Meanderings, 21 April 2023

Good morning from a Chicagoland that is doing its best to turn toward summer. Again, I say this often and could say it each week, thanks to those who send me links for these Meanderings.

Photo by Chris Thompson on Unsplash

Maybe they can go deeper and find the solution, as well, to baldness:

Ever wondered why your hair turns gray as you age? A team of researchers says it has identified the root cause as trapped stem cells — and that means new tips for naturally fending off grays from your mane could be coming soon.

It all starts with a type of stem cell called melanocytes, also known as McSCs, says the study, which was published in the journal Nature this week.

The research team from NYU Grossman School of Medicine was already familiar with melanocytes. They're the main mechanism that produces the pigment melanin, bringing color to your skin and eyes.

That melanin is key to hair color. McSCs hang around in your hair follicles, where they receive a protein signal that tells them when to become mature cells. Mature cells release pigment and, voilà, you get your hair color.

But over the course of this study, the researchers learned that McSCs actually move between microscopic compartments in your hair follicle. Each compartment might give the MsSC a slightly different protein signal, which allows the cell to oscillate between different levels of maturity. That's largely unlike how other stem cells operate — that is, maturing until they die.

The unique maturity level of MsSCs gets more complicated the older you get. As your hair grows and sheds in cycles, the more McSCs get stuck in one particular compartment called the hair follicle bulge.

Oh my!

Scientists have found thriving communities of coastal creatures, including tiny crabs and anemones, living thousands of miles from their original home on plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a 620,000 square mile swirl of trash in the ocean between California and Hawaii.

In a new study published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal on Monday, a team of researchers revealed that dozens of species of coastal invertebrate organisms have been able to survive and reproduce on plastic garbage that’s been floating in the ocean for years.

The scientists said that the findings suggest plastic pollution in the ocean might be enabling the creation of new floating ecosystems of species that are not normally able to survive in the open ocean.

Unlike organic material that decomposes and sinks within months or, at most, a few years, plastic debris can float in the oceans for a much longer time, giving creatures the opportunity to survive and reproduce in the open ocean for years.

“It was surprising to see how frequent the coastal species were. They were on 70% of the debris that we found,” Linsey Haram, a science fellow at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the study’s lead author, told CNN.

The wages of overwork:

The data isn’t surprising. But it underlines something that we’ve been talking about for some time now. The more educated you are, the more money you make — the more time you spend working, and the slipperier your work becomes, oozing into all corners of your life. The more you’re paid, the more ostensibly prestigious your job, the more time you spend working outside of standard working hours. (Conversely, the less money you make, the more likely you are to have not enough work: the same Pew study found that 23% of lower income workers report that they have too few working hours, compared to 4% of upper income workers).

This is a marked switch from, say, the 19th century, when the rich worked as little as possible and the poor worked as much as possible. It’s not that the rich became industrious and the poor became lazy; it’s that the poor organized to gain a living wage and protect themselves from exploitation, and the rich, or at least the “new” rich, used their own “industriousness” (e.g., working all the time) to frame them as both morally upright and outside the critique of the entitled leisure class.

But part of it, too, was structural — a direct result of the “billing hour” as the be-all-end-all of professional advancement in a small but influential corner of American industry. These jobs are ostensibly salaried, but a worker’s salary is bolstered (either through bonuses or advancement) by the sheer number of hours billed. And billed hours don’t have to be creative hours, or efficient hours, or collaborative hours. They just have to be.

The high-income high-status jobs that demand the most hours are known, in sociological terms, as “greedy” jobs. Think finance, of course, but also big law and consulting. Back in 2019, Claire Cain Miller busted my mind wide open with a piece on how the standards of these greedy professions have effectively negated women’s educational gains (and calcified the inequitable distribution of domestic labor) in homes where both partners have the same educational level. (Go read the article for more, including the hall of fame quote from economist Claudia Golden that “Women don’t step back from work because they have rich husbands. They have rich husbands because they step back from work.”)

You could easily argue: these people are making millions of dollars, who cares if they’re reifying gender norms and grinding themselves into dust! So they’re work robots and miserable — maybe they should be. If they want to work that many hours a week in order to make that much money — let them. I mean, isn’t that the heart of the “right to work” movement? If someone wants to exploit themselves, that’s liberty in action!

But the norms of the rich and powerful influence the norms of those striving to be rich and powerful. Work culture at the highest echelons, in the most handsomely-paid professions, trickles down to professions where work is far more precarious. Today, people with paid time off (which, generally, are also people who are not lower income) work more hours and, when they have paid time off, don’t take the full amount. Not because they love their work, but because that’s the standard — and they’ve rationalized that they don’t need it.

Intellectual hospitality anyone?

Rarely a day goes by without a report of our inability to discuss our differences with clarity and charity: scholars are silenced, lectures interrupted, celebrities cancelled, lives and reputations destroyed by twitter trolling. Both within the university and broader civic culture, we are increasingly angry, addled, and alienated—so focused on what we believe to be the darkness or dimness in others, we can no longer see clearly ourselves. The irony is that while partisans are busy asserting that their opponents are evil and stupid, the very act of doing so—widely replicated as it is, and provoking a corresponding vitriol from the other side—renders our public discourse and character as a whole ever more callous, clueless, and cruel. We are becoming what we denounce.

