[book_info title=”Love is the Drug: The chemical future of our relationships” author=”Brian D. Earp and Julian Savulescu” publisher=”Manchester University Press” title_link=”https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526145413″]
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IF A pill could make you fall deeper in love and transform your romantic relationships, would you take it? Or if a doctor was able to prescribe an anti-love drug to help a break-up go smoothly and avoid a potential lifetime of heartache, would you urge your partner to make an appointment?

For Brian D. Earp and Julian Savulescu, who pose these questions in Love is the Drug, these aren’t merely theoretical or philosophical matters. There already are drugs, both legal and illegal, that can alter our minds and the way we think about love, sex and relationships.

“All of these love drugs exist right now. Others have yet to be created,” they write. As such, it is no longer a question of can we use the chemicals to control our feelings, but should we.

This gives Earp, a cognitive scientist, and Savulescu, a doctor turned philosopher, the scope to ask deliberately provocative questions to stoke the debate. It is time to imagine a world in which we can chemically alter feelings, they say. In an interview with żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”, Savulescu says he has pushed for such a debate since he became interested when a relationship ended after 15 years; Earp says his motivation is to get beyond the sentimental “sense that love is this disembodied thing that happens in a soul”.

“It’s going to be the case that we’re able to do something about love, and that changes the choice set before us,” says Earp. “We can no longer just shrug our shoulders and say – love is just something that happens to you. Given that there’s going to be and, in some ways, already are active steps that we can take to shape the course of our romantic lives, once a choice is available to you, failing to engage is not a choice.”

In the book, the authors detail how conventional medicines, such as antidepressants, can have libido-altering side effects that may affect relationships. “We have good theoretical reasons, and now increasing empirical reasons, to think that these drugs are having effects on our romantic neurochemistry,” says Earp. “They’re having those effects whether we measure them or not. What would be foolish would be to fail to understand the effects of the drugs we’re already using – [drugs that are approved and seen as medicinal].”

The book doesn’t ignore the possible hype around the subject. For example, it sounds a note of caution over the many research claims made for the so-called “love hormone” oxytocin – a molecule made by the hypothalamus that acts on the brain, and plays a role in bonding, sex and pregnancy. There should still be a healthy scepticism about the effects of oxytocin nasal sprays, say Earp and Savulescu: the results of studies of its ability to enhance relationships should be taken with “a grain of salt”, they write.

But the scepticism might be addressed if there were more rigorous studies of the way drugs affect our relationships, the authors argue. “This is a blind spot in Western medicine: the tendency to ignore the interpersonal effects of drug-based interventions,” they write. “It should be a scandal that we don’t know more about the effects of these drugs (good or bad) on our romantic partnerships.”

This needn’t be restricted to chemicals that alter our relationships “for the better”, say the authors. They explore the potential of “anti-love drugs” to suppress emotions like jealousy, and drugs that could help break the attachment of an abused person to their abuser.

“There already are drugs, legal and illegal, that can alter how we think about love, sex and relationships”

Drugs could also suppress sexual desires. Love is the Drug attempts to address even more controversial questions, such as whether we should permit the use of such medicines to curb what society may see as taboo or deviant sexual desires, or even addictions to online pornography.

We learn, too, about the growing use of illegal drugs such as MDMA and psilocybin as a means to help people with relationship problems. Psilocybin, the psychoactive substance in magic mushrooms, is being explored under strict controls and supervision by psychiatrists, alongside other treatments, for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, which can be a cause of relationship breakdown.

There is also a suggestion from research in mice that MDMA, also known as ecstasy, might help to relieve social anxiety for people with autism.

“We’re not talking about a chemical utopia where everybody tries whatever drugs they want,” says Savulescu. But neither should individuals have to get a diagnosis in order to qualify for love drugs for medicinal purposes, he argues.

“We don’t need to call them medicinal or recreational drugs,” says Savulescu. “We can introduce a third category. We need to identify the people for whom they would be genuine welfare enhancers, not crutches, not replacements for dealing with the deep questions in their lives, but people for whom they would genuinely improve their lives.”

But this would mean breaking free of society’s distinction between legal and illegal drugs. “Everything is just chemicals, and whether we decided to call it medicine or not is largely a social and value decision,” says Earp.

The authors say they don’t know if society is ready for this new approach, to start a new relationship with drugs as chemical love enhancers. But they are happy to matchmake.

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In his book : The internet and racial justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, Charlton D. McIlwain at New York University highlights the lives and histories of those pioneers who explored and used the internet for digital activism, creating a space for the African American community.

