Bryan VanDyke at The Millions:

In the foreword to the 1947 edition of Mary Shelley’s collected journals, editor Frederick L. Jones complains that many of Mary’s entries are too short, too self-aware. She’s cautious, impersonal. As if it’s somehow unfair that Mary kept back some of herself, rather than filling page after page with the guileless trust that no one else would ever read them. Because clearly she knew otherwise.

Mary Shelley was the daughter of two famous writers, each with cult-like followings. As a child, she watched her father William Godwin regularly receive guests at their home who ran the gamut from the wooly Samuel Coleridge to the wily Aaron Burr (“This family truly loves me,” Burr wrote of the Godwins in a letter). As a young adult, she reread on an annual basis her mother Mary Wollenstonecraft’s famous tract on the natural rights of women; Wollenstonecraft died less than two weeks after Mary was born. Mary would have been all too acutely aware of how powerful—and dangerous—words were; it’s no wonder she chose to record her thoughts only with great care.

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Timothy Williamson at IAI News:

The stereotype of a philosopher is an old man with a long beard. Saul Kripke made world-leading contributions to philosophy and logic as a teenager. It was the starting-point for his most distinctive later work, which gave philosophers a new framework to think in.

Kripke’s first breakthrough came in modal logic, the branch of logic concerned with structural principles about necessity and contingency, possibility and impossibility. In English, such matters are expressed by everyday modal auxiliary verbs like ‘can’ and ‘must’; a language incapable of making such distinctions would be radically impoverished. The study of modal logic goes back at least to Aristotle. When we accept the inference from ‘It can’t happen’ to ‘It won’t happen’, but reject that from ‘It can happen’ to ‘It will happen’, we are already doing simple modal logic.

Logicians want a more systematic, rigorous approach to classifying arguments as valid or invalid, rather than just relying on vague impressions of plausibility. More specifically, they want to define a range of models of how things are against which they can test an argument, to see whether its conclusion really follows from its premises.

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Anita Slomski at Proto:

Sarah’s story is familiar in a country where more than 40% of adults and a fifth of children have obesity. At school, she was bullied for her weight and, starting in her teens, dreaded getting weighed by doctors because they were always critical. At age 26, she had bariatric surgery—yet after dropping 80 pounds, her weight returned. Year after year passed with cycles of strict dieting and trials of various anti-obesity medications. “The weight always came back,” says Sarah, who asks that her real name not be used. 

Last fall, Sarah’s care team, including obesity specialist Fatima Cody Stanford, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Weight Center, recommended that Sarah try a new drug, semaglutide. “I knew within the first week that it was going to work,” says Sarah, now 46. “Without trying, I was eating less than what I normally did, but I didn’t feel hungry or deprived.” Within a year, she had lost 63 pounds. And although only time will tell whether the weight stays off, for now she feels as if “the battle is over” and she can get on with her life.

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Matthew Crain in the Boston Review:

The race to commercialize the Internet is over, and advertising is the big winner. This is excellent news if you are an executive or major shareholder of one of the handful of companies that dominate the $600 billion global digital advertising economy. For almost everyone else, advertising’s good fortunes have meant the erosion of privacy, autonomy, and security, as well as a weakening of the collective means to hold power accountable.

This is because the industry’s economic success is rooted in its virtually unrestrained monetization of consumer surveillance. Digital advertising technologies are widely distributed but largely operate under the control of a few giant companies whose monopoly-like market power has, among other ills, unleashed a wave of manipulative communication and deepened a revenue crisis among the nation’s most important journalism outlets. For the ownership class of Silicon Valley, digital advertising has been a gold mine of epic proportions. For democratic society, it is gasoline on a fire.

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Linda Kinstler in 1843 Magazine:

In June 2017, Stern, a liberal German magazine, published an article, “Why your banker can save more lives than your doctor”, introducing readers to a social movement called effective altruism. The piece was about a 22-year-old called Carla Zoe Cremer who had grown up in a left-wing family on a farm near Marburg in the west of Germany, where she had taken care of sick horses. The story told of an “old Zoe” and a new one. The old Zoe sold fair-trade coffee and donated the profit to charity. She ran an anti-drug programme at school and believed that small donations and acts of generosity could change lives. The new Zoe was directing her efforts to activities that were, in her view, more effective ways of helping.

Cremer discovered effective altruism through a friend who was at Oxford University. He told her about a community of practical ethicists who claimed to combine “empathy with evidence” in order to “build a better world”. Using mathematics, these effective altruists, or eas as many called themselves, sought to reduce complex ethical choices to a series of cost-benefit equations. Cremer found this philosophy compelling. “It really suited my character at the time to try to think about effectiveness and rigour in everyday life,” she told me. She began attending ea get-togethers in Munich and eventually became a public face of the movement in Germany. Following the guidance of Peter Singer, a philosopher who has inspired many effective altruists, Cremer pledged to donate 10% of her annual income to good causes for the rest of her life, which would make a greater difference than selling coffee beans. As she considered her next job, she was directed towards the movement’s careers arm, 80,000 Hours – a reference to the amount of time that the average person spends at work during their life.

