The book “If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal,” by Justin Gregg, contrasts human thought with animal intelligence. The people come up short.
Featuring Zadie Smith, @parislees, @lindasgrant, @TulipSiddiq, @DJYodaUK, @iNikeshPatel, @theJeremyVine, Sarah Waters & more.
In this week’s issue: How the healing power of silence can improve our mental and physical health.
Death’s-head moths correct course based on an internal “compass,” a new study finds, revealing insights into how insects traverse such long distances during seasonal migrations.
Logistical and ethical challenges are complicating the design of efficacy studies
U.S. Title IX law update requiring mandatory reporting of sexual misconduct would cause harm, they say
Long magnetic lull mimics Maunder Minimum, when sunspots largely disappeared 400 years ago
University of Delaware finding vindicates whistleblowers
Star formation after the big bang appears much faster than models had forecast
Read that research and more this week in Science. https://fcld.ly/zebukkw
Marram grass, or beachgrass, grows on and stabilizes coastal sand dunes on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula. Grasses, whether terrestrial or submarine, tend to be undervalued but have influenced the trajectory of human history through their domestication as food staples, as well as natural ecosystems worldwide. If restored and conserved appropriately, grasslands can benefit climate change mitigation efforts. See the special section beginning on page 590.
A new special issue of Science explores the unrecognized value of grass: https://fcld.ly/bo80dpr
An individual’s social network and community — their ‘social capital’ — has been thought to influence outcomes ranging from earnings to health. But measuring social capital is challenging. In two papers in this week’s issue, Raj Chetty and his colleagues use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to construct a Social Capital Atlas containing measures of social capital for each ZIP code, high school and college in the United States. The researchers measure three types of social capital: connectedness between different types of people, social cohesion and civic engagement. They find that children who grow up in communities where people of low and high socio-economic status interact more have substantially greater chances of rising out of poverty. The team then examines what might limit social interactions across class lines, finding a roughly equal contribution from lack of exposure — because children in different socio-economic groups go to different schools, for example — and friending bias, the tendency for people to befriend people similar to them.
The New York Review of Books – August 18, 2022
At a time when the threat of authoritarianism is rising, Democrats have a duty to make crystal clear to voters what is at stake in the November elections.
In Andrew Holleran’s novels, the inescapable narrowness of his world is transcended and given poetic resonance by his close and steady attention to pain and loneliness.
The Kingdom of Sand by by Andrew Holleran
An unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather provides the best sense of how Pushkin considered his own Blackness.
by Alexander Pushkin, translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, edited by Robert Chandler
Two viruses plus a child’s genetic background may explain a recent surge in the United Kingdom
Success rates for white scientists far exceed the NSF average, whereas Black and Asian researchers do worse
Giant study of ancient pottery and DNA challenges common evolutionary explanation for lactase persistence
A small marine isopod plays a role in fertilizing red seaweed, according to a new report that presents evidence of animal-mediated “pollination” in the marine environment. Read that study and more this week in Science: https://fcld.ly/fhhe8ba
Grab a copy from newsstands now or get our app to download digital and audio editions. https://newscientist.com/issue/3397/
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