McIlwain has made excellent use of his position as the founder of New York University’s centre for critical race and digital studies. In the book, he combines first-person interviews with historical online and offline correspondence and other archive materials to bring the stories and perspectives of these forgotten figures to light.

Over five decades, beginning in the 1960s with the rise of the civil rights movement in the US and the start of the computing revolution, McIlwain traces a path from this “vanguard” to present-day activists, campaigners and organisers.

In the first half of the book we learn how black entrepreneurs, engineers, information technicians, hobbyists, journalists and activists connected with each other, using new technologies as they emerged: bulletin board systems and the Usenet network in the 1970s, file-sharing and CD-ROMs in the 1980s.

The Universal Black Pages, a comprehensive online directory of African American-related internet resources, was launched in July 1994. McIlwain describes its rise and fall, along with websites such as NetNoir and AfroNet. This was an experimental era, which ultimately fell victim to the dotcom bust in 2000.

In the second half of the book, McIlwain delves deeper, back to the origins of the computing revolution, showing how the technology was put to use to “set America’s principles of white supremacy loose to run amuck in new computational systems”.

This culminated, McIlwain argues, in the development of law enforcement applications that applied computing power to areas such as crime analysis, fingerprint identification and resource allocation. We think the use of algorithms by police forces is a new phenomenon; McIlwain describes how these technologies were in use by police forces as early as the mid-1960s.

These information systems and connected databases later developed into automated policing systems and crime prediction tools which “began to lock black people up at skyrocketing and racially disparate rates”.

This was only possible, McIlwain argues, because black people, “by and large, didn’t have access to the technology being used to profile, target, and forecast their tendency toward criminality”. The early computing industry’s lack of diversity and resistance to attempts at inclusion meant that black people were effectively excluded from conversations about, and deprived of access to, the very technology that would go on to shape their lives.

“Black people were not hired as technicians to process the data. Black people certainly did not design the systems
 were not at the table to contribute to conversations about how to deploy the outputs,” he writes.

It may have started as “an alien technology destined to
 grind them into submission and exert racial power over their entire existence”, but change was ushered in, as members of the African American tech vanguard encouraged others to get online, harnessing the power of the internet to shape their lives.

McIlwain quotes one activist: “We
 who were ignored by the industrial revolution, cannot afford to be bypassed by the multimedia communications revolution inherent in the emerging information superhighway
 to avoid our continuing characterisation, lamented by [W. E. B.] Du Bois, as an ‘afterthought of modernity’.”

That mention of Du Bois is apposite: this influential African American activist and intellectual had started a movement in the early 1900s to fight racial segregation. Just as the members of McIlwain’s vanguard are little known despite their innovative use of communications technology, so Du Bois’s use of infographics tends to be omitted from accounts of his work to end segregation.

As co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Du Bois is celebrated for his profound essays and books, including the seminal The Souls of Black Folk, and is considered one of the most influential activists for racial justice of the 20th century.

But alongside his famous writings, Du Bois produced an astounding body of infographics to challenge pseudoscientific racism, making visual arguments every bit as powerful as those in his books. The infographics are the subject of an exhibition, , at London’s House of Illustration. This displays, for the first time in the UK, 63 infographics that Du Bois presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition, a world fair.

Du Bois’s charts, graphs and maps, the result of collaboration with African American students he taught at his sociology lab at Atlanta University in Georgia, are beautiful. Visually, they are certainly striking. And then there is what they represent: a radical and stark approach to refuting racism, using facts and statistics to counter white supremacy and challenge and debunk the era’s prevailing racist stereotypes.

Du Bois wanted to prove, to an international audience, the essential equality of African American people. By presenting his own research on the achievements of African Americans in the short time since the emancipation of slaves, Du Bois demonstrated that black culture had flourished even within the extreme constraints of violently enforced racial segregation across the southern states of the US.

The infographics shown at the Paris Exposition presented statistics on issues such as crime, literacy and affluence in Georgia – at the time the US state with the highest African American population. And rather than let us fall into the complacency of thinking that race science no longer exists, the exhibition also features original artwork by Guardian journalist Mona Chalabi. This demonstrates the enduring relevance of Du Bois’s data visualisation methods and the racial inequalities he fought against by updating four of the 1900 infographics with 21st-century data.

Both the exhibition and McIlwain’s book are utterly compelling demonstrations of the contributions black people have made, and struggle to make still, to modern culture.

The work Du Bois began in 1900 with his data visualisations has lasted into the internet age, and the web has become a key venue for conversations about why black lives matter.

Charting black lives

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The spiralled graph above illustrates the preponderance of rural inhabitants among the black American population of 1890. The Atlanta University researchers used such visual flourishes sparingly, and to dramatic effect.

