Ian Rose at JSTOR Daily:

One hundred years ago, in 1922, the American musician and scholar W. B. Olds contributed to this debate with “Bird-Music,” an essay whose very title itself demonstrates his position. Olds makes the case that not only is birdsong music, but it’s uniquely beautiful and powerful. To him, each species of bird is a star in its own right, and he gives special mention to a few common American birds; the field sparrow’s song is “a perfect accelerando,” while the song of the white-throated sparrow compels him to ask, “Where is there to be heard a finer legato or more definite rhythm?” Above all, Olds seems most inspired by the tiny ruby-crowned kinglet: “It seems scarcely believable that such a cascade of sparkling tones, extremely high in pitch but wonderfully clear, could proceed from so small a throat. The musician who has not heard it has something to live for.”

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Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

Grief is painful. We all know that. But Is there a “good grief”? Eminent essayist and man of letters Joseph Epstein discusses grief, theoretically and from personal experience, including the devastating loss of his son by opioid overdose, as well as departed relatives and friends in his essay, “Good Grief” in Commentary. Like him, I haven’t experienced the legendary “five states of grief,” which I see as an attempt to organize and manage grief, which is by its nature tormenting, chaotic, unpredictable.

Socrates argued that we should keep death foremost in our minds, and that our inevitable deaths will goad us to live better lives. “But no one has told us how to deal with the deaths of those we love or found important to our own lives. Or at least no one has done so convincingly,” he writes. A few excerpts:

Like death itself, grief is too manifold; it comes in too many forms to be satisfactorily captured by philosophy or psychology. How does one grieve a slow death by, say, cancer, ALS, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s; a quick death by heart attack, stroke, choking on food, car accident; death at the hands of a criminal, which in our day is often a random death; death at a person’s own hands by suicide; death in old age, middle age, childhood; death in war; yes, death by medicine tragically misapplied. Grief can take the form of anger, even rage, deep sorrow, confusion, relief; it can be long-lived, short-term, almost but never quite successfully avoided. The nature of grief is quite as highly variegated as its causes.

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Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker:

It wasn’t until my mid-forties that I began to write about the world of medicine. Before that, I was busy building a career as a hematologist-oncologist: caring for patients with blood diseases, cancer, and, later, aids; establishing a research laboratory; publishing papers; training junior physicians. A doctor’s workload tends to crowd out everything but the most immediate concerns. But, as the years pass, the things you’ve pushed to the back of your mind start to pile up, demanding to be addressed. For two decades, I had seen my patients and their loved ones face some of life’s most uncertain moments, and I now felt driven to bear witness to their stories.

After writing and revising three chapters of what I envisioned as my first book, I showed a draft to my wife, an endocrinologist. She read them, and then looked at me squarely. “They’re awful,” she said. I was taken aback. I’d felt pretty good about what I had produced. “They’re overwritten, with run-on sentences, filled with fancy words,” she explained. I stayed silent, absorbing her criticism. “I can’t really figure out what you’re trying to say here.”

I reread my words and concluded that she was right. What’s more, I realized that many of the problems with my draft reflected the conditioning that occurs during medical training. I had used technical jargon, as if communicating with colleagues, rather than addressing a general reader. And I had removed myself from the stories, a result of the psychological distancing needed to remain steady while helping a patient coping with a life-threatening disease. Finally, I’d focussed on the clinical details of the cases, instead of exploring patients’ emotional and spiritual dilemmas—the very thing that had moved me to write in the first place.

More here.

Gala

……… One evening the summer sun isn’t enough

We, poets from the South & West, in the US sense of the words,
and the East, in the global sense, walked through a blade of Vermont,
in sunglasses, in lace-up boots, in zigzag, in jeans, commenting on

……… a beauty so murderous and magical it emancipated
some of us hundreds of years ago, for us to hear, You should feel lucky
to be in this country. One of us looks out at the rows of yellow flowers
and says, Can you imagine arriving at land like this, thinking, How beautiful—

I’m going to take it? Which reminded me of another friend, this time in Paris,
looking around its gilded splendor to say, Look what Empire is capable of.

Which reminded me of another friend, this one from Paris, looking down
at Seoul from a gold observatory to say, It’s kind of ugly. & it felt as if he had said I am.

