What was it like to be a bat?

by Mike O’Brien

They say that everyone’s a critic. Some more than others. I have a particularly critical streak, that occasionally strays into full-on curmudgeonry. I have a few excuses. First, the generally awful and worsening state of the world tends to put me into a bit of cranky mood. Second, I am lazy, and picking at the flaws in other people’s work is easier than creating something new. And third, there is a lot of really awful, slap-dash work being done in the world of letters that cries out for detraction.

As a break, if not an antidote, to my nay-saying tendencies, I’m going to attempt something a little more constructive this time around. My first column, way back when, was basically a riff on all the facets of my generalized anxiety, and the ecological facet featured prominently there, but there’s still some unpacking left to do.

First, some predictions. After all, anxiety implies that I think something is going to happen, and in this case that something is very bad and very difficult to avoid. Mass extinction will continue, and continue to accelerate, for the rest of my life and beyond. Global warming, ocean acidification, habitat destruction and atmospheric carbonization will continue to blow past every “point of no return” that scientists set, and narrowly human-regarding effects will continue to immiserate billions of people. If we were the kinds of creatures, organized in the kinds of societies, that were capable to avoiding these inevitabilities, we would not be as far along the road to perdition as we are. This is not about what might happen. This is about what has happened and will continue to happen. Read more »

Our search for meaning(s)

by Callum Watts

A small good thing

Growing up often feels like a process of finally understanding advice you completely ignored when it was first given to you. For me, this often has the form of thinking I’ve just discovered a profound insight about life, only to realise that it sounds entirely cliché once articulated. Perhaps it supports Plato’s idea that nothing brand new is every really learnt, because learning is really just remembering innate wisdom. More likely though, it’s just a happy reflection of the fact that there really are many general lessons to be learnt on how to live well. Happier still, these are shared and passed down not by philosophers, but by everyone, and so they become clichés. The past year of lockdowns has given me such a remembering, specifically, on the nature of how we find meaning.

Lockdown leaves us bereft of ordinary sources of meaning and value. This is extremely hard to do anything about because meaning is a little like happiness, the pursuit of it tends to scare it away. It is often the by-product of other activities, rather than the goal pursued. Like happiness, it also seems to be the case that the more our source of meaning rests on the dogged pursuit of a single thing, the more it is hostage to the what one thing, and so the more fragile it is.

For example, a person who mainly finds a sense of meaning through their work is extremely vulnerable to existential crises if their job fails to deliver that sense of purpose. The so-called midlife crisis is often (not always) a reaction to professional disappointment, a sense that one’s career has not really lived up to what was demanded of it. In this scenario the failure of a career to have delivered meaning can result in one’s whole existence appearing pointless all of a sudden. Read more »

Accidental Adventures in Immunology

by Joan Harvey

As we’ve all noticed, as soon you mention something about, say, your neighbor’s annoying poodle and your phone is anywhere within a three mile radius, you immediately get ads for poodles, poodle accessories, poodle food, and yet more poodles. I must have been talking or writing to someone about my immune issues, or possibly just Covid, and boom, they got me. Among all the ads I get for sheer underwear with snakes on it, there it was: immunology, Coursera, first week free, then $49 a month. Okay, I thought, I should know something about this, I’ll sign up, learn a bit, and go on my merry way. Little did I know. Because I’m someone who often doesn’t pay attention to details—exactly the wrong type for this sort of thing—I accidentally ended up in a course from Rice University designed for people with a serious interest and commitment to actually knowing how antibodies work.

I’m not much for video learning in general, or at least I hadn’t been until Covid, when a friend pointed out to me that the wonderful British-Israeli cookbook writer Yotam Ottolenghi did a Master Class. Up until that point I had conscientiously avoided Master Class and all those celebrities telling you they have the answer to life and if you just follow their advice you are guaranteed to become a confident-glamorous-successful novelist-filmmaker-model-architect. I’d also never had a cooking lesson, and found Ottolenghi’s cookbooks (of which I have four) intimidating, though when I attempted one of his recipes, or, more usually, part of one, it was always delicious. I would not have considered learning cooking from anyone else, but Ottolenghi was irresistible. So I paid the fee and there he was in my kitchen: relaxed, gay, handsome, with his wonderful accent, pouring olive oil on everything, squeezing lemons with his hands, squooshing garlic, talking me through each step, making everything easier. With him nearby I was no longer the anxious cook I often am; I was relaxed and reassured, and, following his steps, the food I turned out—Smacked Cucumber Salad with Sumac-Pickled Onions, Mafalda Pasta with Quick Shatta, Pea Spread with Smoky Marinated Feta—was actually amazing. I was only sorry there weren’t more recipes. But that was the extent of the video learning I’d done until my venture into B-cell arcana. Read more »

Arguments

by Peter Wells

Jesus is reported to have critiqued the seventh commandment as follows: 

You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Mt 5:27-28, New Revised Standard Version).

