Not With a Bang

There was not even nothing
before there was anything,
then everything entered
all at once, a great chord,
all of the notes and all of
the almost-notes between – yes,
all at once.
………… So the universe
began not with percussion,
but the whole orchestra
tuning in a marvelous
cacophony before the show.

Then Maestro Space-Time
entered, opened the score
of Whatever-Will-Be
and raised his baton.

by Nils Peterson
from All the Marvelous Stuff
Poetry Center San José, 2019

Justina Buskaitė in the European Review of Books:

Lithuania has lost the Eurovision Song Contest thirty times. The first loss, in 1994, was awarded to Ovidijus Vysniauskas’ « Lopšinė mylimai » (Lullaby for my lover). The ballad about a secret love, worthy of a soundtrack to a Kevin Costner romance, received nul points and placed absolute last, disqualifying Lithuania from the next year’s contest and prophesying the three decades to come. (I count disqualification as a second loss rather than a continuation of the first loss. I also count withdrawals as losses.)

There are different ways we could count. Since 1994, Lithuania has had 24 entries, out of which:

☞ seven failed to qualify for the Eurovision final;
☞ eight placed at the bottom half of all the entries;
☞ three have placed so low that Lithuania was disqualified from competing in the next year’s contest;
☞ three have made it to the top 10!
☞ zero have been close to the podium.

Lithuania withdrew from Eurovision after the trauma of « Lopšinė mylimai » and only returned in 1999, with an entry sung entirely in Samogitian, a Western Lithuanian dialect, which then disqualified Lithuania from competing in 2000. But Lithuania has lost Eurovision not only in standard Lithuanian and Samogitian: we’ve lost in English and French, and with scattered losing lyrics in German, Russian, and American Sign Language.

More here.

Ron Barrett in The Conversation:

Since 2000, the world has experienced 15 novel Ebola epidemics, the global spread of a 1918-like influenza strain and major outbreaks of three new and unusually deadly coronavirus infections: SARS, MERS and, of course, COVID-19. Every year, researchers discover two or three entirely new pathogens: the viruses, bacteria and microparasites that sicken and kill people.

While some of these discoveries reflect better detection methods, genetic studies confirm that most of these pathogens are indeed new to the human species. Even more troubling, these diseases are appearing at an increasing rate.

Despite the novelty of these particular infections, the primary factors that led to their emergence are quite ancient. Working in the field of anthropology, I have found that these are primarily human factors: the ways we feed ourselves, the ways we live together, and the ways we treat one another. In a forthcoming book, “Emerging Infections: Three Epidemiological Transitions from Prehistory to the Present,” my colleagues and I examine how these same elements have influenced disease dynamics for thousands of years.

More here.

Joseph Lawler in The New Atlantis:

Interstate 35 through Austin, Texas, is the most congested stretch of road in the fastest-growing city in one of the sprawliest states in the country.

Yet the Texas Department of Transportation’s plan to expand the highway starting this year faces opposition from a well-organized contingent of local activists. They argue that the expansion will fail to reduce congestion because it will only coax more drivers onto the road — an effect known in urban and transportation policy circles as “induced demand.”

The opponents of the expansion are mostly a speck of blue in a red state, where the vast majority of people are not conflicted about car-dependent lifestyles. And the activists have failed to stop the project, pending a last-ditch lawsuit. But they are part of a nationwide movement aiming to limit highway construction that has gained strength in recent years.

The controversy extends well beyond the question of whether highway expansion reduces congestion — it’s part of a low-level culture war over how cities should form and grow.

More here.

Francesco Pacifico in Paris Review:

LAHIRI

In my life in English, so to speak, there’s a sense that if I don’t hit a certain benchmark, I’ve failed. That’s the judgment I’ve felt from American culture from the start—the expectation to assimilate, and then, when I became a writer, to “represent” the Indian American experience, the immigrant experience. Then there’s the eternal, original judgment—of my mother, my parents, their immigrant community, their many friends with advanced degrees. Theirs was a language of comparison and competition, everyone striving to establish themselves and get ahead. And there’s the overhanging judgment, of the world my parents left behind in Kolkata. All of which I internalized.

INTERVIEWER

It’s interesting—in your books in English, the family is a totalizing force, but you’ve put solitary women at the center of your Italian books.

LAHIRI

Thank you, Dr. Pacifico—maybe that’s because it’s only in Italian that I feel I’m at the center of myself.

More here.

Rachael Gorman in The Scientist:

The retina is layered with photoreceptors, a variety of other neurons, and protective and structural membranes, but retinal disorders can tamper with this delicate system. Mutations in the Crumbs homolog 1 (CRB1) gene disrupt the integrity of retinal membranes, leading to the gradual loss of photoreceptors. CRB1 mutations associate with multiple retinal diseases, including Leber congenital amaurosis and retinitis pigmentosa. However, since each patient’s disease presents differently, with various types, numbers, and locations of retinal lesions, some scientists suspect that environmental factors interact with the CRB1 gene to influence how disease manifests.

