Stephanie Bastek in The American Scholar:

In pursuit of the natural laws of the universe, human beings have accomplished remarkable things. We’ve outlined the principles of gravity and thermodynamics. We’ve built enormous machines to dig into the deepest parts of the Earth, to understand what happens at the shortest quantum distances, and equally large machines to take pictures of the most distant parts of the cosmos. Still, there remain a number of foundational gaps in our knowledge—gaps that have allowed some wild ideas to take root. Some scientists hypothesize that, with every decision we make, our universe forks into multiverses, that consciousness arises from the quantum movements of microtubules, that the universe itself is conscious, or that there is this cat in a box and not in a box at the same time. These ideas, and related big questions about the nature of the universe, are the subject of particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book, Existential Physics. In it, she argues that many of these far-out theories, put forward without evidence, are on par with religious belief. Physics, she contends, does not yet provide the answers to all of our questions—and it’s doubtful that it ever will.

More here.

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

Inside a soundproofed crate sits one of the world’s worst neural networks. After being presented with an image of the number 6, it pauses for a moment before identifying the digit: zero. Peter McMahon, the physicist-engineer at Cornell University who led the development of the network, defends it with a sheepish smile, pointing out that the handwritten number looks sloppy. Logan Wright, a postdoc visiting McMahon’s lab from NTT Research, assures me that the device usually gets the answer right, but acknowledges that mistakes are common. “It’s just this bad,” he said.

Despite the underwhelming performance, this neural network is a groundbreaker. The researchers tip the crate over, revealing not a computer chip but a microphone angled toward a titanium plate that’s bolted to a speaker. Other neural networks operate in the digital world of 0s and 1s, but this device runs on sound.

More here.

Ryan Kemp in The Hedgehog Review:

We’ve got the Internet all wrong. Its raison d’être is not, as Mark Zuckerberg claims for his own corporation, to “strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” To the contrary, the Internet is a pernicious disease. It is—as Justin E.H. Smith argues in his new book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is—thoroughly “anti-human.”

The problem is straightforward: The Internet as we know and use it in our daily lives (the realm of Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.) significantly limits our capacity for freedom in all the various and complex senses of the term. We might think about the proliferation of action-constraining algorithms and ubiquitous surveillance. Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, admits that these things undermine our well-being, but he focuses instead on the so-called crisis of attention: the idea that the Internet is ferociously adept at cultivating distraction.

More here.

Noga Arikha in The White Review:

Very few writers in the twenty-first century are polymaths of the sort that previous centuries sometimes spawned – those who knew about all the subjects that mattered at the time, while still producing original work. Specialisation and the multiplication of fields and subfields of research, in both the humanities and the sciences, has rendered such breadth nearly impossible. Siri Hustvedt, however, is an exception: she is a polymath for our times, fluent in multiple specialised discourses, but whose mode is artistic.

More here.

Jed Esty in The Baffler:

In the United States, the political baptism of the non-elites to the hegemonic mission happened in the years between 1920 and 1960. Mass culture in those crucial years paved the way for a patriotic politics built around U.S. military prowess, massive expansion of literacy and lifestyle, the phobias of the Red Scare and Jim Crow, and commercial success across the globe. By the midcentury, anti-communism produced a coordinated ideological effort at cohesion. Elites recruited the political aspirations of working-class and middle-class voters into the cause of American supremacy, framing the export of American consumer capitalism as the triple gift of sacred freedom, true democracy, and general prosperity. The Hollywood studio system picked up the plots of late-Victorian adventure genres, adapting them to the worldview of U.S. supremacy and global centrality.

More here.

Alice Su in The Economist:

Two Chinese psychologists talk about divorce, stockpiling and crying into your mask.

Chuan He: Some of my patients were surprisingly happy when the lockdown began. There was a couple and the husband had had an affair. The wife was in pain, thinking, should I fight with my spouse, avoid him, or let myself go numb? Then suddenly they were inside together for months, forced to face their relationship. Things actually improved.

Other couples struggled. One of my clients is a high-performing businessman. At first he was OK, busy in his study all day. But after the fourth, fifth week of lockdown, work annoyed him and he started yelling at his wife and kids. He didn’t want to get up in the morning; he napped at lunch and then played mahjong and watched videos on his phone until 3am. He felt powerless and started to ask: What am I working for? What is this life for? Is there still meaning? That is depression. He needed a professional to tell him: “You’ve met something unprecedented. This is a stress response. It doesn’t mean you’ll always be like this.”

