially with those she feels have been victims of injustice: Larry Flynt, Daniel DePew and, at the heart

of Unwanted Advances, Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University, who was charged

under Title IX with inappropriate sexual behaviour (in one case rape) by two students, and forced from his

job. One of his accusers had been a first-year in his class, the other a postgraduate student. Kipnis gives them

the pseudonyms Eunice Cho and Nola Hartley, and has written the case for the defence. You could argue that

she is trying to redress the balance, but that is a term I have always considered corrupt in an unbalanced world

(I have also noticed that the demand for ‘balance’ is made only when you clash with the official position or

are seen to be on the wrong side of a debate, never when your views are welcome).

For Kipnis, the administrative behemoth that is Title IX is part of a backlash against the intellectual and

sexual freedoms seized over decades by feminists, and puts at risk student autonomy, intellectual spirit and

the impulse to learn. A mental and sexual straitjacket is turning women students into passive victims, who are,

or see themselves as, the prey of men. (Isn’t being the prey of men precisely what anti-harassment activists



29

most hate?) She wrote her book when, having expressed sympathy with Ludlow, he gave her access to a stash

of more than two thousand emails and messages between himself and Hartley, with whom he had been in a

relationship for more than a year. When she is critical of Ludlow it feels like a concession: ‘Let me be

honest,’ she says, ‘you are not going to find me arguing that Ludlow showed fantastic judgment’ (independent

of the main charges against him, he admits to having had two undergraduates in his bed). She also

demonstrates that the Title IX investigators in this case, and in others, were heavily inclined towards the

plaintiff. But as I see it, she makes the fatal error of confusing her critique of injustices under Title IX with

tearing the complainants’ evidence to shreds. Even allowing that she is driven by the wish that women claim

back their sexual agency the feminist aspect of this way of proceeding escapes me. Challenged on Facebook,

Kipnis responded that Unwanted Advances is ‘a polemic, not journalism. It’s a work of opinion. It’s based on

reporting, and a close reading of the available documents, but the heart of the book is my interpretation of that

material.’ The Philosophy Graduate Student Association accused her of the ‘unauthorised exposure of private

information and reckless, unfounded speculation’ about Nola Hartley.

In Unwanted Advances, terms like hysteria, projection and paranoia are thrown around, alongside ‘witch

hunt’, as if they could be used to settle political debate, with no regard for the way they have been used

historically to persecute, insult and silence angry women. Faced, for example, with contradictory behaviour

on the part of one of Ludlow’s two main accusers (‘both flinging herself at Ludlow in a sexualised way and

also feeling victimised’), she doesn’t hesitate to offer a wild diagnosis of ‘borderline personality disorder’,

which means the patient, instead of being happily – or rather unhappily – neurotic like everybody else, sits on

the border between neurosis and psychosis. One of its components, we are told, is ‘provocative or seductive

behaviour’, at which point I find myself wanting to invoke Jane Gallop as an ally. Victimised and seductive.

Far from being a sign of mental disturbance, this might instead be grounds for hope: it suggests that a

woman’s ability to seduce hasn’t been completely quashed by ambient violence. Is it disordered, in a sexually

disordered world, for a woman to feel something of both?

*

In UK universities, those accused of harassment in whatever form tend not to be named, on grounds of

confidentiality. Cases rarely get to court as universities do all they can to avoid adverse publicity, even where

rape is involved. In June 2016, Sara Ahmed resigned from her post as director of the Feminist Studies Centre

at Goldsmiths, University of London over the university’s treatment of harassment. In solidarity with Ahmed,

a student blog reproduced images of the title pages of 16 books, found in the Goldsmiths library, by a member

of faculty who had been charged with harassment, each page scrawled with accusations that the author was a

serial harasser who had been allowed to resign before a full disciplinary hearing could be held. This type of

outcome – hushing up, discreet departure, financial settlements or non-disclosure agreements with students –

is not uncommon, either in the UK or, despite Title IX, in the US. Among other things it means that the

accused, if he is never formally charged, can more or less seamlessly move on to another institution,

safeguarding, indeed advancing, his career. When Carole Mundell spoke out against a colleague at Liverpool

John Moores University’s Astrophysics Research Institute for writing a glowing reference for a serial

harasser, the colleague made a libel claim against her (it was thrown out by the High Court). The harasser had

been able to leave the university without charge and take up a prestigious university position in South Africa.

By contrast – and this is one of the least commented on aspects of campus sexual harassment – women

graduate students who have been on the receiving end as often as not fall by the professional wayside. ‘Get

used to it or get out of it,’ Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life: ‘No wonder if these are the choices, many

get out of it.’



30

Goldsmiths has appointed someone to work out ways to improve its practices. The new plan includes a single

policy on sexual harassment, violence and misconduct; a partnership with Rape Crisis in South London; more

robust co-ordination of records; and training for all staff. The college is aiming to make its policies

‘exemplary’ – an acknowledgment of the fact that there has been no co-ordinated policy on harassment across

the UK. A central concern has been that insufficient attention has been paid to the overall culture that allowed

things to go so wrong in the past. When I spoke to Lisa Blackman, joint head of media and communication at

Goldsmiths, about what had happened and what the college was doing in response, she said about colleges

and universities in general: ‘We don’t have the measure of the problem’ (she wasn’t speaking in her official

capacity and is herself involved in sexual harassment initiatives across the UK). According to a survey

published by the Guardian in December, 63 per cent of universities have no harassment advisers or sexual

violence liaison officers; 23 per cent have no designated point of contact for anyone wanting to bring a

complaint; 39 per cent do not train staff in any aspect of sexual misconduct. All this despite a

recommendation in 2016 from Universities UK, the higher education representative body, that a centralised

reporting system should be established for all such cases.

Instead, and perfectly in tune with the behaviour expected of women on the receiving end of harassment, most

British universities have continued to turn a blind eye. ‘Not addressing the problem of sexual harassment,’

Ahmed blogged shortly after her resignation, ‘is reproducing the problem of sexual harassment. By snapping,

you are saying: I will not reproduce a world I cannot bear, a world I do not think should be borne.’ This might

serve as a caution to anyone wanting to put the clock back on Title IX. Laura Kipnis, asked whether she

wanted Title IX rescinded (a fair conclusion for anyone reading Unwanted Advances), suggested that this on

its own wouldn’t be enough to turn the tide: the solution would come only when men like Ludlow, who have

fallen foul of Title IX, sued institutions for lost reputations and livelihood. As I cast my eye from the UK to

the US and back again, it strikes me that in the matter of harassment there is no legal or procedural middle

ground. Sexuality collides with the law. The only available options, at least to date, seem to be too much

interference or not enough.

For Kipnis, the atmosphere around Title IX meant that the critical, inquiring spirit of women students was

being suppressed. For the Goldsmiths students, on the other hand, it was the crushing of curiosity about

sexual harassment, the quiet disappearance of the accused and the lack of transparency that was threatening

minds and bodies alike. As far as they were concerned, they were just reaffirming the impulse that brought

them to university in the first place: ‘We are at university because we are curious and we want to learn …

Clearly something is being covered up which makes our desire to learn even stronger.’

Like the million and more voices in the #MeToo campaign, the young women studying at universities today

are filled with rage. They are not passive; nor are they ‘damsels’ tied to the railway tracks – to cite just one of

the images used by Kipnis to describe the way women students are portrayed under Title IX. Today’s feminist

students aren’t excited by the same things as the sisters turned on by feminist teaching in the 1970s and

1980s. Why, at a time when misogyny and assaults against women show no sign of diminishing, would they

not be a little more cautious about sex? Grigoriadis’s book is full of stories of women students who look back

on their willing participation in hook-up culture with regret, not least because of the dire sex. Or because it

took them time to understand what had happened. ‘It took me a while to realise that he shouldn’t have done

that,’ one woman told the Guardian in response to their call-out on harassment. She is not denying

responsibility: ‘I thought … that’s OK, I put myself in that situation. I took a while to realise what he did was

wrong.’ None of this, it should be said, implies anything about a woman’s pleasure and agency during a

consensual sexual act. Or indeed about so-called passivity, a term that could itself do with some undoing. As

Freud once observed, striking a blow against one of the most damaging binaries of them all, it can take ‘a

large amount of activity … to achieve a passive aim’. (Kipnis reads this as passivity’s bad faith: I take it as a

sign of its latent energy.)



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*

Evidence is always key, especially in a disputed case. But it isn’t neutral. ‘The evidence we have of racism

and sexism,’ Ahmed writes, ‘is deemed insufficient because of racism and sexism.’ Evidence has to be

interpreted. When a student in a long-term consensual relationship with a tutor messages him to apologise for

hurting his feelings and tells him that she loves him, someone has to decide whether her subsequent claim that

he had raped her the day before was a lie. Someone has to decide that when there is a delay, possibly a long

delay, between an event and your feeling upset about it, that means your claim to have been disturbed by the

event is false (this again would be news to anyone informed by psychoanalysis, which takes the mind’s

reluctance to register what is happening at the time it is happening as one of the marks of trauma). Someone

has to decide that a student who messages a hook-up inviting him to have anal sex with her must really have

wanted it, or if she had wanted it at that moment, couldn’t have changed her mind, could not, therefore, have

been anally raped. Someone has to decide that a student whose messages establish that she wanted to have sex

with a male student who was rejecting her advances, that she even mused on the pleasures of violence (‘It is

always nice to be sexually assaulted without breaking the law’), could not have been raped. They asked for it,

no? I take these examples from the cases of Ludlow (the first two), Sulkowicz and Liam Allan respectively.

† Each opens a door into the murky world of sexuality, where all bets are off, where desire can flare up and be

followed by a change of heart in the space of a single breath. Such moments may indeed give us pause. But it

is the elation with which they are seized on, the unseemly haste with which they are used to bludgeon the

complainant’s case, that I find chilling. A woman starts down a sexual path which she then for whatever

reason no longer wants to continue. She tries to bring it to a halt. If the man doesn’t stop – and please don’t

tell me that he might fail to understand the message, or that once he gets going no man can control himself –

then that is rape.

To which we must surely add that a woman can be driven to co-operate in a violent sexual act, or seem to be

co-operating, out of fear. This is common in cases of rape. ‘Judges and juries are more convinced if they can

see torn knickers and proof that the victim was beaten,’ the human rights QC Helena Kennedy has said about

the ‘ideal’ victim in rape trials in the UK, but

even the signs of resistance have to be more than the odd bruise, which defendants explain away as the result

of vigorous sex-play and playful pinching. The paradox is that the requirement to show that they put up a

fight flies in the face of everything we are told about self-protection. As one victim said when interviewed

about her experience, ‘Everything I did right to save my life is exactly wrong in terms of proving I was telling

the truth.’

In which case, the ‘evidence’ will be fake.

What of the strange idea that loving or caring for an abuser, even as soon as the morning after, rules out a

claim of abuse? Jennifer Marsh is vice president of the US national support service for abuse victims,

RAINN. They take an average of 266 calls a day. ‘One of the first things our users say is: “I don’t know what

happened to me.” It’s not uncommon for them to say things like: “I woke up the next morning and cooked

him breakfast.”’ ‘As in all things shitty,’ Hartley messaged Ludlow the morning after the alleged rape, ‘this

too shall pass. I love you.’ Women’s refuges across the UK are packed with women who have entered,

willingly and lovingly, into intimate relationships that turn violent. The enduring nature of the attachment is

one of the reasons it can be such a struggle to stop them from returning home.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/jacqueline-rose/i-am-a-knife#fn-dagger

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/jacqueline-rose/i-am-a-knife#fn-dagger



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This hasn’t prevented the government, at the exact moment when sexual harassment and assault are in the

news as never before, from ending guaranteed funding for refuges, a move that is predicted to leave around

four thousand women and children stranded. The government has also slashed legal aid, which will

disproportionately affect abused women, who will have no choice but to represent themselves in court, often

face to face with their abusers. In 2013 the government introduced a fee of £1200 to go to tribunal; since then

there has been a 71 per cent drop in the number of discrimination cases brought on grounds of sex. In

October, when the Weinstein scandal spread to Westminster, Theresa May made a commitment to create

‘robust’ policies to protect staff from sexual harassment. By November, the speaker of the Commons was

demanding that the proposals for handling allegations of harassment be made public, while members of the

cross-party working group complained that the plan was simply being transferred from the procedure for

dealing with employment grievances, and wouldn’t offer sufficient protection since it would remain in the

hands of MPs – like ‘foxes talking about how to make the hen house safer’, in the words of one member.

Their final report, published in February, recommends a mechanism of independent investigation.

All of which should, again, make us wary of the notion that a corner has at last been turned. Institutions can

only do so much (though doing something would surely help). We also need to look beyond Westminster and

Hollywood. According to a TUC report last year, more than 50 per cent of women in the workplace have

experienced sexual harassment, most of whom haven’t reported it or failed to get a positive outcome when

they did (which more or less takes us back to where we started in the 1970s). Today, women who are casually

and precariously employed are the most vulnerable, and their numbers are steadily rising. ‘Me Too’ was

founded by an African-American woman, Tarana Burke, in 2007 as a grassroots movement for women,

particularly women of colour, in underprivileged communities, with the motto ‘Using the power of empathy

to stamp out shame’. At the height of the Weinstein scandal, 700,000 women farmworkers sent a letter to

prominent figures in Hollywood protesting against the constant harassment they experienced at work.

*

I have never so regretted agreeing to write on a subject. But as I have sunk deeper into the morass, Roxane

Gay has more than once come to my aid. Gay became famous as the ‘bad’ feminist who had fantasies about

Bill Clinton and likes to wear pink. She has also made assault against women more or less her life’s work.

Reading the stories of sexual harassment both here and in the US, I have started to feel that all the attention

has served not only to bolster the urgent call for a better world but, oddly and at the same time, as a

diversionary tactic to help us avoid having to think about sex. Or, to put it another way, if harassment and

sexual violence are, as a certain version of radical feminism would have it, the whole story of human

sexuality, then we may as well lock the door on who we are and throw away the key. How can we

acknowledge the viciousness of sexual harassment while leaving open the question of what sexuality at its

wildest – most harmful and most exhilarating, sometimes both together – might be?

Gay was gang-raped at the age of 12. The gang included a boy she loved who set the whole thing up and

whom, though he had treated her badly, she had more or less trusted until then. The legacy of that moment –

above all a manic appetite that turned her body into a fortress against pain – is the subject of her

memoir, Hunger, which was published last year: ‘If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away … My

body could become so big it would never be broken again.’ Among other things, Hunger is a riposte to those

who find it odd that a woman could go on loving a man who treated her with unforgivable violence (‘I woke

up the next morning and cooked him breakfast’; ‘As with all things shitty, this too shall pass. I love you’). Or

that it might take a very long time for what happened to register fully, for the experience to break the

threshold of anguish and pass into speech. Gay doesn’t shy away from the word ‘victim’; she prefers it to



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‘survivor’: ‘I don’t want to pretend I am on some triumphant, uplifting journey.’ Far from rendering her

passive or pathetic, naming herself in this way is a form of agency that makes it possible for her to live and to

write – ‘I am stronger than I am broken’ – though there is a price to pay: ‘Writing that kind of story requires

going to a dark place. At times, I nauseated myself in the writing and by what I am capable of writing and

imagining, my ability to go there.’

At the same time as telling this gruesome story, Gay explores the furthest limits of a woman’s imagination,

the lengths to which she can be driven, or choose to go, in the domain of love and intimacy. This is especially

true of her second collection of short stories, Difficult Women, which also appeared last year but received less

attention than Hunger – critics seem to have greeted it either with disappointment or false cheer. Gay has been

accused of exploitation. She has also been praised for having ‘fun’ with her ‘ladies’: ‘no shrinking violets’,

they give ‘as good as they get’. She is, I suggest, a borderline writer, a term I intend not as diagnosis but as

praise. Despite, or perhaps because, of what happened to her, Gay is always on the side of the

untamed. Untamed State is the title of her first novel. It too tells the lurid story of a rape, with which – and

this is one of the strengths of her writing – race and class are given full recognition: the daughter of a rich

Haitian businessman is kidnapped, held to ransom, and repeatedly raped by a gang of men who roam the

streets spreading fear.

In Hunger, revulsion towards fat people is seen as being fuelled by anxiety about unruly bodies, bodies whose

outlines stretch to infinity and which break all the rules: ‘My body is wildly undisciplined’ (‘undisciplined’

and ‘unruly’ are a refrain). A fat body stands as a terrifying rebuke to anyone who foolishly believes that their

mortal bodies, not to speak of their inner lives, could ever be truly under control. Hence the ‘strange civic-

minded cruelty’ with which Gay, like all fat people, is greeted, as if such cruelty were the only way the people

hurling the insults or turning away in disgust can feel confident of keeping their place in the ranks of the

civilised. ‘My wife and I,’ the narrator of the short story ‘Florida’ explains, ‘watch documentaries about the

lives of extraordinarily fat people so we can feel better about ourselves.’

Despite the ugly beginnings, Hunger – which portrays appetite as uncontrolled, unruly, untamed – slowly but

surely comes to testify not only to trauma, but to the intensity and breadth of human desire: ‘I often tell my

students that fiction is about desire one way or another … We want and want and oh how we want. We

hunger.’ This is what Gay does so brilliantly: she points the finger at male violence and its deadly aftermath

for women, while exuberantly – some would say ‘perversely’ – keeping open all the pathways of the mind.

‘North Country’, another story in Difficult Women, includes a cameo of sexual harassment at a fictionalised

version of Michigan Technological University, where Gay studied for a PhD. The narrator is the only black

person and the only woman in her department. Her dissertation adviser, with whom she has had an affair,

takes up with his new lab assistant – she finds them having sex in the lab – when she fails to move on after the

death of their unborn child (he endlessly promises her a future and then reneges). Babies who have died recur

in Gay’s stories.

They are often, but not always, the cause of the agonised pleasure her protagonists take in psychic and

physical pain: ‘At a bar I found a man who would hit me … I used one hurt to cover another … I tried to lose

myself in my bruising.’ She would be a much less interesting writer if that were always the explanation, as if

violated virtue were a woman’s only possible route to vice. Gay sits on a border between a space in which

trauma is the sole cause of anguish – ‘Look what has been done to me’ – and one in which the mind,

thumbing trauma, takes flight: ‘See how far I can go.’

Perhaps the most disturbing story opens: ‘My husband is a hunter. I am a knife.’ She likes him to mark her

body and takes pleasure in skinning and disembowelling his prey. Long ago, when her sister lay dying by the



34

roadside after their car was hit by a drunk driver, she used her knife to cut out the heart ‘he did not deserve’

and placed it inside her sister’s chest, until the two hearts ‘started beating as one’. At the end of the story, she

delivers her sister’s unborn child, and then loses her own: ‘I wish I could carve the anger out of my body the

way I cut everything else.’

To borrow the title of the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin’s most recent book, Gay’s characters are ‘beyond

doer and done to’, or, to be more precise, they are both. They are violated, but they also cut through life with

exceptional energy and determination. Gay is here to remind us that fiction, rather than being suspect or

fraudulent (‘She made the whole thing up’), is an imaginative tool that belongs at the centre of these debates.

It can depict damage as well as freedom, seized from a wretched past. In her hands, telling stories – her own

story, the stories she invents – is the place where impossible paths meet.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/jacqueline-rose/i-am-a-knife



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A man with a small boy on his shoulders walks through Villa 31, an informal settlement in Buenos

Aires. Marcos Brindicci/Reuters

Letting Slum Residents Control Their Own Destiny

1. ANTHONY FLINT

At UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum 9, a pressing question was how to integrate informal settlements into

the formal city. Community land trusts might be the way to start.

KUALA LUMPUR—As with past editions of the global conference on cities, the ninth World Urban Forum

kept coming back to the stubborn question of what to do about slums.

An estimated 900 million people live in informal settlements, according to UN-Habitat, the organizer of the

event, which concluded last week in the Malaysian capital. According to various estimates, one in four city

dwellers is in an area lacking basic services, and the majority of all new housing worldwide is technically

built illegally.

Over the decades, governments have tried a range of strategies, from outright eviction and bulldozing to

massive relocations into public housing. The latter has not worked especially well, because the new housing is

most often built on cheap land at the urban periphery, far from jobs. An estimated 5 million housing units are

vacant or under-occupied across Latin America, having been abandoned by the households who were

relocated there.

https://www.citylab.com/authors/anthony-flint/

https://unhabitat.org/wuf/



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The most prominent alternative policy has been to leave residents in place and attempt to “regularize”

informal settlements by giving people legal title to their property, so they can own the homes they have built.

Sometimes authorities will intervene with targeted upgrades, such as new schools and libraries, public spaces,

water and sanitation facilities, and expanded transportation options. The cable cars of Medellin are a well-

regarded example of this approach.

Yet problems arise with it as well—namely, the prospect of gentrification and real-estate speculation. Some

residents actually refuse to accept title on their homes and resist upgrades out of fear that rising values or the

prospect of taxes will ultimately force them to leave their communities.

So it is that one of the most promising new policies in global urbanization has emerged: allowing residents of

informal settlements to control their own destiny through community land trusts. This arrangement, in which

land is collectively owned, effectively protects homes from real-estate speculation.

A CLT addresses the number-one concern of residents in informal settlements: the promise of being able to

stay.

There are more than 250 community land trusts, or CLTs, in the United States. Typically, a municipality and

a non-profit organization (such as a community development corporation) work together to purchase a plot of

land. Residents can either rent or buy the homes, which may be existing homes or new construction. But the

cost of the land—the biggest factor in housing markets—is taken out of the equation. One of the first

attempts to create a CLT in an informal area is Fideicomiso de la Tierra, or the Caño Martín Peña Community

Land Trust, along the Martín Peña Canal in San Juan, Puerto Rico. That effort was inspired in part by

the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in the Roxbury section of Boston.

A CLT addresses the number-one concern of residents in informal settlements: the promise of being able to

stay in the communities where they have lived for years, said Theresa Williamson, founder of Catalytic

Communities. Legislation allowing for the creation of CLTs would give residents of Brazil’s favelas a feeling

of control as those settlements are integrated into the formal city, Williamson said, speaking at the Lincoln

Institute of Land Policy late last year. (The Lincoln Institute is supporting her efforts to ascertain the legal and

political feasibility of CLTs in Brazil.)

A major test of the concept may unfold in one neighborhood in Buenos Aires that embodies the challenge of

that integration: Villa 31. An 80-year-old shantytown of about 40,000 residents densely settled on 100 acres,

Villa 31 sits literally on the other side of the tracks from the booming downtown neighborhoods of Buenos

Aires. The label villa comes from the Argentinian phrase loosely translated as “village of misery.”

Bolstered by funding from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the city

government teed up a $320 million initiative to bring services and transformation to Villa 31: health clinics,

housing centers, and plans for a new school and government offices right in the heart of the neighborhood.

https://www.voanews.com/a/rio-slum-favela-home-ownership-gentrification/3705588.html

http://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/have-hold

https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/community-land-trusts-grown-grassroots

https://www.progressivecity.net/single-post/2017/06/07/AN-INFORMAL-SETTLEMENT-IN-PUERTO-RICO-HAS-BECOME-THE-WORLD%E2%80%99S-FIRST-FAVELA-COMMUNITY-LAND-TRUST

https://www.progressivecity.net/single-post/2017/06/07/AN-INFORMAL-SETTLEMENT-IN-PUERTO-RICO-HAS-BECOME-THE-WORLD%E2%80%99S-FIRST-FAVELA-COMMUNITY-LAND-TRUST

https://www.world-habitat.org/es/premios-mundiales-del-habitat/ganadores-y-finalistas/fideicomiso-de-la-tierra-del-cano-martin-pena/

https://www.world-habitat.org/es/premios-mundiales-del-habitat/ganadores-y-finalistas/fideicomiso-de-la-tierra-del-cano-martin-pena/

http://www.dsni.org/

http://catcomm.org/

http://catcomm.org/

http://www.lincolninst.edu/news/lincoln-house-blog/potential-community-land-trusts-rios-favelas

https://www.apnews.com/51de4424dba7408ba5277bc31508c653



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Children in Villa 31 at a new playground, one of the improvements the city government has made in the

community. (Marcos Brindicci/Reuters)

An entrepreneurship center—symbolically, in a narco bank that authorities had seized and closed—paid

immediate dividends, said Diego Fernandez, the city’s secretary for social and urban integration, who

appeared at a packed session at the World Urban Forum with Francisca Rojas, urban development and

housing specialist at the IDB. A shopkeeper learned to track sales on a spreadsheet, allowing her to take a day

off to tend to errands on the day with the least sales.

In that kind of urban acupuncture, it’s the little things—like learning how to manage data about sales and

inventory—that can make a big difference. The area has a lot to build on. According to research by Cynthia

Goytia, an urban economics professor at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, the commercial

activity in Villa 31 is on par with malls in the formal city.

https://www.lincolninst.edu/about-lincoln-institute/people/cynthia-goytia

https://www.lincolninst.edu/about-lincoln-institute/people/cynthia-goytia



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Commercial activity in Villa 31 is robust. (Anthony Flint)

Throughout the community, the city has overhauled playgrounds once occupied by drug dealers, burnished

soccer fields, built 1,200 new homes, and renovated 500 existing dwellings. Still, building trust remains a

major challenge, and fears of gentrification persist—that if the neighborhood gets this much attention, it’s

only a matter of time before it becomes as swanky as the redeveloped industrial waterfront of Puerto

Maderojust to the south. Some people declined to have their homes renovated. Some people didn’t mind

living under the expressway, despite the international design competition to transform the viaduct into a park.

The early sketches look eerily similar to the High Line in Manhattan, where rents have soared.

Houses under an expressway. Some residents of Villa 31 are concerned about a plan to turn the viaduct

into a park. (Anthony Flint)

A CLT is being considered to address these concerns, Fernandez said, although officials want to be sure to

emphasize that residents will have home ownership. “That’s culturally important,” he said.

One of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals calls for making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and

sustainable. The right to adequate and affordable housing is a major tenet of the New Urban Agenda, the

implementation of which was the main focus of the Kuala Lumpur Declaration coming out of World Urban

Forum 9. If housing can be made more affordable generally, there would be less need for the poor to occupy

http://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/puerto-madero-0

http://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/puerto-madero-0

http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

https://unhabitat.org/the-right-to-adequate-housing-fact-sheet-no-21rev-1/

http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2016/10/newurbanagenda/

http://wuf9.org/kuala-lumpur-declaration/



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land any way they can. “Formal or informal, we have to bring dignity to these areas,” said Claudio Acioly,

head of capacity building for UN-Habitat.

But the work is not done in a vacuum. The vagaries of land markets permeate all the efforts to improve

conditions for the poor in cities, just as sure as the thunderstorms that drench Kuala Lumpur just about every

afternoon.

