Dan O’Brien in Literary Hub:

Almost every first draft (and third, and fifth) is overwritten. Maybe too much is happening, but usually it’s all the talk that bloats and clogs. Too much of anything at the outset can be helpful, though; every tailor knows it’s easier to cut cloth than to adhere it. But there is an art to cutting.

I spend many of my days at my desk deleting dialogue. Because I am inveterately cautious I like to bracket first by hand, then strikethrough, then remove words when I am sure; and by decluttering my speech of the words that don’t need to be spoken—that cannot be spoken—I find I am loosing, if you will, a more living speech. Actors in rehearsal may help a new play along with, “Can I cut this line and instead be it or do it? If I step from Line A to Line C, or leap to D or F, without these intermediate and preparatory words and phrases, will the speech still make sense? Will it make more sense? Will the speech—will I, the actor—come alive?”

More here.

M.R. Narayan Swamy in The Wire:

US-based Azra Raza, a respected oncologist of Pakistani origin, has been treating cancer patients for around two decades. Her grouse, articulated in her book, The First Cell, is that most new drugs add mere months to one’s life, that too at great physical, financial and emotional cost. In her telling, the reason the war on cancer has reached an impasse is because doctors are essentially trying to protect the last cell, instead of checking the disease at birth. This has to change, and now, Raza writes with an evangelist’s passion.

Raza is a specialist in a bone marrow preleukemic condition called myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), and acute myeloid leukemia (AML), which develops in a third of MDS patients. The treatment landscape for AML has not evolved much in the last half century, nor in fact has it vis-à-vis most common types of cancers. With minor variations, the slash-poison-burn approach to treating cancer remains the staple: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. No one, she says, is winning the war on cancer. Claims to the contrary are mostly hype.

More here.

Gili Kliger in Public Books:

When the philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s essay “The Right to Sex” appeared in the London Review of Books, in 2018, it garnered a level of attention not usually paid to writing by academics. From the provocative title to the bracing clarity of the content (“Sex is not a sandwich,” Srinivasan wrote), the essay’s stylistic appeal was matched by a willingness to entertain positions that had long been off the table in both feminist and mainstream discussions of sex. The piece responded to the commentary surrounding Elliot Rodger, perhaps the most famous of the so-called incels, or involuntary celibates, who in 2014 killed six people after penning a 107,000-word manifesto that railed against the women who had deprived him of sex. Many feminists were quick to read Rodger as a case study in male sexual entitlement. Fewer wanted to broach one of the manifesto’s thornier claims: that Rodger, who was half white and half Malaysian Chinese, had been denied sex because of his race. Srinivasan took Rodger’s undesirability head-on: of course, no one has a right to be desired, she wrote. But we ought to acknowledge, as second-wave feminists more readily did, that who or what is desired is a political question, subject to scrutiny.

In her debut collection of essays, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, out this month, Srinivasan extends on the LRB piece by bringing analytic precision to a range of related subjects: Title IX and consent, the ethics of professor-student relationships, the role of pornography in shaping sexual expectations and desires, and the criminalization of sex work.

More here.

Nikk Ogasa in Scientific American:

As spring ends, maple trees begin to unfetter winged seeds that flutter and swirl from branches to land gently on the ground. Inspired by the aerodynamics of these helicoptering pods, as well as other gliding, spinning tree seeds, engineers claim to have crafted the smallest ever wind-borne machines, which they call “microfliers.”

The largest versions of these winged devices, which the researchers sometimes refer to as “mesofliers” or “macrofliers,” are about two millimeters in length, roughly the size of a fruit fly. The smallest microfliers are a quarter that size. That makes them tiny enough to drift like seeds—but still large enough to tote compact microchips with sensors that gather information about the devices’ surroundings and wireless transmitters that send these data to scientists. Swarms of microfliers could be dropped from the sky to catch the wind and scatter across vast areas, says John Rogers, a physical chemist at Northwestern University. “Then you can exploit them as a network of sensors to map environmental contamination, disease spread, biohazards or other things,” he adds. Rogers and his colleagues describe the machines in a Nature paper published on Wednesday.

To help their contraptions descend as sedately and stably as possible, the engineers started by analyzing the shapes of airborne seeds such as those of big-leaf maples, box elders and woody vines in the genus Tristellateia. Then they used computers to simulate the airflow around similar shapes with slightly different geometries. This process allowed the researchers to refine a variety of designs until the microfliers fell even more steadily and slowly than their botanical counterparts.

More here.

Elizabeth Lund in The Christian Science Monitor:

During her lifetime, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was widely regarded as Britain’s best female poet. Her groundbreaking work helped sway public opinion against slavery and child labor and changed the direction of English-language poetry for generations. Yet within 70 years of her death, Barrett Browning was no longer viewed as an international literary superstar but as an invalid with a small, couch-bound life. By the 1970s, critics described her as lacking the talent of her husband, Robert Browning, and hindering his writing. Fiona Sampson challenges those views in “Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” the first new biography of the poet in more than 30 years. Sampson, whose works include the critically acclaimed biography “In Search of Mary Shelley,” reframes Barrett Browning’s reputation by highlighting her development as a writer despite the many restrictions she faced in Victorian society.

