Fixing Cars

I like the argument that man is alone in the universe,
and ipso facto its most intelligent being.
It proves there is no God, or if there is,
it’s the god of low SAT scores.

Astronomers debate the dark matter between stars.
I picture a conversational pause with a Trump apologist,
each party wondering, What planet?

If I read the moon right tonight, there is no reading it.
If I tell my kid sister the stars are eyes twinkling,
why do their cold winks give me the shivers?

The smartest kid on our block couldn’t jump-start
his engine if he was stuck on the wrong end of town
and his life depended on it. I can’t read my tax form.
I fix his cars, he interprets the IRS,
and under earth’s starry hood,
we solve the problems of the universe.

by Kent Newkirk
from Rattle, Winter, 2009

—For the sake of currency, one word in this poem has been swapped for another but
it has not altered in any way the poem’s thrust or relevance. The more things change
the more they remain the same, they say.

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian:

It’s all very meticulous, even his horror, which is considerable when it comes to the way the bishops covered up for their paedophile priests. On every subject, Tóibín’s writing is what people these days inevitably describe as nuanced, a word that has become a kind of shorthand for expressing a person’s rare ability to understand – or to try to understand – the foibles of others (how sad that this should be thought unusual). But he can be gripping, too. This country that censored the hell out of people’s hearts is so much his territory. If the speed with which the power of the church in Ireland has been undermined is still astonishing, it’s nevertheless important to consider the hold it may continue to have over those citizens – Tóibín is one – who remember when its authority was ironclad. In the end, this is a book of shadows: tumours in testicles, fog in Venice, expensively clad cardinals who may be up to no good.

more here.

Alexandra Jacobs at the NYT:

Remember boredom? The first English translation of the French writer Marguerite Duras’s second novel, “La Vie Tranquille,” published by Gallimard in 1944 but only just here as “The Easy Life,” will transport you right back to those old blank stretches of time when you couldn’t just whip out the Candy Crush. When there was no electronic refuge from your own punitive thoughts, or absence of thought.

“Nothing can be as surprising as boredom,” declares Duras’s narrator, Francine “Françou” Veyrenattes, who is undergoing what we might now call a quarter-life crisis, in one of several meditations on this grayest and most grinding of emotions. “You think each time that you’ve reached the end. But it’s not true. At the very end of boredom, there is always a new source of boredom. You can live off boredom.” (And maybe a little escargot?)

more here.

Karen Bakker in The Guardian:

Scientists have recently made some remarkable discoveries about non-human sounds. With the aid of digital bioacoustics – tiny, portable digital recorders similar to those found in your smartphone – researchers are documenting the universal importance of sound to life on Earth.

By placing these digital microphones all over Earth, from the depths of the ocean to the Arctic and the Amazon, scientists are discovering the hidden sounds of nature, many of which occur at ultrasonic or infrasonic frequencies, above or below human hearing range. Non-humans are in continuous conversation, much of which the naked human ear cannot hear. But digital bioacoustics helps us hear these sounds, by functioning as a planetary-scale hearing aid and enabling humans to record nature’s sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capacities. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers are now decoding complex communication in other species.

More here.

Deborah Blum in The New York Times:

It was late in 1972 — a year in which the science of genetic engineering really began to sizzle — that two California researchers announced the unusually tidy transfer of genetic information from one bacterium to another with help from a specialized enzyme. It was a scientifically heralded result, but behind the hoopla was just one small catch. The information transferred enabled a common human disease bacterium, E. coli, to resist not just one antibiotic, but two. “Alarm bells should have rung,” writes Matthew Cobb, in his deeply researched and often deeply troubling history of gene science. And that nothing did ring — that scientific success trumped the obvious risks of the work — becomes the focus of his book’s primary inquiry: whether a research community capable of altering life is also capable of putting ethical decisions first.

Cobb, a biology professor at the University of Manchester and the author of several popular science books, is far from the first scientist to lose sleep over this question. And he acknowledges this, emphasizing the many positive and corrective steps taken by geneticists over the past 50 years. Members of the global community have raised other alarms, such as a furious reaction to gain-of-function research in viruses — which serves to deliberately render them more pathogenic — and have instituted moratoriums on some of the most dangerous aspects of the research. In such cases, Cobb describes the behavior of those in the field as “exemplary.”

More here.

David Stromberg in The Hedgehog Review:

Missing persons cases are seldom about finding someone. Too often, people who have disappeared are not missing at all. They are either hiding or long dead, possibly victims of murders waiting to be solved. Such cases, in short, are best to avoid. But when I heard that there had been recent sightings of the long-lost Wandering Jew, I knew I had to investigate.

The challenge was that no one could actually say where the Wandering Jew had been sighted. Since allegedly taunting Jesus in Jerusalem on his way to being crucified, resurfacing in thirteenth-century Christian folklore in England as an immortal penitent, making regular appearances throughout Europe in booklets published during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and finally being mentioned in reports published in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News in 1868, the Wandering Jew had left no visible trail. Forced to take a different tack, I decided to focus less on the question of the wandering and more on the question of the Jew. If I could find some answers to the Jewish question, I thought, I might also discover where the Jew might have gone. But first I had to see what the Jewish question was all about. What, in fact, was the question?

