Good morning, everyone. First up, Lisa Abend writes about the sudden demand for Danish television shows: “A decade ago, there might be two or three television series in production in Denmark at any time, Mr. Ladegaard said. Now there are close to 20. That’s in addition to 20 to 25 films being shot, a number that has remained steady, but exacerbates the labor shortfall because they draw from the same talent pool.”

An “enchanting history” of the elements: Peter Wothers’s Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf: How the Elements Were Named “is full of demons, imps and daft experiments.”

Back in black: “A rare solo exhibition at the Louvre celebrates Pierre Soulages.”

Rubens at his zenith: “The finest of Rubens’s youthful works express a pared-down physicality altogether different from his extravagant and sometimes repetitive later work, and one of the great paintings in the show was Samson and Delilah, in which Samson is shown sprawling in the lap of his treacherous lover as a servant starts cutting his hair. The exhibition included sketches that revealed how Rubens arrived at the final composition having contemplated different scenes from the biblical story – one showing Samson’s blinding, another his capture. But if we wish to experience early Rubens at his most accomplished we need to leave London and head to Belgium to seek out his Descent from the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral, a spellbinding example of Gothic architecture.”

Edward Sorel reviews Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser’s Mag Men: “In 1968, when my friend Milton Glaser started New York magazine with Clay Felker, I became one of its regular illustrators. This brash new weekly didn’t pay a lot, but it gave me something I coveted more—a chance to write and illustrate my own ideas. Appearing in New York changed my career, just as it did the careers of Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin, James McMullan, Nora Ephron, and the dozens of others who were given their big chance to strut their stuff. In Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines, by Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser, we get the inside scoop on how New York magazine came into being, plus a dazzling show-and-tell of about 25 of the hundreds of periodicals that these two designed.”

Kyle Smith recommends Matthew Warchus’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol on Broadway: “It’s a thoroughly charming sort-of musical infused with traditionalism that stars Campbell Scott as old Ebenezer. It is also clearly aimed at out-of-towners, not New Yorkers, which is to say it isn’t interested in turning the story inside-out and upside-down; Scrooge isn’t ‘daringly reimagined’ as a Republican senator, nor is Tiny Tim an illegal immigrant. This is pretty much just a normal, crowd-pleasing Christmas Carol with a few welcome tweaks, so rest easy. Also there are treats handed out to the audience.”

Essay of the Day:

In Nautilus, Marco Altamirano writes about new research on memory and nerves:

“The study of memory has always been one of the stranger outposts of science. In the 1950s, an unknown psychology professor at the University of Michigan named James McConnell made headlines—and eventually became something of a celebrity—with a series of experiments on freshwater flatworms called planaria. These worms fascinated McConnell not only because they had, as he wrote, a ‘true synaptic type of nervous system’ but also because they had ‘enormous powers of regeneration…under the best conditions one may cut [the worm] into as many as 50 pieces’ with each section regenerating ‘into an intact, fully-functioning organism.’

“In an early experiment, McConnell trained the worms à la Pavlov by pairing an electric shock with flashing lights. Eventually, the worms recoiled to the light alone. Then something interesting happened when he cut the worms in half. The head of one half of the worm grew a tail and, understandably, retained the memory of its training. Surprisingly, however, the tail, which grew a head and a brain, also retained the memory of its training. If a headless worm can regrow a memory, then where is the memory stored, McConnell wondered. And, if a memory can regenerate, could he transfer it?”

* * *

“McConnell’s work has recently experienced a sort of renaissance, taken up by innovative scientists like Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University specializing in limb regeneration, who has reproduced modernized and automated versions of his planarian maze-training experiments. The planarian itself has enjoyed a newfound popularity, too, after Levin cut the tail off a worm and shot a bioelectric current through the incision, provoking the worm to regrow another head in place of its tail (garnering Levin the endearing moniker of ‘young Frankenstein’). Levin also sent 15 worm pieces into space, with one returning, strangely enough, with two heads (‘remarkably,’ Levin and his colleagues wrote, ‘amputating this double-headed worm again, in plain water, resulted again in the double-headed phenotype.’)”

Read the rest.

Photo: Mammatus clouds over Nebraska

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