A life spent seeking it
Like a worm in the earth,
Like a hawk. Catching threads
Sketching bones
Guessing where the road goes.
Lao-tzu says
To forget what you knew is best.
That’s what I want:
To get these sights down,
Clear, right to the place
Where they fade
Back into the mind of my times.
The same old circuity
But some paths color-coded
Empty
And we’re free to go.
by Gary Snyder
from Left Out in the Rain
North Point Press, 1986
Roni Rabin in The New York Times:
Surgeons in Baltimore have transplanted the heart of a genetically altered pig into a man with terminal heart disease who had no other hope for treatment, the University of Maryland Medical Center announced on Friday. It is the second such procedure performed by the surgeons. The first patient, David Bennett, 57, died two months after his transplant, but the pig heart functioned well and there were no signs of acute organ rejection, a major risk in such procedures. The second patient, Lawrence Faucette, 58, a Navy veteran and married father of two in Frederick, Md., underwent the transplant surgery on Wednesday and is “recovering well and communicating with his loved ones,” the medical center said in a statement. Mr. Faucette, who had terminal heart disease and other complicated medical conditions, was so sick that he had been rejected from all transplant programs that use human donor organs.
…The transplantation was performed by Dr. Bartley Griffith, who operated on the first patient. Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, designed the protocol.
More here.
Erik Guzik in Singularity Hub:
Of all the forms of human intellect that one might expect artificial intelligence to emulate, few people would likely place creativity at the top of their list. Creativity is wonderfully mysterious—and frustratingly fleeting. It defines us as human beings—and seemingly defies the cold logic that lies behind the silicon curtain of machines.
Yet, the use of AI for creative endeavors is now growing.
New AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are increasingly part of creative production, and some have started to win awards for their creative output. The growing impact is both social and economic—as just one example, the potential of AI to generate new, creative content is a defining flashpoint behind the Hollywood writers strike. And if our recent study into the striking originality of AI is any indication, the emergence of AI-based creativity—along with examples of both its promise and peril—is likely just beginning.
More here.
Shruti Swamy at AFAR:
It is Mumbai in November, which is to say: hot.
I have stood where I am standing many times before, in all eras of my life—as a baby wobbly on my own two feet, as a bespectacled kid with scraped knees, as an awkward teen tugging down the skirt that attracts too much attention, as a young woman backpacking after college, and as a newlywed, visiting with my husband.
This time I am here as a writer, wife, mother. I’m around the corner from the park teeming with morning walkers, in the leafy suburb of Vile Parle, on the street where my grandparents, and then my aunt, used to live in a building called Nav Samaj. I remember every inch of it: the mineral smell of the staircase, the daybed where I spent hours as a child reading piles of Reader’s Digests. The cool tile floor I’d lie on when the heat was overwhelming, the dark kitchen in which some of the most spectacular meals of my life were created. The almirah in the bedroom that held my grandmother’s starched, mothball-scented saris.
More here.
Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:
In an attempt to address climate change and other environmental problems, governments are increasingly turning to economic solutions. The underlying message is clear: capitalism might have created the problem, but capitalism can solve it. Adrienne Buller, a Senior Fellow with progressive think tank Common Wealth, is, to put it mildly, sceptical of this. From carbon credits to biodiversity offsets, she unmasks these policies for the greenwashing that they are. The Value of a Whale is a necessary corrective that is as eye-opening as it is shocking.
More here.
Nikhil Krishnan in The Guardian:
The past few years have seen an abundance of works of popular science about a variety of human beings who once inhabited Eurasia: “Neanderthals”. They died out, it appears, 40,000 years ago. That number – 40,000 – is as totemic to Neanderthal specialists as that better known figure, 65 million, is to dinosaur fanciers.
What distinguishes these new books isn’t just what they tell us about an extinct sub-species of humans, but the surprising passion they bring to their subject. Their authors are enraged that popular ideas about the Neanderthals lag so far behind the cutting edge of paleontological research – research that has brought the Neanderthals closer to us than they have been in 40,000 years.
More here.
Colin Burnett in The Common Reader:
To understand the origins of any franchise, look first to rights—who owns the intellectual property, how it is managed, and where the revenue generated from its exploitation is set to flow.
In February 1952, Ian Fleming (1908-1964), a former Naval Intelligence officer and manager of the foreign desk of the Kemsley newspaper group (including The Sunday Times), writes the first in a series of spy novels. He cribs the central character’s name from a 1936 book entitled The Birds of the West Indies. Its author: James Bond. But who the fictional character James Bond would become, what international schemes he would solve, and what kind of life he would lead are not the only matters occupying Fleming’s thoughts. He wants his novels to sell, quickly, and for his young family to reap the financial rewards.
