Michael Fried at nonsite:

Willard Boepple’s “Shards” fuse two art forms, sculpture and monoprints, to make a third which is sui generis and yet partakes of both of the others. Most intimately, the “Shards” bear a relation to the intensely coloristic monoprints that Boepple has been making since roughly 2004 in collaboration—following his choices and decisions—with Kip Gresham, a master printmaker in Cambridge, England. As described by Karen Wilkin in her indispensable book on the artist:

Each shape goes down on the paper as an expanse of uninflected, transparent color. [The shapes determined by stencils prepared beforehand.] As other shapes are added, the overlapping hues create new densities and new colors. Changing the sequence can further alter these tonal and chromatic relationships, creating new spatial suggestions, so that we read each of these unique images differently.1

“New spatial suggestions” is right.

more here.

Firmin DeBrabander at The Hedgehog Review:

“I have discovered a potion for memory and wisdom,” the Egyptian god of the underworld tells the King of Thebes in an exchange recounted by Plato. This “magic potion,” it turns out, is writing. Previously, stories and histories, facts and fables were passed on orally. Minstrels would commit to memory the whole of the story of Troy, for example, which Homer ultimately put to the page. This was challenging work, time consuming, and imprecise. Stories were liable to variation, and exaggeration. Heroes were perhaps overly exalted. Details, dates, even characters would change over time. Writing solved many of these problems, and perfected our ability to recall.

But the King of Thebes is not impressed. Writing will “introduce forgetfulness,” he says. People will no longer “practice their memory because they will put their trust in writing… instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.” It is uncanny how his worries anticipate current critiques of technologies, which allow us to outsource cognitive duties and habits, and deactivate parts of our mind.

More here.

Xiao-Li Meng and Liberty Vittert at the Harvard Data Science Review:

Xiao-Li Meng: Well, thank you so much, Steve, for joining us. I know how busy you are, so let’s just get to it. What is intelligence? What are the key components? What do you think constitutes intelligence?

Steven Pinker: I think intelligence is the ability to use knowledge to attain goals. That is, we tend to attribute intelligence to a system when it can do multiple things, multiple steps or alternative pathways to achieving the same outcome: what it wants. I’m sitting here right now in William James Hall, and my favorite characterization comes from William James himself, the namesake of my building, where he said, “‘You look at Romeo pursuing Juliet, and you look at a bunch of iron filings pursuing a magnet, you might say, ‘Oh, same thing.’ There’s a big difference. Namely, if you put a card between the magnet and filings, then the filings stick to the card; if you put a wall between Romeo and Juliet, they don’t have their lips idiotically attached to opposite sides of the wall.” Romeo will find a way of jumping over the wall or around the wall or knocking down the wall in order to touch Juliet’s lips.’ So, with a nonintelligence system, like physical objects, the path is fixed and whether it reaches some destination is just accidental or coincidental. With an intelligent agent, the goal is fixed and the path can be modified indefinitely. That’s my favorite characterization of intelligence.

More here.

Rikki Schlott and Greg Lukianoff at Persuasion:

A 2019 study found that on both the left and right, people overestimate how prevalent extreme views are on the opposite side—something that was especially true of those who rely on social media for their news.

This is the modern manifestation of the anthropological phenomenon schismogenesis, which contends that group identity is formed in opposition to competing groups. Like the ancient Athenians and Spartans, by defining ourselves as being “the complete opposite of those guys,” we become less and less like each other—and more and more confident that our way is the right way.

This has been true since social media’s inception. But it’s only been worsened by a series of mass bans, particularly on Twitter, the digital home for all things political.

More here.

Gary Garrels at Artforum:

BRICE MARDEN was an artist for whom intensive looking was essential. To be with him in the studio or in a museum was to focus as hard as possible on the work of art in front of your eyes. Words never disrupted the silence of seeing.

