Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker:

Last week, Sinéad O’Connor took off on an early-morning bicycle trip around Wilmette, Illinois, a pleasant suburb of Chicago. The Irish pop singer—now forty-nine, and still best known for ripping up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live,” in 1992, while singing the word “evil,” a remonstrance against the Vatican’s handling of sexual-abuse allegations—had previously expressed suicidal ideations, and, in 2012, admitted to a “very serious breakdown,” which led her to cancel a world tour. Ergo, when she still hadn’t returned from her bike ride twenty-four hours later, the police helicopters began circling. Details regarding what happened next—precisely where O’Connor was found, and in what condition—have been scant, but authorities confirmed her safety by the end of the day.

I was barely ten years old when O’Connor’s second album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” was released in America. I recall tugging my lumpy beanbag chair directly up to the television set so that I could watch the video for “Nothing Compares 2 U” in terrifying proximity to the screen. O’Connor is wearing a black turtleneck, framed close, and standing in front of a black background. The filmic effect is austere, nearly ghostly. “It’s been seven hours and fifteen days since you took your love away,” O’Connor sings, her voice barely betraying a brogue. There are moments when the vocal seems to slip away from her a little, like a phonograph needle jerking out of its groove—this is the strange looseness of the freshly wounded. Like a maimed animal, the mind goes feral.

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Charlene Lancaster in The Scientist:

Behind cardiovascular disease, cancer is the second major cause of death in the United States and will likely cause approximately 600,000 deaths in 2023 alone.¹ While chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation therapy are traditional cancer treatments that can be applied individually or in combination, a patient’s response to these approaches depends on cancer type, location, heterogeneity, and drug resistance.² Consequently, researchers need to develop novel therapies and delivery methods.

Khalid Shah, the director of the Center for Stem Cell and Translational Immunotherapy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, develops cancer therapeutics that use stem cells as delivery vectors to treat primary and metastatic brain and lung cancers. In a recently published Science Translational Medicine paper, Shah’s laboratory developed an allogeneic twin stem cell system carrying oncolytic viral particles and immunomodulators to treat brain metastases.³ A few weeks later, his lab also published a Stem Cells Translational Medicine paper, where they engineered mesenchymal stem cells to secrete a bi-functional molecule targeting two receptors in lung tumors, leading to cancer cell death.⁴

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Kyle Edward Williams in The Hedgehog Review:

Even before Lee Iacocca sold the two-millionth copy of his autobiography, it was the most successful business book of its kind. More impressively, when that sales milestone was reached in July 1985, less than a year after its publication, Iacocca joined the ranks of America’s all-time bestsellers, regardless of genre, including Gone With the Wind and The Power of Positive Thinking. From his humble origins as the firstborn son of Italian immigrants, Iacocca distinguished himself as an engineer at Ford Motor Company before becoming CEO of the Chrysler Corporation in 1978, when it was on the brink of bankruptcy. Iacocca turned Chrysler around, paying back a government bailout and leading the former automotive straggler to the top of the car industry within a few short years. Highlighted repeatedly in Iacocca’s practically unavoidable TV commercials for Chrysler in the 1980s and ’90s, it was an American success story. But it was also something else, maybe something more: the creation of a new character on the American scene, the Celebrity CEO.

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Clare Watson in Nature:

A study of more than 38,000 young people has confirmed what researchers had begun to suspect: the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a jump in cases of type 1 diabetes in children and teenagers. At first, researchers thought that the rise was caused by the virus itself — but it turns out that is probably not true. Nevertheless, with the overall cause of type 1 diabetes still a mystery, the findings offer new mechanisms for researchers to explore.

The study, published on 30 June in JAMA Network Open¹, pooled data from 17 previous studies and found that the incidence of type 1 diabetes in children and teenagers under 19 years old was about 14% higher during 2020, the first year of the pandemic, than in the previous year. The incidence rose higher still in the second year of the pandemic, up 27% from 2019.

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Christopher Caldwell in the Claremont Review of Books:

Narendra Modi, the 72-year-old Hindu activist from Gujarat, has been prime minister since 2014. His father was a railroad station tea seller. A rare member of India’s “backward” castes to reach his country’s top post, he is the antitype of the urbane Nehru, and the movement he leads is the antithesis of Congress as Nehru reshaped it. Under Modi’s leadership the BJP, founded in 1980 and focused on the aspirations of the 80% of Indians who are Hindu, has become the world’s largest political party. Political scientists say India has moved on to a “second party system” with the BJP at its center, much as the first party system was dominated by Congress.

India’s tiny sliver of Western-connected English-language opinion-makers tend to find Modi appalling. Their minoritarian take has hardened into Western conventional wisdom about India: Modi is understood as a subcontinental Viktor Orbán or Donald Trump. He is a demagogue, a populist, a reactionary. Some accuse Modi of religious fundamentalism, or of bigotry against India’s Muslims. He cares little for the rights of women and gays, say others. For certain opponents his sin is nationalism, for others it is cozying up to India’s billionaire tech moguls and venture capitalists.

More here.

Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

by Wendell Berry
from Farming —A Hand Book
Harcourt Brace, 1970

Anastasia Berg at The Point:

The critical tide is turning, once again. The professional critics—and not just the old, curmudgeonly ones—are fed up with moralizing, and they are willing to speak about it in public. From Lauren Oyler’s observation that “anxieties about being a good person, surrounded by good people, pervade contemporary novels and criticism” to Parul Sehgal’s exhortation against the ubiquitous “trauma plot” that “flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and … insists upon its moral authority” to Garth Greenwell’s lament about a literary culture that “is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime”—the critical vanguard has made its judgment clear. For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.

