Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
how will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

by May Swenson
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986

Solcyre Bulga in Time:

When Tina Turner died on Wednesday after a half-century career full of legendary anthems, many remembered her as the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” But the chart-topping hit for which she will perhaps be most remembered isn’t a rock song—and that fact almost got in the way of the song ever being released. “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” which debuted in 1984, spent 28 weeks on the Billboard chart—including three at No. 1, making it one of just six top-10 hits from Turner’s solo career. The single went gold, and the album on which it appeared topped 5 million units sold; the song also provided the title for a Turner biopic of the same name, for which lead actress Angela Bassett was nominated for an Oscar.

But “What’s Love Got To Do With It” was different from Turner’s previous hits.

Rob Stein on NPR:

Researchers are inching closer to mass-producing eggs and sperm in the lab from ordinary human cells. The technique could provide new ways to treat infertility but also open a Pandora’s box.

ROB STEIN, BYLINE: It’s a Wednesday morning at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in downtown Washington, D.C.

ELI ADASHI: Welcome, everybody, to the National Academy of Medicine workshop.

STEIN: Dr. Eli Adashi from Brown University opens the Academy’s first gathering to explore the latest scientific developments and complicated social implications of something known as in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, which involves making human eggs and sperm in the laboratory from any cell in a person’s body.

ADASHI: It is on the precipice of materialization, and IVF will probably never be the same.

STEIN: Japanese scientists describe how they’ve already done this in mice, coaxing cells from the tails of adult mice to become what’s known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPS cells, and then coaxing those cells to become mouse sperm and eggs. They’ve even used those sperm and eggs to make embryos and implanted the embryos into the wombs of female mice, which gave birth to apparently healthy mouse pups. Mitinori Saitou joins the workshop via Zoom from Kyoto University.

More here.

Maxwell Strachan in Vice:

After 35 years of living in relative control of my decisions, I had decided to see what would happen if I asked AI to control my life instead. Years of suboptimal performance, both personally and professionally, and numerous failed attempts at self-improvement had convinced me there had to be a better way, and I wondered if the collective knowledge hidden inside OpenAI’s hit tech product could help me. But when I asked Sam Altman’s ChatGPT to become my all-powerful leader, it seemed reticent, at least at first.

“While I appreciate your willingness to explore new possibilities, I must emphasize that I cannot truly take control of your life or make decisions on your behalf,” ChatGPT said as it ominously labeled our conversation “Control Your Life.” As someone who was hoping to have his entire life controlled by AI, I found the answer frustrating.

More here.

O, Scallion!

The first time I cut into a scallion,
I leapt back, watching it splinter
into a thousand translucent Os
that skipped across the counter
like flecks of young jade.
I was enamored by its crinkle,
its staticky scrunch. How it
doubled over, limp,
in a melodramatic act of being
O so done with this world. Its
rubbery stems, capped in mottled
whiskery faces, like a deep-sea
bottom feeder, gasping as soon as
pulled from dark moist. I marveled:
O, tenacious green, teenage
zest. Skins that smear
in protest against board
when knife is too dull.
O, child of spring, ripped from home
far too soon, dug up for babyish
bulbs, your final form forgotten.
I confess, I sometimes falter when
you’re tucked between cousins
in camouflage of leek, shallot, chive—
and then I swore
to one day snip
a fistful of scallions
right at the end
of their hollowness,
stand them
in shallow water
and witness how,
when allowed to,
unfettered and alone,
they bloom.

by Sofia Koyama
from Brooklyn Poets

Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

A new generation of drugs is revolutionizing the treatment of obesity and astonishing researchers with their potency. The drug semaglutide, for example, enabled one-third of clinical-trial participants to shed at least 20% of their body weight¹. Tirzepatide, a competing therapy, achieved similar results in more than half of study participants².

Despite their high effectiveness, researchers are learning that these drugs are not necessarily the solution for everyone living with obesity. “Everybody wants to try them but not everyone responds to them,” says Andres Acosta, an obesity specialist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Now that semaglutide and tirzepatide have been around for some time, health-care providers are beginning to identify who is likely to benefit the most from them — and to recognize challenges in the drugs’ use.

More here.

Brett Christophers in The Guardian:

Coming up with economic policy is a difficult, unforgiving task. To make the best of it, it helps to work with an accurate model of how the economy works. If you use a misleading model and act on it, you can’t reasonably expect good outcomes: in that scenario, we end up, as JM Keynes warned in the 1930s, with “madmen in authority”, acting according to the precepts of “some defunct economist”.

But that’s exactly where we are. One of the most deeply held and frequently heard propositions about capitalism is that it revolves around private companies and individuals taking risks. When, earlier this year, the US government arranged a rescue package for Silicon Valley Bank, for instance, among the many objections to it was the claim that the rescue contravened capitalism’s risk norms.

More here.

Adam Kirsch at The New Criterion:

When Hans Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina premiered in Munich in June 1917, it found an enthusiastic admirer in Thomas Mann. “Quickly I made this difficult and audacious production into my own, my intimate possession,” Mann said in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), the nonfiction book he spent most of World War I writing. “Its appearance at this moment brought me the consolation and blessing of complete sympathy.” Before the year was out, he saw the opera performed five times.

