Anechoic

George Foy stayed in the anechoic chamber
for 45 minutes and nearly went mad.
He could hear the blood rushing in
his veins and began to wonder if he was
hallucinating. He had been to a monastery,
an American Indian sweat lodge,
and a nickel mine two kilometers underground.
In the anechoic chamber, the floor’s design
eliminates the sound of footsteps.
NASA trains astronauts in anechoic chambers
to cope with the silence of space.
Without echo, in the quietest place on earth,
what else can we hold onto? What replaces sound
in concert with what you see? The human voice,
the timber when a person says kamsahamnida
or yes, please, or fuerte, is 25 to 35 decibels.
Hearing damage can start around 115 decibels.
Metallica, front row, possible damage
albeit possible love. The Who, 126 decibels.
A Boeing jet, 165 decibels. The whale, low rumble
frequency and all, 188 decibels, can be heard
for hundreds of miles underwater.
I once walked around inside a whale heart,
which is the size of a small car. The sound
was like Brian Doyle’s heart that gave out
at 60 after he wrote my favorite essay
about the joyas voladoras and the humming
bird heart, the whale heart, and the human
heart. Glass can break at 163 decibels.
Hearing is the last sense to leave us.
Some say that upon death, our vision,
our taste, our touch, and our smell
might leave us, but some have been
pronounced dead and by all indication
are, but they can hear. In this moment,
when the doctor pronounces the time
or when the handgun pumps once more,
what light arrives? What sounds, the angels?
The Ultrasonic Weapon is used for crowd
control or to combat riots—as too many
humans gathered in one place for a unified
purpose can threaten the state. The state
permits gatherings if the flag waves. Sound
can be weaponized or made into art.
It can kill. It can heal a wound. It is
a navigation device and can help determine
if the woman has a second heart inside of her
now, the beating heart of a baby on the ultrasound,
a boy or a girl, making a new music in the body
of another body, a chorus, a concert, a hush.

by Lee Herrick
from Scar and Flower
Word Poetry, 2019

Maya Jasanoff in The Guardian:

About a century ago, a series of giant murals was unveiled in the Palace of Westminster depicting the “Building of Britain”, which bounded in eight set-pieces from King Alfred’s long-ships beating back the Danes in 877 to bewigged parliamentarians presenting Queen Anne with the articles of Union in 1707. The penultimate scene travels to India in 1614, where the Mughal emperor Jahangir receives an ambassador from King James I, on a mission to promote trade with the newly chartered English East India Company.

From the hindsight of the 1920s, this embassy looked like a key step in the building of a British imperium that would end with Britain’s monarchs as India’s emperors. But the arrival of the British in India in the early 1600s looked very different at the time – and from the other side. A contemporary painting by the Mughal master miniaturist Bichitr shows a supersized Jahangir on his throne, bathed in a halo of blinding magnificence. He hands a Qur’an to a white-bearded Sufi, a pious gesture that doubles as a majestic snub: pressed into a lower corner is none other than James I, an overlooked supplicant, depicted in three-quarter profile, “an angle reserved in Mughal miniatures for the minor characters”.

More here.

Robert Sapolsky in Nautilus:

The other day I fixed something—a rarity for me. The flotation device in the toilet water tank was rubbing against the side, getting stuck halfway up so that the tank didn’t fill completely. I own a hammer and know how to operate it. But I couldn’t fit it into the tank to whack the device back into place. Ditto for owning and using a wrench. It wouldn’t fit either. But fortunately I also own a plunger and I used its handle to push the floating thing back the other way, using the side of the tank as a fulcrum. It worked, although the device got bent so that the top of the tank didn’t quite fit. That overwhelmed me, so I called it a good day’s work. I was proud of myself. “There,” I thought smugly. “It’s not just chimps who can use tools.”

Humans used to be unique in lots of ways. We were the only species who made tools, murdered each other, passed on culture. And each of those supposed defining features has now been demonstrated in other species. We’re not so special after all. But there are still ways that humans appear to stand alone. One of those is hugely important: the human capacity to think symbolically. Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech—they exert enormous power over us. We kill for symbols, die for them. Yet symbols generate one of the most magnificent human inventions: art.

