Shahidha Bari in The Guardian:

How do you evade a rampaging crocodile? By zigzagging as you run, according to Margaret Atwood, since crocodiles, apparently, struggle to navigate corners. It’s a piece of wisdom she imparts in passing in one of the essays in her latest collection. To be clear, the burning questions of the title are less to do with crocodiles and more concerned with those issues “we’ve been faced with for a century and more: urgent climate change, wealth inequality and democracy in peril”. The most serious questions of all, then. Still, the crocodiles are indicative of a sensibility that prevails throughout: droll, deadpan humour and an instinct for self-deprecation that saves the work from grandstanding or piety.

The novelist’s essay collection has become a curious genre in recent years. Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie periodically produce them to fanfare, but really there’s no reason for us to expect writers of fiction to be qualified to comment on fact. For every writer that proves themself a stylish and smart observer of reality, another dismays us with windbaggery and vanity. Atwood’s essays luckily escape that, but they do have the whiff of a publisher capitalising on the odds and ends that litter the successful writer’s desk – the keynote speech here, the guest lecture there. Still, there’s something cheerfully game about how politely Atwood thanks her hosts for their invitations to speak at the “Carleton School of Journalism and Communication”, “the Charles Sauriol Environmental Dinner” and the “Department of Forestry’s Centennial”. She’s both gracious and tongue-in‑cheek about the grandeur of these occasions.

More here.

Helen Briggs in BBC:

Francesco D’Isa in The Philosophical Salon:

Some philosophical ideas have a bad reputation: until a few centuries ago, for example, in Christian Europe it was quite dangerous to profess atheism. Present-day forbidden ideas put you at risk of a shit-storm rather than the stake, but it’s still interesting to explore the philosophical taboos of our era.

Whether because of the aforementioned Christian legacies, or because of a society that mainly wants us to be consumers, in the West the rejection of free will has become one of these unwelcome moves. Since freedom is one of the ideological foundations of democracy, to deny it is akin to philosophical assault. Therefore, now I’m in the unpleasant position of defending an idea that most people abhor – namely, that the future is determined. I hope I won’t encounter too-harsh a disapproval.

In summary, I believe that there is no such thing as ‘possibility’, and that everything that has happened could not have been otherwise. Worse: I don’t just believe it, I find it obvious – a presumption that makes me look suspicious, because experience shows us that triviality and truth often disagree. I therefore want to test this opinion, which luckily has illustrious precursors and supporters.

More here.

Amy Maxmen in Nature:

Scientists have released three studies that reveal intriguing new clues about how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Two of the reports trace the outbreak back to a massive market that sold live animals, among other goods, in Wuhan, China^1,2, and a third suggests that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals — possibly those sold at the market — to humans at least twice in November or December 2019³. Posted on 25 and 26 February, all three are preprints, and so have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

These analyses add weight to original suspicions that the pandemic began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which many of the people who were infected earliest with SARS-CoV-2 had visited. The preprints contain genetic analyses of coronavirus samples collected from the market and from people infected in December 2019 and January 2020, as well as geolocation analyses connecting many of the samples to a section of the market where live animals were sold. Taken together, these lines of evidence point towards the market as the source of the outbreak — a situation akin to that seen in the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002–04, for which animal markets were found to be ground zero — says Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and an author on two of the reports. “This is extremely strong evidence,” he says.

More here.

Phillip Meylan in The Factual:

The state of U.S. defense spending is often boiled down to eye-catching but incomplete statistics. On one side, the U.S. spends more than the next 11 nations combined, amounting to a grand total of 38% of defense spending worldwide, three times more than China, and ten times more than Russia. Conversely, defense spending as a percentage of GDP is at one of the lowest points since World War II, at somewhere between 3 and 4 percent. Depending on who you ask, the U.S. is either at risk of being unable to cope with 21st-century security challenges, including from actors such as China and Russia, or wasting money hand over fist on unproven, outdated, or irrelevant platforms.

Proponents of maintained or higher spending often focus on a rising threat from China and Russia and see maintaining a military superiority as a buttress against global authoritarian powers. Through the maintenance of a military advantage, they argue the U.S. can deter aggression, or win a conflict if required. The current invasion of Ukraine by Russia is a prime example of such a security concern, though the U.S. military seems unlikely at this point to become formally involved. Those in favor of lower defense spending often see concerns about rising authoritarian powers as issues that can be solved at the negotiating table, with the cooperation of allies and partner forces, or, if need be, with a more limited military. Rather than indispensable military capabilities, critics often see bloated spending on ineffective, unproven, or irrelevant platforms.

More here.

Trio of Mortality

Phenotyping Tears

Today a man I hardly knew
Died peacefully while morphine dripped in
Lungs no longer wheezing wet sounding symphonies
An aura of quiet around him
His daughter is in the corner
Sniffling softly
Her tears are of understanding
The man in the next bed snored gently
Unaware, innocent
Outside,
In the hall
Life went on as usual
That moment,
That peaceful room
With the sniffling and the snoring
Was gone
Tears threaten to spill in
Tears of fate and
Embarrassed vulnerability
Walking home,
Darkness presents itself earlier and earlier
Cold blurs my eyes
Faces moving past are mere figures
Tears of winter
Read more »

Betsy Mason in Smithsonian:

In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessentially human capacity for language, scientists are finding that the most tantalizing clues lay farther afield.