About the Author

Anthony Flint

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/letting-slum-residents-control-their-own-destiny/554120/

https://www.citylab.com/authors/anthony-flint/



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Color Palettes of Historic Paintings Subdivided with Algorithms by Dimitris Ladopoulos

KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/about/#kate



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Athens-based motion graphics and visual designer Dimitris Ladopoulos uses a series of algorithms to

subdivide his favorite works of art, breaking down the color compositions of centuries old paintings in the 3D

animation software Houdini. With this process, Ladopoulos digitally observes the palette

of Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn‘s Portrait of Johannes Wtenbogaert, in addition to examining the thousands

of specific shades used to compose Rembrandt Peale‘s portrait of his daughter Rosalba.

The two digital compositions provide a contemporary view of historical paintings, showcasing how each

might be analyzed as a designed object rather than a painted work. You can see more of Ladopoulos’s

projects, like this earlier experiment with algorithm-based geometric patterns, on the

designer’s website and Behance.

http://www.dimitris-ladopoulos.xyz/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt_Peale

https://www.behance.net/gallery/59061121/Algorithm

http://www.dimitris-ladopoulos.xyz/

https://www.behance.net/dimitris_ladopoulos



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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/painting-algorithms-dimitris-

ladopoulos/?utm_source=Colossal+Weekly+Highlights&utm_campaign=aa83e5bcd7-



http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/painting-algorithms-dimitris-ladopoulos/?utm_source=Colossal+Weekly+Highlights&utm_campaign=aa83e5bcd7-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_986f15c4a6-aa83e5bcd7-79550057&mc_cid=aa83e5bcd7&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f






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Museum Visitors Invited to Crawl and Slide Inside Massive Suspended Tape Structure

JANUARY 23, 2018

LAURA STAUGAITIS

Photographs by Dan Hodges and Rich Sanders

The Des Moines Art Center’s recent exhibit, Drawing in Space, highlighted four artists working in the

medium of tape. The show included Numen/For Use (previously), an artist collective based in Vienna and

Zagreb. Their interactive sculpture, called simply “Tape,” is made exclusively of clear packing tape,

suspended within the art center’s I.M. Pei-designed architecture. Museum visitors are encouraged to explore

the piece from the inside out—as long as they wear socks and move through the structure in a clockwise

direction. Numen’s exhibit at the Art Center closed on January 21st, and we’re looking forward to seeing

where it appears next. Previous iterations have been built in Paris, Frankfurt, and Vienna. See more of

Numen/For Use’s work on their website and Facebook.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/suspended-tape-sculpture/


https://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/

http://www.numen.eu/home/news/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/02/a-massive-inflatable-string-jungle-gym-by-numenfor-use/

http://www.numen.eu/

https://www.facebook.com/Numen-For-Use-261193490587757/



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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/suspended-tape-

sculpture/?utm_source=Colossal+Weekly+Highlights&utm_campaign=aa83e5bcd7-



http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/suspended-tape-sculpture/?utm_source=Colossal+Weekly+Highlights&utm_campaign=aa83e5bcd7-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_986f15c4a6-aa83e5bcd7-79550057&mc_cid=aa83e5bcd7&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f






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Accurate simulation of aqueous-based electrochemical setups

DIPC February 1, 2018

Figure 1. Adsorption of a single water molecule at a positively biased gold electrode.

Following the need for new and renewable sources of energy worldwide, fuel cells using electrocatalysts can

be thought of as viable options. Catalyst materials modify and increase the rate of chemical reactions without

itself undergoing any permanent change. An electrocatalyst is a catalyst that participates in electrochemical

reactions and that functions at electrode surfaces or may be the electrode surface itself.

The interface between metal (the electrode) and water in these systems is the electrochemical central point,

since it is the region where charge transfer can take place. A better understanding of the metal–water interface

is also an essential requisite for predicting the correspondence between the macroscopic voltage and the

microscopic interfacial charge distribution in electrochemical fuel cells. This reactivity is governed by the

explicit atomic and electronic structures built at the interface as a response to external conditions, such as an

applied potential.

The advance in experimental techniques for studying surfaces in the last decades started to provide important

results concerning the local structure of water at interfaces, revealing a behaviour dependent on the reference

electrical conditions set, the so-called bias. From a theoretical perspective this makes the task of simulating

this setup difficult. In fact, accurate calculation of the electrostatic potential at electrically-biased metal–

electrolyte interfaces is a challenge for ab initio simulations. Current methodologies attempt to simulate the

https://mappingignorance.org/author/dipc/



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effect of finite bias at the metal by altering their charge (adding/subtracting electrons), whereas in

experiments the potential is the quantity that is controlled.

Figure 2. (a) A schematic view of the metal–water system used for the non-equilibrium calculations; the left

(right) electrodes (LE/RE) and scattering region (SR) are indicated. (b) A sketch of the effect of a positive

bias potential on a parallel plate capacitor; the corresponding charge accumulated in each plate, as well as the

bias ramp, is shown.

Now a team of researchers, including Pedro Brandimarte (CFM, DIPC), resolves 1 the local structure of water

at the interfaces of metallic electrodes using a new computational method that allows to accurately simulate

how atoms and molecules rearrange under an applied external potential using first principles methods,

including ab initio molecular dynamics. This work opens the door to the accurate simulation of aqueous-based

electrochemical setups.

The electrochemical cell is usually thought of as two metallic electrodes which act as charge reservoirs, with

the two metal plates separated by a solution (mostly composed of water). This arrangement is analogous to

the one encountered in simulations of electronic transport: a central scattering region coupled to electrodes.

And implies periodic boundary conditions.

In this new work, the researchers propose an alternative to this concept using open boundary conditions. This

is done by employing the nonequilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) method that, as it name suggests, was

designed to treat out-of-equilibrium situations, combined with density functional theory to properly compute

the effect of an external bias potential applied to electrodes.

This combination has been developed over the past decade to describe the current–voltage characteristics of

nanoscopic systems. It treats an open system under the influence of an external bias, and although dynamics –

or forces – are typically ignored in such systems, they can be incorporated into the methodology.

https://mappingignorance.org/2018/02/01/accurate-simulation-aqueous-based-electrochemical-setups/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%28Mapping+Ignorance%29#note-5032-1



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The team applies this framework to a system consisting of a single water molecule between two Au(111)

surfaces, at different configurations and as a function of an external voltage. This results in the successful

description of a truly semi-infinite metallic electrode that sets a reference chemical potential that can be

controlled by applying an external bias without adding/removing additional charge to the system. Meaning

that a more direct comparison with the experimental setups is now possible as the electrochemical cell can be

fully simulated, ionic currents and forces properly calculated and included.

This work opens the door to the accurate simulation of aqueous-based electrochemical setups.

Author: César Tomé López is a science writer and the editor of Mapping Ignorance.

References

1. Luana S. Pedroza, Pedro Brandimarte, Alexandre Reily Rocha and M.-V. Fernández-Serra (2017)

Bias-dependent local structure of water molecules at a metallic interface Chemical Science

doi: 10.1039/c7sc02208e ↩

Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) is a singular research center born in 2000 devoted to research at

the cutting edge in the fields of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science. Since its conception DIPC

has stood for the promotion of excellence in research, which demands a flexible space where creativity is

stimulated by diversity of perspectives. Its dynamic research community integrates local host scientists and a

constant flow of international visiting researchers.

Website:http://dipc.ehu.es/

Twitter:@DIPCehu

https://mappingignorance.org/2018/02/01/accurate-simulation-aqueous-based-electrochemical-

setups/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%28

Mapping+Ignorance%29

http://about.me/cesar_tome

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2018/SC/C7SC02208E#!divAbstract

https://mappingignorance.org/2018/02/01/accurate-simulation-aqueous-based-electrochemical-setups/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%28Mapping+Ignorance%29#origin-note-5032-1

http://dipc.ehu.es/

https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=DIPCehu&lang=en-US

https://mappingignorance.org/2018/02/01/accurate-simulation-aqueous-based-electrochemical-setups/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%28Mapping+Ignorance%29





54

Permian carbo-loading: How starchy treats helped build an ancient world

Source:

Geological Society of America

Summary:

Everyone loves a nice plate of pasta. After all, starch is the ultimate energy food. Now, we have

proof that carbo-loading has been a thing for at least 280 million years.

FULL STORY

Figure 2. Transmitted-light, cross-polarized-light, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of starch-

bearing Lagenicula-type megaspore from the Baode section, north China. AL Details of the starch grain in D

(rectangle) in transmitted light. Note the hilum (small depression) in center, and Y-shaped fissures. B:

Another detail of the same grain under cross-polarized light. Note the Maltese-cross extinction in the center.

C: Detail of compound starch grains under cross-polarized light. D: SEM image showing a complete starch-

bearing Lagenicula-type megaspore. E: Detail of D, showing starch grains on the gula surface. Black arrow

indicates the hilum appearing as a small depression.



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Credit: Liu et al. and Geology

Everyone loves a nice plate of pasta. After all, starch is the ultimate energy food. Now, we have proof that

carbo-loading has been a thing for at least 280 million years.

A team of Chinese and German scientists has discovered the oldest unequivocal fossilized starch ever found,

in the form of granular caps on the megaspores of a Permian-age plant called a lycopsid. They also found

evidence that these high energy treats may have been the power bars of early spore spreading.

"We suggest that these starch caps were used to attract and reward animals for megaspore dispersal," explains

lead author Feng Liu, of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, in Nanjing, China. The study,

published online ahead of print for the journal Geology, also provides early evidence for mutualism between

plants and animals.

Lycopsids were vascular plants, ancestors of modern club mosses. They thrived in the teeming swamp forests

of the Permian, about 280 million years ago. The fossil megaspores of lycopsids, with remarkably well-

preserved starch granule toppings, were found in Permian-age coal in northern China.

Plant seeds store starch internally to nourish seedlings. But after analyzing the starch masses in the fossil

megaspores using scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy, and comparing them

to modern seeds, the scientists concluded that the starch caps were only outside, not inside, the megaspore.

That means the starch wasn't part of the lycopsids' embryo nutrient system. Instead, the granules likely existed

specifically as a spore-spreading device.

Ants, birds, and mammals weren't around 280 million years ago, so the authors speculate that snails, along

with arthropods like millipedes and cockroaches, may have been the main consumers of the scrumptious

starch snacks. In turn, they dispersed the lycopsid megaspores. While starch certainly existed long before the

Permian, this discovery dishes up new insights into its ecological role, says Feng Liu. "It can help us better

understand the terrestrial animal food habit and the complexity of biotic interactions in deep geological time."

Plus, it shows that starchy food was a creature comfort long before the days of fettucine.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Geological Society of America. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Feng Liu, Benjamin Bomfleur, Huiping Peng, Quan Li, Hans Kerp, Huaicheng Zhu. 280-m.y.-old fossil

starch reveals early plant–animal mutualism. Geology, 2018; DOI: 10.1130/G39929.1


http://www.geosociety.org/GSA/News/pr/2018/18-06.aspx

http://www.geosociety.org/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G39929.1



56

Santorini: an archetypal Greek island fantasy

With its sea-drowned caldera, black-sand beaches and crimson sunsets, Santorini is the archetypal Greek

island fantasy. But its beauty hides a dark secret.

By Stav Dimitropoulos

Santorini’s five Cycladic islands surround a colossal volcanic caldera (Credit: Sylvain

Sonnet/Getty Images)

Giannis Bellonias was standing on the edge of a craggy cliffside in Imerovigli, a village

built on the apex of Santorini’s vertigo-inducing caldera, waiting for sunset from the

infamous lookout known as the ‘balcony to the Aegean’.

“There, right there! Look at the volcano,” the Santorini local said to me, pointing to what

are in fact two small, black lava islands created by volcanic activity (and are the most

http://www.santorini.net/things-to-do/santorini-volcano/

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recently formed pieces of land in the Eastern Mediterranean basin), called Palea Kameni

(Old Burnt) and Nea Kameni (Young Burnt).

With sun-bleached, blue-shuttered houses dotted among rocks, and alabaster paved paths

meandering between them, Santorini is the archetypal Greek island fantasy, an envy-

inducing sight on travel brochures and Instagram posts. But beneath the glittering facade,

there is a dark secret to its seductive prowess.

You may also be interested in:

• Europe’s most endangered language?

• The Greek word that can’t be translated

• The mystery behind Greece’s temples

Situated in the southern Aegean Sea, Santorini is a small, circular group of five Cycladic

islands, made up of main island Thera; Therasia and Aspronisi at the periphery; and the

two lava islands. All five surround a colossal, mostly drowned caldera, a bowl-shaped

crater that forms when the mouth of a volcano collapses. But during the Bronze Age,

approximately 5,000 years ago, Santorini was a single volcanic landmass called

Stronghyle (which means ‘round’ in Greek), and one that played a crucial role in shaping

history.

The Minoans were seafarers whose empire may have extended as far as Egypt and Syria (Credit: De

Agostini/G. Nimatallah/Getty Images)

http://www.santorini.net/things-to-do/santorini-volcano/

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170731-greeces-disappearing-whistled-language

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170605-the-greek-word-that-cant-be-translated

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170705-the-mystery-behind-greeces-temples

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Around that time, a civilisation started developing on the nearby island of Crete. The

inhabitants were the Minoans, named for mythical King Minos, an enigmatic and educated

people, who were warriors but also merchants, artists and seafarers. The Minoans’

ancestry has been the subject of hot dispute: some believe they were refugees from Egypt's

Nile Delta, while others say they hailed from ancient Palestine, Syria or North

Mesopotamia. The most recent research says the Minoan civilisation was a local

development, originated by early farmers who lived in Greece and south-western Anatolia.

Whatever the case, there is little doubt that between 2600 and 1100BC a sublimely

sophisticated and advanced civilisation thrived here. Excavations in Crete, especially in

Knossos (the capital of Minoan Crete), have unearthed the remains of a spectacular palace,

golden jewellery and elegant frescoes.

Europe’s first writing systems were found in buildings in Akrotiri (Credit: Gail

Mooney/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images)

Over the centuries, the Minoan empire extended over the island of Rhodes (309km east of

Stronghyle) as well as parts of the Turkish coast and perhaps as far as Egypt and Syria.

Stronghyle (now Santorini) was an especially important outpost for the Minoans due to its

privileged position on the copper trade route between Cyprus and Minoan Crete.

“The excavations in Akrotiri [a village in Santorini’s south-west] have found three-storey

houses, vast and elaborate palaces, Europe's first paved roads, running water and a

spectacular sewage system,” said Paraskevi Nomikou, assistant professor in geological

oceanography and natural geography at the University of Athens.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/greeks/minoan_01.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/greeks/minoan_01.shtml

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22527821

http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/traces-minoan-civilization-egypt-syria-00581

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/prehistoric-town-of-akrotiri

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/prehistoric-town-of-akrotiri

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Most fascinating of all, Europe’s first writing systems were found in buildings in Akrotiri

and on the faces of Bronze Age rocks in the Cretan palaces of Knossos and Malia: it was

here that the Minoans inscribed the first of their written words, initially in the form of

Cretan Hieroglyphics and later in Linear A.

Cretan Hieroglyphs is an ancient script of around 137 pictorials that look like plants,

animals, body parts, weapons, ships and other objects, and is believed to have been in use

until 1700BC. Gradually, the Minoans refined Cretan Hieroglyphs down to the much more

stylised Linear A, which took the linguistic helm until about 1450BC. Linear A had

various numbers, 200 signs and also more than 70 syllable signs, making it more like

language as we know it today (though both scripts remain undeciphered).

Rightfully, the creators of Europe’s earliest written script have been hailed as the

continent’s first literate and advanced civilisation. And their intellectual achievements

were only surpassed by their uninhibited way of living, celebrating the joy of life even at

funerals, playing with bulls instead of killing them and living in blissful harmony with

nature.

And it was nature that finally decided to kill them.

Linear A’s 200 signs and 70 syllable signs made it more like language as we know it today (Credit: Print

Collector/Getty Images)

https://luwianstudies.org/linear-a-script/



http://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/civil/greece/gr1020e.shtml

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Between 1627 and 1600 BCE, the Late Bronze Eruption (commonly called the Minoan or

Santorini Eruption), perhaps the greatest eruption in 10,000 years, took place on

Stronghyle.

It was nature that finally decided to kill them

“Prior to the eruption, the modern caldera did not exist. Instead a smaller caldera, from a

much older eruption, formed a lagoon at the north of the island,” Nomikou said. “During

the eruption, titanic flows of 60m-thick landslides of volcanic material fell onto the sea,

triggering 9m-high tsunami waves that smashed onto the shores of Crete.”

The waves may have reached western Turkey and even Israel.

Once the cataclysm ended, the modern caldera began to form (though conjuring into

existence the modern Santorini would take several thousand years).

The Late Bronze Age Eruption triggered the formation of modern Santorini’s caldera (Credit: Florian

Trojer/Getty Images)

For the Minoans it was the beginning of the end. “The volcanic destruction decimated

their commercial boats, and the huge amount of carbon dioxide that was released in the

atmospheredisturbed the climate balance, destroying Minoan agriculture. All this

gradually enabled the Mycenaeans [a Bronze Age civilisation that inhabited mainland

http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/28/1/59.abstract

https://theconversation.com/santorini-eruption-new-theory-says-pyroclastic-flows-caused-devastating-bronze-age-tsunamis-68368

https://theconversation.com/santorini-eruption-new-theory-says-pyroclastic-flows-caused-devastating-bronze-age-tsunamis-68368

https://www.forbes5.pitt.edu/article/eruption-thera

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61

Greece between 1600 and 1100 BCE] to seize their chance to put an end to Minoan

independence.”

But what startles Nomikou is that, unlike the ancient Roman town-city of Pompeii, which

got buried in more than 6m of volcanic ash and pumice in the wake of Vesuvius in 79AD,

no bodies have ever been found on Santorini.

“By all appearances, the people of Santorini were warned in advance and escaped,” she

said. To this day, no-one knows where they went.

But if Santorini destroyed Europe’s first great civilisation, it did not destroy language.

Once the more-belligerent Mycenaeans ruled over the previous Minoan empire, they

replaced Linear Awith their own evolved version, Linear B, the first attested writing

system of the Greeks, which eventually led to the Ancient Greek language that spread

democracy, scientific reasoning, theatre and philosophy around the world.

The Ancient Greek language spread democracy, theatre and philosophy around the world (Credit: Universal

History Archive/Getty Images)

More than 3,500 years after the mayhem, Bellonias is a proud owner of one of Santorini’s

traditional hillside cave settlements, carved straight into the volcanic caldera.

http://ancient-greece.org/archaeology/mycenae.html



http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199873609.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199873609-e-27

http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199873609.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199873609-e-27

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“They are the perfect air-conditioned houses. In the winter, the volcano sends heat your

way and in the summer it chills you,” he said with a grin.

Bellonias, an art collector who owns a cultural foundation with a library housing 35,000

books(including hundreds dedicated to Santorini), has been living on and off the island for

almost 60 years now, having spent his childhood and formative years in Athens.

Santorini is not for the faint of heart

“It may surprise you, but what dwells in my mind is that smell,” he told me. “Every time

we came to the island from Athens when I was a child – we arrived at dawn from Piraeus;

the voyage was a hard labour back then – I was hit by the smell of cavallines,the

excrement of the horses that hauled locals and tourists up to Imerovigli, before Santorini,

well, caught on.”

“You can still smell cavallines if you sacrifice the convenience of your car,” he added,

looking straight ahead at the volcanic islands, behind which fiery colours stretching from

deep red to ultra-violet were brewing as the sun prepared to set.

Giannis Bellonias: “I just can’t put the sunset in words” (Credit: Lee Frost/Getty Images)

http://www.bellonio.gr/library.html

http://www.bellonio.gr/library.html

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“I have never been able to put these colours in words. I don’t think anyone who has ever

lived on this island has. They might be crimson, pink, orange, red, violet... I just can’t put

the sunset in words. For me it’s a visceral feeling. Santorini is not for the faint of heart.”

And he’s probably right; it did destroy Europe’s first civilisation, after all.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180128-santorini-an-archetypal-greek-island-fantasy



64

Walking as Creative Fuel: A Splendid 1913 Celebration of How Solitary Walks Enliven “The Country of

the Mind”

“Nature’s particular gift to the walker… is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad

maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Every walk is a sort of crusade,” Thoreau wrote in his manifesto for the spirit of sauntering. And who hasn’t

walked — in the silence of a winter forest, amid the orchestra of birds and insects in a summer field, across

the urban jungle of a bustling city — to conquer some territory of their interior world? Artist Maira

Kalman sees walking as indispensable inspiration: “I walk everywhere in the city. Any city. You see

everything you need to see for a lifetime. Every emotion. Every condition. Every fashion. Every glory.”For

Rebecca Solnit, walking “wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy,

allegory, and heartbreak.”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/17/thoreau-walking/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/07/30/maira-kalman-thinking-feeling-interview/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/03/wanderlust-rebecca-solnit-walking/





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Perched midway in time between Thoreau and Solnit is a timeless celebration of the psychological, creative,

and spiritual rewards of walking by the Scottish writer Kenneth Grahame (March 8, 1859–July 6, 1932), best

known for the 1908 children’s novel The Wind in the Willows — a book beloved by pioneering

conservationist and marine biologist Rachel Carson, whose own splendid prose about natureshares a kindred

sensibility with Grahame’s.

Kenneth Grahame

Five years after publishing The Wind in the Willows, Grahame penned a beautiful short essay for a

commemorative issue of his old boarding school magazine. Titled “The Fellow that Goes Alone” and only

ever published in Peter Green’s 1959 biography Kenneth Grahame (public library), it serenades “the country

of the mind” we visit whenever we take long solitary walks in nature.

With an eye to “all those who of set purpose choose to walk alone, who know the special grace attaching to

it,” Grahame writes:

https://www.brainpickings.org/tag/rachel-carson/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/09/20/rachel-carson-lost-woods-the-real-world-around-us/


http://www.worldcat.org/title/kenneth-grahame-1859-1932-a-study-of-his-life-work-and-times-by-peter-green/oclc/459560678&referer=brief_results




66

Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking — a gift no other form of

exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree — is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted,

a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you

and as if it were talking to you whilst you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in,

sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the

friendly old earth that is pushing life firth of every sort under your feet or spell-bound in a death-like winter

trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any

possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that…; here and now, the mind has shaken off its

harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow.

In a sentiment which, today, radiates a gentle admonition against the self-defeating impulse to evacuate the

moment in order to capture it — in a status update, in an Instagram photo — Grahame observes:

Not a fiftieth part of all your happy imaginings will you ever, later, recapture, note down, reduce to dull

inadequate words; but meantime the mind has stretched itself and had its holiday.

Art

from What Color Is the Wind? by Anne Herbauts

Nearly a century before Wendell Berry’s poetic insistence that in true solitude “one’s inner voices become

audible” and modern psychology’s finding that a capacity for “fertile solitude” is the seat of the imagination,

Grahame writes:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/10/13/what-color-is-the-wind-anne-herbauts/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/17/wendell-berry-pride-despair-solitude/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/17/wendell-berry-pride-despair-solitude/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/07/18/adam-phillips-on-risk-and-solitude/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/10/13/what-color-is-the-wind-anne-herbauts/



67

This emancipation is only attained in solitude, the solitude which the unseen companions demand before they

will come out and talk to you; for, be he who may, if there is another fellow present, your mind has to trot

between shafts.

A certain amount of “shafts,” indeed, is helpful, as setting the mind more free; and so the high road, while it

should always give way to the field path when choice offers, still has this particular virtue, that it takes charge

of you — your body, that is to say. Its hedges hold you in friendly steering-reins, its milestones and finger-

posts are always on hand, with information succinct and free from frills; and it always gets somewhere,

sooner or later. So you are nursed along your way, and the mind may soar in cloudland and never need to be

pulled earthwards by any string. But this is as much company as you ought to require, the comradeship of the

road you walk on, the road which will look after you and attend to such facts as must not be overlooked. Of

course the best sort of walk is the one on which it doesn’t matter twopence whether you get anywhere at all at

any time or not; and the second best is the one on which the hard facts of routes, times, or trains give you

nothing to worry about.

In consonance with artist Agnes Martin’s quiet conviction that “the best things in life happen to you when

you’re alone,” Grahame writes:

As for adventures, if they are the game you hunt, everyone’s experience will remind him that the best

adventures of his life were pursued and achieved, or came suddenly to him unsought, when he was alone. For

company too often means compromise, discretion, the choice of the sweetly reasonable. It is difficult to be

mad in company; yet but a touch of lunacy in action will open magic doors to rare and unforgettable

experiences.

But all these are only the by-products, the casual gains, of walking alone. The high converse, the high

adventures, will be in the country of the mind.

Complement with poet May Sarton’s sublime ode to solitude, Robert Walser on the art of walking, and

Thoreau on the singular glory of winter walks, then revisit Rebecca Solnit’s indispensable cultural history of

that art.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/10/kenneth-grahame-the-fellow-that-goes-

alone/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=96b0c99109-

EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-96b0c99109-

234059117&mc_cid=96b0c99109&mc_eid=d1c16ac662

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/22/agnes-martin-1997-interview/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/22/agnes-martin-1997-interview/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/12/01/may-sarton-canticle-6-considerations/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/11/the-walk-robert-walser/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/05/thoreau-excusrsions-a-winter-walk/



https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/10/kenneth-grahame-the-fellow-that-goes-alone/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=96b0c99109-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-96b0c99109-234059117&mc_cid=96b0c99109&mc_eid=d1c16ac662






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How Ikea has changed the way we shop

The flat-pack furniture giant has some subtle – but powerful – methods to influence buyer behaviour.

By Cathrine Jansson-Boyd, Anglia Ruskin University

From The Conversation

Ingvar Kamprad, who started Ikea as a teenager, died last week at the age of 91. He started

with stationery and stockings, but went on to build one of the world’s biggest furniture

companies. And the way he did it has revolutionised how retailers operate.

There are two facets of modern life that we have Ikea to thank for: flat-pack furniture and

a shop layout that gets you buying more of its products than you initially intended to. Both

are principles that a number of other companies have put to good use.

Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad died last week aged 91. The Swedish billionaire founded Ikea when he was 17

years old (Credit: Getty Images)

https://theconversation.com/

https://m.ikea.com/ms/en_MY/img/store_images/default_store/Map.jpg

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Ikea first brought out its now signature style of flat-pack furniture in the 1950s. Whether

you love or loathe this concept, it was a stroke of genius and a effective way of making the

masses value the brand. There are the obvious aspects of cost efficiency and the

practicality of shipping. But flat-pack furniture also has an important subconscious

influence on consumers.

The simple act of touching products can increase your overall perceived value of the product

When Ikea made the switch away from selling furniture that was already assembled, it was

most likely unaware of how it would influence its consumers. Yet scientists have since

managed to pinpoint why consumers simply can’t get enough of building their own

furniture. The simple act of touching products (and what better way to ensure touch based

interaction than through assembling a piece of furniture) can increase your overall

perceived value of the product. Couple this with the fact that the more effort a consumer

has to put into building something the more they like it – you have an undoubtedly

winning formula.

