Newspaper reports credited Sergeant Louis R. Vitullo, but a few also mentioned a woman collaborator. Kennedy proceeded to investigate, and the result is this cogent narrative about this feminist technology and its true inventor, the activist Martha “Marty” Goddard. The Secret History of The Rape Kit is a gripping book about a grim topic, written with exemplary grace.

In 1972, Goddard, a volunteer for a teen crisis helpline in Chicago, realized that many of those runaway teens had fled home after being molested by a family member or teacher. Goddard, Kennedy writes, was moved to speak to rape survivors, attorneys, and hospital workers to gain insights into a crime that left a victim feeling hopeless, even responsible for her own condition.

What if there was a way to prove that rape had happened, Goddard had asked.

.pdf

The post The Secret History of The Rape Kit appeared first on Vijee Venkatraman.

After linguist Philip Seargeant’s grandmother suffered a stroke, her thoughts remained trapped in her body. Although she had no cognitive damage, her paralyzed muscles didn’t allow her to speak or write. To communicate, she would point to letters printed on one side of a tattered communication board to spell words, while the other side had some simple pictures.

The idea of typing using the mind is at the core of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, which aims to let people type simply by imagining themselves speak. Technology giants are investing heavily in neurological research that promises to revolutionize the way we communicate with our devices and with each other – with the future aim of transferring our thoughts directly to another person.

“You wouldn’t need to talk,” said Elon Musk, founder of the brain implant company Neuralink,  , adding that we could still speak for sentimental reasons. In his new book, The Future of Language, Seargeant explores technologies like BCI, as well as AI tools such as autocomplete, predictive texting and ChatGPT and invites us to consider the implications of innovations that seem poised to transform the future of language as we know it.

He offers context from history, philosophy and literature to show how changes in communication tools impact language, which, in turn, reshapes society. The myth of the Tower of Babel, which he cites several times, suggests that humans once had a universal language and that this was considered an ideal thing. The global popularity of English has brought us close to a universal language, but machine translation does one better and promises to make us mutually intelligible to one another, without sacrificing linguistic diversity.

Seargeant reports that the science-fiction vision of a universal translation device seems close, but in a multilingual world, with over 7000 languages, there are many challenges. If machine translation can be used effectively for both text and speech as the tech companies plan, phrasebooks may soon be history.­­­­­­­ While Google Translate cannot yet be used in literary translation, machine translation may be good enough for functional purposes – except in settings like hospitals, where translation errors can have such serious consequences that we need back-up systems, warns the author.

He also reminds us that communication is largely mediated by technology owned by the multinational companies whose business model is built around selling behavioural insights gleaned from a user’s personal online experiences. Technology like BCI, augmented reality and the metaverse, will only increase the amount of such data available to the big tech companies.

And this could lead to new ways of manipulating us. For example, when AI programs compose responses for you, sometimes they suggest a reply which is better phrased than the one that occurred to you. With BCI, AI has the potential to sit directly between our thoughts and our ability to express them, writes Seargeant. And it might not be too much of a jump to say — those who control these technologies will be better able to direct our behaviour, from personal spending to voting.

So next time we hit “Tab” to complete a sentence, pick the most appropriate emoji or use clever prompts to craft a document with ChatGPT, we should pause. In his scholarly, must-read book, Seargeant makes us think about the underpinnings of these convenient tools and what they portend for language, one of the cornerstones of human identity.

The post The Future of Language appeared first on Vijee Venkatraman.

Anyone who has crossed a busy road in a metropolis without well-regulated traffic, in say Mumbai, India, can understand the plight of a deer trying to cross a two-lane highway, in rural United States. Evolution has not prepared deer for encounters with automobiles. Over one million crashes between vehicles and large mammals, like deer, occur annually  in the U.S alone, with wildlife often ending up as roadkill.  Roads, and fast-moving vehicles, give humans mobility. Ironically, for thousands of wildlife species worldwide, ranging from butterflies to elephants, the same pathways act as barriers to movement, and cut off some animals from their seasonal migration routes.