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Donald Smith in BBC Earth:

Will our descendants be cyborgs with hi-tech machine implants, regrowable limbs and cameras for eyes like something out of a science fiction novel? Might humans morph into a hybrid species of biological and artificial beings? Or could we become smaller or taller, thinner or fatter, or even with different facial features and skin colour?

Of course, we don’t know, but to consider the question, let’s scoot back a million years to see what humans looked like then. For a start, Homo sapiens didn’t exist. A million years ago, there were probably a few different species of humans around, including Homo heidelbergensis, which shared similarities with both Homo erectus and modern humans, but more primitive anatomy than the later Neanderthal. Over more recent history, during the last 10,000 years, there have been significant changes for humans to adapt to. Agricultural living and plentiful food have led to health problems that we’ve used science to solve, such as treating diabetes with insulin. In terms of looks, humans have become fatter and, in some areas, taller.

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Only you, O Iranian woman, have remained
In bonds of wretchedness, misfortune, and cruelty;
If you want these bonds broken,
grasp the skirt of obstinacy

Do not relent because of pleasing promises,
never submit to tyranny;
become a flood of anger, hate and pain,
excise the heavy stone of cruelty.

It is your warm embracing bosom
that nurtures proud and pompous man;
it is your joyous smile that bestows
on his heart warmth and vigour.

For that person who is your creation,
to enjoy preference and superiority is shameful;
woman, take action because a world
awaits and is in tune with you.

Sleeping in a dark grave is happier for you
than this abject servitude and misfortune;
where is that proud man..? Tell him
to bow his head henceforth at your threshold.

Where is that proud man? Tell him to get up
because a woman is here rising to battle him;
her words are the truth, in which cause
she will never shed tears out of weakness.

by Forough Farrokhzad
from Poetic Outlaws

Jerry Saltz at Vulture:

In 1972, the American artist Lee Bontecou, who died this week at age 91, showed a series of plastic flowers and vacuum-formed fish and sea creatures in New York. She felt she got bad reviews and left the city, settling in rural Pennsylvania, where, with her artist husband, she raised a child (“Having a baby was the most wonderful piece of sculpture I ever made,” she later said). For 20 years she commuted to Brooklyn College to teach, but her low-to-no profile turned her into a kind of ghost artist.

She was also already a legend. In 1962, Donald Judd, citing her three-dimensional works — raw canvas stitched together in great bulging forms over wire armature, erupting from their frames like volcanic hell holes — called her “one of the best artists working anywhere.” He was right. Bontecou’s best-known pieces, which have been referred to as “vagina dentata” (only art by women gets this sort of restrictive treatment), were simultaneously painting and sculpture, embodiments of a mythic libido and an anarchic consciousness. When Eva Hesse saw her work, she said, “I am amazed at what this woman can do.”

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Jonathan Wilson at The Paris Review:

Enough about the past. We are about to step into Qatar’s balmy winter, average 70 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit, with high humidity to be dispersed by serious AC in the outdoor stadiums. Of the more than two hundred national teams that set out on this journey four years ago, only thirty-two remain, eight groups of four, the top two in each group to move on to the knockout stage. The games will run for almost a month, culminating in a final on December 18.^. As is almost always the case, Brazil is favored to win, followed by Argentina, France, England, and Spain, and you never rule out Germany. All these countries have lifted the trophy before, and wouldn’t it be great if someone else crashed the party? After all, Croatia (population 3.8 million) made it to the finals the last time out, and the ageless midfield genius Luka Modrić still runs their show. There is always Kevin De Bruyne’s Belgium (population 11.5 million) or, for a real long shot, Africa’s best hope, Senegal.

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Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:

In his 1625 essay “Of Truth,” the English writer and politician Francis Bacon—who, a few years earlier, had been deposed from his place as Lord Chancellor of England for corruption—commented on this passage: “What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” The hint here is that Pilate turns away from Jesus after asking his question because he is afraid it might be answered. And Pilate may not be the only one who has such feelings.

“Jesting” Pilate—truth is but a game to him, a joke. People like that, Bacon says, “count it a bondage to fix a belief.” Bacon’s thoughts on these matters are useful to us because there are many such jesters—always have been—and many reasons for jesting. When Dominion Voting Systems first brought suit against Donald Trump’s legal adviser Sidney Powell for defamation, Powell’s attorneys declared that “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” What is truth? said jesting Sidney.

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Julia Belluz in the New York Times:

A select group of the world’s top researchers studying obesity‌ recently gathered in the gilded rooms of the Royal Society, the science academy of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, where ideas like gravity and evolution were once debated.

Now scientists were arguing about ‌‌the causes of obesity, which affects more than 40 percent of U.S. adults and costs the health system about $173 billion each year. At the meeting’s closing session, ‌John Speakman, a biologist, offered ‌‌this conclusion on the subject: ‌ “There’s no consensus whatsoever about what the cause of it‌ is.”

