18 December, 2022

Nature

Beavering away on a dam. Allison Shelley/Getty

The strangest members of the animal kingdom

A million years ago, “beavers the size of bears roamed North America”, says Leila Philip in LitHub. The “deep weirdness” of their modern descendants poses an evolutionary puzzle. Swimming, they seem more like seals than big rodents, but then their “dexterous forepaws” look startlingly human with “five nimble fingers and naked palms”. They groom their lustrous fur with “catlike fastidiousness”, standing on “gooselike hind feet”, each as wide as the beaver’s head. Then there’s the “reptilian tail”, which looks like it’s been “run over by a tractor tire, the treads leaving a pattern of indentations that resemble scales”.

Part bear, part bird, part monkey, part lizard, humanoid hands, an aquatic tail. “Is it any surprise that beavers have fired the human imagination in every continent that they are found?” Some of mankind’s oldest animal effigies are of beavers; Russia’s Shigir Idol – “the earliest wooden carving in the world” – was sculpted using a beaver’s lower jawbone. Tribes across North America hunted but also revered the creature, sometimes gouging out the eyes of trapped beavers to prevent them witnessing their own death. In Europe, the Roman Catholic Church decreed they could be “eaten like fish as penance” on holy days. Throughout the ancient Middle East, castoreum, the sweet-smelling excretion from beaver glands, was used for medicinal purposes. In Persia, where beavers were considered sacred, the animals were protected by a system of fines: harming one could cost you 60,000 gold darics, “although you could get out of it by killing one thousand snakes”.

Gone viral

TikToker @TannerLeatherstein purchases designer bags “specifically for dissecting”, says Alina Dizik in The Cut: he measures the leather and burns scraps to estimate the items’ true cost. In one video, he deconstructs a $1,200 Chanel wallet, the actual value of which he reckons is around $130. In another, he finds that the Saffiano leather in a $2,100 Prada clutch is coated in a thick, plasticky layer that will quickly break and crack. Real value: $120. The brand he would be happy to splurge on? Bottega, he says, because they use “minimally processed and naturally clean leathers… They really are playing the top game.”

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Don’t spoil the view: a lighthouse in Nantucket. Getty

The rich liberals betraying Biden

Joe Biden’s clean energy bill was rightly trumpeted when it was passed in August, says Edward Luce in the FT. But it looks like many of its green projects will never materialise – and Democrats only have themselves to blame. Last week, an accompanying bill that would have cut through the “Kafkaesque” red tape blocking new solar plants, wind farms and so on was torpedoed by lawmakers. Republicans opposed it for the usual reason: it had the name “Biden” on it. But they were joined by lefty Democrats like Bernie Sanders, because the bill would have enabled a new gas pipeline in West Virginia. It will now be “all but impossible” for Biden to hit his target of cutting 50% of US emissions by the end of the decade.

Clearly, America’s left can’t resist a “moral gesture”, even at the expense of an obviously good outcome. What’s worse is their hypocrisy. The rich residents of liberal island haven Nantucket are blocking America’s first serious offshore wind farm on the “flimsy” claim that it would disturb local whales. “The reality is they do not want their view spoiled.” The same happened on the previous attempt in nearby Cape Cod, when local progressive royals (the Kennedy family) killed the plans. “At some point, America’s left must choose between having its cake and eating it.”

Arts

The Lviv Opera House. Shutterstock

Ukrainian opera’s Blitz spirit

“Why should a country at war waste time bothering about opera?” says Gerald Malone in Engelsberg Ideas. Because it’s a struggle to “assert its national identity, that’s why”. Within days of the Russian invasion, Vasil Vokun, director of Lviv Opera House, decided his venue was “a dog in this fight”. Unperturbed by air strikes, he has continued to stage performances as usual, albeit with a few adjustments – the audience is limited to 300 people, as that’s the capacity of the “hastily constructed” underground air-raid shelter. “London’s West End grit in the Second World War Blitz springs to mind.”

I planned to attend a performance of When the Fern Blooms, a folkloric faerie tale by Yevhen Stankovych, in October, but the “resumption of random missile strikes” led me to cancel my trip. Vokun was “clearly miffed”. The “grimly determined” director would never cop out as I had. The “heartbeat of a nation” can be measured in many ways, but one guarantor of vitality is a willingness to “defend at all costs a heritage, tradition and culture” and prevent it being “steamrolled by aggression”. The musicians at Lviv Opera have proved they have that willingness “in spades”.

Quirk of history

Jenner with his rather unwilling test subject. Getty

How the vaccine was invented

May 14, 1796 was a “golden day in the history of science”, says Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, “but a terrifying one for a certain eight-year-old boy”. Determined to prove that humans could be inoculated against smallpox by infecting them with cowpox, the British physician Edward Jenner slashed the arm of his gardener’s “brave and healthy son”, with a knife dipped in the ooze from a cowpox blister. After the boy recovered from a brief chill, Jenner stabbed him with a lancet infected with smallpox. “Nothing happened.” Jenner had invented a cure for “one of the deadliest viruses in world history”. The name he gave to this revolutionary new treatment, from the Latin for cow, was: “vaccine”.

Doctors still faced the “prodigious challenge” of delivering the stuff around the world, in an era before cold storage, planes or cars. Their solution was “ingenious”. In the early 1800s, two Spanish boys were given the smallpox vaccine just before they departed on a ship to the Americas. When they developed pustules, doctors scraped material from them and jabbed two other kids on board – and this “daisy-chain routine” continued until the ship reached modern-day Venezuela. From there, it travelled “arm-to-arm” to Mexico, Macau and Manila. Within 10 years, “the vaccine had gone global”.

Property

THE COUNTRY HOUSE This six-bedroom family home in rural Wiltshire has high ceilings, large windows and an impressive hall that extends the full depth of the house. Its two dual-aspect reception rooms have grand stone fireplaces, and the spacious kitchen/breakfast room is fitted with an Aga. Regular trains from nearby Kemble to London Paddington take 1hr 20mins. £1,500,000.

Quoted

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”