Endling

There’s a man who cares
for the last snail of its kind,

Achatinella apexfulva, knows precisely
how much moisture, shade and light

it needs to thrive while it spends
its dwindling time in a glass cabinet.

Don’t think about what you can start,
think about what you can end was the advice

I heard on a time management podcast
while slicing bananas

for my daughter’s breakfast.
The banana comes from Guatemala

where its kind is plagued
by the Fusarium fungus to a possible

almost certain if-it-continues
at-this-rate extinction.

I’ve never been to Guatemala,
seen a rotting banana plant, or touched

a snail’s glossy shell of the kind
that resembles the palette

of a chocolate box— dark brown, chestnut,
white, the occasional splash of mint.

I watch my daughter collect stones
in her plastic bucket, clinking them beside her

as she runs smiling from one corner
of our yard to another — impossible to say

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Jonathan Haidt in Persuasion:

In the last few years, I have had dozens of conversations with leaders of companies and nonprofit organizations about the illiberalism that is making their work so much harder. Or rather, I should say I’ve had one conversation—the same conversation—dozens of times, because the internal dynamics are so similar across organizations. I think I can explain what is now happening in nearly all of the industries that are creative or politically progressive by telling you about what happened to American universities in the mid-2010s. And I can best illustrate this change by recounting the weirdest week I ever had in my 26 years as a professor.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

America’s frustrating inability to learn from the recent past shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with the history of public health. Almost 20 years ago, the historians of medicine Elizabeth Fee and Theodore Brown lamented that the U.S. had “failed to sustain progress in any coherent manner” in its capacity to handle infectious diseases. With every new pathogen—cholera in the 1830s, HIV in the 1980s—Americans rediscover the weaknesses in the country’s health system, briefly attempt to address the problem, and then “let our interest lapse when the immediate crisis seems to be over,” Fee and Brown wrote. The result is a Sisyphean cycle of panic and neglect that is now spinning in its third century. Progress is always undone; promise, always unfulfilled. Fee died in 2018, two years before SARS-CoV-2 arose. But in documenting America’s past, she foresaw its pandemic present—and its likely future.

More Americans have been killed by the new coronavirus than the influenza pandemic of 1918, despite a century of intervening medical advancement.

More here.

Francice Prose at Lapham’s Quarterly:

In case we wonder why not all of us have healthy, sustaining, lifelong friendships, this issue offers some answers to the riddle of why and how friendships, begun in such pleasure and good faith, can derail so catastrophically.

Obviously, one threat to friendship is death, the built-in drawback to any cherished human connection. Composed in the second millennium, Gilgamesh’s haunting lament for his friend Enkidu makes us realize how little grief and mourning have changed in four thousand years. Saint Augustine is nearly destroyed by sorrow over the death of a friend: “I hated everything, because nothing had him in it, and nothing could now say to me, ‘Look, he’s coming.’ ”

The moral, as always, is that if you’re afraid of losing friends, it’s probably better not to have any.

more here.

Madiha Tahir in the Boston Review:

The United States began bombing the border zone, then known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), in 2004, ostensibly to combat al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It has bombed the area at least 430 times, according to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalists, and killed anywhere between 2,515 to 4,026 people.

But the United States is not the only force bombing the region. Between 2008 to 2011 alone, the Pakistan Air Force carried out 5,500 bombing runs and dropped 10,600 bombs. The Pakistani security forces have also conducted scores of major military operations in the Tribal Areas as well as other Pashtun regions. There is no detailed accounting of the human costs of these military assaults.

More here.

Steven Nadler at Literary Review:

The term ‘atheist’ can be just as ambiguous as ‘religious’ and ‘God’. In the 17th century, it was essentially an all-purpose word used against anyone whose view of God departed from orthodoxy – much in the way that ‘communist’ was (and is) used in the USA to cast aspersion on political opponents (and much in the way that ‘Spinozist’ was used in the early modern period after Spinoza’s works were posthumously published and condemned). But Spinoza does not only dismantle the orthodox notion of a personal God, which he regards as a source of human misery. He also famously refers to ‘God or Nature’ (Deus sive Natura), which suggests that God is nothing but nature, and that ‘God’ can broadly be construed to refer both to the visible cosmos and to the unseen but fundamental power, laws and principles that govern it. And this, to me at least, looks like true atheism. In Spinoza’s view, all there is is nature. There is no supernatural; there is nothing that does not belong to nature and that is not subject to its causal processes.

more here.