Pfitzner continued to compose until his death in 1949 at the age of eighty, yet Palestrina is his only work widely known today. Part of the reason is that his reputation went into a deep eclipse after World War II—a backlash against his celebrity status in Nazi Germany, where he was one of the regime’s favored composers. It is only in recent years that many of his chamber, orchestral, and choral works have been recorded. None of them, however, seems likely to join Palestrina in the canon. Pfitzner’s magnum opus continues to repay listening and reflection today for the same reason that it fascinated Mann more than a century ago: its powerful expression of the pathos and the perils of conservative artistry in the modern world.

more here.

Rachel B. Glaser at The Paris Review:

I like when the refs touch each other in any way, but especially when all three of them put their arms around one another, huddling to discuss a difficult call. I like watching endless replays of fouls, trying to decide whether something was a block or a charge, or who touched the ball last. I like when the commentators disagree with the refs and when the broadcast cuts to the former ref Steve Javie in some NBA warehouse in New Jersey, standing in front of TV screens, calmly hypothesizing what the refs are discussing.

I love the emotions, which in other sports are often hidden under the players’ helmets and hats. Jamal Murray’s arms outstretched in joy as he backpedals after nailing yet another three. Jimmy Butler’s and Grant Williams’s noses touching while they scream at each other like two feuding angelfish. Robert Williams’s head in his hands on the bench.

more here.

From Essayful at Twitter:

1. Write in longhand: when you scratch out a word, it still exists there on the page. On the computer, when you delete a word it disappears forever. This is important because usually your first instinct is the right one.

2. Minimum number of words to write every day: no “quota.” Sometimes it will be no words. Sometimes it will be 1500.

3. Use any anxiety you have about your writing — or your life — as fuel. Ambition and anxiety: that’s the writer’s life.

4. Never say ‘sci-fi.’ You’ll enrage purists. Call it SF.

5. Don’t dumb down: always write for your top five per cent of readers.

More here.

Jeannette Cooperman in The Common Reader:

In the twenties, Archie League was spinning, diving, and doing loop-the-loops above the clouds, engine roaring, little plane shaking as he and the other barnstormers in his flying circus entertained folks across Missouri and Illinois. Necks grew stiff from watching, eyes squinted against the light, jaws dropped and air rushing in with every oooohhhh and whoa and oh my sweet Lord Jesus.

By 1929, though, League had crossed over to safety’s side and taken a job with St. Louis’s nine-year-old airport. Every day, he walked to the end of the Lambert Field runway with a wheelbarrow that held a deck chair, a beach umbrella for summer heat, a notepad, his lunch and, most important, two flags. The big red one meant STOP, and the checkered one meant GO, you can take off or land now.

He was, in other words, the first air traffic controller.

More here.

Algis Valiunas in The New Atlantis:

Amid the carnage of the Second World War, which saw some 60 million killed, including the Nazis’ industrialized annihilation of six million Jews, one event stands out in American memory as the most momentous: the atomic bomb attack that leveled Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. According to the most authoritative Japanese casualty count, which is higher than the American figure, the bomb killed some 100,000 people outright and another 40,000 over the next several months; blast, flash burns, and firestorm took care of the former, and radiation sickness accounted for the latter. A second bomb that dropped just three days later on Nagasaki killed 70,000 all told but gave some people misgivings even more troubling than those produced by Hiroshima.

Political men at the time understood, or at least appreciated sufficiently to exult in, the historic scale of the devastation. Upon getting word of the successful mission, while he was returning to the United States from the Potsdam Conference in Germany, President Harry Truman, ultimately responsible for the bombing, let off an exclamation of fiery triumph: “This is the greatest thing in history!”

More here.

Adam Nayman at The Current:

While Bogdanovich was about as immersed in cinema as is possible, a key inspiration for his 1968 debut, Targets—a thriller whose terse, nightmarish qualities would not be repeated across his wide-ranging and influential filmography—came not from the movies but from real life. Charles Whitman was an altar boy, an Eagle Scout, a marine, and a mass murderer: in 1966, between the last day of July and the first day of August, the twenty-five-year-old ex–bank teller killed sixteen people—including his wife and mother—and wounded more than thirty others, shooting the majority of his victims from the observation deck of the Main Building of the University of Texas at Austin. For the mass media, which made him a household name—“The Psychotic and Society,” declared a Time cover featuring his image—he was a cleaner-cut cousin to Lee Harvey Oswald, his sights trained not on political power or celebrity but on the everyday citizens whom he resembled at a distance, and maybe under the skin as well. “I don’t really understand myself these days,” the shooter himself observed in the half-typed, half-handwritten suicide note discovered at his residence. “I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.”

more here.

George Prochnik at Cabinet Magazine:

It began as an urbane fable about how to brush down bristling nerves. Sometime in the summer of 1909, not long before Sigmund Freud was due to embark on his only visit to the United States, he was enjoying a cigar in the company of his inner circle in the busy Biedermeier interior of Berggasse 19, when he suddenly announced, “I am going to America to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.”

The declaration no doubt provoked coughs and clinks of china—perhaps punctuated here and there by crinkling mouth-corners in anticipation of Freud’s masterstroke, which would illuminate the conceit. No one credited him with being so avid a porcupine aficionado that he would travel three thousand miles by steamship to make the acquaintance of one specimen of Erethizon dorsatum in its native woodland habitat.

more here.