As a child, Elizabeth Barrett – called “Ba” by her parents and 11 siblings – defied expectations. She penned her first poems at the age of 8 and began reading Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton, guided by her mother. For her 14th birthday, her father paid to have 50 copies printed of “The Battle of Marathon,” a 1,500-line moral tale she wrote in heroic couplets.

Her life changed profoundly a year later when she developed an illness that doctors tried to treat with prolonged bed rest and dangerous remedies, including opium. Despite her confinement, which would continue for most of her life, the young poet’s writing flourished. Her work was published, drawing the attention of two male mentors. One, like her father, encouraged her talent as well as submissive dependency on his guidance and approval.

More here.

Household

The tons of brick and stone, the yards of piping,
the sinks and china basins, three toilets, the tiles,
and the tons of wood in floors, chairs, tables,
the yards of flex and cable that wrap the house
like a net, the heavy glassed front door, the gate
onto the street, the rippled sheets of window,
the yew tree by the back, the pictures, books, piano:
what would it all weigh? One kiss, one breathed
declaration, and there it is: the mass of love.

by Henry Shukman
from the National Poetry Archive

Steven Pinker in The Harvard Gazette:

How should we think of human rationality? The cognitive wherewithal to understand the world and bend it to our advantage is not a trophy of Western civilization; it’s the patrimony of our species. The San of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa are one of the world’s oldest peoples, and their foraging lifestyle, maintained until recently, offers a glimpse of the ways in which humans spent most of their existence. Hunter-gatherers don’t just chuck spears at passing animals or help themselves to fruit and nuts growing around them. The tracking scientist Louis Liebenberg, who has worked with the San for decades, has described how they owe their survival to a scientific mindset. They reason their way from fragmentary data to remote conclusions with an intuitive grasp of logic, critical thinking, statistical reasoning, correlation and causation, and game theory.

More here.

Servaas Storm over at INET:

In the waning days of August, in a world beset by the unending COVID19 public health crisis, by increasingly frequent extreme climate events, and by the terrible news from Afghanistan, the world’s central bankers, the rich, and the influential gathered (online) for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual Jackson Hole symposium. The title of this year’s Economic Policy Symposium was “Macroeconomic Policy in an Uneven Economy.” Few observers were paying attention and most had low expectations, knowing that central bankers are caught in a catch-22: they cannot lower interest rates (already at the zero-lower bound) to boost the economy, and they cannot raise rates, because the current high private and public debts are sustainable only at very low interest rates. Likewise, central bankers are unable to discontinue their accommodative (QE) policies, because this would abruptly end the irrational exuberance in financial markets and risk another global financial crash. Indeed, Fed chair Jay Powell’s speech was predictably careful, cautiously outlining how the Fed will continue its accommodative policy, while steadily monitoring data for signs of persistent broad-based inflation. No news from the monetary policy front, in other words.

However, one of the contributions to the symposium, a paper by Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi (2021), managed to make headlines in the New York Times and the Financial Times (amongst others). The authors argue that high income inequality is the cause, not the result, of the low natural rate of interest r* and high asset prices evident in recent years. “As the rich get richer in terms of income, it creates a saving glut,” Professor Mian told the New York Times, “The saving glut forces interest rates to fall, which makes the rich even wealthier. Inequality begets inequality. It is a vicious cycle, and we are stuck in it” (Irwin 2021).

More here.

Becca Rothfield in Boston Review:

One of the least interesting things a woman can do vis-à-vis sex is consent to it—yet lately, we seem to have less to say about female erotics than we do about male abuses.

On the one hand, it is not hard to understand why consent and its absence are at the forefront of mainstream conversation. A focus on rape and assault is warranted in a culture where sexual crimes are so tragically common: one in every six women in the United States is the victim of rape or attempted rape, and 81 percent of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment.

Still, hollow consent, unaccompanied by inner aching, is at least as ubiquitous as sexual coercion. Sex that is merely consensual is about as rousing as food that is merely edible, as drab as a cake without icing. Even in our era of ostensible liberation, women face emotional and social pressures, both externally imposed and uneasily internalized, to appease men at the cost of their own enjoyment. Heterosexual women are forever licensing liaisons that don’t excite them—perhaps because they have despaired of discovering anything as exotic as an exciting man, or because it no longer even occurs to them to insist on their own excitement, or because capitulation to unexciting men is so exhaustingly expected of them and so universally glorified in popular depictions of romance. As the formidable Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes in her debut essay collection, The Right to Sex, her female students regularly report that they regard their erotic lives as “at once inevitable and insufficient.” In short, the young women in Srinivasan’s classes are resigned to sex that is consensual but underwhelming.

More here.

Adam Tooze at his podcast Ones and Tooze over at Foreign Policy:

How did the Chinese real estate giant Evergrande become so laden with debt?