Tests have shown that the actual act of putting something together (even though there may

be sweat, swearing and tears involved) so that it becomes a complete object generates a

much more favourable perception of that object than it would purchasing it in a completed

form. The phenomenon is known as the Ikea effect.

This effect is further enhanced by the fact that touch itself is neurologically coupled with

emotion. This means that when we touch something the emotive part of our brain is

activated so that we experience a close connection with the product. Touch creates feelings

of ownership and increases the perceived value we have of items. Thus the happy

assembler of the flat pack will, once finished, feel proud of their achievement and

experiencing feelings of being closely connected to the item.

Round and round in circles

The layout of the Ikea stores has also paved the way for a more creative way of thinking

about how to guide shoppers. If you have ever visited one of its huge warehouse stores,

you may have gone in thinking you were only buying a few items, to find yourself coming

out of the store with a trolley full of things. This is because of its circular design and one-

way system.

https://theconversation.com/how-ikea-used-affordable-and-innovative-design-to-transform-the-homes-of-everyday-consumers-86069

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3057837/the-man-behind-ikeas-world-conquering-flat-pack-design

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10350330.2011.591996http:/www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10350330.2011.591996

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10350330.2011.591996http:/www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10350330.2011.591996

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057740811000829

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/11-091.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23538146




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People nap on a bed at an Ikea store to escape the heat outside in Hangzhou, China, in 2017 (Credit: Getty

Images)

This design means you often can’t see what is coming next and fear you’ll miss something

you need if you don’t continue all the way along the path. There are potential escape

points throughout the store, but that would mean that you will miss several of the sections

and rarely consumers are prepared to take that risk.

Because you know it may be tricky to revisit a particular item later on, you are inclined to

pick it up when you see it and put it in your big trolley. This ensures that the customer

touches the product, which in turn again generates a psychological sense of ownership

over it and decreases the likelihood that it will be put down en route to the tills.

The fact that you can’t see around the next corner also creates a subconscious sense of mystery, which draws

the customer gradually further into the store

The fact that you can’t see around the next corner also creates a subconscious sense of

mystery, which draws the customer gradually further into the store. Environments

perceived to be mysterious usually generate an overall stronger liking and so encourage

shoppers to keep walking through the store. And the more you do this, the more likely you

are to buy something – especially all the smaller items on display such as candles, napkins

and picture frames as they seem cheap compared to the larger more expensive items.

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/suzanne.shu/JCR%2520touch%2520ownership.pdf

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/suzanne.shu/JCR%2520touch%2520ownership.pdf

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0013916587191001

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Ikea’s creative ability to tap into the unconsciousness of consumers is undoubtedly a big

part of its success – and also why it’s been copied by many other companies. Even though

Ingvar Kamprad is no longer with us, Ikea has inherited from him an ethos of thinking

outside of the box to communicate with consumers. It will be interesting to see what

follows next.

Cathrine Jansson-Boyd is a reader in consumer psychology at Anglia Ruskin University.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative

Commons licence.

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180201-how-ikea-has-changed-the-way-weshop

http://www.digitalistmag.com/customer-experience/2016/04/11/why-apply-ikea-affect-to-your-business-04134971

http://theconversation.com/the-ikea-effect-how-ingvar-kamprads-company-changed-the-way-we-shop-90896?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20January%2031%202018%20-%2093597998&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conv

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180201-how-ikea-has-changed-the-way-weshop



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“A Wrinkle in Time” Author Madeleine L’Engle on Self-Consciousness and the Wellspring of

Creativity

“When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform

it into a hand that bestows gifts,” Franz Kafka told a young friend ambivalent about pursuing a creative life.

This prayerful quality of art and the free-flowing generosity it presupposes can only arise from a certain self-

transcendence, from a place untrammeled by ego and untrapped in a static, contracted self. “The creative

self,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful case for the liminal, “[asks] the surrender of ordinary

conceptions of identity and will for a broader kind of intimacy and allegiance.”

That delicate relationship between self-consciousness and creativity is what A Wrinkle in

Time author Madeleine L’Engle (November 29, 1918–September 6, 2007), a woman of abiding wisdom on

the creative life, contemplates in Glimpses of Grace: Daily Thoughts and Reflections (public library) — a

collection of meditations drawn from L’Engle’s beloved books and personal writings, arranged like

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/07/03/kafka-music-art/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/22/jane-hirshfield-nine-gates-writing-threshold-life/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/18/madeleine-lengle-creativity-hope-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi/



http://www.worldcat.org/title/glimpses-of-grace-daily-thoughts-and-reflections/oclc/723440868&referer=brief_results




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Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom and Joanna Macy’s A Year with Rilke, with a short reflection allotted to each

day of the year.

Madeleine L’Engle (Photograph: Sigrid Estrada)

In a series of reflections chosen for the last stretch of June, L’Engle echoes the Buddhist admonition

against clinging to the “ego-shell”and examines how letting go of the illusion of a static, solid self uncorks

creativity:

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing

ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at

work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/15/a-calendar-of-wisdom-tolstoy/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/10/joanna-macy-a-year-with-rilke-death-mortality/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/30/d-t-suzuki-essays-in-zen-buddhism/




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A most perilous malignancy of self-consciousness is pride — something Bruce Lee knew when he observed

that “the core of pride is self-rejection,” and Agnes Martin knew when she cautioned that pride destroys

freedom, joy, and creativity. With a kindred awareness, L’Engle adds:

Art by Olivier Tallec from This Is a Poem That Heals Fish by Jean-Pierre Simeón

The Greeks had a word for ultimate self-consciousness which I find illuminating: hubris: pride: pride in the

sense of putting oneself in the center of the universe. The strange and terrible thing is that this kind of total

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/12/18/bruce-lee-artist-of-life-self-esteem/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/31/agnes-martin-john-gruen-interview/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/31/agnes-martin-john-gruen-interview/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/03/24/this-is-a-poem-that-heals-fish/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/03/24/this-is-a-poem-that-heals-fish/



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self-consciousness invariably ends in self-annihilation. The great tragedians have always understood this,

from Sophocles to Shakespeare. We witness it in history in such people as Tiberius, Eva Perón, Hitler.

Creativity, she argues, is the work of absolute unselfconsciousness, for it requires nonjudgmental observation

and discovery, with an element of what Jeanette Winterson has so memorably termed “active

surrender.” L’Engle writes:

Creativity is an act of discovering. The very small child, the baby, is still unself-conscious enough to take joy

in discovering himself: he discovers his fingers; he gives them his complete, unself-conscious concentration.

Writing at a time when psychologists were formalizing this unselfconscious creative state in the concept

of flow, L’Engle adds:

The kind of unself-consciousness I’m thinking about becomes clearer to me when I turn to a different

discipline: for instance, that of playing a Bach fugue at the piano, precisely because I will never be a good

enough pianist to play a Bach fugue as it should be played. But when I am actually sitting at the piano, all

there is for me is the music. I am wholly in it, unless I fumble so badly that I perforce become self-conscious.

Mostly, no matter how inadequate my playing, the music is all that matters: I am outside time, outside self, in

play, in joy. When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love.

Because this sense of being “outside self” is so central to creative flow, at the heart of this generative

unselfconsciousness is the discipline of holding the self loosely, as the ever-changing constellation of values,

beliefs, and habits that it is — for, as the young Borges observed in his fantastic first essay, “there is no whole

self.” Echoing philosopher Jacob Needleman’s insight into the path to self-liberation, L’Engle points to what

is problematic about simply giving the growing person a ready-made self-image:

I haven’t defined a self, nor do I want to. A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed

to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming. Being does mean becoming, but we run so fast

that it is only when we seem to stop — as sitting on the rock at the brook — that we are aware of our

own isness, of being. But certainly that is not static; for this awareness of being is always a way of moving

from the selfish self — the self-image — and towards the real.

Who am I, then? Who are you?

The young Tolstoy considered this very question “the entire essence of life.” The young Emily Dickinson

answered it splendidly in a perfect line of verse: “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

Complement Glimpses of Grace with L’Engle on how to get unstuckand her forgotten Library of Congress

lecture on creativity, then revisit Walt Whitman on the paradox of the self and mathematician-turned-

physician Israel Rosenfield’s pioneering inquiry into how our sense of self arises.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/29/madeleine-lengle-glimpses-of-grace-self-

consciousness/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=593f790a07-

EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-593f790a07-

234059117&mc_cid=593f790a07&mc_eid=d1c16ac662

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/27/jeanette-winterson-art-objects/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/27/jeanette-winterson-art-objects/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/05/peter-turchi-a-muse-a-maze-book-flow/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/03/the-nothingness-of-personality-borges/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/10/12/i-am-not-i-jacob-needleman/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/28/leo-tolstoy-irina-paperno-self/



https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/10/dare-to-be-creative-madeleine-l-engle/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/10/dare-to-be-creative-madeleine-l-engle/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/24/walt-whitman-democratic-vistas-self/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/17/the-strange-familiar-and-forgotten-israel-rosenfield/



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Alberto Bustos’ Paperlike Ceramics Imitate Sprouting Blades of Grass

JUNE 9, 2015

KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

Inspired by forms of vegetation, Spanish artist Alberto Bustos' pieces appear like blades of grass sprouting

from the earth, stretching and curling upwards towards an imagined sun. At first glance the pieces look

delicate enough to be paper, layered works that exude a dual sharp and fragile quality. However, after a closer

inspection one can see that the works are indeed porcelain, adding another dimension to their soft initial

appearance.

Bustos lives and work in Spain and his work will be included in Mas De Les Gralles with 40 other

international artists on June 13th just outside of Barcelona. Hundreds more images of his work can be found

on his Facebook page here. (via Ron Beck Designs)

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/06/alberto-bustoss-paperlike-ceramics-imitate-sprouting-blades-of-grass/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/about/#kate

http://www.bustosescultura.es/

http://www.masdelesgralles.com/eventos/gralles-experience

https://www.facebook.com/Alberto.Bustos.Ceramica/photos

http://ronbeckdesigns.tumblr.com/post/121071023719/alberto-bustos



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How your social media betrays your mood

Clues to the state of your mental health may be hiding in plain sight – in the tweets you send and the

Facebook updates you post.

By Jules Montague

There it is in your Facebook timeline or Instagram gallery – a digital footprint of your

mental health.

#LikeMinded

A special series about social media and well-being

This month, BBC Future is exploring social media’s impact on mental health and well-being – and seeking

solutions for a happier, healthier experience on these platforms. Stay tuned for more stories, coming soon…

Share your tips for a happy life on social media with the hashtag #LikeMinded on Facebook, Twitter and

Instagram.

It’s not hidden in the obvious parts: the emojis, hashtags and inspirational quotes. Instead,

it lurks in subtler signs that, unbeknownst to you, may provide a diagnosis as accurate as a

doctor’s blood pressure cuff or heart rate monitor.

For those who see social media mainly as a place to share the latest cat video or travel

snap, this may come as a surprise. It also means the platform has important – and

potentially life-saving – potential. In the US alone, there is one death by suicide every 13

minutes. Despite this, our ability to predict suicidal thoughts and behaviour has not

materially improved across 50 years of research. Forecasting an episode of psychosis or

emerging depression can be equally challenging.

But data mining and machine learning are transforming this landscape by extracting

signals from dizzying amounts of granular data on social media. These methods already

have tracked and predicted flu outbreaks. Now, it’s the turn of mental health.

Studies have found that if you have depression, your Instagram feed is more likely to

feature bluer, greyer, and darker photos with fewer faces. They’ll probably receive fewer

likes (but more comments). Chances are you’ll prefer the Inkwell filter which converts

colour images to black and white, rather than the Valencia one which lightens them.

http://www.bbc.com/future/columns/likeminded



https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255567678_Modeling_Spread_of_Disease_from_Social_Interactions

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255567718_Predicting_Disease_Transmission_from_Geo-Tagged_Micro-Blog_Data

https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-017-0110-z

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Even then, these patterns are hardly robust enough in isolation to diagnose or predict

depression. Still, they could be crucial in constructing models that can. This is where

machine learning comes in.

US President Donald Trump's tweets score highly for upbeat language (Credit: Alamy)

Researchers from Harvard University and the University of Vermont used these

techniques in their recent analysis of almost 44,000 Instagram posts. Their resulting

models correctly identified 70% of all users with depression. compared to a rate of 42%

from general practitioners. They also had fewer false positives (although this figure drew

from a separate population, so may be an unfair comparison). Depressive signals were

evident in users’ feeds even before a formal diagnosis from psychiatrists – making

Instagram an early warning system of sorts.

Meanwhile, psychiatrists have long linked language and mental health, listening for the

disjointed and tangential speech of schizophrenia or the increased use of first-

person singular pronouns of depression. For an updated take, type your Twitter handle

into AnalyzeWords. It’s a free text analysis tool which focuses on junk words (pronouns,

articles, prepositions) to assess emotional and thinking styles. From my 1017 most recent

words on Twitter, I’m apparently average for being angry and worried but below average

on being upbeat – I have been pretty pessimistic about the state of the world recently.

Enter @realdonaldtrump into AnalzyeWords and you’ll see he scores highly on having an

upbeat emotional style, and is less likely than average to be worried, angry, and depressed.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.224.4752&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.224.4752&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://analyzewords.com/

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The behaviour we exhibit online can be used to inform diagnostic and screening tools – Chris Danforth,

University of Vermont

But far beyond this quick and sometimes amusing scan of emotional and social styles

(AnalyzeWords tells you if you’re more “Spacy/ValleyGirl” than average), researchers are

exploring profound questions about mental health.

Telling signals of depression include an increase in negative words (“no”, “never”,

“prison”, “murder”) and a decrease in positive ones (“happy”, “beach”, and “photo”), but

these are hardly definitive. Taking it a step further, researchers at Harvard University,

Stanford University and the University of Vermont extracted a wider range of features

(mood, language and context) from almost 280,000 tweets. The resulting computational

model scored highly on identifying users with depression; it also was correct in about nine

of every 10 PTSD predictions.

The ratio of positive to negative words was a key predictor within the model, says Chris

Danforth, one of the researchers and Flint professor of mathematical, natural and technical

sciences at the University of Vermont. Other strong predictors included increased tweet

word count.

Danforth emphasises that only a small, specific group of people were assessed so he sees

this study as proof-of-concept. But he’s optimistic. “These and other similar results

suggest that the behaviour we exhibit online can be used to inform diagnostic and

http://www.uvm.edu/~cdanfort/research/2017-reece-scirep.pdf

http://www.uvm.edu/~cdanfort/main/home.html

http://www.uvm.edu/~cdanfort/main/home.html

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screening tools," he says. Incorporate physical information (from FitBits and sleep apps,

for example) and those tools could yield even greater power.

There are still linguistic challenges, though. Take these tweets:

“My schizophrenia article got approved for my #Psychopharmacology presentation! #yass

#cantstopwontstop”

“Watching True Life: I Have Schizophrenia Yessss... My kinda topic, future Clinical

Psychologist right here!”

This is “noisy data” – a computerised model might incorrectly recognise it as belonging to

users with schizophrenia. In a 2017 US study, mental health specialists first eliminated this

sort of noise from 671 Twitter users. Machine learning then predicted a schizophrenia

diagnosis with a mean accuracy of 88%, a level of success only made possible by human-

machine collaboration.

What to do with all this information? Empowerment would be a good start. A Microsoft

Research team has managed to forecast which new mothers might develop extreme

changes in behaviour and mood, all based on pre-natal and early post-natal Twitter usage.

Although perinatal depression and anxiety are underdiagnosed, the researchers emphasise

they’re not aiming to replace traditional diagnostic and prediction methods. But imagine,

they say, if expectant mothers could opt to run this sort of predictive model on their

smartphones. This way they could receive a “PPD risk score” via an app, with information

about resources or more intensive and immediate help offered if needed.

Users are frequently unaware their data has been mined

Reservations persist more broadly in this field, though, especially around privacy. What if

digital traces of your mental health become visible to all? You might be targeted by

pharmaceutical companies or face discrimination from employers and insurers. In

addition, some of these types of projects aren’t subject to the rigorous ethical oversight of

clinical trials. Users are frequently unaware their data has been mined. As privacy and

internet ethics scholar Michael Zimmer once explained, “just because personal

information is made available in some fashion on a social network, does not mean it is fair

game for capture and release to all”.

https://www.jmir.org/2017/8/e289/

http://www.munmund.net/pubs/chi_13.pdf

http://www.munmund.net/pubs/chi_13.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/23/perinatal-anxiety-postnatal-depression

http://www.michaelzimmer.org/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10676-010-9227-5



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AnalyzeWords looks at the words you use on Twitter to assess your mental state (Credit: AnalyzeWords)

Circumspection about this brave new world is also required. In 2013, Google Flu

Trends drastically overestimated peak flu levels. A group of Harvard researchers

blamed Big Data Hubris: “the often implicit assumption that big data are a substitute for,

rather than a supplement to, traditional data collection and analysis.”

Data mining and machine learning offer the potential for earlier identification of mental

health conditions. Currently, the time from onset of depression to contact with a treatment

provider is six to eight years; for anxiety, it’s nine to 23 years. In turn, hopefully we’ll see

better outcomes. Two billion users engage with social media regularly – these are signals

with scalability. As Mark Zuckerberg wrote recently while outlining Facebook’s AI plans,

“there have been terribly tragic events – like suicides, some live streamed – that perhaps

could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them

sooner.”

Mental health exists between clinic appointments. It ebbs and flows in real time. It lives in

posts and pictures and tweets. Perhaps prediction, diagnosis and healing should live there,

too.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180201-how-your-social-media-betrays-your-mood

http://www.nature.com/news/when-google-got-flu-wrong-1.12413

https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/0314policyforumff.pdf

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/208684

https://wearesocial.com/special-reports/digital-in-2017-global-overview

https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634

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Hubble observes exoplanet atmosphere in more detail than ever before

Source:

ESA/Hubble Information Centre

Summary:

An international team of scientists has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study the

atmosphere of the hot exoplanet WASP-39b. By combining this new data with older data they

created the most complete study yet of an exoplanet atmosphere. The atmospheric composition of

WASP-39b hints that the formation processes of exoplanets can be very different from those of our

own Solar System giants.

Share:

FULL STORY

A team of British and American astronomers used data from several telescopes on the ground and in space --

among them the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope -- to study the atmosphere of the hot, bloated, Saturn-



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mass exoplanet WASP-39b, about 700 light-years from Earth. The analysis of the spectrum showed a large

amount of water in the exoplanet's atmosphere -- three times more than in Saturn's atmosphere.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

An international team of scientists has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study the atmosphere

of the hot exoplanet WASP-39b. By combining this new data with older data they created the most complete

study yet of an exoplanet atmosphere. The atmospheric composition of WASP-39b hints that the formation

processes of exoplanets can be very different from those of our own Solar System giants.

Investigating exoplanet atmospheres can provide new insight into how and where planets form around a star.

"We need to look outward to help us understand our own Solar System," explains lead investigator Hannah

Wakeford from the University of Exeter in the UK and the Space Telescope Science Institute in the USA.

Therefore the British-American team combined the capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

with those of other ground- and space-based telescopes for a detailed study of the exoplanet WASP-39b. They

have produced the most complete spectrum of an exoplanet's atmosphere possible with present-day

technology [1].

WASP-39b is orbiting a Sun-like star, about 700 light-years from Earth. The exoplanet is classified as a "Hot-

Saturn," reflecting both its mass being similar to the planet Saturn in our own Solar System and its proximity

to its parent star. This study found that the two planets, despite having a similar mass, are profoundly different

in many ways. Not only is WASP-39b not known to have a ring system, it also has a puffy atmosphere that is

free of high-altitude clouds. This characteristic allowed Hubble to peer deep into its atmosphere.

By dissecting starlight filtering through the planet's atmosphere [2] the team found clear evidence for

atmospheric water vapour. In fact, WASP-39b has three times as much water as Saturn does. Although the

researchers had predicted they would see water vapour, they were surprised by the amount that they found.

This surprise, combined with the water abundance allowed to infer the presence of large amount of heavier

elements in the atmosphere. This in turn suggests that the planet was bombarded by a lot of icy material

which gathered in its atmosphere. This kind of bombardment would only be possible if WASP-39b formed

much further away from its host star than it is right now.

"WASP-39b shows exoplanets are full of surprises and can have very different compositions than those of our

Solar System," says co-author David Sing from the University of Exeter, UK.

The analysis of the atmospheric composition and the current position of the planet indicate that WASP-39b

most likely underwent an interesting inward migration, making an epic journey across its planetary system.

"Exoplanets are showing us that planet formation is more complicated and more confusing than we thought it

was. And that's fantastic!," adds Wakeford.

Having made its incredible inward journey WASP-39b is now eight times closer to its parent star, WASP-39,

than Mercury is to the Sun and it takes only four days to complete an orbit. The planet is also tidally locked,

meaning it always shows the same side to its star. Wakeford and her team measured the temperature of

WASP-39b to be a scorching 750 degrees Celsius. Although only one side of the planet faces its parent star,

powerful winds transport heat from the bright side around the planet, keeping the dark side almost as hot.



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"Hopefully this diversity we see in exoplanets will help us figure out all the different ways a planet can form

and evolve," explains David Sing.

Looking ahead, the team wants to use the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope -- scheduled to

launch in 2019 -- to capture an even more complete spectrum of the atmosphere of WASP-39b. James Webb

will be able to collect data about the planet's atmospheric carbon, which absorbs light of longer wavelengths

than Hubble can see [3]. Wakeford concludes: "By calculating the amount of carbon and oxygen in the

atmosphere, we can learn even more about where and how this planet formed."

Notes

[1] Data used to produce the full spectrum was also collected by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and ESO's

Very Large Telescope. In addition older data from Hubble were used.

[2] When starlight passes through the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it interacts with the atoms and molecules in

it. This leaves a weak fingerprint of the atmosphere in the spectrum of the star. Certain peaks and troughs in

the resulting spectrum correspond to specific atoms and molecules, allowing scientists to see exactly what

gases make up the atmosphere.

[3] Given the large amount of heavy elements in WASP-39b's atmosphere, Wakeford and her team predict

that carbon dioxide will be the dominant form of carbon. This could be measured at a wavelength of 4.5

micrometres with James Webb's NIRSpec instrument. Such follow-up investigations would allow further

constraints to be placed on the ratio of carbon to oxygen, and on the metallicity of WASP-39b's atmosphere.

More information

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

The international team of astronomers in this study consists of H.R. Wakeford (University of Exeter, UK;

Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), D.K. Sing (University of Exeter, UK), D. Deming (University of

Maryland, USA), N.K. Lewis (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), J. Goyal (University of Exeter, UK),

T.J. Wilson (University of Exeter, UK), J. Barstow (University College London, UK), T. Kataria (NASA Jet

Propulsion Laboratory, USA), B. Drummond (University of Exeter, UK), T.M. Evans (University of Exeter,

UK), A.L. Carter (University of Exeter, UK), N. Nikolov (University of Exeter, UK), H.A. Knutson

(California Institute of Technology, USA), G.E. Ballester (University of Arizona, USA), A.M. Mandell

(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA)

Story Source:

Materials provided by ESA/Hubble Information Centre. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1804/

http://www.spacetelescope.org/



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Mmmm.... robot full of pizza... Ford

Self-Driving Pizza Just Hit Miami

1. LAURA BLISS

The automaker Ford is bringing autonomous deliveries from Domino’s and Postmates (plus Lyft rides) to

Miami-Dade County.

If you didn’t get a chance to experience the pizza delivery of the supposed future in Ann Arbor, Michigan last

summer, fret not: Self-driving Domino’s Pizza vehicles are now roving the streets of Miami.

It’s part of a new research partnership between Miami-Dade County and the automaker Ford. Over the

coming months, the company will deploy custom-built autonomous cars across Miami and Miami Beach

through a variety of partnerships with other businesses. Apart from the world’s largest pizza chain, they’ll

include the on-demand delivery company Postmates, the ride-hailing giant Lyft, and others yet to be

announced.

Consumers will soon be able to opt to order their pies, groceries, and on-demand rides to be conveyed via

robot (with backup drivers behind the wheel in case of emergency). The county, meanwhile, hopes that the

experiment can be a learning opportunity and a signal to other self-driving technology leaders.

https://www.citylab.com/authors/laura-bliss/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-dominos-biggest-pizza-chain-in-the-world-20180223-story.html



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“We want to learn from Ford what it is we need to do to get ready for these vehicles, so that when AVs

become a reality, fully, we’ll be one of the first communities to get them,” said Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos A.

Giménez. “We want to let the world know that Miami is ready to be a testbed.”

According to the latest Pew polls, Americans are “more worried than enthusiastic” about the development of

driverless vehicles. Do people really want to share the roads with job-stealing, crash-preventing robots?

Maybe not. But for carmakers, it’s more a question of familiarizing the populace with a disruptive new

technology. To accomplish this, partnerships with familiar brands could be a savvy move.

“We’re going to see what an AV would do when it encounters double-parked cars.”

The Domino’s “research vehicles,” a few of which are already on the road in Miami, are specially modified

Ford Fusions with lidar hats and built-in pizza warming compartments. Stuffed-crust lovers have to walk out

of their homes and up to the curb to retrieve their pies from the cars; a robot voice emanating from the vehicle

instructs them how to unlock the special pie window. (Some of you may ask: Can’t the human emergency

driver perform this chore, or even bring the pizza to the door? But you are clearly missing the whole point of

this automation exercise.)

The autonomous Postmates deliveries and Lyft rides haven’t started yet, but they will work similarly,

according to Sherif Marakby, Ford’s vice president of autonomous vehicles and electrification. Key for Ford,

Marakby said, will be to see how consumers in relatively dense, urban Miami-Dade will react to these new

behavioral norms compared to more suburban Ann Arbor, where the cars were tested in summer 2017.

“In Ann Arbor, some people might be coming out in their PJs. But that’s not the busy, bustling downtown of a

big city—it might be different in Miami,” he said. The service and its user interface might have to be tweaked

accordingly.

Likewise, the performance of the vehicles themselves—which are powered largely by Argo AI, a major Ford

investee that builds artificial intelligence for self-driving vehicles—will be put to the test in a larger city with

more pedestrians, cyclists, and construction zones. “Curbside management is a big challenge when you’re

picking up and dropping off goods, even in a normal, non-AV situation,” Marakby said. “We’re going to see

what an AV would do when it encounters double-parked cars where it needs to go.”

More broadly, this is also a chance for Ford to test out a variety of business models for self-driving

technology. The automaker has stated that it plans to deploy large fleets of robotic cars built for ride-hailing

purposes by 2021. But such vehicles hold promise for freight and package delivery, too. Through its

partnerships with other cities, such as San Francisco and New York, Ford is testing other new mobility

modes, including bikesharing and microtransit shuttles.