In recent years scientists from leading universities, including UCLA, University College London, and Yale, have made remarkable insights into the neurobiology of symbols. A major finding from their work is that the brain is not very good at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal. In fact, as scientists have shown us, symbols and metaphors, and the morality they engender, are the product of clunky processes in our brains. Symbols serve as a simplifying stand-in for something complex. (A rectangle of cloth with stars and stripes represents all of American history and values.) And this is very useful.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Porch Magazine:

Consider the opening shots of the movie Human Desire, directed by Fritz Lang and released by Columbia Pictures in 1954. We see a man on a train. He’s the engineer. He sits at the front of the train, driving it along the tracks. His demeanor is one of comfort and ease. Then we move to another shot. The camera has been positioned at the side of the train looking forward. Another train comes into view moving toward us, on the opposite track. It seems, for a moment, that there is not enough space for the two trains to pass one another safely. A collision is imminent. But then, with a whoosh, the trains pass one another without incident. We’ve all experienced this fear as two trains pass at high speeds. The margin of error is so small. The violence of the rush of air smacking both trains is startling.

The first few minutes of Human Desire are a study in the joys and contradictions of train travel, back and forth, back and forth between the scary almost overwhelming power of this form of locomotion, and the quiet contemplation that is the unexpected byproduct of a train’s motion along its fixed track. Finally, the train pulls into a station. It is difficult to describe the sense of comfort and completion in this final terminus. And then the giant hanger looms into view, ushering the train into a place of rest.

These opening scenes of Human Desire are a direct tribute to another film. That’s La Bête humaine by Jean Renoir (1938).

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

I suspect most loyal Mindscape listeners have been exposed to the fact that I’ve written a new book, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. As I release this episode on Monday 9 September 2019, the book will officially be released tomorrow, in print, e-book, and audio versions. To get in the mood, we’ve had several podcast episodes on quantum mechanics, but the “emergence of spacetime” aspect has been neglected. So today we have a solo podcast in which I explain a bit about the challenges of quantum gravity, how Many-Worlds provides the best framework for thinking about quantum gravity, and how entanglement could be the key to showing how a curved spacetime could emerge from a quantum wave function. All of this stuff is extremely speculative, but I’m excited about the central theme that we shouldn’t be trying to “quantize gravity,” but instead looking for gravity within quantum mechanics. The ideas here go pretty far, but hopefully they should be accessible to everyone.

More here.

Rick Shenkman in Politico:

Everything was unfolding as it usually does. The academics who gathered in Lisbon this summer for the International Society of Political Psychologists’ annual meeting had been politely listening for four days, nodding along as their peers took to the podium and delivered papers on everything from the explosion in conspiracy theories to the rise of authoritarianism.

Then, the mood changed. As one of the lions of the profession, 68-year-old Shawn Rosenberg, began delivering his paper, people in the crowd of about a hundred started shifting in their seats. They loudly whispered objections to their friends. Three women seated next to me near the back row grew so loud and heated I had difficulty hearing for a moment what Rosenberg was saying.

What caused the stir? Rosenberg, a professor at UC Irvine, was challenging a core assumption about America and the West. His theory? Democracy is devouring itself—his phrase — and it won’t last.

More here.

Nigel Warburton in aeon:

Has the behaviour of another person ever made you feel ashamed? Not because they set out to shame you but because they acted so virtuously that it made you feel inadequate by comparison. If so, then it is likely that, at least for a brief moment in time, you felt motivated to improve as a person. Perhaps you found yourself thinking that you should be kinder, tidier, less jealous, more hardworking or just generally better: to live up to your full potential. If the feeling was powerful enough, it might have changed your behaviour for a few minutes, days, weeks, months, years or a lifetime. Such change is the result of a mechanism I shall call ‘moral hydraulics’.

