Andrew Yamakawa Elrod in Phenomenal World:

In 1959, the leaders of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, now the OECD) appointed a Group of Independent Experts “to study the experience of rising prices” in the recent history of the advanced capitalist countries. Between the end of World War II and the termination of the Korean War conflict, economic planners had tolerated rising prices as an insurmountable consequence of postwar reconstruction and war-induced commodity speculation. These governments expected inflation to end as economies readjusted following the stalemate in Korea. “In the event, however,” the Group of Independent Experts wrote in their final report, “rising prices proved to be a continuing problem.”

The OECD report classified four causes to the inflation of the 1950s: rising wages, monopolistic pricing, excess demand, and what they called “special prices”—those influenced, for example, by foreign governments, bad harvests, or the lifting of government price controls.

At a moment when inflation control is back on the agenda, it is worth observing just how little consensus existed—during a period remembered for its supposed social cohesion and intellectual conformity—on these ostensibly technical concerns. By 1961, when the study group released its final report, its members were not even able to agree on concrete findings regarding the causes of inflation.

More here.

Richard Brody in The New Yorker:

I’m not at the Cannes Film Festival, but a few days ago the festival came to me, at a New York screening of a movie that premièred today at Cannes. The film is James Gray’s “Armageddon Time,” which is of local and national interest, and which makes the connection between the local and the national its very subject. It’s an essentially autobiographical film, set in 1980, in the Queens neighborhood where Gray grew up, and it’s centered on a crucial turn of the historical screw. The movie’s big idea is that the racist and xenophobic political madness that has overtaken the United States in the Trump era has its roots in Donald Trump’s home turf of Queens.

In “Armageddon Time,” the personal is tragically political, and vice versa. The movie is a coming-of-age story in which the young protagonist’s maturation comes at an unbearably high price, at the intersection of privilege and guilt; it’s both a horror story and a tale of a debt that can never be paid; it’s a New York secular-Jewish story that resounds with a quasi-Biblical weight of moral responsibility. Among recent films, “Armageddon Time” most resembles a cross between the Safdie brothers’ “Good Time” (also set in Queens) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza”: like “Good Time,” its overwhelming subject is the presumption and the power of white privilege, and, like “Licorice Pizza,” it delves into the infinitesimal details of memory to rediscover the spirit of the past.

More here.

Tracks

Night, two o’clock: moonlight. The train has stopped
in the middle of the plain. Distant bright points of a town
twinkle cold on the horizon.

As when someone has gone into a dream so far
that he’ll never remember that he was there
when he comes back to his room.

As when someone goes into a sickness so deep
that all his former days become twinkling points, a swarm,
cold and feeble on the horizon.

The train stands perfectly still.
Two o’clock: full moonlight, few stars.

by Tomas Tranströmer 
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996

Benjamin Moser in The New York Times:

Last fall, I made my first visit to London since the start of the pandemic. A routine commuter flight from Europe felt like a great adventure, and once I’d jumped through the bureaucratic hoops, I was excited to arrive. But the city looked disappointingly unchanged after everything the world had gone through. The only thing that really shocked me was something I hadn’t expected: hearing people speaking English. After two years away from it, I had never felt so moved to encounter my own language.

Hearing a mother tongue is like stepping into a warm bath. But one of the disquieting discoveries that studying foreign languages brings is the awareness that your own can be a trap. By providing a steady drip of prefabricated words and ideas, your only tool for thinking and feeling can just as easily become a tool for not thinking, for not feeling; and when forced to do without those words and ideas, you realize how many of your so-called thoughts are nothing more than clichés grafted onto you by the language with which you grew up. In “Translating Myself and Others,” the Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri traces a journey away from the automatisms of English.

When she was 45, Lahiri decided to begin writing in Italian. Her choice was considered mystifying, eccentric: “Why Italian instead of an Indian language, a closer language, more like you?” Yet the whole point, of course, was to be less like her — less trapped by unconscious accretions of unthinking. Italian, for her, was an entirely learned language. “Nothing came to me naturally; I had to pay my dues,” she writes.

More here.

Dwight Garner at the NYT:

It was if he’d stepped, steaming, out of a Tom of Finland drawing. “My definition of tit for tat,” he wrote, is: “You lick my tattoo while I handle your nipple.”

In the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, a friend came across Gunn in Golden Gate Park, this book tells us in a footnote. It was very hot, and Gunn was otherwise shirtless in a chain mail vest. “There was his hairy chest and then hot metal burning into his skin, his flesh,” the friend reported. “He was trying to look very nonchalant but he was obviously being crucified. It was horrible. But he wouldn’t take it off because it would’ve spoiled the whole look of the thing.”

These details, in general, won’t surprise anyone who kept up with Gunn’s poetry, which was metrically sophisticated and dealt sometimes with earthy topics such as LSD, the Hell’s Angels, sex and its itchy discontents, and gay culture writ large.

more here.