One evening of summer in Vermont,
we are beauty in sunglasses and embroidery and flower crown and plaid, cocktails,
our languages in our hands. Delicious & loud. We are at a gala
for writers. What does “gala” even mean, one of us asks,
to which another one says, I think it’s a kind of party, to which
the first one says, No, motherfucker, I want the etymology. & we flare in laughter.

Two years later I consult The Online Etymology Dictionary to see gala (n.) 
1620s, “festive dress or attire” (obsolete), from French en gala,
perhaps from Old French gale “merriment,” from galer “rejoice, make merry” (see gallant).

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Gabriel Pokin in Science:

CHILE’S VILLARRICA NATIONAL PARK—As a motley medley of mycologists climbed the basalt slopes of the Lanín volcano earlier this year, the green foliage at lower elevations gave way to autumnal golds and reds. Chile’s famed Araucaria—commonly called monkey puzzle trees—soon appeared, their spiny branches curving jauntily upward like so many cats’ tails. Beneath the majestic trees, the scientists were focused on something far less glamorous—indeed, mostly invisible: mycorrhizal fungi, tiny organisms that intertwine with roots of the Araucaria and nearly all the other plants in this forest. The multinational research team had come to collect soil samples they hoped would, with help from DNA testing, reveal exactly which fungi live here, and how they support this complex assemblage of flora. By the end of an exhausting day that included bushwhacking through heavy brush, the fungi hunters had filled seven small plastic sacks with dirt from different locations. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are 100 undescribed species” of fungi in each bag, said mycologist Giuliana Furci, founder of the Chilean nonprofit Fungi Foundation and one of the expedition leaders.

The April ascent was also a road test of sorts: the first of many surveys that the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), a new fungus-focused nonprofit, hopes to conduct. It has raised some $3.5 million for an ambitious effort to map the global distribution of mycorrhizal fungi, which can create subterranean networks that are thought to play a key, but often overlooked, role in shaping ecosystems. “Up to 50% of the living biomass of soils are these networks,” says ecologist Toby Kiers of VU Amsterdam, a co-founder of SPUN and one of the leaders of the Chile expedition. “We have to figure out where they are and what they’re doing.”

More here.

Brian D. Earp in New Humanist:

For many generations in societies shaped by Christianity, monogamy has been the almost undisputed champion of relationship norms. In Britain and the US, it has been held up as the dominant – really the only – ideal for serious romantic partnerships, toward which all of us should always be striving. According to the authors of a 2019 article in Archives of Sexual Behavior, focused on the US context, a “halo surrounds monogamous relationships . . . monogamous people are perceived to have various positive qualities based solely on the fact they are monogamous.” Other relationship models, or even just being persistently single, have often been seen as suspect, if not morally wrong.

Things are starting to change, though. Progressives, at least, increasingly exhibit a greater open-mindedness about intimate pairings that are not expected to be exclusive. There is growing awareness of alternatives to monogamy, such as polyamory: roughly, valuing or engaging in more than one sexual or romantic relationship at a time.

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Lea Booth in Quillette:

Germans call it Energiewende (“energy transition”), and they aim to decarbonize their economy and lead the world by replacing their fossil fuel and nuclear plants with renewable energy. Germany is the first major nation to undertake such an effort, and, as hoped for, their early adoption of renewables has catalyzed a spectacular drop in costs for those technologies. A reporter summed up German attitudes towards the Energiewende, writing, “Germans would then at last feel that they have gone from being world-destroyers in the 20th century to world-saviors in the 21st.”

The Energiewende gained legislative support in 2010, and Germany spent nearly 202 billion euros on renewable energy projects from 2013 to 2020. Since 2010, the share of German electricity generation that has come from solar and wind power has risen from 8 percent to 31 percent, no small feat.

Yet Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has laid bare critical weaknesses in German energy policy. Before the war in Ukraine, Germany received 55 percent of its natural gas imports from Russia. While that percentage has fallen since the war began, the European Union chose not to ban Russian gas imports because gas is so crucial to EU nations like Germany. Unsurprisingly, Putin has been using Russia’s gas flows to exert influence over Germany and the EU.

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Martha Bayles in The Hedgehog Review:

Published in 1953, The Captive Mind remains possibly the best book ever written about the lure and trap of totalitarian ideology. In his riveting collection of linked essays, the great poet Czesław Miłosz probed the motivations of Polish writers and intellectuals (Miłosz, at one time, included) who joined the Communist regime after World War II. The rewards of the book begin with its epigraph, which Miłosz attributes to “An Old Jew of Galicia”:

When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.¹

Where Miłosz found this epigraph, I cannot say. But it resonates today, in large part because the old Jew he quotes is from Galicia, the medieval name for a region stretching from eastern Poland to western Ukraine, whose principal city, Lviv, is now overflowing with refugees fleeing a scorched-earth invasion ordered by a twenty-first-century fanatic claiming to be 100 percent right.

