Tim Smedley in The Guardian:

During the summer months in the Oxfordshire town where I live, I go swimming in the nearby 50-metre lido. With my inelegantly slow breaststroke, from time to time I accidentally gulp some of the pool’s opulent, chlorine-clean 5.9m litres of water. Sometimes, I swim while it’s raining, when fewer people brave it, alone in my lane with the strangely comforting feeling of having water above and below me. I stand a bottle of water at the end of the lane, to drink from halfway through my swim. I normally have a shower afterwards, even if I’ve showered that morning. I live a wet, drenched, quenched existence. But, as I discovered, this won’t last. I am living on borrowed time and borrowed water.

Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and lakes and returned polluted, allows me to live this way. It will have to stop – not through some altruistic hand-wringing desire to do better, but because even in England this amount of water will soon be unavailable.

More here.

Amna A. Akbar, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Anthony Morgan in the Boston Review:

As part of our event series with The Philosopher, Amna Akbar sat down with Bernard Harcourt, legal scholar and professor of political science at Columbia University, to discuss his new book, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory. In the course of their conversation, moderated by Philosopher editor Anthony Morgan, they discuss the failure of traditional electoral politics and mass mobilization, existing cooperative efforts, our punitive society, and how we might build democratic self-governance. Below is a transcript of their conversation, which has been edited for clarity and concision.

More here.

Rita Horanyi at The Sydney Review of Books:

Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai has become a more familiar name to English speaking readers over the last few years thanks to his receipt of the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. Nevertheless, his is a name that remains shrouded in a certain mystique, due in part to his gnomic responses in interviews, and to the notorious difficulty of his work, with its breathtakingly long sentences and apocalyptic, melancholic themes. The World Goes On, which has been shortlisted for 2018 Man Booker International Prize, continues to explore these themes, albeit in a less menacing or apocalyptic tone than some of his earlier works.

The World Goes On is composed of twenty-one short prose pieces, divided into three sections entitled: ‘He Speaks’, ‘He Narrates’ and ‘He Departs.’ Some of these prose works have appeared elsewhere before.

more here.

Astra Taylor at Lapham’s Quarterly:

One March day in 1742, a very unusual man set up a table on a busy Philadelphia street. Benjamin Lay was sixty-one years old, wore humble homespun clothes, and sported a long beard. His head was large and his eyes luminous, but his posture and height immediately set him apart: he had a stooped back and stood a little over four feet tall. He carefully laid out a few teacups and saucers, delicate objects that had been treasured by his wife before she passed away, and then proceeded to smash them with a hammer, crushing the dishes with dramatic flair. With each loud blow, bits of ceramic flying, he denounced the “tyrants” in India and the Caribbean who mistreated the workers who harvested the tea and enslaved the people who produced the sugar that his Pennsylvania neighbors consumed.

more here.

Labor of Love

Every day I watch him,
as he passes my office window
on his daily walk.

It is akin to watching a turtle.
He moves so slowly, carefully placing each foot
with every step he takes.

It is laborious for him, that much is obvious.
I wonder if he does it for them –
they seem so happy on this little jaunt around the block.

They are up ahead, talking and laughing,
while he walks so slowly, dutifully,
behind them, keeping watch.

They only walk this one block,
I don’t think his old body could carry him much further,
but still, his tail wags the whole way.

by Amanda Judd
from Heroin Love Songs

Matt Hrodey in Discover:

Temnothorax nylanderi is a low-key species of ant found mostly in Europe, where it builds nests in tree bark and rotting branches and other woody, secluded places. This tiny brown arthropod leads a quiet life, preferring shade and shelter and staying out of the way of the woodpecker’s bill. But for all this quiet, T. nylanderi faces a strange, alien threat in the form of a parasite that turns its members into yellowed, sedentary oafs. These compromised individuals hang out in the nest, not doing much of anything, defying what it means to be an ant.

How does this happen? A new paper posted to the bioRxiv preprint server concludes that the parasites flood the ants with new proteins that appear to change how their bodies function. Most notably, the proteins extend the ants’ lives by several fold (an exact figure has yet to be determined). The infected may even live as long as queens, which can last 20 years.

More here.

Benji Jones in Vox:

Over the last decade, dozens of companies and nearly all large countries have vowed to stop demolishing forests, a practice that destroys entire communities of wildlife and pollutes the air with enormous amounts of carbon dioxide. A big climate conference in Glasgow, in the fall of 2021, produced the most significant pledge to date: 145 countries, including Brazil, China, and Indonesia, committed to “halt and reverse” forest loss within the decade. Never before, it seems, has the world been this dedicated to stopping deforestation.

And yet forests continue to fall.

A new analysis by the research organization World Resources Institute reveals that deforestation remained rampant in 2022. More than 4 million hectares (about 10 million acres) of forests vanished from the tropics that year in places like Brazil and Central Africa, according to the analysis, which is based on data from the University of Maryland. That’s a Switzerland-size area of forest gone, WRI said. Alarmingly, the world lost 10 percent more tropical forest in 2022 compared to the previous year, indicating that countries are, on the whole, moving in the wrong direction. This is especially troubling considering that tropical forests are among the most important ecosystems on Earth. They help regulate weather, store vast amounts of carbon, and provide homes to the richest assemblages of wildlife on the planet.

More here.

Vikram Murthi at The Nation:

The premise of Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener is, on paper, a provocation: A reformed white supremacist, living a secluded life in witness protection after flipping on his crew, falls in love with a young biracial woman during a period of shared crisis. The man in question, Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), toils away as a horticulturist employed by the estate of a wealthy, childless dowager, Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). His steadfast commitment to her land, and to the diurnal rhythms of gardening, helps him preserve order in his own life after spending much of it dedicated to death. In Narvel’s eyes, it’s an act of penance to give back to the earth with the same hands he previously used to poison it.

