Maya Krishnan at The Point:

“I may die before my time.” The English philosopher Gillian Rose (1947-1995) opened one of her final lectures with these words; soon after, she would die of cancer at the age of 48. Rose’s words were doubly prescient. While her reputation has long been overshadowed by that of her more famous sister, the literary critic Jacqueline Rose, Gillian’s time seems to have arrived at last. Earlier this year in the U.K. Penguin Classics reissued Rose’s forthright memoir Love’s Work (1995), for which she is best known. The book, with its intimate yet unsentimental portrayal of sex, illness and death—in response to her cancer diagnosis, the author reaches “for my favourite whisky bottle” and vows “not to cease wooing, for that is my life affair”—has captivated many of its readers. London’s literati gathered in April at the London Review Bookshop for an event on Love’s Work, and preparations are already underway to mark the thirty years that have passed since the book’s publication and Rose’s death.

But if Rose’s time has arrived, it seems that it is Rose the memoirist, not Rose the philosopher, whom the world is ready to meet. That’s a shame, in part because it is an all-too-familiar story for a female philosopher’s reception to foreground her personal life. It’s also a missed opportunity.

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The Editors at the LRB:

‘The trick is to create a world,’ John Burnside’s poem ‘Koi’ begins, ‘from nothing.’ Published in the LRB in 2001, it was one of nearly a hundred poems by Burnside that appeared in the paper between 1996 and his death last month at the age of 69. ‘The Persistence of Memory’ is published in the current issue:

Out in the field where, once,
we played Dead Man’s Fall,

the others are being called
through the evening dusk

As well as his many collections of poetry, Burnside was the author of several novels, two collections of short stories and three books of memoir.

Reviewing A Lie about My Father in 2006, Hilary Mantel called it a ‘challenging and troubling book’ by a ‘master of language, pushing language to do what it can.

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next to of course god america i

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ‘tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?

He spoke.    And drank rapidly a glass of water

by E.E. Cummings
from Literature and the Writing Process
Prentice Hall, 1996

Christopher Solomon in The New York Times:

The average human head contains around 100,000 hairs. Each is connected to a follicle, which can hold one to five hairs. “It’s basically its own organ,” Dr. Mostaghimi said of a scalp follicle. “It has its own stem cells. It regenerates.”

Typically, men’s hair loss occurs because of an increase in an enzyme in the scalp that converts testosterone to a more potent form, called dihydrotestosterone (or DHT), Dr. Mostaghimi said. The reasons that one man might have more DHT than another are not well understood, but it has a genetic component. When men have too much DHT in their scalp, the hormone initiates a complex process that leads to hair miniaturization, in which hairs and follicles begins to shrink. (This is why men frequently have finer hair or even peach fuzz where they are balding.) This hair loss occurs in a predictable sequence: first around the temples, then at the crown of the head, where increased levels and activity of the offending enzyme and its modified testosterone are found, Dr. Mostaghimi said. Hence the phrase “male-pattern baldness.”

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Josie Glausiusz in Nature:

Cheese fungus, head lice, human sperm, a bee eye, a microplastic bobble: scientific photographer Steve Gschmeissner has imaged them all under the probing lens of a scanning electron microscope (SEM). In his colourized electron micrographs, faecal bacteria resemble thin spaghetti, silica-walled diatoms look like cubes of breakfast cereal and a segmented tardigrade resembles a curled-up, tubby piglet. Gschmeissner, who has been imaging microbes, cancer cells and invertebrates for about 50 years, has crafted an extraordinary array of more than 10,000 SEM images, some of which have been featured in Nature. He spoke to Nature about the importance of scientific images, looking at imploding cancer cells and the miniature world he found on a rotten raspberry.

What are some of the projects you’ve worked on recently?

For the past six years, I’ve been collaborating with Greg Towers, a molecular virologist at University College London, who supplies me with samples to photograph. We’ve looked at a variety of viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. The latest work I’ve done with Towers is a project on cancer-cell death. It’s the sort of work I love doing: science that tells a story with images. It’s been one of my most enjoyable and successful recent projects, because there’s very little else out there that shows what happens to cancer cells during chemotherapy.

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Solangel Maldonado at The Conversation:

If you are single and looking for a romantic partner, chances are that you have used a dating app. But the likelihood that others will like, or even see, your profile may depend on your race.

Studies have found that all people on dating apps, regardless of their own race, are more likely to contact white people using the app. And all people using dating apps are least likely to contact African American women and Asian American men.