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Beatrice Loayza at The Current:

In the first half of her career, Delphine Seyrig seemed to float above reality. To watch her in films by Alain Resnais and Luis Buñuel is to feel hypnotized, to be compelled to reach out and touch her, only to grasp at thin air. It was not until almost fifteen years into her life in the spotlight that she was brought down to earth, by her stripped-down performance as the widowed housewife and part-time prostitute in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). That role helped unshackle the actor from her ethereal persona, but it was her second collaboration with the Belgian filmmaker that truly set her free.

In the effervescent and bittersweet shopping-mall romance Golden Eighties, Seyrig plays another Jeanne—Jeanne Schwartz, a Jewish woman who runs a clothing store. Like Dielman, the character is a dutiful mother to a self-absorbed young man.

more here.

Barnaby Crowcroft at Literary Review:

In Arabia Through the Looking Glass, when he wasn’t comparing everything to Alice in Wonderland, Jonathan Raban likened his experiences in the Gulf States at the height of the 1970s oil boom to passing through a ‘time loop’ into Britain at the heyday of the Industrial Revolution. Today – in polite academic circles, at least – it would constitute a major faux pas to compare the societies of the Middle East with those at some earlier stage of Western historical development. Yet, forty years on, one gains a strikingly similar impression from John McManus’s picture of life in 21st-century Qatar, from the outsized ambition, the extraordinary rate of economic growth and the transformation of the urban environment to the dreadful working conditions, the open racial hierarchies and the persistence of traditional rentier elites. To venture ‘inside Qatar’ in 2022, as McManus puts it, is to get a ‘glimpse of life at the coalface of globalisation’.

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April White in Slate:

Flora Bigelow Dodge had not traveled to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in January 1903 for the same reason so many women of her acquaintance had. She did not do anything for the same reason other women did—at least not if you believed the newspapers. A fixture in the society pages, Flora was the “most daring, most original, cleverest woman in New York.” She was a wonderful musician, a graceful dancer, an expert horsewoman, and a captivating storyteller, an author of plays and short stories. She was “both courageous and imaginative.” She was witty, ambitious, generous, and beautiful, a woman of “unusual individuality” with a retinue of admirers.

She was also unhappy.

After 16 years of marriage to Charlie Dodge, son of the Dodge family, well-known for its lumber and mining fortune, 34-year-old Flora wanted a divorce—one which would be denied to her in her home state of New York unless she could furnish proof of adultery. And so she traveled west to join the “divorce colony,” as newspapermen called the sorority of dissatisfied wives who moved to South Dakota at the turn of the twentieth century to take advantage of the laxest divorce laws in the country.

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Jeanne Erdmann in Nature:

Zion Levy remembers the excitement that he and his daughter felt while poring over body scans in 2019, watching small black dots, representing melanoma metastases, shrink away and eventually vanish. They weren’t Levy’s scans. He didn’t even know who the scans came from, but he did share a connection with them.

About five years earlier, Levy had been diagnosed with melanoma, but he was in remission thanks to a powerful immunotherapy called nivolumab. Because he had responded well to the drug, doctors at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer, Israel, asked whether he would consider donating his stool — and the microbes inside — to possibly help others who had failed to respond or whose cancers had become resistant to treatment. He agreed to rigorous tests, blood draws and detailed questions about what he ate most (pizza). Levy made his donation, packed it into a cooler, and then called a taxi hired by the hospital. As with any transplant, travel time mattered. Doctors wanted the sample to arrive in less than 90 minutes.

Once there, Levy’s faeces were tested for pathogens, diluted, homogenized, centrifuged and sifted down to a refined microbial broth that could be freeze-dried and packed into capsules. Levy’s enthusiasm for the project convinced Ben Boursi, an oncologist at the Sheba Medical Center, who was leading the study, to share the anonymized scans of a recipient of his donated microbes. Today, that person has gone more than three years without evidence of cancer and has become a donor in a similar melanoma-treatment trial. It’s a legacy that Levy feels good about. “I am very proud that I can save lives. I would like to do it again,” he says.

