Nicholas Frankel in Literary Hub:

Oscar Wilde’s ship docked in New York Harbor on the evening of January 2, 1882, one week before he was scheduled to speak at Chickering Hall. During the crossing he had composed his first lecture, but the journalists who swarmed onto the ship as it lay at anchor off Staten Island were more interested in Wilde himself than in the theories he had come to expound. “His outer garment was a long ulster trimmed with two kinds of fur, which reached almost to his feet,” reported the New York World; “he wore patent-leather shoes, a smoking-cap or turban, and his shirt might be termed ultra-Byronic . . . His hair flowed over his shoulders in dark-brown waves, curling slightly upwards at the ends . . . His teeth were large and regular, disproving a pleasing story which has gone the rounds of the English press that he has three tusks or protuberants.” His face presented “an exaggerated oval of the Italian face carried into the English type of countenance,” the World reporter continued, while his “manner of talking” was “somewhat affected . . . his great peculiarity being a rhythmical chant in which every fourth syllable is accentuated.” “The dress of the poet was not less remarkable than his face,” declared the San Francisco Chronicle, “and consisted of a short velvet coat, rose-colored necktie and dark-brown trousers . . . cut with a sublime disregard of the latest fashion.”

Like modern tabloid journalists, they peppered him with questions both flippant and straight: what time did he get up in the morning? Did he like his eggs fried on both sides or just one? Did he trim his fingernails in the style of the Empress of Japan? Was he here to secure copyright in his play? If Wilde was thrown by this barrage of questions, he did not betray it.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Two decades after the draft sequence of the human genome was unveiled to great fanfare, a team of 99 scientists has finally deciphered the entire thing. They have filled in vast gaps and corrected a long list of errors in previous versions, giving us a new view of our DNA.

The consortium has posted six papers online in recent weeks in which they describe the full genome. These hard-sought data, now under review by scientific journals, will give scientists a deeper understanding of how DNA influences risks of disease, the scientists say, and how cells keep it in neatly organized chromosomes instead of molecular tangles.

For example, the researchers have uncovered more than 100 new genes that may be functional, and have identified millions of genetic variations between people. Some of those differences probably play a role in diseases.

More here.

Katharine Gammon in The Guardian:

A new study tracking the planet’s vital signs has found that many of the key indicators of the global climate crisis are getting worse and either approaching, or exceeding, key tipping points as the earth heats up.

Overall, the study found some 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content and ice mass, set worrying new records.

“There is growing evidence we are getting close to or have already gone beyond tipping points associated with important parts of the Earth system,” said William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University who co-authored the new research, in a statement.

“The updated planetary vital signs we present largely reflect the consequences of unrelenting business as usual,” said Ripple, adding that “a major lesson from Covid-19 is that even colossally decreased transportation and consumption are not nearly enough and that, instead, transformational system changes are required.”

More here.

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker:

Facebook has a save-the-world mission statement—“to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”—that sounds like a better fit for a church, and not some little wood-steepled, white-clapboarded, side-of-the-road number but a castle-in-a-parking-lot megachurch, a big-as-a-city-block cathedral, or, honestly, the Vatican. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., announced this mission the summer after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, replacing the company’s earlier and no less lofty purpose: “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Both versions, like most mission statements, are baloney.

The word “mission” comes from the Latin for “send.” In English, historically, a mission is Christian, and means sending the Holy Spirit out into the world to spread the Word of God: a mission involves saving souls. In the seventeenth century, when “mission” first conveyed something secular, it meant diplomacy: emissaries undertake missions. Scientific and military missions—and the expression “mission accomplished”—date to about the First World War. In 1962, J.F.K. called going to the moon an “untried mission.” “Mission statements” date to the Vietnam War, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff began drafting ever-changing objectives for a war known for its purposelessness. (The TV show “Mission: Impossible” débuted in 1966.) After 1973, and at the urging of the management guru Peter Drucker, businesses started writing mission statements as part of the process of “strategic planning,” another expression Drucker borrowed from the military. Before long, as higher education was becoming corporatized, mission statements crept into university life. “We are on the verge of mission madness,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 1979. A decade later, a management journal announced, “Developing a mission statement is an important first step in the strategic planning process.” But by the nineteen-nineties corporate mission statements had moved from the realm of strategic planning to public relations. That’s a big part of why they’re bullshit. One study from 2002 reported that most managers don’t believe their own companies’ mission statements. Research surveys suggest a rule of thumb: the more ethically dubious the business, the more grandiose and sanctimonious its mission statement.

