Sarah Hart in The New York Times:

“Call me Ishmael.” This has to be one of the most famous opening sentences in all of literature, and I’m embarrassed to say that — until quite recently — I didn’t get beyond it. “Moby-Dick” was, for me, one of those books that languished in the guilt-inducing category of “things you should have read a long time ago,” and I just never got around to it. Plus, I am a mathematician. And despite my interest in literature, my intellectual priorities did not include 400-page novels about whales — or so I thought. That all changed one day when I overheard a mathematician friend mention that “Moby-Dick” contains a reference to cycloids.

Cycloids are among the most beautiful mathematical curves in existence — the French mathematician Blaise Pascal found them so distractingly fascinating that he claimed merely thinking about them could relieve the pain of a bad toothache — but applications to whaling are not usually listed on their résumé. Intrigued, I finally read “Moby-Dick,” and was delighted to find that it abounds with mathematical metaphors. I realized further it’s not just Herman Melville; Leo Tolstoy writes about calculus, James Joyce about geometry. Fractal structure underlies Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” and algebraic principles govern various forms of poetry. We mathematicians even appear in work by authors as disparate as Arthur Conan Doyle and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

There have been occasional academic studies on mathematical aspects of specific genres and authors. But the more holistic connections between mathematics and literature have not received the attention they deserve.

More here.

Clever and Poor

She has always been clever and poor,
Especially here off the Yugoslav

Train on the platform of dust. Clever was
Her breakfast of nutmeg ground in water

In place of rationed tea. Poor was the cracked
Cup, the missing bread. Clever are the six

Handkerchiefs stitched to the size of a scarf
And knotted at her throat. Poor the thin

Coat, patched with cloth from the pockets
She then sewed shut. Clever is the lipstick,

Petunia pink, she rubbed with a rag on her nails.
Poor the nails, yellow with cold, Posed

In a cape to hide her waist, her photograph
Was clever. Poor then was what she called

The last bill twisted in her wallet. Letter
After letter she was clever and more

Clever, for months she wrote a newspaperman
Who liked her in the picture. The poor

Saved pounds of sugar, she traded them
For stamps. He wanted a clever wife. She was poor

So he sent a ticket—now she would come to her wedding
By train. Poor, the baby left with the nuns.

Because she is clever, on the platform to meet him
She thinks, Be generous with you eyes. What is poor

Is what she sees. Cracks stop the station clock,
Girls with candle grease to sell. Clever, poor,

Clever and poor, her husband, more nervous
Than his picture, his shined shoes tied with twine.

by Penelope Pelizzon
from Ploughshares. Everyday Seductions
Spring, 1995

Todd McEwen at Lit Hub:

North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are “woven” together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there—he gets knitted into his suit before his adventure can begin.

Indeed some of the popular “suitings” of that time, “windowpane” or “glen plaid,” reflected, even perfectly complemented office buildings. Cary’s suit reflects New York, identifies him as a thrusting exec, but also protects him, what else is a suit for? Reflects and Protects … a slogan Roger Thornhill himself might have come up with. The recent usage of calling a guy a “suit” if you don’t like him, consider him a flunky or a waste of space, applies to Cary at the beginning of the film: this suit comes barreling out of the elevator, yammering business trivialities at a mile a minute, with the energy of the entire building.

more here.

Ben Hutchinson at Literary Review:

On 28 February 1989, a matter of days after the publication of what he had described as the first volume of a tetralogy, the Swiss writer Hermann Burger kept a long-held promise and killed himself. The world could not say it had not been warned: from his first novel, Schilten (1976), about a school teacher who prepares his pupils for death, to his collection of aphorisms Tractatus logico-suicidalis (1988), a gathering of over a thousand ‘mortologisms’ on the logic of self-slaughter, Burger was nothing if not consistently morbid. To rehearse Spike Milligan’s famous epitaph, he had told us he was ill.

That Burger’s warnings were not taken seriously during his lifetime owes much to his consistently difficult, narcissistic character. Declaring that he had no need to save money given his intention to die young, Burger drove around in a Ferrari, wore expensive white suits, performed magic tricks for politicians and offended almost everyone with whom he came into contact.

more here.

Hunter Dukes in The Public Domain Review:

It was dangerous to be a man of letters in the eighteenth century. All that rumination; such single-minded concentration; countless hours hunched over the escritoire. “Some men are by nature insatiable in drinking wine, others are born cormorants of books”, wrote the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot in An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (1768). As with the reckless consumer of claret, an overindulgence in books could have devastating consequences for the mind and body.