More here.

Arctic Wolf

—for three fine people

I
I told her I did not
Have a copy of All Things Must Pass
She found out I loved pretzels
When she came over my house
To visit,
She brought the boxed set of three albums
New, from the Record Exchange
A plastic coffer
Full of long pretzel sticks

II
After all these years
She held nothing against me
Shipped me a copy of a Pulitzer Prize winning
Short story collection
I read Interpreter of Maladies
Crafted a short story myself
After the stylistic aroma I gleaned
From Jhumpa Lahiri

III
She looked after my interest
Made suggestions where they seemed to fit
Burned me First Light CDs
Sent a Colin Hay video link
The frontman of Men at Work
Now a seasoned singer-songwriter

IV

I do not know
What I hold against love
I could not give any of the three
My heart, not for too long
Or in the way that was needed, or proper
Maybe it is true
I am an Arctic Wolf
Seven of them, in a dream
A scene in blue light, heaven, I gathered
They nipped at me playfully
I was blissful
A creature, happiest when alone
Like each one of them
I had found my pack

by Marc Steven Mannheimer

Matthew Shipe in The Common Reader:

Published by Thunder Bay Press, The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics: 1963-1970 offers an attractive, if strangely incomplete, collection of the lyrics that John, Paul, George, and (very rarely) Ringo produced during their 1960s heyday. The brevity of the Beatles’ career—seven short years from “Please Please Me” to “The Long and Winding Road”—remains the most mystifying element of the band, of how so much music poured out of the band in a remarkably brief amount of time. The Beatles Illustrated does not offer any answers or provide any new insight on the Fab Four’s magic—the commentary is limited to Steve Turner’s one-page introduction—but instead captures the bulk of the Beatles’ lyrics alongside some great photos of the band and illustrations that nicely compliment the songs.

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Beth Gardiner in Scientific American:

With its recent decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which reined in the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to address climate change, the Supreme Court wrote into precedent an idea that has been gaining traction for years in conservative legal circles. The concept, known as the “major questions” doctrine, holds that regulatory agencies may not take actions with wide-ranging economic impact unless Congress has specifically authorized them to do so.

The case concerned the powers granted by the Clean Air Act, the landmark 1970 law that— in the absence of legislation specifically dealing with climate change—has been the best tool available for checking greenhouse gas emissions. And while the Court now constrains the federal government’s power to tackle big issues, the Clean Air Act was designed to address just such “major questions”—including, explicitly in its text, questions yet to be understood when it was enacted.

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Lynzy Billing in Undark:

Anita’s case was far from unique. According to hospital records, the women’s ward in Herat saw 900 such cases that April. In 2021, the facility recorded 12,678 cases, up from 10,800 cases in 2020.

These mysterious ailments — often entailing loss of consciousness, convulsions, paralysis — have plagued girls and women in Afghanistan for more than a decade. Government officials, local media, and, often, the women themselves have described these events as poisonings, usually attributed to attacks by the Taliban or other militant groups. Doctors who review the cases have come to a different diagnosis: conversion disorder, part of a class of conditions called somatoform disorder.

Patients with somatoform disorder experience bodily symptoms with no apparent physical cause. Conversion disorder is a specific form in which a patient’s physical symptoms mimic a neurological disorder. The symptoms often follow a period of significant emotional or physical distress, and they are outside of the individual’s conscious control.

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Daniel Callcut in Psyche:

Suppose that I am polyamorous and that my mother disapproves. She tolerates my love life but thinks it’s wrong that I have not one partner but two. What her half-accepting, half-critical attitude reveals is a duality at the heart of toleration, an ambivalence that is beautifully captured by the British philosopher Bernard Williams (1929-2003). Toleration, for Williams, is a central ingredient in thinking through ‘what coexistence under conditions of fundamental disagreement requires’ (to use a helpful phrase from the philosopher Teresa Bejan).

To tolerate, as Williams stresses, is to be conflicted. Toleration involves putting up with something that you would rather not be the case. This doesn’t have to involve moral disapproval: perhaps you just can’t stand your colleague’s taste in music. But toleration is likely to be especially hard when what you experience is moral disapproval. After all, if you think that something is wrong, why not try to stop it happening?

Consider what is called for when one group of people in society (perhaps members of a religion) are asked to tolerate behaviour (perhaps polyamory) they consider sinful.

More here.