Lauren Beard on NPR:

Cambodian American Eden Teng was was born in a refugee camp on the border of Thailand and Cambodia just a few years after the Cambodian genocide. She moved to the U.S. with her mom and aunt when she was 6. Teng attributes much of her own resilience in transitioning to the U.S. to her exuberant mom, who wore whatever she wanted and wasn’t afraid to defy social norms — even when it was embarrassing for a teenage Teng.

But when she was growing up, Teng also witnessed the negative impacts of historical, racial and intergenerational trauma on her mom’s wellbeing. Teng often felt confused by the way her mom’s emotions could spiral out of control for seemingly no reason, or why why she had so many health problems. When Teng first encountered psychology in college, she realized that her mother’s past was directly connected to her emotional and physical health. (Scientists are learning that stress and trauma are sometimes linked to chronic illnesses, like hypertension, diabetes and kidney disease.) It was this realization that compelled Teng to become a therapist; in 2018 she began her graduate studies in Seattle.

More here.

Ian Crouch in The New Yorker:

Political strategists on winning campaigns are visited like gurus after an election, with reporters looking to discern secrets of success that might be replicated at scale. In this spirit, in the days after the midterms, the Independent sought out Joe Calvello, the communications director for John Fetterman’s Senate campaign. What should the Democrats do to win more often? “You gotta find someone who’s six foot eight,” Calvello said. “The biggest candidate you can find.”

Calvello’s joke was a fitting capstone to what was the funniest campaign of the midterms. The race between the very tall Fetterman and the television doctor Mehmet Oz had its moments of gravity, but, for much of the summer, it was defined by a one-sided meme war from Fetterman’s team against Oz, painting him as an out-of-touch quack from New Jersey. The most potent weapon in this war was supplied by Oz himself, whose stunt shopping at a local grocery store to highlight inflation became this cycle’s Dukakis in the tank. In a viral clip, Oz first misidentifies the store he’s in, calling it “Wegner’s”—a portmanteau of Wegmans and Redner’s, though perhaps the doctor was thinking of Wegener’s granulomatosis, a rare disease of the blood vessels. Then he starts grabbing vegetables off the shelves. “Guys, that’s twenty dollars for crudités!” he says, taking it all in. “And this doesn’t include the tequila!” More campaign lessons: remind your rich-guy candidate of the perils of words that take accents, and keep him out of the produce section.

More here.

Moze Halperin at Artforum:

IF ’80S CINEMA experienced a “cannibal boom” by way of Italian exploitation flicks, the ’00s/’10s zeitgeist’s deviant gourmand was the libidinous vampire. At a time when many complained sex was disappearing from film, a glut of horny American mainstream cultural phenomena (most notably True Blood, Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and The Originals) took cues from Anne Rice and transferred desire onto the undead. The vile parasites, once mythical scapegoats for pestilence in pockets of Eastern Europe, were rebranded as soulful fuck machines and brooding suburban classmates, dousing normie sexuality with a soupçon of transgression—ultimately to such a culturally redundant extent that they became vanilla (the coup de grâce being their full transformation back into flavorless humans in Twilight fanfic 50 Shades). It’s hard to imagine vampires, post-Pattinsonization, as a vehicle for true horror, the kind that might incite visceral, existential, or moral panic. On a primal level, vampirism’s earthy, inelegant cousin—cannibalism—does the trick. Harder to romanticize and defang, cannibalism can’t hide behind the conceit of the supernatural to sanitize the act of consuming humans: It carries the full taboo of gastronomic incest. And it’s not just drinking—it’s eating, bones and all.

more here.

Antón Barba-Kay in The New Atlantis:

The digital era has two basic axioms. The first is that information has no form; information technology is a means of disseminating and aggregating data, but data itself belongs to no place or context. Data cannot tell the story; information is uninforming and uninformative. The digital age can therefore have no real culture of its own, no culture in the etymological sense of cultivation and accumulated growth. Things trend or happen online, but nothing settles into lasting place or takes its time to show itself significant. Each day’s frenzy and distraction are as overwhelming unto the day as they are forgettable.