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One of the favourite weapons in W E B Du Bois’s rhetorical arsenal was the sheer size of the black population of the US. Here, though, it’s the rate at which the whole US population is expanding that stands out most markedly.

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This study of the population of the state of Georgia today stands as eloquent testimony of slow but real progress since W E B Du Bois’ day. Divide today’s current population of Georgia on similar ethnic lines, and the two halves of the chart are symmetrical. There are no statistically significant differences in occupation between the two communities.

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The visual power of this last chart hardly needs glossing. It also records the varying fortunes of the small free black population prior to emancipation, and the seven years that passed between the official declaration of the end of slavery and its actual termination.

Elon Musk has said that his Starship spacecraft – which is designed to carry people to the moon and Mars – will begin orbital test flights in less than two months. The SpaceX CEO made the comments during an evening presentation at Space X’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, with the gigantic shiny spacecraft lit up in the background.

Musk first revealed plans for the rocket in 2016, updating them and calling the craft the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) in 2017. Last year, he revised the design again and changed the rocket’s name to Starship. It is 118 metres tall and apparently capable of carrying about 100 people to the moon or Mars.

SpaceX has said that the rocket will carry eight artists around the moon in 2020, with tickets paid for by Yusaku Maezawa, a billionaire and art curator who founded Japan’s largest online clothing retailer. Maezawa says he will go along too.

But the end game for Musk still appears to be Mars. Ahead of the presentation, he that the Starship “will allow us to inhabit other worlds”.

To make life as we know it multiplanetary

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

The prospect of “being a space-going civilisation and being out there among the stars makes me [and] many people glad to be alive”, said Musk at the event.

The “critical breakthrough” that is needed to achieve this, he said, is to make space travel as practical as air travel by creating a “rapidly reusable orbital rocket”. Starship is intended to fulfil this criterion.ÌęMusk said that he plans for Starship to fly to 65,000 feet and then land back on Earth within the next “one to two months”.

SpaceX says Starship “will be the most powerful rocket in history, capable of carrying humans to the Moon, Mars, and beyond”, and “provide affordable delivery of significant quantities of cargo and people, essential for building Moon bases and Mars cities”.

People diagnosed with Lyme disease in England and Wales tend to be older, white women living in rural, relatively affluent areas.

An analysis of hospital records found that the disease is most commonly diagnosed in women aged between 61 and 65, with a second peak in incidence in girls aged between 6 and 10.

Researchers at the and Public Health England looked at the records of 2259 people diagnosed with Lyme disease at National Health Service hospitals in England, and 102 people in Wales, between 1998 and 2015.

They found that 96 per cent of patients self-identified as white. Significantly more cases were recorded in hospitals in rural locations than in urban areas, and there were more cases in richer areas than in areas of higher deprivation.

The highest incidence of Lyme disease was in south-west England, where there were 3.13 cases a year for every 100,000 people.

Rising incidence

Overall, the team found there was a significant increase in the disease’s incidence in England and Wales during the course of the study, from 0.08 cases per 100,000 people in 1998 to 0.53 cases per 100,000 in 2015.

at the University of Liverpool says he is confident the results reflect the groups that are most likely to be at risk of infection, but there needs to be more research to understand why more girls and women in certain age groups are diagnosed.

“It may be due to a result of sexÌędifferences in health-seekingÌębehaviour and this result needs to be further explored,” he says. Girls and women of these age groups and geographical areas may spend more time outside for leisure activities.

The picture in relation to ethnicityÌęis still unclear as this is the first time this has been studied in the UK, says Tulloch. “We do not know whether this is broadly representative of the whole Lyme disease-affected population or just of those who have contact with NHS hospitals.”

In July, an analysis of Lyme disease cases recorded in primary care in the UK concluded that the infection may be three times more common than previously thought. at the University of East London says this kind of analysis is likely to be a less robust way to investigate disease incidence than hospital records, which were used in the new study. “The true incidence probably lies somewhere between the two [studies]”, she says.

It can be difficult to accurately diagnose the disease, says Cutler. “A lot of the clinical manifestations of Lyme disease can overlap with other diseases – especially in older women – and there’s no agreement on what criteria to include when confirming a positive case.” This could mean some women are being diagnosed as having the disease when they actually have a different condition.

Although the study points to who is most at risk of Lyme disease, says Tulloch, “tick awareness is important for everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity and gender, when spending time outdoors in areas where ticks might be found”.

Lyme disease is caused by bites from ticks infected with Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria. The symptoms can include a flu-like illness and a circular red rash resembling the bullseye of a dartboard.

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