Weekly Picks – May 5, 2024
Credits (clockwise from top left): NASA/ Johnson; Hamilton Matthew Masters; Knowable Magazine; Paolo Pellegrin/ Magnum for The New York Times.
A few minutes on aligning phases of cyclical cicadas:
This week’s collection:
- Discipline and Protest
- Alien life is no joke: How UFOs almost killed the search for life in the Universe
- ‘Where Is the Palestinian Gandhi?’*
- From toxic fungus to soy sauce superstar
*A companion piece, filed here to underline other, valid responses/ forms of struggle against oppression:
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
“At private Vanderbilt University on March 26th, 27 students affiliated with the Vanderbilt Divest Coalition occupied the main administration building, Kirkland Hall, before they were forcibly removed by police. The students had demanded that they be allowed to vote on a student government referendum that would restrict student funds from being invested in Israel. Prior to the arrests, conditions for the occupying students quickly deteriorated, leaving them in an unsanitary environment. Controversially, a reporter from the Nashville Scene was also arrested by the Vanderbilt University Police for trespassing while covering the events inside the building.
The intensity and speed of the administrative backlash to the occupation was striking, even in the context of the intensifying political repression on U.S. college campuses for those calling for the end of the genocide in Gaza. Vanderbilt’s decision to call in police to arrest students—now criminalized as trespassers—was echoed when cops in riot gear arrived at Pomona College to arrest 20 students less than two weeks later. Soon after that, the President of Columbia invited the NYPD to Columbia, where they would arrest over 100 students. As we have seen since then, there has been a steady one-upmanship in terms of administrative authorizations of the use of force. On Wednesday, at the University of Texas at Austin, fifty-seven students were arrested for criminal trespassing by lines of police in riot gear. Every charge was dropped by the county attorney because each arrest lacked probable cause. Thursday at Emory University Atlanta Police and Georgia State Troopers fired pepper balls, stun guns, and rubber bullets at students and faculty at an encampment there. And on Friday, snipers were spotted on a roof at Ohio State University, brandishing firearms as arrests began.
These efforts to stop these demonstrations largely operate by the faulty logic that students, some of whom pay nearly $100,000 year, are trespassing on the campuses where they are currently enrolled. (The trespassing claims are so flimsy that even some municipal police departments have refused to act on the invitation of university presidents to campuses.) University administrations have shown that they take no umbrage embracing their private property rights and policing capacities, while otherwise abandoning their mission to educate. Still, students on university campuses show no signs of letting up.
. . .
Student repression takes different forms across the many tiers of the U.S. higher education system. Elsewhere, it may appear less immediately spectacular than a police cordon. Instead, there are varying shades of repression, some of which arise in the form of dilapidated buildings, gutted academic programs (especially in the humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences), and other indicators of leadership and funding priorities. Or it may manifest in ideologically driven legislation, neglect of student reports of sexual harassment and assault, or the growing weight of student indebtedness associated with increased college costs. (And of course, we have seen academic repression in its most direct and violent form in Gaza itself, where part of Israel’s genocidal campaign has been the full-scale destruction of university campuses and the institutions themselves—and with them, the chance of opportunity and better lives for their would-be students.)
Domestically, austerity-based forms have not stopped student protests or other forms of organized resistance, but they are widely accepted modes of disciplining students—and academic workers of all kinds, from professors to adjuncts to custodial staff. For students, as has been widely described, the growth of student debt and increased college costs have in part resulted from a consciously enacted right-wing strategy designed to thwart what appeared at Columbia in April: i.e., the kind of radical student movement also seen in May of 1968.
Envisioning a future of indebtedness retroactively informs students’ view of themselves in the present, engendering a sense of precarity and limiting their imagined possibilities of what kinds of risks they can afford to take. Conservative and liberal strategies to delegitimize higher education by starving university budgets and legally jeopardizing entire fields of study are a continuation of these efforts.
. . .
Now, facing committed students calling for an end to genocide in Gaza, elite university administrators are on the hunt for new repressive measures.”
2. Alien life is no joke: How UFOs almost killed the search for life in the Universe
“Suddenly, everyone is talking about aliens. After decades on the cultural margins, the question of life in the Universe beyond Earth is having its day in the sun. The next big multibillion-dollar space telescope (the successor to the James Webb) will be tuned to search for signatures of alien life on alien planets and NASA has a robust, well-funded programme in astrobiology. Meanwhile, from breathless newspaper articles about unexplained navy pilot sightings to United States congressional testimony with wild claims of government programmes hiding crashed saucers, UFOs and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) seem to be making their own journey from the fringes.
What are we to make of these twin movements, the scientific search for life on one hand, and the endlessly murky waters of UFO/UAP claims on the other? Looking at history shows that these two very different approaches to the question of extraterrestrial life are, in fact, linked, but not in a good way. For decades, scientists wanting to think seriously about life in the Universe faced what’s been called the ‘giggle factor’, which was directly related to UFOs and their culture. More than once, the giggle factor came close to killing off the field known as SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Now, with new discoveries and new technologies making astrobiology a mainstream frontier of astrophysics, understanding this history has become important for anyone trying to understand what comes next. But for me, as a researcher in the field of technosignatures (signs of advanced alien tech) – the new face of SETI – getting past the giggle factor poses an existential challenge.
. . .
What’s important about the Roswell story is how loose even the idea of evidence becomes. Anyone with a vague connection to the events and a story to tell gets added to the list of witnesses. New books pile on old books and theories multiply until even those claiming to be serious UFO researchers can’t sort out which version with how many saucers and bodies is the one they’re supposed to investigate; garden-variety enthusiasts are beyond confused.