The language of hydraulics belongs to a tradition in moral psychology dating back to Plato’s Republic, which aims to describe the interdependent relationship between disparate motivational drives. In short, hydraulics operate as follows: the elevation of one desire in a closed system causes a proportional diminution in another. Plato takes this hydraulic dynamic very literally, but the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant presents it as a useful metaphor for capturing the seesawing nature of real psychological forces. In his view, the subordination of self-interest removes, or at least diminishes, hindrances to willing the good. For Kant, the denigration of one’s pathological interests is thus tantamount to removing barriers to acting well.

This pivotal mechanism of moral education could be classed as a form of sublimation or diversion, whereby inappropriate desires are channelled into higher pursuits. Such a model is endorsed by the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, who claimed that psychic energy can be redirected from lower aims to higher ones, at least when the patient herself recognises that the desiderative drive imperils her. In Freud’s picture, the painful recognition of one’s imperilling desires acts as what the American scholar Volney Gay in 1992 called a ‘moderating influence’ on that person’s psychology and behaviour. The effect of this recognition is that the patient’s behaviour and pursuits become more appropriate.

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

A small clinical study in California has suggested for the first time that it might be possible to reverse the body’s epigenetic clock, which measures a person’s biological age. For one year, nine healthy volunteers took a cocktail of three common drugs — growth hormone and two diabetes medications — and on average shed 2.5 years of their biological ages, measured by analysing marks on a person’s genomes. The participants’ immune systems also showed signs of rejuvenation. The results were a surprise even to the trial organizers — but researchers caution that the findings are preliminary because the trial was small and did not include a control arm.

“I’d expected to see slowing down of the clock, but not a reversal,” says geneticist Steve Horvath at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted the epigenetic analysis. “That felt kind of futuristic.” The findings were published on 5 September in Aging Cell¹. “It may be that there is an effect,” says cell biologist Wolfgang Wagner at the University of Aachen in Germany. “But the results are not rock solid because the study is very small and not well controlled.” The epigenetic clock relies on the body’s epigenome, which comprises chemical modifications, such as methyl groups, that tag DNA. The pattern of these tags changes during the course of life, and tracks a person’s biological age, which can lag behind or exceed chronological age.

More here.

Dexter Filkins at The New Yorker:

Power’s book didn’t offer much discussion of failure, of the limitations of intervention, even in places where it was unclear that American efforts could have succeeded. In Rwanda, which is often cited as an example of U.S. inaction, most of the killing was done so swiftly—eight hundred thousand people in three months—that it’s hard to imagine the American bureaucracy and military orchestrating a response quickly enough to make a difference, and then staying around long enough to insure that violence didn’t recur. But in 2002 the notion that America could police the world didn’t seem so far-fetched. nato had recently taken on three new members. China’s economy was a tenth of its present size. The World Trade Center had been destroyed, but the U.S. had toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan. The invasion of Iraq was still a year away.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not pitched as humanitarian interventions. (That came later, as proponents looked for retroactive justification.) But for many in the American foreign-policy establishment the coming decade served as a rebuke to the idea that the U.S. could remake the world.

more here.

Alexander Earl at The Marginalia Review of Books:

So what is to be done? What might seem like an esoteric crisis in Augustinian scholarship suddenly reflects a crisis about how we think, and how that thinking might give rise to a whole host of other predicaments. In which case, perhaps the resolution of one can aid us in resolving the other. In Augustine’s case, Kenyon argues that we should approach him in a holistic way and cease strip-mining his work for this or that argument or literary trope. We should especially not get bogged down in attempts to historically recreate Augustine’s psyche, but turn to the “overarching arguments and rhetorical strategy instead of individual passages” and “prefer interpretations that make sense of a text as a whole.” What we find, Kenyon avers, are “works centrally concerned with the practice of inquiry. When it comes to finding guidance, the dialogues look foremost to the act of inquiry itself: the fact that we can inquire at all tells us various things about ourselves.” The direction has shifted: what might it look like to view Augustine’s dialogues, and the nature of dialoguing in general, in terms of pedagogy and not in terms of content, as journeys of self-discovery instead of didactic treatises?

more here.

