Veronique Greenwood in Quanta:

Every organism responds to the world with an intricate cascade of biochemistry. There’s a source of heat here, a faint scent of food there, or the crack of a twig as something moves nearby. Each stimulus can trigger the rise of one set of molecules in an animal’s body and perhaps the fall of others. The effect ramifies, tripping feedback loops and flipping switches, until a bird leaps into the air or a bee alights on a flower. It’s a vision of biology that entranced Andreas Wagner, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zurich, when he was still a young student.

“I thought that was much more fascinating than this idea that biology is about counting the number of things that are out there,” he said. “I realized biology could be about fundamental principles of organization in living systems.”

His career, which has included stints at the Santa Fe Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, has taken him from modeling the regulation of gene transcription in an embryo, where precision timing makes the difference between life and death, to asking how an organism can manage to evolve when any change in its genes could spell disaster.

More here.

Constance Grady in Vox:

Elon Musk is an Ozymandias for our moment.

He’s got wealth and influence. His place as the richest man on earth fluctuates with the market, but he consistently cycles among the top three slots. He’s the CEO of two major companies and the owner of what was, up until he bought it, arguably the most influential social media network in the world. Marvel used him as the basis for Tony Stark. Since Musk first made his way into public view in the mid-2000s, he has promised to change the world. He is going to solve climate change. He is going to take humanity to Mars. He is going to use AI to unravel the true nature of the universe. He is going to save the human race.

For most of the past decade, the media and Musk’s many super fans treated Musk’s promises as something close to fait accompli. After all, Musk may not yet have taken people to Mars, but he did build reusable rockets. He reinvigorated the electric car industry. Surely, the people who congregate in Musk’s Twitter replies would suggest, he was on the cusp of doing the rest of what he says he’ll do, no matter how abrasive his personality might seem or how many times he’s already failed to deliver.

To understand exactly how this worldview works, it’s illustrative to look at a book by the English writer and actress Talulah Riley. Riley was Musk’s second and third marriages: The pair divorced in 2012, remarried in 2013, and divorced a second time in 2016. (Riley recently announced her engagement to Thomas Brodie-Sangster, the kid from Love Actually — the woman has lived a life.) Also in 2016, Riley published a romance novel titled Acts of Love.

More here.

Jason Zinoman in the New York Times:

Last month, in the crowded back room of a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the fate of humanity hung in the balance.

Or at least that’s how Matt Maran, a bro-y comic from Queens, portrayed it. He was bidding for sympathy during what was billed as the first roast battle pitting artificial intelligence against a human comedian.

It didn’t work. Maran lost the crowd early with a joke that riffed on the idea that women aren’t funny. His opponent was a ChatGPT-powered version of Sarah Silverman, the comic who, as it happens, had sued the developer behind that chatbot for copyright infringement earlier in the week. On a screen nearby, her head shook back and forth. “Why did the human stare at the glass of orange juice?” it asked in a close approximation of her girlish voice. “They were trying to concentrate.” Then oddly, it proclaimed: “Roasted!”

Neither side was getting big laughs, but the A.I. was more unflappable, moving from quip to quip with the pace of a metronome.

More here.

Seth Simons at Longreads:

Michaels is intimately acquainted with this power, having spent the last half-century using SNL to launch bankable talents and profit from their careers. Bupkis isn’t just a Pete Davidson vehicle; it’s a Lorne Michaels production. So is Staten Island Summer, for that matter, and Shrill, The Tonight Show, Schmigadoon!, and That Damn Michael Che—not to mention the recently departed The Other Two and Kenan. The promise of SNL under Michaels’ leadership is simple: If you are loyal to the family, you will reap handsome rewards. Over almost 50 years, that promise has come to justify a legacy of alleged workplace abuses ranging from the familiar to the shocking. Beyond 30 Rock’s walls, it has become the promise of the massive live comedy ecosystem feeding SNL, an amorphous network of small businesses that successfully encoded their exploitative labor practices and regressive cultural norms into the industry’s DNA. As they churned ruthlessly through generations of comedy workers, they helped create the world we’re in now, the one Hollywood writers and actors are striking to change. It’s a world where talent and hard work aren’t nearly enough to earn a stable living; a world where a few fabulously wealthy men hold the power to shape entire art forms in their image.

More here.

Glad to Be Gone

I ran through the rain,
the rest huddled in oilcloth
or canvas,
afraid, each one,
of wind and rain.
I love
the needles on my face,
the wind under my dress,
my hair strung out behind.

No one knows the confinement
of woman, sitting,
standing, bustled and trussed,
never allowed to run—sometimes
to dance demure.

I was the only one
who never wept for home.
I scream into the wind,
race after cattle,
pluck the black river fruit,
and reach so high my waist tears,
and no one can say
I’m not a lady.

Last night I washed clothes
in the moonlight, the river
soft and dark. I
dove, the water black—
streaming, the light
on my body.
I cried for its newness.