Until recently, some popular apps, including OkCupid, Match, Hinge and Grindr, provided race and ethnicity filters that allowed users to categorically exclude daters based on race and ethnicity. Although most apps, including Grindr, removed their ethnicity filters in the past few years, others, such as Hinge and Match, have not.

While people may think that whom they find desirable is a personal preference, attraction is influenced by family members’ views, the schools people attend, friends and society in general and dating sites themselves.

More here.

Bill Gates in Gates Notes:

Today is a big one for Kemmerer—for the coal plant workers who will be able to see their future job site being constructed across the highway, for the local construction workers who will be part of a 1,600-person skilled labor force building the plant, and for the local businesses that will take care of the new workforce.

The plant was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. But my nuclear journey started several years earlier, when I first read a scientific paper for a new type of nuclear power plant.

The design was far safer than any existing plant, with the temperatures held under control by the laws of physics instead of human operators who can make mistakes. It would have a shorter construction timeline and be cheaper to operate. And it would be reliable, providing dependable power throughout the day and night. As I looked at the plans for this new reactor, I saw how rethinking nuclear power could overcome the barriers that had hindered it—and revolutionize how we generate power in the U.S. and around the world.

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Kavita Puri at the BBC:

“I feel enormous shame about what happened,” Susannah Herbert tells me.

Her grandfather was the governor of Bengal, in British India, during the run-up and height of the 1943 famine which killed at least three million people.

She is only just learning about his significant role in the catastrophe, and confronting a complex family legacy.

When I first meet her, she is clutching a photograph from 1940. It’s Christmas Day at the governor’s residence in Bengal. It’s formal, with people sitting in rows, in their finery, staring straight into camera.

In the front are the dignitaries – Viceroy Linlithgow, one of the most important colonial figures in India, and her grandfather Sir John Herbert, Bengal’s governor.

At their feet is a little boy, in a white shirt and shorts, knee-high socks and shiny shoes. It’s Susannah’s father.

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Dan Piraro at Bizarro:

I successfully raised two children to adulthood who, until recently, I called my daughters. But in the past year, one of them has asked that I not refer to her with terms associated with females. She doesn’t feel that words like “her,” “ma’am,” or “daughter” describe her. In fact, she doesn’t think of herself as a woman and does not like to be referred to as “she.” Her pronouns are “they” and “them.”

I want to respect her their wishes, so I’ve asked how I should refer to her them. Their polite response was, “Call me your kid, your offspring, or just by my name.”

Was this confusing for me? Sure. Did it frighten, disturb, or alarm me? No. They (singular) are still the same person I raised; they’re simply sharing things about themself that have always been true but have gone unrecognized. Isn’t that a good thing?

More here.

Esther Landhuis in Quanta Magazine:

Last month, researchers discovered cells in the brainstem that regulate inflammation throughout the body. In response to an injury, these nerve cells not only sense inflammatory molecules, but also dial their circulating levels up and down to keep infections from harming healthy tissues. The discovery adds control of the immune system to the brainstem’s core functions — a list that also includes monitoring heart rate, breathing and aspects of taste — and suggests new potential targets for treating inflammatory disorders like arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.

During an intense workout or high-stakes exam, your brain can sense the spike in your heart rate and help restore a normal rhythm. Likewise, the brain can help stabilize your blood pressure by triggering chemical signals that widen or constrict blood vessels. Such feats often go unnoticed, but they illustrate a fundamental concept of physiology known as homeostasis — the capacity of organisms to keep their internal systems working smoothly and stably amid shifting circumstances. Now, in a paper published on May 1 in Nature, researchers describe how homeostatic control extends even to the sprawl of cells and tissues that comprise our immune system. The team applied a clever genetic approach in mice to identify cells in the brainstem that adjust immune reactions to pathogens and other outside triggers. These neurons operate like a “volume controller” that keeps the animals’ inflammatory responses within a physiological range, said paper author Hao Jin, a neuroimmunologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

More here.

How to Be a Poet

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

by Wendell Berry
from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

Dorian Lynskey at The Guardian:

Hip-hop officially turned 50 last year. It is generally accepted that it was born on 11 August 1973, when 18-year-old DJ Kool Herc first cut up breakbeats at a party in the Bronx and his friend Coke La Rock rapped along, but this DJ-driven art form, which evolved parallel to disco, took another six years to spawn its first hit single, the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight. The star MCs emerged in its second decade, each one redrawing the bounds of the possible. Run-DMC stripped it down, then Public Enemy blew it up. De La Soul made it friendly, Kool Keith made it freaky, NWA made it outrageous, and so on. Always changing, always expanding.