Kent Russell at The Believer:

A little while ago, I was searching the web for the man who best embodied the dictum “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” I was looking for someone who thought he’d succeeded in fortifying his inborn weaknesses, who believed he had bunged the holes left by God. I discovered Tim among the self-immunizers. They’re this community of a couple dozen white, Western males who systematically shoot up increasing doses of exotic venoms so as to inure their immune systems to the effects. Many of these men handle venomous snakes for business or pleasure, so there’s a practical benefit to their regimen. A few prefer instead to work their way from snakes to scorpions to spiders, voiding creatures’ power over them. Most seem to be autodidacts of the sort whose minds recoil at the notion of a limitation deliberately accepted—something I sympathized with, being myself an unfinished, trial creature. On their message boards, Tim talked the biggest medicine.

Their practice of self-immunization has a great old name: mithridatism.

more here.

Winter Dawn

The men and beasts of the zodiac
Have marched over us once more.
Green wine bottles and red lobster shells,
Both emptied, litter the table.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot?” Each
Sits listening to his own thoughts,
And the sound of cars starting outside.
The birds in the eaves are restless,
Because of the noise and light. Soon now
In the winter dawn I will face
My fortieth year. Borne headlong
Towards the long shadows of sunset
By the headstrong, stubborn moments,
Life whirls past, like drunken wildfire.

by Tu Fu
translated by Kenneth Rexroth
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

From the Dynomight blog: You, Your Parents, And The Hotness Of Who You Marry.

They start with a traditional situation: some romance novel heroine wants to marry a tall, dark stranger. But her parents want her to marry a much older nobleman/doctor/engineer who can provide her with a stable income. Or the gender-flipped version: the young man courts a beautiful debutante, while his parents try to force him to marry the plain-faced daughter of their business partner.

Evolutionary psychology has pat explanations for both sides here. People want attractive partners because attraction correlates with health, fertility, and status (eg the debutante’s wide hips and large breasts mean she’ll be able to give birth and nurse effectively; the stranger’s height means he must be strong and healthy). But people also want wealthy partners from good families, because they’ll be able to give more resources to the children.

Dynomight’s question is: why do the suitors and the parents disagree here? Everyone involved (evolutionarily) wants the same thing: lots of healthy, successful descendants.

More here.

Ben Brubaker in Quanta:

Scientific progress has been inseparable from better measurements.

Before 1927, only human ingenuity seemed to limit how precisely we could measure things. Then Werner Heisenberg discovered that quantum mechanics imposes a fundamental limit on the precision of some simultaneous measurements. The better you pin down a particle’s position, for instance, the less certain you can possibly be about its momentum. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle put an end to the dream of a perfectly knowable world.

In the 1980s, physicists began to glimpse a silver lining around the cloud of quantum uncertainty. Quantum mechanics, they learned, can be harnessed to aid measurement rather than hinder it — the thesis of a growing discipline known as quantum metrology.

More here.

Arie Kruglanski in The Conversation:

The idea that committing atrocities and killing innocent victims reflects mental illness has been long discarded by terrorism researchers like me. The over 40,000 foreign fighters who joined the Islamic State organization to kill and die weren’t all mentally disturbed, nor were the mass shooters who in the first 19 weeks of 2022 managed to carry out nearly 200 attacks on U.S. soil.

There is a mental and psychological dimension to the problem, to be sure, but it is not illness or pathology. It is the universal human quest for significance and respect – the mother, I believe, of all social motives.

More here.

Saugat Bolakhe in Discover Magazine:

After his grandfather suffered a spinal cord injury in a car accident, Chris Dulla wondered how his wounded brain cells would repair themselves. So when Dulla learned in medical school two decades ago that star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes support neurons and play a vital role in injury response and recovery, he felt the urge to dive deeper into the topic.

Dulla, who is currently an associate professor of neuroscience at Tufts University, has now discovered a fundamental characteristic of these cells that may transform our understanding of the brain. The recent research suggests that astrocytes don’t just serve as support structures as scientists previously thought. Instead, they are electrically active and in constant communication with neurons, as Dulla and colleagues reported in a Nature Neuroscience study. This finding could lead to innovative treatments for conditions like schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.

More here.

Lydia Denworth in Scientific American:

Imagine there were no Beatles—or that there was no Beatlemania anyway and that the lads from Liverpool were just another band that never got a record deal or that split up before they hit it big. That is the premise Harvard University professor Cass R. Sunstein ponders in an entertaining and thought-provoking essay to be published in September in the first issue of the Journal of Beatles Studies. (A preliminary draft was posted online early this year.)

