To the Young Protestants holding Portraits of Martin Luther on
the steps of the Catholic Cemetery in Bielsko on All Souls Day

When Luther couldn’t convert his Jewish neighbors, he wrote:

Set fire to their synagogues and schools in honor of our Lord
and of Christendom, that God might see we are Christians.

Between us iron grates and the cries of blackbirds on graves.
Wind circles the firs. A child bounces a red ball.

You stand smiling after five hundred years. You ask for nothing
more than a coin from history, the blessing of pigeons nibbling

crumbs at your feet, but it was never this simple. How young
I was when my parents converted from Catholicism, entered

the plain nave of a Protestant chapel and its Bach cantatas.
Condemned by priests, shunned by our Irish relatives,

we became devout Presbyterians. My Polish grandfather,
a religious and political rebel, wouldn’t let a priest in his house.

In Sunday school, I was taught about the Reformation’s doctrines,
martyrs, exiles. What can a child understand of cruelty

and dogma? I missed my cousins in their First Communion
finery, their frosted cakes. In Europe, in Ireland, death came

for centuries with the swing of a censer, a bare cross replacing
the crucifix, families divided with the slice of a cake knife.

We stand in this land where the people of the book visit us
in the fall wind—Jews and Christians, who’ve strayed,

says the Quran, from God’s true faith. Enough, the blackbirds cry.

by Tersa Cader
from Plume Magazine

Lisa Abend at Afar:

Since the 19th century, large numbers of villagers in the poorer parts of Italy have migrated to more prosperous regions and countries. The migration continues; in some places, populations have shrunk so dramatically that there are no longer enough patients to keep the local doctor in business, or enough children to fill the school. Young people who moved away to study or work didn’t want to return, and when their parents died, the family homes stood empty, sometimes for decades. Around 2010, the village of Salemi in western Sicily was one of the first towns to come up with an idea: What if you could fill them again by offering the properties for sale at a ridiculously low price?

I wasn’t in the market for a house, one euro or otherwise. But I wanted to know if the program worked.

More here.

Joanna Thompson at Undark:

Vaccination led to the global eradication of smallpox in 1980. Even today, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation lists one of the goals of its malaria program as “ending malaria for good.” In recent years, Tufts University launched its Lyme Disease Initiative with the stated aim to “eradicate Lyme disease by 2030.”

But as new zoonotic diseases emerge (and resurge), the goal of a world free of such diseases is beginning to feel like a pipe dream to an increasing number of researchers.

“Trying to put a lot of money into the eradication of these diseases with complex ecologies is just throwing money away,” said Susan Jones, an ecologist and historian of life sciences at the University of Minnesota. Instead, Jones and her colleagues argue, we should invest more into control and protection against certain diseases — and learn to live alongside them.

More here.

Zack Hatsfield in Bookforum:

YOU KNOW KEITH HARING. He drew breakdancers and mushroom clouds and triclops and dicks and death and he drew Warhol’s envy. He painted on the Berlin Wall and on Bill T. Jones and on Grace Jones. He painted CRACK IS WACK and SILENCE = DEATH. He smuggled SAMO into SVA to tag the school’s graffiti-blitzed stairwell. His chalk ikons perfused Ed Koch’s decrepit metro, scrawled on seemingly every empty ad space. They called him Chalkman and the Degas of the B-boys, they called him genius and sellout. Club 57, Danceteria, Area, the Roxy, the Pyramid, the Palladium, the Mudd Club, Paradise Garage. Uniqlo, Coach, Nike.

“The first believable twentieth-century halo,” one critic called his Radiant Baby, that eureka light bulb of an infant. “It looks as if it’s always been there,” wrote Rene Ricard of the signature tag in “The Radiant Child,” his 1981 Artforum essay on East Village art now best known for boosting Jean-Michel Basquiat to greater prominence. “If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel,” Ricard surmised. And if Dubuffet had a tryst with Warhol, their radiant child would be Keith, his “primitive” Pop flowing from a seemingly endless élan vital cut short by the artist’s death at thirty-one from aids, in 1990. Thirty-four years later, everybody knows his name. But do we still believe that halo?

More here.

Debasish Roy Chowdhury at Project Syndicate:

Indians tend to fetishize elections, which now wholly define their self-imagination as a democratic society, obscuring other institutional necessities. The carnivalesque quality of the world’s biggest electoral process hides a bitter truth: this year’s elaborate exercise in offering the franchise to 970 million people has all the hallmarks of a despotic election. The voting is not overtly rigged (as in Russia’s farcical polls), but the playing field is tilted decisively in favor of the ruling party. The chances of an electoral upset have not been eliminated, just sharply minimized.