John-Paul Stonard in the TLS:

In the middle of the 1420s, a Dominican friar painted an altarpiece for his convent, San Domenico in Fiesole, Florence, showing the Christian story of the Annunciation. Fra Giovanni, now known as Fra Angelico, was a professional artist who had opted for monastic life largely for the freedom it gave him to paint. The altarpiece, recently restored by the Prado Museum, Madrid, where it has resided since the nineteenth century, hangs at the centre of an exhibition at the museum showing how Angelico took this freedom and created a new type of painting.

Coming across this large painted panel today, one is immediately struck by the lightness of the colours – the pink of Gabriel’s robe and the ultramarine of Mary’s gown – and the elegance of the design. In the 1420s the Dominican friars would have been more impressed by the bold and simple shape of the altarpiece, a square panel without florid carved frame or borders, as well as the startling absence of the customary gold background, either on the surface of the painting, or as a luxurious textile tenderly held by angels.

more here.

Daystar

She wanted a little room for thinking;
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children’s naps.

Sometimes there were things to watch –
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she’d see only her own vivid blood.

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice?  Why,

building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour – where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

by Rita Dove
from Collected Poems 1974-2004
Publisher: W. W. Norton, New York, 2016

David Ciepley in The Hedgehog Review:

On its glittering surface, America’s corporate economy appears to be in fantastic shape. The stock markets recently reached record highs, even if they dipped and bobbed after reaching those heights. Profits are soaring. Financing is cheap. The corporate tax rate has been cut. The unemployment rate is near a fifty-year low, with little inflation.

But look under the hood, and you will find that all is not well. Those stock prices have little, if anything, to do with underlying value creation; those profits owe little to increased productivity; that cheap financing seldom goes to investment. Despite the record profits and unusually favorable terms for borrowers, the rate of corporate investment is down—by historical standards for such conditions, way down. Productivity growth is down. Wages, adjusted for inflation, have remained largely flat since the 1970s, despite all of labor’s subsequent productivity gains. As a proportion of corporate income, wage expenditure today is at a historic low, even with profits at or near historic highs. Profits that used to be allocated to wage increases, training, research, and expansion are instead being disgorged to stockholders in the form of increased dividends and stock buybacks (which helps explain those rising stock prices). The windfall from the 2017 corporate tax cut went almost entirely to such buybacks, not wages or investment. The number of listed companies is actually declining, in part because entrepreneurs who wish to grow their companies dare not place them under Wall Street’s care, to be bled out for the pleasure of today’s short-term–focused stockholders.

Today’s stockholder is fat and happy from cannibalizing the corporate body. Yet the feast is unlikely to last.

More here.

Jan Ellen Spiegel in Undark:

Bob Marra navigated his way to the back of a dusty barn in Hamden, Connecticut, belonging to the state’s Agricultural Experiment Station. There, past piles of empty beehives, on a wall of metal shelves, were stacks of wooden disks — all that remains of 39 trees taken down in 2014 from Great Mountain Forest in the northwest corner of the state.

These cross-sections of tree trunks, known as stem disks — or more informally as cookies — are telling a potentially worrisome tale about the ability of forests to be critical hedges against accelerating climate change. As anyone following the fires burning in the Amazon rainforest knows by now, trees play an important role in helping to offset global warming by storing carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide — a major contributor to rising temperatures — in their wood, leaves, and roots. The worldwide level of CO2 is currently averaging more than 400 parts per million — the highest amount by far in the last 800,000 years.

But Marra, a forest pathologist at the Experiment Station with a Ph.D. in plant pathology from Cornell University, has documented from studying his fallen trees that internal decay has the capacity to significantly reduce the amount of carbon stored within.

More here.

Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books:

“Gun rights,” as used by devotees of an absolutist Second Amendment, means their right to own guns. But as used in real American life these days (or real American deaths), it means the rights of guns. Guns themselves possess even more rights than persons do.