For that, he will need to carefully manage his new property. In September 1952, the United Nations passes the Universal Copyright Convention which decrees that any work which carries the symbol © will retain copyright control in all contracted states. In response to the Convention, Fleming moves swiftly to incorporate himself. He purchases a small theatrical production firm, Glidrose Productions, Ltd., and turns over all rights to his works.
This is where the Bond franchise truly begins.
More here.
Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:
There are five fundamental operations in mathematics,” the German mathematician Martin Eichler supposedly said. “Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modular forms.”
Part of the joke, of course, is that one of those is not like the others. Modular forms are much more complicated and enigmatic functions, and students don’t typically encounter them until graduate school. But “there are probably fewer areas of math where they don’t have applications than where they do,” said Don Zagier, a mathematician at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany. Every week, new papers extend their reach into number theory, geometry, combinatorics, topology, cryptography and even string theory.
They are often described as functions that satisfy symmetries so striking and elaborate that they shouldn’t be possible. The properties that come with those symmetries make modular forms immensely powerful. It’s what made them key players in the landmark 1994 proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
More here.
Nathan Thrall in The Guardian:
Huda Dahbour was 35 years old when she moved with her husband and three children to the West Bank in September 1995. It was the second anniversary of the Oslo accords, which established pockets of Palestinian self-government in the occupied territories. Jerusalem was still relatively open when they arrived in East Sawahre, a neighbourhood just outside the areas of Jerusalem that Israel had annexed in 1967. Huda was able to send her children to school within the city. They were under the age of 12, and Israel allowed them to enter without a special blue ID. But over time the restrictions grew, and from one day to the next Jerusalem was closed off to Palestinians by checkpoints, roadblocks and a tightening of the ever-more elaborate permit regime. On one occasion, the school bus was blocked from bringing the students home to Sawahre. Huda and half the parents of the neighbourhood spent the afternoon searching for their children, who finally showed up at sunset, after walking for several hours. Huda immediately took them out of their Jerusalem schools.
More here.
NOTE: Tomorrow will be the 20th anniversary of Edward Said’s death.
Lorenzo Forlani at Middle East Eye:
Forty-five years have passed since the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said published his seminal 1978 book, Orientalism. It was a breakthrough in understanding western representations of an unspecified notion of the “Orient”, stretching from Asia to North Africa.
Said presents a framework for identifying and analysing the myths and stereotypes about the East that have long dominated western discourses, media representations, and academic scholarship.
Decades later, there is certainly greater awareness of the harm perpetuated by such constructs, particularly those pitting Islam against the West, which, according to Said, are “perceived as a discourse of power originating in an era of colonialism”.
Yet the post-9/11 era, in which racist and Islamophobic narratives were deployed to justify imperialist wars, demonstrates that not much has changed.
More here.
Zack Beauchamp in Vox:
In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew are forced to navigate a strait bounded by two equally dangerous obstacles: Scylla, a six-headed sea serpent, and Charybdis, an underwater horror that sucks down ships through a massive whirlpool. Judging Charybdis to be a greater danger to the crew as a whole, Odysseus orders his crew to try and pass through on Scylla’s side. They make it, but six sailors are eaten in the crossing. In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced an analogous problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.
The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side of the strait: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.
“By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule,” they write. This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down the anti-democratic whirlpool. The Republican Party, they argue, has become an anti-democratic institution, its traditional leadership cowed by Trump and a racially reactionary base. As such, it is increasingly willing to twist legal tools designed to check oppressive majorities into tools for imposing its policy preferences on an unwilling majority. The best way out of this dilemma, in their view, is radical legal constitutional reform that brings the American system more in line with other advanced democracies.
More here.
Jess Thomson in Newsweek:
A strange, immortal tube-shaped animal has been discovered to regenerate a whole new body from only its mouth to avoid getting old. This creature, named Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus, a tiny invertebrate that lives on the shells of crabs, is usually immune to aging altogether, but was found to use aging within its body to grow an entirely new body, a study published in the journal Cell Reports found.
…Hydractinia had previously been found to have special stem cells that it used for regenerating its tissues. These stem cells are capable of transforming—differentiating—into any type of body cell, which more specialized cells like heart tissue or muscle tissue cannot do. This makes them capable of growing new body parts; humans can only use stem cells during development, but animals like Hydractinia can use stem cells throughout their lifetimes, making them functionally immortal. The researchers found that while Hydractinia stores its stem cells in the lower half of its body, but when they cut off its mouth, the mouth grew a whole new body, indicating that the animal could generate new stem cells. To investigate how these stem cells are triggered to generate, the authors described in the paper how they scanned the genome of Hydractinia for genes related to aging or “senescence”—lagging of cell repair and the aging of the body and its systems.
