Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay on the Jain Family Institute’s new project:

What crisis?

A year ago, one might be forgiven for thinking there was a moment of relative calm for wealthy countries: a year of vaccinations had made the pandemic less acute, inflation hadn’t yet provoked interest rate hikes, and labor markets were strong. In the climate world, the energy transition was progressing and, after years of struggle in the UN climate diplomacy track, there was even some sign from rich countries that the poorest and most vulnerable states might be compensated for the loss and damage from climate-fueled disasters.

In reality, all was not well. As anticipated early in the pandemic, dozens of low-income and smaller middle-income countries were continuing to grind towards sovereign debt crises provoked by a sudden drop in foreign income and climbing healthcare costs. Creditors (the wealthy Paris Club countries, multilateral banks, bondholders, and China) had all failed to head off this debt crisis. Meanwhile, vaccines remained unavailable to many people in the poorest countries. Energy costs were climbing.

Then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and historic coordinated economic sanctions by Western governments, made everything much worse—in ways that even the world’s richest countries couldn’t avoid.

Energy costs in Europe were already high going into the winter of 2021. This was driven in part by the curtailment of China’s coal-fired generation leading to more demand for imported gas. In 2022, it’s spilled over into other countries: Europe and richer east Asia countries are now in a bidding war for limited gas supplies. Others have been priced out of the market entirely.

More here.

Grace van Deelen in The Scientist:

For the first time, scientists report they have devised a method that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging brain recordings to reconstruct continuous language. The findings are the next step in the quest for better brain-computer interfaces, which are being developed as an assistive technology for those who can’t speak or type. In a preprint posted September 29 on bioRxiv, a team at the University of Texas at Austin details a “decoder,” or algorithm, that can “read” the words that a person is hearing or thinking during a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan. While other teams had previously reported some success in reconstructing language or images based on signals from implants in the brain, the new decoder is the first to use a noninvasive method to accomplish this.

“If you had asked any cognitive neuroscientist in the world twenty years ago if this was doable, they would have laughed you out of the room,” says Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and a coauthor on the study. Yukiyasu Kamitani, a computational neuroscientist at Kyoto University who was not involved in the research, writes in an email to The Scientist that it’s “exciting” to see intelligible language sequences generated from a noninvasive decoder. “This study . . . sets a solid ground for [brain-computer interface] applications,” he says.

More here.

David Montgomery in The Washington Post:

Tobias Jones at The Guardian:

Over the course of her distinguished career, Caroline Moorehead has created an oeuvre that is varied and yet also thematically coherent. As well as writing about trailblazing women – Freya Stark, Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn and Lucie de la Tour du Pin – she has also focused on pacifists, refugees and deportees. Her books are scholarly and readable because she always seems able to find stories that combine history and human rights, female bravery and antifascism (or else nonconformity).

Edda Mussolini is, perhaps, a subject it’s harder to warm to. Benito Mussolini’s first child with Rachele Guidi, Edda was born in 1910, and her early years were marked by poverty, beatings and instability. Her father was very often absent, either at war or at work, in prison or in hospital. On prison visits, Edda was apparently taught to hug him so that he could pass his incendiary articles to his wife. She later said of herself: “I was barefoot, wild and hungry… a miserable child.”

more here.

Katy Waldman at The New Yorker:

The novelist Lydia Millet once told an interviewer that when she first moved to New York, in 1996, she was “amazed” by how people were “relentlessly interested in exclusively the human self.” This myopia—a sort of “inarticulate, ambient smugness about everything”—wasn’t her creed. Millet, who now lives near Tucson, has written more than a dozen books of fiction, one of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but she works at the Center for Biological Diversity and holds a master’s in environmental policy. As in life, so in art. Increasingly, fiction studies the “arc of the private individual,” Millet told another interviewer: “The personal struggles of a self and the ultimate triumph of that self over the obstacles in its path.” But Millet is energized, instead, by how feelings are “intermeshed with abstract thought,” with “our place in the wider landscape.” Why, her work demands, are we afraid to die? What are the ethics of wanting what we want?

more here.

