Pedro Mendes Loureiro in Phenomenal World:

Earlier this month, Brazilians went to the polls in an election billed as the most momentous since democratization in 1985. Far-right president Jair Bolsonaro faced off against former two-term president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Though Lula did win the first-round election by more than 5 percentage points, or 6 million votes, it was not enough to clear the 50 percent threshold needed for first-round victory. The opponents will face a polarizing run-off on October 30.

In Brazil, the national and state-level executives are elected by direct proportional representation for four-year terms. This is also the case with the Senate, comprising eighty-one seats, each serving eight-year terms. The lower-house national legislature, the Chamber of Deputies (comprising 513 seats, each serving four-year terms) is elected via open list proportional representation through state-based lists, with a 2 percent threshold and a rather complicated alliance system between parties. As a result, there has systematically been a disjuncture between the executive and the legislative in the country, and presidents need to cobble together shifting alliances to try and form the temporary majorities they need to legislate. At best this has led to weak governments, and at its worst it has been the breeding ground for semi-legal practices and various corruption scandals over the years.

The results from Brazil’s first round show a sharp turn to the right in the legislature—for which there are no run-offs—as well as in gubernatorial races.

More here.

Molly Young at the New York Times:

The K stands for “Kindred.” It was a family name, but if there’s anyone who can forgive a fanciful imputation of significance, it is Philip K. Dick. How lovely that a poet of alienation would come into existence bearing that word.

Perhaps you’ve nurtured a suspicion that you have the makings of a Dick fan. The writer’s influence is everywhere, though mainstream acknowledgment of his talents arrived belatedly. (His obituary in this newspaper is under 200 words and lists his age of death incorrectly. He was 53, not 54.)

The question is where to start. Dick’s published output — at least 35 novels and countless short stories — ranges from sublime to inscrutable, which is partly a result of volume. His book advances were skimpy and there was a family to support, so he wrote quickly, often fueled by amphetamine tablets.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C7Y8WEIsBU&ab_channel=EsotericAudio

“Damn!”

Sometimes he’d be washing the car
. . . all by himself
and he’d say, “Damn!”
or sweeping the last morsels of leaves
onto an old dustpan
saved just for outside
for when he was alone
in the silence of summer afternoons
he’d say. “Damn!”
He didn’t go to his abuelita’s funeral
He wasn’t there when his father died
He was with somebody else he loved,
and he wasn’t there the moment she died
Y le pasaba, sabes?
An anvil of loneliness
would fall onto his chest
and he’d say, “Damn!”

by Cézar A González
from Paper Dance
Persea Books, NY, NY, 1995

Y le pasaba, sabes (and it happened to him, you know)

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

In his new book, “The Song of the Cell,” Siddhartha Mukherjee has taken on a subject that is enormous and minuscule at once. Even though cells are typically so tiny that you need a microscope to see them, they also happen to be implicated in almost anything to do with medicine — and therefore almost anything to do with life. Guided by Mukherjee’s granular narration (“As you keep swimming through the cell’s protoplasm …”), I was repeatedly dazzled by his pointillist scenes, the enthusiasm of his explanations, the immediacy of his metaphors. But I also found myself wondering where we were going. What kind of organism might these smaller units add up to? What was the shape of the story he set out to tell?

They’re questions that Mukherjee himself anticipates in the early pages of “The Song of the Cell,” drawing a contrast between the structure of his new book and the arcs of his previous ones. “The Gene” (2016), he says, “was propelled by the quest to decode and decipher the code of life”; his first book, the superb “The Emperor of All Maladies” (2010), which won a Pulitzer Prize, was animated by “the aching quest to find cures for cancer or to prevent it.” This latest effort — with sections on cell biology, on neurons, on immunotherapy, among other topics — “is itself a sum of parts,” Mukherjee writes. “The organization is cellular, if you will.”

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Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times:

Imagine taking in an orphaned baby bird, giving it food and shelter so that it could grow, and then one day it swoops down and attacks the family hamster.

Peter Brooks says he experienced something similar in December 2000, when George W. Bush, then the president-elect, presented the members of his cabinet to the American public. Brooks had spent his career arguing for the importance of narrative and storytelling; his book “Reading for the Plot” (1984) was already considered a classic of literary criticism. But hearing Bush talk mistily about how each of his appointees “has got their own story that is so unique, stories that really explain what America can and should be about,” Brooks found himself, well, losing the plot.