What do cities get out of it? Giménez, for his part, is a believer that self-driving cars could reduce

transportation expenses and cut back on personal vehicle ownership in Miami-Dade. In the city of

Miami, about 80 percent of households own cars. He also hopes that the city can eventually make use of the

maps and that Ford and Argo AI will create to underpin and guide the self-driving vehicles.

Recommended

https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/08/will-dominos-pizza-deliver-the-driverless-dream/538473/




http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/10/04/americans-attitudes-toward-driverless-vehicles/




https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/12/wtf-is-lidar/


https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/08/san-francisco-gobike-launch/532083/

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/11/dont-believe-the-microtransit-hype/545033/

http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-vehicles-by-city-map.html






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America Will Trust Driverless Cars When They Deliver Pizza

1. ANDREW SMALL

AUG 30, 2017

People Aren't Ready for Self-Driving Cars

2. JACK BARKENBUS

JAN 4, 2018

Self-Driving Cars Should Be Regulated Like Drugs

3. LINDA POON

JAN 29, 2017

Of course, few cities have had meaningful success in gaining access to the wealth of trip data generated by

new private mobility services, even though many believe much of this information could be invaluable for

planning purposes—and in the case of autonomous cars, to prevent the dreaded “zero occupancy” gridlock of

the future, in which empty robo-cars clog the roads. Companies often argue that privacy and competitive

concerns prevent them opening up their stores. This disagreement has led to all manner of ill will between

tech companies and the cities they test in; Pittsburgh soured on Uber after the ride-hailing behemoth fell short

of the city’s expectations of it as a data-sharing civic partner.

Giménez and Marakby both said that they have not had conversations about data sharing in relation to the

self-driving pilots. “We have no agreement with any of the companies,” Giménez said. “They’re hoarding it

very well.”

John Kwant, the vice president of Ford’s City Solutions group, expressed enthusiasm for recent efforts to

create third-party repositories of anonymized and aggregated trip data to help cities get the information they

need. “Cities want to achieve the ability to orchestrate things,” Kwant said. “Companies are going to

eventually need to offer that up, either by political pressure or mandate.”

Whether that’ll be the case in Miami remains to be seen. Meanwhile, there’s pizza.

About the Author

Laura Bliss

@MSLAURABLISS

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/02/self-driving-pizza-just-hit-miami/554138/


https://www.citylab.com/authors/andrew-small/

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/autonomous-vehicles-consumer-backlash/549650/

https://www.citylab.com/authors/jack-barkenbus/

https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/01/self-driving-cars-should-be-regulated-like-drugs/514523/

https://www.citylab.com/authors/linda-poon/

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/02/a-powerful-map-promises-to-help-cities-keep-streets-free/553739/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/21/technology/pittsburgh-ubers-driverless-car-experiment.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=6BADDBD32471B13971C5E7D0DBEE8A5E&gwt=pay

https://www.citylab.com/authors/laura-bliss/

https://twitter.com/mslaurabliss



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A grisly photo of a Saigon execution 50 years ago shocked the world and helped end the war

By Michael E. Ruane February 1 Email the author

In this Feb. 1, 1968, photo, South Vietnamese Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of National Police, fires

his pistol at Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem. (Eddie Adams/AP)

Before he pulls the trigger, the South Vietnamese general waves his soldiers out of the way so they don’t get

hurt.

He shoos them with the pistol he holds in his right hand, and flicks out his left hand as he approaches the

prisoner standing before him.

His men guess what’s coming, and scatter. The general raises the shiny snub-nose .38, points it at the

prisoner’s right temple and pulls the trigger.

At that instant on the sunny Thursday of Feb. 1, 1968, in what was then called Saigon, Associated Press

photographer Eddie Adams’s camera shutter clicked once, and one of the most powerful pictures of the

Vietnam War, or any war, was taken.

In 1/500th of a second, Adams caught the moment the bullet crashed through the Viet Cong prisoner’s skull at

about 600 mph, distorting his face, tousling his hair and shoving his head off center.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/michael-e-ruane/

mailto:[email protected]?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20%27A%20grisly%20photo%20of%20a%20Saigon%20execution%2050%20years%20ago%20shocked%20the%20world%20and%20helped%20end%20the%20war%27



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A photographer took a harrowing image of the War. He didn’t live to see it published.

Some people say you can see the bullet coming out the other side. Adams thought it was still inside. It’s hard

to tell.

In the picture, Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the head of South Vietnam’s National Police, stares coldly at

his victim. Loan, who had a reputation as a government enforcer, is a thin man with a receding hairline who

seems to be wearing a bulky flak vest.

His shirt sleeves are rolled up, showing the sinews in his forearm. The gun looks like it has recoiled slightly

upward. Off to the left in the frame, another soldier winces.

The prisoner, whose hands are bound behind him, already has a fat lip, likely acquired when he was captured

after leading a brutal commando raid. He wears dark shorts, a plaid shirt and no shoes.

Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams near Danang in South Vietnam, June 1965. (AP)

On film footage of the incident, the shooting scene unfolds in about 10 seconds. (Adams can be seen for an

instant in an earlier part of the footage.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/02/a-young-photographer-took-this-harrowing-image-of-the-vietnam-war-he-didnt-live-to-see-it-published/?utm_term=.22bccf2a44cb



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[There’s video footage of one of the most famous photos of the Vietnam War. And it changes everything.]

The prisoner, Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem, tumbles to the pavement, blood spouting from his head.

Loan calmly holsters his pistol, saying to Adams, “They killed many of my men and many of your people,”

and walks away.

Adams waits until the blood stops gushing. “It was gross,” he would say later. He takes a few more pictures of

the body then returns to the Associated Press office to drop off his film.

No big deal.

“I thought absolutely nothing of it,” he said in an interview that later became part of a Newseum podcast. “I

said, ‘I think I got some guy shooting somebody.’ And, uh, I went to lunch.”

Just another day on the bloody streets of Saigon in the midst of the enemy’s famous Tet offensive —

sweeping guerrilla attacks across South Vietnam — during the endless Vietnam War.

“So what?” Adams, a former U.S. Marine from a small town north of Pittsburgh, said later. “It was a war. I’m

serious. That’s how I felt. I had seen so many people die at that point in my life.”

Adams did not realize he had taken one of history’s great pictures. He did not know it was a shot that would

summarize in a millisecond the savage, seemingly mindless, violence of the war.

He had no idea that his photograph, snapped 50 years ago Thursday, would help change history, and echo

throughout his life and that of his surviving subject. “He wasn’t allowed to forget that photograph,” Loan’s

son, August, said in a 2008 documentary. “It stuck with him everywhere he went.”

Fifty years after Vietnam’s bloodiest battles, the ‘lucky ones’ gather

The picture ran on the front pages of many U.S. newspapers, and the footage ran on TV. But it was the

photograph, and its frozen portrait of agony, that fueled the antiwar movement and helped end U.S.

involvement.

“It just kind of summed up the whole war,” former CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer said in the short film

“Eddie Adams: Saigon ’68” by Douglas Sloan.

“The horrificness of it stops you,” the late Life Magazine photographer Bill Eppridge said in the 2012

documentary. “I think his picture was the moment that changed the war.”

David Hume Kennerly, a fellow Vietnam War photographer who became chief White House photographer

and was a friend of Adams’s, compared the picture with Joe Rosenthal’s famous shot of U.S. Marines raising

the flag on Iwo Jima in World War II.

“Where Joe Rosenthal’s picture represented the heroism … and courage in war and patriotism … Eddie’s

picture was exactly the opposite,” Kennerly said in a telephone interview. “Eddie’s picture was the real

underbelly of violence and summary execution.… It’s what war is really like.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/09/25/the-american-war-theres-video-footage-of-one-of-the-most-famous-photos-of-the-vietnam-war-and-it-changes-everything/?utm_term=.c606fb731b51

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2017/04/29/fifty-years-after-vietnams-bloodiest-battles-the-lucky-ones-are-gathering-for-what-could-be-a-final-reunion/?utm_term=.ed41efa67a51



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“I don’t know that it ended the Vietnam War, but it sure as hell didn’t help the cause for the government,” he

said. “One thing I know for sure, anybody who’s ever seen that photo has never forgotten it.”

In 1969, Adams was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the shot.

But he felt terrible about the photo, which he didn’t think was that good, and bitter about the prize, according

to interviews he gave over the years.

He believed he had taken far more worthy pictures, and that the execution photo was viewed out of context by

most people: The slain Viet Cong prisoner was captured after he reportedly killed a South Vietnamese officer,

his wife and six children.

Vietnamese soldiers pose in victory in the ornate throne room of the Imperial Palace in the Citadel of Hue

City, Feb. 26, 1968. (Eddie Adams/AP)

Adams believed he had destroyed Loan’s life.

“Two people died in that photograph,” Adams wrote in Time magazine years later. “The recipient of the

bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my

camera.”



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[A Vietnam War photographer captured the bloody Tet offensive. Fifty years later, he bears witness again.]

“General Loan was … a real warrior,” Adams wrote in a Time eulogy for Loan. “I’m not saying what he did

was right, but you have to put yourself in his position…. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn’t taken

the picture, someone else would have, but I’ve felt bad for him and his family for a long time.”

U.S. tanks line up in Saigon, South Vietnam, during the Tet Offensive, Feb. 8-26, 1968. (Eddie Adams/AP)

Loan, who later lost a leg in combat, was treated for the injury at Washington’s old Walter Reed Army

Hospital in 1969, which outraged some people. Then-Sen. Stephen M. Young (D-Ohio) called Loan a “brutal

murderer” and said his treatment in the United States was “a disgraceful end to a … disgraceful episode.”

Loan was university-educated and had become a jet pilot before he was named national police chief. He was

married and had five children. After the war, he made his way with his family to the United States and ran a

restaurant in Northern Virginia. But the photograph stalked him. In the restaurant men’s room, someone

scrawled on the wall: “We know who you are, you f—”

In 1976, he told a Washington Post reporter he was trying “to think about the present and the future of my

children. I have no time to think back or regrets.”

In 1978, the government moved to deport him. “Gen. Loan cold-bloodedly shot and killed another human

being,” Rep Elizabeth Holtzman (D-N.Y.) wrote at the time. “By any standard what he did was immoral.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/01/28/a-vietnam-war-photographer-captured-the-bloody-tet-offensive-fifty-years-later-he-bears-witness-again/?utm_term=.1d30371a3f5d



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But Loan had local support and was never deported. Twenty years later, on July 14, 1998, he died at home in

Burke, Va., at the age of 67.

Adams, a rough-edged, cantankerous figure who had great fame after the war, also was haunted by the photo,

among other things.

In the documentary, he said that when he died he wanted to be buried in his Marine Corps “dress blues”

uniform. He wanted a 35mm camera with a wide-angle lens, and he wanted some slow-speed color film.

“Because where I go there’s going to be a lot of light,” he said. “And it [won’t be] from up above, either. Fire,

you can photograph really well with a slow-speed film.”

Adams died of Lou Gehrig’s disease on Sept. 18, 2004, in New York City. He was 71. He was laid to rest

beside his father just outside his home town of New Kensington, Pa. He didn’t fit into his old uniform, his

widow, Alyssa, said. But she did bury him with a camera.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/01/a-grisly-photo-of-a-saigon-execution-50-

years-ago-shocked-the-world-and-helped-end-the-

war/?utm_term=.35cfa4dc2c79&wpisrc=nl_insight&wpmm=1

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/01/a-grisly-photo-of-a-saigon-execution-50-years-ago-shocked-the-world-and-helped-end-the-war/?utm_term=.35cfa4dc2c79&wpisrc=nl_insight&wpmm=1





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Soaring Murals of Plants on Urban Walls by Mona Caron

LAURA STAUGAITIS




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Muralist Mona Caron (previously) has continued her worldwide Weeds series, with colorful renderings of

humble plants growing ever taller on buildings from Portland and São Paulo to Spain and Taiwan. The San

Francisco-based artist often partners with local and international social and environmental movements for

climate justice, labor rights, and water rights, and selects plants, both native and invasive, that she finds in the

cities where she paints. Caron also integrates tiny details into the main visual elements of her murals:

Several of these murals contain intricate miniature details, invisible from afar. These typically narrate the

local history, chronicle the social life of the mural’s immediate surroundings, and visualize future possibility,

and are created in a process that incorporates ideas emerging through spontaneous conversations with the

artwork’s hosting communities while painting.

Caron regularly shares process videos and photos of completed works on Instagram, and she delves into the

narratives behind several of her murals on her website.

https://www.instagram.com/mona.caron/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/?s=caron

https://www.instagram.com/mona.caron/

https://monacaron.com/narrative-murals#slideshow-0



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Collaboration with Liqan



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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/02/murals-of-plants-mona-caron/



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Feathered, Furred or Coloured

Francis Gooding

Palaeoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past by Zoë Lescaze

Taschen, 289 pp, £75.00, August 2017, ISBN 978 3 8365 5511 1

What colour was a Tyrannosaurus rex? How did an Archaeopteryx court a mate? And how do you paint the

visual likeness of something no human eye will ever see? Far from bedevilling the artists who wanted to

depict prehistoric creatures and their lost worlds, Zoë Lescaze’s book shows that such conundrums have in

fact been invitations to glorious freedom. For nearly two hundred years the resulting genre – now known as

palaeoart – has been a playground wherein tyrannosaurids, plesiosaurs and their fellows have not only

illustrated scientific knowledge, but acted as scaled and feathered proxies for the anxieties of contemporary

life. Lescaze argues that they should be seen as ‘roads to understanding our relationship to the past and our

place within the present’. Despite these garish images of dinosaur combat and primeval cataclysm having held

at best the status of kitsch, it is impossible to deny the extraordinary success of the genre. None of us has ever

seen one, but who doesn’t know what a dinosaur looks like?

Tyrannosaurus and edmontosaurus by Ely Kish (1976)

Palaeoart is inseparable from palaeontology, the scientific discipline it illuminates, and as interpretations of

dinosaur anatomy and behaviour have changed, artists have generally tried to keep up with them. Debate still

https://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Lescaze,+Zo%C3%AB



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centres on how true to life it is possible to make representations of extinct creatures – how much soft tissue

should they have? What colouration is plausible, given what we know about extant animal patterning?

Historical palaeoartists typically incorporated the best knowledge of the time, so such questions can’t be

completely ignored when looking at their work. But Lescaze deftly sidesteps this by making Palaeoart a

history of images and artists, not a history of the accuracy of their art. Almost every image in the book

became scientifically obsolete soon after it was created. ‘It is the imaginative nature of these works that

makes them wonderful,’ Lescaze writes. ‘Rather than dismissing them as outdated, we should revel in their

departures from reason.’

These images channel the spirit of their times and the character of their authors with a transparency their

scientific pretension only underlines. Adorno wrote that the public’s fascination with dinosaurs was a

‘collective projection of the monstrous total state’ (‘people prepare themselves for its terrors by familiarising

themselves with gigantic images’); keeping an eye on the wider historical context, Lescaze picks up on

similar historical and psychological investments. Of the most widely repeated motif in 19th-century palaeoart

– a plesiosaur and an ichthyosaur locked in deadly combat on the high seas – she observes that ‘the study of

prehistoric marine reptiles began in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which were

characterised by spectacular marine battles.’ In more surrealist mode, a painting by the Czech artist Zdeněk

Burian showing a confrontation between a plated and spiked stegosaurian and a surprised-looking

Antrodemus is given a psychological reading: ‘Violent arguments between Burian’s parents marred his

childhood,’ Lescaze writes, transforming the prehistoric antagonists into monstrous grown-ups.

Images of violent combat between different prehistoric species are a constant in palaeoart. As the science of

long-vanished creatures developed from unearthed bones, artists immediately forced these newly discovered

beasts mercilessly to fight or eat each other, as if to make them extinct all over again. The very first notable

attempt to depict prehistoric life, Henry Thomas De la Beche’s Duria Antiquior(c.1830), prominently features

the ichthyosaur v. plesiosaur tableau that would become so common. In De la Beche’s watercolour, the

dolphin-like former crushes the snake-like neck of the latter between vicious teeth. Lescaze describes the

image as a ‘paean to primordial savagery’: ‘of the 34 animals swarming the revolutionary little painting,

roughly half are feasting on or falling prey to one another in a riot of reptilian appetites.’

De la Beche, who lived in Dorset, was a respected geologist and clergyman. He was also a lifelong friend of

the fossil hunter Mary Anning, whose excavations on the coast at Lyme Regis were instrumental in the

development of palaeontology. Anning’s self-taught expertise, her subtle interpretation of fossils, and her

many notable discoveries (including the ichthyosaur) made her one of the first authorities in the nascent

discipline. But as a woman she couldn’t join the Geological Society of London and De la Beche, who was a

member, had to present her findings in her stead. Credit for her discoveries was taken by others who

published them as their own, and so while her work advanced the field, she was sidelined and became

impoverished. De la Beche painted Duria Antiquior in the hope of helping his friend out of her dire financial

straits, and based the denizens of his ancient sea largely on the creatures whose remains she had uncovered in

the fossil-rich limestone and shale of Lyme Regis. When the painting became a print, the image sold widely,

earning Anning a significant amount of money.

Although De la Beche’s well-informed tableau of conflict and predation became the genre’s template, the

many 19th-century artists who adopted primordial subject matter were not all equally concerned with

accuracy. Prehistory was frequently represented in what Lescaze calls ‘violent hellscapes’, and many of these

early images recall not only the dragons and monsters of folklore and fantasy, but visions of hell itself, filled

with writhing beasts that rend at one another as fires destroy the earth. In John Martin’s The Country of The

Iguanodon (1837), a group of dragon-like reptiles slither and bite; in A. Demarly’s apocalyptic Eruptions of

Poisonous Hot Springs in the Triassic Period (1883) a geyser of toxic gas spurts from a volcanic vent, while

dead dinosaurs lie piled up in front of us.



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Such images reveal a profound unease about the very idea of extinct, prehistoric creatures. In a Christian

society, the precise place these newly discovered animals held in God’s creation was a source of debate and

consternation. Were they antediluvian beings, who had been destroyed in the Flood? Did that mean they’d

been wicked – undeserving of the salvation afforded other animals? Did they date from a time earlier still, a

‘pre-Adamic’ moment of creation? Or had they never lived at all, their bones having been placed in rocks by

the Creator as a test of faith? In 1830, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology had argued that the Earth was

much older than the six thousand or so years suggested by scripture, and in 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of

Species promoted a new theory that scandalously linked all of organic life together through an iron law of

competition and extinction. Meanwhile, the factories of the industrial revolution were issuing forth new,

smoke-belching, roaring creations. The wild violence of much early palaeoart, with its images of frenzied

consumption and environmental disaster, were symptomatic of these alarming uncertainties.

The model room at the Crystal Palace



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Alongside these visions of universal catastrophe, a more peaceful ancient world also existed. In much early

British palaeoart, the dinosaur is dignified lord of creation not hellish dragon. These visions of a sublime

prehistory can be seen as a transformation of Romantic landscape painting, and in them dinosaurs appear as

the just rulers of a natural kingdom. Britain was newly in its imperial pomp, and Lescaze argues that

‘palaeoart held a mirror to an expanding empire, reflecting its shining ideals of progress and well-ordered

sovereignty … As Britain forged a new, imperial identity, prehistoric animals became beasts of immense

metaphorical burden, conveying both the optimism and anxieties of an era.’ In the wake of Darwin’s

revolution, dinosaurs started to find their place as part of the great evolutionary chain of being that led

towards the human species and the light of reason. In Georges Devy’s engraving The Trumpet of Scientific

Judgment Sounded (1886), a thinking scientist, heralded by an angel, is attended by a patient herd of

mammoths, pterosaurs and frog-like dinosaurs – newly discovered, they await the classification that will

assign them places in the grand scheme that science had started to discern.

Though Lescaze does reproduce a number of popular images of prehistory – including some marvellously

florid tea cards, postcards and popular prints – Palaeoart is not about the pop cultural reach of the dinosaur

(W.J.T. Mitchell’s The Last Dinosaur Book deals with that subject).＊ The paintings Lescaze writes about

were high art, and closely allied to contemporary science. But this doesn’t mean they weren’t aimed squarely

at the public. And no single artist in the genre’s early years had the ambition and popular influence of

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.

The great dinosaur sculpture park that Hawkins made for the reopening of the Crystal Palace in 1854 is

perhaps the most famous example of palaeoart. ‘These days most schoolchildren can draw or identify a dozen

different dinosaurs,’ Lescaze writes, ‘but hardly anyone in the world knew what they looked like when

Hawkins unveiled his concrete zoo.’ A zoological illustrator who had worked for Darwin among others,

Hawkins worked on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs with the scientist Richard Owen, who had coined the word

‘dinosaur’ (from the Greek deinos, ‘terrible’, and sauros, ‘lizard’) in 1841. Theirs was the first attempt to

revivify dry fossil bones and even drier scientific discourse for a large public. Though the sculptures are now

known for their inaccuracy – with the bipedal Iguanodon, the talismanic beast of early English palaeontology,

recreated as a slothful and rhinocerotic quadruped, its thumb-spike misplaced on the tip of its snout as a horn

– they were faithful to the most recent science, and are rendered in startling anatomical detail. Hawkins’s

concrete and brick beasts included ichythosaurs, pterosaurs, a hunched and baleful Megalosaurus and a half-

submerged mosasaur, all of them arrayed on a series of artificial islands and lakes. Created as a new attraction

after the Crystal Palace was moved to South London, it was a life-size diorama representing the magnificence

of prehistoric Britain, and the public were captivated. Forty thousand visitors attended the opening day.

Scientists sniped that his creations involved too much conjecture, but Hawkins’s work was celebrated and

satirised across the press.

For the crowds that flocked to see them, Hawkins’s dinosaurs were a revelation. ‘The sensational statues

acted on viewers in the same way frescoes affected early Renaissance worshippers,’ Lescaze suggests. ‘Just as

Giotto rendered the life of Christ viscerally real and immediate … Hawkins vividly conveyed prehistory to

broad audiences.’ The artist’s work continued after the grand opening, and he was engaged in creating a new

set of dinosaurs when the Crystal Palace Company’s shareholders decided his creations were too pricey, and

terminated his contract. Hawkins worked only intermittently from then on, but with moments of great success,

in both Britain and America. Nothing on the scale of his Crystal Palace work was ever undertaken again.

Hawkins believed with a ‘fierce conviction’ that new scientific knowledge of prehistory ‘should not only be

accessible to the wealthy and well educated’, but to all. Having already redefined the public perception of

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prehistoric life, he would make one further critical contribution, arguably even more important: the piecing

together of a complete Hadrosaurus skeleton at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, in 1868.

Articulated dinosaur skeletons are now a standard part of the museum experience, but Hawkins’s hadrosaur

was the first dinosaur to be reconstructed in its natural posture, ‘a 14-foot-tall reptile standing in midstride as

though it could charge out of the building’. It was a sensation, ‘an astounding, utterly alien sight’, and the

crowds that came to see it were so large that the Academy charged an entrance fee in an attempt to keep the

numbers down.

In 1850s Britain, the growth of palaeontology and the worlds it uncovered were seamlessly folded into the

British imperial imaginary; in late 19th-century America, the fossil hunters and their quarry rapidly became

inseparable from the myths and realities of the American West. Lescaze likens the US palaeontological scene

to ‘a bar-room brawl’, and for the American palaeontologists ranging over the deserts of the western states in

search of bones, the horned and frilled Triceratops took on the air of the vanishing American bison, while

tyrannosaurids began to absorb the features of the near extinct cowboy (Disney’s recent animation The Good

Dinosaur casts them in this role; the Ray Harryhausen-animated creature feature The Valley of Gwangi also

contains a mash-up of dinosaur and Western themes).

‘The Primitive World’ by Adolphe François Pannemaker (1857)

The artist who breathed life into the vast numbers of dinosaur fossils collected on the outlaw frontier was

Charles Knight. Born in New York in 1874, and severely visually impaired from birth, he had to hold his face

close to the canvas as he painted (by the end of his career he was registered blind). He spent his youth as a

habitué of New York’s zoos, where he learned to draw living animals, and of the American Museum of

Natural History, where he learned to draw dead ones. Eventually the museum’s scientists began to



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commission him to paint prehistoric creatures, and his work caught the eye of the museum’s president, Henry

Fairfield Osborn. Osborn became Knight’s main patron, and in the late 1890s he revolutionised palaeoart for

the new century, recasting the sluggish behemoths of the 19th century as alert and agile creatures set in

vibrantly naturalistic landscapes.

Artistic mores had also changed since Hawkins’s day; Knight’s work draws on the bright palette and lively

movement of Impressionism. His experience of painting zoo animals informed his depictions of scale and

muscle; it was, he said, important to remember that dinosaurs were once ‘living breathing creatures, existing

in an atmosphere of colour, light and shade’, just like the animals we know. His 1897 painting Laelaps shows

two of the eponymous predators in tumbling, aggressive combat; it set a precedent that continues to define the

active, intelligent dinos of the contemporary imagination.

Though Lescaze shines new light on them, the images of Hawkins, Knight and their followers in Europe and

the US are comparatively well known. Better known still is their legacy: generations of children have grown

up with pictures and models, and latterly films, that draw heavily on their work. But there is another tradition

of prehistoric imagery which hasn’t had such reach, having been ‘locked into obscurity by the legacy of the

Cold War’: the palaeoart of the Soviet Union and the countries in its sphere of influence. The final sections of

Lescaze’s book are dedicated to this almost completely unknown tradition.

*

A precursor to Soviet palaeoart is to be found in the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Victor Vasnetsov’s

huge mural of early human life, Stone Age, painted for the museum between 1882 and 1885, shows dramatic

scenes from the Palaeolithic era – bacchanals, frenzied hunts, fire-making and cooking – in a broadly realist

mode. Vasnetsov’s vast painting is certainly extraordinary and, insofar as it shows Stone Age life as a

recognisable if primitive human existence, it is visionary. But things become even more interesting after the

Revolution.

Palaeoart flourished under the Soviets, and the high status of scientific research in the USSR lent the pictures

legitimacy as well as a rare degree of freedom. ‘The intrinsically unknowable, mysterious nature of prehistory

enabled works of palaeoart to elude the requisite propagandism of Soviet artwork devoted to contemporary

subjects,’ Lescaze writes; palaeoartists ‘dodged the scrutiny directed at professional fine artists, and were able

to create less didactic images favouring open interpretation over instruction’. The most influential of them

was Konstantin Flyorov, whose career was sponsored by the State Darwin Museum in Moscow. An irascible

and domineering man, his images of prehistoric life are less concerned with scientific veracity than with the

creation of boldly imagined worlds.