Our growing collective inability to abide or understand disagreeable ideas (and those that hold them) has implications both for the state of the country and the state of education. It is hard to imagine how an increasingly diverse republic can flourish when growing numbers of its citizens won’t listen to and can’t stand each other. And if much of education (classicly understood) aims at enabling students to discover, discern, and value that which is true, good, and beautiful from that which is not, the unwillingness to hear viewpoints with which we disagree undermines the purpose of the enterprise, as it disincentivizes curiosity, exploration, and debate in favor of conformity.

How to disrupt this toxic cycle? In a time riven by difference and marked by malice and misinformation, we need new and creative means of rebuilding a shared sense of the common good. Vital to such renewal will be the reinvigoration of what might seem a modest practice: the extension of intellectual hospitality.

Defining Intellectual Hospitality

What is intellectual hospitality? If hospitality, classically understood, involves welcome for the stranger and the offer of attention and care, intellectual hospitality extends an invitation to new ideas and the people who hold them. Scholar Diana Glyer observes that

the ancient tradition of hospitality specifically meant to take our eyes off ourselves and linger face to face with someone who is not like me. . . In the classroom, the concept of intellectual hospitality occurs when students engage with unfamiliar ideas, read books from unknown authors, and entertain new ways of looking at the world. . . Intellectual hospitality encourages us to engage with new ideas, not merely contradict, dismiss, dispute, reject or ridicule them.

Pickleball anyone?

AUSTIN (KXAN) – There is no doubt that pickleball is exploding in Texas. In the U.S. The Sports and Fitness Industry Association said that participation in the sport nearly doubled in 2022, seeing a year-over-year increase of around 85% and a 158.6% increase over the last three years. 

At the South Austin Recreation Center, the increase in participation in the sport is overwhelmingly clear. Matt Winebright started playing three years ago. He said he began seeing the courts get more crowded during the COVID lockdown. 

“I think pickleball was starting to become more popular,” he said. “But then it turned into a sport people could still play – even when tennis nets were down, basketball hoops were boarded up and the gyms were closed.”

Pickleball was invented in the 1960s by three dads living in Washington state, according to USA Pickleball. It’s sort of like a cross between ping-pong and tennis and takes up about half of the space as a traditional tennis court. 

Courts at the South Austin Recreation Center have become such a hit that eager pickleball players sometimes will have to wait up to an hour to get a chance on the court. The center has two pickleball courts next to a standard tennis court. If no tennis players are out, the court can be turned into four additional pickleball courts. 

How about beginning the day with some long words:

It should come as no surprise that we are word lovers. In fact, we are big word lovers in that we love really big words. To express our love, we looked around for some of the biggest, most ludicrously long words in the English language. In addition to pure length, we also tried to find: 

• the longest word without vowels

• the longest one-syllable word

• and other uniquely long words.

Figuring out which word is the longest of them all isn’t as simple as just counting letters, though. Should you count scientific words? Should obscure, rarely used words be included, or should we give the honor to a word people actually use? In the interest of fairness, our list includes scientific words, obscure words, and all of the absurdly long words stuck in between.  

methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl… 

At over 180,000 letters long, the chemical name of the protein titin is often said to technically be the longest English word. If spoken out loud, this word takes over three hours to say! Its absurd length is due to the fact that proteins get their scientific names by combining the names of all of their joined amino acids together, and titin has quite a lot of them. For obvious reasons, titin’s official name has never actually appeared in a dictionary or scientific text. Because it is a scientific term, many would disqualify the Big M from actually taking the crown as English’s longest word. 

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, coming in at 45 letters long, is typically the biggest word you will find that actually appears in an English dictionary. According to many sources, it was coined around 1935 by Everett Smith, who at the time was the president of the National Puzzlers’ League. The word, which was basically engineered for its length, refers to a lung disease caused by inhaling silica dust. 

If complementarianism doesn’t work for all, she says …

I know that there are women who are happy in patriarchal churches. But that doesn’t make patriarchy right or good—or even tenable or tolerable. If it is not working for some women, it is not working for all women. If there is even one of us—and I know there are many, so many, with experiences similar to mine—who has been held back from pursuing her God-given callings by complementarian theologies and by patriarchally-minded people in power, the whole system is not right. It is corrupt from the inside out. It needs to change—and if, as is so often the case, it is not willing to change, then women need to leave.

Church communities are hurting not only individual women but also themselves as a whole when they don’t make room for every kind of woman in this world—every personality type, every set of gifts. If there is not room for us all, something is missing. This is what the metaphor of the human body in 1 Corinthians 12 is about: we are not whole as a community if any body part is broken or missing. Churches who say to women, you may not preach, or we don’t want you to lead us, are like the eye saying to the hand, I don’t need you (1 Cor. 12:21). And, the apostle Paul is very clear here, if one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers (1 Cor. 12:26). The Luke 15 parables of the lost sheep, lost coin, and lost son tell a similar story: God cares about the one for whom the system is not working, even if it seems to be working for one or nine or ninety-nine others. God values and makes room for each individual in her amazing and complicated particularity. Church communities are invited to do the same—and we miss out dearly when we refuse to.

I want there to be room in the church for those like Ally, room for those like me, and room for every single one of the four billion women in this world. I want there to be room for us and our gifts, exactly as God made us to be—no one pressured into roles that do not fit them, no one belittled or stereotyped or cast out for being who they are. Complementarianism may seem to work for some women. But it does not work for us all. And I will no longer settle for anything less.