While this might have seemed amusing to those on the sidelines at the time, it established a pattern of ‘anything goes’ in the public’s perception of UFOs and, by association, the question of alien life that continues to this day.
That loose relationship between extraordinary claims and the evidence for such claims also had a profound effect on me as a teenager interested in astronomy and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life.
At the time, I was reading both hard-science books (Sagan) and speculative works about UFO-related topics. For a time, I’d become enamoured of von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods (1968) and its claims that many archaeological mysteries could best be explained by ancient aliens who had once come to visit Earth. That time ended when, one evening, I chanced upon a PBS documentary called The Case of the Ancient Astronauts (1977). It presented interviews with scientists who had actually spent their lives studying the subjects of von Däniken’s ancient alien speculations. The simplicity with which hard-won archaeological evidence trumped von Däniken’s claims left me both angry (I felt duped by his book) and exhilarated. The establishment of proper standards for what counts as evidence is what set the archaeologists apart from von Däniken’s wishful fantasies. The experience of that stark difference ended my own interest in UFOs and visiting aliens of any historical epoch.
If it hadn’t made me so angry, it might have made me laugh – and it’s that giggle factor that has been so harmful to the establishment of the true scientific study of astrobiology.”
3. ‘Where Is the Palestinian Gandhi?’
“On Oct. 7, as the Israeli military deployed across the country to combat Hamas, a group of soldiers waited on an ancient hill called Tel Rumeida in Hebron, a city in the West Bank. Their target was a burly Palestinian man, then 43, named Issa Amro. As Amro approached the soldiers through an olive grove, they moved in and struck him with their rifles, he later recalled. Amro put up little defense; he was handcuffed and taken to a military base. There he was tied to the back of a chair with zip ties. He was first blindfolded, then gagged. Then a beating began, Amro says. The ordeal lasted more than 10 hours.
Amro is no Hamas terrorist, however. He is a Palestinian activist — a man who for decades has urged his followers, whether in viral online videos or in speeches before leaders at the United Nations, to take the path of nonviolent resistance forged by Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. That path, difficult in any environment, is a notably challenging one in the West Bank. Since Israel conquered the region in 1967, its military has forbidden nearly every form of protest, even things as small as gathering more than 10 people for a political conversation or simply waving the Palestinian flag.
The simplest acts of defiance can be seen as a threat: Amro once organized and videotaped an effort by a Palestinian man to pass through an Israeli checkpoint while balancing on his shoulder a large watermelon — a longtime symbol of Palestinian nationalism because its colors are those of the Palestinian flag. In the video, soldiers confiscate the watermelon and, as the camera zooms in, eye it warily as though it might explode. But Amro’s protests often offer a more direct challenge to Israeli authority. He has repeatedly filmed Israeli soldiers at close range and been beaten and grabbed by the throat when he refused to stop. When armed settlers eyed new sites in the city on which to raise the Israeli flag, Amro organized local Palestinians to “occupy” the land first, often in the dead of night. Using the same tactics, Amro helped start a kindergarten, tried to open a cinema in an abandoned factory and persuaded multiple Palestinians to move into homes after residents had fled. Amro himself lives in one such home, surrounded by some of the West Bank’s most violent settlers. “He’s trying to do to settlers what the settlers are doing to Palestinians,” Yehuda Shaul, a left-wing Israeli activist who has known Amro for nearly 20 years, told me. “He is an extremely stubborn person.”
The Israeli authorities, and even sometimes the West Bank’s Palestinian ones, have rarely viewed his actions as legitimate political activity. He has been arrested more times than he can count, evicted from his home for weekslong stretches, shot in both legs, and arraigned by both Israeli military courts and the Palestinian Authority on charges ranging from participating in an assembly without a permit to “causing strife” and “insulting the higher authorities.” Yet the cause of nonviolent Palestinian resistance has advanced little in recent years — and support for Hamas in the West Bank has grown following the Oct. 7 attack. Many of Amro’s neighbors praise his efforts as a human rights defender, but others question what his nonviolent approach has yielded after so long. Some have wondered aloud about his various stunts in Hebron. Why does he seem so determined to martyr himself?”
4. From toxic fungus to soy sauce superstar
“Nearly 9,000 years ago, around the time that humans were first domesticating corn and pigs, some people in China were taming fungi.
One such fungus, the mold Aspergillus oryzae, would go on to become a culinary superstar. Through fermentation of raw ingredients like soybeans or rice, A. oryzae helps to bring us soy sauce, sake and several other traditional Asian foods. It does so by breaking down proteins and starches so that other microbes can finish off the fermentations.
But A. oryzae wasn’t always so obliging. The wild version of the mold makes potent toxins that can poison the consumer and lead to cancer in the liver and other organs. Plus, it’s a destructive agricultural pest that causes millions of dollars in damage each year to crops like peanuts and corn.
What changed? Research is steadily revealing how the fungus transformed from a dangerous, toxic mold into a superior tool of food biotechnology that thrives in human-made environments. And as scientists study A. oryzae, they’re learning more about the process of domestication in microbes in general — which still remains in many ways mysterious.
“Almost everything we know comes from plants and animals,” microbial genomicist John Gibbons of UMass Amherst says of domestication. “You can see the difference between dogs and wolves, between corn and teosinte, but you can’t really see the differences between microbes … because most of it is changes in metabolism.””