Abbas El-Zein in the Sydney Review of Books:

Arabic speakers are spoilt for choice when it comes to expressions of love. At least twenty-five Arabic words for different shades of love, affection and love-induced states of mind are in common usage, by my count. The actual number is said to be somewhere between fifty and one hundred, if formal Arabic words, less encountered in day-to-day speech, are included.

hub, hawaa, gharaam, walaa, hanaan, shaghaf, kalaf, shawq, walah, tatayyum, haneen …

No two words have the same meaning, and the vocabulary maps out a range of emotions, moods and relationships with the beloved, while conveying myriad kinds of love – sensual, carnal or chaste, profane or divine, joyful or melancholy.

From love as tenderness (atf or sababa), forlornness (wajd) or feelings of warmth towards someone (wod), through chaste (eeffa), eternal (rasseess) or unrequited (lajaa) love, to adulation (oshq), infatuation (wallah) and passionate love (hiaam). Love that leaves us burning is huraaq and love that stings is lathgh.

More here.

The Silence

What must a man do to be at home in the world?
There must be times when he is here
as though absent, gone beyond words into the woven
…… shadows
of the grass and the flighty darknesses
of leaves shaking in the wind, and beyond
the sense of the weariness of engines and of his own heart,
his wrongs grown old unforgiven. It must be with him
as though his bones fade beyond thought
into the shadows that grow out of the ground
so that the furrows he opens in the earth opens
in his bones, and he hears the silence
of the tongues of the dead tribesmen buried here
a thousand years ago. And then what presences will rise up
before him, weeds bearing flowers, and the dry wind
rain! What songs he will hear!

by Wendell Berry
from Farming-A Handbook
Harvest Books, 1970

Christine Smallwood at Bookforum:

Writing explicitly about sex is provocative. Being too interested in food would be tacky, domestic. Debré’s narrator is comfortable with the upper classes and the down-and-out—“when your parents are upper-class junkies, you get good training”—but with Agnès has her first experience of a member of the “petty bourgeoisie.” She’s cast off the comforts of her class position, but she’s still rich on the inside. She tries to get used to Agnès’s mannerisms—the phrases like “Oh shoot” and “the little ones,” the habit of taking one’s shoes off at the door—and can’t. She admits to speaking with a “snobby accent.” She’s related to duchesses on her mother’s side; her grandfather on her father’s side was the prime minister. (Debré doesn’t spell it out, but the reference is to Michel Debré, who held office for three years under de Gaulle, and drafted the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.) She loves filthy language, and bourgeois striving and planning make no sense to her. She lives cheaply and insists that her change of station involves real risk, casting aspersion on the middle-class assumption that “when your family name’s in the dictionary you must automatically have money invested in mutual funds.” She writes that making money “stresses me out,” that “it’s only when I’m poor and the bailiffs are on my ass that I feel like I’m where I belong.” She seeks extremity. But no bailiff actually comes to call. She’s “so rich that I don’t care about being poor.”

more here.

James Womack at Literary Review:

The billing of Until August as Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘dementia novel’ is a simplification. Although García Márquez’s last years were marked by a falling away of his powers, and his brother confirmed a diagnosis of dementia in 2012, the manuscript was largely finished by 2004. An earlier version of the story, in a translation by Edith Grossman rather than Anne McLean, appeared in the New Yorker in 1999. The book as a whole seems to have been put away once García Márquez realised that he couldn’t pull off his intended structure: five stories of similar length, all with the same protagonist. Readers who want to examine this slip of a book pruriently, as a chance to see the shattered visage of a once-great writer, should look elsewhere.

This is not to say that there aren’t issues with its publication, as the preface to this translation makes clear. García Márquez himself was blunt: ‘This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.’ 

more here.

Simon Schuster in Time:

In Russian custom, the soul of the dead is believed to remain on earth for forty days, finishing its business among the living before it moves on to the afterlife. Surviving friends and relatives often spend this period in mourning and reflection. But the loved ones of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading dissident, did not have much freedom to abide by this custom after he died in an Arctic prison camp on February 16.

For them, and especially for his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, the days and weeks that followed his death rushed by in a blur of studio lights, airport terminals, hotel rooms and video calls. Somewhere in that time, between consoling their two children and being consoled by them, she met with President Joe Biden in San Francisco and addressed the European parliament in Strasbourg. She accused Vladimir Putin of killing her husband, and she implored the Russian people to help her get revenge. Along the way, to the surprise of many of her husband’s followers, Navalnaya took on a role she had never occupied before — no longer the first lady of the Russian opposition, but now its figurehead.

More here.

From NY Langone News Hub:

An experimental drug already tested as a potential treatment for cancer, lung disease, and Alzheimer’s disease may slow the progression of atherosclerosis that leads to heart disease, a new study shows.

Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study explored the mechanisms behind atherosclerosis, in which fatty deposits build up in blood vessels. As this buildup hardens into plaques and causes misplaced immune reactions, known as inflammation, it can block blood flow, causing heart attack or stroke.