Light was always a fundamental subject of Brice’s work. It is what enables us to see. Different light reveals different aspects of what we observe, opening different experiences. Brice worked with the distinct qualities of light in discrete locations. He loved the light of New York, what he argued was a beautiful, silvery light coming off the water—a northern, colder light that is very clear. By contrast, the light in Hydra, Greece, where he had maintained a home and studio since the early 1970s, was brilliant and intense. The landscape also shifts the effects of light. New York has skyscrapers and steel. Greece has palm, pine, and olive trees. Brice would say that color has to be brought up to the light, that pigment is simply a substance that reacts to light.

more here.

John Adamson at Literary Review:

Darnton chooses forty or so ‘happenings’ from the four decades before the French Revolution, each crisply recounted in chapters that rarely run to more than ten pages, and assesses what Parisians made of them. All the period’s great political événements are here: Louis XV’s calamitous foreign wars and the humiliating treaties that ended them; the repeated clashes between royal government and the Paris Parlement (the city’s hugely prestigious high court); the summoning of the Estates General and the fall of the Bastille. So too are the great cultural events of the age: we have the publication of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Rousseau’s Emile and Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolerance (his plea for religious toleration), along with the performance of Beaumarchais’s hierarchy-subverting Mariage de Figaro – the great succès de scandale of the 1770s Parisian stage – and much else. Even the first public balloon flight over Paris in 1783, emphasising the boundless possibilities of science, finds its place on Darnton’s list.

more here.

Maybe Lewiston

Maybe we will see Katahdin, we tell our children; maybe we will see a moose.
…… Pulling over at the Lewiston Travel Center,
trucks at the tagging station, hunting season just beginning.
…… Death like a warm meal; Death like a family reunion; Death like a game.

We always take precautions hiking,
…… blaze-orange hats in the back of the car.
Once a woman weeding her garden was mistaken for a deer.
…… Death like a stray bullet; Death like a mistake.

Inside the Circle K everyone is grabbing whoopie pies and hot slices.
…… My son wants a Halloween skull.
We tell him there will be plenty of time for souvenirs.
…… Death like a pirate; Death like a clown.

Heading north the road is empty, ambulance screaming in the other direction,
…… police cars, helicopter searchlight desperate circling.
What’s happening, I wonder. Someone is lost, my husband answers.
…… Death like a whisper; Death like a broken mirror; Death like a Passover prayer.

We are too late to see Katahdin, pass the turnoff, scenic view;
…… we keep right on driving. I imagine a moose
behind the dark trees, watching; a sign to stay grounded.
…… Death like a warm meal; Death like a family reunion; Death like a game.

We find out that night. First thing in the morning,
…… detouring past Lewiston, I keep searching the woods for meaning:
Amber leaves a tracksuit; frost a car of interest; shadow a man with a gun;
…… Death in the passenger seat. Death on manhunt. Death still at large. Death on the run.

by Katherine Hagopian Berry
from Rattle Magazine —
Poets Respond October 29, 2023

Will Sansom in UTHSCSA:

A cancer therapy may shrink the tumor of a patient, and the patient may feel better. But unseen on a CT scan or MR image, some of the cells are undergoing ominous changes. Fueled by new genetic changes due to cancer therapy itself, these rogue cells are becoming very large with twice or quadruple the number of chromosomes found in healthy cells. Some of the cells may grow to eight, 16 or even 32 times the correct number. Quickly, they will become aggressive and resistant to treatment. They will eventually cause cancer recurrence.

…“When you give therapy, some cells don’t die,” explained Dr. Mahadevan, leader of hematology and medical oncology care at the Mays Cancer Center, home to UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson. “These cells don’t die because they’ve acquired a double complement of the normal chromosomes plus other genetic changes. Many types of chemotherapy actually promote this.”

