Annie Jacobsen in New Scientist:

As an investigative journalist, I write about war, weapons, national security and government secrets. I’ve previously written six books about US military and intelligence programmes – at the CIA, The Pentagon, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency– all designed to prevent, or deter, nuclear world war III. In the course of my work, countless people in the upper echelons of US government have told me, proudly, that they’ve dedicated their lives to making sure the US never has a nuclear war. But what if it did?

“Every capability in the [Department of Defense] is underpinned by the fact that strategic deterrence will hold,” US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which is responsible for nuclear deterrence, insists publicly. Until the autumn of 2022, this promise was pinned on STRATCOM’s public Twitter feed. But to a private audience at Sandia National Laboratories later that same year, STRATCOM’s Thomas Bussiere admitted the existential danger inherent to deterrence. “Everything unravels itself if those things are not true.”

If deterrence fails – what exactly would that unravelling look like?

More here.

Nick Hunt in Noema:

Returning home after being away for any length of time is strange. The Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta, who journeyed 70,000 miles across much of the 14th-century Islamic world, wrote that “traveling gives you home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.” I’d venture that all travelers, whether they have been away for years, months or only weeks, know something of this estrangement. What gap year student hasn’t returned from their rite-of-passage journey to find that the “gap” now lies between them and their former life? This peculiar dislocation — a kind of out-of-body experience — might wear off after several days, or it might last much longer.

For me it lasted for at least the same period as my absence. During that time I tried and failed to slot back into my old life, but everything seemed misaligned. The familiar sights around me had become foreign. One of the most confounding things was that my mental map of London — a city I’d learned street by street in the era before Google Maps, cycling for hours each day with a battered A-Z map — had completely vanished, as if the data had been wiped. I constantly found myself lost in neighborhoods I had known for years.

This cartographic distortion was accompanied by a temporal one. Travel, as has often been noted, has a warping effect on time, elongating it in some ways while compressing it in others. Like Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the bigger the journey and the greater its gravitational pull on the trajectory of your life, the more the temporal field around it seems to become dilated. It can feel like you’ve been gone for a lifetime and have changed irrevocably, and yet when you return, time has apparently stood still.

More here.

Paula Span in The New York Times:

Determining whether someone has Alzheimer’s disease usually requires an extended diagnostic process. A doctor takes a patient’s medical history, discusses symptoms, administers verbal and visual cognitive tests. The patient may undergo a PET scan, an M.R.I. or a spinal tap — tests that detect the presence of two proteins in the brain, amyloid plaques and tau tangles, both associated with Alzheimer’s. All of that could change dramatically if new criteria proposed by an Alzheimer’s Association working group are widely adopted. Its final recommendations, expected later this year, will accelerate a shift that is already underway: from defining the disease by symptoms and behavior to defining it purely biologically — with biomarkers, substances in the body that indicate disease.

The draft guidelines, Revised Criteria for Diagnosis and Staging of Alzheimer’s Disease, call for a simpler approach. That could mean a blood test to indicate the presence of amyloid. Such tests are already available in some clinics and doctors’ offices. “Someone who has biomarker evidence of amyloid in the brain has the disease, whether they’re symptomatic or not,” said Dr. Clifford R. Jack Jr., the chair of the working group and an Alzheimer’s researcher at the Mayo Clinic. “The pathology exists for years before symptom onset,” he added. “That’s the science. It’s irrefutable.”

More here.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus at The New Yorker:

While one segment of Silicon Valley lamented the perpetual absence of flying cars, another, it turns out, was quietly building them—or, at least, something flying-car adjacent. Just three months after the Founders Fund manifesto appeared, a Canadian inventor named Marcus Leng invited his neighbors and a couple of friends to his rural property, north of Lake Ontario. Leng was in his early fifties, with a bowl cut of coarse graying hair. He instructed his guests to park their (conventional) cars in a row and cower behind them. He strapped on a helmet and boarded a device that he’d built in his basement. It had a narrow single-seat chassis and two fixed wings, one in front and one in back, each with four small propellers. It was at once sleek and ungainly, as if a baby orca had been hitched to two snowplows. Observers described it, for lack of a better comparison, as looking like a U.F.O. Leng called it the BlackFly.