Painted in a lurid expressionist style, Flyorov depicts a brace of Triceratops battling a wheeling, roaring

Tyrannosaurus, while a caravan of Baluchitherium stalk a parti-coloured fauvist landscape; his Prehistoric

People (1939) represents early humans looking out from the darkness of their cave towards a sunlit landscape

– an allegory of the future life likely impermissible in any other context. The prehistoric subject matter,

Lescaze writes, allowed for ‘greater subtlety, narrative ambiguity, and nuance’ to enter the work; the

paintings by other Soviet artists such as Alexei Komarov and Andrei Lopatin reproduced here bear this

judgment out. The opalescent dreamscape of Mai Miturich-Khlebnikov and Viktor Duvidov’s Late

Cretaceous Landscape of the South Gobi was painted in 1986, in the months after Gorbachev admitted that

the Soviet miracle had long been a mirage. It is an astonishing image of a dissolving reality, its vast beasts

wading in a golden meadow of flowering waterlilies, oblivious in their gilded dream, just before the reality of

extinction struck.



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Lescaze doesn’t bring us all the way to modern palaeoart. Instead, she ends with the 1970s work of Ely Kish,

whose painting is unusual in its focus on extinction. Featuring decayed corpses, dried-out skeletons, and

parched creatures dying in the desert, and drawing on an increasing anxiety about environmental damage,

Kish’s work showed the great dying of the dinosaurs.

It’s a pertinent note to end on, and it’s the one thing that’s beyond debate: however they were feathered,

furred or coloured, and whether they were sluggish or nimble, dim-witted or highly intelligent, all these

dinosaurs are utterly dead, for ever. Prey or predator, they are all extinct. Adorno suggests that the dream of a

living dinosaur signals the hope, born in guilt, that other living things might survive the disaster humankind is

inflicting on the natural world, even if we don’t. If the cosmic memento mori provided to us by these strange

paintings of resurrected ancient creatures was once oblique, it is not any more. We are already well into the

sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, and it is being caused by us. The comet isn’t coming, it has arrived.

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Vitamin D receptor, a powerful weapon against colorectal cancer

NuRCaMein February 5, 2018

Vitamin D is an atypical vitamin because it is not a real vitamin. Vitamins are supposed to be essential,

meaning that our organism cannot live without them but their synthesis cannot take place in our cells, so we

must ensure an external intake through the diet. However, only 10% of vitamin D daily requirements come

from the diet, and 90% is photochemically produced in our skin on the presence of UVB radiation, that is,

sunlight.

Sun emits a solstice coronal mass ejection (NASA Goddard)

Hence, our body requires sun exposure to synthesize vitamin D.Recommendations about the time of sun

exposure needed to cover vitamin D daily requests are vague as these depend on the energy of sun radiation,

which ultimately depends on latitude (distance from the equator) and season of the year. Moreover, each of us

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synthesizes and regulates vitamin D levels differently in accordance to age (it decreases as we grow older),

skin colour (there are lower levels in dark skin), metabolism, weight…

Tentatively, someone who lives in Spain and is commonly healthy will have enough with a 15-30 minute

walk twice a week (April to October) to produce the vitamin D he or she needs. In winter, however, the

energy received from the sun in the Spanish territory is quite lower, so we must increase vitamin D dietary

intake or otherwise our vitamin levels will drastically decrease. Vitamin D has an evolutionary significance

in Homo sapiens skin pigmentation: it is responsible for the loss of pigmentation and skin colour distribution

around the world (skin is lighter in higher latitudes, where insolation is lower). But this is such an interesting

story that it deserves its own post.

Worldwide distribution of skin colour (Wikimedia Commons)

At this point, there are two issues that should be clarified: firstly, beneficial effects of sunlight (due to vitamin

D synthesis) cannot be an excuse for uncontrolled sun exposure. On the contrary: excessive exposure to

sunlight raises the risk for skin cancer. For that purpose, dermatologists and many other experts recommend

protecting skin from too much sun exposure or, more practically, limit time exposure. Secondly, it is critical

to seek medical advice before taking vitamin D supplements. Not only because it is imperative to know about

the vitamin status of the organism before following a medical treatment, but also because an excess of vitamin

D may damage your health and aggravate certain pathologies (renal insufficiency, granulomatous diseases,

and so on).

In the diet, the main sources of vitamin D are oily fish (or blue fish): salmon, tuna, anchovy, herring and

mackerel. There are other vitamin D rich foods, although in this case vitamin levels are lower.

The multiple effects of vitamin D on the organism are not exerted by the molecule itself but by some of its

derivatives, especially calcitriol (technically, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3). Calcitriol is generated in the kidney

and other tissues and is considered a key hormone for calcium and phosphate regulation and, accordingly, for

bone biology. It also participates in the regulation of the immune system and in the control of proliferation

and survival of different cell types. These regulatory effects on the cell cycle connect calcitriol to cancer.

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Vitamin D metabolism in the human organism (Wikimedia Commons)

Many epidemiological studies show that vitamin D deficiency is associated with an increased risk of cancer,

particularly colorectal cancer, a major cause of mortality worldwide (around 40,000 new cases are diagnosed

every year Spain).

At the molecular level, calcitriol action is mediated by a receptor that is preferentially located in the nucleus

of the cells (vitamin D receptor or VDR). VDR exerts its role in two ways: it binds to DNA controlling the

transcription of many genes and it operates in other metabolic pathways. In fact, the calcitriol-VDR bond is a

key regulator of the human genome, as it modulates the expression of more than a thousand genes.

Human colon epithelial cells express VDR as well as many of the colon tumour cells, so it has been suggested

that VDR detection may be lead to improve medical diagnosis. On the other hand, it has been experimentally

tested that calcitriol modifies gene expression in colorectal cancer cells, diminishing its proliferation and

malignancy. The findings accomplished by Dr. Muñoz’s group have significantly contributed to establish this

connection.



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Tumour invasion into a vein in colorectal cancer (Wikimedia Commons)

Currently, Dr. Muñoz’s lab focuses on detecting which genes and proteins are regulated by calcitriol in

human colorectal cancer, both in tumour cells and in other cells that enclose the tumour (fibroblasts mainly),

which are part of the so-called tumour stroma. They also study the effect of calcitriol on stem cells, as

alterations on their physiology have been proposed to be a cause for cancer initiation.

Dr. Muñoz’s group studied 1 the expression of VDR and two VDR-controlled genes in 658 colorectal cancer

patients. This work reports the role of tumour stroma fibroblasts on cancer development. The results derived

from these experiments associate VDR expression in stroma fibroblasts with survival in pacients. In other

words, patients with a high VDR expression in tumour stroma fibroblasts show better overall survival than

patients where VDR expression is lower. This correlation is independent from VDR contents in tumour cells.

Thus, vitamin D or its derivatives, which activate VDR in patients whose tumour cells do not express VDR,

may have protective effects against colorectal cancer. This is, the stimulation of VDR expression in

fibroblasts near the tumour may contribute to a positive evolution of the disease.

All things considered, the results obtained in this study support the convenience of maintaining suitable

vitamin D levels, avoiding the decrease occurred in winter, when our skin is incapable of producing enough

vitamin D due to low sunlight exposure.

References

1. Gemma Ferrer-Mayorga et al (2017) Vitamin D receptor expression and associated gene signature in

tumour stromal fibroblasts predict clinical outcome in colorectal cancer Gut doi: 10.1136/gutjnl-

2015-310977 ↩

http://www.ub.edu/nurcamein/grupos/grupo_munoz/

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/gutjnl-2015-310977

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/gutjnl-2015-310977

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written by

NuRCaMein

The Nuclear Receptors in Cancer, Metabolism and inflammation network

Website:http://www.ub.edu/nurcamein/

Twitter:@nurcamein

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cancer/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%28

Mapping+Ignorance%29

https://mappingignorance.org/author/nurcamein/

http://www.ub.edu/nurcamein/

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The Star Wars posters of Soviet Europe

Behind the Iron Curtain, artists created strikingly trippy ads for the saga, writes Christian Blauvelt.

By Christian Blauvelt

Hungarian Star Wars poster by Tibor Helényi

Star Wars was released in Hungary for the first time in 1980, three years after it came out in the US. Helényi

brought his own vision to the saga with a striking palette of blue, orange and red and some features that fans

would decry as certainly not being ‘canon’: Darth Vader’s helmet suddenly has a mouth like the grill of a

vintage Cadillac; the Death Star is destroyed via a blast out of the side; and then there’s some scaly lizard

creature on the left with a flailing tongue and ganglia and an impressively alien-looking scimitar. No such

creature exists in any Star Wars film, but Helényi’s approach is to suggest that such an alien could exist in the

world Lucas created. Call it ‘added value’! Or perhaps it’s a reference to how Lucas originally envisioned

Han Solo as a lizard creature, before going the more conventional route of casting Harrison Ford to play the

character as a human. (Credit: Tibor Helényi)

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Hungarian Star Wars poster by András Felvidéki

Felvidéki liked to wed old-fashioned engraving and etching techniques with trippy, avant-garde content, and

the result for Star Wars looks like an illustration that could have been part of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Under

the Moons of Mars serial in 1912. A steampunk-looking starship of a design never seen in the films shines a

light on Chewbacca, whose tongue action is most disturbing. The bantha on the left is infinitely more

fearsome than anything seen in the film, and C-3PO suddenly looks like he’s swapped parts with The Wizard

of Oz’s Tin Man. The idea of situating figures as if they’re ornamental features of a landscape was common

in Hungary during this time – just check out this contemporaneous poster for Apocalypse Nowthat features

the back of Marlon Brando’s bald head as the monumental dome of an ancient temple. (Credit: András

Felvidéki)

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/36/ed/0b/36ed0bf81a5eaa68dad62633dc2c72a6.jpg

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Russian Star Wars poster by Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev

Star Wars was banned in the Soviet Union until 1990, although a thriving black market bootleg video

exchange meant many Soviet citizens had in fact seen the films during the 1980s. Yuri Bokser and Alexander

Chantsev created this poster, along with three others (all below), to commemorate the lifting of the ban. Some

critics have described Star Wars as a ‘space Western’ but Bokser and Chantsev make visualised the idea.

Perhaps they were just ahead of the curve, though – the bounty hunter Cad Bane wears the Star Wars’ version

of a cowboy hat on the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series and there was a kind of horse-racing in The Last

Jedi. (Credit: Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev)

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Bokser and Chantsev strike again: none of these aliens actually appear in Star Wars, but they could have.

Bokser and Chantsev’s work is almost like the visual art equivalent of fan fiction. Intriguingly, the recent Star

Wars novella collection, Canto Bight, featured a story by Saladin Ahmed called Rules of the Game centred on

a pink, one-eyed alien named Kedpin Shoklop who looks much like the creature on the right. (Credit: Yuri

Bokser and Alexander Chantsev)




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Where to begin? The odd hieroglyphs around the border? That Vader now has a helmet resembling the face of

a jaguar? That he bears a crown of multi-coloured lightsabers? Obviously, nothing here has any relationship

to the films – except for that last feature. Before this poster none of the Star Wars films had featured

lightsabers of any colour other than blue, green and red. After this poster, the Star Wars prequels and

animated TV programmes would introduce lightsabers of different colours, such as Mace Windu’s purple

saber. Did this poster have any influence on Lucasfilm’s decision to expand their lightsaber colour palette?

Almost assuredly not. But it was an unwitting glimpse of things to come. (Credit: Yuri Bokser and Alexander

Chantsev)

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Polish Empire Strikes Back poster by Jakub Erol

Would you know this poster was for The Empire Strikes Back, if the actors’ names weren’t listed at the

bottom? Looking more like one of Der Spiegel’s Donald Trump-themed cover illustrations, Jakub Erol’s take

on Star Wars’s first sequel evokes Constructivism – a graphic style preferred by early Soviet propagandists

anyone in the Eastern Bloc would have associated with authoritarianism. Erol was a prolific poster designer in

Poland, and he gravitated to simple, stark images that instantly communicate a powerful idea: his poster for

the Czech drama Days of Betrayal, about the rise of Nazism and the appeasement efforts of Neville

Chamberlain, featured skull-tipped matchsticks arranged to form a swastika. (Credit: Jakub Erol)

http://www.adweek.com/digital/der-spiegel-donald-trump-edel-rodriguez/

http://www.poster.com.pl/old/erol.htm




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Polish Empire Strikes Back poster by Miroslaw Lakomski

Lakomski opted for a more direct approach to the film than Erol. With colourful circles recalling Piet

Mondrian and Saul Bass, this poster presents The Empire Strikes Back’s AT-AT walkers and Yoda. But look

closer at Yoda: most of his facial features are rendered in black and white, his expression neutral, his gaze off-

centre as if he’s looking to the horizon. It’s a classic pose for a heroic sage, but it also looks strikingly similar

to Jim Fitzpatrick’s iconic poster of Che Guevara from 1968. A figure from an American film series rendered

like a hero of global socialist revolution? A suggestion that aligning with US-backed, capitalist culture was

the new rebellion. (Credit: Miroslaw Lakomski)

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Hungarian Empire Strikes Back poster by Tibor Helényi

Tibor Helényi returned to create a poster for The Empire Strikes Back. No addition of a strange lizard creature

here. Instead we get an incredibly detailed Imperial Star Destroyer in the upper left corner, and a strikingly

stylised Vader on the lower right. He appears to have a coterie of similarly mechanized henchmen alongside

him – if Episode IX should finally reveal the Knights of Ren, let us hope they are half as cool as these

baddies. Completing the dynamic, diagonal composition is a Goth AT-AT lurching forward into the frame

like an unstoppable steampunk force of nature. Helényi’s work here seems to anticipate the underrated

brooding aesthetic artist Cam Kennedy deployed for the Dark Empire graphic novel in 1993, which imagined

the resurrection of Emperor Palpatine in a fresh clone body and Luke’s attempts to learn more about the Jedi.

(Credit: Tibor Helényi)




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Hungarian Return of the Jedi poster by Tibor Helényi

Okay, so maybe Tibor Helényi is repeating himself here by including another strange lizard creature that is

nowhere to be found in the film itself. But you’ve got to love how the second Death Star forms one of Darth

Vader’s eyes. Helényi’s work is absolutely singular, and it’s very much worth the time of anyone interested in

graphic design to explore some of his other movie posters, as well. His poster for Ben-Hur depicts the famed

chariot race and Christ’s crucifixion by way of Dali’s Hallucinogenic Toreador, while his art for Akira

Kurosawa’s Kagemusha imagines a medieval European jouster in place of the film’s story about feudal Japan.

(Credit: Tibor Helényi)

http://budapestposter.com/artists/helenyi-tibor




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Russian Return of the Jedi poster by Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev

Jabba the Hutt’s monumental head is one of the twin poles of Bokser and Chantsev’s poster commemorating

the conclusion of the original trilogy – the other is, of course, the Death Star, with star streaks like those seen

when the Millennium Falcon jumps to lightspeed in the middle. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition: do the two

orbs, one of a moon-sized weapon, the other of a gangster’s head, suggest that authoritarianism enables Hutt-

like corruption? A lot to ponder here. (Credit: Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev)




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Polish Return of the Jedi poster by Witold Dybowski

The destruction of Vader’s helmet here is certainly a spoiler for the end of Return of the Jedi – but it also

suggests the destroyed version of Vader’s helmet that we wouldn’t see until The Force Awakens 31 years

after Polish artist Dybowski created this image in 1984. Look closer, though, and you’ll see that various cogs

and spools that make up a film camera are incorporated into the design of the helmet. Is this a subtle

commentary that Star Wars had obliterated cinema and that the global film industry would never be the same?

Or is it suggesting that cinema itself is a kind of Vader figure – it can be a force for good or a force for harm,

depending upon the intent of the film-maker. (Credit: Witold Dybowski)

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180129-the-star-wars-posters-of-soviet-europe

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180129-the-star-wars-posters-of-soviet-europe

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Dancing Dwarf Galaxies Deepen Dark Matter Mystery

A surprising alignment between small satellites of the galaxy Centaurus A challenges the standard model of

cosmology

By Shannon Stirone on February 1, 2018

Centaurus A. Credit: By ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre);

NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray) [CC BY 4.0]

Many large galaxies—our Milky Way among them—are orbited by a retinue of smaller, fainter companions:

dwarf galaxies. Some are probably nearly as old as the universe itself, isolated islands of ancient stars that

never managed to glom onto a larger galaxy; others are younger, born from the shredded remains of bigger

galaxies that collided and ripped one another apart. Regardless of whether any given dwarf galaxy is a

primordial building block or a late-stage leftover from a galactic merger, studying these diminutive objects is

arguably one of the best ways to learn about how galaxies and other large cosmic structures emerge, interact

and grow. And studying the large-scale structures in turn is one of the best ways we have of understanding the

fundamental rules of the universe we live in.

In some respects, watching dwarf galaxies orbiting their larger hosts is rather like watching bees humming

around a hive. Dwarfs, like bees, appear aimless in their flights—up and down, left and right, with no obvious

rhyme or reason. But both have a hidden order. Bees surf around their hives on wind currents carrying the

scents of flowers and pheromones, and the orbits of dwarf galaxies are dictated in part by something even

https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/shannon-stirone/

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AESO_Centaurus_A_LABOCA.jpg

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more mysterious: the gravitational pull of dark matter. This theoretical, invisible substance is more felt than

seen, for it emits no light; the only way we infer its existence is by how it warps the space around it. Crude

maps of its distribution indicate dark matter forms a sort of cosmic web, where galaxies large and small are

gravitationally glued to filaments and sheets of dark matter. “We have this web of dark matter that feeds the

host galaxy from all angles and directions, and that’s why we find so many different orbits and motions of

these dwarf galaxies,” says Oliver Müller, a PhD candidate at the University of Basel.

In a new study published Thursday in Science, Müller and colleagues charted how 16 dwarfs moved around

the “beehive” of Centaurus A, a large galaxy upward of 10 million light-years distant from the Milky Way.

They found that rather than following random orbits, 14 of the dwarfs of Centaurus A are surprisingly aligned

and coplanar, that is, they share the same orbital plane—a bit like bees flying in a well-ordered ring around a

hive. The puzzling configuration—which Müller’s simulations suggest only have a 0.5 percent probability of

occurring by happenstance—has some scientists questioning just how much they understand the behavior and

environment around these satellites. If seen around many other galaxies across the universe, Müller says, such

bizarrely coplanar dwarfs could even challenge cosmologists’ “Lambda cold dark matter” (LCDM)

conception of the universe—the standard model used to explain how galaxies and galaxy clusters emerge and

evolve.

ADVERTISEMENT

But although the new study emphasizes the rarity of aligned coplanar dwarf galaxies, such configurations

have been observed before. In fact, prevailing theories suggest that one out of every 10 dwarf galaxies should

possess some kind of alignment; at least that’s what computer simulations suggest.

What is unique about this particular alignment is “this is the first example of this kind of configuration seen

outside of our local (galactic) group, so that’s quite interesting,” says Carlos Frenk, a cosmologist at Durham

University in England. Coplanar dwarf galaxies have been found for the Milky Way and Andromeda, Frenk

notes, but the 14 around Centaurus A are the first observed circling a more distant galaxy.

In their study, Müller and his team argue that if coplanar alignments of dwarf galaxies are widespread, this

would pose a worthy challenge to the LCDM model—which predicts a random distribution of dwarfs.

Finding many coplanar arrangements would suggest, in short, our already limited understanding of dark

matter is even more incomplete than previously appreciated. Frenk, for one, is not entirely convinced,

pointing out the LCDM model remains in excellent agreement with the vast majority of decades’ worth of

observations. “The standard model works quite well,” Frenk says. “Why would it just stop in an instant? It’s

interesting, but not a challenge that threatens the cosmological paradigm at this point.”

Unfortunately, taking a more complete census of dwarf galaxies would take decades. Observing the

movements of dwarf galaxies is extremely nuanced, in large part because we can more easily measure the

speeds of far-distant objects that move either away from or toward us in the sky, rather than those that move

across the celestial sphere. And as their name implies, dwarf galaxies are extremely small and dim, making

their discoveries even more of a challenge the farther out one looks from the Milky Way. All these effects act

to bias the observational data, muddying the waters so that a clear trend either of coplanarity or of disorder

becomes hard to see. The only solution is to find and study dwarf galaxies, near and far, using multiple

overlapping and time-consuming methods.



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Meanwhile, intriguing observations like these might do more to actually confirm the success of the LCDM

model than to replace it. Michael Boylan-Kolchin, an astrophysicist at The University of Texas at Austin and

author of an accompanying commentary in Science, says the standard model has overcome similar challenges

before. “The LCDM has faced many tests and is still the standard cosmological model; I expect the same will

be true in the case of satellite planes,” he says. “However, I also think it is essential to fully investigate all

potential inconsistencies. It is the only way we increase our confidence in theories or, in rare cases, find the

flaws that demand fundamental revisions.”

As a part of his dissertation work, Müller plans to spend time in the upcoming months using the Dark Energy

Camera in Chile to study the Centaurus A system with the hopes of finding more dwarf satellites. Another

dozen or so in nonplanar orbits could make the reported trend disappear. For now though, he is excited about

this oddity, because it may actually be the norm. “These systems aren’t just an outlier—they look like they’re

more common. I think we have to take this very seriously…. I want us to do further studies of this structure. I

want to show that this isn’t just a coincidence.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dancing-dwarf-galaxies-deepen-dark-matter-mystery/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dancing-dwarf-galaxies-deepen-dark-matter-mystery/



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Holding hands can sync brainwaves, ease pain, study shows

Source:

University of Colorado at Boulder

Summary:

A new study by a pain researcher shows that when a romantic partner holds hands with a partner in

pain, their brain waves sync and her pain subsides.

FULL STORY

Couple holding hands.

Credit: © PauloPJ / Fotolia



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Reach for the hand of a loved one in pain and not only will your breathing and heart rate synchronize with

theirs, your brain wave patterns will couple up too, according to a study published this week in

the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The study, by researchers with the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Haifa, also found that

the more empathy a comforting partner feels for a partner in pain, the more their brainwaves fall into sync.

And the more those brain waves sync, the more the pain goes away.

"We have developed a lot of ways to communicate in the modern world and we have fewer physical

interactions," said lead author Pavel Goldstein, a postdoctoral pain researcher in the Cognitive and Affective

Neuroscience Lab at CU Boulder. "This paper illustrates the power and importance of human touch."

The study is the latest in a growing body of research exploring a phenomenon known as "interpersonal

synchronization," in which people physiologically mirror the people they are with. It is the first to look at

brain wave synchronization in the context of pain, and offers new insight into the role brain-to-brain coupling

may play in touch-induced analgesia, or healing touch.

Goldstein came up with the experiment after, during the delivery of his daughter, he discovered that when he

held his wife's hand, it eased her pain.

"I wanted to test it out in the lab: Can one really decrease pain with touch, and if so, how?"

He and his colleagues at University of Haifa recruited 22 heterosexual couples, age 23 to 32 who had been

together for at least one year and put them through several two-minute scenarios as electroencephalography

(EEG) caps measured their brainwave activity. The scenarios included sitting together not touching; sitting

together holding hands; and sitting in separate rooms. Then they repeated the scenarios as the woman was

subjected to mild heat pain on her arm.

Merely being in each other's presence, with or without touch, was associated with some brain wave

synchronicity in the alpha mu band, a wavelength associated with focused attention. If they held hands while

she was in pain, the coupling increased the most.

Researchers also found that when she was in pain and he couldn't touch her, the coupling of their brain waves

diminished. This matched the findings from a previously published paper from the same experiment which

found that heart rate and respiratory synchronization disappeared when the male study participant couldn't

hold her hand to ease her pain.

"It appears that pain totally interrupts this interpersonal synchronization between couples and touch brings it

back," says Goldstein.

Subsequent tests of the male partner's level of empathy revealed that the more empathetic he was to her pain

the more their brain activity synced. The more synchronized their brains, the more her pain subsided.

How exactly could coupling of brain activity with an empathetic partner kill pain?

More studies are needed to find out, stressed Goldstein. But he and his co-authors offer a few possible

explanations. Empathetic touch can make a person feel understood, which in turn -- according to previous

studies -- could activate pain-killing reward mechanisms in the brain.



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"Interpersonal touch may blur the borders between self and other," the researchers wrote.

The study did not explore whether the same effect would occur with same-sex couples, or what happens in

other kinds of relationships. The takeaway for now, Pavel said: Don't underestimate the power of a hand-hold.

"You may express empathy for a partner's pain, but without touch it may not be fully communicated," he said.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Colorado at Boulder. Original written by Lisa Ann Marshall. Note:

Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Pavel Goldstein, Irit Weissman-Fogel, Guillaume Dumas, Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory. Brain-to-brain

coupling during handholding is associated with pain reduction. Proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences, 2018; 201703643 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1703643115


https://www.colorado.edu/today/2018/02/28/just-two-us-holding-hands-can-ease-pain-sync-brainwaves?utm_source=colorado.edu&utm_medium=Hold%20hands%20to%20ease%20a%20lover%27s%20pain%2C%20and%20your%20brains%20couple%20up%2C%20too&utm_campaign=Homepage&utm_

http://www.colorado.edu/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1703643115



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Beyond ‘The Scream,’ painter Edvard Munch experimented with photography

By Chloe Coleman January 29 Email the author

“Self-Portrait Wearing Glasses and Seated Before Two Watercolors” at Ekely, ca. 1930 (Edvard

Munch/Courtesy of Munch Museum)

Though his face is perhaps more recognizable when rendered in paint, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch was

also interested in using photography for self-portraiture. Among some of the earliest artists in history to turn a

camera on himself, Munch was not married to technical form. He experimented with what might be seen as

mistakes, such as unusual points of focus, distorted perspective, and using the ghosting effects possible with

long exposure times. These effects were visually akin to some of his painting techniques.

Munch’s photographs dated from 1902 to 1910 and from 1927 to the mid-1930s, periods of physical and

emotional stress for the artist that included a stay at the private Copenhagen clinic of Dr. Daniel Jacobson for

a rest cure. He didn’t intend to exhibit his photographs. “I have an old camera with which I have taken

countless pictures of myself, often with amazing results,” Edvard Munch said in 1930. “Some day when I am

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/chloe-coleman/

mailto:[email protected]?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20%27Beyond%20%E2%80%98The%20Scream,%E2%80%99%20painter%20Edvard%20Munch%20experimented%20with%20photography%27



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old, and I have nothing better to do than write my autobiography, all my self-portraits will see the light of day

again.”