Now I watch
the canvas flap in the wind,
and I, like a sailor,
joyed at the rigging.
the slap and rush of the wind,
the land a wild sea
ahead.

by Ann Turner
from Grass Songs- Poems of Woman’s Journey West
Harcourt Brace, 1993

A useful tool from Harvard’s Growth Lab:

J. Howard Rosier interviews Adam Shatz about solidarity, the art of the essay, and his recent collection Writers and Missionaries in The Nation:

In 2014, Adam Shatz’s “Writers or Missionaries” appeared in The Nation, a piece about his relationship, as a Jewish American journalist, to the political conflicts in the Arab-speaking world. The article features, among other anecdotes, a bracing summary of Shatz’s discussion with V.S. Naipaul following 9/11, in which the late novelist divided reporters and journalists into two camps. “Writers”—those who describe the world as it is—are, in this formulation, diametrically opposed to “missionaries,” or those who render a picture of the world as they want to see it, their work serving as advocacy for a specific cause. While discussing his experience covering Algeria in 2002, Shatz turns this paradigm on its head. The issue is not whether it’s a mistake for a reporter to identify with a particular cause or camp. Rather, the essay gains its energy from Shatz’s constant reevaluation—a vacillation between surety and the unknown. (“This was not a matter of finding the story,” Shatz writes, “but of allowing the story to find me.”)

In Shatz’s debut collection, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, this dichotomy is put to work. Examining novelists like Kamel Daoud, Michel Houellebecq, and Richard Wright, and scholars and pundits like Fouad Ajami, Edward Said, and Roland Barthes, the book serves as a series of case studies on how a writer’s relationship to politics shades both their decision-making and their work. A writer might gain notoriety or financial stability from a particular institution, but will it hinder what one is allowed to write? Does patriotism preclude saying certain things in public so as not to discredit political goals? What are the ethics of the personal becoming political (that is to say, outward), when a writer is putting forth bigotry and violence?

More here.

Branko Milanovic over at his Substack:

There has recently been lots of discussion of globalization, its effects, especially on poverty and inequality, and many contradictory statements, some even absurd, were made. Here are eleven theses on globalization.

First, inequality and poverty. Globalization is a force for the global good: the globalization of economic activity has enabled production of many commodities and provision of many services to be done in the places where it is cheapest to do. It has released previously used resources for other activities. It has also mobilized capital and labor that was misused or unemployed. The effect was a significant acceleration in global rate of growth (when measuring global growth by using democratic and not plutocratic measures, which have gone up too) and a dramatic decrease in global income inequality and global income poverty.

Second, China. The most important positive effects, largely due to globalization and international trade, have been achieved in China. China explains most of the decrease in global inequality and poverty. But these advances have been realized by the application of non-standard or non-neoclassical policies. This has created the first dilemma for the supporters of globalization and neoliberalism. To defend globalization they have to praise China, but they find Chinese policies distasteful. Thus their comments are most of the time contradictory.

More here.

Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp in Polycrisis:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Two types of images are key to understanding current debates about economic globalization: the hockey stick chart, representing the stunning and inexorable growth of some phenomenon; and the cross chart, whose lines represent changes in relative power and prosperity.

There are good and bad hockey sticks, and the job of policy makers the world over is to harness the former while curbing the latter. But the domestic and international politics of addressing these hockey sticks is complicated by their intersection with distributive conflicts—which can be seen in the form of crosses.

In Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters, we identify a series of narratives that dominate Western debates about the virtues and vices of economic globalization. These storylines are important because they offer different interpretations about what the problems are, how they came about, who is responsible, and what should be done. Here, we highlight some of the key hockey sticks and crosses on which these narratives rely.

No single narrative or image can capture the multifaceted nature of complex issues like economic globalization and the climate crisis. Understanding different perspectives and how they interact is crucial…

More here.

From Pink Mirror:

Do you know what makes you attractive? Your best features are the Nose Width, Bi-Temporal Width, and Bi-Temporal to Bi-Zygomatic Ratio. Also, you may want to know your features that need special attention. Your features that require improvements are Bi-Gonial Width.
The attractiveness of multiple facial features contributes to overall facial attractiveness. The American University of Beirut Medical Center study says beauty and facial attractiveness are easily identified but difficult to quantify.Despite its subjective nature, we can attempt to define, measure, and explain the captivating phenomenon of beauty by describing it numerically and geometrically.
Hence, a single feature does not determine attractiveness because it depends on how well that feature harmonizes with the face.The unit of measurement we used here is Interpupillary Distance (IPD).

Your Nose Width is 37 PCI units and the ideal value is 39 PCI units. The smaller the value, the better it is. This feature dramatically impacts your perceived attractiveness, and you have a high score on this feature and that also means you won a genetic lottery.

More here.

Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times:

We could all use a hype man like George Henry Lewes.

George Henry Who’s?

Well, exactly. A “littérateur, physiologist and metaphysician,” as an obituary in The New York Times called him in 1878, Lewes is today most remembered as the longtime romantic partner and de facto agent of George Eliot: author of works consistently ranked among the best of Victorian literature — perhaps all of English literature. “A novel without weakness” was how the generally unsparing Martin Amis assessed her “Middlemarch,” the mistress-piece to which Rebecca Mead, a writer for The New Yorker, devoted an entire memoir.