More here.

Be Brave

We are stuck in this story
of America,

these Whitman dreams,
Guthrie songs
and bright Ginsberg rants,

with even the land itself
teary-eyed, disillusioned,
forever in love,

knocked down
by Kerouacian gifts
of western horizons
and beautiful, unknown women
waiting in lost cafes,

flattened by Bukowski’s tender heart
bleeding beneath the drunken roar.

What is left? What epic has the soul left burning?

Get it down. Get everything down.

Chances remain,
but they must be taken
or lost.

America, like you, is here for the dance.
Her story will never be fully told.

by Jeff Weddle
from Poetry Feast

Suzanne Kahn at the Roosevelt Institute:

In the first 18 months of the Biden presidency, while the administration executed one of the fastest economic recoveries in memory following the COVID-induced recession, rising prices nevertheless helped stall the progressive agenda. For policymakers, journalists, and the American public, inflation felt more salient than record employment levels.

In More than Consumers: Post-Neoliberal Identities and Economic Governance, Suzanne Kahn argues that this is partly due to the way in which policymakers and the public understand themselves: For generations, our government has understood its constituents primarily as consumers, with their other identities—workers, parents, etc.—taking a back seat, and Americans, in turn, have understood their government as responsible primarily for maintaining functioning consumer markets rather than providing essential public resources.

By looking at how policymakers since the New Deal have conceptualized the intersection of inflation, wages, and prices, this report explores how the governance stance shared across parties became one that imagined Americans’ primary identity as that of consumer. And while progressives have moved away from policies that center markets and the consumer in recent years, they’ve continued to frame the policy conversation around consumer identities.

Marco D’Eramo in Sidecar:

In Europe, the war bulletins come not just from Ukraine, but also from the climate front. The French government has cracked down on water use, banning watering lawns and washing cars in 62 of 101 departments, as more than 100 municipalities no longer have potable water. Nuclear power plants on the Rhône and Garonne have had to reduce production due to insufficient water in the rivers. In Italy, the government has declared a state of emergency in 5 of 20 regions, while Second World War bombs are discovered on the beds of its largest river, the dried-up Po. In Germany, the Rhine is so low that the barges plying its 1,000 kilometres from Austria to Holland have had to reduce their cargo from 3,000 to 900 tons so as not to run aground, and the river is expected to soon become impassable to freight traffic. In England, for the first time on record, the source of the Thames has dried up and the river is beginning to flow more than 5 miles further downstream. In Spain, restrictions on water consumption have been imposed in Catalonia, Galicia and Andalusia.

These are all warning signs. In a few centuries, the idea of water as an abundant resource and universal right may be unimaginable. It is easy to forget that even in the so-called advanced world, domestic running water – for toilets, cooking, personal hygiene, washing clothes and dishes – is a very recent and ephemeral phenomenon, dating back less than a century.

More here.

PD Smith at The Guardian:

In the course of his book, Calvo describes many experiments that reveal plants’ remarkable range, including the way they communicate with others nearby using “chemical talk”, a language encoded in about 1,700 volatile organic compounds. He also shows how, like animals, they can be anaesthetised. In lectures, he places a Venus flytrap under a glass bell jar with a cotton pad soaked in anaesthetic. After an hour the plant no longer responds to touch by closing its traps. Tests show the plant’s electrical activity has stopped. It is effectively asleep, just as a cat would be. He also notes that the process of germination in seeds can be halted under anaesthetic. If plants can be put to sleep, does that imply they also have a waking state? Calvo thinks it does, for he argues that plants are not just “photosynthetic machines” and that it’s quite possible that they have an individual experience of the world: “They may be aware.”

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

It was nothing short of a miracle — that was what South African schoolchildren were taught when Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994, in the country’s first fully democratic elections. Apartheid, the brutal system of white minority rule that made South Africa a global pariah, was over. As Eve Fairbanks writes in “The Inheritors,” her new book about the decades before and after that transition, its miraculousness “was like mathematics, amazing but incontrovertible.”

But Malaika, one of the central figures in this account, remembers that her teachers’ soaring language seemed completely out of step with what she endured in her daily life. Born a few years before the end of apartheid, she continued to live in a shack in Soweto, a Black township on the outskirts of Johannesburg. She and her mother, Dipuo, were still poor.

more here.

