From The Artisanal Writer:

How did you conceive your first book?

I had a lot of free time to reflect and ‘fabulate’ when I was laid up in bed with a spinal injury. I wrote these linked stories — some remembered, some invented — in seven months. It took another three to edit them and send them out to literary awards and publishers. I was lucky with the reception.

I should mention the CBC Literary Award, Heather Birrell’s generous review in Quill & Quire when the book came out, and making the longlist of the Crossword Vodafone Award for global South Asian fiction and the finals of the Danuta Gleed Award.

What memorable or formative experience around learning to write springs to mind?

Reading and thinking led to writing. There were all kinds of books at home. I spent quite a bit of time alone as I was often hospitalized when I was young. I remember James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man, but I didn’t get it all at that age. I was truly shaken when I re-read it later at Cambridge. Like many, I loathed V.S. Naipaul for his neo-colonial take on India.

More here.

Megan Pillow in Guernica:

The first time I saw the Breonna Taylor memorial was on a livestream. It was summer of 2020, and I watched a small team of people at Injustice Square shake out tarps and cover the collection of paintings and signs to protect them from rain. The second time I saw it was in person. I walked around it, noticed the nameplates inscribed with the names of the other Black men and women killed by police encircling its edges. There was one painting of Taylor that was massive, vibrant; a sheen of purple glistened in her hair, and a small jewel glittered in her nose. At its base were poster boards proclaiming “Justice for Bre” and “She was asleep.” Around me, protestors shouted out some of those same lines through their masks.

In Breonna Taylor’s city, which is also my city, protestors have gathered at Injustice Square regularly since May 28, 2020. Beginning just three days after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, they occupied that small square of land. Through the summer of 2020 and into the fall, they showed up every day—even after another Louisville resident, beloved local chef and entrepreneur David McAtee, was gunned down by the National Guard just days after Floyd’s death and his body left in the street for hours. Every day, even through colder months that saw protest leaders Travis Nagdy and Kris Smith shot down in the street, becoming part of Louisville’s record 173 homicides last year.

After my second visit to the square, I felt haunted by a question I didn’t know how to ask. I worried that the ink on the posters would run in a hard rain, that people’s memories would degrade. Most of all, I was terrified that the police would attack the very people desperately fighting for justice and preserving Taylor’s memory. At a loss, I turned to Google and typed: How do we save everyone, everything?

A more generative question is this: How will we remember 2020? In the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, as protests against racial injustice and police violence spread across the country, there was more than one Saturday night where I found myself Googling “pandemic archives.” Enraged and lonely and trying to make sense of why some stories are preserved and others are overlooked, I wanted to know what preservation work was already happening and, crucially, who was doing it. I wanted to know what stories and objects they deemed important enough to save, and what strategies, rationales, and systems they were using to capture them. What I found was a range of organizations attempting to chronicle a monumental and disastrous year while it was still underway.

In between a couple of links to archives of the flu pandemic of 1918 and a host of sites banking medical and scientific information about the virus were a number of crowdsourced projects, some localized, some international.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Researchers developing the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine have identified biomarkers that can help to predict whether someone will be protected by the jab they receive. The team at the University of Oxford, UK, identified a ‘correlate of protection’ from the immune responses of trial participants — the first found by any COVID-19 vaccine developer. Identifying such blood markers, scientists say, will improve existing vaccines and speed the development of new ones by reducing the need for costly large-scale efficacy trials.

“We would like to have an antibody measure that is a reliable guide to protection because it could speed up the licensure of new vaccines,” says David Goldblatt, a vaccinologist at University College London. New formulations of influenza vaccines, for instance, are generally judged by whether they trigger a strong enough antibody response against a viral protein in a relatively small number of people, instead of in large trials that look for reductions in rates of infection. Researchers and regulators hope to do the same with COVID-19 vaccines.

“The power of a correlate in vaccines is profound,” says Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. “If there’s a reliable correlate, then it can be used in clinical trials to make decisions as to what vaccines are likely to work, what form of vaccines are likely to work, or how durable the vaccines are going to be.”

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YruHXR-a9Zs

Erik Morse at Artforum:

“Neuroaesthetics can perhaps be understood in the Duchampian sense,” he claimed in a 2004 interview. “Neuroscience is a readymade, which is recontextualized out from its original context as a scientific-based paradigm into one that is aesthetically based.” He pointed to Conceptualists like Dan Graham and Sol LeWitt as precursors of a later generation of artists who would act as mediators between an increasingly technologized and monetized society and its hyperactive visual culture. Neuroaesthetics endeavored not to produce a synthesis of neuroscience and aesthetics, but rather to estrange the former from normal usage—much as Duchamp did the bicycle wheel and bottle rack—and reenvision in a more psychodynamic capacity its tools for mapping cognitive categories such as color, memory, and spatial relationships, in order to reveal, in Neidich’s words, “the idea of becoming brain.”