So I went straight to the source: the German Protestant theologian Bruno Bauer and his 1843 essay “Die Judenfrage,” translated in turn as “The Jewish Question” and “The Jewish Problem.” Obviously, much had happened with and to the Jews since Bauer tried to address the question, but since he was the first to put it so directly, his essay seemed like a good start.

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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

Blood-sucking mosquitoes have their uses. An innovative approach analysing their last blood meals can reveal evidence of infection in the people or animals that the flying insects feasted on.

Scientists say that the method, presented at an infectious-disease conference in Malaysia last week, could be used to study people’s and animals’ past exposure to a range of pathogens, while avoiding the ethical and practical issues of testing them directly.

“This is a novel and fascinating approach, which demonstrates innovative ways to use the environment around us to learn more about exposure to infection,” says Shelly Bolotin, a vaccine scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada.

It could also aid early detection in animals of diseases such as Ebola and SARS-CoV-2, says Niels Verhulst, who studies pathogens transmitted by insects, at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. And it could help scientists to identify the animal host of a new virus, adds Verhulst, who has tested the approach.

More here.

Sarah Bush and Lauren Prather in The Conversation:

Can Americans’ trust in elections be rebuilt?

Answering that question is complicated by the country’s decentralized system of election management. Researchers have found that trust can be enhanced when whole countries reform their electoral systems to make them fairer and more transparent. Although American elections are democratic, it is difficult to highlight specific qualities – or implement reforms that would make elections even better – because election administration varies from state to state.

Poll worker training and other measures that make it likely that voters have a positive experience on election day can improve Americans’ trust in their elections. This will likely happen at a local level.

Another way that countries help the public understand election quality is through positive reports from trusted election observers, both domestic and international.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-EbcjerWvc&ab_channel=InOurTime

Martin Tyrrell at the Dublin Review of Books:

Weber says that most writings about the Beatles can be categorised into one of four principal narratives ‑ four ways of seeing and telling the band’s story. The first and earliest of these is the Fab Four Narrative. This is the more or less official version of the Beatles that evolved following their initial breakthrough. It was propagated by a largely friendly media nudged along by the Beatles themselves, their management and publicists. In the Fab Four Narrative, the Beatles are depicted as four friends whose relationship with each other is easy and free of tension. This is how they come across in their early interviews, their monthly fan magazine, and, especially, in their first two films: A Hard Day’s Night and Help. In Help, for example, the fictionalised Beatles live in a luxurious communal home that is, by mid-sixties standards, high-tech. These are rich young men, leisured and with few responsibilities, but who get along together, well enough to live in the same shared space like perpetual teenagers. As Weber comments, these mainstream films were especially important in differentiating one Beatle from another for a wider public (Jonathan Miller, commenting when they were new on the scene, had thought they all looked the same, like the Midwich Cuckoos).

more here.

Michael Hofmann at n+1:

THE WORD “GENIAL” IN ENGLISH conveys pleasantness as much as genius: it takes the chill off what otherwise can be a cold and lonely quality. That fits it for the German polymath Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929–2022), who was both a genius and a charming, inquisitive, and endlessly productive man, who, further, like only the very greatest, was entirely lacking in self-regard. You wouldn’t want to keep pace with his entry in Who’s Who, but then you didn’t have to. Friends called him Magnus, and I wrote to him in the Latin vocative as Care Magne and visited him several times in Munich. Once, I missed the last train, and stayed over in his guest room. Of course. No problem. He would ask me about Florida, which he pronounced as Flo-ri-da—with the Cuban pronunciation, as I realized after years. He had a wonderful capacity for taking an interest—but only in interesting things, not to be mistaken for the perverse and arid professional quality that specializes in making something but only out of nothing. In fact, we didn’t meet as professionals. What brought us together wasn’t “shop,” or the biz, I didn’t “ask what he was writing,” we exchanged perspectives, we met as temperaments or as tastes (where I corresponded to maybe 5 or 10 percent of his sweep).

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Michael Robbins in Harper’s Magazine:

I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible in the hallway outside my chemistry classroom, in which lurked a boy I loathed named Glenn, who would make fun of my Journey T-shirts. It would be years before I really got into Iron Maiden, but at my friend Jonathan’s house I’d heard Barry Clayton’s creepy recitation of Revelation 13:18 on the title track of The Number of the Beast: “Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast: for it is a human number; its number is six hundred and sixty-six.”

I wanted to know what that was all about. My father was so dismissive of any form of religious thought that I was in second grade before I realized that some people believed in the devil, whom I had drawn for an art project. My teacher wouldn’t post my drawing on the wall with the others, on the grounds that it might offend Christian sensibilities, though it was a standard cartoonish red devil with horns, pitchfork, and pointy tail. I was nonplussed: surely Satan was a fictional character, like Santa Claus or Batman. (Of course he is, my dad explained that night, but not everyone realizes this.)

