Madoc Cairns at The Guardian:

On Saturday 13 December 1958, the People’s Republic of China declared war on a bird. Mobilisation was total: 600 million enlisted for the fight. Their target was a tiny songbird, between five and six inches long: the Eurasian tree sparrow. It might seem like overkill, writes Stephen Moss in his history of human-avian relations, but in the eyes of China’s leaders the sparrows more than deserved it. An estimated 1.5m tonnes of grain disappeared down the gullets of said feathered gourmets each year. China was short on food – and short on patience. Peace was never an option.

Such extreme enmity, Moss reassures readers, is historically an exception, not a rule. Not that there’s much of a rule to be found in our millennia of coexistence – apart from how consistently we get birds wrong. Scavenging habits – and a certain native glamour – helped ravens coast into human mythologies as helpful companions across neolithic Eurasia.

more here.

Sexsmith the Dentist

Do you think that odes and sermons,
And ringing of church bells,
And the blood of old men and young men,
Martyred for the truth they saw
With eyes made bright by faith in God,
Accomplished the world’s great reformations?
Do you think that the Battle Hymn of the Republic
Would have been heard if the chattel slave
Had crowned the dominant dollar,
In spite of Whitney’s cotton gin,
And steam and rolling mills and iron
And telegraphs and white free labor?
Do you think that Daisy Fraser
Had been put out and driven out
If the canning works had never needed
Her little house and lot?
Or do you think the poker room
of Jonnie Taylor, or Burchard’s bar
Had been closed up if the money lost
And spent for beer had not been turned,
By closing them, to Thomas Rhodes
For larger sales of shoes and blankets,
And children’s cloaks and gold-oak cradles?
Why, a moral truth is a hollow truth
Which must be propped with gold.

by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology
Collier Books 1962

JC Hallman in Datebook:

Tompkins produced two fine books in the 1990s, “West of Everything” and “A Life in School,” but she more or less retired after that — until now, re-emerging with another impassioned missive that concerns itself with shadows and dualities and the self. “Reading Through the Night” is a perfect book for anyone who believes literature should amount to more than diversion and fodder for term papers. The recent trend in better writing about reading generally falls into two camps: books that tell the story of a writer’s relationship with another writer, and books that chronicle one’s reading life. Tompkins does both.

It begins when she receives an unexpected gift: Paul Theroux’s “Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” the author’s account of his tumultuous friendship with Nobel Prize–winner V.S. Naipaul, who died in August. Even more unexpected is Tompkins’s reaction to the book, which she is sure she will dislike. Rather, she is mysteriously enthralled, in no small part because Tompkins, a long-time champion of women and education, begins to spot bits of herself peeking out from the story of a feud between writers whose misogyny and racism and disdain for teaching is well known. How can that be? It’s so unsettling that Tompkins sets out on a kind of quest — reading the writers’ other books — to figure out what made “Sir Vidia’s Shadow” resonate so strongly with her and to begin to ask whether, contrary to critical vogue, finding oneself in books is exactly what reading should really be about.

More here.

Nicole Flattery in The Guardian:

In every argument, debate or article about the rise of the modern celebrity, one name always reappears: Andy Warhol. Do you know who first documented the minutiae of their life? Andy Warhol. Do you know who coined the phrase “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”? Andy Warhol. How did it happen? He made it happen. Warhol, the original narcissist; Warhol, the genius; Warhol, the void. He is responsible for the TikTok dancers, the Instagram models hogging the infinity pools, the needy comedians, the intense desire for recognition we are confronted with daily. It’s an awful lot for one notoriously frail man to carry.

I think the main reason why Warhol is blamed for our disposable celebrity culture is because of the superstars. The superstars were Warhol’s set, plucked from relative obscurity to star in his films, circle him and make him interesting, because Warhol’s only real god was work. Some of the superstars were talented; some were not. Some were beautiful; some were bizarre, and that was even better. Some were forgettable but some – and this is crucial – had something special. Charisma, charm, electricity, a presence that defied description.

More here.

Michael Le Page in New Scientist:

Balls of human brain cells grown in a dish, known as organoids, have been linked to computers and used to solve mathematical equations. The work is an early step towards using living brain tissue as a form of artificial intelligence, but this goal may raise ethical questions in the future, researchers say.

In a paper posted online before peer review, Feng Guo at Indiana University Bloomington and his colleagues say they have created “living AI hardware that harnesses the computation power of 3D biological neural networks in a brain organoid”. The paper states that “Brainoware”, as the researchers call it, can learn from training data and that experiments show it could have real-world applications.

Computer-based AI is getting very good at certain tasks, but this progress is being achieved by creating ever bigger and more energy-intensive AI systems, and training them on ever bigger data sets. For instance, the AlphaGo system that first beat humans at the game Go was trained on 160,000 games, more than any person could play in a lifetime.

