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The World the Plague Made is on of the history books that easily made it to the shortlist of an annual Wolfson History Prize.

Meticulously researched and engagingly written by James Belich, currently a Professor of Imperial and Global history at Oxford, the book is, also, another effort to explain the Great Divergence - find an explanation for why Europe drew ahead in the early modern period. 

Or, in his own words, a new attempt to answer an old question: "Why Europe?

One of striking things in this book is that, while acknowledging the undeniable - the pulling ahead of part of Europe, he (for the first time?) adds the just as established, yet barely mentioned facts: that Europe wasn't alone. There was what he calls the Muslim South (Middle East and North Africa) that shared that "great leap ahead".

And it’s not for any institutional or cultural reason, but simply by the arbitrary fact that those were also the places where the plague struck very hard.

To put it starkly, the argument of the book is that wherever the plague hit, these are the parts of the world that eventually benefited and prospered, and those places where the plague didn’t strike—India and China—ended up falling behind. He’s saying this is not about culture, this is not about institutions, this is not about religion—it’s the plague.

Do you think it’s a convincing argument?

He’s laid out the argument in as convincing a way as he can. If you push him—and there are places in the book where he acknowledges it—he accepts that the plague is not the only factor

What he’s really arguing, if one had to summarise it in a schematic way, is that while all these other variables mattered, the plague is the only thing that is common across the board, and therefore, the plague is the most significant factor.

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Without bees what can there be ?!

Well, less stinging, probably, but something tells me wasps will take care of that one. The whole pollination thing, however, we will have to think what to do about

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Watch "משלחת ערבים ישראלים לאושוויץ" on YouTube

משלחת ערביי ישראל מקיימת טקס מיוחד בשפה הערבית באושוויץ לזכר יום השואה

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Watch "משלחת ערבים ישראלים לאושוויץ" on YouTube

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In 1967, two sober-minded men published a book with a sensational title: “Famine—1975!” The authors, William and Paul Paddock, were brothers; William was an agronomist, Paul a retired Foreign Service officer. “A collision between exploding population and static agriculture is imminent,” the Paddocks wrote. They declared, “The conclusion is clear: there is no possibility of improving agriculture . . . soon enough to avert famine.”

Many experts shared their anxiety. In the mid-sixties, the global population was growing by more than two per cent a year, which is believed to be the highest rate in human history. In a number of developing countries—Brazil and Ethiopia, for instance—the annual rate was closer to three per cent. Agricultural production wasn’t keeping up.

The world food situation is now more precarious than at any time since the period of acute shortage immediately after the second world war,” the director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Binay Ranjan Sen, wrote. He warned that unless dramatic action was taken “Malthusian correctives” would "inexorably come into play".

"Famine - 1975!" was followed by "The Population Bomb", by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, published in 1968.

Ehrlich, too, declared disaster unavoidable. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over", he wrote. "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich became a popular guest on the "Tonight Show", and "The Population Bomb" sold more than two million copies.

from Creating a better leaf

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The more that was discovered about the intricacies of photosynthesis, the more was revealed about its inefficiency. The comparison is often made to photovoltaic cells. Those on the market today convert about twenty per cent of the sunlight that strikes them into electricity, and, in labs, researchers have achieved rates of almost fifty per cent. Plants convert only about one per cent of the sunlight that hits them into growth. In the case of crop plants, on average only about half of one per cent of the light is converted into energy that people can use.

The contrast isn’t really fair to biology, since plants construct themselves, whereas P.V. cells have to be manufactured with energy from another source. Plants also store their own energy, while P.V. cells require separate batteries for that. Still, researchers who have tried to make apples-to-apples (or silicon-to-carbon) calculations have concluded that plants come out the losers.

from Creating a better leaf

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/creating-a-better-leaf

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The first autism prevalence study, published by the psychologist Victor Lotter in 1964, suggested (with scrupulous social-scientific disclaimers) that the condition affected 4.5 out of every 10,000 children. In 1999 a widely disseminated report by California’s Department of Developmental Services raised that number to 60 out of every 10,000 children. In 2004, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published an alert for paediatricians which claimed that autism affected one out of every 166 American children. By 2007 it had raised that number to 1 in 110.

(c.) London Review of Books

×××

Professor in New York whose 11-year-old son has autism recently invited him to her class, where he got up on a chair and drew a detailed, accurate map of the world completely from memory.

