J. M. Coetzee’s Weakness

This chapter’s investigation of the value of “soft opinions” from Diary of a Bad Year seeks to take political objections to critical modesty head on by thinking with J. M. Coetzee about the dispositions necessary to speak well in public. Both McEwan and Smith are interested in reading as an event that intimates one to an experience of failure, specifically the failure to know the world as another person does. From this intimation of failure, both draw lessons about the need for a modest disposition towards our own self-knowledge and our ability to make private experience public. Coetzee’s late novels—Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year—take this failure to mean that there is no uncompromised position outside of politics or literature from which to speak about them. Coetzee’s well-known critique of rationalism is a reflection of his insistence that we are already compromised when we speak, that neither pure reason nor pure fiction provides any neutral site of judgment. Against the strong opinions of rationality, Coetzee embraces the weak but still critical claims of fiction, rhetoric, and imagination. Thus, for Coetzee modesty emerges as a condition of speaking in public because such speech is already politically, ethically, and spiritually implicated. In Diary, Coetzee uses multiple overlapping narrative lines to model what he calls “soft opinions” and “sympathetic imagination.” These formal techniques exemplify a disposition of critical modesty that he finds necessary for cultivating a better life from a position already entangled with the world.

‘FROM THE TOTEM TO THE ANTENNA’: MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE AND THE UNIVERSAL AT THE END OF THE FRENCH EMPIRE

This article situates Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète in the context of the end of the French empire. In drawing out conceptual continuities between Schaeffer’s administration of colonial radio in the mid-1950s and works of musique concrète from the same period, I argue that both projects are predicated on a commitment to the capacity of acousmatic listening to provide access to universal essences. The invocation of the ‘primitive’ in Schaeffer’s writing and music thus serves to buttress the universalizing rhetoric of musique concrète, portraying it as a neutral site for the reconciliation of different cultures, underwritten by a shared human essence. As such, musique concrète partakes in the logic of a colonial humanism, in which empire is conceived of as another such neutral framework. By way of conclusion, a form of acousmatic listening opposed to essence and empire is elaborated from the writings of Schaeffer’s anticolonial contemporaries.

Factors Associated with Perceived Trust of False Abortion Websites: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The majority of patients use the internet to search for health information. While there is a vast repository of searchable information online, much of the content is unregulated and therefore potentially incorrect, conflicting, or confusing. Abortion information online is particularly prone to being inaccurate as anti-choice websites publish purposefully misleading information in formats that appear as neutral resources. To understand how anti-choice websites appear neutral, we need to understand the specific website features of anti-choice features that impart trust to viewers. OBJECTIVE We sought to identify characteristics of false or misleading abortion websites that make these websites appear trustworthy to the public. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional study using Amazon.com Inc’s Mechanical Turk platform. We used validated questionnaires to ask participants to rate eleven anti-choice sites and one neutral site identified by experts, focusing on site content, creators, and design. We collected socio-demographic data and participant views on abortion. We used a composite measure of “mean overall trust” as our primary outcome. Using correlation matrices, we determined which website characteristics were most associated with overall trust. Finally, we used linear regression to identify participant characteristics associated with overall trust. RESULTS Our analytic sample included 498 participants ranging from ages 22 to 70, 50.1% of whom identified as female. Across eleven anti-choice sites, creator trust (“I believe that the creators of this site are honest and trustworthy”) had the highest correlation coefficient with overall trust (0.70). Professional appearance (0.59), look and feel (0.59), perception that the information is created by experts (0.59), association with a trustworthy organization (0.58), valued features and functionalities (0.54), and interactive capabilities (0.52) all demonstrated strong relationships with overall trust. At the individual level, pro-choice leaning was associated with higher overall trust of the neutral site (B: -0.43, CI: -0.87, 0.01) and lower overall trust of the anti-choice sites (B: 0.52, CI: 0.05, .99). CONCLUSIONS The overall trustworthiness of anti-choice websites is most associated with design characteristics and perceived trustworthiness of the site creator. Those who believe that access to abortion should be limited are more likely to trust anti-choice websites.

Uncoupling evolutionary changes in DNA sequence, transcription factor occupancy and enhancer activity

Sequence variation within enhancers plays a major role in both evolution and disease, yet its functional impact on transcription factor (TF) occupancy and enhancer activity remains poorly understood. Here, we assayed the binding of five essential TFs over multiple stages of embryogenesis in two distant Drosophila species (with 1.4 substitutions per neutral site), identifying thousands of orthologous enhancers with conserved or diverged combinatorial occupancy. We used these binding signatures to dissect two properties of developmental enhancers: (1) potential TF cooperativity, using signatures of co-associations and co-divergence in TF occupancy. This revealed conserved combinatorial binding despite sequence divergence, suggesting protein-protein interactions sustain conserved collective occupancy. (2) Enhancer in-vivo activity, revealing orthologous enhancers with conserved activity despite divergence in TF occupancy. Taken together, we identify enhancers with diverged motifs yet conserved occupancy and others with diverged occupancy yet conserved activity, emphasising the need to functionally measure the effect of divergence on enhancer activity.

Beyond stateless democracy

Pierre Bourdieu began his posthumously published lectures “On the State” by highlighting the three dominant traditions that have framed most thinking about the state in Western social science and modern social theory. On the one hand, he highlighted what he termed the “initial definition” of the state as a “neutral site” designed to regulate conflict and “serve the common good.” Bourdieu traced this essentially classical liberal conception of the state back to the pioneering political treatises of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.1 In direct response to this “optimistic functionalism,” Bourdieu noted the rise of a critical and more “pessimistic” alternative—something of a diametric opposite.

Timing and Localization of Rhamnolipid Synthesis Gene Expression in Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilms

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms can develop mushroom-like structures with stalks and caps consisting of discrete subpopulations of cells. Self-produced rhamnolipid surfactants have been shown to be important in development of the mushroom-like structures. The quorum-sensing-controlled rhlAB operon is required for rhamnolipid synthesis. We have introduced an rhlA-gfp fusion into a neutral site in the P. aeruginosa genome to study rhlAB promoter activity in rhamnolipid-producing biofilms. Expression of the rhlA-gfp fusion in biofilms requires the quorum-sensing signal butanoyl-homoserine lactone, but other factors are also required for expression. Early in biofilm development rhlA-gfp expression is low, even in the presence of added butanoyl-homoserine lactone. Expression of the fusion becomes apparent after microcolonies with a depth of >20 μm have formed and, as shown by differential labeling with rfp or fluorescent dyes, rhlA-gfp is preferentially expressed in the stalks rather than the caps of mature mushrooms. The rhlA-gfp expression pattern is not greatly influenced by addition of butanoyl-homoserine lactone to the biofilm growth medium. We propose that rhamnolipid synthesis occurs in biofilms after stalks have formed but prior to capping in the mushroom-like structures. The differential expression of rhlAB may play a role in the development of normal biofilm architecture.