Call to Arms

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 mane? 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 Farrokhza
from Poetic Outlaws

Justin E. H. Smith in The Hinternet:

Down in the crypt of the basilica of Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Baume, in the South of France, there is an exquisitely rare object. It is a skull, behind a wall of glass, and it is described by two separate and very different labels. The one label tells you it comes from a woman in her fifties, likely born in the eastern Mediterranean in the early first century CE. The other label tells you it is the skull of Mary Magdalene. Legends of her late-life migration to Southern Gaul had already been circulating for some time when the discovery of her skeletal remains in Saint-Maximin was announced in 1279, and the basilica was subsequently built up around this gravesite. In the fourteenth century the Genoese Dominican author Jacobus de Voragine tells the full story of Mary Magdalene’s shipwreck off the coast of Marseille, and of her subsequent long career of miracle-working throughout Provence. Europe was made Christian not just by real-time conversion, but also a great deal of retroactive inscription of Biblical personages, apostles, and early Church Fathers into the ancient history of what was not yet a well-delineated cultural-geographical sphere.

In 2017 my spouse and I were standing and looking at the skull behind the glass. I was inspecting the two labels, and thinking about the ironies of the contrasting accounts they presented, when, behind us, we heard a voice: Ah, c’est bien, ils nous donnent un choix, the voice said. We turned around, and saw that it belonged to Bruno Latour. “It’s nice, they give us a choice.”

More here.

Adam Frank at Big Think:

What Carroll wants is to give readers something of the mathematical essence which, after all, is how physics is done. To accomplish this goal he proposes a novel approach. As he rightly notes, to become a practicing physicist, a student must not only learn the equations and their meanings, but they must also spend untold hours solving the equations in specific circumstances. To give an example, it is not that hard to learn the basic equations of Newtonian gravity. I walk my freshman non-science students through them. The really hard part is solving those equations for something like the motion of a comet around the Sun when it is perturbed by the gravitational pull of Jupiter. That part takes hours and hours of calculation. Learning to solve equations is what week-long graduate student homework sets are for.

But Carroll is betting that scientifically interested non-scientists don’t need to solve the equations of physics — they just need to know how to read them. For Carroll, understanding specifically what the specific equations say, and how they say it, should be enough to move beyond the metaphors of most popular-science accounts. In this way readers might get a more true and visceral sense of why physics is so potent.

More here.

Jackson Arn at Art In America:

IT TAKES A STRONG STOMACH for paradox to write that Paul Cézanne “cannot be written about any more.” When art historian T.J. Clark began a 2010 London Review of Books article on the painter this way, he meant no insult. The post-Impressionist and proto-modernist Cézanne was one of the keenest observers of the industrial disenchantment of late 19th-century Western Europe. In the 21st century, Clark argued, his paintings had become “remote to the temper of our times,” ergo, a tough subject. Accordingly, Clark’s new study of the painter, If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present, is a book about Cézanne, but also about the difficulties of writing such a book.

Clark accepts that Cézanne’s paintings communicate some fundamental quality of modernity, and he is willing to risk almost anything to hunt down what it was. His worry, sometimes more palpable than his overarching argument, is that Cézanne can’t be caught.

more here.

Chia-Wei Hsu at Cabinet Magazine:

Giant pandas are found in the wild only in a few mountain ranges in China, primarily in Sichuan province, which means that China controls the supply of one of the world’s most beloved animals. Pandas became a key component of China’s diplomatic relations beginning in the mid-twentieth century, with the first instance of such “panda diplomacy”—as the practice of offering the bears as the highest official gift came to be called—occurring in 1941 when Madame Chiang Kai-shek and her sister gave a pair of pandas to the United States in gratitude for assisting the country in its war with Japan. This began a tradition that continued through the Cold War to the present day, with the animal playing a vital role in China’s relationship with countries including Taiwan, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In 1936, the first living panda arrived in the West. It was brought to the United States illegally by Ruth Elizabeth Harkness, a fashion designer from New York whose husband, William, had died that February in Shanghai while preparing an expedition to capture pandas in Sichuan.

more here.