The second axiom is that the Internet is for cat pictures; everyone knows that transmitting images of cute animals is the whole point of it. It remains astounding that pet videos run into the tens of millions of views. That they have their own film festival. That they are used as bait to pull people into political misinformation campaigns. That there are bona fide pet celebrities and pet influencers. That some of them are raking it in, with spin-off merch and copyrighted brand clout all their own.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Here is the setup. You have a set of voters {1, 2, 3, …} and a set of choices {A, B, C, …}. The choices may be candidates for office, but they may equally well be where a group of friends is going to meet for dinner; it doesn’t matter. Each voter has a ranking of the choices, from most favorite to least, so that for example voter 1 might rank D first, A second, C third, and so on. We will ignore the possibility of ties or indifference concerning certain choices, but they’re not hard to include. What we don’t include is any measure of intensity of feeling: we know that a certain voter prefers A to B and B to C, but we don’t know whether (for example) they could live with B but hate C with a burning passion. As Kenneth Arrow observed in his original 1950 paper, it’s hard to objectively compare intensity of feeling between different people.

The question is: how best to aggregate these individual preferences into a single group preference? Maybe there is one bully who just always gets their way. But alternatively, we could try to be democratic about it and have a vote. When there is more than one choice, however, voting becomes tricky.

More here.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Project Syndicate:

Now that the American electorate appears to have rejected Republican extremism, some will argue that Biden should tack right to capture the political center. But that is the wrong way to read the 2022 midterm result, because the electorate is not seeking some kind of Solomonic splitting of the baby.

Consider the divide between candidates who championed women’s reproductive rights and those who advocated an absolute ban on abortion, without exceptions even for rape, incest, risks to the mother, or any of the other compelling circumstances for ending a pregnancy. It is not as though America’s “middle” came out and said, “Draw the line at four and a half months, with exceptions for incest but not for any other cases of rape.” Whatever their beliefs about abortion – no one is enthusiastic about it – Americans have consistently signaled a general agreement that the decision should be left to the woman, not the government.

Centrism is the wrong approach for most other big issues as well.

More here.

……………………..

…….For Just One Moment

…………………………. I was not there
when Charlie Parker started playing between the notes

………………………. I could not be there
when Billie Holiday pondered the fruit of southern trees

…………………..I was unable to sit at a table
…………..when Miles Davis gave birth to the Cool

……..but the musicians aren’t the only ones who sing
……………………. and I am here with you
…………………to hear my heart stop beating
……………………….for just one moment

.
by Nikki Giovanni
from Blues For All the Changes
William Morrow and Company, 1999

Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson at UK in a Changing Europe:

The Liz Truss debacle has many interpretations. Was it an example of the ‘structural dependence of the state on capital’ as capital took flight and the pound crashed? Or was it an example of how short-term political thinking always runs aground on the rocks of fiscal reality? Perhaps it’s both. But perhaps it is also an example of something deeper. That the underlying ‘growth model’ (GM) of an economy can atrophy over time, and that such GM’s are very hard to change through purposive action.

In a recent volume published by Oxford University Press, called Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation, we develop a framework that employs the concept of national ‘growth models.’

Growth models refer, not just to how economies are organized, or what ‘type’ they look like, but to how they grow. That is, what bits of underlying gross value added are stimulated in a given economy to produce GDP? What sectors are involved? How is demand generated and from where? And perhaps most important, what is the dominant electoral coalition that supports and maintains such a model?

In our view the Truss debacle was the crisis of a particular growth model, and the dominant political coalition that supports it, coming into the open.

More here.

From Yahoo! News:

Bacterial infections are the second leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for one in eight of all deaths in 2019, the first global estimate of their lethality revealed on Tuesday.

The massive new study, published in the Lancet journal, looked at deaths from 33 common bacterial pathogens and 11 types of infection across 204 countries and territories.

The pathogens were associated with 7.7 million deaths — 13.6 percent of the global total — in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic took off.

That made them the second-leading cause of death after ischaemic heart disease, which includes heart attacks, the study said.

Just five of the 33 bacteria were responsible for half of those deaths: Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Asterisk Magazine:

Your classiest friend invites you to dinner. They take out a bottle of Chardonnay that costs more than your last vacation and pour each of you a drink. They sip from their glass. “Ah,” they say. “1973. An excellent vintage. Notes of avocado, gingko and strontium.” You’re not sure what to do. You mumble something about how you can really taste the strontium. But internally, you wonder: Is wine fake?

A vocal group of skeptics thinks it might be. The most eloquent summary of their position is The Guardian’s “Wine-Tasting: It’s Junk Science,” which highlights several concerning experiments:

In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as “jammy” and commented on its crushed red fruit.

The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye.

More here.

