Elizabeth Svoboda and Undark in The Atlantic:

As he neared his 50s, Anthony Andrews realized that living inside his own head felt different than it used to. The signs were subtle at first. “My wife started noticing that I wasn’t getting through things,” Andrews says. Every so often, he’d experience what he calls “cognitive voids,” where he’d get dizzy and blank out for a few seconds. Over time, Andrews’s issues became more pronounced. It wasn’t just that he would lose track of things, as if a thought bubble over his head had popped. A dense calm had descended on him like a weighted blanket. “I felt like I was walking through the swamp,” says Andrews, now 54. He had to play internet chess each morning to penetrate the mental murk.

Kim and Faber in Nature:

Burnout — work-related stress resulting in emotional and physical exhaustion — remains an expected rite of passage for many professions. However, the medical community has begun to place more emphasis on reducing burnout — and science academia would do well to learn from it. Despite the differences between medical and scientific training, stress is a common denominator for students in both fields. For example, in a 2011 survey of graduate students at 26 major US universities, 37% of graduate students in the natural sciences and 41% in engineering or computer science reported experiencing “a bit more” or “a lot more” stress than they felt able to handle. Similarly, a 2010 cross-sectional study found that 52.8% of medical students at 7 US universities had experienced burnout¹.

Graduate students must contend with juggling coursework and research, lack of external validation, perceived devaluation of their work by the public and anxiety over future job prospects. All of these stressors combine to create a toxic environment in which cynicism and pessimism can prevail. Many studies have shown that people who experience stress also experience decreased productivity² and creativity³, compared with those who feel little or no stress — yet these two traits are key to being a successful scientist.

Graduate programmes can help students to combat burnout. We propose that institutions take the following steps:

1. Enable time away from the lab. In sectors such as the technology industry, flexible work policies have led to more-satisfied, more productive employees^4,5. Although working from home or taking time off spontaneously is less feasible in medical and graduate training, some institutions have embraced trainee wellness, allowing students to take absences as needed.

More here.

The Editors at n+1:

Maybe podcasting would be more interesting if it were an instrument of fascism, or terrorism. ISIS knows better: they don’t make podcasts, they make YouTube videos. Talk radio can still control the listener’s emotional response, but no one feels threatened by the infinitely banal podcast. Instead of emotion or camaraderie, what podcasts produce is chumminess — reminiscent of the bourgeois club atmosphere, reconfigured as the desperate friendliness of burned-out knowledge workers. They aren’t pieces of media so much as second jobs or second lives — a way to pursue our hobbies when we have no time to spare, to have smart people talk at us when we have no time to think, to have new books summarized when we have no time to read. Our relationship with podcasts exists in uninterrupted parallel to the rest of our existence, a wealth of knowledge ready to be tapped at any moment. Podcasts intensify our saturation while pretending to relieve it. It’s like a voluntary authoritarian state, except instead of state-funded sitcoms, we have Marc Maron. But what would we do without it? Die, probably. Be murdered. Become a true-crime podcast. Don’t forget us when we’re gone; please rate us on iTunes.

more here.

Martin Bashir at the BBC:

He studied theology and philosophy, completing his doctoral studies on happiness in the ethics of Aristotle. He became a teaching professor at St Michael’s College in Toronto.

During the Christmas holidays of 1964, he visited a friend who was working as a chaplain for men with learning difficulties just outside Paris. Disturbed by conditions in which 80 men did nothing but walk around in circles, he bought a small house nearby and invited two men from the institution to join him.

L’Arche – the Ark – was born.

Vanier said that living with the disabled helped him to appreciate two truths: first, that people with learning difficulties have a great deal to contribute; second, by living in a community with people – with and without learning disabilities – we open ourselves up to be challenged and to grow.

more here.

