Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Seven years ago, the White House was bracing itself for not one pandemic, but two. In the spring of 2013, several people in China fell sick with a new and lethal strain of H7N9 bird flu, while an outbreak of MERS—a disease caused by a coronavirus—had spread from Saudi Arabia to several other countries. “We were dealing with the potential for both of those things to become a pandemic,” says Beth Cameron, who was on the National Security Council at the time.

Neither did, thankfully, but we shouldn’t mistake historical luck for future security. Viruses aren’t sporting. They will not refrain from kicking you just because another virus has already knocked you to the floor. And pandemics are capricious. Despite a lot of research, “we haven’t found a way to predict when a new one will arrive,” says Nídia Trovão, a virologist at the National Institutes of Health. As new diseases emerge at a quickening pace, the only certainty is that pandemics are inevitable. So it is only a matter of time before two emerge at once.

“We have to prepare for a pandemic to happen at any time, and ‘any time’ can be when we’re already dealing with one pandemic,” Cameron told me.

More here.

RAVI SHAVI “CASINO” OFFICIAL from Robert Houllahan on Vimeo.

Full album available here.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in the New York Times:

The thesis of Bjorn Lomborg’s “False Alarm” is simple and simplistic: Activists have been sounding a false alarm about the dangers of climate change. If we listen to them, Lomborg says, we will waste trillions of dollars, achieve little and the poor will suffer the most. Science has provided a way to carefully balance costs and benefits, if we would only listen to its clarion call. And, of course, the villain in this “false alarm,” the boogeyman for all of society’s ills, is the hyperventilating media. Lomborg doesn’t use the term “fake news,” but it’s there if you read between the lines.

As with others in Lomborg’s camp, there’s the pretense in this book of balance and reference to careful studies. Yes, climate change is real. Yes, we should do something about it. But, goes his message, let’s be real, there are other problems, too. Resources are scarce. The more money we spend on climate change, the less we have to grow the economy; and as we all know (or do we?) everybody benefits from growth, especially the poor. And besides, there’s not much we can do about climate change.

More here.

Algis Valiunas at The New Atlantis:

The integrity of his understanding mattered immensely to the emerging mathematician. Even as an undergraduate Turing was known for remaining oblivious of the published literature and figuring out his own method of conceiving proofs. After faltering academically in the early going, he demonstrated his supreme competence in his final exams in 1934, being designated a B-star Wrangler — Cantabrigian parlance for a hotshot. In 1935 he presented a dissertation, “On the Gaussian Error Function.” In it he included his proof of the central limit theorem, which explained the way measurements fall into place to produce the statistical bell curve. Although someone else had already proved the theorem more than a decade before, Turing’s version was sufficiently novel and elegant to impress the authorities, and King’s named him a Fellow at the startling age of twenty-two. Admirers celebrated his achievement with an ambiguous morsel of verse: “Turing / Must have been alluring / To get made a don / So early on.”

more here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

This isn’t a style of the Church, Italy, a patron, or a doctrine. It’s a personal style, the work of a self-taught 40-something gay man who devised ways to dye one’s hair blond as well as build bridges. Art history has been going through regular stylistic shifts ever since. This is what a social revolution looks like.

This brings us to Castagno’s marvelous Last Supper, a Middle Renaissance masterpiece. This huge beauty covers one wall in the Florence refectory of the Benedictine nuns of Saint Apollonia. The space isn’t rhythmic, cinematic, naturalistic, breathing, or real. It’s a wildly exciting mix of Byzantine with forced geometric perspective, exaggerated horizontality, metaphysical symbolism, finicky late medievalism, spiritualism, and episodic herky-jerkiness. It shows us what Last Suppers used to look like: Each disciple might be given particular attributes to universalize them and make them recognizable; they might hold certain objects, follow established iconographic or pictorial programs, pose in specific ways.

more here.

Charaxos and Larichos

Say what you like about Charaxos,
that’s a fellow with a fat-bellied ship
always in some port or other.
What does Zeus care, or the rest of his gang?