That question looms large these days, not only in China but also in other countries where markets have been affected by fears of Evergrande’s potential bankruptcy—including the United States.

On this week’s episode of Ones and Tooze, Cameron Abadi and Adam Tooze trace the history of Evergrande’s $300 billion debt problem and discuss the possible outcomes.

Tooze also explains why most wealthy countries around the world have bullet trains while the United States has… Amtrak.

Ones and Tooze is Foreign Policy’s weekly economics show. On each episode, Abadi and Tooze examine two data points that explain the world.

More here.

Marco D’Eramo in NLR’s Sidecar (Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash):

They looked at me with a benevolent smile, almost pitying my credulity, my capacity to be fooled. This person, whom I met by chance, was in their sixties, had taught at the Sorbonne and published several books. They immediately told me they would never get the Covid vaccine. They smiled when I objected that over the course of their life they had unthinkingly accepted over a dozen vaccines, from smallpox to polio, and that to enter a whole host of countries every one of us has been inoculated – against tetanus, yellow fever and so on – with relative serenity. ‘But this vaccine isn’t like the others,’ they replied, as if privy to information from which I had been shielded. At this point I understood that there was nothing I could say to shake their granitic certainty.

What struck me most, however, was their scepticism. I knew that if I entered into the conversation, at best we would have come to the issue of government deception and Big Pharma, at worst conspiracy theories about the microchips Bill Gates is supposedly implanting in the global population. Here we’re faced with a paradox: people believe in extraordinary tales precisely because of their sceptical disposition. Ancient credulity worked in a completely different manner to its contemporary equivalent. It was shared by the highest state authorities – who typically employed court astrologists – and the most downtrodden plebeians. Inquisitors believed in the reality of witchcraft, as did commoners, as did some of the accused witches themselves. In one sense the occult still functions this way in certain parts of postcolonial Africa, where the political class relies on the same rites as ordinary citizens, using witchcraft to perform some of the operations that are the purview of public relations departments in the so-called developed West. (Peter Geschiere’s 1997 text on this topic remains instructive: The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa). But, by and large, the modern world has given rise to a form of superstition that is accepted in the name of distrust towards the state and managerial classes.

More here.

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in The New York Times:

In December 1915, while serving on the Russian front, the German astronomer and mathematician Karl Schwarzschild sent a letter to Albert Einstein that contained the first precise solution to the equations of general relativity. Schwarzschild’s approach had been simple. He had plugged Einstein’s equations into a model that posited an ideal, perfectly spherical star, in order to calculate how its mass would warp the surrounding space. Schwarzschild’s solution was elegant, but it revealed something monstrous: If the same process were applied not to an ideal star but to one that had begun to collapse, its density and gravity would increase infinitely, creating an enclosed region of space-time, or a singularity, from which nothing could escape. Schwarzschild had given the world its first glimpse of black holes.

In “When We Cease to Understand the World,” a gripping meditation on knowledge and hubris, Benjamín Labatut describes how Schwarzschild was seized by a sense of foreboding over his own discovery. “The true horror” of the singularity, he told a fellow mathematician, was that it created a “blind spot, fundamentally unknowable,” since even light would be unable to escape it. And what if, he continued, something similar could occur in the human psyche? “Could a sufficient concentration of human will — millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space — unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in the Fatherland.”

Schwarzschild, who was Jewish, did not live to see Hitler rise to power and concentrate the collective German will to catastrophic effect. But a different premonition came true within months. The “void without form or dimension,” which he told his wife had invaded his being, took shape as a rare disease that would cover his body in pustulant blisters and kill him mere months after his scientific breakthrough.

More here.

Shon Faye at The Guardian:

The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice, by Shon Faye, is not a relaxing read, and yet I am profoundly grateful that it exists. Nor is there all that much in it I didn’t already know, but then that is the nature of being a trans person in the UK. We are forced, in the name of self-defence, to become experts in every subject that might overlap with “the transgender issue”, from prisons to sports to public bathrooms. Meanwhile, many cisgender people live in blissful ignorance of the acute crises that face trans people in this country every day.

It is those people who really need to read this book. Faye lays out in unsparing detail the stark realities of trans life today. She makes sure, however, not to represent the trans condition as uniquely tragic or difficult, highlighting parallels between the trans experience and those of other oppressed or minority groups. This position is clear from the first line: “The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society.”

more here.

Ruth Maclean at the New York Times:

Wole Soyinka the firebrand activist is always getting Wole Soyinka the writer into trouble.

Like the time he held up a radio station to keep it from broadcasting what he said were fake election results, and got jailed for it. Or when he sneaked into Biafra at the height of its war for independence from Nigeria, and spent two years in solitary confinement after calling for an end to the fighting.

When the first Black winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature — and its first African winner — senses that things like freedom and democracy are under threat in the beloved nation whose history has intertwined with his own, he can’t help it. He has to get involved.

“It’s a temperament,” Soyinka, 87, said during an interview in Abeokuta, his hometown in southern Nigeria.

more here.