Nobody knows more about hip-hop, and perhaps popular music in general, than Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. Still drumming with the Roots, the Philadelphia hip-hop crew that have been Jimmy Fallon’s TV house band since 2009, he is also the Oscar-winning director of Summer of Soul, a prolific author, podcaster and DJ, and the man tasked with herding cats for the Grammys’ salute to hip-hop at 50.

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Damon Linker interviews Alexandre Lefebvre in Notes from the Middle Ground:

DL: Thanks for being here, Alex. One reason I enjoyed your book so much is that it’s such a departure from the tired, bone-dry proceduralism of the Rawlsian liberalism I imbibed in graduate school during the 1990s. Liberalism, we were taught, is “political, not metaphysical.” It isn’t a “comprehensive view” of the good. Rather, it shows how people holding such comprehensive views can come together and do politics without reference to such bigger, deeper, or higher commitments. Your account of the liberal tradition is very different and maintains that liberalism, rightly understood, is a “way of life,” which sounds pretty comprehensive to me. Would you say that’s a fair characterization of liberalism?

AL: Thanks for the invitation, Damon. So, those “bone-dry” kind of liberals you mention are still around, publishing in the top journals in the field. And to be fair, they’ve done important work. Starting in the early 1990s, partly in response to liberal democracies becoming more multicultural, they insisted that decent liberal democratic countries must be as inclusive as possible. The state shouldn’t be in the business of favoring or prescribing a particular worldview (whether religious or secular) but instead provide a framework for all its citizens to flourish.

That’s a worthy ideal, don’t get me wrong. But we have to ask: Is it accurate? Does this notion of a “neutral” liberal society, so dear to liberal philosophers, politicians, and pundits, reflect what liberal democratic societies are nowadays?

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Julien Crockett in the LA Review of Books:

A GROWING FEAR and excitement for today’s AI systems stem from the assumption that as they improve, something—someone?—will emerge: feed large language models (LLMs) enough text and, rather than merely extracting statistical patterns in data, they will become intelligent agents with the ability to understand the world.

Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell are skeptical of this assumption. Gopnik, a professor of psychology and philosophy studying children’s learning and development, and Mitchell, a professor of computer science and complexity focusing on conceptual abstraction and analogy-making in AI systems, argue that intelligence is much more complicated than we think. Yes, what today’s LLMs can achieve by consuming huge swaths of text is impressive—and has challenged some of our intuitions about intelligence—but before we can attribute to them something like human intelligence, AI systems will need the ability to actively interact with and engage in the world, creating their own “mental” models about how it works.

How might AI systems reach this next level? And what is needed to ensure their safe deployment? In our conversation, Gopnik and Mitchell consider various approaches, including a framework to describe our role in this next phase of AI development: caregiving

More here.

Jamie Martin interviews Oscar Sanchez-Sibony in Phenomenal World:

JAMIE MARTIN: Your new book is quite a bracing and revisionist history of the international political economy of the Cold War from the Soviet point of view. Both here and in your 2014 book, Red Globalization, you offer a distinct view of the Soviet Union as deeply engaged in the world economy. This tells us something key about how the Soviets navigated the global capitalist system, both from within and from without. Your aim seems to be to get us to think anew and more broadly about the nature of the world economy and global capitalism itself.

OSCAR SANCHEZ-SIBONY: Definitely. One continuity between the two books is that I highlight the extent of Soviet integration and the ideologies that encouraged this integration. I try to reconsider the categories that we usually use to understand the Soviet Union, which are largely ideological. When we look at the way the Soviet Union acts in the world, it doesn’t align with the image of the Soviet Union we tend to have—as the advocate for state control over markets.

But you are right, the main aim of the new book is to focus specifically on the transformation of the world at the end of Bretton Woods, not so much to ask questions specific to the Soviet Union, but rather: What is the power that is transforming the world? Bringing the Soviet perspective into our understanding of this period is where I hope the book can make a new intervention. I argue that during this period, the Soviet Union—like many other countries on the periphery—was trying to break down the boundaries that kept it from accessing capital. Under Bretton Woods, this capital was tightly controlled by the United States, which was specifically prohibiting access to the Soviet Union.

In response, the Soviet Union began to trade with European countries that were also trying to break down certain kinds of US monopolies. Through the construction of energy infrastructure, i.e. a series of pipelines, the Soviet Union gained access to capital and promoted the breakdown of all sorts of compartmentalizations that Bretton Woods had imposed. Through pipeline construction, the USSR set up a sort of debt treadmill.

More here.