Human language is made possible by an impressive aptitude for vocal learning. Infants hear sounds and words, form memories of them, and later try to produce those sounds, improving as they grow up. Most animals cannot learn to imitate sounds at all. Though nonhuman primates can learn how to use innate vocalizations in new ways, they don’t show a similar ability to learn new calls. Interestingly, a small number of more distant mammal species, including dolphins and bats, do have this capacity. But among the scattering of nonhuman vocal learners across the branches of the bush of life, the most impressive are birds — hands (wings?) down.

Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations. The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have even more in common with human language, such as conveying information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the elements of human language such as phonology, semantics and syntax. And the similarities run deeper, including analogous brain structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning.

More here.

Aidan O’Donnell in Delancey Place:

“Cocaine is an alkaloid found in the leaves of the coca plant, Erythroxylum coca, which is native to South America. For centuries, the leaves have been chewed by South American people as a mild stimulant and appetite suppressant. Coca was brought back to Europe by the Spanish in the 16th century. Cocaine itself was first isolated by Friedrich Gaedcke in 1855, and an improved purification process was developed by Albert Niemann in 1860. Later, it came to be incorporated into tonic drinks, such as Coca-Cola in 1866, and was available over the counter at Harrods in London until as late as 1916.

“In 1884, a Viennese ophthalmologist called Karl Koller, an associate of Sigmund Freud, noted that drops of cocaine solution introduced into the eye produced local anaesthesia sufficient for the patient to tolerate eye surgery. The following year, William Halsted and Richard Hall in New York experimented with injecting cocaine around peripheral nerves, to cause numbness. As a result of their experiments on themselves, Halsted and Hall became addicted to cocaine.

More here.

Sarah Weinman in Literary Hub:

In 1999, Nina Khrushcheva met William F. Buckley at the offices of National Review. Then a fellow at the New School’s World Policy Institute (and now a professor of international affairs at the university) Khrushcheva had much to discuss with Buckley, whom she’d first met a few months earlier at an event commemorating the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Buckley had been a panelist along with her uncle Sergey, son of the Cold War-era Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, one of Buckley’s sworn enemies in his, and the conservative movement’s, ferocious fight against Communism.

National Review had gone so far to create a “Khrushchev Not Welcome Here” bumper sticker in 1959, in advance of the premier’s visit to the United States at President Eisenhower’s invitation. The “Kitchen Debates” with then-Vice President Richard Nixon did not alleviate any of Buckley’s concerns about the Communist threat. Forty years later, it all seemed rather ironic to Khrushcheva; her uncle had been an American resident since 1991. And she owned, and displayed, one of the bumper stickers in her own Upper West Side apartment.

More here.

Daniel James Sharp in Areo:

An Oxford undergraduate once wrote a brilliant answer to an exam question about the logic of natural selection, ending with the statement: “And here I rely heavily on the words of Richard Dawkins.” When the exam marker, one Marian Stamp Dawkins, noticed this, she wrote in the margin of the paper: “Yes. Don’t we all?”

J. Arvid Ågren relates this anecdote (originally told by Stamp Dawkins herself) in his recent book, The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution—and he notes how apt it is: Richard Dawkins has had an enormous influence on evolutionary biology since the 1976 publication of his first book, The Selfish Gene (critics and supporters both agree with this—they just differ over whether it is a good thing). The Selfish Gene explains and argues for the gene’s-eye view: the idea that natural selection can best be understood as taking place at the level of the gene, rather than at the level of the individual organism, group or species.

And yet, there has been no recent comprehensive overview until now of the gene’s-eye view that Dawkins did so much to extend and popularise. Thank goodness for Ågren, then: as he notes, evolution is our modern creation story and the gene’s-eye view “strikes right at the heart of the question of what evolution is, and how we go about studying it.”

More here.

Matthew Nimetz in Quillette:

So much is being written about the Russian invasion of Ukraine that more on the situation on the ground is unnecessary. Certainly, it is premature for a post-mortem on causes and responsibilities of a conflict that came on so quickly and unexpectedly. But it is not a bad time to think about medium- and long-term consequences of Putin’s dramatic action, and how the West can recover its equilibrium and face up to a new global challenge.

Historians like to argue about whether history is caused primarily by underlying objective forces or by the will of powerful individuals. The Ukrainian case presents that very question. How we in the West answer will influence how we move forward. In this case, some basic forces that have always existed in the central European arena made this confrontation inevitable, as many predicted at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the expansion of Western influence, and NATO, into the region. But the differences between Moscow and the West over security in central Europe need not have developed into the violent manifestation it has taken, if not for the actions and psyches of key actors.

More here.