Edvard Munch and Rosa Meissner in Warnemünde, 1907 (Edvard Munch/Courtesy of Munch Museum)



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“Self-Portrait in Profile Indoors in Asgardstrand,” ca. 1904 (Edvard Munch/Courtesy of Munch Museum)



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“Self-Portrait at the Breakfast Table at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic,” 1908-1909 (Edvard Munch/Courtesy of Munch

Museum)



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“Self-Portrait ‘a la Marat,’ Beside a Bathtub at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic,” 1908-09 (Edvard Munch/Courtesy of

Munch Museum)



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“Self-Portrait with Housekeeper in Warnemünde,” 1907 (Edvard Munch/Courtesy of Munch Museum)



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“Self-Portrait with Model for a National Monument,” Kragerø, 1909-10 (Edvard Munch/Courtesy of Munch

Museum)



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“Self-Portrait with Valise,” 1906 (Edvard Munch/Courtesy of Munch Museum)

These photographs are part of “The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch’s Photography” exhibition at the

Scandinavia House in New York until April 7, 2018.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2018/01/19/beyond-the-scream-painter-edvard-munch-

experiments-with-photography/?utm_term=.be7a24ea828d&wpisrc=nl_insight&wpmm=1

http://www.scandinaviahouse.org/events/the-experimental-self/

http://www.scandinaviahouse.org/events/the-experimental-self/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2018/01/19/beyond-the-scream-painter-edvard-munch-experiments-with-photography/?utm_term=.be7a24ea828d&wpisrc=nl_insight&wpmm=1

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2018/01/19/beyond-the-scream-painter-edvard-munch-experiments-with-photography/?utm_term=.be7a24ea828d&wpisrc=nl_insight&wpmm=1



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P.L. Prattis (center, in vest), an editor of the Pittsburgh Courier after Robert Lee Vann, in the newsroom with

staff in the mid-1940s Courtesy of Getty Images/Teenie Harris Archive/Carnegie Museum of Art

Pittsburgh's Black Renaissance Started in Its Schools

1. MARK WHITAKER

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Schenley High, Westinghouse High, and other city schools graduated

scores of black notables and anchored the neighborhoods around them.

When historians analyze the causes of the Great Migration, the exodus of millions of African Americans from

the rural South in the early 20th century, they stress the urgency of escaping the vicious Jim Crow backlash

against Reconstruction and the dream of finding factory jobs in Northern cities. Yet a less studied factor—

worth noting in this era of crude stereotypes about black attitudes toward education—was the lure of better

schools in the North. And surprisingly, nowhere was that attraction greater than in the gritty steel town of

Pittsburgh.

https://www.citylab.com/authors/mark-whitaker/



149

In Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the 1940s, Herron Avenue marked the boundary between the elite

Sugartop neighborhood and the working-class Middle Hill. (Courtesy of Getty Images/Teenie Harris

Archive/Carnegie Museum of Art)

In the 19th century, what is now the University of Pittsburgh was called the Western University of

Pennsylvania and considered a sister school to Penn in Philadelphia. Before his death in 1858, Charles Avery,

a white Pittsburgh cotton trader whose travels through the South had awoken him to the horrors of slavery and

turned him into an ardent abolitionist, endowed a fund for 12 scholarships a year at Western University for

“males of the colored people in the United States of America or the British Province of Canada.”

Forty years later, Robert Lee Vann, the teenage son of a former slave cook from North Carolina, traveled by

himself to Pittsburgh to claim one of those scholarships. It was the start of a remarkable success story. In

1910, after earning undergraduate and law degrees from Western University, Vann accepted a job as the

editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, a four-page chronicle of local events. Eventually becoming publisher and

owner as well, Vann transformed the Courier into America’s best-selling black newspaper, with 14 regional

editions and an avid readership in black homes, barber shops, and beauty salons across the nation.



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The Washington edition of the Pittsburgh Courier on April 19, 1947, a few days after Jackie Robinson broke

the color line in Major League Baseball. Courier columnist Wendell Smith had introduced Robinson to the

Dodgers’ Branch Rickey. (Library of Congress)

Ever since the Civil War, blacks had voted overwhelmingly Republican out of loyalty to the Great

Emancipator. But in 1932, Vann used the Courier as a soapbox to urge blacks to turn “the picture of Abraham



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Lincoln to the wall” and vote for FDR, beginning a migration to the Democratic Party that transformed

American politics. As World War II loomed, Vann pressed for a greater role for black soldiers. After his death

in 1940, his successors led a “Double Victory” campaign to rally black support at home while demanding an

end to racial injustice once the war was over. (Sadly, that second victory never materialized—a betrayal that

the Courier exposed as dashed hopes helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement.)

Vann took pride in hiring young college grads, and his recruits played a major part in some of the biggest

cultural stories of the age. Chester Washington, a Pittsburgh native whom Vann helped send to Virginia

Union University, used his behind-the-scenes access to boxer Joe Louis to turn the “Brown Bomber” into a

hero to blacks and a sympathetic champ to whites. Sports columnist Wendell Smith, an alumnus of Wayne

State University, crusaded for the integration of pro baseball, then introduced Brooklyn Dodgers President

Branch Rickey to a promising Negro League rookie named Jackie Robinson.

After hiring Julia Bumry Jones, a West Virginian with a degree from Wilberforce University, as his

stenographer, Vann put Jones in charge of a four-page weekly women’s section and gave her a gossip column

that she used to encourage black women across America to master political as well as party-giving skills.

History hasn’t always been kind to the rapacious capitalists who turned Pittsburgh into an industrial engine of

the Gilded Age, but their philanthropy helped finance some of the best integrated public high schools of the

time. In 1912, Mary Schenley, the heir to a railroad fortune, donated land and money for Schenley High

School, a three-sided limestone behemoth that was the first high school to cost more than $1 million. A

decade later, Westinghouse High School, named after electricity tycoon George Westinghouse, was built for

$2.5 million.

Westinghouse graduated so many black luminaries that a Hall of Fame display of their photographs covered

the walls of its lobby.

Admitting black students from their earliest days, Schenley and Westinghouse attracted many who went on to

become giants in their fields. Earl Hines, a piano prodigy from a steel town south of Pittsburgh, was sent by

his parents to live with an aunt in the city so he could attend Schenley. Later, Hines moved to Chicago and

recorded groundbreaking early jazz with Louis Armstrong.

Although married to an abusive drinker who had trouble holding jobs, Lillian Strayhorn insisted that her

family move to a back-alley shanty in the neighborhood of Homewood so her young son Billy could attend

Westinghouse High. After becoming the star of the school’s music program, Billy Strayhorn met Duke

Ellington at a downtown theater, beginning one of the greatest collaborations in jazz history.



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Dancer Charles “Honi” Coles (left), Billy Strayhorn (center), and Duke Ellington (right) at the Stanley

Theatre, the show palace where Ellington and Strayhorn first met. (Courtesy of Getty Images/Teenie Harris

Archive/Carnegie Museum of Art)

In the ’30s, ’40s, and ‘50s, Westinghouse graduated so many black luminaries that a Hall of Fame display of

their photographs covered the walls of its front lobby. They included piano virtuosos Erroll Garner, Ahmad

Jamal, and Mary Lou Williams, and journalists Bill Nunn Sr. and Jr., the longtime managing editor of

the Pittsburgh Courier and his son, later a football scout who recruited key members of the 1970s Steelers

dynasty.

Meanwhile, Bill Nunn III, the actor who starred in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, graduated from Schenley

High, as did guitarist George Benson and Harvard’s first black law professor, Derrick Bell. (Peabody High

School, in Pittsburgh’s Hillside neighborhood, educated two other legends, singer Billy Eckstine and artist

Romare Bearden.) In the movie version of the play Fences by August Wilson—the Pittsburgh-born

playwright who set most of his dramas in the city’s Hill District—director and star Denzel Washington pays

homage to Schenley High by having Cory, the son of garbage worker Troy Maxson, wear a red varsity jacket

emblazoned with an “S.”



153

In his unique way, Wilson was also a product of black Pittsburgh’s devotion to education. Although Wilson’s

mother was a maid who went on welfare to raise her children after their white German father all but

abandoned them, she insisted on sending August to Catholic schools on the Hill. Later, when Wilson dropped

out of high school as a rebellious teen, he educated himself by roaming the stacks of Carnegie Library, funded

by the most famous Pittsburgh robber baron of them all, Andrew Carnegie.

Yet if these pioneering schools were cornerstones of black Pittsburgh in its heyday, their decline has been part

of the sad narrative of that community’s descent over the past 60 years. In the late 1950s, white downtown

business and political leaders joined forces to push through an early experiment in urban renewal that resulted

in the razing of the Lower Hill, long the center of black business and social life.

Despite big talk, the city never made good on promises of new housing construction. As displaced Hill

residents sought refuge in surrounding neighborhoods, white residents of those previously mixed enclaves

fled, gradually eroding the tax and political bases that had supported schools like Westinghouse.

The Bethel AME Church, the last building to be destroyed on the Lower Hill in 1957. (Courtesy of Getty

Images/Teenie Harris Archive/Carnegie Museum of Art)



154

Today Westinghouse is a shell of its former self, looming forlornly over an entire block in the now

downtrodden neighborhood of Homewood. Metal bars stripe the windows. A magnetometer guards the lobby.

The virtually all-black student body numbers a scant 450 over six grades.

The teachers are almost all white, young, inexperienced, and likely to move on after a few years. Although the

school has worked its way back from a dismal diploma rate to graduating most of its students, more than a

quarter of them will never attend college, and many who do will never finish. As administrators walk the

hallways, they greet students who skip classes not with warnings but inquiries about what’s bothering them, a

sign of their primary concern that no one leave the building before school is out.

A mural in the Hill District honoring playwright August Wilson, who attended Catholic schools in the

neighborhood and set Fences and other plays there. (Beth J. Harpaz/AP)

Schenley, meanwhile, has been shuttered and sold to private developers, the victim of a contentious

experiment in school reform. In 2005, Pittsburgh turned its school system over to Mark Roosevelt, a former

Massachusetts state legislator and great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, who decided in mid-career to become a

school superintendent by attending a one-year training course funded by entrepreneur Eli Broad.

Mark Roosevelt delivered innovation, including support for charter schools and Gates Foundation projects,

but he lost goodwill in both black and white communities by closing Schenley rather than pay for asbestos



155

removal. The uproar over the loss of the iconic school drained support for Roosevelt’s agenda, and it

hamstrung Linda Lane, the black woman who took his place after he quit to take the presidency of Antioch

College. “The pain goes on,” Lane admitted as she stepped down after six years.

Witnessing what has become of the Hill and Homewood and so many black city neighborhoods like them

across America, it’s hard to believe what thriving hubs they once were, and even harder to fathom what it will

take to bring them back. Yet if there is to be progress, virtually every expert agrees, reforms will have to be

multi-pronged—encompassing courts, prisons, police, and banks—and will have to start with schools.

While the overall forecast for Pittsburgh’s inner-city schools is far from bright, there are rays of promise.

When a city-wide vocational high school was shut down to save money, many of its programs—in carpentry,

health services, sports management, cooking, and cosmetology—were moved to Westinghouse. Students in

those programs are now the stars of the school, paraded before visitors as musical prodigies once were.

A handsome, gregarious senior boasts of earning his electrician’s license and having a job lined up after

graduation. Students in a professional cooking class learn from a former sous chef how to work a restaurant

kitchen line and organize a food truck. Although administrators say some parents still look down on

vocational training—a stigma in black America that dates back to controversy over Booker T. Washington’s

trade schools—they concede that for many students, it offers more realistic hope than taking on student debt

to pursue a liberal arts education.

If nothing else, Pittsburgh’s revival gives motivated black youth an incentive to stay put.

The city of Pittsburgh, meanwhile, is enjoying an overall resurgence, propelled once again by its institutions

of higher learning. Tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Uber have opened outposts to snap up

engineers and computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon, Pitt, and Duquesne. Those companies have started

donating computers and other supplies to black neighborhood schools, and they could do more. They could

establish or fund after-school programs where African-American kids can learn extra math and computer

skills. They could create mentorship and internship programs to give high-school students a taste of the jobs

that might await them if they stay in school and get through college.

If nothing else, Pittsburgh’s revival gives motivated black youth an incentive to stay put. For another, more

sensitive, factor in the decline of black Pittsburgh was black flight, by middle-class strivers who walked

through doors opened in the civil rights and affirmative action era and never came back. (One was my father,

C.S. “Syl” Whitaker, Jr., Westinghouse class of 1952, who went to Swarthmore College and then became an

Africa scholar at UCLA and Princeton.)

Today, members of that generation who did eventually return express shame over not being there to fight for

their neighborhoods. One is Lynell Nunn, the actor’s sister, who returned to Pittsburgh to care for her aging

parents after decades working as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., only to discover that it was too late to save

her beloved high school. “I still haven’t forgiven them,” Lynell says of city and school board leaders. “We

had so much pride in Schenley.”

One who did stay was Joe Williams III, the son of a mechanic and grandson of a janitor who grew up in the

North Side neighborhood of Manchester. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne’s law school,

Williams opened a criminal law practice in his old neighborhood on a block that had grown so decrepit that he

was able to buy a boarded-up townhouse from a city slum agency for $4,000. Two decades later, Williams

was elected to a judgeship in a downtown courthouse where his grandfather mopped the floors and his father



156

fixed the boilers. After raising their son in the suburbs, he and his wife Darryl have moved into the

Manchester house and are working with neighbors to rebuild the neighborhood.

Every Memorial Day, Williams also hosts a family reunion at which he and his relatives visit the burial sites

of ancestors who have lived in the Pittsburgh area for four generations. At each grave, they require members

of the younger generation to recite the stories of their forebears. Like so many tales of black Pittsburgh, they

are stories full of sacrifices made for the sake of education, and a reminder to the youngsters that reverence

for learning is a strain as deep and proud as any in the African-American tradition.

Mark Whitaker’s book SMOKETOWN: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance was recently

published by Simon & Schuster.

About the Author

Mark Whitaker

@MARKTWHITAKER

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/pittsburghs-black-renaissance-started-in-its-schools/554237/

https://www.amazon.com/Smoketown-Untold-Story-Other-Renaissance/dp/1501122398

https://www.citylab.com/authors/mark-whitaker/

https://twitter.com/Marktwhitaker



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Researchers Cryopreserve Coral Sperm

A project aims to preserve samples of the climate change–vulnerable animals for future restoration.

By Catherine Offord | February 1, 2018

READY TO FREEZE: Many stony corals such as Acropora, pictured here at Lady Elliot Island on Australia’s

Great Barrier Reef, are vulnerable to the effects of climate change. So researchers are working to

cryogenically preserve them for later.REBECCA SPINDLER/TARONGA ZOO

Mary Hagedorn is the first to admit she has a somewhat unusual research calendar. “My whole schedule is

based on the moon cycle,” she says. “I’m like a modern druid.” But there’s a scientific explanation:

Hagedorn works with corals—animals that famously synchronize mass spawning events to nights just after a

full moon.

For Hagedorn, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Institution and head of the international Reef Recovery

Initiative, such coral spawnings, which occur just once a year for some species, mark the only opportunities to

collect the animals’ eggs and sperm—key ingredients for one of the latest approaches to coral conservation.

As coral communities around the world succumb to climate change—and the attendant increases in water

temperature and acidity—researchers such as Hagedorn are shifting their focus from primarily trying to

protect corals to banking coral genomes in the form of gametes or other biological material for future

generations.

“We’re seeing more and more global changes, [and] the protections we’re able to do are not enough,”

explains Hollie Putnam, an integrative biologist at the University of Rhode Island who studies how corals and

other marine invertebrates respond to environmental stress brought about by a changing climate.

https://nationalzoo.si.edu/conservation/mary-hagedorn

http://www.reefrecovery.org/

http://www.reefrecovery.org/

http://putnamlab.com/



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One approach that Hagedorn’s team is exploring is to cryogenically freeze the coral egg and sperm cells to

serve as seeds for future species reintroductions to marine environments. “Cryopreservation is an amazing

tool for helping wildlife populations,” Hagedorn says. “It can reverse extinction and maintain genetic

diversity.” The method has already been used by other researchers to preserve, and later thaw for artificial

insemination, the sperm cells of critically endangered mammals such as the North American black-footed

ferret (Anim Conserv, 19:102-11, 2016).

Think of it as a human fertility clinic, except for coral.

—Mary Hagedorn,

Smithsonian Institution

A few years ago, Hagedorn and her colleagues embarked on a proof-of-concept project using an important

genus of reef-building coral called Acropora. Starting in 2012, she and other members of the Reef Recovery

Initiative spent a few years assembling samples of two species—A. millepora and A. tenuis—from

populations at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Professional collectors “go out and collect for about a week,

and bring whole colonies back to the station a day before the full moon,” she says. “We help them offload it

and get it into tanks.”

BUNDLES OF JOY: Acropora corals release their gametes in the form of egg-sperm bundles during mass

spawning events.ANDREW HEYWARD/AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE OF MARINE SCIENCE

The researchers then waited for the newly collected animals to release their gametes, parceled up in tiny,

buoyant egg-sperm bundles. “You could imagine it as a cluster of grapes,” Hagedorn says. “You have several

eggs packaged together tightly in this membrane, with a packet of sperm inside. Each little coral polyp

produces that.” These bundles rose to the surface and separated into eggs and sperm that the researchers then

filtered for storage.

To cryopreserve the sperm, the researchers froze the cells using liquid nitrogen—cooling them down to

-196 °C. The cells “just go into stasis, or suspended animation,” Hagedorn says. Then, in a series of

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acv.12229/abstract



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experiments in 2013 and 2014, the team thawed these cells and combined them in glass vials with fresh eggs

to trigger fertilization. “Think of it as a human fertility clinic, except for coral.”

The researchers found that although cryopreservation reduced the fertilization success of sperm—the frozen-

then-thawed gametes were generally less motile than fresh sperm—they could produce viable larvae. Once

transferred to larger tanks, these larvae successfully settled and began laying down a calcareous skeleton, just

as those produced from fresh sperm did (Sci Rep, 7:14432, 2017). Although the team has yet to evaluate how

well the larvae would do in a real marine environment—permits to introduce animals to coral reefs are hard to

come by, Hagedorn explains—the project marks a first step in making cryopreservation of corals practical.

For now, the team’s method falls short of a full restoration, notes Chris Langdon, a coral biologist at the

University of Miami. “Preserving the sperm is only half the equation,” he says. “A bunch of sperm is not

going to do us any good if there aren’t any eggs to fertilize.” Egg preservation is more challenging, and

Hagedorn tells The Scientist that for some coral communities, such as the ones she works with in Hawaii, the

spawning events aren’t always large enough to produce enough cells to work with; her group is now

investigating alternatives that include preserving larvae and other parts of coral tissue.

“I think that’s the right course of action,” says Ken Nedimyer, president of the Coral Restoration Foundation,

a Florida-based nonprofit that creates offshore nurseries for threatened coral species and has agreed to provide

coral samples to Hagedorn’s team. He adds that there are many other elements of corals, such as their algal

symbionts and microbiomes, that would need to be preserved as well. “You can’t just have a sperm and an

egg, make a larva, and think you’re going to restore coral reefs—it’s not going to happen.”

But Langdon notes that there’s a bigger limitation to consider when it comes to Hagedorn’s approach to coral

restoration: there’s no reason to believe that corals dying from oceanic conditions now would be able to

survive any better in the likely warmer and more acidic oceans of the future. “That’s my criticism of the

current-day coral restoration efforts,” he says. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

He is not alone in these concerns, and several research groups are investigating other—though not necessarily

mutually exclusive—methods to preserve coral populations in a changing climate. Putnam, for example, aims

to pin down the factors that make some corals particularly resilient to climate change and other, more specific

environmental stressors. “If we made a comprehensive effort to identify [resilient individuals], and then

interbred those to create new strains, and have the gametes from those, then we could reseed the environment

with climate change–resistant strains,” suggests Langdon, who is working on this approach.

Such selective breeding is just one of several tactics included in a conservation strategy known as assisted

evolution. Other interventions to aid coral survival could include genetic reprogramming and microbiome

manipulation. But first, Putnam says, researchers need a better grip on several aspects of coral biology: much

remains unknown about the interactions of individual polyps with their algal symbionts, and the role of the

coral microbiome. Then, “we can apply that understanding to these approaches,” she says. “I think that’s

where we’re headed right now.”

In the meantime, Hagedorn and Nedimyer point out, frozen coral material, which could potentially last

decades or even hundreds of years in storage, may help preserve genetic diversity that might otherwise be

lost. “I don’t want to get to the point where our only corals are frozen,” says Nedimyer. “But I think

somebody will look at it one day and say, ‘I’m glad you guys did that when you did.’ I think it’s looking into

the future, and trying not to lose something really valuable.”

https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/51371/title/Researchers-Cryopreserve-Coral-Sperm/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5663941/

http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/groups/coral-lab/

http://coralrestoration.org/about/staff/



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Radically Unusual Caterpillars Captured by Photographer Igor Siwanowicz

JANUARY 30, 2018

LAURA STAUGAITIS

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Scientist and photographer Igor Siwanowicz (previously) has made a name for himself documenting the

phenomenal range of shapes, colors, and structures of creatures in the natural world. His many images of

unique caterpillars include wild variations like feathery blue spikes, curling burnt-orange horns, and long

black whiskers. Siwanowicz also works as a neurobiologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia

Farm Research Campus in Virginia. He shares more than ten years of his photography on photo.net.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/10/insect-microscopy-igor-siwanowicz/

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siwanowicz/?mc_cid=af4922dcc2&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/radically-unusual-caterpillars-igor-siwanowicz/?mc_cid=af4922dcc2&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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The insect that painted Europe red

Truly vibrant red was elusive for many years: until a mysterious dye was discovered in Mexico. Devon

Van Houten Maldonado reveals how a crushed bug became a sign of wealth and status.

By Devon Van Houten Maldonado

Although scarlet is the colour of sin in the Old Testament, the ancient world’s elite was

thirsty for red, a symbol of wealth and status. They spent fantastic sums searching for ever

more vibrant hues, until Hernán Cortés and the conquistadors discovered an intoxicatingly

saturated pigment in the great markets of Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City. Made

from the crushed-up cochineal insect, the mysterious dye launched Spain toward its

eventual role as an economic superpower and became one of the New World’s primary

exports, as a red craze descended on Europe. An exhibition at Mexico City’s Palacio de

Bellas Artes museum reveals the far-reaching impact of the pigment through art history,

from the renaissance to modernism.

Baroque painters used cochineal red in works, such as The Musicians (1595) by Caravaggio (Credit: Alamy)

http://museopalaciodebellasartes.gob.mx/rojomexicano/

http://museopalaciodebellasartes.gob.mx/rojomexicano/

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In medieval and classical Europe, artisans and traders tripped over each other in search of

durable saturated colors and – in turn – wealth, amid swathes of weak and watery fabrics.

Dyers guilds guarded their secrets closely and performed seemingly magical feats of

alchemy to fix colours to wool, silk and cotton. They used roots and resins to create

satisfactory yellows, greens and blues. The murex snail was crushed into a dye to create

imperial purple cloth worth more than its weight in gold. But truly vibrant red remained

elusive.

The Turkey red process took months and involved a pestilent mix of cow dung, rancid olive oil and bullocks’

blood

For many years, the most common red in Europe came from the Ottoman Empire, where

the ‘Turkey red’ process used the root of the rubia plant. European dyers tried desperately

to reproduce the results from the East, but succeeded only partially, as the Ottoman

process took months and involved a pestilent mix of cow dung, rancid olive oil and

bullocks’ blood, according to Amy Butler Greenfield in her book, A Perfect Red.

Dyers also used Brazilwood, lac and lichens, but the resulting colours were usually

underwhelming, and the processes often resulted in brownish or orange reds that faded

quickly. For royalty and elite, St John’s Blood and Armenian red (dating back as far as the

8th Century BCE, according to Butler Greenfield), created the most vibrant saturated reds

available in Europe until the 16th Century. But, made from different varieties of

Porphyrophora root parasites, their production was laborious and availability was scarce,

even at the highest prices.

http://www.amybutlergreenfield.com/A%20Perfect%20Red_Story.html

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A farmer collects cochineal insects from cacti. The deep red colour, known as carmine, comes from an acid

that the oval-shaped bug produces to fend off predators (Credit: Alamy)

Mesoamerican peoples in southern Mexico had started using the cochineal bug as early as

2000 BCE, long before the arrival of the conquistadors, according to Mexican textile

expert Quetzalina Sanchez. Indigenous people in Puebla, Tlaxcala and Oaxaca had

systems for breeding and engineering the cochineal bugs for ideal traits and the pigment

was used to create paints for codices and murals, to dye cloth and feathers, and even as

medicine.

Cochineal in the New World

When the conquistadors arrived in Mexico City, the headquarters of the Aztec empire, the

red colour was everywhere. Outlying villages paid dues to their Aztec rulers in kilos of

cochineal and rolls of blood-red cloth. “Scarlet is the colour of blood and the grana from

cochineal achieved that [...] the colour always had a meaning, sometimes magic other

times religious,” Sanchez told the BBC.

Circa 1518, Spanish Conquistador Hernando Cortés speaks with indigenous people in North America

(Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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King Charles V of Spain saw in cochineal an opportunity to prop up the crown’s coffers

Cortés immediately recognized the riches of Mexico, which he related in several letters to

King Charles V. “I shall speak of some of the things I have seen, which although badly

described, I know very well will cause such wonder that they will hardly be believed,

because even we who see them here with our own eyes are unable to comprehend their

reality,” wrote Cortés to the king. About the great marketplace of Tenochtitlan, which was

“twice as large as that of Salamanca," he wrote, “They also sell skeins of different kinds of

spun cotton in all colours, so that it seems quite like one of the silk markets of Granada,

although it is on a greater scale; also as many different colours for painters as can be found

in Spain and of as excellent hues.”

First-hand accounts indicate that Cortés wasn’t overly smitten with cochineal, more

concerned instead with plundering gold and silver. Back in Spain, the king was pressed to

make ends meet and hold together his enormous dominion in relative peace, so, although

he was at first unconvinced by the promise of America, he became fascinated by the exotic

tales and saw in cochineal an opportunity to prop up the crown’s coffers. By 1523,

cochineal pigment made its way back to Spain and caught the attention of the king who

wrote to Cortés about exporting the dyestuff back to Europe, writes Butler.

“Through absurd laws and decrees [the Spanish] monopolised the grana trade,” says

Sanchez. “They obligated the indians to produce as much as possible.” The native

Mesoamericans who specialised in the production of the pigment and weren’t killed by

disease or slaughtered during the conquest were paid pennies on the dollar – while the

Spaniards “profited enormously as intermediaries.”

Red in art history

Dye from the cochineal bug was ten times as potent as St John’s Blood and produced 30

times more dye per ounce than Armenian red, according to Butler. So when European

dyers began to experiment with the pigment, they were delighted by its potential. Most

importantly, it was the brightest and most saturated red they had ever seen. By the middle

of the 16th Century it was being used across Europe, and by the 1570s it had become one

of the most profitable trades in Europe – growing from a meagre “50,000 pounds of

cochineal in 1557 to over 150,000 pounds in 1574,” writes Butler.



