Ivan Kreilkamp at Public Books:

When Joni Mitchell first came to prominence, in the late-1960s “Summer of Love” era, she was often perceived as a kind of “poetess” or “nightingale” folk singer: a putatively pure origin of beautifully natural-seeming songs (“The Circle Game,” “Chelsea Morning, and “Both Sides, Now,” among many others). When the rapper Q-Tip declared (on Janet Jackson’s 1997 song “Got ’Til it’s Gone”) that “Joni Mitchell never lies,” he articulated a familiar understanding of the singer as, above all, truthful and authentic.

But Mitchell’s brilliant art was always a product of artifice as much as it was of honesty. Her song “Woodstock” is now remembered as one of the most iconic musical artifacts of the late 1960s American counterculture, but it’s worth remembering that it was written by a Canadian artist who did not perform at (or even attend) Woodstock.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpLO96_9Qwc&ab_channel=CharacterDriven

Katarina Zimmer in The Scientist:

It’s not unusual for geochronologist Rainer Grün to bring human bones back with him when he returns home to Australia from excursions in Europe or Asia. Jawbones from extinct hominins in Indonesia, Neanderthal teeth from Israel, and ancient human finger bones unearthed in Saudi Arabia have all at one point spent time in his lab at Australian National University before being returned home. Grün specializes in developing methods to discern the age of such specimens. In 2016, he carried with him a particularly precious piece of cargo: a tiny sliver of fossilized bone covered in bubble wrap inside a box.

The bone fragment had come from a skull—still stored at the Natural History Museum in London—with a heavy brow ridge and a large face. It looked so primitive that the miner who had discovered it in 1921 at a lead mine in the Zambian town of Kabwe, then in the British territory of Rhodesia, first thought it had belonged to a gorilla. But later that year, museum paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward noticed what he interpreted as typically human features, such as the skull’s thin and relatively large braincase, that motivated him to designate the specimen as its own hominin species.

In the 1980s, however, museum paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer took another look at the skull and classified it as belonging to the species Homo heidelbergensis, an ancient hominin thought to be a human ancestor. Based on its primitiveness, Stringer says, most researchers guessed it was an early individual who lived around half a million years ago, some 200,000 years before the earliest Homo sapiens were starting to emerge. But nobody knew exactly how old the skull was. For decades, no dating method existed that could identify the fossil’s age without the destructive process of grinding up bits of bone for analysis. But Grün was determined to find a solution.

More here.

Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:

Does anything matter anymore in American politics? In the week since Donald Trump’s Convention ended with a personality-cult party on the White House lawn, the President has completely refocussed his campaign on threats to law and order from “Rioters, Anarchists, Agitators, and Looters.” He has suggested there will be a “Rigged Election”; urged supporters in North Carolina to commit election fraud, by voting twice; and likened protesters demanding racial justice to “Domestic Terrorists.” The President personally ordered a review of federal aid, with the goal of withholding funds from “anarchist” Democratic-run cities that have allowed “themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones.” And he has baselessly alleged that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, is taking some sort of “enhancement” drug, and claimed that Biden is the pawn of shadowy “dark forces.”

On his Twitter feed, Trump repeatedly promoted misinformation about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic while also attacking “Crazy Nancy Pelosi”; the “highly political” National Basketball Association; the governor of Oregon; the “wacky Radical Left Do Nothing Democrat Mayor of Portland”; the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and his brother, CNN’s Chris Cuomo; and various other figures in the “Enemy of the People” media, including the conservative Internet aggregator Matt Drudge and MSNBC’s “very untalented” Joy Reid. Trump’s Administration, meanwhile, is withholding briefings on election interference by Russia and other foreign powers from congressional intelligence committees and telling leaders in key battleground states to be prepared for a coronavirus vaccine, which may be approved by the government just days before the election. And that’s just this week.