The extent of this shift in critical sensibility is hard to measure, but what some have labeled the “aesthetic turn” is not limited to the literary reviews.

more here.

Blake Richards, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Guillaume Lajoie and Dhanya Sridhar at Noema:

Characterizations of evolution as being about interspecies competition and selfishness are a misrepresentation of what evolutionary biology tells us and may be rooted in our own unique phylogenetic history as primates — and patriarchal assumptions. In general, mutualism and cooperation between species are very likely to emerge from the pressures of natural selection.

What we know about extinction events tells us that they are generally caused by changes to the environment, and when they are a result of one species’ impact on another, extinction is induced in one of three ways: competition for resources, hunting and over-consumption or altering the climate or their ecological niche such that resulting environmental conditions lead to their demise. None of these three cases apply to AI as it stands.

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Lisa Allardice in The Guardian:

To say that Patchett is evangelical about books is no mere cliche. In one of her essays, she compares her zeal to that of a Hare Krishna devotee she met many years ago who spent every day proclaiming his love of God to strangers in Chicago airport. “I would stand in an airport to tell people how much I love books, reading them, writing them, making sure other people felt comfortable reading and writing them.”

As a book nerd, who was “raised by nuns” and believes most people are essentially fairly decent, Patchett is neither cool nor edgy. But she gets to hang out with Hollywood royalty, and is friends with pretty much every living American writer you care to mention (Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth Gilbert, Lorrie Moore, who lives in the next block when she is in Nashville). She even knows President Biden “a little bit”. “I deeply love the president. He’s spent his life as a public servant. He works tirelessly on behalf of the people,” she says. “And his wife is a fantastic reader.”

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Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Intelligence explosion arguments don’t require Platonism. They just require intelligence to exist in the normal fuzzy way that all concepts exist.

First, I’ll describe what the normal way concepts exist is. I’ll have succeeded if I convince you that claims using the word “intelligence” are coherent and potentially true.

Second, I’ll argue, based on humans and animals, that these coherent-and-potentially-true things are actually true.

Third, I’ll argue that so far this has been the most fruitful way to think about AI, and people who try to think about it differently make worse AIs.

Finally, I’ll argue this is sufficient for ideas of “intelligence explosion” to be coherent.

More here.

Aaron Shulman in Literary Hub:

“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.” This certain death came tragically early for the Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño, writer of that lapidary sentence, who died twenty years ago this month at the age of 50.

In the years after his death, though, his literary afterlife grew into one of the most extraordinary in recent memory, especially for an artist who wrote mainly about desperate poets and obscure writers—not material usually predictive of strong sales or worldwide fame. A writer with avant-garde origins who worked in almost total obscurity for most of his career, Bolaño somehow emerged as the first global publishing phenomenon of the 21st century, leaving behind a large body of posthumous work that is still expanding and a life story shot through with mythos and confusion.

Today, what might seem almost as surprising as Bolaño’s extraordinary success, is the fact that two decades after his death no one has yet written a biography of him.

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Colin Dickey at Atlas Obscura:

Even today, no one is even sure precisely where the name originated. Some have traced it to an account from 1839, when a young Black man was caught “lurking” around the Capitol in Washington, D.C.—when asked how he got there, he said that he had been sent north by a “railroad which went underground all the way to Boston.”

Through a loose network of formerly enslaved and free Black Americans, along with their white allies, thousands of enslaved Americans made their way north in the decades before the Civil War, moving sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes out in the open, on railways and ships, in wagons and freight, toward freedom. It is impossible now to know for certain how many people made their way out of slavery on the Underground Railroad; both supporters and detractors had an investment in embellishing its impact. In the North, abolitionists dramatized the plight of those seeking refuge and to play up their own heroic efforts. In the South, enslavers argued that the Underground Railroad was nothing short of a grand conspiracy of subversive lawbreakers—the higher the numbers, the greater the threat to the country.

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Sam Sweet at The Baffler:

Gardena’s poker clubs were the product of a legal loophole in California’s 1872 gaming legislation, which outlawed gambling but made an exception for the specific style of draw poker. (Draw poker being the preferred game among nineteenth-century legislators.) No California localities abided poker except Gardena, where a savvy investor named Ernest Primm exerted enough pressure to earn a permit for his first club in 1936. By the 1960s, the Gardena clubs numbered six: the Rainbow, the Monterey, the Normandie, the Horseshoe, the Gardena, and the El Dorado.

With its free meals and cocktails and stage shows, Vegas catered to losers. Gardena catered to regulars. It offered them nothing but poker. Instead of taking a percentage, the clubs made money by selling time. Every half hour, a red light would appear on the clock and players would hand a few dollars in chips to roving “chip girls” who deposited the rent into their sagging aprons.

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Mattie J.T. Stepanak: Here

Andrew Leland at Literary Hub:

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges lost his vision—what he called his “reader’s and writer’s sight”—around the same time that he became the director of the National Library of Argentina. This put him in charge of nearly a million books, he observed, at the very moment he could no longer read them.

Borges, who went blind after a long decline in vision when he was fifty-five, never learned braille. Instead, like Milton, he memorized long passages of literature (his own, and those of the writers he loved), and had companions who read to him and to whom he dictated his writing.

Much of this work—he published nearly forty books after he went blind—was done by his elderly mother, Leonor, with whom he lived until her death at ninety-­nine, and who had done the same work for Borges’s father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, a writer who also went blind in middle age.

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