When Haverhill insists that Narvel take on her estranged grandniece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) as an apprentice, he cautiously agrees at first, but after warming up to her, he eventually sees it as another opportunity for atonement.

more here.

David Hering at The Point:

Éric Rohmer wasn’t his real name. He was born Maurice Schérer, the name by which his mother knew him her whole life. As far as she was concerned, Maurice was a teacher in a lycée in Paris. She never knew of the existence of Éric Rohmer, nor that her son was an internationally lauded filmmaker and one-time editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma. His cinema, too, was self-denying. Rohmer idolized André Bazin, the influential French film theorist who argued that cinema was the “culmination in time of photographic objectivity”—that film should forgo the artifice of its creation and instead claim to be a snapshot of reality, a reflection of the world taking place in front of the camera. Ignore the origins of the image and its mediation, said Bazin; the world one chooses to depict is the world itself.

Many of Rohmer’s productions followed this model closely. The cast and crew, including Rohmer, would live in shared accommodation, often extremely frugal and without basic amenities, near the filming location, and where possible scenes would be shot in sequence.

more here.

Christian Kriticos in Quillette:

Setsuko Nakamura was 13 years old when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima. She remembers seeing “a blinding bluish-white flash” and then “having the sensation of floating” as the building around her collapsed. When she regained consciousness, she heard the faint cries of her classmates, trapped in the burning ruins: “Mother, help me. God, help me.” Three hundred and fifty-one of her schoolmates died—just a fraction of the overall death toll, which is estimated at anywhere from 70,000 to 140,000.

On the other side of the world, in the nation that launched the attack, the human impact of the atomic bomb was not widely understood at the time. The US imposed strict censorship, confiscating medical reports and photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and restricting the publication of survivor accounts. In any case, the American public was more in the mood for jubilation, as the bombings brought an end to almost four years of war with Japan.

Only a few citizens truly understood the destructive power of this new weapon and the existential threat it posed to humanity. Among them was a 28-year-old flight lieutenant named Roald Dahl, stationed at the British Embassy in Washington, DC.

More here.

Giorgio Parisi in The Guardian:

The multi-prize-winning theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi was born in Rome in 1948. He studied physics at the Sapienza University in the city, and is now a professor of quantum theories there. A researcher of broad interests, Parisi is perhaps best known for his work on “spin glasses” or disordered magnetic states, contributing to the theory of complex systems. For this work, together with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe, he won the Nobel prize in physics in 2021. His first popular science book, In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems, which charts some of the highlights of his life’s work and makes a passionate case for the value of science, is published on 11 July.

More here.

More here.

Jackson Lears in Harper’s:

The war in Ukraine has resurrected the ultimate technocratic fantasy: a winnable nuclear war. Intellectuals at the Hoover Institution are urging American strategists to “think nuclearly again,” reestablishing the idea that nuclear weapons are tools to assert U.S. primacy over Russia and China. This isn’t just talk. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently noted “steadily increasing U.S. bomber operations in Europe”—some near the Russian border. Though most Americans are unaware of it, escalation toward nuclear conflict is already under way.

In this strange atmosphere, I feel moved to revisit my own experience as a naval officer on a nuclear-armed ship more than fifty years ago. My story is all too relevant today. As Daniel Ellsberg demonstrates in The Doomsday Machine, the shape of U.S. nuclear strategy has remained unchanged since the early Sixties.

More here.

Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is still an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner. What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a key study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference. “It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof,” says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn’t the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: “There’s been a lot of progress in the field.”

The great wager

Consciousness is everything a person experiences — what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says. Despite a vast effort — and a 25-year bet — researchers still don’t understand how our brains produce it, however. “It started off as a very big philosophical mystery,” Chalmers adds. “But over the years, it’s gradually been transmuting into, if not a ‘scientific’ mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically.” Koch, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, began his search for the neural footprints of consciousness in the 1980s. Since then, he has been invested in identifying “the bits and pieces of the brain that are really essential — really necessary to ultimately generate a feeling of seeing or hearing or wanting,” as he puts it.

More here.

Saima Sidik in Nature:

Two new drugs for treating obesity are on course to become available in the next few years — and they offer advantages beyond those of the highly effective blockbuster drugs already on the market. The first, called orforglipron, is easier to use and to produce, and it will probably be cheaper than existing treatments. The second, retatrutide, has an unprecedented level of efficacy, and could raise the bar for pharmacological obesity treatment. “They’re both breakthroughs,” says endocrinologist Daniel Drucker at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the recent research on either drug. Results from phase II clinical trials of both drugs were announced at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association this month and in the New England Journal of Medicine^1,2. Phase II trials provide data on a drug’s efficacy and ideal dosage in a small group of participants.

Acting on appetite

Orforglipron and retatrutide both mimic hormones produced by the lining of the gut in response to certain nutrients. These hormones help to slow the passage of food through the digestive tract and lower appetite by acting on receptors in the brain — both effects that reduce people’s desire to eat and help them to lose weight.

More here.

Homesickness as Particle Theory

An atom cannot exist
if the center does not hold.

Matter cannot hold
if the atoms swing apart
too far—

that summer night:
I could feel the pieces of my life
circling away from me in distances so vast

the volume of separation
seemed infinite.

I caught
the wisp of my grandfather’s
pipe smoke,

the saturated indigo
of a green downstate summer evening,

every window open
to the chance of sleep

in deep humidity,
washed in waves of cricket song

and the far pungent howl of a coyote
edging the cornfields.

All in seconds
lifted away.

Read more »