Now you’d like me on my knees,
crying out to Hera, “Blah, blah, blah,
bring him home safe and free of warts,”
or blubbering, “Wah, wah, wah, thank you,

thank you, for curing my liver condition.”
Good grief, gods do what they like.
They call down hurricanes with a whisper
or send off a tsunami the way you would a love letter.

If they have a whim, they make some henchmen
fix it up, like those idiots in the Iliad.
A puff of smoke, a little fog, away goes the hero,
it’s happily ever after. As for Larichos,

that lay-a-bed lives for the pillow. If for once
he’d get off his ass, he might make something of himself.
Then from that reeking sewer of my life
I might haul up a bucket of spring water.

by Sappho
from Poetry, July/August 2016
Translated from the Greek by William Logan

Gillen D’Arcy Wood in Nautilus:

In the summer of 1977, on a field trip in northern Patagonia, the American archaeologist Tom Dillehay made a stunning discovery. Digging by a creek in a nondescript scrubland called Monte Verde, in southern Chile, he came upon the remains of an ancient camp. A full excavation uncovered the trace wooden foundations of no fewer than 12 huts, plus one larger structure designed for tool manufacture and perhaps as an infirmary. In the large hut, Dillehay found gnawed bones, spear points, grinding tools and, hauntingly, a human footprint in the sand. The ancestral Patagonians—inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and the Magellan Straits—had erected their domestic quarters using branches from the beech trees of a long-gone temperate forest, then covered them with the hides of vanished ice age species, including mastodons, saber-toothed cats, and giant sloths.

Fire pits indicated where the Monte Verdeans cooked their food. Grinding stones helped fashion their spear points for hunting while, scattered on the excavated floor of the large hut, Dillehay uncovered the fossilized remains of more than 20 medicinal plants, including a species of giant kelp, Durvillaea antarctica. The species was discovered in the 1830s by explorer Jules-Sébastien Dumont D’Urville, who identified the indigenous giant seaweed during the first of his three Southern Ocean voyages on the beaches of the Falkland Islands, east of Tierra del Fuego. Because seaweed is short-lived, the Durvillaea fossil provided the most precise available date for human occupation of the site. Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal, worked wooden artifacts, and the leftover bones of a mastodon meal confirmed the presence of ice age hunter-gatherers at Monte Verde 14,500 years ago, at least 1,000 years prior to any existing archaeological evidence for human colonization of the Americas, North or South.

During his Beagle voyage into the south Atlantic Ocean in the 1830s, Charles Darwin wondered how the Patagonians had come to venture so far south, into sub-polar cold.

More here.

Tara John in CNN:

Ammar Kalia in The Guardian:

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice is quite unlike any other. At turns heavy and hulkingly powerful, yet also nimble and pointedly precise, his vocalisations have come to epitomise not only the tradition of the Sufi qawwali but the art of singing itself.

The qawwali is an Islamic devotional music designed to bring its performers and audience to a state of rapture and trance-like communion with the divine. Born of a 600-year-old line of qawwali singers, Khan’s grasp of music as a form of spiritual communication was acute. For the few thousand attendees at the Womad festival in 1985 witnessing Khan perform for the first time outside of south Asia, their experience would have been one of unexpected transcendence.

Peter Gabriel had begun the festival only three years earlier as a western showcase of music from around the world, as well as that of his peers. The first edition, held in the Somerset town of Shepton Mallet, saw performances by Gabriel, Indian sitar player Imrat Khan and free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry. Poor access to the festival site and low attendance almost sunk Womad in its first year, but a well-timed reunion concert for Gabriel’s old band Genesis kept them afloat.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

In 1931, the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel pulled off arguably one of the most stunning intellectual achievements in history.

Mathematicians of the era sought a solid foundation for mathematics: a set of basic mathematical facts, or axioms, that was both consistent — never leading to contradictions — and complete, serving as the building blocks of all mathematical truths.

But Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems, published when he was just 25, crushed that dream. He proved that any set of axioms you could posit as a possible foundation for math will inevitably be incomplete; there will always be true facts about numbers that cannot be proved by those axioms. He also showed that no candidate set of axioms can ever prove its own consistency.

His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring.

More here.

Mark Dominus in The Universe of Discourse:

There are two boxes on a table, one red and one green. One contains a treasure. The red box is labelled “exactly one of the labels is true”. The green box is labelled “the treasure is in this box.”

Can you figure out which box contains the treasure?

It’s not too late to try to solve this before reading on. If you want, you can submit your answer here:

A) The treasure is in the red box
B) The treasure is in the green box
C) There is not enough information to determine the answer
D) Something else

More here, including the solution to the puzzle.

Adrian Nathan West at The Baffler:

WHAT IS A WOMAN’S MARGINAL UTILITY? The marginal utility of her ecstasy, of her suffering, of her time and attention? Are representations of women a fungible good, or is an investment in the human capital behind them worthwhile? These questions, however perversely stated here, are essential to the economics of camming, a curious, new-ish phenomenon that combines elements of prostitution, pornography, therapy, and friendship-for-hire. I say “phenomenon” because the label “sex work” seems not quite adequate: first because it is hard to say something so depersonalized can be called “sex,” and second because “work” alone fails to encompass the demands its precariousness imposes. Like Uber drivers, Taskers, and others employed in the gig economy, webcam models have no guaranteed wages, no insurance, no paid leave, no pension. Instead, their success depends on a nebulous combination of factors spanning initiative, availability, submissiveness, good looks, personality, and luck. The popular press is filled with stories of cam girls making thousands a week––they seem to be a specialty of the UK tabloids––but my own perusal of some of the biggest sites––Chaturbate, LiveJasmin, and MyFreeCams––shows a preponderance of Russians and Romanians aged eighteen to fifty (the older they are, the more conspicuous their assorted implants and injections) sitting bored in tiny, tackily adorned bedrooms, swaying forlornly to club music or giggling and repeating “thank you” to a lone visitor who types banal variations on “ur so hot.”

more here.

Geoff Dyer at the TLS:

By the halfway point in my journey through Lonesome Dove two things started happening. As I began communicating my Keats-on-Chapman’s-Homer “discovery” to friends, it became clear that the book inspired something more akin to faith than admiration or love. People hadn’t just read the book; they had converted or pledged allegiance to it. When a friend came to dinner and saw my copy on the table she explained that she had been given the middle name MacRae, in honour of Gus. I fell prey to a kind of fanaticism myself, emailing an unsuspecting Zadie Smith to ask why anyone would bother with even a page of Saul Bellow when they could be immersed in Lonesome Dove. When she wrote back that she couldn’t bear Bellow or westerns I was tempted to respond, insanely, that it wasn’t a western. And yet – to deploy a favourite hesitation of Steiner’s – perhaps an underlying sanity or logic was at work.

more here.

When Franny Hammer Said

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired 

She meant
—No more turned cheek
—No more patience for the obstruction
—of black woman’s right to vote
—& plant & feed her family

She meant
—Equality will cost you your luxurious life
—If a Black woman can’t vote
—If a brown baby can’t be fed
—If we all don’t have the same opportunity America promised

She meant
—Ain’t no mountain boulder enough
—to wan off a determined woman

She meant
—Here
—Look at my hands
—Each palm holds a history
—of the 16 shots that chased me
—harm free from a plantation shack

—Look at my eyes
—Both these are windows
—these little lights of mine

She meant
—Nothing but death can stop me
—from marching out a jail cell still a free woman

She meant
—Nothing but death can stop me from running for Congress

She meant
—No black jack beating will stop my feet from working
—& my heart from swelling
—& my mouth from praying

She meant
—America! you will learn freedom feels like
—butter beans, potatoes & cotton seeds
—picked by my sturdy hands

