Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

Robert Conquest is a man of contradictions: He has been called “a comic poet of genius” and “a love poet of considerable force” – but he made his mark as one of the first to expose the horrors of Stalinist communism.

Susan Sontag was a visiting star at Stanford in the 1990s. But when she was introduced to Robert Conquest, the constellations tilted fora moment. “You’re my hero!” she announced as she flung her arms around the elderly poet and acclaimed historian. It was a few years since she had called communism “fascism with a human face” – and Conquest, author of The Great Terror, a record of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, had apparently been part
of her political earthquake.

Sitting in his Stanford campus home last week and chatting over a cup of tea, the 93-year-old insisted it’s all true: “I promise.We had witnesses.” His wife, Liddie, sitting nearby confirmed the account, laughing. Robert Conquest published his seventh collection of poems last year and a book of limericks this year, finished a 200-line poetic summa and is working on his memoirs.

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Why I Like Marriage

At breakfast I tell my wife
To bury me in my new suit.
“The gray one?” she asks,
“Yes, with the pinstripes,”
“Fine,” and she sips her tea.

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From Medical Express:

An antibody treatment developed at Stanford Medicine successfully prepared patients for stem cell transplants without toxic busulfan chemotherapy or radiation, a Phase I clinical trial has shown.

Their work focused on CD117, which regulates the cells’ growth and development. They found that an antibody against CD117 blocked the stem cells’ growth and eliminated the cells from mice without the hazards of radiation and chemo. Together with other Stanford scientists, they subsequently identified the clinical antibody equivalent that was used in this new clinical trial. This clinical trial also addressed a second challenge in stem cell transplants: In the past, about 35% to 40% of patients who needed the transplants for any reason did not receive them because they lacked fully matched donors. But researchers found a way to increase the chance that the transplants would work by modifying the donated bone marrow before giving it to the participants.

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Becky Ferreira at 404 Media:

A major mystery about a long-lost legend that was all the rage in Medieval England but survives in only one known fragment has been solved, according to a study published on Tuesday in The Review of English Studies.

Roughly 800 years ago, a legend known today as the Song of Wade was a blockbuster hit for English audiences. Mentions of the heroic character showed up in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, for example. But the tale vanished from the literature centuries later, puzzling generations of scholars who have tried to track down its origin and intent.

Now, for the first time, researchers say they’ve deciphered its true meaning—which flies in the face of the existing interpretation.

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Alexandra Witze in Nature:

The Doomsday Clock — a symbolic arbiter of how close humanity is to annihilating itself — now sits at 89 seconds to midnight, nearer than it has ever been to signalling our species’ point of no return.

Many threats, including climate change and biological weapons, prompted global-security specialists at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in Chicago, Illinois, to move the clock’s hands in January. But chief among those hazards is the growing — and often overlooked — risk of nuclear war.

“The message we keep hearing is that the nuclear risk is over, that that’s an old risk from the cold war,” says Daniel Holz, a physicist at the University of Chicago, who advised on the Doomsday Clock decision. “But when you talk to experts, you get the opposite message — that actually the nuclear risk is very high, and it’s increasing.”

From Russia’s grinding war in Ukraine and the simmering tensions between India and Pakistan that flared in May, to the US and Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities in June, the world is not short of conflicts involving one or more nuclear-armed nations.

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Pranab Bardhan at his own Substack:

Zorhan Mamdani, the presumed front-runner in the New York mayoral race, calls himself a democratic socialist (which scares Wall Street). So did US senator Bernie Sanders in his earlier election campaigns. Historically, a socialist is usually associated with advocacy of ownership or control of means of production primarily resting with the state or other non-private entities (like cooperatives or worker-owned enterprises). I have not heard either Mamdani or Sanders being associated with the advocacy of any such transformation of most of the means of production in the US. I think they are simply European-style social democrats, who would keep the mode of production essentially capitalist (with some possible light modifications) but with a somewhat greater role of the state in education, health and other welfare services (which, of course, may require higher taxes on the rich).

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Madeline Schwartz in The Paris Review:

Marie NDiaye’s books are often violent, but the violence takes highly particular forms. A person might find herself suddenly called a different name by everyone around her, like Fanny in Among Family (1990, translation 1997), or pregnant with a strange creature, as does Nadia in My Heart Hemmed In (2007, 2017). A lawyer might try to comprehend an act of infanticide; a woman working in a hotel might find herself in a sexual relationship with her boss, who has their encounters filmed. The shocking nature of such scenarios is offset by NDiaye’s prose, precise and formal, with a restraint that adds to her work’s unnerving quality: a placidity where one might expect horror. Claire Denis, with whom NDiaye wrote the screenplay for the film White Material (2009), has described her work as “unbearably sweet.”

