Christopher Harding at Aeon Magazine:

For anyone who has seen or heard Watts at his best – courtesy, perhaps, of his podcast talks – ‘immeasurably alive’ is quite a good description of the man himself. It is easy to see how a basic understanding of God in these terms might have resonated with him. Watts also had moments when the sheer wonder of life around him made it feel as though it was not merely ‘there’, as brute fact, but was being poured out with extraordinary generosity. It seemed ‘given’, convincing Watts that there must be a giver and filling him with the desire to say ‘thank you’. He found backing for all of this in the writings of the 14th-century German theologian Meister Eckhart and the 6th-century Greek author Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. It was there, too, in the ‘I-Thou’ thought of the modern Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.

more here.

Jori Lewis at Switchyard:

The air conditioner was malfunctioning. When I bought the car used in January, the owner said she had just fixed it, but here I was on a steamy August day on the Atlantic coast of Senegal, with the vents pouring hot air into the already hot car. So, it was my imminent dehydration talking when I skidded to a stop in front of a roadside fruit seller’s table. I was once told by a grandmother, who lives in my seaside village but grew up in the northern dry regions where the Senegal River winds across a crispy and prickly savanna not far from the great desert, about a watermelon varietal called beref, which is cultivated mostly for its seeds but also serves as a kind of water reserve.

“There’s water that you can drink from it like a coconut,” she said.

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

Why is giving birth so dangerous despite millions of years of evolution?
Why do humans only have one child per litter?
Why do human women menstruate?
Why does it take us so long to become adults?
Why are there so many stories about evil stepparents?
Why are partners chosen in arranged marriages different from those in love marriages?
Why are parents of small children so tired?

These and many other questions can be answered by realizing that family members are at war.

More here.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

“If China takes Taiwan, they will turn the world off, potentially,” Donald Trump told Fox News recently, apparently referring to a potential seizure of one company that is central to, well, pretty much everything. Indeed, it’s arguably the most important company in the world.

The company Trump alluded to, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or T.S.M.C., is the only corporation I can think of in history that could cause a global depression if it were forced to halt production.

These days it seems impossible to have a conversation about geopolitics or economics without coming back to T.S.M.C., which makes about 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips.

More here.

Mark Krotov and Thomas de Monchaux at n+1:

DE MONCHAUX: In the mid-1960s, Ed Ruscha and his close friend, the Canadian-turned-Californian architect Frank Gehry, used to hang out at the fashionable clubs and bars on the Sunset Strip. One of the many documentary materials that the MoMA survey directs you to on your phone is a quick interview with the latter about the former. “It was the highlight of Hollywood nightlife,” says Gehry of the Strip. “Ed was curious to document it, and he made a book about it. It’s very cool the way he represented it. There was no emotion about what goes on in there. It was just, look at the Hollywood strip, the Sunset Strip. There it is. It’s a bunch of stupid buildings. . . . We all got copies. I still have that in my library somewhere.” Every Building on the Sunset Strip, a 1966 pamphlet, was initially self-published in an edition of one thousand. It folds out, accordion-style, from a trim size of 7×5 5/8 inches x 3/8 inches thick to a satisfying length of 24 feet, 11 1/2 inch when open. Along the top of the pages runs in black and white a continuous horizontal panorama of all the buildings on the north side of the two and a half miles of the Strip. Along the bottom of the pages runs in black and white a continuous horizontal panorama of all the buildings on its south side. “I felt like [Sunset Boulevard] should be recorded with no prejudice, with no agenda, and no moral,” says 2023 Ed Ruscha, in MoMA material also available on your phone.

more here.

Scott Peterson in The Christian Science Monitor:

Rarely have so many Lebanese turned out on the streets to demand wholesale political change as when they began their self-declared “October Revolution” of 2019. And rarely has there been so little positive result.

In recent years, Lebanon has been engulfed by a multitude of crises, starting with economic collapse in late 2019. The following year brought the COVID-19 pandemic. And in August 2020 came the second-largest nonnuclear explosion ever recorded, when illegally stored ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut exploded, taking more than 200 lives, forcing 300,000 from their homes, and leaving some $15 billion in damage.

Three-quarters of the population has since been pushed below the poverty line, and shortages, power cuts, and surging prices have become facts of life.

More here.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Longevity is complicated. Multiple factors influence how fast our tissues and organs age, such as genetic typos, inflammation, epigenetic changes, and metabolic problems. But there is a throughline: Decades of work in multiple species have found that cutting calories and increasing exercise keeps multiple organ functions young as we age. Many of the benefits come from interactions between the brain and body. The brain doesn’t exist in a vat. Although protected by a very selective barrier that only lets certain molecules in, neurons react to blood components which bypass the barrier to alter their functions—for example, retaining learning and memory functions in old age.

Recent studies have increasingly pinpointed multiple communication channels between the brain and muscles, skeleton, and liver. After exercise, for example, proteins released by the body alter brain functions, boosting learning and memory in aging mice and, in some cases, elderly humans. When these communication channels break down, it triggers health problems associated with aging and limits life span and health span (the number of healthy years).

The brain-body connection works both ways. Tucked deep in the base of the brain, the hypothalamus regulates myriad hormones to modify bodily functions. With its hormonal secretions, the brain region sends directions to a wide range of organs including the liver, muscle, intestines, and fatty tissue, changing their behavior with age. Often dubbed the “control center of aging,” the hypothalamus has long been a target for longevity researchers.

More here.