She meant
—Look
—Victoria Gray, Anna Divine & Me
—In our rightful seats on the house floor

She meant
—Until my children
—& my children’s children
—& they babies too
—can March & vote
—& get back in interest
—what was planted
—in this blessed land

She meant
—I ain’t stopping America
—I ain’t stopping America

—Not even death can take away from my woman’s hands
—what I’ve rightfully earned

Mahogany L. Browne
from Vibe Magazine

Schuerle and Danino in The Scientist:

In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, a team of scientists is shrunk to fit into a tiny submarine so that they can navigate their colleague’s vasculature and rid him of a deadly blood clot in his brain. This classic film is one of many such imaginative biological journeys that have made it to the big screen over the past several decades. At the same time, scientists have been working to make a similar vision a reality: tiny robots roaming the human body to detect and treat disease.

Although systems with nanomotors and onboard computation for autonomous navigation remain fodder for fiction, researchers have designed and built a multitude of micro- and nanoscale systems for diagnostic and therapeutic applications, especially in the context of cancer, that could be considered early prototypes of nanorobots. Since 1995, more than 50 nanopharmaceuticals, basically some sort of nanoscale device incorporating a drug, have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. If a drug of this class possesses one or more robotic characteristics, such as sensing, onboard computation, navigation, or a way to power itself, scientists may call it a nanorobot. It could be a nanovehicle that carries a drug, navigates to or preferentially aggregates at a tumor site, and opens up to release a drug only upon a certain trigger. The first approved nanopharmaceutical was DOXIL, a liposomal nanoshell carrying the chemotherapeutic drug doxorubicin, which nonselectively kills cells and is commonly used to treat a range of cancers. The intravenously administered nanoshells preferentially accumulate in tumors, thanks to a leaky vasculature and inadequate drainage by the lymphatic system. There, the nanoparticles slowly release the drug over time. In that sense, basic forms of nanorobots are already in clinical use.

Scientists can manipulate the shape, size, and composition of nanoparticles to improve tumor targeting, and newer systems employ strategies that specifically recognize cancer cells. Still, precise navigation to tumor sites remains a holy grail of nanorobot research and development.

More here.

Tara Burton in The New Atlantis:

Socially and professionally, we create ourselves online. Just as the way we dress our bodies, position our gestures, or cultivate a class-specific accent allows us to occupy not just physical but social space, so too does our creation of a social media personality allow us to project our social selves into the dizzying realms of the disembodied. And the reach of these disembodied spaces — our ability to share content not just with a few “in real life” acquaintances but to the whole expanse of our followers — makes these digital-social selves brutally efficient, a way of projecting ourselves into the gaze of everybody we know, all at once. We cannot dissociate either our economic lives or our social selves from the creeping need for a personal brand. Digital self-creation as a form not just of expanded agency, but of attention-seeking, has become a requirement. We create ourselves not just as works of art, but as objects of commerce. Our digital selves, like our bodies, are vulnerable. “Miniature Gods”

The irony is that self-creation was traditionally seen as evidence not of man’s desperation, but his dignity. In Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (1486), shortly after creating the universe God tells Adam that creativity, and self-creativity in particular, is integral to what it means to exist in the image of God:

Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature…. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.

To self-create is a form of self-divinization.

More here.

Samuel Jay Keyser in Rorotoko:

I don’t believe in coincidences, at least not big ones. That’s why the sea change the sister arts of poetry, painting, and music underwent at the turn of the 20th century has always intrigued me. All of them veered off course at virtually the same time and in virtually the same way. To paraphrase Yul Brynner in The King and I, “It was a puzzlement.” It was as if a group of high achieving artists had met, mafia-style, in some non-disclosed location to plan mischief against the art world. It had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy. They would do something so radical, so scandalous that it would turn the art world on its head.

And they did.

In a remarkably short period of time poetry, painting, and music abandoned all that was tried and true.

More here.