The rest of the news in Trump’s America, two months before Election Day, is equally gutting: twenty or so U.S. states have rising cases of covid-19, and, as many schools and universities reopen, the numbers are expected to grow. On many days, more than a thousand Americans die as a result of the pandemic. By comparison, in the worst week of the Vietnam War, just more than five hundred American personnel died, the national-security expert and former C.I.A. official David Priess noted. All told, American deaths from covid-19 are approaching two hundred thousand. Mass unemployment continues, and many companies are bracing for new, more permanent layoffs. Food banks are overwhelmed. Congress, stuck in an impasse between House Democrats and Senate Republicans, has failed to pass a new round of economic relief, and the initial aid package for small businesses and the unemployed has run out. The national debt as a share of the economy has reached its highest level since the Second World War.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
and before the street begins,
and there the grass grows soft and white,
and there the sun burns crimson bright,
and there the moon-bird rests from flight
to cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
and the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
we shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow
and watch where the chalk-white arrows go
to the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
and we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
for the children, they mark, and the children, they know,
the place where the sidewalk ends.

by Shel Silverstein

Aaron Benanav in The Guardian:

The truth is that Uber and Lyft exist largely as the embodiments of Wall Street-funded bets on automation, which have failed to come to fruition. These companies are trying to survive legal challenges to their illegal hiring practices, while waiting for driverless-car technologies to improve. The advent of the autonomous car would allow Uber and Lyft to fire their drivers. Having already acquired a position of dominance with the rideshare market, these companies would then reap major monopoly profits. There is simply no world in which paying drivers a living wage would become part of Uber and Lyft’s long-term business plans.

Only in a world where more profitable opportunities for investment are sorely lacking can such wild bets on far-flung futuristic technologies become massive multinational companies. Corporations and wealthy individuals have accumulated huge sums of money and cannot figure out where to put it because returns on investments are extremely low.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

The LIGO/VIRGO collaboration has picked up a gravitational wave signal from another black-hole merger—and it’s one for the record books.

The merger is the most massive and most distant yet detected by the collaboration, its signal traveling across the Universe for a billion years before reaching Earth. The merger also produced the most energetic signal detected thus far, showing up in the data as more of a “bang” than the usual “chirp.” And the new black hole resulting from the merger is the rarest of all in terms of its intermediate mass (about 150 times as heavy as our Sun), making this the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole.

“One of the great mysteries in astrophysics is how do supermassive black holes form?” said Christopher Berry of Northwestern University. “They are the million solar-mass elephants in the room. Do they grow from stellar-mass black holes, which are born when a star collapses, or are they born via an undiscovered means? Long have we searched for an intermediate-mass black hole to bridge the gap between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. Now, we have proof that intermediate-mass black holes do exist.”

More here.

Noam Chomsky at the website of the Eqbal Ahmad Center for Public Education:

We are living in a remarkable moment, in fact a moment unique in human history. It is a moment of confluence of severe crises, at least four, which threaten the survival of organized human life on earth, not in the distant future.

The least ominous of the four is the ongoing pandemic. It is having a severe toll, though not everywhere. Governments with some concern for their populations have managed to keep it under control. Others have not. The worst is the most powerful state in the world, with extraordinary advantages, but suffering under leadership of unusual malevolence: the United States. The most successful are the countries of Asia and Oceania. It is important to understand how this happened if we hope to escape the next and probably worse pandemic, and also to understand – and to extirpate – the roots of today’s disaster.

Right now scientists are issuing warning quite similar to those of 2003, after the SARS epidemic was contained. Again, they are spelling out what must be done to contain the likely coming pandemic. But it is not enough to have knowledge; someone must act on it.

More here.

Annalena McAfee at Lit Hub:

There are two types of women, Picasso said: “goddesses and doormats.” His ideal muse—helpmeet and source of creative inspiration—was a hybrid; decorative enough to hold the artist’s eye, and meek enough, as patient unpaid model, to maintain whatever pose he required of her without complaint. Ideally, she should be a biddable lover and accept that great artists had great appetites and she could not claim exclusivity in her role. If she also bore his children, kept house, cooked and took on secretarial duties, so much the better.