Terry Eagleton at Commonweal:

The governing elites of ancient and medieval Europe were not greatly hospitable to humor. From the earliest times, laughter seems to have been a class affair, with a firm distinction enforced between civilized amusement and vulgar cackling. Aristotle insists on the difference between the humor of well-bred and low-bred types in the Nicomachean Ethics. He assigns an exalted place to wit, ranking it alongside friendship and truthfulness as one of the three social virtues, but the style of wit in question demands refinement and education, as does the deployment of irony. Plato’s Republic sets its face sternly against holding citizens up to ridicule and is content to abandon comedy largely to slaves and aliens. Mockery can be socially disruptive, and abuse dangerously divisive. The cultivation of laughter among the Guardian class is sternly discouraged, along with images of laughing gods or heroes. St. Paul forbids jesting, or what he terms eutrapelia, in his Epistle to the Ephesians. It is likely, however, that Paul has scurrilous buffoonery in mind, rather than the vein of urbane wit of which Aristotle would have approved.

more here.

Eviction

the whites cry in their houses
because they’ve had to evict the guests.
the last names and the properties cry
because they’ve burned
the worms’ deeds.

how sad the disillusionment!
how sad the death of love and hope!

the writings cry for the forgotten oralities.
the coldness of the rebel incites the handkerchiefs to come out
and cry through the streets like mary magdalene.

the world ends and those who end it never end up crying,
but when they reach the water ay ay what laments
what bodies of water that flood the planet.
the buried mountains of my island
sit like lost treasures at the bottom of a sea
that is more spume than water.

this poem is personal.
as personal as colonialism and private property.
this poem doesn’t cry because it is worse than an evicted tenant.
this poem doesn’t have friends or time to move,
but still moves.

      (a curse on the house that still smells like my mouth)

either way, what is a poem without the rent,
a couple without equality or love
between landlord and tenant?
wouldn’t pain be inevitable
if you don’t pay the first of the month?

they say that what i am saying is unfair
that really we should be careful.
we all have bills.
the world makes us cruel. 

but i am not of the world,
not even of this planet.
i happened to land here
and my ship ran out of gas.
i stayed because i had no choice.
i fell in love because soy una pendeja
and because the people here are beautiful
when they don’t kick us out.

since my arrival,
i’ve had various lovely houses.
one had green walls
and a white and open kitchen.
another smelled like sage and rusty books.
my favorite had two cats and two people in love.
all evicted me to drain the roofs.

the houses with their whites cry
over the end of the neighborhoods
and with their white nostalgia
for the end of childhood and backyards.

by Raquel Salas Rivera
from Split This Rock
Read more »

Cathy Young in Quillette:

Vladimir Nabokov, whose 120^th anniversary we mark this Spring, remains one of the 20^th Century’s most acclaimed and enduring writers. He keeps turning up on various Greatest–Books lists, often more than once—for the novels Lolita and Pale Fire, as well as his autobiography, Speak, Memory. And yet in this day and age, Nabokov is clearly a “problematic” fave. Not only is he a dead white male of privileged pedigree, but the novel that made him a literary star is, in the scolding words of feminist essayist Rebecca Solnit, “a book about a white man serially raping a child.” What’s more, Nabokov, a Russian-born refugee from both Communism and Nazism who died in 1977, made no secret of his contempt for both progressive political causes and literature as a means to advance them. He was politically incorrect avant la lettre. 

And so it is not surprising that anti-Nabokov rumblings have been bubbling up in recent years. They include Solnit’s widely praised 2015 essay “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” in which she wrote about being lectured by males online after daring to question the misogynistic literary canon. (That piece, as I pointed out in a review of Solnit’s essay collection, is based on a fraud: Solnit’s chief mansplainer turned out to be a woman with a gender-ambiguous name who was not lecturing Solnit, but was talking to someone else in a Facebook group. When caught out by commenters, Solnit made surreptitious face-saving edits such as changing “this man” to “this reader.”)