In Crossings, Ben Goldfarb, an environmentalist journalist, takes us on an eye-opening road trip that spans continents to show how paved roads, seen as markers of civilization, disrupt the natural world. Mostly, he travels with researchers in road ecology, a relatively new discipline which studies “how life change(s) for plants and animals with a road and traffic nearby.” If roads are a disease, the author suggests that wildlife crossings – a network of tunnels, overpasses, and bridge-like structures that allow animals safe passage – could be the treatment. For instance, while underpasses helped cut down elk fatalities on the expanded Trans-Canada highway in the Banff National Park, cutting-edge overpasses were found to serve grizzly bears much better.

The practice of road ecology, the author emphasizes, is a moral mandate. Whether it is saving species from extinction or rescuing more common ones, animal lovers have their work cut out. Roadkill, the author suggests, can be managed better to serve ecology. Deer, the most common roadkill, serves scavenging birds, coyotes, and even humans. But consider the plight of the Golden Eagle of the American West, which when “weighed down by a bellyful of venison takes about as long as a 747 to achieve liftoff,” and risks becoming roadkill itself. A service that drags deer carrion, some distance away from the road, will help the eagles finish their repast in peace, the author writes.

Traffic itself can ravage wildlife that relies on keen hearing for survival. In one study, researchers replayed recordings of Glacier National Park’s iconic Going-to-the-Sun Road at a migratory bird pitstop in Idaho. The road—celebrated as an engineering marvel and a crown jewel of American scenic drives—became, in this experiment, a “phantom road.” Even without cars or predators present, the noise alone unsettled the birds. Some species avoided the area entirely. Others, unable to distinguish safety from threat, defaulted to vigilance: they scanned the skies as if hawks might be near. That constant watchfulness drained their energy, leaving them too exhausted to forage. Many starved. The paradox is striking: a road revered by humans for its beauty can, at the same time, devastate the creatures whose survival depends on silence.

Road ecology has yielded many other insights to the effect that “roads warp earth in every way and at every scale.” But new highways will soon be emerging. Projections say that two billion motorized vehicles, including self-driving cars, will hit the roads by 2030 – twice as many as in 2010.

So, what is to be done?  In the US, there are initiatives to dismantle abandoned forest roads and to protect migratory routes of animals. In developing countries like biodiverse Brazil, new highways come outfitted with wildlife crossings; the law requires highway operators to gather roadkill data and transport injured animals to veterinary clinics.

With technology and thoughtfulness, it may be possible to mitigate the worst effects of roads. There are heartwarming small initiatives like: people in Tasmania who care for orphans of marsupial animals like wallabies, whose mothers have become roadkill, or folks who deliver moose roadkill to hungry families in Alaska.

“Individual drivers can’t make roads lie lighter on earth, any more than people swapping out light bulbs to solve climate change, writes Goldfarb wryly, making it clear it will have to be a colossal, planet-wide effort. This is a rare, beautifully written book, which tells us some truths about roads, automobiles, and life on the planet and still manages to make us feel positive about the road ahead.

Another review in Science, not mine.

The post Crossings appeared first on Vijee Venkatraman.

In the twilight, that nest in the old church of Suntak in Sweden fly around hunting for insects. The twelfth century church’s façade stays unlit at night — a rarity among historic churches — and the darkness continue to make it a sanctuary for the remarkable creatures evolved for the night. You want those bats in the belfry!

In his book The Darkness Manifesto, first published in Swedish two years ago, Johan Eklöf — bat scientist and conservationist — argues that when artificial light burns around the clock, whether in cities, the countryside, or offshore, it disrupts the circadian rhythm of every living being. Nocturnal animals suffer the most, but few creatures on the planet remain untouched by excessive illumination.

Early in the 21^st century, astronomers were the first to sound the alarm about light pollution. To measure how much stray illumination washed over observing sites, they created the Bortle scale, ranging from 1 (none, as in the middle of the ocean) to 9 (inner-city level). They also named skyglow, a term that sounds poetic but isn’t — it’s the diffuse brightening of the night sky caused by artificial light. Skyglow obstructs the work of professional astronomers and dims an urbanite’s view of the stars, as if a careless individual had “used a dirty cloth to wipe the window facing the universe,” Eklöf writes.