Picasso did not, of course, invent the arrangement. The history of western art can be read as a story of male genius, tortured and often truculent as it strove to make one pure, truth-telling mark on an imperfect world, supported by a legion of handmaidens whose self-abnegating silence was immortalized on canvas and in bronze—from Benvenuto Cellini’s abused Nymph Caterina, through the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s evanescent Lizzie Siddal to Picasso’s Weeping Woman, Dora Maar. Genius required it, exempting the artist from the normal rules of human relationships. Decency was for the mediocre.

more here.

Elizabeth Lowry at the TLS:

Oeke Hoogendijk’s riveting documentary highlights the peculiar tendency among private collectors and public curators of Rembrandt’s portraits to talk about his canvases as if they were living people. For the serious devotee Rembrandt appears to be a sort of Rorschach test, revealing a capacity for ardour, or envy; for candour, or duplicity – or for ecstatic belief. In Amsterdam, the boyish art dealer Jan Six – a direct descendant of the seventeenth-century cloth merchant immortalized by Rembrandt – is convinced that he’s spotted not just one, but two undiscovered works by the painter. Six has been trying all his life to live up to his family legacy. The Sixes are part of Amsterdam’s aristocracy; in every generation so far since Rembrandt painted them, a Jan Six has been produced to be the keeper of the family flame and the custodian of its priceless art collection. The tenth Jan Six, the rather dour Baron Jan Six van Hillegom, still presides over the Six house on the Herengracht with its treasure trove, but the eleventh Six is snapping at his heels. He has an art historian’s training, and a relentless desire to prove himself.

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Gayathri Vaidyanathan in Nature:

As scientists edge closer to creating a vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, Indian pharmaceutical companies are front and centre in the race to supply the world with an effective product. But researchers worry that, even with India’s experience as a vaccine manufacturer, its companies will struggle to produce enough doses sufficiently fast to bring its own huge outbreak under control. On top of that, it will be an immense logistical challenge to distribute the doses to people in rural and remote regions.

Indian drug companies are major manufacturers of vaccines distributed worldwide, particularly those for low-income countries, supplying more than 60% of vaccines supplied to the developing world. Because of this, they are likely to gain early access to any COVID-19 vaccine that works, says Sahil Deo, co-founder of India’s CPC Analytics in Pune, which is studying vaccine distribution in the country. Several Indian vaccine makers already have agreements to manufacture coronavirus immunizations that are being developed by international drug companies, or are working on their own vaccines. The government has said that these manufacturers can export some of their supplies as long as a proportion remain in the country.

Without India, there won’t be enough vaccines to save the world, said Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, during an online vaccine symposium organized by the Indian government in July.

More here.

Nayanah Siva in Nautilus:

The scientists crowded around Yuanchao Xue’s petri dish. They couldn’t identify the cells that they were seeing. “We saw a lot of cells with spikes growing out of the cell surface,” said Xiang-Dong Fu, the research team’s leader at the University of California, San Diego. “None of us really knew that much about neuroscience, and we asked around and someone said that these were neurons.” The team, who were made up of basic cellular and molecular scientists, were utterly puzzled. Where had these neurons come from? Xue had left a failed experiment, a dish full of human tumor cells, in the incubator, and when he looked two weeks later, he found a dish full of neurons.

It’s not often an unexpected cell type appears in a petri dish, as if from nowhere. Scientists all over the world have spent a lot of time and money actively trying to generate neurons in the lab—the implications for neurodegenerative disease would be massive. And yet this research team, who were actually studying the RNA-binding protein PTB, had unknowingly generated a whole dish of neurons.

“It puzzled me for quite a long time, and I didn’t know what was wrong with my cells,” said Xue, who is now a researcher at the Institute of Biophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing. Xue was attempting to deplete human tumor cells of PTB with small interference RNAs (siRNAs). He expected his cell lines, which are typically very proliferative, to keep growing, but they stopped, and so were cast aside for two weeks. Sure that the dish had become contaminated, Xue and colleagues tried the experiment again … and again … and again.

More here.