The principle seems clear. It’s not enough to avoid the act of adultery. You have to avoid wishing to do it. Not in the sense of never being tempted, but in the sense that ‘you would if you could.’ To persist in wishing to do a bad thing is as immoral as to do it. So, when Jesus came to comment on the sixth commandment, you’d assume he’d say something parallel, like this:

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder,” and, “whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.” But I say to you that … everyone who looks at someone with murder in his heart has already committed murder.

However, what Jesus is actually reported to have said at this point is this:

if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool,” you will be liable to the hell of fire.

In other words, insulting someone, or calling them a fool, is the equivalent of murder.

Whether you are a Christian or not, it’s a thought that deserves to be reflected upon. Read more »

The Case for Loitering

Anandi Mishra in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

As the pandemic raged in 2020, my boyfriend and I were confined within the closed quarters of my two-bedroom flat in Delhi. When the claustrophobia got too heavy, I would step out to rediscover the pleasure of walking with a sense of calm. I would try — and regularly fail — to meet my pre-pandemic mark of eight kilometers every day. It was not a means to an end. I did not have a grand plan. It was just a way to be a part of the city.

“Aimlessness — in art, in life, in writing, in thought, in being — is always more than the lack it names.” So begins Tom Lutz’s most recent collection of essays, Aimlessness. He takes the reader on a journey, knocking on several doors and discovering that all are answered by the same protagonist: the aimless way of life. Stops on the journey include his travels in Mongolia, the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, the Los Angeles émigré Theodor Adorno, and Friedrich Nietzsche. But his real subject is the unspooling of discursive thought, particularly that seen in writing.

Wandering through the streetscapes of the three most prominent forms of literature — the essay, the poem, and the novel — Lutz finds they all follow a sly, if not obvious, routine of aimlessness.

More here.

New Machine Learning Theory Raises Questions About the Very Nature of Science

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in Sci Tech Daily:

A novel computer algorithm, or set of rules, that accurately predicts the orbits of planets in the solar system could be adapted to better predict and control the behavior of the plasma that fuels fusion facilities designed to harvest on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars.

The algorithm, devised by a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), applies machine learning, the form of artificial intelligence (AI) that learns from experience, to develop the predictions. “Usually in physics, you make observations, create a theory based on those observations, and then use that theory to predict new observations,” said PPPL physicist Hong Qin, author of a paper detailing the concept in Scientific Reports. “What I’m doing is replacing this process with a type of black box that can produce accurate predictions without using a traditional theory or law.”

Qin (pronounced Chin) created a computer program into which he fed data from past observations of the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, MarsJupiter, and the dwarf planet Ceres. This program, along with an additional program known as a “serving algorithm,” then made accurate predictions of the orbits of other planets in the solar system without using Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. “Essentially, I bypassed all the fundamental ingredients of physics. I go directly from data to data,” Qin said. “There is no law of physics in the middle.”

More here.  [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Whatever It Takes in Italy?

Paola Subacchi in Project Syndicate:

With deft and bold action, Mario Draghi’s unity government in Italy can go some way toward addressing the COVID-19 emergency, laying the groundwork for long-term economic recovery, and restoring Italians’ confidence in their political leaders. But he cannot do it alone.

In 2012, then-European Central Bank President Mario Draghi pulled Europe from the depths of economic crisis with his famous promise to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. Now, Draghi’s native Italy is hoping he can save it, too, by leading a new unity government. But even for “super Mario,” success is far from guaranteed.

Draghi’s skill, competency, and credibility are not in question. And he will surely choose a highly qualified cabinet. But the challenge ahead should not be underestimated. Not only has Italy’s long-running economic crisis been compounded by the catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic; the country has been mired in a paralyzing political crisis.