Ethnic Poetry

The ethnic poet said: “The earth is maybe
a huge maraca/ and the sun a trombone/
and life/ is to move your ass/ to slow beats.”
The ethnic audience roasted a suckling pig.

The ethnic poet said: “Oh thank Goddy, Goddy/
I be me, my toenails curved downward/
deep, deep, deep into Mama earth.”
The ethnic audience shook strands of seashells.

The ethnic poet said: “The sun was created black/
so we should imagine light/ and also dream/
a walrus emerging from the broken ice.”
The ethnic audience beat on sealskin drums.

The ethnic poet said: “Reproductive organs/
Eagles nesting California Redwoods/
Shut up and listen to my ancestors.”
The ethnic audience ate fried bread and honey.

The ethnic poet said: “Something there is that
doesn’t love a wall/ That sends
the frozen-ground-swell under it.”
The ethnic audience deeply understood humanity.

by Julio Marzán
from Paper Dance; 55 Latino Poets
Persea Books, 1995

[Mending Wall by Robert Frost]

From Phys.Org:

“Normal behavior and physiology depends on a near 24-hour circadian release of various hormones,” said Jeff Jones, who led the study as a postdoctoral research scholar in biology in Arts & Sciences and recently started work as an assistant professor of biology at Texas A&M University. “When hormone release is disrupted, it can lead to numerous pathologies, including affective disorders like anxiety and depression and metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity.

“We wanted to understand how signals from the central biological clock—a tiny brain area called the SCN—are decoded by the rest of the brain to generate these diverse circadian rhythms in hormone release,” said Jones, who worked with Erik Herzog, the Viktor Hamburger Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University and senior author of the new study. The daily timing of hormone release is controlled by the SCN. Located in the hypothalamus, just above where the optic nerves cross, neurons in the SCN send daily signals that are decoded in other parts of the brain that talk to the adrenal glands and the body’s endocrine system.

“Cortisol in humans (corticosterone in mice) is more typically known as a stress hormone involved in the ‘fight or flight’ response,” Jones said. “But the stress of waking up and preparing for the day is one of the biggest regular stressors to the body. Having a huge amount of this glucocorticoid released right as you wake up seems to help you gear up for the day.”

Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker:

Urging the German people to “stop the steal,” Donald J. Trump claimed that he was elected Chancellor of Germany over the weekend. Trump said that, once the official vote tallies have been recounted, it will be clear that he won the German election by a “landslide.” Reflecting on his purported win, Trump said,

“I’ve always wanted to be the Chancellor of Germany. That’s a title that’s been held by some very fine people.” He revealed that he planned to send the former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani to Germany to contest the election results. “He hasn’t been disbarred there yet,” Trump said. For his part, Giuliani said that he relished his latest mission on Trump’s behalf. “I can’t wait to get to Germany,” he said. “When does Oktoberfest start?”

More here.

Rachel Krantz in The Millions:

Dave Eggers’s newest book, The Every, is about a near-future mega-monopoly clearly based on Amazon, Facebook, and Google. It’s his follow-up to The Circle, and follows a different protagonist, Delaney, who seeks to destroy the company from the inside.

Appropriately enough, Eggers has found a way to avoid Amazon during of The Every’s initial release. The hardcover edition will not be sold through the site. If you want a copy when The Every is released on October 5—with one of its 32 different covers—you’ll only be able to get it from independent booksellers.

The Millions spoke with Eggers about Amazon’s grip on the publishing industry, authorial self-censorship, public surveillance, and much more.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

In the question to understand the biology of life, we are (so far) limited to what happened here on Earth. That includes the diversity of biological organisms today, but also its entire past history. Using modern genomic techniques, we can extrapolate backward to reconstruct the genomes of primitive organisms, both to learn about life’s early stages and to guide our ideas about life elsewhere. I talk with astrobiologist Betül Kaçar about paleogenomics and our prospects for finding (or creating!) life in the universe.

More here.

Emma H. Zhang in the Hong Kong Review of Books:

“Leave? Certainly not. This Brit is staying” wrote journalist Stephen Vines in July 1997. Vines had given up his full-time position at the Observer in London to be stationed in Hong Kong on a part-time basis in 1987. At the time of the Handover, Vines had been living and working in Hong Kong as a journalist and businessman for ten years. He had faith in the people of Hong Kong, in the energy and audacity of the city. He believed that it was “foolish to jump before being pushed,” referring to those who had made plans to leave the city before the governance of the territory was returned to China. Vines kept his resolution and stayed in Hong Kong for another 24 years, constantly reporting on the business, finance, and politics of this city for a wide range of local and international media outlets. In 2021, he paid homage to the people of Hong Kong with his new book, Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World’s Largest Dictatorship. In August, two months after the book’s publication, Vines ended his 34-year-long sojourn in the city and departed for London.

