Reviews and News:
Beyond the birds and the bees: “Humans have always known that sex was necessary to procreation. But what happened between intercourse and birth was a profound, indeed total, mystery. Most surely guessed that semen had something to do with it, but no one knew what, and this gave rise to the male-centered notion that men contributed a ‘seed’ that was sown in the uterus. Of course, that couldn’t help explain how it was that many children resemble their mothers more than their fathers. As Edward Dolnick shows us in his fascinating new book, The Seeds of Life, it would take 400 years—from the time of Leonardo da Vinci, who made wonderful anatomical drawings, to the late 19th century—to unravel the mystery.”
Are index funds bad? “If you’re like me, you’ve cheered the decades-long rise of index funds—investment vehicles that seem (these days) to be a rare case of financial innovation that actually helps regular people. By trying merely to match the market, not beat it—investing passively in stocks that mimic a published market index, like the S&P 500—they’re able to offer both low fees and peace of mind for people not inclined to try to pick which stocks to buy and sell. Index funds have grown exponentially since John Bogle founded Vanguard in the mid-1970s. The top three families of index funds each manage trillions of dollars, collectively holding 15 to 20 percent of all the stock of major U.S. corporations. Best of all for their investors, index funds have consistently beaten the performance of stock-pickers and actively managed funds, whose higher fees may support the Manhattan lifestyle of many bankers, but turn out not to deliver much to customers. It’s a feel-good story—a populist victory, as finance goes. Except there’s a problem, or might be. Over the past year or two, a growing chorus of experts has begun to argue that index funds and shareholder diversification are strangling the economy, and need to be stopped.”
What’s the real reason Michiko Kakutani left the New York Times’s review section? “Lone wolves hurling thunderbolts from their garrets gave way to affable co-critics doing online chats, TimesTalks, and video clips, writing personal essays and exploring their own biases… Critics now meet with editors to brainstorm new elements and submit their pitches to the will of the collective. It’s a sea change for the daily, where critics had barely interacted with either editors or each other, and where, per two sources, Kakutani had sometimes been allowed to choose her editors and even copy editors. ‘For a very long time, Michi got her way,’ says someone close to the situation, ‘until very recently people started pushing back in a big way, and I think that was part of her leaving.’”
No one was better than Glen Campbell, Rebecca Bengal argues over at The Paris Review, at capturing Charles Portis’s “defiantly at-odds small-town characters and their old-fashioned dreams”: “In 1960, Campbell arrived in LA after a stint in Albuquerque playing in an uncle’s band. That same year, Portis decamped to New York, and later to London, where he worked as the London bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune, a job he would eventually ‘quit cold’ as his friend Tom Wolfe put it, going back to Arkansas to write fiction in a fishing shack. Campbell and Portis wouldn’t have much reason to know each other until they did, in 1969, when Campbell portrayed two of Portis’s most itinerant, demanding characters: the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf alongside John Wayne’s Oscar-winning performance as the bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, and the aspiring country singer Norwood, alongside Joe Namath, in Norwood. Perhaps even more memorably, Campbell contributed the soundtrack to both films.”
During Monday’s solar eclipse, balloons with a resistant bacterial strain will be launched into the atmosphere to see what life on Mars might be like. Seriously. “‘Critics of this work might ask, “Why not just do this research in an environmental simulation chamber?”’ Smith said. ‘But there is no way to simulate all the complexity and wavelengths of sunlight. We can use our work in Earth’s atmosphere to hopefully help verify the findings we get in simulation chambers.’”
85% of matter is dark matter, and no one knows what it is: “Dark matter is as tangible as stars and planets to most astronomers. We routinely map it out. We conceive of galaxies as lumps of dark matter with dabs of luminous material. We understand the formation of cosmic structure, as well as the evolution of the universe as a whole, in terms of dark matter. Yet a decade of sophisticated searches has failed to detect the material directly. We see the shadow it casts, but are completely unaware of what the dark side of the universe may contain.”
Scotland Yard may close its famous Art and Antiques Unit.
Essay of the Day:
In The Spectator, Julie Bindel argues that if you want to fight modern slavery, fight the legalization of prostitution. She spent the past three years studying prostitution, visiting 40 countries and carrying out 250 interviews. Here’s what she found:
“In one of the Nevada brothels I visited, the women were locked in at night, and barbed wire surrounded the high walls. In Seoul, South Korea, the women also used to be locked inside brothels all night — until a fire killed 14 young women in 2002. If battery hens were treated this way, there would rightly be an outcry from the same liberal leftists who often bend over backwards to defend this gross trade in human flesh.
“During a brief trip to Auckland, I visited the street prostitution zone. New Zealand, we are regularly told, is the gold standard in dealing with the sex trade. The Home Office Select Committee (prior to its chair Keith Vaz being forced to step down following allegations that he paid for sex with young men) was looking at adopting a similar model of decriminalisation in the UK.
“On the streets I met Carol, who looked 70 but was much younger, using a zimmer frame to rest between punters. Carol told me that since prostitution was decriminalised 13 years ago, nothing had improved for the women. The punters are still violent, and police still don’t care, she said. Nor do human rights defenders. While women all over the world fight to end violence and abuse, the Labour party and Amnesty International, to name but two public bodies, betray them.
“The most effective way to brush over a terrible human rights abuse is to rename it. A pro-slavery strategist in the West Indies once suggested that instead of ‘slaves’, the ‘negroes’ should be called ‘assistant planters’. Then, he said, ‘we shall not then hear such violent outcries against the slave trade by pious divines, tender-hearted poetesses and short-sighted politicians’. The term ‘sex worker’ is just such a convenient gloss.”
Photo: Skeleton shrimp
Poem: Maryann Corbett, “Syringa Vulgaris ‘Victor Lemoine’”
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