Chaoid Gallery was an offshoot of artbrain.org and Journal of Neuroaesthetics, founded in 1996 by Neidich and artist Nathalie Anglès as a critical and curatorial project devoted to the dissemination of neuroaesthetic theory within media arts, a discipline then in its infancy.

more here.

Toast

There was a woman in Ithaca
who cried softly all night
in the next room and helpless
I fell in love with her under the blanket
of snow that settled on all the roofs
of the town, filling up
every dark depression

Next morning
in the motel coffee shop
I studied the made-up faces
of women. Was it the middle-aged blond
who kidded the waitress
or the young brunette lifting
her cup like a toast?

Love, whoever you are,
your courage was my companion
for many cold towns
after the betrayal of Ithaca,
and when I order coffee
in a strange place, still
I say, lifting, this is for you.

by Leonard Nathan
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Boks, Harcourt, Inc. 1996

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

Bridges connect us – and they have since the beginning of time, all the way back to the very first bridge, the rainbow. They connect us geographically, strategically, metaphorically, lyrically (if that last seems a stretch, think of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”). Now we have a book to explain all sorts of bridges to us, thanks to UCLA author Thomas Harrison, whose book Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account, is just out with the University of Chicago Press.

Harrison gave a May 28 Zoom presentation to launch On Bridges, with discussants Christy Wampole of Princeton and Stanford’s Marjorie Perloff. The Stanford literary critic had already weighed in on the book: “Of Bridges is a dazzling investigation into the profound semantic and historical resonance of the seemingly simple word bridge, that passage between two points that is unique in its material, metaphoric, and philosophical properties. Harrison has chapters on every possible aspect of bridging, for example, the musical bridge, the poetic bridge as in Hart Crane’s famous poem by that title, the actual historic bridges of Greece and Rome, and the ‘thought’ bridges of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Throughout, Harrison’s book is astonishingly learned, well written, and imaginative. Bridges will never be the same after this brilliant study.”

more here.

Mukund Padmanabhan in The Hindu:

“What is the use of stories that aren’t even true?” Haroun asks his father in Salman Rushdie’s delightful and inexplicably underrated crossover novel. Rushdie suggests the issue it raises, the relationship between the “world of imagination and the so-called real world”, has occupied most of his writing life.

In Haroun.., the imaginative realm and its sea of stories win the allegorical battle over silence and censorship. In Languages of Truth, Rushdie takes the argument further, marshalling more than merely functional or utilitarian reasons, important though they are, to declare that the worlds of the real and imagined are inextricably twinned.

More here.

Andre Ye in Analytics Vidhya:

The Universal Approximation Theorem is, very literally, the theoretical foundation of why neural networks work. Put simply, it states that a neural network with one hidden layer containing a sufficient but finite number of neurons can approximate any continuous function to a reasonable accuracy, under certain conditions for activation functions (namely, that they must be sigmoid-like).

Formulated in 1989 by George Cybenko only for sigmoid activations and proven by Kurt Hornik in 1991 to apply to all activation functions (the architecture of the neural network, not the choice of function, was the driver behind performance), its discovery was a significant driver in spurring the excited development of neural networks into the plethora of applications in which they are used today.

Most importantly, however, the theorem is an eye-opening explanation of why neural networks appear to behave so intelligently. Understanding it is a key step in developing a strong and deep understanding of neural networks.

More here.

Amartya Sen in The Guardian:

The British empire in India was in effect established at the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757. The battle was swift, beginning at dawn and ending close to sunset. It was a normal monsoon day, with occasional rain in the mango groves at the town of Plassey, which is between Calcutta, where the British were based, and Murshidabad, the capital of the kingdom of Bengal. It was in those mango groves that the British forces faced the Nawab Siraj-ud-Doula’s army and convincingly defeated it.

British rule ended nearly 200 years later with Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech on India’s “tryst with destiny” at midnight on 14 August 1947. Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?

During my days as a student at a progressive school in West Bengal in the 1940s, these questions came into our discussion constantly. They remain important even today, not least because the British empire is often invoked in discussions about successful global governance. It has also been invoked to try to persuade the US to acknowledge its role as the pre-eminent imperial power in the world today: “Should the United States seek to shed – or to shoulder – the imperial load it has inherited?” the historian Niall Ferguson has asked. It is certainly an interesting question, and Ferguson is right to argue that it cannot be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell – and what it managed to do.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2spt7SELhw

Amanda Lee Koe at The Current:

The first real lesbian kiss in a film is an honor that rightfully belongs to Mädchen in Uniform. It’s true that a year earlier, in 1930, Marlene Dietrich played a tux-clad chanteuse who snogs a woman in a nightclub audience in Morocco, but Dietrich has no further contact with this female extra, and the kiss is cynically if efficaciously played to the star’s male love interest, a legionnaire (Gary Cooper) who’s watching her saucy performance intently. Unlike in Morocco, there are no titillated men to be found in Mädchen in Uniform. It is the schoolgirls who are jacked and lusty, the schoolmarms who are patriarchal and tyrannical. The kiss, which takes place behind the closed doors of a dorm, isn’t about who’s performing for whom. It’s about what it feels like for a girl.

more here.