“It was as if a fledgling I had nourished had become a predator,” he writes in his intriguing new book, “Seduced by Story.”

More here.

From Phys.org:

An international team of astrophysicists has made a puzzling discovery while analyzing certain star clusters. The finding challenges Newton’s laws of gravity, the researchers write in their publication. Instead, the observations are consistent with the predictions of an alternative theory of gravity. However, this is controversial among experts. The results have now been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In their work, the researchers investigated open star clusters. These are formed when thousands of stars are born within a short time in a huge gas cloud. As they “ignite,” the galactic newcomers blow away the remnants of the gas cloud. In the process, the cluster expands considerably. This creates a loose formation of several dozen to several thousand stars. The weak gravitational forces acting between them hold the cluster together.

More here.

Bryan Walsh in Vox:

Homo sapiens have existed on the planet for about 300,000 years, or more than 109 million days. The most dangerous of all those days — the day when our species likely came closer than any other to wiping itself off the face of the Earth — came 60 years ago today, on October 27, 1962. And the person who likely did more than anyone else to prevent that dangerous day from becoming an existential catastrophe was a quiet Soviet naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov.

On that day, Arkhipov was serving aboard the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine B-59 in international waters near Cuba. It was the height of the Cuban missile crisis, which began earlier that month when a US U-2 spy plane spotted evidence of newly built installations on Cuba, where it turned out that Soviet military advisers were helping to build sites capable of launching nuclear missiles at the US, less than 100 miles away.

That led to the Cold War’s most volatile confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union — 13 days of high-stakes brinkmanship between two nuclear powers that seemed one misstep away from total war.

More here.

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Dennis Zhou at Poetry Magazine:

The astounding influence that Chinese poetry in translation has had on the English language throughout the 20th century—from the Modernist, Imagist revolution of Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915) through its mid-century, counter-cultural incarnation by Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, and others—can be traced to this ragtag assortment of drunkards, hermits, and exiles. Very few collections, however, situate the Tang poets fully within their political and historical context, drawing out both the urgency and stakes of their verse. Many anthologies, such as Witter Bynner’s classic The Jade Mountain (1929), simply follow the model of Three Hundred Tang Poems (1763) compiled by the Qing scholar Sun Zhu, which for many decades remained the standard text. In the Same Light (The Song Cave, 2022), translated by the Chinese-Singaporean-Irish poet Wong May, does something different. Collecting 200 poems by 38 poets, Wong May promises to find parallels between their time and the present and, in so doing, update them “for our century.” To do this, she excavates her own story and its resonance with those of the Tang poets.

more here.

Elisa Gonzalez at The Point:

What counts as resurrection? A general rising of the dead, a return from the afterworld at the end of time in some physical embodiment, is specific to a small group of monotheistic religions: Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity. Irksome sympathizers say that the dead person will “live” in memory. Reincarnation, especially prevalent in the belief systems collected under Hinduism, is an expansive view of resurrection. The “undead”—whether zombies or ghosts—cluster at the threshold of living again. Science fiction and the superrich try to upload the self to a mechanical container. Some physicists propose the eventuality of a quantum resurrection out there in this universe or another. The corpse fertilizes the cemetery grass. What I began seeking, though, was a straight-up rewinding, my own Lazarus, selfsame.

But even Lazarus’s resurrection, a case of supercharged healing, faces the problem of change. Although Lazarus aged like an ordinary man, he supposedly never smiled again.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3XwCSTCJfo&ab_channel=WhiteCube

Breakfast with Vananu

My mother had me in Boston but really
by the Beit El checkpoint. I trace my begats
to the burning bush, just blooming henna
but it makes me a citizen of the roadmap.
I just have to fill out the forms. I’ll never escape
the past but at least I can call my kitchen
an embassy, my refrigerator a stockpile
of milk and honey. They carried the promise
around on a palanquin. Remember Nazis
shriveling, rays shooting out between gold angels,
the thing then wheeled to a spot in a warehouse?
He found manna jars labeled Heavy Water
on a shelf and became the last raider
of the lost ark. He leaked the truth
and got eighteen years for assaulting
the holy land with a deadly weapon.
But he can visit me for pancakes and not
violate his house arrest. You should be ashamed,
someone said, and perhaps someone should.
They made Moses wear a veil, his face ablaze
when he walked down the mountain,
its whereabouts classified. It takes God
willing times two hundred to protect
a desert, all my mugs and bowls
waiting for the archaeologists.

by David Moolten
from Pank Magazine, Fall/Winter, 2016

Mordechai Vananu

Jef Akst in The Scientist:

Most models of how tumors evolve have assumed that the process is based predominately on cancer cells’ genetics, and many cancer treatments are specifically targeted to mutations associated with disease. But comparing whole genome sequence data with RNA-seq data from samples of colorectal tumors revealed that the vast majority of gene expression differences among cancer cells cannot be explained by genetics, researchers report in Nature today (October 26).