A new study published in Cell demonstrated one way that the environment modifies the phenotype of mice with a CRB1 mutation.¹ Researchers showed that CRB1 degradation triggers both a leaky colon epithelial barrier and a leaky retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) barrier in the mice, allowing bacteria to pass from the gut into the bloodstream, and then into the eye, damaging the retina.

More here.

Michael O’Donnell at The Millions:

Auster spoke in a rolling purr that was equal parts seduction and lament. His voice sounded like cognac poured over stones instead of ice. In narrating 4321, he covered the whole range of human experience: birth, death, illness, sex, hope, failure, parents, children, revolution, and disillusion, all against the noisy backdrop of the midcentury American colossus. In an eerie parallel, one of the novel’s subplots deals with the student protests at Columbia University in 1968, which have been repeating themselves in a different context this spring. As a result of his constant presence, the topicality of his subject matter, I felt a keen pang of the false intimacy that sometimes strikes when celebrities die. I had listened to Auster speak for nearly the entire month of April. It is dreadful to know that his voice in all senses has been silenced. 4321 explores the life and times of a young man named Archie Ferguson born in 1947 to a Jewish family in Newark. The novel tells four diverging stories of a single individual in parallel chapters. The Archie described in chapters 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, and so on, is born into a stable family with loving parents who occupy traditional gender roles and harbor modest aspirations.

more here.

Julia Prewitt Brown at Salmagundi:

Human spontaneity in Lawrence’s work—and indeed in his life as well—is not the simple, cheerful business that popular culture has often made it out to be. Think of those TV commercials in which an office worker suddenly does something unexpected, like dancing down the corridor of his office, to the comical dismay of his fellow workers. In Lawrence, spontaneity is dangerous and sometimes destructive, but it is necessary to being truly alive. The force of spontaneous love prompted Lawrence to run off with a married woman, Frieda Richthofen Weekley, and Frieda would regret leaving her three children for the rest of her life. Throughout their relationship, Lawrence and Frieda suffered continual eruptions of hostility that left them in pieces, but the marriage endured. It’s not uncommon to read in Lawrence’s biographies sentences like this: “The tension between Frieda and Lawrence abated after she struck him with an earthenware plate…” Lawrence would make creative use of this fight in Women and Love, when Hermione strikes Birkin with a paperweight, “almost breaking his neck, and shattering his heart.”

more here.

Nicholas Dames & John Plotz at Public Books:

John Guillory is an award-winning teacher and scholar. His varied and influential work includes  Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (Columbia University Press, 1983) and the field-transforming Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (University of Chicago Press, 1993). His brilliant new book, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, argues that modern literary study remains anxious about the century-old professionalism that betrays the discipline’s relation to its amateur precursor, criticism. He discusses it here with John Plotz of Brandeis and Public Book’s coeditor in chief, Nicholas Dames. Dames is author of such prize-winning books as Amnesiac Selves (Oxford University Press, 2001) and The Physiology of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 2007), and most recently The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2023).

A longer version of this interview aired recently on Recall This Book, a podcast partnered with Public Books.

More here.

Veronique Greenwood in Quanta:

Every organism visible to the naked eye is a mass of genetically identical cells. Each of these multicellular creatures started as a single cell that divided countless times to produce its body. And while each cell contains the same genome, they express their DNA in a variety of ways, giving rise to specialized cells and tissues that perform different roles, such as skin, liver or immune cells. This complex multicellularity has evolved independently in at least five lineages: animals, land plants, brown algae, red algae and fungi.

As different as these multicellular creatures might be, their bodies are all composed of the same type of cell — eukaryotic cells, which enclose their DNA in a nucleus and possess energy-producing mitochondria. The much older prokaryotic cells, which make up the vast kingdoms of bacteria and archaea and whose cells lack these features, never got complex multicellularity off the ground. They have evolved primitive forms of multicellularity, such as colonies of photosynthetic cyanobacteria. But there they stop. Even with a 1.5-billion-year head start on eukaryotes, prokaryotes never evolved this other way of living.

Why?

More here.

Anita Jain in the Washington Times:

In his latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, Fareed Zakaria proffers his own 21st-century spin on storied historian Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal work The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848. Like the famed 20^th-century historian, Zakaria recounts how the French and Industrial Revolutions profoundly shaped the structures, norms, and guiding principles that made our society what it is. The ubiquitous commentator also identifies a few more “revolutions” that aren’t generally considered revolutions, both pre-industrial era and contemporary.

While Zakaria may not be in Hobsbawm’s league, the Mumbai-born son of a political family who was a wunderkind editor of Newsweek International and remains a Washington Post columnist is still going strong at 60. Those who just see the erudite scholar on TV, where he presides over an eponymous CNN program, may not be aware that he earned a Harvard political science PhD under Harvard mainstays like Samuel Huntington of Clash of Civilizations fame and Joseph Nye.