More here.

Natural World

…………… 1.

The earth is almost round. The seas
are curved and hug the earth, both
ends are crowned with ice.

The great Blue Whale swims near
this ice, his heart is warm
and weighs two thousand pounds,
his tongue weights twice as much;
he weighs one hundred tons.

There are so few of him left
he often can’t find a mate;
he drags his six-foot sex
through icy waters,
flukes spread crashing.
His brain is large enough
for a man to sleep in.

…………… 2.

On Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania
thousand upon thousands
upon thousands of hawks in migration
have been slaughtered for pleasure.
Drawn North and South in Spring and Fall:
Merlin and Kestrel, Peregrine, Gyrfalcon,
Marsh Hawk, Red-tailed, Sharp-tailed,
Sharp-shinned, Swainson’s Hawk,
Golden eagle and Osprey
slaughtered for pleasure.

by Jim Harrison
from Selected and New Poems
Delacorte Press, 1982

Edward Said Documentary on ‘The Battle of Algiers’ from The Eqbal Ahmad Project on Vimeo.

From Harvard Magazine:

“WORRYING SEEMS ABOUT as necessary as breathing these days,” President Lawrence J. Bacow remarked last Friday in his address at the tenth annual Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) conference. “Global challenges abound, and efforts to address them will have to be based in deep considerations of equity and justice, of community and humanity. How do we prepare our students to undertake that work? How can we do a better job as teachers, as scholars, as leaders, of putting our own work in as broad a context as possible?” These questions opened the conference, this year titled “Tackling Global Challenges from the Harvard Classroom and Beyond” and attended by more than 300 Harvard faculty members and academic leaders. The conference is designed to create a University-wide dialogue about teaching and learning innovation among Harvard’s professors, senior leaders, academic professionals, and students. (Read about the 2020 conference here.)

This year’s event—again conducted virtually via Zoom—encouraged Harvard educators to reflect on their experience teaching remotely during a pandemic that “exacerbated issues” like social and healthcare inequality “that have existed in society for many, many years,” said panelist and senior lecturer in molecular and cellular biology Alain Viel. Undergraduate courses have returned to in-person instruction, but “We can’t ignore what happened during the last 17 months,” said Bharat N. Anand, vice provost for advances in learning. Those 17 months—marked by the pandemic, remote teaching, protests against systemic racism and police brutality, and economic hardship for millions of people—made it clear to educators that their students will enter a changed world after graduation.

Graduate School of Education (HGSE) dean Bridget Terry Long noted that as students spread around the world into a wide variety of communities, Harvard was no longer “far removed in Cambridge in the ivory tower.” With both the state of the world and the global reach of remote teaching in mind, the conference posed one central question: “How can we best prepare students to address global challenges in thoughtful and creative ways?”

More here.

Sara Novak in Discover:

In 2018, Jennifer Culverson was at home in Charleston, South Carolina, when she was violently assaulted by her then-boyfriend. (Culverson’s name has been changed to protect her identity.) Her attacker overpowered her and battered her head against the floor with such force that it caused a traumatic brain injury. In the weeks and months that followed, Culverson couldn’t walk or get out of bed. She had trouble putting words together and her speech was slurred.

It took months for the most immediate of her wounds to heal and for Culverson to completely assess the damage done to her brain. But when all was said and done, she noticed another painful outcome of the assault: She had lost all sense of taste and smell. In the moments after the initial assault, it wasn’t the first thing on her mind. As time passed, however, Culverson came to realize that something as simple as enjoying a nice meal with friends was about more than just the food. “Today, when I go out for dinner with friends, I have them describe what their meal tastes like because I don’t want to completely miss the experience,” she says.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Reading between the lines, I think she learned pretty much the same thing a lot of the rest of us learned during the grim years of the last decade. Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias – our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds. This is the bias that explains why your political opponents continue to be your political opponents, instead of converting to your obviously superior beliefs. And so on to religion, pseudoscience, and all the other scourges of the intellectual world.

But she also learned that just telling people “Hey, avoid confirmation bias!” doesn’t work, even if you explain things very well and give lots of examples. What does work?

More here.