That’s not to say the researchers disagreed on everything. The three-day meeting was infused with an implicit understanding of what obesity is not: a personal failing. No presenter argued that humans collectively lost willpower around the 1980s, when obesity rates took off, first in high-income countries‌, then in much of the rest of the world. Not a single scientist said our genes changed in that short time. Laziness, gluttony‌‌ and sloth were not referred to as obesity’s helpers.

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Dietrich Vollrath in Asterisk Magazine:

What happened in South Korea offers proof that fundamental transformations of living standards are possible in a few decades. South Korea’s experience, and similar growth trajectories in Taiwan and Singapore, have often been referred to as “economic miracles.” But what if South Korea’s economic growth wasn’t something mysterious or unpredictable, but rather something that we could comprehend and, most importantly, replicate? At current rates of growth, living standards in the poorest countries in the world will eventually catch up to the United States — in about 700 years.³ If we could identify what caused South Korea’s takeoff, we might be able to make the miraculous seem routine, and see more countries catch up over decades and not centuries.

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After Lorca

—for M. Marti

The church is a business, and the rich
are the businessmen.
…………………………….When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when the poor man dies, he has a wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when a rich man dies, they
drag out the sacrament
and the golden Cross, and go doucement, doucement
to the cemetery.

And the poor love it
and thinks it’s crazy.

by Robert Creely
from Naked Poetry
Bobbs Merrill Company, NY, 1969

—(doucement: gently)

Ben Dreith in dezeen.com:

Colorado-based Prometheus Materials has developed masonry blocks from a low-carbon cement-like material grown from micro-algae. The blocks, which meet the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards, were made using an organic cement-like material grown in bioreactors that reproduces itself in ways similar to coral.

“Coral reefs, shells, and even the limestone we use to produce cement today show us that nature has already figured out how to bind minerals together in a strong, clever, and efficient way,” said Prometheus Materials co-founder Wil V Srubar III. “By working with nature to use existing microalgae to bind minerals and other materials together to create new types of sustainable biocomposite building materials, we can eliminate most, if not all, of the carbon emissions associated with traditional concrete-based building materials.”

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Katherine Gammon in Nautilus:

The organoids are coming, the organoids are coming! That’s not a midnight proclamation of science gone rogue—but right. These tiny three-dimensional structures made from human cells are now allowing scientists to perform important medical experiments that can’t be performed on humans themselves. And just as promising, they may obviate many animal experiments done for humans’ sake.

Despite their near ubiquity, a surprising number of animal experiments result in data that is neither valuable nor applicable to humans. Even between closely related animal species, testing does not produce the same results. For example, cancer experiments had similar outcomes in rats and mice only a little more than half of the time.¹ “How can the rodent models predict human outcomes if they cannot predict each other very well?” asks Lena Smirnova, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing. Organoids, Smirnova says, represent a significant step forward. To grow an organoid, scientists start with stem cells, which have the potential to become any type of cell and can come from an embryo, a biopsy taken from a person, or from other adult cells coaxed back into stem cell capabilities (known as pluripotent stem cells). These biological acrobats are induced to turn into specific cell types by adding chemical signals in a sequence that mimics how those cell types develop from stem cells in an embryo.

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Daniel Immerwahr in The Guardian:

On the first page of his 2015 blockbuster book, Prisoners of Geography, Marshall invited readers to contemplate Russia’s topography. A ring of mountains and ice surrounds it. Its border with China is protected by mountain ranges, and it is separated from Iran and Turkey by the Caucusus. Between Russia and western Europe stand the Balkans, Carpathians and Alps, which form another wall. Or, they nearly do. To the north of those mountains, a flat corridor – the Great European Plain – connects Russia to its well-armed western neighbours via Ukraine and Poland. On it, you can ride a bicycle from Paris to Moscow.

You can also drive a tank. Marshall noted how this gap in Russia’s natural fortifications has repeatedly exposed it to attacks. “Putin has no choice”, Marshall concluded: “He must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west.” When Putin did precisely that, invading a Ukraine he could no longer control by quieter means, Marshall greeted it with wearied understanding, deploring the war yet finding it unsurprising. The map “imprisons” leaders, he had written, “giving them fewer choices and less room to manoeuvre than you might think”.

There is a name for Marshall’s line of thinking: geopolitics. Although the term is often used loosely to mean “international relations”, it refers more precisely to the view that geography – mountains, land bridges, water tables – governs world affairs. Ideas, laws and culture are interesting, geopoliticians argue, but to truly understand politics you must look hard at maps.

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Madeleine Cuff in New Scientist:

Delegates at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, have agreed to create a global “loss and damage” fund to provide cash for vulnerable nations hit by the impacts of climate change.

After more than 20 years of campaigning by developing countries battered by increasingly severe droughts, storms and other extreme weather, rich nations finally relented in the early hours of 20 November and backed plans for a compensation fund.

Details of how the fund will operate, including the crucial question of which nations will contribute, are still to be worked out, but activists and delegates from vulnerable nations said the agreement was a historic victory for climate justice.

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