For yes, in case you’ve been living under a giant rockery, George Eliot was a “her,” with several roles other than her nom de plume: daughter, sister, friend, wife, stepmother. There have been a gazillion biographies of the great woman, starting with the one assembled by her only legal, late-in-life husband, John Cross (who was 20 years younger and notoriously attempted suicide on their honeymoon, flinging himself into the Grand Canal of Venice from a balcony and getting fished out by a gondolier and hotel employee).

“The Marriage Question,” a careful but impassioned new book by Clare Carlisle, a philosophy professor who edited Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s “Ethics,” is different in its close focus on an idea: that the titular institution shaped Eliot’s identity and work — and has some affinity with Carlisle’s own current undertaking. “Perhaps a biographer’s devotion is a little like the devotion of a spouse,” she observes, in an especially apt analogy for this noble but sometimes plodding literary endeavor. “Writing a person’s life means living with them intimately, struggling to understand them, wondering how far they can be trusted, dealing with the ways they resist, annoy, disappoint, challenge and elude you.”

More here.

Samantha Harvey at The Guardian:

“All our body wants is to sleep, it wants to leave us, head back to the stable, a worn-out horse,” writes Marie Darrieussecq, at which I, a worn-out human, think yes. In a recent interview, Darrieussecq reflected on how much of her work is concerned with inhabiting. Who has a right to inhabit this planet, she asks, and who doesn’t? Though she was talking about her novel Crossed Lines, in which a Parisian woman finds her life becoming bound up with that of a young Nigerian refugee, she could just as well be referring to Sleepless (Pas Dormir in the original French), a book that is – what? A memoir/interrogation/painting/song of insomnia, her own and that of others. It’s a book about where, why, how we sleep and don’t sleep; about how to find a place in the world where sleep can happen, a stable for the worn-out horse.

Sleepless isn’t a book that’s straightforward to convey, at least not briefly. On the page it’s fragmentary, footnoted and studded with photos and illustrations.

more here.

Alex Johnson at the New York Times:

While recent events have provided a painful reminder of the very bad viruses that prey on us, Tom Ireland’s “The Good Virus” is a colorful redemption story for the oft-neglected yet incredibly abundant phage, and its potential for quelling the existential threat of antibiotic resistance, which scientists estimate might cause up to 10 million deaths per year by 2050. Ireland, an award-winning science journalist, approaches the subject of his first book with curiosity and passion, delivering a deft narrative that is rich and approachable.

In the hands of d’Herelle and others, the phage became a potent tool in the fight against cholera. But, in the 1940s, when the discovery of the methods to produce penicillin at an industrial scale led to the “antibiotic era,” phage therapy came to be seen as quackery in Europe and America, in part, Ireland suggests, because antibiotics, unlike phages, fit the mold of capitalist society.

more here.

Heaney in an Irish Pub, Washington, DC

To reach the bar, he’s got to angle sideways—
the whooping clusters of bureaucrats and staffers
and aspiring pols don’t naturally give way,
nor do they part for him as, jostled and unnoticed

in his wilted raincoat, he ferries the Guinness back
to his table of literary riffraff and strays.
But the touring band, turning their jigs and reels,
know him by sight:  as the squeeze box breathes,

the penny whistler’s fingers curl and splay,
their eyes return, through the blind crowd, to him.
Down from the stage at the break they shyly bend
to shake, to present in return, a gift, a tape.

Rare to see, here where art is kept
or held apart, how tenderly they know him
as one of theirs, a fine voice, true, trained on home,
and him asking them to sign their tape!

Later, resuming, they’re chuffed, grinning broadly.
How can the crowd know why, but joy leaks
from the band’s leavened tone and stance and touch
and up we rise—the whole room—on a tune.

by Sandy Solomon
from Plume Magazine

Seamus Heaney at Salmagundi:

It is well, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coalbins, barrels and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth … The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

Neruda’s declaration that “the reality of the world … should not be underprized” implies that we can and often do underprize it. We grow away from our primary relish of the phenomena. The rooms where we come to consciousness, the cupboards we open as toddlers, the shelves we climb up to, the boxes and albums we explore in reserved places in the house, the spots we discover for ourselves in those first solitudes out of doors, the haunts of those explorations at the verge of our security—in such places and at such moments “the reality of the world” first wakens in us.

more here.

Lars Chittka at Scientific American:

The conventional wisdom about insects has been that they are automatons—unthinking, unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely hardwired. But in the 1990s researchers began making startling discoveries about insect minds. It’s not just the bees. Some species of wasps recognize their nest mates’ faces and acquire impressive social skills. For example, they can infer the fighting strengths of other wasps relative to their own just by watching other wasps fight among themselves. Ants rescue nest mates buried under rubble, digging away only over trapped (and thus invisible) body parts, inferring the body dimension from those parts that are visible above the surface. Flies immersed in virtual reality display attention and awareness of the passing of time. Locusts can visually estimate rung distances when walking on a ladder and then plan their step width accordingly (even when the target is hidden from sight after the movement is initiated).

Given the substantial work on the sophistication of insect cognition, it might seem surprising that it took scientists so long to ask whether, if some insects are that smart, perhaps they could also be sentient, capable of feeling.

more here.