More here.
The way boxers postulate a feeling to label that with which they overcome
……….. the body’s vile fears,
its wish to flinch, to flee, break and run . . . call it anger, pride,
……….. the primal passion to prevail;
the way, before they start, they glare at one another, try to turn themselves
……….. to snarling beasts . . .
so we first make up something in the soul we name and offer credence
……….. to—“meaning,” “purpose,” “end” —
and then we cast ourselves into the conflict, turn upon our soul, snarl
……….. like snarling beasts . . .
And the way the fighters fight, cooly until strength fails, then desperately,
……….. wildly, as in a dream,
and the way, done, they fall into one another’s arms, almost sobbing with
……….. relief, sobbing with relief:
so we contend, so we wish to finish, wish to cry and end, but we never
cry, never end, as in a dream.
by C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994
Justin H. Vassallo in American Affairs:
The recent media flurry over “Bidenomics” is the latest attempt to distill a complex but far from complete rupture with neoliberalism. Premised in part on lifting the wages and employment rate of historically low-income groups, Bidenomics is really about two things: strengthening the relationship between climate policy and national security, and prodding capital to commit to more useful, more productive investment in the domestic economy. Industrial policy is its core feature—the main means of inducing, steering, and even compelling capital to serve societal and national goals short of explicit economic planning. Like a heresy without a new church, industrial policy has been the watchword of the last two years despite having no organized base in the American electorate. As for Bidenomics in general, according to an Associated Press poll released in June, just 34 percent of the public approves of Biden’s overall handling of the economy.
More ambitious than anything attempted by a Democratic administration since the mid-1960s, Bidenomics nevertheless marks another uncertain chapter for the party in the twenty-first century. While some analysts, pointing to bipartisan agreement over the imperative to strategically decouple from China, have been quick to declare a new economic consensus in Washington, debates over industrial policy and Bidenomics more generally are stimulating new divisions within the liberal-left.
For those who hail it as the start of a “new progressive era,” Bidenomics is both the apotheosis and transmutation of the legislative potential glimpsed in Barack Obama’s electoral coalition. It demonstrates that today’s Democrats have finally embraced activist government to achieve inclusive growth, enhance the welfare state, pursue social justice, and meet ambitious climate targets.
Economic progressives of a more populist, New Deal bent are likewise sympathetic, if more cautious. Developmental states, they argue, require time to build up their capacities; altering the composition of a country’s industrial mix does not occur overnight. This is no less true of the West’s ultra-polarized hegemon, pockmarked as it is by staggering social and regional inequalities.
More here.
Evgeny Morozov’s “nine-part exploration of the unlikely effort of Salvador Allende’s youthful technocrats and engineers (the Santiago Boys) to build their own socialist Internet.”
Eli Zaretsky in Sidecar:
As if demonstrating that the repressed does return, politics has erupted in the supposedly apolitical world of American psychoanalysis. An advocacy group, Black Psychoanalysts Speak, and a documentary film, Psychoanalysis in El Barrio, seek to redress the racial and class biases of analysis. Unbehagen, a psychoanalytic list-serve, features a roiling debate over whether it is necessary to match the analyst’s gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation with the patient’s. The American Psychoanalytic Association itself has been shaken by political recriminations, purges, resignations and denunciations. An article by Donald Moss, published in the association’s journal, provided the catalyst in this case. According to its abstract:
Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has – a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable and perverse.
The reaction to the article was sharply divided. Some saw it as a valuable extension of psychoanalytic theory, while others believed it neglected vital determining factors of racialization, such as deindustrialization, union discrimination and the inequities of the real estate market. In response to the controversy, an internal body was appointed, the Holmes Commission, to ‘investigate systemic racism and its underlying determinants embedded within APsaA, and to offer remedies for all aspects of identified racism’. Among the repercussions has been a debate over anti-Semitism precipitated by a speaking invitation to a controversial Lebanese psychoanalytic therapist, which led to the resignation of the President of the Association, Kerry Sulkowicz.
These developments are noteworthy in themselves, but they also raise wider questions about the relation between psychoanalysis and politics. What is striking about the politicization of contemporary psychoanalysis is the extent to which it conforms to the liberal identitarianism, sometimes termed ‘wokeness’, prevailing in the broader culture, which views systematic wrongs such as racism as emanating from individual psyches, along the model of sin.
More here.