Biologists started studying how always-on artificial light disrupts organisms. Some life forms that take their time cues from the moon were the first to show unmistakable signs of disorientation: newly hatched turtles crawling toward a streetlamp and doom, for instance, instead of the sea. And as the research grows, it’s becoming clear that light pollution doesn’t just unsettle individual species — its effects ripple through entire ecosystems.

Take the case of insects — nearly 40 percent of species are now at risk of extinction. Anyone who has watched an insect spiral toward a bulb knows how powerfully artificial light can pull them off course. Moths, being nocturnal, are especially vulnerable. In the pre‑industrial era they were proverbially drawn to flames; today they are fatally drawn to bright lights. And because nocturnal moths pollinate as widely — and often more diversely — than daytime bees, their decline sends trouble rippling through the plants that depend on them.

What of humans themselves, the creators of electrical lighting?  White light, from LEDs and fluorescent bulbs, has a greater proportion of blue wavelengths compared to incandescent bulbs. Over-exposure to this blue-tinged light has been linked to human ailments ranging from disrupted sleep patterns to a greater incidence of hormone-sensitive cancers. 

Recognizing these risks, Sweden’s Karlstad Central Hospital has invested in indoor lighting that mimics the natural shifts in daylight — changes in both color and intensity across the day. The results have been promising, and Eklöf points to this model as evidence that thoughtful design can help restore our circadian balance. With the right light at the right time, he suggests, we can meet our need for brightness without sacrificing our need for darkness.

LEDs — inexpensive, energy‑efficient, and responsible for the explosion of outdoor lighting — may also offer a way out of our excesses, Eklöf writes. Unlike incandescent bulbs, today’s LEDs can be tuned and programmed with remarkable precision. With greater awareness, sensible legislation, and better‑designed fixtures — motion‑activated lights, downward‑facing sources, and other targeted solutions — we can sharply reduce the amount of artificial light that spills into the night sky.

Light pollution may have a straightforward technical fix, but other forces run deeper. Across our evolutionary history, humans have feared the dark, and in many cultures light has come to stand for safety, prosperity, even virtue. Eklöf traces this lineage in succinct chapters that braid psychology, philosophy, and politics to explain how illumination spread so rapidly and so uncritically.

From ancient mythologies to modern religion, he notes, God evokes the light, is the light, and embodies all that is good. Darkness, by contrast, is cast as a literal, moral, and metaphorical enemy — as if “its proximity is an assault to our existence.” Changing that instinctive bias, he suggests, will be far harder than changing the bulbs.

But even before you finish this book, some evening you will step outside at dusk — the Scandinavian landscapes still lingering in your mind — and notice your own neighborhood anew. All at once, the wasteful spill of light will stand out in sharp relief. The final chapter, a true manifesto, offers practical ways to befriend the darkness, which, the author assures us, is “merely a train trip, a walk, or a turned-off phone away.” He urges us to watch how the sun yields to the moon and the stars, to take ourselves into the deep nights of midwinter, and, if we can, toward the mythical northern lights.

From turning off lights when we leave a room to letting our backyards rest in darkness, each small act helps reclaim a night that has grown too bright. And for those who feel moved to go further — to advocate for better lighting policies or challenge the excesses in their own communities — Eklöf offers a path into activism. The planet may be spottily lit, but still far brighter than it needs to be — restoring the darkness is within reach.

 The fix is simple: turn off the lights. The harder task is cultural. Until we stop fearing the dark, bats, moths, and even our own bodies will pay the price.

A version of this appeared in the New Scientist. pdf

P.S. 

This book rewired my reading habits. I’ve started tracking how writers use light — not just the obvious mentions of lamps or sunsets, but the subtler calibrations of brightness and shadow that shape a scene’s emotional temperature. The best writers wield light like a tool, adjusting it with an artist’s precision to make an image endure.

  YiYun Li’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” written in 2011.