Published on June 8 in the journal Nature Cardiovascular Research, the new study showed that plasma, the liquid part of blood, from patients with atherosclerotic disease triggers an unusually high inflammatory signal in immune cells. Further experiments then showed that the drug saracatinib reduced this inflammation signaling by more than 90 percent in human blood samples and diseased tissue samples.

More here.

Sarah Lyall in the New York Times:

Last May, nine months after the knife attack that nearly killed him, Salman Rushdie made a surprise appearance at the 2023 PEN America literary gala. His voice was weak and he was noticeably thinner than usual; one of his eyeglass lenses was blacked out, because his right eye had been blinded in the assault. But anyone wondering whether the author was still his old exuberant self would have been immediately reassured by the way he began his remarks, with a racy impromptu joke.

“I want to remind people in the room who might not remember that ‘Valley of the Dolls’ was published in the same publishing season as Philip Roth’s ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’” he said, riffing on an earlier speaker’s mention of Jacqueline Susann’s potboiler. “And when Jacqueline Susann was asked what she thought about Philip Roth’s great novel” — with its enthusiastically self-pleasuring main character — “she said, ‘I think he’s very talented but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.’”

More here.

Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

In January 2022, researchers at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, reported that these systems, when accidentally allowed to munch on data for much longer than usual, developed unique ways of solving problems. Typically, when engineers build machine learning models out of neural networks — composed of units of computation called artificial neurons — they tend to stop the training at a certain point, called the overfitting regime. This is when the network basically begins memorizing its training data and often won’t generalize to new, unseen information. But when the OpenAI team accidentally trained a small network way beyond this point, it seemed to develop an understanding of the problem that went beyond simply memorizing — it could suddenly ace any test data.

The researchers named the phenomenon “grokking,” a term coined by science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein to mean understanding something “so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed.”

More here.

Annie Jacobsen in New Scientist:

As an investigative journalist, I write about war, weapons, national security and government secrets. I’ve previously written six books about US military and intelligence programmes – at the CIA, The Pentagon, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency– all designed to prevent, or deter, nuclear world war III. In the course of my work, countless people in the upper echelons of US government have told me, proudly, that they’ve dedicated their lives to making sure the US never has a nuclear war. But what if it did?

“Every capability in the [Department of Defense] is underpinned by the fact that strategic deterrence will hold,” US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which is responsible for nuclear deterrence, insists publicly. Until the autumn of 2022, this promise was pinned on STRATCOM’s public Twitter feed. But to a private audience at Sandia National Laboratories later that same year, STRATCOM’s Thomas Bussiere admitted the existential danger inherent to deterrence. “Everything unravels itself if those things are not true.”

If deterrence fails – what exactly would that unravelling look like?

More here.

Nick Hunt in Noema:

Returning home after being away for any length of time is strange. The Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta, who journeyed 70,000 miles across much of the 14th-century Islamic world, wrote that “traveling gives you home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.” I’d venture that all travelers, whether they have been away for years, months or only weeks, know something of this estrangement. What gap year student hasn’t returned from their rite-of-passage journey to find that the “gap” now lies between them and their former life? This peculiar dislocation — a kind of out-of-body experience — might wear off after several days, or it might last much longer.

For me it lasted for at least the same period as my absence. During that time I tried and failed to slot back into my old life, but everything seemed misaligned. The familiar sights around me had become foreign. One of the most confounding things was that my mental map of London — a city I’d learned street by street in the era before Google Maps, cycling for hours each day with a battered A-Z map — had completely vanished, as if the data had been wiped. I constantly found myself lost in neighborhoods I had known for years.

This cartographic distortion was accompanied by a temporal one. Travel, as has often been noted, has a warping effect on time, elongating it in some ways while compressing it in others. Like Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the bigger the journey and the greater its gravitational pull on the trajectory of your life, the more the temporal field around it seems to become dilated. It can feel like you’ve been gone for a lifetime and have changed irrevocably, and yet when you return, time has apparently stood still.

More here.

Paula Span in The New York Times:

Determining whether someone has Alzheimer’s disease usually requires an extended diagnostic process. A doctor takes a patient’s medical history, discusses symptoms, administers verbal and visual cognitive tests. The patient may undergo a PET scan, an M.R.I. or a spinal tap — tests that detect the presence of two proteins in the brain, amyloid plaques and tau tangles, both associated with Alzheimer’s. All of that could change dramatically if new criteria proposed by an Alzheimer’s Association working group are widely adopted. Its final recommendations, expected later this year, will accelerate a shift that is already underway: from defining the disease by symptoms and behavior to defining it purely biologically — with biomarkers, substances in the body that indicate disease.

The draft guidelines, Revised Criteria for Diagnosis and Staging of Alzheimer’s Disease, call for a simpler approach. That could mean a blood test to indicate the presence of amyloid. Such tests are already available in some clinics and doctors’ offices. “Someone who has biomarker evidence of amyloid in the brain has the disease, whether they’re symptomatic or not,” said Dr. Clifford R. Jack Jr., the chair of the working group and an Alzheimer’s researcher at the Mayo Clinic. “The pathology exists for years before symptom onset,” he added. “That’s the science. It’s irrefutable.”