Two Voices

Poet to Friend

If I believed
My caring would relieve your pain
I would be by you forever
But I know
My sympathy is in vain
I do not have the cure you need
Only you can heal yourself
Only you

Friend to Poet

If I believed
There were a cure
Would I ask you
To be by me forever
Is it possible I seek
Something else altogether
Only you can think that through
Only you

by Anjum Altaf
from More Transgressions
LG Publishers, Delhi, 2021
___________
mire hamdam mire dost.
Translations in Shiv Kumar, Victor Kierman

Robert Kanigel in Harvard Magazine:

MILMAN PARRY saw the Homeric epics through new eyes, heard them through new ears. The Iliad and the Odyssey, he said, were the work of generations of illiterate poets who composed orally; their poetry took wing in the moment, were reduced to print only centuries later. The demands of their poetic rhythm, thedum-diddy, dum-diddy of dactylic hexameter, ruled their word choice as much as the gods, heroes, and epic stories they depicted. As a 21-year-old graduate student of Greek at the University of California at Berkeley, Parry, the son of an Oakland pharmacist and the first of his family to attend college, flirted with an early version of this idea in the summer of 1923. It became a succinct master’s thesis that soon was consigned to the library stacks and forgotten. The following year, with his wife, Marian, and their infant daughter, Parry went to Paris, worked on his French, enrolled at the Sorbonne and, under the tutelage of French scholars, refined and expanded his idea into an intricately argued doctoral thesis.

In 1928, he returned to the United States and, after a year on the faculty of a small midwestern college, took a position at Harvard, as instructor in Greek and Latin and tutor in the Division of Ancient Languages. He remained at Harvard for the rest of his brief life, which ended in 1935 with the blast of a revolver in a Los Angeles hotel room: At the time it was judged a tragic accident. Later, some would blithely ascribe it to suicide, though the evidence is lacking. Others, within Parry’s family, would see the shooting as his wife’s doing, a moment’s raging vengeance for supposed marital cruelties.

More here.

David Marchese in The New York Times:

It’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that during some slow day at the lab early in her career, Jennifer Doudna, in a moment of private ambition, daydreamed about making a breakthrough that could change the world. But communicating with the world about the ethical ramifications of such a breakthrough? “Definitely not!” says Doudna, who along with Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for their research on CRISPR gene-editing technology. “I’m still on the learning curve with that.” Since 2012, when Doudna and her colleagues shared the findings of work they did on editing bacterial genes, the 58-year-old has become a leading voice in the conversation about how we might use CRISPR — uses that could, and probably will, include tweaking crops to become more drought resistant, curing genetically inheritable medical disorders and, most controversial, editing human embryos. “It’s a little scary, quite honestly,” Doudna says about the possibilities of our CRISPR future. “But it’s also quite exciting.”

More here.

Abena Ampofoa Asare in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin met for the first time at the 1980 conference of the African Language Association in Gainesville, Florida. The historic encounter between two literary giants comes to us in poignant fragments. Achebe recalled the meeting in a 2001 audio tribute for PEN America’s “A Celebration of James Baldwin: A Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute,” while Baldwin included video from the event in his 1982 documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine. In October 2020, the University of Florida’s Center for African Studies held a commemorative conference where witnesses and scholars recalled, theorized, and celebrated these men’s first moments together.

Achebe and Baldwin walked parallel roads of exile. Each spent decades living outside his country’s borders. Each would die far away from home. Each never stopped writing about his birthplace, even as he pursued life despite and across national borders. At their magnetic meeting, exile, with its wounds, was the ground upon which they recognized each other as brothers.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

It’s always a little humbling to think about what affects your words and actions might have on other people, not only right now but potentially well into the future. Now take that humble feeling and promote it to all of humanity, and arbitrarily far in time. How do our actions as a society affect all the potential generations to come? William MacAskill is best known as a founder of the Effective Altruism movement, and is now the author of What We Owe the Future. In this new book he makes the case for longtermism: the idea that we should put substantial effort into positively influencing the long-term future. We talk about the pros and cons of that view, including the underlying philosophical presuppositions.

Mindscape listeners can get 50% off What We Owe the Future, thanks to a partnership between the Forethought Foundation and Bookshop.org. Just click here and use code MINDSCAPE50 at checkout.

More here.