More here.

Steven Piantadosi at Slator:

Steven: It’s certainly true that for many or most of these models, their training consists of being able to predict the next token in language, right? So they see some string and then they’re asked what the next word is going to be in that string and when you ask them to answer a question like that, what they’re doing is predicting the language that would follow that question. So explain the fundamental theorem of arithmetic in the style of Donald Trump. They’re taking that text and then predicting word by word what the next likely word would be and that happens to be a description of the theorem in the style of Donald Trump. So I think it’s true that they’re working like that. I think where the interesting debate is, is what exactly does that mean, right? So how I think about it is that if you were doing a really good job of predicting upcoming linguistic material, what word was going to be said next? You’d actually have to have discovered quite a bit about the world and about language, right, the grammar. So if you think about these models as having lots of parameters and kind of configuring themselves in a way in order to predict language well, probably what they’re doing is actually configuring themselves to represent some facts about the world and some facts about the dynamics of language, right? So, for example, if you gave it a prompt that said something like, you walk into a fancy Italian restaurant, what happens next, right? Well, it will just predict the next word. It’ll probably give you a plausible description of that scene, of what the next events are going to be.

more here.

Ed Simon at Hyperallergic:

When the water-logged, bloated corpse of the drowned Maddalena Antognetti, a sex worker who used the name “Lena,” was dredged from Rome’s Tiber river in the summer of 1604, she was still beautiful. We know this because her sometimes-lover Michelangelo Merisi, who hustled under the name Caravaggio, used Lena’s dead body as a model in a masterpiece entitled “Death of the Virgin.” 

Completed around 1606 and now at the Louvre, the oil-on-canvas painting transubstantiates Lena into a red-tunicked Virgin Mary, sprawled in a cruciform position atop a gathering of sheets and pillows while an assemblage of apostles mourns around her. A composition such as “Death of the Virgin” is a representative example of Caravaggio’s brilliance when it came to the use of contrast, with the body of the dead Madonna bathed in an otherworldly light that seems to radiate from her being itself, while the periphery of the scene is a continuum of sonoluminescence veering from mild duskiness to the blackness of the void. Mary’s left hand rests on her sternum while the long, pale, and elegant fingers of her other reaches stiffly toward the viewer as rigor mortis sets in.

more here.

Sinan Richards in IAI:

Traditionally, love is seen as a profound and enduring connection. Yet, as Lacan and Deleuze describe, love is also a mad compulsion where we throw ourselves repeatedly against the wall between self and other. Insofar as love is necessary, Sinan Richards writes, it lies in identifying and seeking this madness in each other, and embracing imperfection. While writing The Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan, I was living and teaching in Paris and would often travel to London by train to see friends and family. On one such trip, I was asked by a British Border Force agent at St Pancras International: ‘What is it that you do, then?’ When I explained that I was working on a book on Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan and how love was impossible, the border guard retorted scornfully, ‘That’s the problem with you academics – you spend so much time thinking that you can’t get on with it.’ This exchange still makes me chuckle, because, although rude, what if he was right?

Between 1988 and 1989, while filming L’Abécédaire, Gilles Deleuze linked a fundamental aspect of love to madness. Deleuze says: ‘if you don’t get the little kernel of madness in someone, then you can’t love them. If you don’t seize their point of insanity, you fall short. The location of someone’s insanity is the source of all their charm.’ Deleuze is right: there is a remarkably close proximity between madness and love, and this was also true for Lacan.

More here.

Steve Paulson in Nautilus:

These days, we’re inundated with speculation about the future of artificial intelligence—and specifically how AI might take away our jobs, or steal the creative work of writers and artists, or even destroy the human species. The American writer Meghan O’Gieblyn also wonders about these things, and her essays offer pointed inquiries into the philosophical and spiritual underpinnings of this technology. She’s steeped in the latest AI developments but is also well-versed in debates about linguistics and the nature of consciousness. O’Gieblyn also writes about her own struggle to find deeper meaning in her life, which has led her down some unexpected rabbit holes. A former Christian fundamentalist, she later stumbled into transhumanism and, ultimately, plunged into the exploding world of AI. (She currently also writes an advice column for Wired magazine about tech and society.)

When I visited her at her home in Madison, Wisconsin, I was curious if I might see any traces of this unlikely personal odyssey. I hadn’t expected her to pull out a stash of old notebooks filled with her automatic writing, composed while working with a hypnotist. I asked O’Gieblyn if she would read from one of her notebooks, and she picked this passage: “In all the times we came to bed, there was never any sleep. Dawn bells and doorbells and daffodils and the side of the road glaring with their faces undone …” And so it went—strange, lyrical, and nonsensical—tapping into some part of herself that she didn’t know was there.

More here.