More here.

Not With a Bang

There was not even nothing
before there was anything,
then everything entered
all at once, a great chord,
all of the notes and all of
the almost-notes between – yes,
all at once.
………… So the universe
began not with percussion,
but the whole orchestra
tuning in a marvelous
cacophony before the show.

Then Maestro Space-Time
entered, opened the score
of Whatever-Will-Be
and raised his baton.

by Nils Peterson
from All the Marvelous Stuff
Poetry Center San José, 2019

Justina Buskaitė in the European Review of Books:

Lithuania has lost the Eurovision Song Contest thirty times. The first loss, in 1994, was awarded to Ovidijus Vysniauskas’ « Lopšinė mylimai » (Lullaby for my lover). The ballad about a secret love, worthy of a soundtrack to a Kevin Costner romance, received nul points and placed absolute last, disqualifying Lithuania from the next year’s contest and prophesying the three decades to come. (I count disqualification as a second loss rather than a continuation of the first loss. I also count withdrawals as losses.)

There are different ways we could count. Since 1994, Lithuania has had 24 entries, out of which:

☞ seven failed to qualify for the Eurovision final;
☞ eight placed at the bottom half of all the entries;
☞ three have placed so low that Lithuania was disqualified from competing in the next year’s contest;
☞ three have made it to the top 10!
☞ zero have been close to the podium.

Lithuania withdrew from Eurovision after the trauma of « Lopšinė mylimai » and only returned in 1999, with an entry sung entirely in Samogitian, a Western Lithuanian dialect, which then disqualified Lithuania from competing in 2000. But Lithuania has lost Eurovision not only in standard Lithuanian and Samogitian: we’ve lost in English and French, and with scattered losing lyrics in German, Russian, and American Sign Language.

More here.

Ron Barrett in The Conversation:

Since 2000, the world has experienced 15 novel Ebola epidemics, the global spread of a 1918-like influenza strain and major outbreaks of three new and unusually deadly coronavirus infections: SARS, MERS and, of course, COVID-19. Every year, researchers discover two or three entirely new pathogens: the viruses, bacteria and microparasites that sicken and kill people.

While some of these discoveries reflect better detection methods, genetic studies confirm that most of these pathogens are indeed new to the human species. Even more troubling, these diseases are appearing at an increasing rate.

Despite the novelty of these particular infections, the primary factors that led to their emergence are quite ancient. Working in the field of anthropology, I have found that these are primarily human factors: the ways we feed ourselves, the ways we live together, and the ways we treat one another. In a forthcoming book, “Emerging Infections: Three Epidemiological Transitions from Prehistory to the Present,” my colleagues and I examine how these same elements have influenced disease dynamics for thousands of years.

More here.

Joseph Lawler in The New Atlantis:

Interstate 35 through Austin, Texas, is the most congested stretch of road in the fastest-growing city in one of the sprawliest states in the country.

Yet the Texas Department of Transportation’s plan to expand the highway starting this year faces opposition from a well-organized contingent of local activists. They argue that the expansion will fail to reduce congestion because it will only coax more drivers onto the road — an effect known in urban and transportation policy circles as “induced demand.”

The opponents of the expansion are mostly a speck of blue in a red state, where the vast majority of people are not conflicted about car-dependent lifestyles. And the activists have failed to stop the project, pending a last-ditch lawsuit. But they are part of a nationwide movement aiming to limit highway construction that has gained strength in recent years.

The controversy extends well beyond the question of whether highway expansion reduces congestion — it’s part of a low-level culture war over how cities should form and grow.

More here.

Francesco Pacifico in Paris Review:

LAHIRI

In my life in English, so to speak, there’s a sense that if I don’t hit a certain benchmark, I’ve failed. That’s the judgment I’ve felt from American culture from the start—the expectation to assimilate, and then, when I became a writer, to “represent” the Indian American experience, the immigrant experience. Then there’s the eternal, original judgment—of my mother, my parents, their immigrant community, their many friends with advanced degrees. Theirs was a language of comparison and competition, everyone striving to establish themselves and get ahead. And there’s the overhanging judgment, of the world my parents left behind in Kolkata. All of which I internalized.

INTERVIEWER

It’s interesting—in your books in English, the family is a totalizing force, but you’ve put solitary women at the center of your Italian books.

LAHIRI

Thank you, Dr. Pacifico—maybe that’s because it’s only in Italian that I feel I’m at the center of myself.

More here.