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian:

Historians will look back and see a point of origin to the current madness, one that explains how a new prime minister could see her administration fall apart in a matter of weeks, even if we struggle to name that cause out loud right now. When the textbooks of the future come to the chapter we are living through, in the autumn of 2022, they will start with the summer of 2016: Brexit and the specific delusion that drove it.

More here.

Ingfei Chen in Scientific American: (From 2012)

Amid the endless stream of everyday experience, emotion is like a blazing neon tag that alerts the brain, “Yoo-hoo, this is a moment worth remembering!” The salience of the humdrum sandwich you ate for lunch pales in comparison, consigning its memory to the dustbin. Yet emotions regulate our recall of not just our most riveting moments. Researchers now recognize that the same neural mechanisms involved in flashbulb memories underlie recollections along the continuum of human emotional experience. When people view a series of pictures or words in the laboratory, any emotionally laden content sticks in their head better than neutral information.

Memory is a three-stage process: First comes the learning or encoding of an experience; then, the storage or consolidation of that information over many hours, days and months; and last, the retrieval of that memory when you later relive it. Insights into how emotion modulates this process emerged from studies of conditioned fear responses in rats in the 1980s and 1990s by neuroscientists Joseph E. LeDoux, now at N.Y.U. [see “Mastery of Emotions,” by David Dobbs; Scientific American Mind, February/March 2006], and James L. McGaugh of the University of California, Irvine, among others. Their work established that the amygdala, a structure buried deep within the brain, orchestrates the memory-boosting effects of fear.

More here. (Note: Reading Proust these days has reignited my interest in memories. We know shockingly little about the science)

Tara Parker-Pope in The Washington Post:

Talk

The body is never silent. Aristotle said that we
can’t hear the music of the spheres because it is the
first thing that we hear, blood at the ear. Also the
body is brewing its fluids. It is braiding the rope of
food that moors us to the dead. Because it sniffles
and farts, we love the unpredictable. Because
breath goes in and out, there are two of each of us
and they distrust each other. The body’s reassuring
slurps and creaks are like a dial tone: we can
call up the universe. And so we are always
talking. My body and I sit up late, telling each other
our troubles. And when two bodies are near each
other, they begin talking in body-sonar. The art of
conversation is not dead! Still, for long periods, it is
comatose. For example, suppose my body doesn’t
get near enough to yours for a long time. It is dis-
consolate. Normally it talks to me all night: listening
is how I sleep. Now it is truculent. It wants to speak
directly to your body. The next voice to hear will
be my body’s. It sounds the same way blood sounds
at your ear. It is saying Ssshhh, now that we, at
last, are silent.

by William Matthews
from Sleek for the Long Flight
White Pine Press, 1988

Sarah Shaffi and Lucy Knight in The Guardian:

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the Booker prize for fiction. The judges praised the “ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques”.

Karunatilaka’s second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida comes more than a decade after his debut, Chinaman, which was published in 2011. The Booker-winning novel tells the story of the photographer of its title, who in 1990 wakes up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. With no idea who killed him, Maali has seven moons to contact the people he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos of civil war atrocities that will rock Sri Lanka.

Neil MacGregor, chair of the judges for this year’s prize, said the novel was chosen because “it’s a book that takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through life and death right to what the author describes as the dark heart of the world”.

More here.

Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

Now some computational neuroscientists have begun to explore neural networks that have been trained with little or no human-labeled data. These “self-supervised learning” algorithms have proved enormously successful at modeling human language and, more recently, image recognition. In recent work, computational models of the mammalian visual and auditory systems built using self-supervised learning models have shown a closer correspondence to brain function than their supervised-learning counterparts. To some neuroscientists, it seems as if the artificial networks are beginning to reveal some of the actual methods our brains use to learn.

More here.