If a person were found to have shown up regularly in so many places where so many crimes had been committed by so many people, how could that person not be called to account for such suspicious behavior? He would clearly be investigated for being present with such persistence at crime scenes. Did he facilitate them, making them easier by his mere presence? What could induce any innocent person to be so energetically omnipresent at so many varied crime scenes? What excuse could relieve him from the charge of being an accessory? A person with such skill and dogged effort would be considered a national menace, no matter how many excuses he could concoct for such weird conduct.

But guns can do all of those things and profess an entire non-involvement.

More here.

Sean Carroll in the New York Times:

“I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. That’s not surprising, as far as it goes. Science makes progress by confronting our lack of understanding, and quantum mechanics has a reputation for being especially mysterious.

What’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have.

Quantum mechanics, assembled gradually by a group of brilliant minds over the first decades of the 20th century, is an incredibly successful theory. We need it to account for how atoms decay, why stars shine, how transistors and lasers work and, for that matter, why tables and chairs are solid rather than immediately collapsing onto the floor.

Scientists can use quantum mechanics with perfect confidence. But it’s a black box. We can set up a physical situation, and make predictions about what will happen next that are verified to spectacular accuracy. What we don’t do is claim to understand quantum mechanics. Physicists don’t understand their own theory any better than a typical smartphone user understands what’s going on inside the device.

More here.

Howard LaFranchi in The Christian Science Monitor:

The sleek blue-glass building of the Infosys corporation sits like an intruding spaceship amid the unpaved side streets and half-completed residential structures that surround it. Its giant porthole windows offer a peek into a Jetsons-esque world of workers gliding between floors on elevated moving sidewalks. For now, 19-year-old Nishank Nachappaa toils in the shadows of Infosys and the other high-tech companies that, like him, call the Electronic City section of Bangalore home. The high school graduate helps out at two dormitories for tech workers – one for young men, the other for young women – that his parents manage. His father maintains the buildings and his mother prepares meals for the 120 male and 30 female residents. Walk a block or two from the dorms and other corporate structures loom with multinational names such as Emerson and Yokogawa, Altametrics and Hewlett Packard.

…The country has addressed much of the abject destitution that vast numbers of Indians lived in 25 years ago. As a result, it appears ready to join not just China but also South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and other Asian neighbors that have either made the leap to middle-income prosperity or are well on their way. Along with its world-class space program, assertive foreign policy, and global cultural presence, India is trying to leverage its economic clout and privileged relationship with the United States into a more prominent role among world powers.

And yet, the country that will soon be the planet’s most populous – India is on track to surpass China in 2027– and is perhaps the world’s most culturally and linguistically diverse, also faces a number of key challenges that could yet stifle its rise. Among them: a huge, underproductive rural population and economically inactive female population; a heavy state footprint in the economy that discourages private enterprise and foreign investment; rising political divides and religious tensions; and a lingering post-independence mindset of reliance on the state. It’s a daunting list – one that echoes the period, more than a decade ago, when a first wave of “India’s time has come” declarations coursed through the country.

More here.

Adam Kosan in Nautilus:

Emily Dickinson spent most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Despite the geographic limits of her experience, she perceived an abundant, entrancing and confounding natural world of life and death all around her. Among her many aspects as a poet, she comes down to us as a fascinating observer of birds.

Scott Edwards is an ornithologist who studies the evolutionary biology of birds. Poetry in America director Elisa New recently invited Edwards to join her at Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum in Boston to listen to birdsong and read some of Emily Dickinson’s bird poems. As their conversation makes clear in the video below, you can approach these poems on different levels. There is, on the one hand, Dickinson’s perspective as a naturalist, keen to record patterns of nature, and on the other, her perspective as a poet, finding the raw materials of metaphor in those natural patterns. How do these modes complement or diverge from each other? New and Edwards begin by looking at the nature of robin song, memorably conjured in the poem “You’ll know her by her foot.” Their conversation then proceeds to cover a range of questions about poetic vocabulary and scientific knowledge.

More here.

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal—a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.

by Mary Oliver
from House of Light
Beacon Press, Boston