Dr. Mahadevan found that two cancer-causing genes, called c-Myc and BCL2, are operative in “double-hit” high-grade lymphomas, which are incurable. “These genes are part of the problem, because when they are present, they help the lymphoma cells to live longer and prime them to become large cells with treatment,” he said. Although the drugs seem to be working, once therapy is stopped, the large rogue cells (called tetraploid cells) start to divide again and become smaller but faster-growing cells, driven by c-Myc and BCL2.

“It’s a double hit, a double whammy,” Dr. Mahadevan said.

To counter this, Dr. Mahadevan seeks to find drugs that prevent or treat the rogue cells’ acquisition of multiple chromosomes. He has identified a small-molecule inhibitor that shows promise in cell experiments in the laboratory. “We have data to show that it works,” he said.

More here.

Lizzie Wade in Anthropocene:

During World War II, Londoners often sought shelter from German bombs in the city’s subway tunnels. There, they encountered another type of enemy: hordes of voracious mosquitoes. These weren’t your typical above-ground mosquitoes. They were natives of the Underground, born in pools of standing water that pockmarked the underground passageways. And unlike their open-air cousins, London’s subterranean skeeters seemed to love biting humans.

Fifty years after the war ended, scientists at the University of London decided to investigate the subway population. They collected eggs and larvae from subway tunnels and garden ponds and reared both populations in the lab. The outdoor mosquitoes fed on birds, but the tunnel bugs preferred mammal blood. And when the scientists put males and females from the different populations into close quarters designed to encourage mating, not a single pairing produced offspring. That sealed the deal: the underground mosquitoes were a whole new species, adapted to life in the subway tunnels people had built.

More here.

Sara Lippincott at Edge.org:

I got out of Wellesley in 1959, shortly after Lolita got out of Paris. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. (Na-bwak-awf: a trip down the stairs with a loud bump and a glorious sprawl at the bottom.) I fell in love with it.

I had majored in English, with a minor in Moby Dick, and now planned to become a full-time poet. So I looked for and found a garret in Cambridge, in a seedy gabled house on Kirkland Street. The third floor—two tiny bedrooms and a hall bath—was shared by me and a young woman of about my own age but not my aspirations who was drinking herself to death.

To support myself while writing poems, I took the first job the Harvard personnel office suggested—as secretary to Dr. Frank Carpenter, a paleoentomologist and recent chairman of Harvard’s Biology Department. The department was quartered in the Bio Labs on Divinity Avenue, an impressive pile whose front entrance was guarded by a pair of giant bronze rhinoceroses. Dr. Carpenter published a bug quarterly called Psyche. Now that he was through with his chairmanship, he wanted to turn more attention to it, and he needed someone who could spell and knew where the commas should go. I’d do fine.

More here.

Rupendra Brahambhatt in Ars Technica:

There are some insects that fly synchronously, meaning their wings on both sides flap together and in a coordinated manner. Others demonstrate asynchronous flight, in which each wing operates independently. A big difference between these two modes is that in synchronous flight, the nervous system of an insect has complete control over the wings’ motion.

The insects can command their muscles to beat on each wingstroke with their brains, just like you or I do when we command our leg muscles to move with each step. That is what the very first flying insects likely did, as it’s common in many groups of insects today, including moths, cockroaches, and others.

In asynchronous flight, the wings flap much faster than the insect’s brain can control.

More here.

George Scialabba in The New Statesman:

“The 7 October attack by Hamas was morally barbarous and strategically futile. Nothing justifies the killing of innocents, not even the denial of a people’s nationhood for 75 years, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of them to make way for colonial settlers, or the killing of thousands of their own innocents in scandalously disproportionate ‘reprisals’. And as for strategy, for the weak (and not only for them), nothing is less efficacious than such violence, which makes trust – the only reliable basis of lasting security – impossible. Better a people should suffer another 75 years of dispossession than that another such crime be committed in its name. Of course, those who would allow this people to go without justice for another 75 years, and who allowed it to go without justice for the last 75 years, share the murderers’ guilt, and with far less excuse.”