Facebook’s stated mission amounts to the salvation of humanity. In truth, the purpose of Facebook, a multinational corporation with headquarters in California, is to make money for its investors. Facebook is an advertising agency: it collects data and sells ads. Founded in 2004, it now has a market value of close to a trillion dollars.

More here.

Shi En Kim in Smithsonian:

More than two decades ago, when Elizabeth Turner was still a graduate student studying fossilized microbial reefs, she hammered out hundreds of lemon-sized rocks from weathered cliff faces in Canada’s Northwest Territories. She hauled her rocks back to the lab, sawed them into 30-micron-thick slivers—about half the diameter of human hair—and scrutinized her handiwork under a microscope. Only in about five of the translucent slices, she found a sea of slender squiggles that looked nothing like the microbes she was after. “It just didn’t fit. The microstructure was too complicated,” says Turner. “And it looked to me kind of familiar.”

Istanbul

Woke sleeping on the floor in a hotel room— Bos’n &
Chief Cook on the bed. Got outside and found a place to eat,
all soup and bread in mutton-smelling room; soup dashed with
vinegar. Then found a map and worked my way up the hills
and alleys to Hagia Sophia. What emptiness, what coolness. I
was alone in it. Mary and child mosaic—shivering and
half-crying, the image of lost ceremony, heart and splendor,
once hanging lamps and echoing chants beneath the dome.

Gary Snyder
from Earth House Hold
New Directions Books, 1969

Andrew Stuttaford at The New Criterion:

“The Middle Ages,” wrote Carl Jung in a 1958 book about ufos, “have not died out. . . . Mythology and magic flourish as ever in our midst.” I doubt if Monica Black, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the author of A Demon-Haunted Land,an intriguing, subtle, and occasionally startling examination of a wave of superstitious belief that swept across Germany in the immediate post-war years, would disagree. Certainly, Black recognizes the fascination that supernatural ideas and practices, from astrology to the occult, held for millions of Germans “across the modern period” as well as the persistence of a long-standing tradition of folk and magical healing.

But that is not inconsistent with her finding that there was “something quite particular about the kinds of mass [allegedly] supernatural events that took place in Germany after World War II, so many of which focused . . . on sin and guilt, healing and redemption.”

more here.

Nina MacLaughlin at The Paris Review:

I do not want to be soft-minded or irrational, pursue Dark Aged­–ignorance, be any sort of woo-woo New Age mush head. I do not know my moon sign. I own a Tarot deck but do not know how to read the cards. I don’t know much about prayer, though I have aimed begging attention at thunderstorms to come, please come, break this heat, rip it open. I believe, in some ferocious kid place, that there’s a lot on this earth and beyond it that we don’t understand. No correlation? Maybe, instead, the more honest: we don’t know, we have not figured a way to measure, or to say. “Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?” Bram Stoker asks. “It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.” Stephen Jay Gould had a name for this, when scientists interpret an absence of discernible change as no data, leaving significant signals from nature unseen, unreported, ignored.

more here.

Richard Zenith in Literary Hub:

When the ever elusive Fernando Pessoa died in Lisbon, in the fall of 1935, few people in Portugal realized what a great writer they had lost. None of them had any idea what the world was going to gain: one of the richest and strangest bodies of literature produced in the twentieth century. Although Pessoa lived to write and aspired, like poets from Ovid to Walt Whitman, to literary immortality, he kept his ambitions in the closet, along with the larger part of his literary universe. He had published only one book of his Portuguese poetry, Mensagem (Message), with forty-four poems, in 1934. It won a dubious prize from António Salazar’s autocratic regime, for poetic works denoting “a lofty sense of nationalist exaltation,” and dominated his literary résumé at the time of his death.