“So far, a lot of the work that’s been done exploring cancer evolution in cancer development has focused very much on just the genetics,” says Nicholas McGranahan, a computational cancer researcher at the University College London Cancer Institute’s CRUK UCL Centre who was not involved in the research. But according to the new study, “there’s lots of these alterations that they can’t identify a clear [genetic] underpinning for. . . . It’s a nice study because it highlights some of the limitations of what we’ve been doing before.”

Computational biologist Andrea Sottoriva says that it’s those limitations that led him and his colleagues to consider the transcriptome in cancer evolution. “Basically, looking at the genetic evidence was not explaining everything that we were seeing,” says Sottoriva, a group leader at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and the head of Computational Biology Research Centre at Human Technopole in Milan, Italy. For example, he explains, “if you just look at . . . mutations in genes that are involved in cancer, it’s not very easy to distinguish a benign cancer from a malignant cancer: In a benign cancer, there are as many cancer driver mutations as in a malignant cancer.”

More here.

David Brooks in The New York Times:

Taylor Swift was quite the romantic when she burst on the scene in 2006. She sang about the ecstasies of young love and the heartbreak of it. But her mood has hardened as her star has risen. Her excellent new album, Midnights, plays upon a string of negative emotions — anxiety, restlessness, exhaustion and occasionally anger. “I don’t dress for women,” she sings at one point, “I don’t dress for men/Lately I’ve been dressing for revenge.”

It turns out Swift is part of a larger trend. The researchers Charlotte Brand, Alberto Acerbi and Alex Mesoudi analyzed more than 150,000 pop songs released between 1965 and 2015. Over that time, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits roughly halved. Meanwhile, the number of times such songs contained negative emotion words, like “hate” rose sharply. Pop music isn’t the only thing that has gotten a lot harsher. David Rozado, Ruth Hughes and Jamin Halberstadt analyzed 23 million headlines published between 2000 and 2019 by 47 different news outlets popular in the United States. The headlines, too, grew significantly more negative, with a greater proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Headlines in left-leaning media got a lot more negative, but headlines in right-leaning publications got even more negative than that.

More here.

Diana Preston in Literary Hub:

The first Europeans to reach Tahiti were the crew of HMS Dolphin, commanded by Samuel Wallis, in June 1767. When the Dolphin approached the island and, like the Beagle, anchored in Matavai Bay, some Tahitians had thought the ship was “a floating island.” Others had recalled a prophecy that, as a result of the chopping down of a sacred tree, newcomers of an unknown kind would arrive and that “this land would be taken by them. The old order will be destroyed and sacred birds of the land and the sea will come and lament what the lopped tree has to dictate. [The newcomers] are coming upon a canoe without an outrigger.”

After some initial friction, Wallis’s crew and the Tahitians became so close that both were sad to see the Dolphin leave, not least on the sailors’ part because of the friendliness of the people, their willingness to trade, the fertility of their island, and most of all because of the ties between some of the crew and Tahitian women who had uninhibitedly made love to them.

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John Horgan in Scientific American:

Studying quantum mechanics, which I’ve been doing for the last two-plus years, has served as an antidote to my tendency toward habituation, taking reality for granted. Wave functions, superposition and other esoterica remind me that this is a strange, strange world; there is a mystery at the heart of things that ordinary language can never quite capture.

I’m thus thrilled by this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger won for experimental probes of entanglement, a peculiar connection between two or more particles. The Nobel Foundation’s press release emphasizes the applications of this prize-winning work; researchers are building “quantum computers, quantum networks and secure quantum encrypted communication” based on entanglement. But I value the work of Clauser, et al., because it upends our commonsense notions about what is real and what is knowable. It rubs our noses in the riddle of reality.

More here.