Human brains use only around 20 watts of power, and people need to play far fewer games to become good. So some researchers think the way forward is biocomputing – using living brain cells as AIs.

More here.

Alex Raskolnikov in the Boston Review:

“Those in the 1 percent are walking off with the riches, but in doing so they have provided nothing but anxiety and insecurity to the 99 percent,” explained Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in his 2012 book The Price of Inequality. The “main fault line in the American society is . . . between the 1 percent and everybody else,” insisted celebrated economists Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in their book The Triumph of Injustice, published amid the 2020 presidential campaign. Dramatic wealth tax proposals by Democratic presidential candidates Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, chair of the tax-writing committee Senator Ron Wyden, and even an income taxation plan by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do not come close to hiking taxes on anyone below the 1 percent threshold. The same is true of the suggestions by numerous tax academics considering how to tax the rich.

But there are plenty of reasons to expand the conversation about higher taxes to some of those in the 99 percent—specifically those with incomes in the 90th to 99th percentile. Let us call them the affluent.

More here.

Anne Fadiman at Harper’s Magazine:

Until last summer, we had a dead frog in our freezer. When Bunky died, George and I thought we should wait to bury him till both our grown children were home, so we put him in a Ziploc bag and propped him on his side on a shallow shelf in the freezer door, just above the icemaker. Bunky was flat and compact and, very soon, as rigid as a cell phone. He fit perfectly. I’d always wondered what KitchenAid intended that shelf for—it was too narrow for any food I could think of—but now we knew. It was intended to hold a frog.

There are two kinds of pets—the ones you choose and the ones that happen to you. Bunky belonged to the second category. He entered our family in the haphazard fashion of pets of that ilk: tadpole kit (cubical plastic “habitat” with domed top, like nave of Hagia Sophia, sans tadpole but accompanied by redeemable coupon), left by educational-toy-oriented grandmother for granddaughter under Christmas tree; kit sidelined for years on toy shelf; kit discovered by granddaughter’s preschool-age little brother; tadpole coveted; tadpole coupon redeemed by parents; tadpole shipped to New York City from Florida in Styrofoam container; tadpole universally admired for transparent skin (visibly beating heart!) and awesome metamorphosis (weird whiskers! hind legs! front legs! no more tail!); froglet admired somewhat less; adult frog mostly ignored, except by visiting small boys, who, if they didn’t have frogs themselves, paused to pay brief homage before moving on to Legos, and by owner’s father, who, despite initial intentions to teach son responsibility through pet care, ended up feeding frog (Stage Two Food Nuggets, meted out with tiny yellow Stage Two Food Serving Spoon dainty enough for fairy) and, once frog graduated from Hagia Sophia, cleaning aquarium, first two-gallon plastic, then four-gallon glass (challenging, because frog, coated with gelatinous goo, required apprehension and temporary relocation while aquarium was emptied, refilled, and doctored with dechlorinating crystals, and damn, was he slippery).

more here.

Albert Camus at the Paris Review:

Their fondness for animals. A multistory pet shop: canaries on the second floor, great apes at the top. A couple of years ago, a man was arrested on Fifth Avenue for driving a giraffe around in his truck. He explained that his giraffe didn’t get enough air out in the suburbs where he kept it and that he’d found this to be a good way to get it some air. In Central Park, a lady brought a gazelle to graze. To the court, she explained that the gazelle was a person. “Yet it doesn’t speak,” the judge said. “Oh, yes, it speaks the language of lovingkindness.” Five­-dollar fine. There’s also the three-­kilometer tunnel under the Hudson and the impressive bridge to New Jersey.

After the talk, a drink with Schiffrin and Dolorès Vanetti— who speaks the purest slang I’ve ever heard—and with others, too. Madame Schiffrin asks if I was ever an actor.

more here.

Mitch Leslie in Science:

Stephanie Blendermann, 65, had good reason to worry about heart disease. Three of her sisters died in their 40s or early 50s from heart attacks, and her father needed surgery to bypass clogged arteries. She also suffered from an autoimmune disorder that results in chronic inflammation and boosts the odds of developing cardiovascular illnesses. “I have an interesting medical chart,” says Blendermann, a real estate agent in Prior Lake, Minnesota.

Yet Blendermann’s routine lab results weren’t alarming. At checkups, her low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad,” cholesterol hovered around the 100 milligrams-per-deciliter cutoff for normal values, and her total cholesterol—the good and bad versions combined—remained in the recommended range. “I thought I was cruising along just fine,” she says.

But because Blendermann’s risk was unclear, in late 2021 her doctor decided to refer her to cardiologist Vlad Vasile at the Mayo Clinic. To pin down her susceptibility to atherosclerosis, Vasile prescribed a test for substances Blendermann had never heard of: lipids called ceramides. Long overlooked, they are emerging as powerful alternatives to standard markers of heart disease risk such as LDL cholesterol. Blendermann’s score was moderately high, suggesting that compared with a person with a low score, she was more than twice as likely to suffer a cardiovascular event such as a heart attack. “It woke us up big time,” she says. “The ceramides told me the bigger story.” She began to take cholesterol-lowering drugs and overhauled her diet and exercise regime.