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Cristóbal de Villalpando embraced cochineal red, as in his 1695 painting Saint Rose Tempted by the Devil

(Credit: Alamy)

In the Mexican Red exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the introduction of cochineal

red to the European palette is illustrated in baroque paintings from the beginning of the

17th Century, after the pigment was already a booming industry across Europe and the

world. Works by baroque painters like Cristóbal de Villalpando and Luis Juárez, father of

José Juárez, who worked their entire lives in Mexico (New Spain), hang alongside the

Spanish-born Sebastián López de Arteaga and the likes of Peter Paul Rubens.

López de Arteaga’s undated work The Incredulity of Saint Thomas pales in comparison to

Caravaggio’s version of the same work, where St Thomas’s consternation and amazement

is palpable in the skin of his furrowed forehead. But the red smock worn by Christ in

López de Arteaga’s painting, denoting his holiness, absolutely pops off the canvas. Both

artists employed cochineal, the introduction of which helped to establish the dramatic

contrast that characterised the baroque style.

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Caravaggio used cochineal as an essential element of his style, creating a dramatic contrast in The Incredulity

of Saint Thomas, created in 1601-2 (Credit: Alamy)

In López de Arteaga’s undated work The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, the red smock worn by Christ,

denoting his holiness, pops off the canvas (Credit: Wikimedia)

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/1600_900/images/live/p0/5w/w4/p05ww45m.jpg

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A few steps away, a portrait of Isabella Brandt (1610) by Rubens shows the versatility of

paint made from cochineal. The wall behind the woman is depicted in a deep, glowing red,

from which she emerges within a slight aura of light. The bible in her hand was also

rendered in exquisite detail from cochineal red in Rubens’ unmistakable mastery of his

brush, which makes his subjects feel as alive as if they were in front of you.

A portrait of Isabella Brandt (1610) by Rubens shows the versatility of paint made from cochineal (Credit:

Alamy)

Moving forward toward modernism – it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th Century that

cochineal was replaced by synthetic alternatives as the pre-eminent red dyestuff in the

world – impressionist painters continued to make use of the heavenly red hues imported

from Mexico. At the Palacio de Bellas Artes, works by Paul Gauguin, Auguste Renoir and

Vincent van Gogh have all been analysed and tested positive for cochineal. Like Rubens,

Renoir’s subjects seem to be alive on the canvas, but as an impressionist his portraits

dissolved into energetic abstractions.

Gauguin also used colour, especially red, to create playful accents, but neither compared to

the saturation achieved by Van Gogh. His piece, The Bedroom (1888), on loan from the

Art Institute of Chicago, puts a full stop on the exhibition with a single burning-hot spot of

bright red.

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After synthetic pigments became popular, outside of Mexico, the red dye was mass-

produced as industrial food colouring – its main use today. Yet while the newly

independent Mexico no longer controlled the valuable monopoly on cochineal, it also got

something back – the sacred red that had been plundered and proliferated by the Spanish.

“In Europe, as has happened in many cases, the history of the original people of Mexico

has mattered very little,” Sanchez told the BBC, but in Mexico “the colour continues to be

associated with ancestral magic [and] protects those who wear attire dyed with cochineal.”

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180202-the-insect-that-painted-europe-red

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180202-the-insect-that-painted-europe-red



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Besides, I’ll be dead

Meehan Crist

BUYThe Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilised

World by Jeff Goodell

Black Inc., 340 pp, £17.99, October 2017, ISBN 978 1 76064 041 5

After Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, I helped a friend in Brooklyn remove her car battery, put it in a backpack

and lug it over to Wall Street. The subways were flooded, so we took a ferry across the East River to

downtown Manhattan, where a muddy grey waterline cut across ground-floor walls and windows. The ocean

had come and gone, and the mouldering streets were deserted. The air smelled of briny rot and the only sound

was the industrial hum of generators pumping water from flooded basements. Orange accordion tubing

snaked in and out of waterlogged buildings. We turned into the lobby of an apartment building where

residents wandered in a commiserating daze and an exhausted man in uniform was laying out a plate of fresh

fruit, presumably procured from somewhere far uptown, where people still had power and running water and

the sudden absurdity of brunch. A paraplegic friend on an upper floor needed the car battery to help power her

ventilator. The elevators were out of commission, so we walked up twenty narrow flights of stairs, lighting

our way in the dark with torches. Inside the apartment, the friend and her roommate, also paraplegic, had

abandoned their motorised wheelchairs and lay in their beds in a sunny front room, laughing and chatting. It

wasn’t clear when the power would be back, but when things returned to normal they planned to have a party.

I don’t think anyone in that room fully grasped, then, that the ocean would be coming back to stay.

Global sea level rise is hard for scientists to predict, but the trend is clear. Massive ice sheets in Greenland

and the Antarctic have begun to collapse, in a phenomenon known as ‘marine ice-sheet instability’, which

previous models of global sea level rise didn’t take into account. When the Paris Agreement was drafted just

over two years ago, it was based on reports that ice sheets would remain stable and on the assumption that sea

levels could rise by up to three feet two inches by the end of the century. In 2015, Nasa estimated a minimum

of three feet. In 2017, a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the pre-

eminent climate science agency in the United States, revised estimates up dramatically, stating that by 2100

sea levels could rise by more than eight feet. Last year, a study estimated that if carbon emissions continue at

present levels, by 2100 sea levels will have risen by as much as 11 feet. Higher sea levels mean higher storm

surges, like the nine-foot surge that inundated Lower Manhattan and severely affected neighbourhoods in

Long Island and New Jersey, but also that low-lying coastal areas, from Bangladesh to Amsterdam, will be

underwater in less than a hundred years. It’s worth remembering that two-thirds of the world’s cities sit on

coastlines. In a high-emissions scenario, average high tides in New York could be higher than the levels seen

during Sandy. A rise in global sea levels of 11 feet would fully submerge cities like Mumbai and a large part

of Bangladesh. The question is no longer if – but how high, and how fast.

Jeff Goodell, who has been reporting on climate change for years (his previous books include How to Cool

the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate and Big Coal: The Dirty Secret

behind America’s Energy Future), was also in Lower Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy, and the experience so

spooked him that he spent the next four years trying to understand how coastal communities will face the

inevitable rise in sea levels. Goodell travels from Norfolk, Virginia to the waterparks of Rotterdam, talking to

scientists, politicians, architects, artists, refugees and people living at the waterline, where regular flooding is

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9781760640415/water-will-come-rising-seas-sinking-cities-and-the-remaking-of-the-civilized-world?utm_source=LRB&utm_medium=BNbutton&utm_campaign=BuyNow

http://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Goodell,+Jeff



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already a fact of life. He wades barefoot through the polluted waters that flood Miami Beach during king

tides, visits a family living in the ‘blackwater slum’ of Makoko, just outside Lagos, and interviews Barack

Obama during his historic trip to Alaska. The book skips along with the brisk pace of magazine journalism –

some of the chapters first appeared in a different form in publications such as Rolling Stone – and Goodell

finds people with visionary plans, dubious schemes and heads planted deep in shifting sands. Most of the

time, he is an observer rather than a polemicist, but his profound concern resonates throughout, as when he

asks Obama: ‘How do you gauge how much truth America can take? Because you know what’s coming.’ This

is a soggy, saturated book. Everywhere Goodell goes, the water is rising. ‘For anyone living in Miami Beach

or South Brooklyn or Boston’s Back Bay or any other low-lying coastal neighbourhood,’ he writes, ‘the

difference between three feet of sea level rise by 2100 and six feet is the difference between a wet but liveable

city and a submerged city … The difference between three feet and six feet is the difference between a

manageable coastal crisis and a decades-long refugee disaster.’

This isn’t the first time in human history that global sea levels have risen dramatically in a short period of

time. Archaeological evidence shows that when glaciers melted and sea levels rose at the end of the first Ice

Age, humans living along coastlines packed up their communities and moved inland. But today’s coastal

infrastructure is far less mobile. ‘There’s a terrible irony in the fact that it’s the very infrastructure of the

Fossil Fuel Age – the housing and office developments on the coasts, the roads, the railroads, the tunnels, the

airports – that makes us most vulnerable,’ Goodell writes. Major airports such as JFK and San Francisco

International are likely to be underwater within a hundred years. The eastern coast of the UK will be altered

for ever. Florida’s Turkey Point nuclear reactor, which sits perched on an exposed island in Biscayne Bay, is a

disaster waiting to happen. Trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure and entire coastal economies have been

built on land that will soon be flooded, and that’s without taking into account the road erosion, beach erosion

and coming property collapse along coastlines, which could trigger economic plunges deeper than the Great

Recession. Today, more than 145 million people around the world live three feet or less above sea level, many

in poor countries in the global South. ‘As the waters rise,’ Goodell writes, ‘millions of these people will be

displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s

Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.’ There is no longer any doubt that the rise

in global sea levels will reshape human civilisation.

Goodell focuses on the city, that unit of human organisation small enough to have local leaders capable of co-

ordinating action and large enough to seem organised by forces beyond human control. Throughout his

travels, he keeps the brash, glittering city of Miami in his peripheral vision. This most American of cities is

new, having been built over the last hundred years as developers turned swamps and coastlines into a

playground for a generation who came to see what had been ‘wilderness’ as a place for umbrellas and snacks

and leisure. ‘The core business of Miami is real estate and tourism,’ Goodell writes. ‘It is an empire of

property and pleasure.’ Real estate is still the economic engine of Miami, where properties are sold and resold

so fast that ‘nobody wants to spend the money to build a more resilient city because nobody owns the risk.’

The current housing boom is tied to foreign buyers’ parking cash in condos; much of the cash is derived from

commodities like oil, which makes it ‘a city that is literally drowning as a result of the combustion of the

fossil fuels that made them rich’. Miami is now caught in a deadly paradox: coastal development must

continue to keep the city running, but developing the coastline is suicidal folly in the face of rising seas. All

along the coast and into the low-lying Everglades, buildings and crucial infrastructure are threatened. ‘I am

afraid my people are going to lose everything,’ says Xavier Cortada, an artist and child of Cuban refugees

who tries to raise awareness in his communities about the risks of sea level rise. And yet, development

continues. As one ‘apoplectic’ estate agent tells Goodell after a talk about whether brokers should be required

to disclose flood risks, ‘That would be idiotic … It would just kill the market.’

Goodell paints a compelling portrait of a city paralysed by conflicting interests, greed and deep-seated denial.

At one event he describes as speed-dating for ‘the sea-level rise intelligentsia’, a geologist from the University



176

of Miami candidly explains to a table of Florida estate agents that the sea level may rise by 15 feet over the

next eighty years. One ‘expensively dressed real estate broker’ at the table responds ‘like a six-year-old on the

verge of a temper tantrum … “This can’t be a fear-fest … Why is everyone picking on Miami?”’ At an art

opening (for Michele Oka Doner, whose work addresses climate change), Goodell manages to corner Jorge

Pérez, the Miami real estate mogul and an influential Democratic Party donor. Asked if he’s worried that

flooding will affect the value of his empire, Pérez replies: ‘No, I am not worried about that … I believe that in

twenty or thirty years, someone is going to find a solution for this … Besides, by that time, I’ll be dead, so

what does it matter?’ This devil-may-care response echoes a common sentiment: someone is going to save us.

‘In Miami,’ Goodell writes, ‘as in every other city in the world, there is hope that if sea levels rise slowly

enough, it will erode the politics of denial and inspire innovation and creative thinking, and the whole crisis

will be manageable.’

The rate at which sea levels rise matters immensely for coastal cities, as a slow and steady rise could allow for

adaptation strategies such as ‘planned retreat’ from shorelines, or raising cities up (Chicago was raised by

about eight feet in the 1860s to combat flooding and sewage problems), or massive engineering projects to

divert seawater from highly populated areas. The relationship between water and land in Amsterdam isn’t the

same as it is in Jakarta or Lagos, so what may work for one city will not work for another. In New York, city

planners are considering a sea wall known as the Big U around Lower Manhattan, but a sea wall won’t work

in Miami, which is built on porous limestone. In Venice, elegant MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale

Elettromeccanico) barriers, designed to fit the canals, rise and fall with the tides to prevent flooding. But the

$6 billion project remains unfinished (it was nearly capsized by corruption) and the system will cost anywhere

between $5 million and $80 million a year to maintain, depending on how often the barriers are raised. When

Goodell asks a representative from the engineering firm what rise in sea levels the barriers can handle, he is

shocked to hear that the answer is about two feet. MOSE could be useless by 2050. ‘After that,’ the

representative says matter-of-factly, ‘the sea will come in from other places … There’s nothing we can do to

stop it.’ The Thames Barrier in London will soon need to be replaced, but planners are holding off because

big infrastructure is ‘very expensive, it takes a long time to build, and it’s not very adaptable to changing

conditions’.

How coastal communities fare may rest on how easily their inhabitants are able to let go of the status quo. In

Toms River, New Jersey, a ‘working-class version of Miami’ perched on ‘a wispy island of sand facing the

Atlantic’ and prone to flooding, ten thousand homes were lost to Hurricane Sandy. Over the course of the

following year, a team of scientists and researchers at Rutgers University worked with local officials and

community members to come up with a plan for the future:

The Rutgers team wanted to create an inland ‘pier’ or passageway to connect the coast with the nearby Pine

Barrens, a heavily forested area with a unique coastal ecosystem (orchids and carnivorous plants), allowing

for easy movement of people and wildlife. They imagined connecting the beach with inland areas by means of

new, more sea-level-rise-friendly transportation systems, including aerial trams and water taxis. But they also

imagined that as the seas rose, beach tourism would give way to a broader and more sustainable kind of

ecotourism, including hiking and biking and birdwatching in the Pine Barrens. The plan included five

thousand new housing units on higher ground to ease the transition away from the coast … it would have

begun transforming the city into a place that might thrive in a world of rising seas and increased storms.

Goodell speaks admiringly of visionary architects and city planners, but acting on large-scale, long-term plans

requires short-term economic, political and personal losses that serve as powerful disincentives. In Miami, it

remains political suicide to suggest action that would undercut the housing market. In Toms River, inhabitants

who liked their homes by the sea and ‘voted two to one in favour of Trump’ chose to use federal money to

rebuild the town more or less exactly as it was.



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Even if a wealthy city can muster the resources and political will necessary for massive adaptation projects,

there remain serious concerns about who will be protected. In New York, the Big U would divert water from

the financial centre of Lower Manhattan, but diverted seawater would spill out along the edges of the wall.

Who would be protected and who would be harmed remains an open question. On a global scale, sea level

rise is inherently unequal. The use of fossil fuels by a slim minority of Earth’s human population is driving

the collapse of ice sheets, and the water won’t rise evenly along all coastlines. In Bangladesh, the land is

sinking, so the sea will rise higher than in other places. The collapse of Greenland’s ice sheets will have a

greater effect in the southern hemisphere, while collapse in Antarctica will have a greater effect in the north.

‘Scientists call this regional effect fingerprinting,’ Goodell writes. ‘The ice sheets melt and their mass gets

smaller, which reduces their gravitational pull on the water around them. This causes the sea levels in the

immediate area to fall – but that falling water pushes the water higher on the opposite side of the Earth.’

While the collapse of glaciers in West Antarctica would cause an average rise in global sea levels of about ten

feet, New York coastlines would see a rise of 13 feet, which is well above what any coastal city is prepared to

absorb. For Pacific islanders in places like Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, the threat is existential.

*

Sea level rise is a problem humans are particularly ill-equipped to handle. We’re not good at thinking on

geological timescales and ‘we are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually

accelerate over time.’ To help explain inaction in the face of rising seas, Goodell invokes, as others have, the

five stages of grief outlined by the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining,

depression, acceptance. He suggests that in Miami at least, denial is giving way to anger and bargaining, with

overtones of fear. But classical grief paradigms, in which the object of attachment has gone and must be

mourned, don’t map neatly onto the experience of living in a city that may soon be submerged. Reading this,

it seemed to me that there is another psychological paradigm, less often invoked in discussions of climate

grief, that might be more apt. In the 1970s Pauline Boss, studying families of soldiers who had gone missing

in action, coined the term ‘ambiguous loss’ to describe the arrested mourning that follows a loss without

closure or understanding.

Boss describes two types of ambiguous loss: when the object is physically absent but psychologically present

(as with soldiers missing in action), and when the object is physically present but psychologically absent (as

with Alzheimer’s disease). The first helps illuminate the arrested mourning often experienced by climate

refugees. How do you mourn a home that is sinking into a faraway sea, but remains psychologically present?

The second type of ambiguous loss is appropriate to the experience of living in an area threatened by a rise in

sea levels. The object of attachment is there but not there – still present, but slowly disappearing. How do you

mourn the loss of someone whose hand you can still hold? How do you mourn a home increasingly prone to

flooding, but not submerged, yet? The parallels aren’t perfect, but even the disjunctures reveal how wickedly

hard the problem of climate grief can be. When a beloved person is slowly disappearing into the fog of

senescence, the endpoint is known. With rising seas, the endpoint remains unknown. Three feet? Eight feet?

Grief is stalled by uncertainty. For what eventuality should you and your community prepare? Of what do you

need to let go in order to move forward? The incentive to wait and see is powerful. But hoping for a rise in

sea levels of just one or two feet by 2100 is starting to look a lot like self-delusion, and for those who have the

luxury of choice, clinging to life at the waterline is increasingly an exercise in self-defeat. For politicians and

the rich, who prosper from maintenance of the status quo, it is increasingly unconscionable.

In the coming years, as cities around the world need to be raised, rebuilt, walled off from the ocean, or

abandoned, millions of people will be displaced, impoverished and left to fend for themselves by governments

unwilling or unable to help. Driving along the Jersey shore, Goodell hears a man called Anthony Caronia on

the radio, pleading for a government buyout of his home so he can move to higher ground:



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I’m being honest with you, I’m giving up! … This is not right. This is not fair. Something needs to be done

today. Today. Please understand me – this is a cry out for help. From anyone and everyone in America

listening, Mr Anthony Caronia is begging the State of Louisiana and the United States government to come in

and buy me out and please move my family outta harm’s way. Please understand my cry. I’m ready to go. I’m

begging for help.

Goodell writes with compassion and clarity: ‘Not everyone is going to be saved. Wealthy people will take

care of themselves, either by moving their homes or elevating them or building seawalls or simply writing off

the house as it crumbles into the sea, but for the vast majority of people who live on coastlines, it’s going to

be a tough day when they wake up and realise that their state or federal government doesn’t have the money

or the political will to rescue them.’ In a sprawling slum just outside Lagos, where houses stand on stilts over

polluted water and are accessible only by boat, residents’ homes ‘will be chainsawed or burned and they will

be forced to live on the streets or jam themselves into … buildings which, like virtually all buildings in Lagos,

have been built at sea level and are therefore doomed in the coming years, creating a new generation of

refugees’. He doesn’t mince words: these refugees ‘will pay for the stupidity and greed of others with the

health of their children and their own brutally short lives’. Already, the greatest human migration since the

end of the first Ice Age is underway, and while people aren’t water (Steve Bannon’s favourite novel is a racist

fantasy that insistently describes migrants as a flood), it isn’t hard to imagine increasingly nationalistic

governments committing to closed border policies as a barbarous form of flood insurance.

This melancholy book is not without glimmers of hope. Goodell writes in nostalgic terms about a past when

people lived with water, not in opposition to it. Looking forward, he is enamoured of the Nigerian architect

Kunlé Adeyemi’s floating school in Makoko, ‘an astonishingly simple, elegant structure, one that suggested

we could solve the problem of living with water if we just thought about it a little differently’. He trains his

gaze on Rotterdam, a young city built to adapt perhaps better than any other to sea level rise. The book’s very

last pages finally touch on the idea that people might join together to share resources and work to save each

other. The Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze compares the remaking of global coastlines with other

‘transformative catastrophes’ such as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, ‘a partly manmade natural disaster that

profoundly changed the geography of America and also expanded the role government plays in ensuring the

long-term welfare of even the most vulnerable people’. Geuze tells Goodell that what’s to come ‘is going to

require a rethinking of the social contract between government and its citizens’. Goodell’s response is

cautious: ‘Maybe it will.’

What will happen in the next eighty years remains far from certain. There is a tipping point after which ice

sheets will fully collapse – Greenland holds enough water to raise sea levels by roughly 22 feet – but

researchers don’t know where that point lies. In January, NOAA released a major report on sea level rise that

factors in current ice-sheet collapse and more than doubles the median rise in global sea levels predicted at the

time of the Paris Agreement, from 2.3 feet to 4.9 feet. Goodell’s conclusion is crystal clear: ‘If we want to

minimise the impact of sea level rise in the next century, here’s how we do it: stop burning fossil fuels and

move to higher ground.’ If humans stopped using fossil fuels entirely by 2050, we might face two to three feet

of sea level rise by the end of the century. Instead of 4.9 feet. Or 11 feet. But the water will come. The future

depends on how humans rise to meet it.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/meehan-crist/besides-ill-be-dead



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This Japanese Concept of Happiness Could Help You Live a More Meaningful Life

Focusing on your own happiness can prove self-defeating. Finding your “ikigai” offers an alternative

perspective on well-being.

Iza Kavedžija posted Jan 27, 2018

Happiness is the subject of countless quotations, slogans, self-help books and personal choices. It is also being

taken seriously by national governments and organizations like the United Nations, as somethingsocieties

should aim for.

This political recognition makes a welcome change from long-held obsessions with income and economic

growth when it comes to choosing policies or measuring their success—but it is not without its faults.

To begin with, how do you measure and compare national happiness levels? This is particularly challenging

given that people tend to inaccurately evaluate their emotional states or present themselves to others in a

positive light.

Different cultural understandings of happiness also make comparisons difficult. But understanding what

makes life worthwhile in certain contexts—which may be different from happiness—can offer an alternative

perspective on well-being.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/@@also-by?author=Iza+Kaved%C5%BEija

http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/

http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/



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For example, even though the Japanese language possesses several terms that could be translated as

“happiness” or “happy” (including “shiawase” and “koufuku”), one that has emerged as central to that

country’s understanding of a life well-lived is “ikigai.”

The word is often translated as: “that which makes life worth living”—having a purpose in life. Examples of

ikigai could include aspects related to one’s social identity, such as work or family, or the pursuit of self-

realization, such as hobbies or travel, activities that are seen as ends in themselves.

Numerous books have been published recently on how to find one’s true ikigai. In fact, the “ikigai treatise

boom” peaked in the 1970s and 1980s—perhaps as the product of two trends characterizing that period.

Economic prosperity and the weakening of societal values both contributed to a sense of instability in Japan at

that time.

In the years since, after a lengthy era of economic stagnation, uncertainty in Japanese society has only

increased. Today, books on ikigai appear to function more as a cultural export.

The idea is now often detached from its original context, and offered to foreigners as the “Japanese path to

happiness,” not too dissimilar to the recent craze for the Danish concept of “hygge.”

Ikigai, as a focus on a particular sphere of life or activity that makes life worth living, is important.

It would be easy, then, to dismiss the value of ikigai as a fad, or to take it at face value and neglect its nuanced

cultural meanings. Both would be a mistake in my view, as despite its limitations, the concept of ikigai still

has much to offer.

Japanese ideas of ikigai are often gender-based. Men tend to say their work or employer gives them a sense of

self-worth. Women often say their sense of meaning comes from family or motherhood. Such male/female

framing is not only restrictive, it also poses a problem for those who are unable to frame their life in such

terms. Japanese self-help manuals are most often targeted at retired or unemployed men, or single women.

In this sense, ikigai appears closely related to the idea of a clearly defined social role, offering a source of

identity and meaning. It might also be seen to put an emphasis on only one domain of life, at the expense of

others. Seeing work as one’s ikigai might make it all too easy to neglect meaningful pursuits outside the

workplace.

One can feel the pressure to perceive a certain domain as the source of one’s ikigai – but what happens when

that domain is no longer available, or no longer brings joy? Luckily, ikigai can also change and develop.

A sense of purpose

Focusing on one’s own happiness can prove self-defeating. The active pursuit of happiness and a

determination to be or feel happy can quickly lead to a sense of inadequacy and disappointment. In this sense,

happiness as a goal might be forever out of reach, little more than a fleeting and elusive ideal.

Yet the pursuit of other goals seen as worthwhile can lead to a sense of well-being. In this sense, ikigai, as a

focus on a particular sphere of life or activity that makes life worth living, is important. It gives a sense of

purpose to life, but one that need not be grand or monumental.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Japan/Economic-transformation

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/30/britains-economy-what-happened-japan

https://theconversation.com/the-danish-concept-of-hygge-and-why-its-their-latest-successful-export-67268



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Unlike the English term “purpose in life,” ikigai need not imply large or extraordinary projects that promise to

lift one above everyday experiences. Such projects can equally be located in the mundane and the humble.

Furthermore, as I have learned in my own research with older Japanese, effective ikigai is inextricably linked

to a sense of mastery—the idea known as “chanto suru” that things should be done properly. As such, ikigai

emphasizes process and immersion rather than a final aim.

Doing something as well as you possibly can makes life more meaningful.

This article was originally published by The Conversation. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/this-japanese-concept-of-happiness-could-help-you-live-a-more-

meaningful-life-

20180127?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=YTW_20170202&utm_content=YTW_20170202+CID_59a

d1aa3fe5c5ec234bbe36c11aa17d2&utm_source=CM&utm_term=This%20Japanese%20Concept%20of%20H

appiness%20Could%20Help%20You%20Live%20a%20More%20Meaningful%20Life

https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau5.3.008

https://theconversation.com/the-japanese-concept-of-ikigai-why-purpose-might-be-a-better-goal-than-happiness-88709



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Gravity doesn’t leak into large, hidden dimensions

Observations from neutron star smashup challenge some theories that include unknown realms

BY

EMILY CONOVER

3-D VISION Light and gravitational waves from a recent neutron star merger (illustrated) suggested that

there are only three large dimensions of spacetime into which gravity can penetrate.

FERMILAB

When it comes to the dimensions of spacetime, what you see may be what you get.

Using observations from the collision of two neutron starsthat made headlines in 2017 (SN: 11/11/17, p. 6),

scientists found no evidence of gravity leaking into hidden dimensions. The number of observed large spatial

dimensions — kilometer-scale or bigger — is still limited to the three we know and love, the researchers

report January 24 at arXiv.org.

Just as insects floating on a pond may be unaware of what’s above or below the water’s surface, our 3-D

world might be part of a higher-dimensional universe that we can’t directly observe. However, says

astrophysicist David Spergel of Princeton University, a coauthor of the new study, “gravity might be able to

explore those other dimensions.”

https://www.sciencenews.org/author/emily-conover

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neutron-star-collision-gravitational-waves

https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.08160



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Such extra dimensions might explain some conundrums in physics, such as the existence of dark matter (an

as-yet-unidentified source of mass in the universe) and dark energy (which causes the universe’s expansion

rate to accelerate), says coauthor Daniel Holz, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. “That’s why

people get excited about these modifications.”