Across his essay, Tissot offers hundreds of examples of men who read too much, studied too hard, and consumed knowledge to the point of madness. There is the young man who developed an allergy to reading: “if he read even a few pages, he was torn with convulsions of the muscles of the head and face, which assumed the appearance of ropes stretched very tight.” And the man whose laser focus effected hair removal: “his beard fell first, then his eye-lashes, then his eye-brows, then the hair on his head, and finally all the hairs of his body”. There is Nicolas Malebranche, who was gripped with “dreadful palpitations” upon looking into Descartes’ Treatise on Man, and an unnamed Parisian rhetorician, who “fainted away whilst he was perusing some of the sublime passages of Homer.”

More here.

Liz Kimbrough in Mongabay:

When it comes to climate solutions, your first thought may not be the wildebeest. But in the Serengeti, these buffalo-looking antelopes are the key to carbon capture.

Wildebeest eat large amounts of grass and recycle it back into the soil as dung. So when their population plummeted in the early 1900s due to a disease transmitted from domestic cattle, the loss of natural grazing led to more frequent and intense wildfires, turning the Serengeti into a carbon source.

Efforts to bring back or “rewild” the wildebeest population through disease management were a huge success, helping reduce the frequency and intensity of wildfires, and restoring the Serengeti back into a carbon sink.

Trophic rewilding, or restoring and protecting the functional roles of animals in ecosystems, is an overlooked climate change solution, says a new report published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change.

More here.

David Fogarty in The Straits Times:

A major ocean circulation that forms around Antarctica could be headed for collapse, risking significant changes to the world’s weather, sea levels and the health of marine ecosystems, scientists say, offering a stark warning about the growing impacts of climate change.

Global warming is accelerating the melting of ice in Antarctica, and the increased amount of fresh water flooding into the ocean is disrupting the flow of the Antarctic overturning circulation, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The Antarctic overturning circulation is part of a global network of currents that shift heat, oxygen and nutrients around the globe.

More here.

After the Election: A Father Speaks to His Son

He says, they will not take us.
They want the ones who love
another god, the ones whose
joy comes with five prayers and
songs to the sun in the mornings
and at night. He says, they will
not want us. They want the ones
whose tongues stumble over
silent e’s, whose voices creak
when a th suddenly appears
in the middle of a word.

They want the ones who cannot hide
copper skin like we can. He says,
I am old. I lived through one revolution.
We can hide our skin.
We have read the books.
He says, we are the quiet kind, the ones
who stay late and do not speak,
the ones who do not bring trumpets
or trouble. He says, we are safe in silence.
We must become ghosts.

I think, so many are already dust.
tried to stay thin, be small, tried
breaking bone and voice, tried
to be soft. So many tried to be
empty, to be barely breath. To be
still enough to be left alone. Become
shadows, trying not to be bodies.

It never works. To become nothing.
They come for the shadows, too.

by M. Soledad Caballero
from Split This Rock

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked extraordinary destruction and misery, killing nearly 7 million people worldwide thus far and devastating the lives of many more. And yet, viewed through the long lens of human history, writes the public health sociologist Jonathan Kennedy, “there is little about it that is new or remarkable”. Previous pandemics have killed many more, both in absolute numbers and as proportions of populations, and so may future ones. Covid should be a wakeup call that helps us manage deadlier plagues in the future. But will we heed it?

Our very existence and success as a species, Kennedy argues in this fascinating book, has been shaped by bacteria and viruses. Where, for example, did all the other species of humans go? At one time, early Homo sapiens shared the Earth (and interbred with) the stronger, larger-brained and equally artistic Neanderthals, as well as the hobbit-like Denisovans. What happened to them? It could be, as some argue, that we simply killed them all, or that they were somehow less well able to adapt to climate change. But Kennedy explores the possibility that roving Homo sapiens from Africa, who had acquired strong immune systems on their travels, might have simply infected the already settled Neanderthals of Europe with a novel pathogen that they couldn’t fight off – just as the colonising Spanish, tens of thousands of years later, decimated the Aztec population with smallpox as much as with weapons.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Air pollution could cause lung cancer not by mutating DNA, but by creating an inflamed environment that encourages proliferation of cells with existing cancer-driving mutations, according to a sweeping study of human health data and experiments in laboratory mice. The results, published in Nature on 5 April¹, provide a mechanism that could apply to other cancers caused by environmental exposure — and might one day lead to ways to prevent them. “The idea is that exposures to carcinogens could promote cancer without actually doing anything to the DNA,” says Serena Nik-Zainal, a medical geneticist at the University of Cambridge, UK. “Not every carcinogen is a mutagen.”