Leng, who had been flying since he was a teen-ager, had long dreamed of the “perfect aircraft”—something “that didn’t require a pilot’s license, and could take off or land anywhere.” He’d paid close attention to past designs but suspected that their propulsion systems were too heavy, too complex, and too unresponsive.

more here.

What He Thought

…………. —an excerpt

. . . we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,
till, sensible it was our last
big chance to be poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked
………………………………….. “What’s poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables and
marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or
the statue there?” Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn’t have to think—“The truth
is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was the easiest to say. What followed
taught me something about difficulty,
for our underestimated host spoke out,
all of a sudden, with rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents Giordano Bruno,
brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offense against
authority, which is to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is
poured in waves through all things. All things
move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is
The soul of the soul of the world.” Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him
forth to die, they feared he might
incite the crowd (the man was famous
for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which
he could not speak. That’s
how they burned him. That is how
he died: without a word, in front
of everyone.
………………. And poetry—
………………………………….. (we’d all
put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on
softly)—
……………………… poetry is what
he thought, but did not say.

by Heather McHugh
from Poetry 180
Random House 2003

Henry Louis Gates, Jr at The New Yorker (from 1995):

The two weeks spanning the O. J. Simpson verdict and Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March on Washington were a good time for connoisseurs of racial paranoia. As blacks exulted at Simpson’s acquittal, horrified whites had a fleeting sense that this race thing was knottier than they’d ever supposed—that, when all the pieties were cleared away, blacks really were strangers in their midst. (The unspoken sentiment: And I thought I knew these people.) There was the faintest tincture of the Southern slaveowner’s disquiet in the aftermath of the bloody slave revolt led by Nat Turner—when the gentleman farmer was left to wonder which of his smiling, servile retainers would have slit his throat if the rebellion had spread as was intended, like fire on parched thatch. In the day or so following the verdict, young urban professionals took note of a slight froideur between themselves and their nannies and babysitters—the awkwardness of an unbroached subject. Rita Dove, who recently completed a term as the United States Poet Laureate, and who believes that Simpson was guilty, found it “appalling that white people were so outraged—more appalling than the decision as to whether he was guilty or not.” Of course, it’s possible to overstate the tensions. Marsalis invokes the example of team sports, saying, “You want your side to win, whatever the side is going to be. And the thing is, we’re still at a point in our national history where we look at each other as sides.”

more here.

Amelia Nierenberg in The New York Times:

Walnuts can improve cognitive function. Blueberries can boost memory. Fish oil supplements can lower your risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

You may have noticed these buzzy “brain food” claims scattered across online health articles and social media feeds. But can certain foods or diets really stave off or prevent dementia? Experts say that while nutrition studies are notoriously challenging to carry out, there is a compelling and ever-growing body of research that does suggest that some foods and diets may offer real benefits to an aging brain. So we spoke with two dozen researchers and pored over the research to better understand the links between diet and dementia. Scientists don’t yet know for certain what causes Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. And there is currently no medication that can reverse it, said Dr. Uma Naidoo, the director of nutritional and metabolic psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and the author of “This Is Your Brain on Food.”

More here.

Ann Gibbons in Science:

Zeresenay Alemseged doesn’t remember the 1974 discovery of the famous fossil Lucy at Hadar in Ethiopia, because he was 5 years old, living 600 kilometers away in Axum. Later he saw Lucy’s name on cafes and taxis, but he knew little about her until he became a geologist working at the National Museum of Ethiopia. Then, she changed his life. In 2000, Alemseged was swept into Lucy’s orbit: He discovered “Lucy’s child,” a partial skeleton of a toddler of her species, at Dikika, 10 kilometers from Hadar. In 2015, by then a well-known scientist, he had the honor of showing Lucy to then-President Barack Obama before a state dinner at Ethiopia’s National Palace. Alemseged allowed Obama to touch the prized skeleton, telling him the fossil shows Ethiopia is the birthplace of humankind and that “every single person” on the planet shares an origin in Africa. “Including Donald Trump,” Alemseged joked to Obama.