In person, NDiaye is warm and gracious. She likes talking about babies, dinner parties, her friends’ books; she often wanted to know what I was reading, and to discuss movies she enjoyed, like Anatomy of a Fall and Mulholland Drive.

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Alice Park in Time Magazine:

On July 14, 48 students walked through the doors of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville, Ark. to become its inaugural class. Some came from neighboring cities, others from urban centers in Michigan and New York. Almost all had a choice in where they could become doctors but took a chance on the new school because of its unique approach to rethinking medical education.

Named after its founder—the world’s richest woman and an heir to the Walmart fortune—the school will train students over the next four years in a radically different way from the method most traditional medical schools use. And that’s the point. Instead of drilling young physicians to chase symptom after symptom and perform test after test, Alice Walton wants her school’s graduates to keep patients healthy by practicing something that most doctors today don’t prioritize: preventive medicine and whole-health principles, which involve caring for (and not just treating) the entire person and all of the factors—from their mental health to their living conditions and lifestyle choices—that contribute to wellbeing.

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Ed Schad interviews Takashi Murakami at The Brooklyn Rail:

Rail: We have spoken in the past of the status that a copy has in Japan, that, for instance, it is not unusual or out of place to see a copy of a national treasure standing in for an original work in a museum. Practically, most treasures are too fragile and too old to be on continuous view, but it is also more than that, more like the copy can transmit what the original is meant to transmit. This bothers us in the West, but less so in Japan. We have also spoken of a copy as a way of both affirming and breaking from a teacher. Your idea of a person vicariously reaching back to Matabei through your work seems in this vein.

Murakami: Matabei captured all the details of people’s different jobs during a moment in the city of Kyoto, the landscape of the town, even more details than have been recorded in writing. So it really was just like I was using someone else’s genius to boost my work. It is difficult to do a copy of old works like these because so much of the original tints and paintings have rubbed off and a lot of the details are missing. If you fill in too many details or imitate too many of the missing lines, then it seems to become your own work and it has less to do with the older artist. However, two to three years ago I started to use AI to recreate those details more faithfully and get much closer to the older artist’s work. This use of AI to fill in the details of an older work made it possible later for me to work with Hiroshige’s prints when the Brooklyn Museum asked me.

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After Babel

What moved the men of Shinar
to build with brick and slime
their storied tower?

Was it a name
that kept them unified?

And why should God
destroy this unity
scattering them one by one
across the world?

I’ve never mastered
another tongue
always wondering
what was the language that we lost
the Ur-Sprache,
the babble we once shared

and whether it reappears unwittingly
in a mother’s lulling of a child,
the dialects of love,
our gestures when another suffers pain,
the will to give.

These are the bricks
we’ve always used to build
not only towers and walls
but simple, open places where we can live and breathe
and may still do.

by Michael Jackson
from Dead Reckoning
Auckland University Press, 2006

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Rachel Aviv at The New Yorker:

Karl Jaspers, the German psychiatrist and philosopher, has described what he calls the “delusional atmosphere,” a profound alteration in the way certain people experience the world. “There is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light,” he wrote. People in this state search for a story that explains why everything suddenly feels uncanny and ominous. The “vagueness of content must be unbearable,” he wrote. “To reach some definite idea at last is like being relieved from some enormous burden.”

Mary had landed on a story that overwrote the reality of her daughters’ lives, but they also recognized in it a kind of emotional logic. Mary had been pressured to marry Chris, in an arranged match, and, when they settled in America, he had traditional ideas about a woman’s role and restricted her freedom to pursue her career. Christine and Angie came to feel that their mother’s delusions—that her former colleagues would free her from marriage and she’d be restored to her place in the medical community—were “a way of explaining how she ended up trapped in this position,” Christine said. “We theorized that psychosis was almost a reasonable response.”

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Adam Aleksic at Literary Hub:

It seems as though everything happens faster on the internet. Each week brings a dizzying parade of new memes, fads, and slang words that evaporate as quickly as they materialize. It can be hard to keep up with the latest references unless you’re spending hours a day catching up on social media trends.

Of course, it wasn’t always like this: Look at Middle English six hundred years ago. Language was far more insular. Each city and region had its own, different dialect, to a point where there can scarcely be any discussion of a uniform “English” language as we understand it today. The only reason to adopt a new word was that it helped you better communicate with your fellow townspeople, so of course change came about more slowly.