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Ava Kofman in The New Yorker:

Over the years, Marsha Farmer had learned what to look for. As she drove the back roads of rural Alabama, she kept an eye out for dilapidated homes and trailers with wheelchair ramps. Some days, she’d ride the one-car ferry across the river to Lower Peach Tree and other secluded hamlets where a few houses lacked running water and bare soil was visible beneath the floorboards. Other times, she’d scan church prayer lists for the names of families with ailing members.

Farmer was selling hospice, which, strictly speaking, is for the dying. To qualify, patients must agree to forgo curative care and be certified by doctors as having less than six months to live. But at AseraCare, a national chain where Farmer worked, she solicited recruits regardless of whether they were near death. She canvassed birthday parties at housing projects and went door to door promoting the program to loggers and textile workers. She sent colleagues to cadge rides on the Meals on Wheels van or to chat up veterans at the American Legion bar. “We’d find run-down places where people were more on the poverty line,” she told me. “You’re looking for uneducated people, if you will, because you’re able to provide something to them and meet a need.”

More here.

Boar: Even Though

He stumps along on his cloven hooves,
his midget legs, bulging, fat, 300-pound
pig, gorgeous, huge porker, jiggling
hams and haunches. He’s surfeit,
an abundance of lean muscle and pure
lard, old feast in himself, a perfectly
fulfilled purpose in the flesh.

He stands for all the swine relatives
and ancient ancestors of 10,000
years—warthog, bush pig, white-lipped
peccary, woolly boar, javelina, bristled
tuskers, acorn shovelers, river
swimmers, acute detectors of thunder
and lightning two days away, keen
routers of hidden truffles and tubers.

He adores his pignut hickories. He adores
his sows and their wallows.
He can sprint as fast as a squirrel.

Rolling and rooting, settling
into sleep, his great breathing body
inside his grass nest is such a mound
of steady heaving someone might believe
a hillock of forest were quaking to life.

His rumbling, guttural, reverberating
bass snorting, rising from the subterranean
depths of his barrel chest, is the kettle
drumroll of the generous earth
announcing its bounty: Here he is.
He eats anything—fungi, grasshoppers,
grains and garbage, eggs, snakes,
mollusks, birds, bark, manure.

Forgive his stink, forgive his beady,
squinty eye, his ears like stiff hairy
handkerchiefs hanging over his brown,
his jutting teeth, his dripping digging
snout; for he possesses and intriguing
skull, a brain much superior to a cow’s
or a dog’s. And he is senior sire
of countless progeny, his seed so
multiplied “as the stars of the heaven.”
He is provision. He nourishes.

Waddle-trotting away now, see
how his tail in its coil is laughing
at everything he turns his back on.

by Pattianne Rogers
from Wayfare
Penguin Books, 2008

Matt Taibbi in his Substack newsletter:

After the Internet arrived and flooded the market with new voices, some outlets found that instead of going after the whole audience, it made more financial sense to pick one demographic and dominate it. How? That’s easy. You feed the audience news you know they will like. When Fox had success targeting suburban and rural, mostly white, mostly older conservatives – the late Fox News chief Roger Ailes infamously described his audience as “55 to dead” – other companies soon followed suit.

Now everyone does it. Whether it’s Fox, or MSNBC, or CNN, or the Washington Post, nearly all Western media outlets are in the demographic-hunting business. This may be less true in Canada, where there’s a stronger public media tradition, but in the U.S., it’s standard.

Call it the “audience-optimization” model: instead of starting with a story and following the facts, you start with what pleases your audience, and work backward to the story.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space.

The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or “qubits,” stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole, they reported today in the journal Nature.

The team, led by Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology, implemented the novel “wormhole teleportation protocol” using Google’s quantum computer, a device called Sycamore housed at Google Quantum AI in Santa Barbara, California. With this first-of-its-kind “quantum gravity experiment on a chip,” as Spiropulu described it, she and her team beat a competing group of physicists who aim to do wormhole teleportation with IBM and Quantinuum’s quantum computers.

More here.

Eli Friedman in the Boston Review:

With or without the COVID-19 pandemic, China has maintained a greater capacity to control the internal movement of its population than perhaps any other country in the world. This is primarily enforced through the household registration system (hukou) which has linked the provision of social services to regional locales since 1958. Under Deng Xiaoping, China set about constructing a national labor market, which today allows citizens to enjoy the narrow market freedom to seek employment throughout the country. But social citizenship, including access to state subsidized health care, education, pensions, and housing, is structured at the level of the city.

In recent years the central government has promoted a technocratic biopolitics that aims to specifically distribute people, in just the right qualities and quantities, within a complex socio-spatial hierarchy of cities and regions. This “just-in-time urbanization” is meant to pull elite talents into elite cities and push the “low-end population” to low-end places.

More here.