Sasha Frere-Jones at Harper’s Magazine:

For most of my adult life, I believed in the implications of the phrase “non-stick pans”: other pans must be unmanageably sticky. During the pandemic, as I began to want my own listening room and wrote every day across from a stove, I started to cook. I bought a Lodge cast-iron skillet that cost about forty dollars. It heats up quickly and evenly and can be easily cleaned. Our non-stick pan, by comparison, sheds its coating, and the handle keeps coming unscrewed. This is like the history of audio gear. The cast iron was sufficient, but an imaginary quality—stickiness—was being “solved” by new technology like Teflon. The new gear is fine, and works well in a couple of settings, but seems largely like an unnecessary innovation.

One day, I brought Weiss a copy of Comet Meta, a record by David Grubbs and Taku Unami that features the sound of two electric guitars playing at relatively low volume. When we put the vinyl through his Imperia speakers, we heard the guitar lines ring and hang and interlock—and then something else happened. I felt a presence, as if someone had entered the room.

more here.

Jamie Hood at the LARB:

In My Life, Walsh remembers a time when “instead of dying I went to Paris,” a providentially budgeted eleventh-hour day trip consisting of “ten hours’ travel and eight hours’ walking: eighteen hours: a day, a day that saved my life.” The transformation by the pandemic of Paris — of crowds, of urban bustle, of the tactile delectations of flânerie — from a font of salvation into a space of mortal dangers and morbid anxieties appears as a kind of violent inversion. But this alienated affect sits comfortably in Walsh’s oeuvre: the founding condition of her writings is a consciousness and interrogation of feelings of geographic, interpersonal, and emotional displacement. Her women navigate their worlds in the exilic mode. Walsh’s settings are intermediary or quite literally transit/ory: hers is a literature of the cafe, the train, the bus, the hotel. That the principal concerns of Godard’s early period were the ennui and political uncertainties of an interstitial generation (“the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” as Godard notoriously identifies them in 1966’s Masculin Féminin), the defamiliarization of romance, and a kind of uncanny French apocalyptica (think, for example, of the remarkable, and remarkably long, single-take traffic scene in Week-end) establishes an especially fructuous ground for Walsh’s philosophies of the uprooted.

more here.

Morgan Cutolo in Reader’s Digest:

More here.

Brian Resnick in Vox:

Anyone who has argued with an opinionated relative or friend about immigration or gun control knows it is often impossible to sway someone with strong views. That’s in part because our brains work hard to ensure the integrity of our worldview: We seek out information to confirm what we already know, and are dismissive or avoidant of facts that are hostile to our core beliefs. But it’s not impossible to make your argument stick. And there’s been some good scientific work on this. Here are two strategies that, based on the evidence, seem promising.

1) If the argument you find convincing doesn’t resonate with someone else, find out what does

The answer to polarization and political division is not simply exposing people to another point of view. In 2017, researchers at Duke, NYU, and Princeton ran an experiment where they paid a large sample of Democratic and Republican Twitter users to read more opinions from the other side. “We found no evidence that inter-group contact on social media reduces political polarization,” the authors wrote. Republicans in the experiment actually grew more conservative over the course of the test. Liberals in the experiment grew slightly more liberal. Whenever we engage in political debates, we all tend to overrate the power of arguments we find personally convincing — and wrongly think the other side will be swayed. On gun control, for instance, liberals are persuaded by stats like: “No other developed country in the world has nearly the same rate of gun violence as does America.” And they think other people will find this compelling, too. Conservatives, meanwhile, often go to this formulation: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

More here.

Artificial Supernova

My peace lily thinks this LED
is the sun. Indoor plants
can seldom tell the difference.

She only knows the warmth
that radiates from the perfect
distance. Any closer and her

glossy leaves would be
incinerated. I am a cloddish
creator, carelessly overloading

circuits. I strove to stimulate
growth, but when the fuse blows
my lily thinks she has seen

stars explode. this must be
mass extinction she thinks,
retreating into her bulb.

by Becca Fang
from National Poetry Library

Samuel Jay Keyser at berfrois:

Malta is not so much an island as it is the top of a mountain. Some 14,000 years ago the glacier that covered Europe began to recede. As it did, the water level of the Mediterranean rose, some 120 meters to be exact, enough, anyway, to separate Malta from its mainland. Just 80 kilometers separates the island from Sicily’s Cape Passero. On a clear day you can see Mt. Etna.

The first inhabitants reached Malta around 5200BC, roughly 2500 years before the building of the Palace of King Minos at Knossus. The oldest free standing stone structures in the world are here. They date from 4000BC to 2500BC. These structures belong to the so-called Temple period. They were not dwellings but ceremonial buildings in which god knows what went on. Orgies, maybe. Or sun worship. Or just plain old gossip mongering. We don’t know who the people were or where they came from, except that it was probably over water from Sicily.

more here.