While Solnit offered the disclaimer that “I had never said that we shouldn’t read Lolita,” she clearly seemed to include it among books that treat women as “dirt.” Some got the message. Author, editor and literary publicist Kait Heacock wrotethat, partly due to Solnit’s essay, she has decided to “break up” with her once-beloved Lolita because she will no longer support literature “built on the backs of young girls.”

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

For decades now physicists have been struggling to reconcile two great ideas from a century ago: general relativity and quantum mechanics. We don’t yet know the final answer, but the journey has taken us to some amazing places. A leader in this quest has been Leonard Susskind, who has helped illuminate some of the most mind-blowing ideas in quantum gravity: the holographic principle, the string theory landscape, black-hole complementarity, and others. He has also become celebrated as a writer, speaker, and expositor of mind-blowing ideas. We talk about black holes, quantum mechanics, and the most exciting new directions in quantum gravity.

More here.

Rachel Leah in Salon:

The opening frame of “What’s My Name” shows Ali explaining that should his story ever be told, he wants it done in full. So, there are no talking heads or narration, because who better to tell such a remarkable, revolutionary story than Muhammad Ali himself? His interviews and words guide us through his life, from early childhood until his final days, as he endures the bodily constraints of Parkinson’s disease. Ali’s famous, rhythmic one-liners, like “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” are accompanied by his critical analysis about race, white supremacy and his politics, which are global.

“What’s My Name” doesn’t just show the extreme bravery of Ali’s activism, as he spoke expertly and passionately about the plight of black people in America and the perils of U.S. empire, but it also focuses on the immense sacrifices he made — how Ali put his life, safety and career on the line for his convictions and was punished immensely for it — marginalized and dehumanized by his own country. Ali is universally celebrated today, but like many black radical activists, he was undercut during the zenith of his life.

More here.

Clare Coffey at The New Atlantis:

Mesmerism is the brainchild of Franz Mesmer, a German doctor born in 1734 who practiced medicine in Vienna and Paris, and who believed in the influence of magnetic fluids and astronomical movements on human physiology. (If that sounds particularly quaint, consider that today Dave Asprey has built an empire offering advice such as that walking barefoot is a necessary and healing method of getting in touch with the earth’s electrical energy.)

The doctor regularly treated his patients with magnets, and one day, while employing his technique on a female patient, he discerned a fluid in her body that responded to his manipulations. Mesmer called the fluid “animal magnetism,” a term that in general use now means raw charisma. As he used it, “animal” just meant “vital”; it was the force that sustains and animates us. When it became blocked or flowed in the wrong direction, physical and mental ailments resulted. In this, mesmerism resembled Reiki, developed in Japan by Mikao Usui about a hundred years later. But unlike Usui, who claimed to regulate intangible, spiritual energies, Mesmer claimed to have made a bona fide breakthrough in physiology. He presented himself as a scientist, not a healer.

more here.

Bruce Whiteman at The Hudson Review:

Trilling rather disliked the label “literary critic” and was pleased when Étienne Gilson suggested, in 1955, that he was not one. (Just what Gilson proposed him to be is not made clear.) All the same, twenty years after the Gilson exchange, Trilling would write to someone, who had sent him some offprints, to aver that he should “best refer to me as a critic of literature.” He did not much care for the New Criticism of Allen Tate, William Empson, and Cleanth Brooks, calling it snide and restrictive. Leon Edel, more a literary historian than a critic to be sure, he thought dull-witted (“a very stupid man”). One would not expect the life of a literary critic to be full of high adventure and derring-do, and the composite portrait of a critic’s life as painted in Trilling’s letters appears a largely unruffled if not a completely serene one. He married young and stay married to the same woman for his entire life. If there were any occasions of extramarital desire, much less action, they are not even intimated here. There is only a single rather explicit letter, to his wife, Diana, in which he talks about sex, and he never once swears and rarely uses slang. (When he writes in a letter to Norman Mailer that sex should be a subject for novelists for “ten, maybe twelve years; then everybody shut up,” it is a bit of a shock.)

more here.