Some of Pessoa’s admirers—other poets, mostly—were baffled by the publication of Message, whose mystical vision of Portugal’s history and destiny seemed to rise up out of nowhere. In periodicals he had published other, very different kinds of poems, over half of which were signed by one of three alter egos, all of whom came into being in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I.

More here.

Steven Weinberg in the New York Review of Books in 2001:

One evening a few years ago I was with some other faculty members at the University of Texas, telling a group of undergraduates about work in our respective disciplines. I outlined the great progress we physicists had made in explaining what was known experimentally about elementary particles and fields—how when I was a student I had to learn a large variety of miscellaneous facts about particles, forces, and symmetries; how in the decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s all these odds and ends were explained in what is now called the Standard Model of elementary particles; how we learned that these miscellaneous facts about particles and forces could be deduced mathematically from a few fairly simple principles; and how a great collective Aha! then went out from the community of physicists.

After my remarks, a faculty colleague (a scientist, but not a particle physicist) commented, “Well, of course, you know science does not really explain things—it just describes them.” I had heard this remark before, but now it took me aback, because I had thought that we had been doing a pretty good job of explaining the observed properties of elementary particles and forces, not just describing them.

More here.

Graham Farmelo at his own website:

‘The greatest living theoretical physicist’ – many commentators in the past few decades have described Steven Weinberg in such terms. When I rather cheekily asked him what he thought of that statement, he shot back: ‘It is quite ridiculous to rank scientists like that’, adding with a twinkle in his eye, ‘but it would be impolite to dispute the conclusion’. That reply was classic Weinberg: self-aware, intimidatingly direct but always ready to lighten the moment with humour.

After Weinberg died on 23 July 2021, at the age of 88, there was a great sense of loss among physicists. For more than half a century, he had been an outstandingly productive researcher and one of his subject’s most forceful and eloquent ambassadors. He loved physics with a passion and made no apology for regarding the physicist’s way of looking at the world as uniquely valuable.

It had been clear from his days at school in the Bronx that he was extremely bright, exceptionally diligent and destined to be a formidable physical scientist. He excelled at university as a physics student, but – as he often told me – he did not take quickly to research because of his mistaken view that a scientist has to know everything about a topic before making creative contributions to it. It was this attitude, he said, that prevented him from making the most of his stay in 1954-55 at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, where he met quantum pioneer Niels Bohr (‘he was very kind, but I never got to know him’, Weinberg later told me). Fifteen years later, he was at the front rank of theorists, determined to make his name in ‘fundamental physics’, as he called it – the study of the most basic forces and the most basic entities of nature.

More here.

Elaine Scarry and Rachel Ablow in the Boston Review:

Elaine Scarry has been writing about the unique dangers and challenges of nuclear weapons in Boston Review for almost two decades. In the following interview with Rachel Ablow, which took place in 2018 and originally appeared in a longer form in the journal Representations, Scarry highlights a number of her more recent thoughts on the issue—thoughts that are especially relevant given rising tensions with both Iran and North Korea.

North Korea, Scarry points out, has fewer than 60 nuclear weapons. The United States, by contrast, has 6,500. The U.S. population is “sleeping” on the issue for a variety of reasons, ranging from the philosophical and psychological to the logistical. The architecture of nuclear weapons renders the citizenry powerless. It is time to wake up, Scarry argues, and she has some provocative proposals—including embracing the Second Amendment—for reclaiming democratic power.

More here.

Cratershan ……… 15 August

When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.

…… orange juice is what she asked for
………. bright chrome restaurant, 2 a.m.
…… the rest of us drinking coffee
…… but the man bought orange pop.      haw!

late night, the eyes tired, the teapot empty, the tobacco damp.

Almost had it last night: no identity. One thinks, “I emerged
from some general, non-differentiated thing. I return to it.” One
has in reality never left it; there is no return.
………………………………. my language fades. … Images of erosion.