To look for any hint of leaking gravity, scientists turned to the light and gravitational waves emitted in the

neutron star smashup detected on August 17, 2017. The light allowed scientists to find the galaxy where the

neutron stars merged. Spergel, Holz and colleagues showed that, given the galaxy’s distance from Earth, the

strength of the gravitational waves was as expected. Extra dimensions weren’t stealing, and thus weakening,

the observed ripples.

A variety of theories predict extra dimensions of spacetime into which gravity could leak, but the new result

applies only to large extra dimensions, Spergel says. That’s because the gravitational waves detected from the

neutron star collision have wavelengths of thousands of kilometers. Tiny extra dimensions, smaller than a

fraction of a millimeter across, have also been proposed, but they wouldn’t affect such extended ripples.

One theory, proposed in 2000 by a group of theoretical physicists including Georgi Dvali, predicts a type of

large extra dimension. The effects of gravity leaking into such dimensions would be visible only over long

distances — explaining why gravity on smaller scales, such as the size of the solar system, behaves as if there

are three spatial dimensions.

Because the gravitational waves don’t seem to weaken on their trek to Earth, they must travel more than about

65 million light-years before leaking into any potential additional dimension, the researchers concluded in the

new study.

But other theories of extra dimensions are unaffected by the result. String theory, which posits that particles

are made up of infinitesimal vibrating strings, predicts tiny extra dimensions that are curled up on themselves.

“We’re not in any way ruling out string theory,” Spergel says. Another variety of extra spacetime dimension,

of potentially infinite size, was proposed by physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum in 1999 (SN:

9/26/09, p. 22). But such theories also would not be ruled out, because gravity can’t penetrate very far into

that type of extra dimension.

Neutron star mergers are “a completely new laboratory of testing gravity,” says Dvali, of Ludwig-

Maximilians-Universität in Munich, who was not involved with the research. “This is absolutely fascinating

and fantastic.” But, Dvali notes, the type of extra dimension he proposed back in 2000 already seems unlikely

on these scales. “I would say there is already an extremely strong constraint on leakage coming from

cosmology.” No matter how far we peer out into space, the universe seems to follow the normal laws of

gravity in three dimensions.

For now, the dimensions of space remain as simple as 1, 2, 3.

Citations

K. Pardo et al. Limits on the number of spacetime dimensions from GW170817. arXiv:1801.08160. Posted

January 24, 2018.

Further Reading

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269300006699?via%3Dihub

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269300006699?via%3Dihub

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/hunting-hidden-dimensions

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.4690

https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.08160



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E. Conover. Neutron star collision showers the universe with a wealth of discoveries. Science News. Vol.

192, November 11, 2017, p. 6.

D. Steele. Hunting hidden dimensions. Science News. Vol. 176, September 26, 2009, p. 22.

R. Cowen. Capping the length of extra dimensions. Science News. Vol. 176, August 1, 2009, p. 7.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/gravity-doesnt-leak-large-hidden-dimensions

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neutron-star-collision-gravitational-waves

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/hunting-hidden-dimensions

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/capping-length-extra-dimensions



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What if you never saw your colleagues in person again?

How telecommuting will shape our work and our minds

By Bryan Lufkin

In our new Augmented Reality column, BBC Capital will explore scenarios you might encounter in your not-

so-distant future. First, we’re going to look at what would happen if your 40-hour workweek were entirely

devoid of other people.

Throughout my career I’ve worked with people that I’ve never met in person. In theory, I could spend an

entire day without meeting another human face-to-face.

But could this kind of self-imposed isolation become standard working practice in the future?

Would we care? Have things gone so far that we might not even notice?

Studies show that in the US, the number of telecommuters rose 115% between 2005 and 2017. And in early

2015, around 500,000 people used Slack, the real-time chat room programme, daily. By last September, that

number soared to over 6 million.

In 2017 a Gallup poll revealed that 43% of 15,000 Americans say they spend at least some of their time

working remotely, a 4% rise from 2012. And a 2015 YouGov study found that 30% of UK office workers say

they feel more productive when they work outside their workplace.

How would we feel if we never had to work with another person face-to-face again? Would we care? Have

things gone so far that we might not even notice?

Our drift towards working alone could have a significant impact on our physical and mental health, the way

our companies run and even shape our cities. We spoke to a group of experts to find out what they think.

https://www.flexjobs.com/2017-State-of-Telecommuting-US/

https://www.fastcompany.com/3042326/with-500000-users-slack-says-its-the-fastest-growing-business-app-ever

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/09/12/slack-passes-6-million-daily-users-and-opens-up-channels-to-multi-company-use/#6f3662267fdb

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/09/12/slack-passes-6-million-daily-users-and-opens-up-channels-to-multi-company-use/#6f3662267fdb

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/remote-workers-work-from-home.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/remote-workers-work-from-home.html

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/10/20/30-uk-office-workers-are-more-productive-when-work/

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/10/20/30-uk-office-workers-are-more-productive-when-work/



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Over 40% of UK workers feel more productive working remotely, and the number of remote workers has

gone up 115% in the US in 12 years (Credit: Getty)

What could a human-free workplace look like?

In 2018 it seems we’re in the middle of a work-from-home era of pyjamas and Slack. But futurists envisage

something a lot more science-fiction in decades to come. The working day could start, for instance, by

uploading our schedules and daily goals into virtual reality doppelgangers - representations of ourselves that

we then dispatch to online meetings in our stead.

“My digitally-engineered persona might be interacting with clients and employees and customers around the

world simultaneously,” says James Canton, CEO of the Institute for Global Futures, and who has advised

three White House administrations on future workplace trends. “I can direct it and it can have a certain degree

of autonomous decisions.”

The working day could start by uploading our schedules and daily goals into virtual reality doppelgangers -

representations of ourselves that we then dispatch to online meetings in our stead

He’s working with scientists to develop these online bots: “On the back end, there will be massive

supercomputer capabilities and The Cloud.” But they’ll look like whatever we want them to look like: “Kids

may want to choose a dinosaur, guys might want to choose Emma Stone,” says Canton.

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Office workers are already happily abandoning their face-to-face interactions in droves, in favour of what’s

widely referred to as flexible working, or telecommuting. But if human beings “are such social creatures”

then won't sitting hunched over glowing screens all day risk damaging our mental health, or even impair our

emotional intelligence?

What does working alone do to your mind?

Some believe the increase in telecommuting will inevitably lead to employee ennui at best, and a rise in

depression at worst.

Faith Popcorn, a futurist who has advised giants like AT&T, IBM and Coca-Cola on the future of the

workforce says, “you’re going to have to go somewhere. Find some amusement.” And that diversion could

involve companies sanctioning staff down time to watch YouTube videos or listen to music or even going on

trips, she says. Still, Popcorn believes a human-free, remote-only workplace will inevitably prompt some

employees to go on “fantasy adventures”: that could meaning anything from extra holidays to retreats to

immersive VR worlds to even pornography addiction.

It certainly makes it more challenging to build that camaraderie when you’re not physically there sharing

meals at a lunch room – that does change the dynamic - David Ballard

“For some people, (telecommuting) is not a good fit – the lack of informal interactions with co-workers

throughout the day wears on them,” says David Ballard, a doctor at the American Psychological Association

who oversees its Center for Organizational Excellence. “Or the lack of structure, when they’re left to their

own devices at home or in a remote setting. It’s harder to stay organised.”

And while sending holographic likenesses of ourselves along to board meetings sounds pretty fun, going

through the cycles of the workweek entirely alone might not. It will likely make it harder for workers and

their managers to build any sort of sense of collaborative team.

“It certainly makes it more challenging to build that camaraderie when you’re not physically there sharing

meals at a lunch room – that does change the dynamic,” Ballard adds.

Smart robots stand to replace humans in many fields - and empathy that only humans bring to the table might

be at risk with the rise of remote working, experts say (Credit: Getty)

There’s nothing that can really replace face-to-face interaction and connection. The things you pick up from

meeting someone in person – such as body language, intonation, or the intuition that senses when someone’s

upset or something’s off in a conversation – are the advantages that humans use at work that technology

cannot.

Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics, a firm that specialises in analysing emerging workplace

strategies, says emotional intelligence is declining. “In part because people are on their computers instead of

out on the playground.”

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150706-the-small-list-of-things-that-make-humans-unique



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A steady drop in emotional intelligence (EQ) has been tracked by researchers over several years: back in

2010, a University of Michigan studyfound that university students show 40% less empathy than students a

couple decades ago, less frequently agreeing with statements like “I sometimes try to understand my friends

better by imagining how things look from their perspective" and "I often have tender, concerned feelings for

people less fortunate than me."

But it's developing this type of emotional intelligence that will be key to navigating jobs of the future,

especially if those jobs will require being surrounded by fewer humans and more technology.

The argument against working from home

At first glance it looks like firms will save millions and stand only to gain from granting more employees

flexible working. They can potentially save massive amounts of money: according to Global Workplace

Analytics, each company could stand to save $11,000 per employee per year, from cost savings in areas like

property, turnover and electricity bills.

But the reality of managing an entire workforce that are out-of-office could have some significant unforeseen

costs. Last year, IBM reversed its position on flexible working when it called employees back to offices in-

person, after stating in 2007 that 40% of its 400,000 employees no longer reported to a traditional

office. Yahoo did something similar in 2013; a leaked memo to Yahoo staff was reported to suggest that some

of the best decisions and insights at the firm came from "hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new

people, and impromptu team meetings in the office."

Body language, intonation, or the intuition that senses when someone’s upset or something’s off in a

conversation – are the advantages that humans use at work that technology cannot

http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724-empathy-college-students-don-t-have-as-much-as-they-used-to

http://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/cut-oil

http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/19/technology/ibm-work-at-home/index.html

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-workplace-flexibility/yahoo-memo-sparks-debate-on-pros-and-cons-of-working-at-home-idUSBRE91P0S720130226

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/1600_900/images/live/p0/5w/l5/p05wl5kr.jpg



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Though there isn’t yet much hard data that suggests firms will lose any money by letting a majority of its

workers telecommute, the persistent fear is that these workers might end up being less efficient or loyal. After

all, “you don’t want employees running their own start-ups on company time,” Ballard says.

Still, the rise of the “gig economy” has created a surge of skilled freelancers and remote workers. Walk into

any trendy, Fairtrade café in any major city and no doubt you’ll find waves of hip, tattooed professionals

hunched over Macbooks and drip coffees. But monitoring this out of office workforce and keeping tabs on

their productivity is tricky. Although companies like Humanyze, a start-up in Boston, have developed

employee ID badges that track biometric data from human employees, like physical movements, voice tone

and length of conversation which could help.

Preparing managers for the transition

More people working from home is an inevitability, if recent statistics are to believed. And the onus will be

on managers to adapt to the new environment.

“Part of the problem is that we still manage people the way we did in the Industrial Revolution, like when

people were working on an assembly line – if they see you, they think you’re being productive,” says Ballard

of the American Psychological Association. “We need to train managers and supervisors how to better

manage a remote workforce.”

How do they do that? Well, in 2015, Harvard Business Review wrote that many companies that allow

telecommuting “focus too much on technology and not enough on process. This is akin to trying to fix a

sports team’s performance by buying better equipment.” There needs to be emphasis on basics like

communication and coordination, HBR argues.

That means that managers must still able to explain complex ideas to employees, even in a virtual setting.

HBR mentions one exercise in which subject A describes an image to subject B over the phone. Then subject

B must attempt to describe the description via email to subject C – and sure enough, subject C’s interpretation

often ends up wonky.

It is also suggested that managers also be readily available to all employees in all time zones to build trust and

efficiency.

And that's the real challenge that could develop, one that's more probable (or at least more pressing) than

working alone and being surrounded by talking holograms.

An already blurred line separating work and not work is becoming increasingly blurred as working remotely

becomes more popular. We might end up with the freedom to work where we want, but those technologies

that grant us mobility will simultaneously chain us more to our jobs, as we become instantly and freely

accessible, regardless of time or place.

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180130-what-if-you-never-saw-your-colleagues-in-person-again

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/07/11/535398716/some-employers-are-rethinking-telework-citing-a-need-for-better-collaboration

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170918-how-the-gig-economy-creates-job-insecurity

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170613-the-tech-that-tracks-your-movements-at-work

https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-remote-work-thrives-in-some-companies-and-fails-in-others

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180130-what-if-you-never-saw-your-colleagues-in-person-again



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The rise of the superbugs

Sergio Laínez January 31, 2018

Scanning Electron Microscopy of Acinetobacter Baumannii. Source: CDC’s Public Health Image Library.

Our society will be facing a number of health-related challenges in the near future, partly as a consequence of

our own practices. Perhaps the best known examples are the (severe) health issues linked to smoking (not just

to smokers, but also their children via epigenetic changes) or the abnormally high intake of carbohydrates,

with the latter one becoming an ever-growing burden for the public health system (and entirely preventable).

Regrettably, these are not isolated issues and there is yet another fast-growing -and potentially worse-

problem, which is the rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) pathogens, the so-called superbugs.

Antibiotic prescription has revolutionized medicine since it was serendipitously discovered by Fleming back

in 1928, but it has come at a price. Despite the tendency to unnecessarily prescribe antibiotics by physicians –

with ~30% of antibiotics prescribed in US being dispensable – and the debate as to whether this has led to a

faster acquisition rate of resistance by bacterial strains, the genetic versatility of these unicellular organisms

allows them to rapidly develop resistance to many antibiotics currently in use. Still, the acquisition of

resistance varies depending on the bacterial species and the antibiotic under consideration. As an illustrative

example, Spain had in 2015 a 25-50% range of Escherichia coli invasive isolates with resistance to

fluoroquinolones, while the percentage of the same bacteria resistant to third-generation cephalosporins was

https://mappingignorance.org/author/sergio-lainez/

https://phil.cdc.gov/default.aspx

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2016/p0503-unnecessary-prescriptions.html

https://ecdc.europa.eu/sites/portal/files/media/en/publications/Publications/antimicrobial-resistance-europe-2015.pdf



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10-25%, suggesting we are not in a national health emergency, but some sort of strategy should be in place.

Perhaps the most pressing issue is the occurrence of nosocomial infections, which are those acquired by

different means (e.g. contaminated equipment, staff gowns, among others) in hospitals or related health care

facilities, accounting for at least 2.5 million new healthcare-associated infections per year just in Europe.

Mutations in bacterial own genes or horizontal acquisition of exogenous mobile genetic elements between

bacteria represent the main mechanisms explaining the acquisition of resistance. At the functional

level, resistance involves enzymatic degradation of antibiotics, modification of antibiotic protein targets or

changes in membrane permeability to them. One of the “usual suspects” involved in nosocomial infections is

the gram-negative Acinetobacter baumannii, which causes thousands of deaths every year –via pneumonia or

bloodstream infections- and has been tagged as “serious threat” by the US Centers for Disease Control. The

underlying reason seems to be an abnormally fast rate of resistance acquisition through horizontal gene

transfer (HGT), not being clear how they can achieve such high transfer rate.

In order to shed light on that matter, Cooper et al decided to study the well-known relative Acinetobacter

baylyi, which is arguably not the best model to use for comparison purposes -as is a soil bacterium lacking

clinical relevance- but as a basic research approximation is quite interesting. They co-cultured A.

baylyi and E. coli containing green fluorescence and AMR genes against kanamycin on a microfluidics device

allowing single cell monolayer visualization 1. As both bacteria began to grow, they observed lysis of E.

coli accompanied by the appearance of green fluorescing A. baylyi, indicative of HGT (Figure 1). Likewise,

when Kanamycin was added to the culture, these brand new green Acinetobacter kept growing, confirming

the AMR genes had been transferred too (Figure 1). Interestingly, HGT was dramatically reduced when the

ability of A. baylyi to kill was inhibited, indicating the high HGT rate relies upon a cell killing-dependent

mechanism. However, when killing-dependent HGT happens, the newly acquired genes can be uptaken by

nearby non-killing cells. That means that the presence of different microbes together further facilitates HGT,

and that is not good news, as different bacterial strains cohabitate in hospitals.

Finally, they narrow-down conditions at which maximal HGT rates happen. These include: The need for

direct contact between predator and prey cells, and high predator to low prey density (especially at the

beginning of the experiments). These observations represent valuable information that should enable scientists

to find more efficient ways to fight AMR, and provide guidance to assess if similar transfer rates and

mechanism are common to other bacterial strains tagged as “serious threats” too.

Furthermore, authorities should envisage other types of measures which should then be efficiently

implemented and strictly followed by healthcare professionals. Some of them may include: The prevention of

infections and spread of resistant bacteria (hygienic measures, especially in hospital environment); continuous

tracking of resistant bacteria (development of commercial kits allowing the identification of hundreds of

bacterial strains); optimize the use of antibiotics by reducing their prescription and foster the development of

new types of antibiotics and fast diagnostic tests.

References

1. Cooper RM, Tsimring L, Hasty J. Inter-species population dynamics enhance microbial horizontal

gene transfer and spread of antibiotic resistance. Elife. 2017 Nov 1;6. pii: e25950.

doi: 10.7554/eLife.25950. ↩


http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002150#abstract2


https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/615030?redirect=true

https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/threat-report-2013/pdf/ar-threats-2013-508.pdf#page=59

https://mappingignorance.org/2018/01/31/the-rise-of-the-superbugs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%28Mapping+Ignorance%29#note-5029-1

https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/threat-report-2013/pdf/ar-threats-2013-508.pdf#page=59

https://elifesciences.org/articles/25950

https://mappingignorance.org/2018/01/31/the-rise-of-the-superbugs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%28Mapping+Ignorance%29#origin-note-5029-1



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written by

Sergio Laínez

Sergio Lainez Vicente has spent more than a decade studying ion channels in research centres across Europe.

After getting his PhD in the Sensory Biology lab at the CIPF (Valencia, Spain), he moved to Nijmegen (The

Netherlands) as a postdoctoral fellow to work on divalent cation reabsorption in kidney. Studies in pain

physiology at University of Cambridge, King's College London, and the Neuroscience and Pain Research

Unit Pfizer had in Cambridge (Neusentis) would follow. Recently, he has accepted a senior research associate

position at the University of Bristol to get involved in an MRC-funded project aiming to reduce the incidence

of sudden death on patients with heart failure.

Twitter:@LainezSergio

https://mappingignorance.org/author/sergio-lainez/

https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=LainezSergio&lang=en-US



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Crowdsourced family tree yields new insights about humanity

Researchers harness massive dataset to reassess marriage and migration patterns, longevity

Source:

Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science

Summary:

Researchers have amassed a family tree of 13 million people to trace the last 500 years of Western

marriage and migration patterns. They also show that the genetic basis of longevity is lower than

many have suggested.

FULL STORY

In the above 6,000 person family tree cleaned and organized using graph theory, individuals spanning seven

generations are represented in green, with their marital links in red.



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Credit: Image courtesy of Columbia University

Thanksgiving gatherings could get bigger -- a lot bigger -- as science uncovers the familial bonds that bind us.

From millions of interconnected online genealogy profiles, researchers have amassed the largest,

scientifically-vetted family tree to date, which at 13 million people, is slightly bigger than a nation the size of

Cuba or Belgium. Published in the journal Science, the new dataset offers fresh insights into the last 500 years

of marriage and migration in Europe and North America, and the role of genes in longevity.

"Through the hard work of many genealogists curious about their family history, we crowdsourced an

enormous family tree and boom, came up with something unique," said the study's senior author, Yaniv

Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University and Chief Science Officer at MyHeritage, a genealogy

and DNA testing company that owns Geni.com, the platform that hosts the data used in the study. "We hope

that this dataset can be useful to scientists researching a range of other topics."

The researchers downloaded 86 million public profiles from Geni.com, one of the world's largest

collaborative genealogy websites, and used mathematical graph theory to clean and organize the data. What

emerged among other smaller family trees was a single tree of 13 million people spanning an average of 11

generations. Theoretically, they'd need to go back another 65 generations to converge on one common

ancestor and complete the tree. Still, the dataset represents a milestone by moving family-history searches

from newspaper obituaries and church archives into the digital era, making population-level investigations

possible. The researchers also make it easy to overlay other datasets to study a range of socioeconomic trends

at scale.

"It's an exciting moment for citizen science," said Melinda Mills, a demographer at University of Oxford who

was not involved in the study "It demonstrates how millions of regular people in the form of genealogy

enthusiasts can make a difference to science. Power to the people!"

The dataset details when and where each individual was born and died, and mirrors the demographics

of Geni.com individuals, with 85 percent of profiles originating from Europe and North America. The

researchers verified that the dataset was representative of the general U.S. population's education level by

cross-checking a subset of Vermont Geni.com profiles against the state's detailed death registry.

"The reconstructed pedigrees show that we are all related to each other," said Peter Visscher, a quantitative

geneticist at University of Queensland who was not involved in the study. "This fact is known from basic

population history principles, but what the authors have achieved is still very impressive."

Marriage, Migration and Genetic Relatedness Industrialization profoundly altered work and family life, and

these trends coincide with shifting marriage choices in the data. Before 1750, most Americans found a spouse

within six miles (10 kilometers) of where they were born, but for those born in 1950, that distance had

stretched to about 60 miles (100 kilometers), the researchers found. "It became harder to find the love of your

life," Erlich jokes.

Before 1850, marrying in the family was common -- to someone who was, on average, a fourth cousin,

compared to seventh cousins today, the researchers found. Curiously, the researchers found that between 1800

and 1850, people traveled farther than ever to find a mate -- nearly 12 miles (19 kilometers) on average -- but

were more likely to marry a fourth cousin or closer. Changing social norms, rather than rising mobility, may

have led people to shun close kin as marriage partners, they hypothesize.

http://geni.com/

http://geni.com/

http://geni.com/

http://geni.com/



195

In a related observation, they found that women in Europe and North America have migrated more than men

over the last 300 years, but when men did migrate, they traveled significantly farther on average.

Genes and Longevity To try and untangle the role of nature and nurture in longevity, the researchers built a

model and trained it on a dataset of 3 million relatives born between 1600 and 1910 who had lived past the

age of 30. They excluded twins, individuals who died in the U.S. Civil War, World War I and II, or in a

natural disaster (inferred if relatives died within 10 days of each other).

They compared each individual's lifespan to that of their relatives and their degree of separation and found

that genes explained about 16 percent of the longevity variation seen in their data -- on the low end of

previous estimates which have ranged from about 15 percent to 30 percent.

The results indicate that good longevity genes can extend someone's life by an average of five years, said

Erlich. "That's not a lot," he adds. "Previous studies have shown that smoking takes 10 years off of your life.

That means some life choices could matter a lot more than genetics."

Significantly, the study also shows that the genes that influence longevity act independently rather than

interacting with each other, a phenomenon called epistasis. Some scientists have used epistasis to explain why

large-scale genomic studies have so far failed to find the genes that encode complex traits like intelligence or

longevity.

If some genetic variants act together to influence longevity, the researchers would have seen a greater

correlation among closely related individuals who share more DNA, and thus more genetic interactions.

However, they found a linear link between longevity and genetic relatedness, ruling out widespread epistasis.

"This is important in the field because epistasis has been proposed as a source of 'missing heritability,'" said

the study's lead author, Joanna Thornycroft, a former graduate student at the Whitehead Institute for

Biomedical Research, now at Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Adds Visscher: "This is entirely in line with theory and previous inference from SNP [variant] data, yet for

some reason many researchers in human genetics and epidemiology continue to believe that there is a lot of

non-additive genetic variation for common diseases and quantitative traits."

The dataset is available for academic research via FamiLinx.org, a website created by Erlich and his

colleagues. Though FamiLinx data is anonymized, curious readers can check Geni.com to see if a family

member may have added them there. If so, there is a good chance that they may have made it into the 13

million-person family tree.

In addition to his position at MyHeritage, a company that allows consumers to discover their family history

through genetic tests and its genealogy platform, Erlich is a computer science professor at Columbia

Engineering, a member of Columbia's Data Science Institute, and an adjunct core member of the New York

Genome Center (NYGC).

Other study authors are Assaf Gordon, of NYGC and the Whitehead Institute; Tal Shor, of MyHeritage and

Technion; Omer Weissbrod of Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science; Dan Geiger of Technion; Mary Wahl

of Whitehead Institute, NYGC and Harvard; Michael Gershovits, Barak Markus and Mona Sheikh of

Whitehead Institute; Melissa Gymrek of University of California at San Diego; and Gaurav Bhatia, Daniel

MacArthur and Alkes Price of Harvard and the Broad Institute.

http://familinx.org/

http://geni.com/



196

Story Source:

Materials provided by Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science. Note: Content may

be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Joanna Kaplanis, Assaf Gordon, Tal Shor, Omer Weissbrod, Dan Geiger, Mary Wahl, Michael Gershovits,

Barak Markus, Mona Sheikh, Melissa Gymrek, Gaurav Bhatia, Daniel G. MacArthur, Alkes L. Price, Yaniv

Erlich. Quantitative analysis of population-scale family trees with millions of relatives. Science, 2018;

eaam9309 DOI: 10.1126/science.aam9309


http://www.engineering.columbia.edu/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aam9309



197

Amanda Parer’s Giant Inflatable Rabbits Invade Public Spaces Around the World

FEBRUARY 2, 2018

LAURA STAUGAITIS

Amanda Parer examines the relationship between humans and the natural world in her massive inflatable

artworks. The Tasmania-based artist works with a team including New York based co-producer Chris

Wangro. Together, Parer Studio realizes her larger-than-life versions of translucent rabbits, a series of works

called Intrude.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/02/amanda-parer-rabbits/


https://www.parerstudio.com/



198

The white fabric appears opaque during the day as it reflects sunlight. After dark, the creatures take on a

different dimension: they are illuminated from within and reduce surrounding humans into diminutive

silhouettes. Parer grew up in Australia, where rabbits are a non-native species and are considered a serious

pest as opposed to a domestic pet; since being introduced by settlers in the late 18th century, their

overpopulation has caused substantial ecological destruction. Parer describes the further cultural

contradictions:

They represent the fairytale animals from our childhood – a furry innocence, frolicking through idyllic fields.

Intrude deliberately evokes this cutesy image, and a strong visual humour, to lure you into the artwork only to

reveal the more serious environmental messages in the work. They are huge, the size referencing “the

elephant in the room”, the problem, like our environmental impact, big but easily ignored.

Intrude, which Parer has created in a variety of sizes ranging from Small to XXL, has been exhibited at

museums around the world, as well as installed at several music festivals. She encourages viewers to engage

with the works, describing her smallest rabbits as “very huggable.” You can see part of the installation

process in the video below, and find more of the artist’s work on her website and Facebook.

https://www.parerstudio.com/

https://www.facebook.com/parerstudio/



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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/02/amanda-parer-rabbits/?mc_cid=af4922dcc2&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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