Fifty years after her discovery, “Lucy is an icon,” says Alemseged, now a paleoanthropologist at the University of Chicago.

More here.

George Makari at Literary Hub:

George Makari: I heard you say in an interview that as you’re starting to think about writing a book, you write a note to yourself, saying, “Write a book that no one else could write.”

Geoff Dyer: Yeah, it’s a little piece of self-encouragement. Because, you know, sometimes I’m sort of worried about my take on a given subject. Do I know enough about it? Take for example, my history of photography called The Ongoing Moment. I wrote that book because I wanted to find out about the history of photography. I wrote the book for the same reason that readers might later go to it.

I think one of the features of nonfiction today is that, to a degree, a book could be written by anyone possessed of a certain level of knowledge. The area of expertise might change, but quite often, there’s nothing particularly distinct about the writing or the thought. With my books, for good or ill, they could only be written by me.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Quanta:

Granted, the social lives of viruses aren’t quite like those of other species. Viruses don’t post selfies to social media, volunteer at food banks or commit identity theft like humans do. They don’t fight with allies to dominate a troop like baboons; they don’t collect nectar to feed their queen like honeybees; they don’t even congeal into slimy mats for their common defense like some bacteria do. Nevertheless, sociovirologists believe that viruses do cheat, cooperate and interact in other ways with their fellow viruses.

The field of sociovirology is still young and small. The first conference dedicated to the social life of viruses took place in 2022, and the second will take place this June. A grand total of 50 people will be in attendance. Still, sociovirologists argue that the implications of their new field could be profound.

More here.

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.

His method – called Rootclaim – uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it.

But the joke goes that you do Bayesian reasoning by doing normal reasoning while muttering “Bayes, Bayes, Bayes” under your breath. Nobody – not the statisticians, not Nate Silver, certainly not me – tries to do full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems. They’d be too hard to model. You’d make some philosophical mistake converting the situation into numbers, then end up much worse off than if you’d tried normal human intuition.

Rootclaim spent years working on this problem, until he was satisfied his method could avoid these kinds of pitfalls.

More here.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld at Corporate Board Member:

The negative buzz over board challenges experienced by Harvard, Tesla and Boeing shows remarkably parallel problems over the same period. Harvard’s stumble is particularly educational for boards facing a governance crisis.

At a recent Yale Higher Education Leadership Summit, 87 percent of 70 college and university presidents attending concluded that it was right for Harvard’s former president, Claudine Gay, having lost the legitimacy to lead, to step down, with 60 percent also expressing support for Harvard in pushing her from office.

How could this happen just a year after Gay’s installation as the first Black woman to lead Harvard University? In her own published statement, Gay referenced racial bias as a factor. However, there are many brilliant Black women educators and scholars triumphantly leading major colleges and universities, and Gay was not the first to blaze a trail in the Ivy League. Summit attendees largely concurred, with 86 percent saying that racial bias was not the reason Gay had to resign.

More here.

Elevator Music

A tune with no more substance than the air,
performed on underwater instruments,
is proper for this short lift from the earth.
It hovers as we draw into ourselves
and turn our reverent eyes toward the lights
that count us to our various destinies.
We’re all in this together, the song says,
and later we’ll descend. The melody
is like a name we don’t recall just now
that still keeps on insisting it is there.

by Henry Taylor
from Poetry 180
Random House 2003

Sarah Aziza in The Baffler:

THERE IS NO PROPER ENTRANCE to an essay that undertakes things which should never be uttered, which have already been said. There is no way to reconcile the knowledge that the hours I spend writing will also mark the death of numerous Palestinians, and an endless interval of hunger and agony for many more. For Palestinians in the diaspora, there is no body but the uncanny body now—this set of bones and skin which I have inexplicably been granted, while so many others languish, rupture, decay. In New York City, I watch the tree outside my window flicker into bloom, and I shudder at this sign of spring. It is the advent of the third season, and the seventh month, of the Gaza genocide.