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In 1820, in the Indian city of Benares, an English Baptist missionary named Smith helped to save a woman from the Hindu practice of sati, the burning of widows. He described the scene: ‘As soon as the flames touched her, she jumped off the pile. Immediately the Brahmins seized her, in order to put her again into the flames: she exclaimed, “Do not murder me! I don’t wish to be burnt!” The Company Officers being present, she was brought home safely.’ A London magazine reported the heroic efforts of Britain’s East India Company under the headline ‘A Woman Delivered’. If there was one thing 19th-century Europeans knew about India, it was probably sati.

Mr Smith’s 1820 account of valiant British men rescuing an Indian woman from her husband’s funeral pyre is one of many such contemporary reports. The East India Company had just become the effective governing authority of India. As a trading presence, it had been uninterested in culture. As a ruling presence, it set out to reform the barbaric local customs.

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Gates of Hakone shrine on a rainy day

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Other Afghan women

▫️ In 1979, Communists seized power in Kabul and tried to launch a female-literacy program [in Helmand]. Tribal elders and landlords refused. [...] When the authorities began forcing girls to attend classes at gunpoint, a rebellion erupted, led by armed men calling themselves the mujahideen. In their first operation, they kidnapped all the schoolteachers in the valley, many of whom supported girls' education, and slit their throats. The next day, the government arrested tribal elders and landlords on the suspicion that they were bankrolling the mujahideen. These community leaders were never seen again.

Tanks from the Soviet Union crossed the border to shore up the Communist government—and to liberate women. Soon, Afghanistan was basically split in two. In the countryside, where young men were willing to die fighting the imposition of new ways of life—including girls’ schools and land reform—young women remained unseen. In the cities, the Soviet-backed government banned child marriage and granted women the right to choose their partners. Girls enrolled in schools and universities in record numbers, and by the early eighties women held parliamentary seats and even the office of Vice-President.

▫️ [Not long afterward] the mujahideen toppled the Communists in Kabul, and they brought their countryside mores with them. In the capital, their leaders—who had received generous amounts of U.S. funding—issued a decree declaring that “women are not to leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case they are to cover themselves completely.” Women were likewise banned from “walking gracefully or with pride.” Religious police began roaming the city’s streets, arresting women and burning audio- and videocassettes on pyres.

▫️ A farmer in a nearby village, Mohammed Nasim, was arrested by U.S. forces and sent to Guantánamo because, according to a classified assessment, his name was similar to that of a Taliban commander. A Karzai government official named Ehsanullah visited an American base to inform on two Taliban members; no translator was present, and, in the confusion, he was arrested himself and shipped to Guantánamo. Nasrullah, a government tax collector, was sent to Guantánamo after being randomly pulled off a bus following a skirmish between U.S. Special Forces and local tribesmen. “We were so happy with the Americans,” he said later, at a military tribunal. “I didn’t know eventually I would come to Cuba.”

▫️ In a a nearby village, when U.S. forces raided the home of a beloved tribal elder, killing him and leaving his son with paraplegia, women shouted at their menfolk, “You people have big turbans on your heads, but what have you done? You can’t even protect us. You call yourselves men?”

▫️ Both sides of the war did make efforts to avoid civilian deaths. In addition to issuing warnings to evacuate, the Taliban kept villagers informed about which areas were seeded with improvised explosive devices, and closed roads to civilian traffic when targeting convoys. The coalition deployed laser-guided bombs, used loudspeakers to warn villagers of fighting, and dispatched helicopters ahead of battle. [...] In a war waged in mud-walled warrens teeming with life, however, nowhere was truly safe, and an extraordinary number of civilians died. Sometimes, such casualties sparked widespread condemnation, as when a nato rocket struck a crowd of villagers in Sangin in 2010, killing fifty-two. But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths—anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war's civilian toll.

▫️ Some British officers on the ground grew concerned that the U.S. was killing too many civilians, and unsuccessfully lobbied to have American Special Forces removed from the area. Instead, troops from around the world poured into Helmand, including Australians, Canadians, and Danes. But villagers couldn’t tell the difference—to them, the occupiers were simply “Americans.” “There were two types of people—one with black faces and one with pink faces. When we see them, we get terrified.”