At the Beginning of Covid-19

Night, night, night. And the shadows
That wane talk to us. The music rounds
Up, exempt from history. It’s an endless
Canceling out of divinity, ready to speak

Again, saying, I am here. I’d call it endless,
Endless. What is stripped of its mortality
Goes on like a soldier to war. But we can’t
Do that, not really. Instead, we balance

On the head of a pin with the angels. I’ve
Spent hours lettering the borders of this
World. My cohorts, I don’t believe the laments
About leaving our lives, but I do believe it

That there is elegy, as green as grass. Nothing’s
Touching me anymore, and the spring rain Is peace.

by Noelle Kocott
from The National Poetry Library

Justin E. H. Smith in his newsletter:

Is the individual person a composite of a material body and an immaterial mind or soul? And if so, what is the relationship between these two ingredients?

This is the “mind-body problem” in its simplest formulation. But simplicity is not always a virtue, and in fact this formulation conceals a good deal of the historical complexity of the issue. Most philosophers are generally aware that the problem is part of our inheritance from early modern Europe, but when it is formulated in this concise way, we miss some of the important reasons why seventeenth-century Europeans were so anxious about apportioning and delimiting the respective powers of the mind and the body. And without understanding these, neither can we understand the nature of the problem we have inherited.

Anglo-American scholars have for the most part treated the problem as a timeless one, while continental scholars have tended to see its origins in early modern Europe as a result of the cultural transformations of the wars of religion. It became urgent, these latter maintain, to account for such questions as whether spirit is coextensive with body, or rather whether it should not be said to have any locus at all, in a cultural setting in which entire populations were being massacred over disagreements about the composition of the Eucharist. But what both the historically ignorant Anglo-Americans and the historically sensitive but terribly ethnocentric Europeans miss is the crucial role of global encounters, in what used to be called the “age of exploration”, for the shaping of a distinctly modern set of philosophical problems, among them, importantly, that of the relationship between mind and body.

More here.

Wilfred M. McClay at Hedgehog Review:

The work of cultural criticism never ends. A hundred years ago, Thomas R. Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, proclaimed that “what this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.” But who would say that now? Times have changed, tobacco has become an evil weed, and anyway, what the country needs now is a really good four-letter word.

No, I’m not talking about love, although that would be a decent guess, since love is highly desirable and always in short supply. I’m talking about the primordial human need for the genuinely dirty word, or, better yet, a few of them, a finite but reliable stock of good old-fashioned profanities—racy, pungent, transgressive, maybe even a bit radioactive. Words that can shock, provoke, even lead to a barroom brawl.

more here.

John Spurr at HistoryExtra:

In Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare’s Hotspur turns on his prissy wife: “Heart! You swear like a comfit-maker’s wife. ‘Not you in good sooth!’ and ‘as true as I live!’”. Instead Hotspur demanded a good mouth-filling oath. Something like his own “By God’s heart” was more suited to a lady of rank.

The oaths of the Tudor and Stuart centuries, the era of Shakespeare (1564–1616), still jump out at modern readers from plays, courtroom testimonies and countless other sources. And they strike us as very different from our own bad language. Swearing – solemn or profane – was a religious issue: an oath called on God to guarantee the truth of a statement, just as profane swearing took God’s name in vain.

Swearing supposedly ran along the lines of social status and gender. And swearing was always something of a performance.

more here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

For nearly three full centuries, the most accurate way that humanity kept track of time was through the pendulum clock. From its initial development in the 17th century until the invention of quartz timepieces in the 1920s, pendulum clocks became staples of household life, enabling people to organize their schedules according to a universally agreed upon standard. Initially invented in the Netherlands by Christian Huygens all the way back in 1656, their early designs were quickly refined to greatly increase their precision.

But when the first pendulum clock was brought to the Americas, something bizarre happened. The clock, which had worked perfectly well at keeping accurate time in Europe, could be synchronized with known astronomical phenomena, like sunset/sunrise and moonset/moonrise. But after only a week or two in the Americas, it was clear that the clock wasn’t keeping time properly. The first clock in America was a complete failure, but that’s only the beginning of a story that would revolutionize our understanding of the physics of planet Earth.

More here.