In the beginning—the chilled and chilling autumn when the annihilation commenced—time moved like an accordion. Interminable nights, bitter-bright mornings, weekends compressed with urgency. I burned with an electric grief, my veins timed to the hammer-pulse of war. With millions around the world, I read our death, wrote our death, protested our death, measuring each hour in corpses, in outrage and fear. The enduring Zionist fantasy—to finish the job, to solve the Palestinian question—hulked on the horizon, a rapacious body, steel-toothed and single-willed. In its path, the last, fragile membrane of Western pretense, which, for all its hypocrisies, still feigned belief in red lines, in keeping up appearances of restraint.

On the knife’s edge, not only Gaza, but all of us.

More here.

Paolo Gerbaudo in Phenomenal World:

In the late 1970s, Western markets were flooded with Japanese cars from then-unfamiliar brands like Toyota, Mazda, Datsun, and Honda. The combination of a high quality product, efficient fuel consumption, and a low price tag made these brands very popular in the US and Europe in the aftermath of the 1970s oil shock, resulting in a decline in market share for domestic manufacturers and complaints of unfair competition from entrepreneurs and trade unions.

The “Japan Shock” soon engendered a protectionist policy response. The US and the UK negotiated voluntary import quotas with Japan to limit competitive pressure on their car industries, and European countries adopted similar measures. But this was only the first step in a deeper transformation of Western industry. Desperately seeking avenues to regain international competitiveness and quell heightening domestic labor unrest, companies in the global automotive sector and beyond began to emulate their Japanese rivals. The “Toyota method,” expounded by the company’s leading industrial engineer Taiichi Ohno, became a must-read for any serious industrial manager, while North Atlantic business schools started teaching Kaizen and Kanban methods of “just-in-time” production. This cultural shift, sometimes described as part of a broader process of “Japanization,” served to catalyze the embrace of what sociologists came to call post-Fordist management strategies, which focused on flexibility and cost-cutting while rejecting the vertically integrated production models of 1950s US and European auto leaders.

Nearly fifty years after the “Japan shock,” today’s global automotive industry confronts a far more systemic upheaval—what we could term the “Chinese electric vehicle (EV) shock.” Until recently, China’s automotive industry was dismissed as a low-quality copy of Western or Japanese models. However, it has since achieved impressive quality and price competitiveness in the strategic section of electric vehicles—in 2023, the Chinese giant BYD overtook Tesla as the largest producer of electric cars with 3 million New Energy Vehicles (NEVs). That year, China’s export of NEVs grew by 64 percent. Together with good Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) sales and Russian demand induced by Western sanctions, China has already overcome Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter overall.

More here.

Adam Shatz interviews Pankaj Mishra in the LRB Podcast:

Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss his recent LRB Winter Lecture, in which he explores Israel’s instrumentalisation of the Holocaust. He expands on his readings of Jean Améry and Primo Levi, the crisis as understood by the Global South and Zionism’s appeal for Hindu nationalists.

You can read The Shoah After Gaza in the LRB archive, or watch the lecture via the LRB YouTube channel. From The Shoah After Gaza:

In​ 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of the systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments as things of the past. He insisted that those who are tortured remain tortured, and that their trauma is irrevocable. Like many survivors of Nazi death camps, Améry came to feel an ‘existential connection’ to Israel in the 1960s. He obsessively attacked left-wing critics of the Jewish state as ‘thoughtless and unscrupulous’, and may have been one of the first to make the claim, habitually amplified now by Israel’s leaders and supporters, that virulent antisemites disguise themselves as virtuous anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists. Yet the ‘admittedly sketchy’ reports of torture in Israeli prisons prompted Améry to consider the limits of his solidarity with the Jewish state. In one of the last essays he published, he wrote: ‘I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.