Then England centralized, and the dialects of London and the East Midlands became the basis of what we now think of as Standard English. It was as if a switch had flipped: The upper class suddenly had a set vocabulary they could point to as “correct,” meaning that all other dialects became “incorrect.” By the 1750s, the word “slang” emerged as a catchall term to describe the nonstandard words used by the lower classes.

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Amos Zeeberg in Quanta:

The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot earlier this year called R1, which drew a huge amount of attention. Most of it focused on the fact(opens a new tab) that a relatively small and unknown company said it had built a chatbot that rivaled the performance of those from the world’s most famous AI companies, but using a fraction of the computer power and cost. As a result, the stocks of many Western tech companies plummeted; Nvidia, which sells the chips that run leading AI models, lost more stock value in a single day(opens a new tab) than any company in history.

Some of that attention involved an element of accusation. Sources alleged(opens a new tab) that DeepSeek had obtained(opens a new tab), without permission, knowledge from OpenAI’s proprietary o1 model by using a technique known as distillation. Much of the news coverage(opens a new tab) framed this possibility as a shock to the AI industry, implying that DeepSeek had discovered a new, more efficient way to build AI.

But distillation, also called knowledge distillation, is a widely used tool in AI, a subject of computer science research going back a decade and a tool that big tech companies use on their own models. “Distillation is one of the most important tools that companies have today to make models more efficient,” said Enric Boix-Adsera(opens a new tab), a researcher who studies distillation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

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April White at JSTOR Daily:

“The sea is a stranger to me,” Sheldon confessed in the first pages of her journal, yet the thirty-six-year-old had not hesitated a moment when she had been asked, two days earlier, to join the voyage as the stewardess—the only woman on the crew for the sixty-five-day trip to Hong Kong and back, with stops for additional passengers and cargo in Japan and Hawai‘i. For Sheldon, who had been born into a farming family in central Wisconsin before the Civil War, and for other women like her, the position of ship stewardess was a rare and, from the outside, glamorous chance to see the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her travels, Sheldon would see things most Americans had encountered only in books or on canvas. “The sunset was beautiful,” she wrote on her first evening aboard the Belgic, “one of those soft pink and yellow tinted skies which we see in pictures and think was created by the artist just to see what he could do. I know now they are real.”

For at least eight years, between 1892 and 1900, Sheldon worked shipboard for the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, traveling from San Francisco to Asia and Central America tending to the every need of the women passengers in the first-class, or “saloon,” cabins and doing the ship’s mending. On at least six of those voyages, she kept a detailed record of her travels. Now, more than 125 years later, the Ella Sheldon Diaries have been shared via JSTOR by the University of the Pacific.

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Udi Greenberg in Aeon:

To grasp just how revolutionary this inter-Christian peace was, it’s worth remembering what came before it. Because the mutual hatred between the confessions shaped not only the early modern era, when gruesome acts of violence like St Bartholomew’s Day (1572) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) tore Europe apart. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism remained powerful forces well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and shaped social and political life. The most extreme case was Germany, where the Protestant majority in 1871 unleashed an aggressive campaign of persecution against the Catholic minority. For seven years, state authorities expelled Catholic orders, took over Catholic educational institutions, and censored Catholic publications.

In the Netherlands, Protestant crowds violently attacked Catholic processions; in Austria, a popular movement called ‘Away from Rome’ began a (failed) campaign in 1897 to eradicate Catholicism through mass conversion. Catholics, for their part, were just as hostile to Protestants. In France, Catholic magazines and sermons blamed Protestants for treason, some even called for stripping them of citizenship. Business associations, labour unions and even marching bands were often divided across confessional lines.

Even on an everyday level, it still was common into the 20th century for neighbourhoods, parties and magazines to be strictly Catholic or Protestant.

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Michael Wood at the LRB:

The events​ of Danny Boyle’s new film, 28 Years Later, are not too far away. It’s set in the near future, but the prologue takes us back to 2002, which is when Boyle’s earlier film 28 Days Later was released. (There is also 28 Weeks Later, the 2007 sequel directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, but this seems to borrow a piece of the storyline without becoming part of the sequence.) In the first film a virus strikes Britain, killing millions and turning survivors into zombies, smeared with blood and often naked. The prologue to 28 Years Later shows a group of massive zombies killing a priest, who is mysteriously smiling and passes a young boy a cross to remember him by. The priest is sure that this is the end of the world and is ready to welcome it as such.

It’s not the end of the world, but the world has changed. The virus has spread beyond Britain, and continental European nations have found a way of keeping it at bay. But the British haven’t, and the mainland of England, Scotland and Wales has become a vast space of quarantine. The virus is called Rage, allowing for a crisp double meaning: the virus is rage and rage is a virus. To be alive and infected is to be angry.

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