▫️ Some NATO officers were trying to persuade Taliban commanders to flip. In 2010, a group of Taliban commmanders, liaising with the British, promised to switch sides in return for assistance to local communities. But, when the Taliban leaders met to hammer out their end of the deal, US Special Operations forces - acting independently - bombed the gathering, killing the top Taliban figure behind the peace overture.

(c.) New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

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Whether it’s an eye, a heart or a liver, a new organ evolves when a multicellular organism sets up a division of labor among its cells. But how that specialization evolves is a problem like the “chicken or the egg” riddle: The diverse cells in an organ perform different functions whose benefit may only be apparent in the context of the whole working organ’s purpose, so why did those cells and functions evolve in the first place?

Depening the mystery, many organs are so ancient that their origins are almost impossible to reconstruct. It’s really hard to pinpoint the transitions that occurred to make something as complex as a whole organ.”

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to make deep inroads into the problem by probing the origins of eyes and other features in various invertebrates. And now the study from Parker and his colleagues identifies what could be important principles guiding the emergence of new organs: first, that changes in one type of cell can open up new opportunities, or niches, for neighboring cells to capitalize on. And second, that once such a partnership is successfully established, the different cell types can become reliant on one another, locked in a cycle of mutual dependence.

Glands may seem humble in comparison to more elaborate organs, but they have become an important focus for these kinds of studies. Because they have fewer cell types than complex organs, they offer a simpler starting point for the discovery of basic principles. They have typically evolved more recently, which makes their evolution easier to reconstruct. They are also often the sites for remarkable biological innovations, such as new chemical defenses and bioluminescence.

It also makes sense that the secretory cells in glands and other tissues could be “hot spots for the evolution of novel function.” By definition, such cells are proficient at concentrating gene products into vesicles and then removing them from the cell body through secretion. “The ability to concentrate gene products — proteins — into a vesicle allows the cell a lot of control over what’s going on inside of it” while also communicating information and exerting effects outside.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-do-new-organs-evolve-a-beetle-gland-shows-the-way-20210816/

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Cigarette holder for nudists

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The reason why you should remove seeds from fruits before eating them

Or we can say that to each his own way of actively contributing to the much hyped reforestation effort.

While some are out there, virtue signalling by vocal calls for action, others are in ... elsewhere, quietly (and efficiently) acting, saving the planet.

Acts of selfless sacrifice and heroism have many ... um ... faces.

😉

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Tweet from The Economist (@TheEconomist)

The Economist (@TheEconomist) Tweeted:

Some 82m people will have dementia by 2030 and 152m by 2050. Set against the size of the world’s population, these numbers may seem manageable. That is illusory https://t.co/2NcqfEldGP https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1301124000853250048?s=20

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A Young Woman and Her Little Boy Bronzino c.1540 Red is trouble. Sometimes too much trouble. Look at what it’s doing to these pages; this paragraph. Flooding them with the promiscuity of its associations: blood, desire, danger, anger, love, good luck, failure, frustration, fight, flight, fault. We might beg for it to stop, but we’d need red to make the sign. And what would be the point? When we speak of the power of its varieties – scarlet, crimson, claret, carmine – we’re evoking something that culture deploys but cannot quite control. Purple was stolen from sea snails and coded into imperial power. Horticulture domesticated greenness. Orange is the preposterous colour of lost causes and boiled sweets. But red is untameable. On the road, in the arena, in the bedroom, on the battlefield, at high and holy Mass, it arouses us. Engages our hot and despicable animal brains. Cuts to the chase.

This boy looks like he’s invented photo-bombing centuries too soon, but that’s because he’s Bronzino’s afterthought, inserted late in the composition process. Imagine the canvas without his distracting presence, and it becomes a portrait of a dress with a Medici deposited somewhere inside. The red hue blazes her status. This is the European 1540s, when the watery carmine of madder-rose extract acquired an eye-popping rival – cochineal, the dust of Mesoamerican bugs. It was used in paint too – and so valuable that, like this boy, it was added only at the very end.

Bonnet de libertè

The shape is ancient. Slaves freed by Rome had their heads shaved and crowned with a conical hat in honour of the goddess of liberty. But the sans-culottes chose the colour and wore it to storm the Bastille. Like all smart Paris fashions, these hats travelled – American Republicans and abolitionists marched in them; the sculptor Hiram Powers tried to put one on the Statue of Liberty. Today’s French insurgents prefer yellow vests. A less powerful choice, perhaps, than the red teardrops that formed a tide that drowned the monarchy.