Honor Moore at The Paris Review:

There is a way in which all of Bette Howland’s characters seem like visitors from a parallel universe, where they are free rather than confined. This is the eponymous visitor in the opening story of this collection: “I was catching on at last. The bad roads, the crash, the minor injury. This petty bureaucrat. This place. Sir? I’m dead? Is that it? I’m dead? … That’s what they all want to know! he said. But that’s the whole show! I can’t give that away, can I?” An uncle’s young wife is “a big handsome Southern girl, rawboned, rock jawed, her pale head dropped over her knitting. Peculiarly pale; translucent, like rock candy, and almost as brittle.” It is as if they step into a room accompanied by their own lighting. “ ‘When are you going to get married?’ Uncle Rudy asked, towering over me.” Imagination is what she calls what she does with them, imaginative selection from the panoply of life. “He’s a scofflaw. He’ll go out of his way to park illegally. He’ll drive around the block looking for a No Parking sign or a nice little fire hydrant.” Reading the prose brings a Bette I’d forgotten—a glass of Scotch, how she threw back her head and uproariously laughed. Ah, yes; here’s the one with verve, the woman in the fedora photo.

more here.

Brad Plumer in The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded. The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.

More here.

Allie Volpe in The New York Times:

When I was laid off in 2015, I told people about it the way any good millennial would: By tweeting it. My hope was that someone on the fringes of my social sphere would point me to potential opportunities. To my surprise, the gambit worked. Shortly after my public plea for employment, a friend of a friend sent me a Facebook message alerting me to an opening in her department. Three rounds of interviews later, this acquaintance was my boss. (She’s now one of my closest friends).

Think of the parents you see in the drop-off line at school. Your favorite bartender. The other dog owners at the park. The sociologist Mark Granovetter calls these low-stakes relationships “weak ties.” Not only can these connections affect our job prospects, they also can have a positive impact on our well-being by helping us feel more connected to other social groups, according to Dr. Granovetter’s research. Other studies have shown weak ties can offer recommendations (I found my accountant via a weak tie) and empower us to be more empathetic. We’re likely to feel less lonely, too, research shows. A 2014 study found that the more weak ties a person has (neighbors, a barista at the neighborhood coffee shop or fellow members in a spin class), the happier they feel. Maintaining this network of acquaintances also contributes to one’s sense of belonging to a community, researchers found.

More here.

The Accompanist

Don’t play too much, don’t play
too loud, don’t play the melody.
You have to anticipate her
and to subdue yourself.
She used to give me her smoky
eye when I got boisterous,
so I learned to play on tip-
toe and to play the better half
of what I might. I don’t like
to complain, though I notice
that I get around to it somehow.
We made a living and good music,
both, night after night, the blue
curlicues of smoke rubbing their
staling and wispy backs
against the ceilings, the flat
drinks and scarce taxis, the jazz life
we bitch about the way Army pals
complain about the food and then
re-up. Some people like to say
with smut in their voices how playing
the way we did at our best is partly
sexual. OK, I could tell them
a tale or two, and I’ve heard
the records Lester cut with Lady Day
and all that rap, and it’s partly
sexual but it’s mostly practice
and music. As for partly sexual,
I’ll take wholly sexual any day,
but that’s a duet and we’re talking
accompaniment. Remember “Reckless
Blues”? Bessie Smith sings out “Daddy”
and Louis Armstrong plays back “Daddy”
as clear through his horn as if he’d
spoken it. But it’s her daddy and her
story. When you play it you become
your part in it, one of her beautiful
troubles, and then, however much music
can do this, part of her consolation,
the way pain and joy eat off each other’s
plates, but mostly you play to drunks,
to the night, to the way you judge
and pardon yourself, to all that goes
not unsung, but unrecorded.

by William Matthews
from Poetry 180
Random House 2003

Anjali Enjeti in Guernica:

In the opening of The Other Americans, Laila Lalami’s fourth novel, a man is killed in a hit-and-run collision. The victim is Driss Guerraoui, an immigrant and small business owner who, after fleeing political unrest in Casablanca, eventually settles in a small town in California’s Mojave Desert to open a business and raise his family. His immigrant story is one his younger daughter Nora, a jazz composer, considers with mixed feelings. “I think he liked that story because it had the easily discernible arc of the American Dream: Immigrant Crosses Ocean, Starts a Business, Becomes a Success.” And it’s this clichéd American-immigrant narrative that Lalami sets out to deconstruct in her book.