Rachael Gorman in The Scientist:

The retina is layered with photoreceptors, a variety of other neurons, and protective and structural membranes, but retinal disorders can tamper with this delicate system. Mutations in the Crumbs homolog 1 (CRB1) gene disrupt the integrity of retinal membranes, leading to the gradual loss of photoreceptors. CRB1 mutations associate with multiple retinal diseases, including Leber congenital amaurosis and retinitis pigmentosa. However, since each patient’s disease presents differently, with various types, numbers, and locations of retinal lesions, some scientists suspect that environmental factors interact with the CRB1 gene to influence how disease manifests.

A new study published in Cell demonstrated one way that the environment modifies the phenotype of mice with a CRB1 mutation.¹ Researchers showed that CRB1 degradation triggers both a leaky colon epithelial barrier and a leaky retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) barrier in the mice, allowing bacteria to pass from the gut into the bloodstream, and then into the eye, damaging the retina.

More here.

Michael O’Donnell at The Millions:

Auster spoke in a rolling purr that was equal parts seduction and lament. His voice sounded like cognac poured over stones instead of ice. In narrating 4321, he covered the whole range of human experience: birth, death, illness, sex, hope, failure, parents, children, revolution, and disillusion, all against the noisy backdrop of the midcentury American colossus. In an eerie parallel, one of the novel’s subplots deals with the student protests at Columbia University in 1968, which have been repeating themselves in a different context this spring. As a result of his constant presence, the topicality of his subject matter, I felt a keen pang of the false intimacy that sometimes strikes when celebrities die. I had listened to Auster speak for nearly the entire month of April. It is dreadful to know that his voice in all senses has been silenced. 4321 explores the life and times of a young man named Archie Ferguson born in 1947 to a Jewish family in Newark. The novel tells four diverging stories of a single individual in parallel chapters. The Archie described in chapters 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, and so on, is born into a stable family with loving parents who occupy traditional gender roles and harbor modest aspirations.

more here.

Julia Prewitt Brown at Salmagundi:

Human spontaneity in Lawrence’s work—and indeed in his life as well—is not the simple, cheerful business that popular culture has often made it out to be. Think of those TV commercials in which an office worker suddenly does something unexpected, like dancing down the corridor of his office, to the comical dismay of his fellow workers. In Lawrence, spontaneity is dangerous and sometimes destructive, but it is necessary to being truly alive. The force of spontaneous love prompted Lawrence to run off with a married woman, Frieda Richthofen Weekley, and Frieda would regret leaving her three children for the rest of her life. Throughout their relationship, Lawrence and Frieda suffered continual eruptions of hostility that left them in pieces, but the marriage endured. It’s not uncommon to read in Lawrence’s biographies sentences like this: “The tension between Frieda and Lawrence abated after she struck him with an earthenware plate…” Lawrence would make creative use of this fight in Women and Love, when Hermione strikes Birkin with a paperweight, “almost breaking his neck, and shattering his heart.”

more here.

Nicholas Dames & John Plotz at Public Books:

John Guillory is an award-winning teacher and scholar. His varied and influential work includes  Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (Columbia University Press, 1983) and the field-transforming Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (University of Chicago Press, 1993). His brilliant new book, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, argues that modern literary study remains anxious about the century-old professionalism that betrays the discipline’s relation to its amateur precursor, criticism. He discusses it here with John Plotz of Brandeis and Public Book’s coeditor in chief, Nicholas Dames. Dames is author of such prize-winning books as Amnesiac Selves (Oxford University Press, 2001) and The Physiology of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 2007), and most recently The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2023).

A longer version of this interview aired recently on Recall This Book, a podcast partnered with Public Books.

More here.

Veronique Greenwood in Quanta:

Every organism visible to the naked eye is a mass of genetically identical cells. Each of these multicellular creatures started as a single cell that divided countless times to produce its body. And while each cell contains the same genome, they express their DNA in a variety of ways, giving rise to specialized cells and tissues that perform different roles, such as skin, liver or immune cells. This complex multicellularity has evolved independently in at least five lineages: animals, land plants, brown algae, red algae and fungi.

As different as these multicellular creatures might be, their bodies are all composed of the same type of cell — eukaryotic cells, which enclose their DNA in a nucleus and possess energy-producing mitochondria. The much older prokaryotic cells, which make up the vast kingdoms of bacteria and archaea and whose cells lack these features, never got complex multicellularity off the ground. They have evolved primitive forms of multicellularity, such as colonies of photosynthetic cyanobacteria. But there they stop. Even with a 1.5-billion-year head start on eukaryotes, prokaryotes never evolved this other way of living.

Why?

More here.