If Draghi is to address the COVID-19 emergency effectively, let alone fortify Italy’s economic foundations, he will first have to find a way to navigate the country’s intricate politics. That means, for starters, securing the full support of the anti-establishment Five Star movement (M5S).

More here.

Why jealousy is the secret to lust

Agnes Callard in The Point:

Tolstoy was a moralist. He wrote one novel—Anna Karenina—in which infidelity ends in death, and another—War and Peace—in which his characters endure a thousand pages of political, military and romantic turmoil so as to eventually earn the reward of domestic marital bliss. In the epilogue to War and Peace we encounter his protagonist Natasha, unrecognizably transformed. Throughout the main novel, we had known her as temperamental, beautiful and reflective; as independent, occasionally to the point of selfishness; as readily overwhelmed by ill-fated romantic passions.

Marriage and motherhood turn out to sap Natasha’s interest in music, in parties, in dance, in her appearance; in fact they seem to sap her interest in having interests of her own. In her new life, she self-consciously and gladly subordinates her mind to her husband’s, and finds the fulfillment of her domestic duties both thoroughly rewarding and utterly absorbing. All of this makes her, in Tolstoyan ethics, “an exemplary wife and mother.”

There is only one moment in the epilogue in which we catch a glimpse of the old Natasha.

More here.

The New Jim Crow

Colin Grant in The Guardian:

In 2008, months before his election as president, Barack Obama assailed feckless black fathers who had reneged on responsibilities that ought not “to end at conception”. Where had all the black fathers gone, Obama wondered. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander has a simple answer to their whereabouts: they’ve gone to jail. Her clear-eyed assessment, published in the UK almost a decade after it first stunned America, is an indictment of a society that, since the 1980s, has been complicit in the explosion of its prison population from around 300,000 to more than 2 million. Drug convictions have largely fuelled the increase, and an extraordinary number of those new felons have been black. This is not coincidental. The Reagan administration’s “war on drugs” shifted the legal goalposts, Alexander asserts, so that mass incarceration “emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialised social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow”.

In the years following the civil war southern legislators designed “Jim Crow” laws to thwart the newly emancipated black population, notably curbing voting rights. Under the laws, black people also, increasingly, found themselves “relegated to convict leasing camps that were, in many ways, worse than slavery”. If Jim Crow was an effective means of controlling the black population, then modern mass incarceration, Alexander argues, is its successor. The figures are extraordinary. A decade ago in Chicago, for instance, 55% of the adult black male population had a felony record. In quiet yet forceful writing Alexander, a legal scholar, outlines how the Reagan government exploited 1980s hysteria over crack cocaine to demonise the black population so that “black” and “crime” became interchangeable. It was a war – not on drugs – but on black people. While churchgoing mothers in the ghetto might want politicians to be tough on crime, they don’t want to see their sons routinely arrested (suspected of being drug dealers for wearing baggy trousers).

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Sunday Poem

 

The Missing Father

“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters.”
— W.H. Auden,

That’s what Auden tells us:
never wrong because their
paintings show how suffering
occurs while others don’t notice,
or care. People close their windows
while the girl screams in the alley.
They drive past the strange man
staggering alongside the road.

Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall
of Icarus
gives Auden his example.
In the painting, Icarus has just
plummeted into the sea. Only his legs
and a tiny splash are still visible. Yet
the plowman in the foreground
goes on plowing. And the “expensive,
delicate ship” whose passengers may
have seen Icarus fall had, Auden writes,
“somewhere to get to, and sailed calmly on.”

And so here’s my question: Where is
the father in this painting? Where
is Daedalus, who conceived and created
the wings and planned their escape
from the island prison; who carefully
instructed his son on the dangers
of flight and then, magically, sprang
into the air with him? Why did Brueghel
and Auden not see him scan the waters
for a sign of his foolish, elated boy;
and, not finding Icarus, searching
across every island; and finally,
realizing what must have happened,
pulling up to the spot, seeing
the tire marks and the smoldering wreck,
running down into the ditch, choking back
the tears, frantically trying to pry open
the door of the crushed vehicle?

by Lou Lipsitz
from The Sun

 

Digging Deeper Into Holocaust History

Virat Markandeya in Nautilus:

On a trip to Warsaw, Poland, in 2019, Richard Freund confronted the history of resistance against the Nazis at a Holiday Inn. Freund, an archaeologist, and professor of Jewish Studies at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, was led by the hotel manager into the basement. “Lo and behold,” Freund says, a section of the Warsaw Ghetto wall was visible. Freund was in Warsaw accompanied by scientists from Geoscientists without Borders, a nonprofit group whose mission includes investigating archaeological sites and working to mitigate natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis.