Emperor Shenzong of Song, reigned 1067-85

A red thread runs through the cultural history of China, one that stitches the symbolism of Taoism (in which it codes for the element of fire), birthday customs (red eggs are given at children’s parties) and the relentlessly consistent colour scheme of the Communist Party. Unless it’s a mysterious vapour seen in the sky – as happened in 1101, when it was held to signify an imminent barbarian raid – the colour is associated with luck and warding off evil. The red longpao of Emperor Shenzong of Song, sixth emperor of his dynasty, turns him into a beacon of good fortune. (Caveat: his executioner also wore red.)

Portrait of Louis XIV (detail), Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1701

Who wears red high heels today? (Google Images has a few ideas about that, some of them NSFW.) Who wore red high heels in pre-revolutionary France? Totter forward absolutist Sun King Louis XIV who, as part of his campaign to pacify the aristocracy, declared that only those in royal favour could climb into them. The symbolism of talons rouges was unsubtle. The shoes were expensive. They elevated the wearer. And their soles were red, too, as if they were already stamping on someone’s face.

The red shoes

We can tell this story with three women, three kinds of magic. In the Oz books, Dorothy’s slippers are white. Technicolour demanded something stronger and more fitting for footwear prised from the corpse of a Wicked Witch. Hans Christian Andersen’s Karen brings her own wickedness: she wears red shoes to church and they then become an instrument of torture. When Michael Powell put the story on screen in ballet form it became a fable about the demonic power of art. “Why do you want to dance?” asks the impresario. “Why do you want to live?” the dancer replies.

Clerical red, 2005

Rome and Byzantium ruled that purple was the exclusive colour of imperial power. Then, in 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks. The Ottoman Empire was the principal source of purple dye. No self-respecting pope was going to maintain the symbol of his authority by enriching the enemy: in 1467, Paul II issued a decree that put cardinals in a hot shade of scarlet derived from a parasite that preyed on Mediterranean oak trees. Economic warfare? Semiotic, too. European kings wore red. One style decision, two papal power moves.

Red Riding Hood

What was she called, before she put on the garment that supplied her name? And why no horse to wear it on, Red Riding Hood would have asked? She was an inquisitive girl. But we know from our earliest childhood that this is a story that shouldn’t be questioned. The answers are too bloody to share with someone you’re tucking up in bed. Red is violated virginity. She’s rebirth. She’s from a long line of indigestible women, who went into the forest and survived. That wolf didn’t stand a chance.

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, 1953

Gentlemen prefer blondes. But how do they like them wrapped? In red, according to a 2010 study from Potsdam University, which brought female volunteers to the lab and correlated their sartorial choices with their expectations about the hotness of the researcher. In many primate species, females display red when nearing ovulation – as many embarrassed zoo-going parents will know. Are scarlet sequinned frocks and little red cocktail dresses callbacks to the ripe pudenda of some ancestral hominid? Like the existence of gentlemen, it’s only a hypothesis.

The Red Balloon, 1956

When Eisenstein hoisted the red flag for “Battleship Potemkin” someone had to paint its progress through 108 frames of the movie. Once colour became cinema’s custom it was easier for film-makers to exploit red’s urgent claim on our attention. Albert Lamorisse’s little French fantasy loosened a red balloon of optimism over war-damaged Paris. Little figures in bright-red coats skittered through the frame of “Don’t Look Now” and “Schindler’s List”, but in “Marnie” Hitchcock turned the entire screen red, remaking the world as a visionary wound.

Rouge Baiser Rene Gruau, 1927

Love doesn’t always endure. Neither does lipstick. Red traces on the collar; red smears on someone else’s mouth. These are sometimes marks of shame and regret. In 1927 René Gruau, a commercial artist, created this image of Sadean sophistication for Rouge Baiser, a kissproof crimson lipstick formulated by a chemist called Paul Baudecroux. Propylene glycol was the active ingredient. Too active. Its first users found they couldn’t remove it. The recipe was revised but the image endured – a symbol of the kind of desire that’s so intense it cannot be gazed upon.

via The Paris Review

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They say "Better late, than never!" Are they right this particular time? Don't know if and how better, but ... shouldn't be worse. Many more reactions at the actual source

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Asia - at least this way it's boundaries are clear ...