The fact that there could be an academic journal devoted just to John, Paul, George and Ringo is emblematic of how popular and influential the Beatles are. Many assume they were destined for greatness. “It was just a matter of time,” said John Lennon in a 1980 interview. But maybe not. Early on, record executives were unimpressed (“The boys won’t go,” they told manager Brian Epstein). And the group did almost split up. Its members were carried along their winding road by an unusually enthusiastic manager (Epstein), a risk-taking producer (George Martin), a big local fan base, and more. “They were, at the crucial time, better than excellent,” says Sunstein, who is a fan as well as a legal and policy scholar at Harvard Law School. Nevertheless, it is quite possible that “if seven or 17 things had gone differently, the Beatles wouldn’t have made it.”

More here.

Priyamvada Gopal in Prospect:

On the back cover of Tariq Ali’s new book on Winston Churchill, a less flattering and so less familiar portrait of the wartime icon comes into view. Here, the man voted the Greatest Briton ever by over a million of his compatriots in 2002 fulminates against everything from women’s suffrage and liberal causes to “international Jews,” “uncivilised tribes” and “people with slit eyes and pigtails.” Ali also alludes to Churchill’s approval of the Conservative slogan “Keep England White”—at the same time MPs like Fenner Brockway were bringing the Race Discrimination Bill to parliament—and includes an extract from the cringeworthy praise he heaped on Mussolini in 1927. Such pronouncements will not be new to anyone familiar with the subject, but to invoke them in rarefied British company is usually to elicit the dismissive claim that they are not representative of Churchill or that they were simply “of their time.” “Nobody’s perfect” goes the more casual response, as if a view of the world in which Anglo-Saxons were “a higher grade race” entitled to rule the rest was simply a charming upper-class foible.

Nobody’s perfect, indeed, but not everyone had the power to make such a worldview consequential for the lives of millions of people across the globe, often lethally so. At the heart of Ali’s account is this historical reality, one that is evaded in Britain today in favour of a burnished and bullish mythology in which both Churchill and his beloved British Empire emerge with untarnished courage and virtue.

More here.

Bobak Parang in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“No cancer patient should die without trying immunotherapy” is a refrain in oncology clinics across the country right now. A treatment consisting of antibodies that awaken the immune system to attack cancer, immunotherapy carries far more promise than chemotherapy, and it has considerably fewer side effects. Since the FDA’s first approval a decade ago, it has revolutionized cancer care. Consider Stage IV non-small cell lung cancer. Twenty years ago, when the only option was chemotherapy, oncologists could tell their patient, with almost 100 percent certainty, that they would not be alive in two years. Today, miraculously, many patients with Stage IV lung cancer are alive five years after diagnosis — and some are even cured.

But the rub is that this immunotherapy revolution applies only to a narrow set of patients. Some benefit, but the majority do not. And patients who are cured constitute an even smaller minority. Why is this?

More here.

Emily Stewart in Vox:

In recent weeks, I spoke with nearly two dozen people in, adjacent to, and critical of the crypto space about what they envision to be the purpose of crypto. What emerged was a picture that was simultaneously murky and clarifying, in that there’s not one good answer. Some of what it does is promising; a lot of what it does — even boosters admit — is trash, and trash that’s costing some people a lot of money. This probably isn’t the death knell for crypto — it’s gone through plenty of boom and bust cycles in the past. It would be unwise to definitively say that crypto has no chance of being a game changer; it would also be disingenuous to claim it is now.

Crypto is a solution in search of a problem, or rather, problems. And at the moment, it’s hard not to wonder whether it is, instead, creating more problems than it’s worth.

More here.

The Long Road Home

—a poem for Muhammed Ali

I am Beginning to Comprehend
the mystery
of the gift of suffering.
It is true as some
have said
that it is a crucible
in which the gold of one’s spirit
is rendered
and shines.

Ali,
you represent all of us
who stand the test of suffering
most often alone
because who can understand
who or what
has brought us to our feet?

Their knees worn out
ancestors stood us up
from the awkward position
they had to honor
on the floor beneath
the floor.

I have been weeping
all day
Thinking of this.
The cloud of witness
the endless teaching
the long road home.

by Alice Walker
from Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart
Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., 2016

Peter C. Baker at The New Yorker:

“Now we’re old with creaking bones,” Stuart Murdoch, the front man of the Scottish band Belle and Sebastian, sings on “Young and Stupid,” the jaunty opening track of its new album, “A Bit of Previous.” The lyric feels less like a resigned lament than a jubilant mission statement—a declaration that it’s possible for a band widely associated with youthful languor to successfully train its sensibilities on the indignities and forced epiphanies of middle age. The album is full of references to aging, parenting, and nostalgia for youth, but also to some new orientation to life, one that takes its finitude a touch more seriously. “This is my life,” Murdoch sings in the chorus of “Unnecessary Drama.” He sounds a little shocked. “This is my only life.”

Like many (maybe most) Belle and Sebastian fans, I fell in love with the band on the basis of the trio of albums—“Tigermilk,” “If You’re Feeling Sinister,” “The Boy with the Arab Strap”—that it released from 1996 to 1998.

more here.