More here.

Griffy the Cooper

The cooper should know about tubs.
But I learned about life as well,
And you who loiter around these graves
Think you know life.
You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon
,…… perhaps,
In truth you are only looking around the interior
……. of your tub.
You cannot lift yourself to its rim
And see the outer world of things,
And at the same time see yourself.
You are submerged in the tub of yourself —
Taboos and rules and appearances,
And the staves of your tub.
Break them and dispel the witchcraft
Of thinking your tub is life!
And that you know life!

by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology
Collier Books, 1962

From Quanta Magazine:

By genetically instructing cells to perform tasks that they wouldn’t in nature, synthetic biologists can learn deep secrets about how life works. Steven Strogatz discusses the potential of this young field with researcher Michael Elowitz.

What is synthetic biology and what are scientists trying to do with it? Simply put, we could say that synthetic biology is a fusion of biology, especially molecular biology, and engineering. The distinctive thing about it is that it treats cells as programmable devices. It’s a kind of tinker toy approach that builds circuits, but not out of wires and switches like we’re used to, but rather out of biological components, like proteins and genes. Programming cells in this way isn’t really all that different from programming computers, except that the programming language isn’t Python, or C++. It’s the language of biology, the language of DNA, with the goal of making proteins that will interact with each other in some clever ways.

The potential medical applications of synthetic biology are huge. But also, the approach holds promise for illuminating how life works at the deepest level. It’s one thing to strip cells apart to see how they work. That’s the classic approach to molecular biology. But it’s another thing to tinker with cells to try to get them to perform new tricks, which is something that my guest, Michael Elowitz, does. For example, a while back, he engineered cells to blink on and off like Christmas lights.

More here.

Jonathan Owen at The Current:

The 1960s saw a remarkable cinematic renaissance in what was then called Czechoslovakia, and Ester Krumbachová was its renaissance woman. Combining the talents of costume, set, and prop designer, screenwriter, and director, Krumbachová contributed to many of the greatest films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, including Daisies (1966), A Report on the Party and Guests (1966), Witchhammer (1970), and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970). Though these films have long been celebrated for their anarchic imagination and bold political critiques, the woman who perhaps most fully embodied their inventive spirit and sharp moral viewpoint remains all too little appreciated.

Krumbachová has been feted as the “queen of Czech film design” and “the muse of the Czechoslovak New Wave.”

more here.

Kate Mossman at The New Statesman:

Twenty-five years on from the YBA movement, Lucas is still admired for her lightness of touch. She used sex to draw people in to her work, she recently said – to keep art open to “plebs like myself”. She was funny, but she was funny because she was clever: much of her work was barely “made”, just a couple of objects, perfectly arranged. Has she never wanted assistants, like Hirst, to help her churn out more bunnies? “If I can’t be bothered to make ’em, I wouldn’t want someone else to make ’em,” she says. “And I don’t know where I’m going with it until I’ve done it, so it’s not like I can tell someone else how to do it.” Unlike her former friend Tracey Emin, she does not try to draw.

Lucas, now 60, talks soft and fast in a velveteen smokers’ tone that, in ten years, will be as deep as Dot Cotton’s. She refers to herself as more or less an alcoholic.

more here.

Elaine Szewczyk at The Millions:

Kazuo Ishiguro has had a busy few months. The acclaimed novelist has been attending film festivals and walking red carpets to promote the film Living, for which he wrote the screenplay. Living—a remake of the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru, directed by Akira Kurosawa, which was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The Death of Ivan IIyich—is set in 1950s London and stars Bill Nighy as Rodney Williams, a senior bureaucrat in the Public Works department who is dying of cancer. The film has been an awards season darling, and this January Ishiguro was nominated for an Academy Award, his first, for best adapted screenplay.

No stranger to big awards, Ishiguro has won the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 2019 received a knighthood for his contribution to literature.

More here.

Huw Price and Ken Wharton in The Conversation:

In 2022, the physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the universe works.

Many look at those experiments and conclude that they challenge “locality” — the intuition that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact. And indeed, a mysterious connection between distant particles would be one way to explain these experimental results.

Others instead think the experiments challenge “realism” — the intuition that there’s an objective state of affairs underlying our experience. After all, the experiments are only difficult to explain if our measurements are thought to correspond to something real. Either way, many physicists agree about what’s been called “the death by experiment” of local realism.

But what if both of these intuitions can be saved, at the expense of a third? A growing group of experts think that we should abandon instead the assumption that present actions can’t affect past events. Called “retrocausality”, this option claims to rescue both locality and realism.

More here.