Equally astonishing was American lighting: in many places, lights stayed on from morning till night. At home, our family, conscious of saving every penny, would not turn on a single lamp until the last ray of daylight had vanished. Lights in public places were sound-controlled. The residents in our building had developed the habit of clapping or stomping to turn on a lamp, and to announce their presence; a few, like me, preferred a stealthy, unnoticeable passing in the dark. How does one live in such a well-lighted country?

KC Grifant’s “All Aboard” written in 2022

 The city lights teemed, sending a flood of crimson and violet colors along the dirty harbor water.

Jeymohan’s “Iravu” 

listening in 2026 and will hopefully translate sections of it soon.

The post Hello Darkness, My Old Friend! appeared first on Vijee Venkatraman.

Worldwide, the COVID 19 virus affected millions of patients’ ability to smell – and the symptom persisted in some, months after the infection passed. The pandemic put a spotlight on this spectrum of olfactory impairment. Anosmia is the clinical term for an inability to perceive smell. Parosmia turns pleasant smells like coffee and cologne into stenches for some (the “fortunate” ones perceive foul smells as pleasant.) In phantosmia, people hallucinate smells.

Totaro’s personal experience and sensitive profiles of fellow-anosmics and parosmics make it clear that a sense of smell is integral to peoples’ emotional well-being — depression strikes a good third of the people who have lost their ability to smell. The neuroscientist Oliver Sacks has written of “a woman transfixed by grief when she couldn’t recognise the smell of her own baby; a man’s faltering explanation of the deadening effect of anosmia on lovemaking; and a passionate home cook who could not enjoy the tantalizing smell of onions frying – or of her pots burning on the stove.”

Smells warn us of spoiled food or gas leaks, and other threats in our surroundings. Even when olfactory loss is temporary, it cannot be dismissed as trivial.

Smell is the most understudied of our five senses. The author introduces us to the work of pioneering olfactory researchers such as Linda Buck who identified the family of genes that allows humans to detect and distinguish smells. Buck’s fundamental research, for which she won the Nobel Prize for physiology in 2004, has laid the groundwork to understand certain diseases characterized by a loss of smell.

Gathering evidence shows that conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are associated with an early loss of smell and the symptom is linked with schizophrenia and dystonia. So, in the future, the smell test may be part of routine health checkups, particularly for older people, the author writes.

Researchers have figured out some of the biological mechanisms that lead to covid-related smell loss. The virus does not infect odor-detecting nerve cells, but attacks cells that play a supporting role in the olfactory system – so regeneration is a possibility.

But no doctor can tell you how long this disruption of smell will last or even if you will recover. Though there is no cure for anosmia, a technique known as smell training – regular, mindful sniffing of basic aromas such as those of rose, clove, eucalyptus, and lemon – has been demonstrated to help some patients with olfactory loss. Patience is key, writes Tatoro.

On a recent trip to Puglia, that authors saw a religious procession on the streets of a small Italian town, complete with a parishioner carrying an old incense burner. Tatoro writes that the scent of frankincense and myrrh brought back childhood memories of attending Mass with her grandmother. And she wept in gratitude, for her newly functional nose.

html. pdf

The post Scent! appeared first on Vijee Venkatraman.

A good book can take you to unexpected places. The whiskey room at a giant tech company — furnished with beanbags and foosball tables — is one of them. When coders at Google hit a creative wall, they can apparently pop into this room for a dose of liquid inspiration. It’s a sanctioned pause in the workday, but it is not a place to get drunk alone. In his fascinating new book Drunk, Edward Slingerland argues that such spaces, which combine face‑to‑face interaction with easy access to alcohol, can act as incubators for collective creativity.

The creativity boost alcohol provides to individuals, Slingerland writes, is amplified when people drink together. For millennia, across cultures, humans have used intoxicants to get high. Some archaeologists even suggest that the first farmers were motivated more by beer than by bread.

If intoxicants were merely hijacking pleasure centers in the brain, or if they gave humans an evolutionary edge once, but are purely vices now, then evolution would have put the kibosh on our taste for these chemicals, the author points out. So, why does Mother Nature turn a blind eye to our fondness for the tipple, given alcohol’s deleterious side-effects?