Wouter Klein at JSTOR Daily:

When European naturalists explored the plants of the New World in the sixteenth century, they tended to relate new species to better-known plants whenever they could. Sarsaparilla is a case in point. Smilax species found in America were recognized as variants of Smilax aspera and therefore also began to be called sarsaparilla. Nicolás Monardes (1493–1588) described different kinds of American sarsaparilla in his work Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (1565). His descriptions carried a commercial touch. For instance, he tried to convince his readers that the whitish sarsaparilla from Honduras was better than the black variety from Mexico. Similarly, he aimed to embed the new American kinds of sarsaparilla in the traditional framework of European medicine. When American sarsaparilla began to be used in European medicine around 1545, physicians first administered it as a broth to be taken in the morning, the same way as it was used by Native Americans at the time. Monardes, however, argued that it should be given in a syrup, a conventional mode of administration for his European readers.

more here.

Seth Stern in The Christian Science Monitor:

A painful pattern repeats itself throughout America: A Black person is killed by police officers, protests ensue, and police are brought in to stifle the demonstrations. Most of the time, the protests against racial injustice are peaceful, but occasionally violence breaks out. Meanwhile, politicians do little to prevent the cycle from continuing.

The language surrounding that cycle is highly politicized. Elizabeth Hinton, a professor of history, African American studies, and law at Yale, drills down on the term “riot,” which she argues is a misnomer. In her book, “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s,” she suggests instead that violent protests are political acts best described as rebellions – “a sustained insurgency” against “an unjust and repressive society.”

This is a sequel of sorts to Hinton’s 2016 book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.” There, Hinton showed how fears of violence prompted federal policymakers to build punitive, militarized urban police forces that filled prisons with Black inmates. In this equally impressive followup, Hinton chronicles how attempts to quell protests in American cities actually spawned more unrest.

More here.

Laura Quinn in Phys.Org:

Proteins have been quietly taking over our lives since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We’ve been living at the whim of the virus’s so-called “spike” protein, which has mutated dozens of times to create increasingly deadly variants. But the truth is, we have always been ruled by proteins. At the cellular level, they’re responsible for pretty much everything.

Proteins are so fundamental that DNA—the genetic material that makes each of us unique—is essentially just a long sequence of protein blueprints. That’s true for animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, archaea, and even viruses. And just as those groups of organisms evolve and change over time, so too do proteins and their component parts.

A new study from University of Illinois researchers, published in Scientific Reports, maps the evolutionary history and interrelationships of protein domains, the subunits of protein molecules, over 3.8 billion years. “Knowing how and why domains combine in proteins during evolution could help scientists understand and engineer the activity of proteins for medicine and bioengineering applications. For example, these insights could guide disease management, such as making better vaccines from the spike protein of COVID-19 viruses,” says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences, affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois, and senior author on the paper.

More here.

Uncollected Poems -71

Every time I think about a thing, I betray it.
I should only think about what is there in front of me.
Not thinking, but seeing.
Not with the mind, but with the eyes.
Anything that is visible exists in order to be seen.
And what exists for the eyes has no reason to exist in the mind;
It exists purely for the eyes and not for the mind.

I look and things exist.
I think and only I exist.

by Fernando Pessoa
from The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro
Translation from The Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

Paul J. D’Ambrosio in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Academia puts scholars through the wringer. Few — very few, in fact — come out willing or even able to express complex ideas in ways appealing to non-academics. John Gray is one of those rare intellectuals.

Professors tend to scoff at books written for more general audiences. Anything that becomes popular is taken as potentially not serious. But the truth is, most professors simply cannot write, talk, and perhaps even think in a manner which can engage non-academics. Having gone through years of rigorous, specialized training, scholars find it hard to communicate their insights to anyone outside their narrow fields. Gray does not. Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life is broadly appealing. Even more impressive, it has readers seriously consider radical ideas.

More here.

Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein in the Boston Review:

The most basic tenet undergirding neoliberal economics is that free market capitalism—or at least some close approximation to it—is the only effective framework for delivering widely shared economic well-being. On this view, only free markets can increase productivity and average living standards while delivering high levels of individual freedom and fair social outcomes: big government spending and heavy regulations are simply less effective.

These neoliberal premises have dominated economic policymaking both in the United States and around the world for the past forty years, beginning with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the States. Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism became a rallying cry, supplanting what had been, since the end of World War II, the dominance of Keynesianism in global economic policymaking, which instead viewed large-scale government interventions as necessary for stability and a reasonable degree of fairness under capitalism. This neoliberal ascendency has been undergirded by the full-throated support of the overwhelming majority of professional economists, including such luminaries as Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas.

In reality neoliberalism has depended on huge levels of government support for its entire existence.

More here.