Dia de los Muertos

The oddity that was put in my hands—
your truck. It used to be I drove this road
each week to pick you up. Now I drive this road
each week to lay you down again. Today
is the day of the dead: When did you die?
Today I bring you chicharron con huevo,
chile. Which is to say, I brought breakfast
to the goats. I want to slip my hand into
the photo of you, fix your hair as I did,
help you with your sweater, guide heavy salt
to your plate. Grass is starting to grow over
you. Shards of rock gone smooth. I sing to bees.
I lay my ear to stone; it doesn’t hurt:
I hear your song—water rising from dirt.

by Lauri Ann Guerrero
from Dreamflowers
Poet Hound

Mario Arriagada Cuadriello in the Ideas Letter from Open Society Foundations:

Evita, the Falklands, the Hand of God: if you are an English speaker you have already guessed the subject. For the Spanish-speaking world, the key terms would be different: Peronismo, Malvinas, and, again, Maradona. But irrespective of language there is a more robust set of signifiers that (all too often) effectively describes Argentina’s zeitgeist: Inflation, debt, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). And it’s the last that will be the central protagonist of this story.

Rotten governance in Argentina is undoubtedly to blame for the country’s knocking on the IMF’s door to the point of becoming it largest debtor. But what about the IMF? How are they reacting to newly-inaugurated President Javier Milei’s promise of a radical reboot via old-line shock therapy? In a world in which “we are all post-neoliberals now” (in the way that we were all Keynesians once upon a time) has the progressives’ Darth Vader, the International Monetary Fund, mended its ways? Can it push back against the paleo-austerity ideas of President Milei? Or will the world find out that the world’s last neo-liberal, an Argentine far-right devotee of libertarian economics, is just the ticket for the IMF’s return to form?

Before we go there let’s rewind and travel back to the annus horribilis of 1976. On 29 March, a civilian-military coup deposed Isabel Perón, who had assumed the presidency after her recently returned husband Juan died in 1974, and made Jorge Rafael Videla the de facto president of Argentina.

More here.

Alex Worsnip in Aeon:

…incoherence can hold between mental states of various types: for example, between beliefs, preferences, intentions, or mixtures of more than one of these types. In all cases, though, it’s crucial that the defect is in the combination of states, not necessarily in any of them taken individually. There’s nothing wrong with preferring chocolate ice cream to vanilla, or preferring vanilla to strawberry, or preferring strawberry to chocolate; but there is something very strange about having all of these preferences together.

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

Despite millennia of arguments, the question of whether we have free will or not remains unresolved. Last year October, two neurobiologists stepped into the fray, giving me the chance to dip my toes into the free-will debate. I just reviewed Robert Sapolsky’s Determined which presented a case against. Though successfully showing that we have less of it than we think, I remain unconvinced by his total rejection of free will. For the second half of this two-part review, I turn to Kevin J. Mitchell’s Free Agents which, also starting from neurobiology, presents a tightly argued and compelling case in favour.

More here.

Sam Kahn in Persuasion:

There seem to be two words in the air at the moment, that keep popping up in articles and finding their way into American political discourse. One is “sleepwalking.” The other is “homelessness.”

The “sleepwalking” is obvious enough. After the most consequential election in American history, pitting Biden against Trump, with democracy in the balance, we once again have… the most consequential election in American history, pitting Biden against Trump, with everything even more in the balance and with everybody just that much angrier at each other.

On the Democratic side, the sense is of spending the last year waiting to have what David Brooks calls “The Conversation” about Joe Biden… and never quite getting around to it. None of the major potential rivals were willing to challenge him. He wasn’t willing to step down. And it’s not clear that anybody ever really pushed it—even as Biden’s poll numbers continued to plummet.

On the Republican side, there was the charade of a primary campaign, dutifully covered by the media.

More here.

Leonid Schneider in For Better Science:

Max Kozlov in Nature:

The prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, acknowledged yesterday that it would seek retractions for six papers and corrections for an additional 31 — some co-authored by DFCI chief executive Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer William Hahn and several other prominent cancer researchers. The news came after scientific-image sleuth Sholto David posted his concerns about more than 50 manuscripts to a blog on 2 January. In the papers, published in a range of journals including Blood, Cell and Nature Immunology, David found Western blots — common tests for detecting proteins in biological samples — where bands seemed to be spliced and stretched. He also found images of mice duplicated across figures where they shouldn’t have been. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature, and of other Nature-branded journals.)

…You recently left your 2,000th comment on PubPeer. What keeps you coming back?

I enjoy the ridiculous back and forth with the authors over e-mail. I care a lot about the animals [whose lives are taken to conduct these experiments] as well. The level of expectation we should have when we’re dealing with animals and high-profile institutions is that they’re super careful and that they get things right, so it’s frustrating when you see errors.

More here.

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there must always be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure, the sun shone
As it had on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

by W.H. Auden
from Literature and the Writing Process
Prentice Hall, 1996

Jenny Price at The Believer:

There are many places in L.A. you can go to think about the city, and my own favorite has become the Los Angeles River, which looks like an outsize concrete sewer and is most famous for being forgotten. The L.A. River flows fifty-one miles through the heart of L.A. County. It is enjoying herculean efforts to revitalize it, and yet commuters who have driven over it five days a week for ten years cannot tell you where it is. Along the river, the midpoint lies roughly at the confluence with the Arroyo Seco, near Dodger Stadium downtown. L.A. was founded near here in 1781: this area offers the most reliable aboveground supply of freshwater in the L.A. basin. It’s a miserable spot now, a trash-strewn wasteland of empty lots, steel fences, and railroad tracks beneath a tangle of freeway overpasses: it looks like a Blade Runner set that a crew disassembled and then put back together wrong. It’s not the most scenic spot to visit the river but may be the finest place on the river to think about L.A.

more here.