Slingerland, professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, gives us this thought-provoking thesis: “by causing humans to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal – to live like social insects despite our ape nature – intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups.” In short, civilization might not have been possible without intoxication.

It’s an audacious claim, but Slingerland marshals evidence from history, anthropology, cognitive science, social psychology, genetics, and literature — including classical poetry composed under the influence — to make his case. He is an entertaining guide, deftly weaving disparate studies into a coherent argument.

Without a science-based understanding of intoxicants we cannot decide what role they can, and should, play in modern societies, Singer reasonably points out. In small doses, alcohol can make us happy and more sociable, he says. Still, consuming any amount of intoxicant does seem stupid, Slingerland concedes, because the chemical immediately targets the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

This late-maturing region of the brain is the seat of abstract reasoning, which also governs our behavior, and our ability to remain on task. All the data suggests that small children are more creative because their PFCs are barely developed, he writes. A childlike state of mind in an adult is the key to cultural innovation. And intoxicants, he says, allow us to access that state efficiently by temporarily taking the PFC offline.

OK, drinking once made humans thrive as a species, but is it still a good thing in the modern world ?

Slingerland cites research which uses a natural experiment to test the idea that the communal consumption of alcohol can be a driver of innovation. American Prohibition, which was imposed a hundred years ago in the U.S., saw a decline in the percentage of patents, in counties that were previously “wet,” as communal drinking centers closed.

The book also considers modern alternatives to alcohol without the hangovers, the danger of liver damage or addiction. In centers of innovation, microdosing, or taking tiny doses of purified psychedelics, is growing in popularity. It also discusses non-chemical ways of achieving the same end but concludes that alcohol is a very low-tech, efficient way of temporarily taking the PFC offline.

After exploring the stress busting, creativity-boosting, trust-building, pleasure-inducing aspects of alcohol, the final chapter of this book dwells on the dark side ranging from drunk-driving to alcohol-induced violence. The chapter includes practical takeaways to make non-drinkers feel included in professional settings where alcohol is already integrated.

The book is not prescriptive in telling you how, and when, to consume alcohol to enjoy only its benefits. It does, however, tell you not to drink too many distilled spirits (wine or beer is better),  and if possible, never, to drink alone.

Ultimately, this heady book is an ode to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. It does us all — drinkers and open-minded abstainers alike — a favor by taking a hard look at the merits of drinking without moral judgement.

A version of this review for New Scientist.

And feedback: From Bryn Glover, Kirkby Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK
*Letters to the Editor in New Scientist*
Vijaysree Venkatraman’s review of Edward Slingerland’s book Drunk: How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way to civilization got me wondering whether an analysis of recording devices placed in the bars of Magaluf in midsummer might prove useful for the future of humanity (5 June, p 30).

From Vijaysree Venkatraman, Cambridge, MA, USA
Bryn Glover’s wry suggestion (Letters, 5 July) to install recording devices in the bars of Magaluf as a means of understanding the future of humanity made me chuckle—and nod in agreement. As I noted in my review of Edward Slingerland’s Drunk, the idea that intoxication has played a catalytic role in human cooperation, creativity, and even civilization itself is both provocative and oddly persuasive.
But perhaps we don’t need covert surveillance in Spanish party towns. The data is already out there—in karaoke videos, WhatsApp voice notes, and the collective memory of bartenders. The real challenge isn’t gathering the evidence; it’s interpreting it. What does it mean when a group of strangers sings “Bohemian Rhapsody” in perfect unison at 2 a.m.? Is it Dionysian chaos or proto-democracy?
If nothing else, Slingerland’s thesis invites us to look again at our most unguarded moments—not as lapses in judgment, but as windows into the social technologies that have shaped us. So yes, let’s raise a glass to the anthropologists of the future. 

Image: Hip, Hip, Hurrah! by Peder Severin Krøyer (1851–1909) was one of the leading figures of the Skagen Painters, the Scandinavian artists’ colony that gathered in the late 19th century at the northern tip of Denmark. This is a jubilant outdoor toast among the Skagen artists — sunlight filtering through leaves, glasses raised, laughter suspended in paint.

The post Drunk! appeared first on Vijee Venkatraman.