The Other Americans grapples with a host of complex issues facing American immigrants today. And although it’s a murder mystery—focused on finding Guerrauoi’s killer—it’s also a provocative commentary on migration, identity, assimilation and bigotry. Lalami, a Moroccan American immigrant, has a PhD in linguistics and is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her novel The Moor’s Account was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and she writes a column about human rights and foreign policy for The Nation.

I spoke with Lalami over the phone recently. She shared with me her tricks for how best to depict racist characters; her fears about being an immigrant and an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s immigration policies; and her upcoming nonfiction book, Conditional Citizens, which examines the relationship of nonwhite citizens to America through Lalami’s own personal immigration story.

More here.

Matt Simon in Wired:

This week, amid devastating flooding, Indonesia announced it’s planning to move its capital out of Jakarta, which really is nothing new—the country’s first president was talking about it way back in 1957. Part of the problem is extreme congestion, but today the city of more than 10 million is facing nothing short of obliteration by rising seas and sinking land, two opposing yet complementary forces of doom. Models predict that by 2050, 95 percent of North Jakarta could be submerged. And Jakarta is far from alone—cities the world over are drowning and sinking, and there’s very little we can do about it short of stopping climate change entirely.

Jakarta is a victim of climate change, the fault of humans the world over (though mostly the fault of corporations), but it’s also a victim of its own policies. The city is sinking—a process known as land subsidence—because residents and industries have been draining aquifers, often illegally, to the point that the land is now collapsing. Think of it like a giant underground water bottle: If you empty too much of it and give it a good squeeze, it’s going to buckle. Accordingly, parts of Jakarta are sinking by as much as 10 inches a year.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Skeptical Inquirer:

If someone says, “I guess it’s in my DNA,” you never hear people say, “DN—what?” We all know what DNA is, or at least think we do.

It’s been seven decades since scientists demonstrated that DNA is the molecule of heredity. Since then, a steady stream of books, news programs, and episodes of CSI have made us comfortable with the notion that each of our cells contains three billion base pairs of DNA, which we inherited from our parents. But we’ve gotten comfortable without actually knowing much at all about our own genomes.

Indeed, if you had asked to look at your own genome twenty years ago, the question would have been absurd. It would have been as ridiculous as asking to go to the moon. When scientists unveiled the first rough draft of the human genome in the early 2000s, the final bill came to an Apollo-scale $2.7 billion.

More here.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

For a few months in 2008 and 2009 many people feared that the world economy was on the verge of collapse…

“Firefighting” is a brief account of that crucial moment by three of the most important actors. Ben S. Bernanke was the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, then and now the most influential economic position in the world. Henry M. Paulson Jr. was George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary. Timothy F. Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — another key position in the Fed system — then became Paulson’s successor under Barack Obama.

There are a number of forms a book by central players in a historic episode can take. “Firefighting” could have been a juicy tell-all; it could have been an exercise in boasting about how its authors saved the world; it could have been a litany of excuses, explaining why none of what went wrong was the authors’ fault. And the truth is that there’s a little bit of each of these elements — but not much, considering.

What Bernanke et al. — I’m going to call them BGP for short — have given us, instead, is a primer on why the crisis was possible (and why, even so, almost nobody saw it coming); a ticktock on how the crisis and the financial rescue unfolded; and a very scary warning about the future.

More here.