More here.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus at The New Yorker:

While one segment of Silicon Valley lamented the perpetual absence of flying cars, another, it turns out, was quietly building them—or, at least, something flying-car adjacent. Just three months after the Founders Fund manifesto appeared, a Canadian inventor named Marcus Leng invited his neighbors and a couple of friends to his rural property, north of Lake Ontario. Leng was in his early fifties, with a bowl cut of coarse graying hair. He instructed his guests to park their (conventional) cars in a row and cower behind them. He strapped on a helmet and boarded a device that he’d built in his basement. It had a narrow single-seat chassis and two fixed wings, one in front and one in back, each with four small propellers. It was at once sleek and ungainly, as if a baby orca had been hitched to two snowplows. Observers described it, for lack of a better comparison, as looking like a U.F.O. Leng called it the BlackFly.

Leng, who had been flying since he was a teen-ager, had long dreamed of the “perfect aircraft”—something “that didn’t require a pilot’s license, and could take off or land anywhere.” He’d paid close attention to past designs but suspected that their propulsion systems were too heavy, too complex, and too unresponsive.

more here.

What He Thought

…………. —an excerpt

. . . we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,
till, sensible it was our last
big chance to be poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked
………………………………….. “What’s poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables and
marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or
the statue there?” Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn’t have to think—“The truth
is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was the easiest to say. What followed
taught me something about difficulty,
for our underestimated host spoke out,
all of a sudden, with rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents Giordano Bruno,
brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offense against
authority, which is to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is
poured in waves through all things. All things
move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is
The soul of the soul of the world.” Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him
forth to die, they feared he might
incite the crowd (the man was famous
for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which
he could not speak. That’s
how they burned him. That is how
he died: without a word, in front
of everyone.
………………. And poetry—
………………………………….. (we’d all
put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on
softly)—
……………………… poetry is what
he thought, but did not say.

by Heather McHugh
from Poetry 180
Random House 2003

Henry Louis Gates, Jr at The New Yorker (from 1995):

The two weeks spanning the O. J. Simpson verdict and Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March on Washington were a good time for connoisseurs of racial paranoia. As blacks exulted at Simpson’s acquittal, horrified whites had a fleeting sense that this race thing was knottier than they’d ever supposed—that, when all the pieties were cleared away, blacks really were strangers in their midst. (The unspoken sentiment: And I thought I knew these people.) There was the faintest tincture of the Southern slaveowner’s disquiet in the aftermath of the bloody slave revolt led by Nat Turner—when the gentleman farmer was left to wonder which of his smiling, servile retainers would have slit his throat if the rebellion had spread as was intended, like fire on parched thatch. In the day or so following the verdict, young urban professionals took note of a slight froideur between themselves and their nannies and babysitters—the awkwardness of an unbroached subject. Rita Dove, who recently completed a term as the United States Poet Laureate, and who believes that Simpson was guilty, found it “appalling that white people were so outraged—more appalling than the decision as to whether he was guilty or not.” Of course, it’s possible to overstate the tensions. Marsalis invokes the example of team sports, saying, “You want your side to win, whatever the side is going to be. And the thing is, we’re still at a point in our national history where we look at each other as sides.”

more here.

Amelia Nierenberg in The New York Times:

Walnuts can improve cognitive function. Blueberries can boost memory. Fish oil supplements can lower your risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

You may have noticed these buzzy “brain food” claims scattered across online health articles and social media feeds. But can certain foods or diets really stave off or prevent dementia? Experts say that while nutrition studies are notoriously challenging to carry out, there is a compelling and ever-growing body of research that does suggest that some foods and diets may offer real benefits to an aging brain. So we spoke with two dozen researchers and pored over the research to better understand the links between diet and dementia. Scientists don’t yet know for certain what causes Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. And there is currently no medication that can reverse it, said Dr. Uma Naidoo, the director of nutritional and metabolic psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and the author of “This Is Your Brain on Food.”

More here.

Ann Gibbons in Science:

Zeresenay Alemseged doesn’t remember the 1974 discovery of the famous fossil Lucy at Hadar in Ethiopia, because he was 5 years old, living 600 kilometers away in Axum. Later he saw Lucy’s name on cafes and taxis, but he knew little about her until he became a geologist working at the National Museum of Ethiopia. Then, she changed his life. In 2000, Alemseged was swept into Lucy’s orbit: He discovered “Lucy’s child,” a partial skeleton of a toddler of her species, at Dikika, 10 kilometers from Hadar. In 2015, by then a well-known scientist, he had the honor of showing Lucy to then-President Barack Obama before a state dinner at Ethiopia’s National Palace. Alemseged allowed Obama to touch the prized skeleton, telling him the fossil shows Ethiopia is the birthplace of humankind and that “every single person” on the planet shares an origin in Africa. “Including Donald Trump,” Alemseged joked to Obama.

Fifty years after her discovery, “Lucy is an icon,” says Alemseged, now a paleoanthropologist at the University of Chicago.

More here.