Cancer-causing pollution

Air pollution causes millions of deaths worldwide each year, including more than 250,000 from a type of lung cancer called adenocarcinoma. But it has been difficult to investigate how air pollution triggers cancer, in part because its effects are less pronounced than those of better-studied carcinogens such as tobacco smoke or ultraviolet light, says Nik-Zainal.

More here.

S. N. Johnson-Roehr at JSTOR Daily:

A major exhibition on the art and influence of Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai recently opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hokusai’s Great Wave is possibly the most recognized woodblock print on Earth, but as a digital collection from nearby Boston College demonstrates, many of Hokusai’s predecessors and contemporaries were skilled in the design and production of woodblock prints, or ukiyo-e, as well.

Ukiyo-e translates literally as “picture(s) of the floating world.” Ukiyo, the “floating world,” was originally “a Buddhist concept of the transitory, insubstantial nature of human existence,” explains art historian Donald Jenkins. But by the Tokugawa (Edo) period (1615–1868), the phrase evoked “the pleasures of human life, especially those associated with the brothel districts and the amusement quarters, even while some remnants of its earlier connotations remained.”

more here.

Rachel Syme at The New Yorker:

Klawans, like many before him, notes the echoes of Sturges’s life in his work: the juxtaposition of bohemians and stern squares, the fluency in both American vernacular and European argot, the linking of slapstick and hypocrisy. But he also wants to make this reading “wobble a bit,” and he peers between every snappy line for cultural references, Biblical allegories, political sympathies, and philosophies about love and suffering. A Sturges film, Klawans believes, is more than just its witty banter: “One of the chief distractions from thinking your way through the films is their most universally admired trait: the dialogue.”

This is a compelling idea, but it misses what makes Sturges’s films so fascinating. His rat-a-tat scripts aren’t running cover for some hidden meaning; they are the meaning. His characters make sense because they slip the yoke of explanation.

more here.

Johann N. Neem in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom under former president Donald Trump, relied on his listeners’ resentment of college-educated folks throughout the 1990s to stoke the fires of culture war. There was something about what colleges did that convinced many of Limbaugh’s listeners that, in journalist Will Bunch’s words, “nothing in America made sense anymore.” And it was this confusion, Bunch argues in his new book, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It, that produced the biggest divide in American politics, between those with and without college degrees. Rather than dismiss the concerns of Limbaugh’s listeners, Bunch takes them seriously. They are not wrong to sense that “the American way of college went off the rails,” Bunch concludes.

More here.

Kit Chapman in Undark:

Within the past decade, scientists have discovered a class of materials that, at extreme pressures, show superconductivity at temperatures just a few tens of degrees below freezing, but the goal of a room-temperature superconductor has remained out of reach. In a paper published in the journal Nature on March 8, Dias and his colleagues reported they’d found a material, known as a lutetium hydride, that under high pressures can be superconducting at temperatures as high as 21 degrees Celsius, or nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit — a discovery that many physicists describe as worthy of a Nobel Prize, if true.

But the physics community has been here with Dias before. In 2020, a similarly bold claim from Dias — of a material that became superconducting at around 15 degrees Celsius (59 Fahrenheit) — unleashed a torrent of critiques and accusations, ultimately leading to the paper’s retraction last fall. Dias’ fiercest critics say that he has committed research misconduct, possibly on more than one occasion, and that he has yet to be held fully accountable.

More here.

Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:

Recently, I argued in this publication that one of our best guides to the world of social media is David Hume—but Hume helps us to understand other elements of our current political culture as well.

Take, for instance, Hume’s contention, in a famous essay, that the two primary “corruptions of true religion” are superstition and enthusiasm. He was thinking primarily of Roman Catholics on the one hand and, on the other, a variety of Protestant religious groups that today we might see as examples or forerunners of evangelicalism; but he deliberately frames his argument in more general terms, as though describing not distinct factions of his time but rather enduring dispositions. “The true sources of superstition,” he argues, are “weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance.” The true sources of enthusiasm, by contrast, are “hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance.” You will note that the only item common to both sides is ignorance. A typical Hume comment.

I want to argue that the primary social forces disrupting American society today are modern versions of these two false religions. Our current version of superstition is the MAGA belief system. Our current version of enthusiasm is what some people call wokeness but I prefer to call Left Purity Culture (LPC).

More here.

And, “so it goes.”
. . . . —Kurt Vonnegut

Babel

Oh, God did cunningly, there at Babel –
Not mere togues dividing, but soul from soul,
So that never again should men be able
To fashion one infinite, towering whole.

by Lola Ridge