No one asked me for a public statement after the Hamas raid. If anyone had, this is roughly what I would have said, and I’ve used it as a kind of template in reacting to the innumerable public statements, solicited and unsolicited, that I’ve encountered since the event.

More here.

More here.

Ari Schulman at The New Atlantis:

As I have written elsewhere, we must begin again to see science as something people do. We must stop seeing science as an alien force and admit it as a full participant in human affairs — a messy enterprise like all others, with its own distinct yearnings and vices.

It is with no small trepidation that I suggest the spirit of a rather different story: the Manhattan Project, whose proof of success, the first detonation of an atomic bomb, happened seventy-eight years ago this weekend, and will be depicted in Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer, set to be released next week. Here was an episode where America spoke of science not with the passive but the full active voice, as a powerful — and dangerous — ally.

Science has led America well through crises when it has eagerly anticipated needs and set ambitious, specific, achievable goals. The vaccine development, backed by Operation Warp Speed, was the proudest example during the pandemic. The Covid Tracking Project, which became our national data dashboard, nimbly solved a dire problem that the CDC wouldn’t.

more here.

Louise Glück from the archives at The Paris Review:

I had left my passport at an inn we stayed at for a night or so whose name I couldn’t remember. This is how it began. The next hotel would not receive me. A beautiful hotel, in an orange grove, with a view of the sea. How casually you accepted the room that would have been ours, and, later, how merrily you stood on the balcony, pelting me with foil-wrapped chocolates. The next day you resumed the journey we would have taken together.

The concierge procured an old blanket for me. By day, I sat outside the kitchen. By night, I spread my blanket among the orange trees. Every day was the same, except for the weather.

After a time, the staff took pity on me. A busboy would bring me food from the evening meal, the odd potato or bit of lamb. Sometimes a postcard arrived. On the front, glossy landmarks and works of art. Once, a mountain covered in snow. After a month or so there was a postscript: X sends regards.

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Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

One of the greatest transformations in the history of life occurred more than 600 million years ago, when a single-celled organism gave rise to the first animals. With their multicellular bodies, animals evolved into a staggering range of forms, like whales that weigh 200 tons, birds that soar six miles into the sky and sidewinders that slither across desert dunes.

Scientists have long wondered what the first animals were like, including questions about their anatomy and how they found food. In a study published on Wednesday, scientists found tantalizing answers in a little-known group of gelatinous creatures called comb jellies. While the first animals remain a mystery, scientists found that comb jellies belong to the deepest branch on the animal family tree.

The debate over the origin of animals has endured for decades. At first, researchers relied largely on the fossil record for clues. The oldest definitive animal fossils date back about 580 million years, although some researchers have claimed to find even older ones. In 2021, for example, Elizabeth Turner, a Canadian paleontologist, reported finding 890-million-year-old fossils of possible sponges. Sponges would make sense as the oldest animal. They are simple creatures, with no muscles or nervous system. They anchor themselves to the ocean floor, where they filter water through a maze of pores, trapping bits of food.

More here.

Layal Liverpool in Nature:

The group behind the radical open-access initiative Plan S has announced its next big plan to shake up research publishing — and this one could be bolder than the first. It wants all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports to be published openly from the outset, without authors paying any fees, and for authors, rather than publishers, to decide when and where to first publish their work.

The group of influential funding agencies, called cOAlition S, has over the past five years already caused upheaval in the scholarly publishing world by pressuring more journals to allow immediate open-access publishing. Its new proposal, prepared by a working group of publishing specialists and released on 31 October, puts forward an even broader transformation in the dissemination of research. It outlines a future “community-based” and “scholar-led” open-research communication system (see go.nature.com/45zyjh) in which publishers are no longer gatekeepers that reject submitted work or determine first publication dates. Instead, authors would decide when and where to publish the initial accounts of their findings, both before and after peer review. Publishers would become service providers, paid to conduct processes such as copy-editing, typesetting and handling manuscript submissions.

More here.