The geoscientists were helping Freund pinpoint the location and contents of underground bunkers, where hundreds of Nazi resisters, led by 24-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz and his girlfriend Mira Fuchrer, plotted to combat the deportation of Jews to death camps. The rebellion erupted in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the largest Jewish revolt in World War II. The resistance lasted nearly a month. During the battles, Nazis funneled poison gas into the underground bunkers, killing many of the rebels and driving others to escape through sewer tunnels. The Nazis crushed the uprising and razed the Warsaw ghetto. Tens of thousands of Jews either died in the battles, were executed, or were deported to death camps.

The history of the uprising was written in part by those who escaped. “They tell us what happened in that final moment,” says Freund, who has led archaeological investigations into Jewish history in Israel and Europe. But the story of the Warsaw uprising, and the Holocaust, is not complete. Holocaust survivors and their stories are dwindling. Now geoscientists have stepped in to fill in the historical gaps. By employing geophysical mapping and soil sampling, among other techniques, they have located mass grave sites—there are an estimated 200 such sites in Lithuania alone—corroborated testimonies of daring escapes, and unearthed the remains of a once-thriving culture.

More here.

What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

Ross Andersen in The Atlantic:

Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world, if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they’re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth’s first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.

In some ways, it’s no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government’s aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country’s science-fiction scene. Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning “Big,” to his surname. In years past, the academy’s engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish’s construction, along with notes saying how he’d inspired their work.

More here.

A Parable and Parody of Restorative Justice

Judith Levine in Boston Review:

After “the,” “and,” and “fuckin’,” the most frequently used word in the Netflix series Dead to Me must be “sorry.

The protagonists of the show, Judy Hale and Jen Harding, have plenty for which to be sorry. First Judy (Linda Cardellini) kills Jen’s husband with her 1966 Mustang in a hit-and-run accident. Then Jen (Christina Applegate) bludgeons Judy’s ex-fiancé with a wooden bird and leaves him to bleed to death in her backyard pool.

Their victims, it must be said, sort of had it coming. Ted Harding was a peach of a dad but a rotter of a husband: he rejected his wife after a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction and cheated on her with a waitress named Bambi, who is about as old as her namesake. Steve Wood, Judy’s fiancé (who survives until the end of the first season), has no redeeming qualities aside from bedroom-blue eyes and a big cock. He is, among other things, a liar, an egotist, an abuser, a Mafia collaborator, and a preposterous home decorator. He is also the reason Judy left the scene of the accident after hitting Jen’s husband.

More here.

Dynamo Current, Feet, Fists, Salt

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

When​ Jacques Carbonnel went to Algeria to do his army service in 1956, his wife, Jeanne, asked him not to hide anything from her. ‘You want me to tell you everything,’ he wrote to her soon after arriving. ‘It’s ugly and you are too pretty. We arrest suspects, we release some, we kill some – it’s the dead runaways you see in the newspapers, phoney runaways! We push some out of helicopters above their villages. Criminal, inexcusable. The military solution doesn’t work here.’ Three days later, after returning from a two-day operation, he explained the method the army used to make suspected rebels talk: ‘We fill them up with water. We put a pipe in their mouths, in the anus, and we open the tap.’

Carbonnel was one of 1.5 million conscripts – appelés – who were sent to Algeria to defeat a nationalist uprising: an entire generation of young men in their early twenties. (The population of France in 1954 was 43.3 million.) But they were not at war, at least not officially. Algeria had been conquered in 1830 and administered as an integral part of France since 1848, when it was divided into three départements. More than a million European settlers lived there as French citizens. In Algeria the French were chez eux: according to a popular saying, the Mediterranean separated France from Algeria just as the Seine in Paris divided the Left Bank from the Right. When the rebels of the Front de Libération Nationale launched their war of independence in November 1954, France referred to them as hors-la-loi, outlaws rather than combatants. By the time Algeria won its independence in July 1962, hundreds of thousands of Algerians, and roughly 24,000 French soldiers, were dead. Algeria was liberated after more than a century of colonial domination, and France woke up to find itself stripped of its most prized imperial possession.

More here.