Alexander Howard (2024), The Dispossessed at 50: Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘anarchist utopia’ was an anguished response to war. Its political power endures, ' Le Guin changed science fiction. When she started publishing in the late 1950s, the genre tended to privilege scientific accuracy and technological credibility. But the ethically minded Le Guin used her work to challenge conventional norms and explore alternative societal structures, pushing readers to rethink their perceptions of the world around them. The novelist Margaret Atwood confirms this: Le Guin was always asking the same urgent question: what sort of world do you want to live in? Her own choice would have been gender equal, racially equal, economically fair and self-governing, but that was not on offer. . . . Thinking again of the pro-Palestinian protesters camped out not far from my office, I wonder what Le Guin, with her longstanding commitment to nonviolent forms of civil disobedience, would make of such a situation. In lieu of a definitive answer, I’ll close with a passage from one of Le Guin’s most memorable essays, which, like The Dispossessed, reflects on oppression and revolution, and is alive to utopian possibility and paradox: The shift from denial of injustice to recognition of injustice can’t be unmade. What your eyes have seen they have seen. […] From now on, if you don’t resist, you collude. But there is a middle ground between defence and attack, a ground of flexible resistance, a space opened for change. It is not an easy place to find or live in.' back

Belen Fernandez, Mexico’s election: A victory for organised crime, ' On June 2, Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum as its first woman president. The 61-year-old scientist served as mayor of Mexico City from 2018 until 2023 and is the protégée of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), to whose Morena party she belongs and in whose shadow she will now govern. In the largest election in Mexico’s history, Sheinbaum faced off against ex-senator Xóchitl Gálvez, head of a conservative coalition. In addition to the presidential race, Mexicans also voted for candidates contesting more than 20,700 federal and local positions countrywide. In the run-up to the election, observers relentlessly cast the prospect of an impending female head of state in Mexico as a victory for women’s empowerment, although a glance at facts on the ground suggests the prematurity of any such celebration. Back in 2019, Sheinbaum, the first female mayor of Mexico City, promised to eradicate violence against women. During her tenure, however, the femicide epidemic in the Mexican capital – and the rest of the country – continued to rage. Mexico currently sees at least 10 women and girls killed on a daily basis, with tens of thousands of women missing. The vast majority of femicides go unprosecuted. Of course, the surge in femicides occurs within a general context of violence; in the first four and a half years of AMLO’s term, Mexico registered 160,594 homicides, while the estimated number of missing people has now surpassed 111,000 – a figure AMLO has preferred to drastically lowball.' back

Hugh Ollerook & Hamed Gamaleldien, Fresh water and key conditions for life appeared on Earth half a billion years earlier than we thought, ' We need two ingredients for life to start on a planet: dry land and (fresh) water. Strictly, the water doesn’t have to be fresh, but fresh water can only occur on dry land. Only with those two conditions met can you convert the building blocks of life, amino acids and nucleic acids into tangible bacterial life that heralds the start of the evolutionary cycle. The oldest life on Earth left in our fragmented rock record is 3.5 billion years old, with some chemical data showing it may even be as old as 3.8 billion years. Scientists have hypothesised life might be even older, but we have no records of that being the case. Our new study published in Nature Geoscience provides the first evidence of fresh water and dry land on Earth by 4 billion years ago. Knowing when the cradle of life – water and land – first appeared on Earth ultimately provides clues as to how we came to be. . . . To figure out whether these grains held a record of fresh water, we used tiny beams of ions on these dated zircon grains to measure the ratio of heavier to lighter oxygen. This ratio, known as an oxygen isotopic ratio, is thought to be nearly constant through time for seawater, but much lighter for fresh water. Conspicuously, a small portion of zircon crystals from 4 billion years ago had a very light signature that could only have formed from the interaction of fresh water and rocks. Zircon is extremely resistant to alteration. For the Jack Hills’ zircon to obtain this light oxygen signature, the rock altered by fresh water had to melt and then re-solidify to impart the light oxygen isotopic signature into our zircon. Thus, fresh water had to be present on Earth before 4 billion years ago.' back

Jane Gleeson-White, ‘I don’t feel gendered’: Rachel Cusk’s most radical novel yet makes the familiar strange – and moves beyond womanhood, ' Rachel Cusk’s new novel conjures myriad acts of creation – of lives and of art. It explores the violence creation entails and the possibilities it opens. Her twelfth novel, Parade is concerned with artists, with mothers and children, and with place: material, psychological, historical, cosmic. This is familiar terrain. But, as ever with Cusk’s writing in all its forms – fiction, memoir, essay – she renders the familiar strange in ways that force us to see it anew. Perhaps this is the best way to describe, or to recognise, the operations of art in a world continually in the throes of collapse and transmutation. It’s certainly the way Cusk presents the work of “G” at the outset of this novel: At a certain point in his career the artist G, perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down. At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake, but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality. His wife believed that with this development he had inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition […] . . . In conversation with Sheila Heti in 2018, Cusk said: I felt I lived through womanhood in the most basic and indeed arduous ways and now I don’t feel gendered. And I’m interested in knowing what is after gender. I suppose I see it as a blankness of spirituality ahead of me and I’m interested to know what’s in it. It this what is in it? An entire cosmos in the throes of transmutation and recreation? Parade is Cusk’s most formidable, radical and compelling novel yet. It enacts its own words: “Art is a pact of individuals denying society the last word".' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1987), A theory of Peace, ' The argument: I began to think about peace in a very practical way during the Viet Nam war. I was the right age to be called up. I was exempted because I was a clergyman, but despite the terrors that war held for me, I think I might have gone. It was my first whiff of the force of patriotism. To my amazement, it was strong enough to make even me face death.
In the Church, I became embroiled in a deeper war. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but the war between good and evil that lies at the heart of all human consciousness. Existence is a struggle. We need all the help we can get. Religion is part of that help and theology is the scientific foundation of religion.' back

Langmore, Grealy, Holleley & Medina, What’s that in my nest? How the evolutionary arms race between cuckoos and hosts creates new species, ' How do new species arise? And why are there so many of them? One possible reason is the arms race between animals such as predators and parasites, and the victims they exploit. Many predators and parasites have evolved specialised strategies to avoid detection, such as mimicking their prey or host. In these cases, when the exploiter adopts a new victim, it needs to mimic the new victim to succeed. As a result, the exploiter can diverge from its original population and ultimately become a new species. Charles Darwin proposed this process more than 160 years ago, but it has been difficult to observe in practice. In new research published in Science, we show how this process drives the creation of new species of cuckoos. These birds lay their eggs in the nests of other species, and their chicks mimic the appearance of their host’s chicks to avoid detection.' back

Robert Delaney, Former US health official Anthony Fauci counters accusations he played role in Covid-19 origins, ' Under heated questioning, Fauci, 83, who was the highest-profile public health official steering the US government’s pandemic response, also challenged allegations that he covered up the possibility that the virus causing the illness originated in a laboratory. “The accusation being circulated that I influenced the scientists to change their minds [about a possible lab leak] by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false and simply preposterous,” the retired immunologist testified. . . . Fauci testified that the viral samples EcoHealth shared with the Wuhan lab “were phylogenetically so far removed from Sars-CoV-2 that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses that have evolved or been made into Sars-CoV-2”. “It’s just a virological fact that it was so far removed, that it could not possibly be a progenitor,” he said, referring to the virus cited as responsible for the pandemic.' back