“That which includes all change never changes; without change
time is meaningless; without time, space is destroyed.   Thus we
arrive at the void.”

………………………… ~~~~~~~

“If a Bodhisattva retains the thought of an ego, a person, a
being, or a soul, he is no more a Bodhisattva.”

…… You be Bosatsu,
…… I’ll be the taxi driver
…… Driving you home

The curious multi-stratified metamorphic rock. Blue and white,
clouds reaching out. To survive a winter here you learn to browse
and live in holes in the rocks under snow.
Sabi: One does not have a great deal to give.  That which one
does give has been polished and perfected into a spontaneous
emptiness; sterility made creative, it has no pretensions, and
encompasses everything.

…………………………………………………………. Zen view, o.k. ?

by Gary Snyder
from Earth House Hold, Lookout’s Journal
New Directions Books, 1969

Steve Donoghue in The Christian Science Monitor:

Many of us tend to like our geniuses as neatly lovable caricatures. And when it comes to Isaac Newton, we tend to envision a virtually disembodied intellect who was inspired by a falling apple to revolutionize physics from the quiet of his study at Trinity College.

But even when Newton was performing his intellectual feats at Cambridge in the 1680s, he was eager to move on to a new life. Patricia Fara, historian of science at Cambridge University, seeks to chronicle that period in “Life after Gravity: Isaac Newton’s London Career.” In this book she presents Newton as “a metropolitan performer, a global actor who played various parts.”

Here we have not the familiar – and almost inhuman – Newton who produced his great “Principia Mathematica” in 1687, but rather a worldly, cosmopolitan Newton: master of the Royal Mint, president of the Royal Society, member of parliament, speculator on the market, prominent man-about-town.

More here.

Lina Zeldovich in Nautilus:

Part of Dennis Plenker’s daily job is growing cancer. And a variety of different ones, too.

Depending on the day and the project, different tumors may burgeon in the petri dishes stocked in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where Plenker works as a research investigator. They might be aggressive breast cancers. They might be glioblastomas, one of the deadliest brain tumors that rob patients of their ability to speak or read as they crowd out normal cells. Or they might be pancreatic cancers, the fast and vicious slayers that can overtake a healthy person within weeks or even days.

These tiny tumor chunks are transparent and bland—they look like little droplets of hair gel that accidentally plopped into a plastic dish and took hold. But their unassuming appearance is deceptive. If they were still in the human bodies they came from, they would be sucking up nutrients, rapidly growing and dodging the immune system defenses. But in Plenker’s hands—or rather in the CSHL’s unique facility—these notorious killers don’t kill anyone. Instead, scientists let them grow to devise the most potent ways to kill them.

More here.

Daniel Callcut in Psyche:

Knowledge is so often assumed to be a good thing, particularly by philosophers, that we don’t think enough about when it makes sense to not want it. Perhaps you’re a parent and want to give your children space: you might be glad to not know all that they do when out of your sight. Perhaps you want to reconcile politically with a group that’s committed violence: it might be easier to move on if you deliberately spare yourself all the details of what they’ve done. There are, in fact, a variety of reasons why one might reasonably choose ignorance. One of the most obvious is to avoid needless pain.

Most of us care about other people and the world at large, and that makes us vulnerable to bad news. That’s life. Nonetheless, it’s good to be self-aware about when we’re self-punishingly seeking painful or depressing knowledge about ourselves or the world, and returning again and again to such knowledge. It’s easy to become what I shall call a truth masochist.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Natural selection has done a pretty good job at creating a wide variety of living species, but we humans can’t help but wonder whether we could do better. Using existing genomes as a starting point, biologists are getting increasingly skilled at designing organisms of our own imagination. But to do that, we need a better understanding of what different genes in our DNA actually do. Elizabeth Strychalski and collaborators recently announced the construction of a synthetic microbial organism that self-reproduces just like a normal unicellular creature. This work will help us understand the roles of genes in reproduction, one step on the road to making DNA molecules and artificial cells that will perform a variety of medical and biological tasks.

More here.