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

A few years ago, I sat through an enjoyable lecture by the artist Grayson Perry about the familiar evils of rigid ideas of masculinity: war, imperialism, misogyny, alienation. The lecture was part of a festival called Being a Man (or BAM! for less evolved members of the tribe). Perry ended his comments with a scribbled series of demands on a whiteboard for a new bill of men’s rights, with which it was hard to argue. “We men ask ourselves and each other for the following: the right to be vulnerable, to be uncertain, to be wrong, to be intuitive, the right not to know, to be flexible and not to be ashamed.” He insisted that men sit down and mostly talk quietly to achieve these aims and was given a rousing standing ovation.

The need for men to be vulnerable, to open up about their insecurities – to become, in cliched terms, more like women – is certainly one antidote to what has become widely understood as the current crisis in masculinity. Thinking about that lecture afterwards, though, it felt a bit limited as a solution. There is no question that mansplainers and manspreaders could do with a fatal dose of humility and doubt. But what about that generation of young men who already feel marginalised from a consumer society, who have been denied most of the markers that traditionally help boys become men: decent jobs, responsible dads, stable homes of their own and, often in consequence, meaningful adult relationships. Would opening up about doubt and vulnerability in itself allow them to achieve self-worth and purpose?

More here.

Karl Kruszelnicki in ABC News:

It’s not just their ability to run 42 kilometres that separates marathon runners from the rest of us. They’ve got a secret energy source hidden deep inside: a special bacteria in their gut turns a painful waste material into energy. No doping scandal required!

Now if you’ve been following the latest trends in Science for a while, you might remember that about a decade ago, there was a sudden spike of interest in gut bacteria. We had begun to realise just how important the bacteria that live on us, and inside us, actually were. And now, the latest surprising research suggests that these gut bacteria can even help you win a marathon!

But first, a bit of background. You probably know by now that you started off when an egg cell was fertilized by a sperm cell. And by now, there are about 37 trillion cells in your body that all arose from that first fertilized egg cell! Now 37 trillion is a lot of cells — but your body is also home to even more bacterial cells! That’s right – about 40 trillion bacteria live on your skin, inside your gut, and in a few other places. These bacteria are a lot smaller than your human cells, so in total, they weigh only a kilogram or so.

More here.

What to Tell, Still

Reading the galley pages of Laughlin’s Collected Poems
with an eye to writing a comment.
How warmly J speaks of Pound,
……….. I think back to —

At twenty-three I sat in a lookout cabin in gray whipping wind
at the north end of the northern Cascades,
high above rocks and ice, wondering
………. should I go visit Pound at St, Elizabeth’s?

And studied Chinese in Berkley, went to Japan instead.

J puts his love for women
his love for love, his devotion, his pain, his causing-of pain,
………… right out there.

I’m 63 now & I’m on my way to pick up my ten-year-old stepdaughter
……….. and drive the car pool.
I just finished a five-page letter to the County Supervisors
dealing with a former supervisor,
……….. now a paid lobbyist,
who has twisted the facts and gets paid for his lies. Do I
have to deal with this creep? I do.

James Laughlin’s manuscript sitting on my desk.
Late last night reading his clear poems —
and Burt Watson’s volume of translations of Su Shih,
……….. next in line for comment.

September heat.
The Watershed Institute meets,
……….. planning more work with the B.L.M.
And we have visitors from China, Forestry guys,
……….. who want to see how us locals are doing with our plan.
Editorials in the paper are against us,
……….. a botanist is looking at rare plants in the marsh.

I think of how J writes stories of his lovers in his poems —
……….. puts in a lot
……….. it touches me,

So recklessly bold — foolish?
to write so much about your lovers
when you’re a long-married man. Then I think,
what do I know?
……….. About what to say
……….. or not to say, what to tell, or not, to whom,
……….. or when,

……….. still.

by Gary Snyder
from Danger on Peaks
Shoemaker-Hoard, 2004

Gary Saul Morson at The American Scholar:

“Perhaps there would be a birth of a whole new era of the sciences and arts,” German romantic thinker Friedrich Schlegel hoped, “if symphilosophy and sympoetry became so universal and heartful that it would no longer be extraordinary for several complementary minds to create communal works of art. One is often struck by the idea that two minds really belong together …  to realize their full potential only when joined … an art of amalgamating individuals.”

By symphilosophy and sympoetry (and other “syms”), Schlegel referred to dialogues in which interlocutors achieve insights otherwise unrealizable. Several minds “amalgamated” this way in the German university town of Jena around 1800.

more here.

Steve Richards at Literary Review:

The consequences of Farage’s ubiquity have been seismic, reshaping the UK and the wider political landscape. He sought a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU and then a hard Brexit, and ultimately got everything he wanted. The Conservative Party’s embrace of a form of English nationalism was partly a response to the threat that Farage posed. The near-silence of the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, on the subject of Brexit is a form of vindication for him. Starmer knows that Brexit is having calamitous consequences but does not dare to say so. No wonder Michael Crick concludes that ‘it’s hard to think of any other politician in the last 150 years who has had so much impact on British history without being a senior member of one of the major parties at the time’.

more here.