Allan Stratton at Quillette:

The Oscars have never been about art. As Louis B. Mayer once remarked, recalling the creation of his brainchild, “I found that the best way to handle [moviemakers] was to hang medals all over them. If I got them cups and awards, they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.” Awards had the further benefit of projecting an aura of respectability on a field then associated with vaudeville and debauchery. The awards’ host, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, was created for the same reason—and to handle labour disputes without unions (postmodernists are hardly the first to use language to redefine reality). Besides, an awards event hosted by an organization with a highbrow name created plenty of free publicity.

More here.

Joshua March and Kasia Gora in Noahpinion:

The field of biology has driven remarkable advancements in medicine, agriculture, and industry over the last half-century, despite facing a significant hurdle: The immense complexity of biological systems makes them incredibly difficult to predict. This lack of predictability means that any innovation in biology requires many expensive trial-and-error experiments, inflating costs and slowing down progress in a wide range of applications, from drug discovery to biomanufacturing. But we are now at a critical inflection point in our ability to predict and engineer complex biological systems—transforming biology from a wet and messy science into an engineering discipline. This is being driven by the convergence of three major innovations: advancements in deep learning, significant cost reductions for collecting biological data through lab automation, and the precision editing of DNA with CRISPR.

More here.

Jordan Michael Smith in Smithsonian Magazine:

Norval Morrisseau was certain. “I did not paint the attached 23 acrylics on canvas,” he wrote in a typed letter in 2001 to his Toronto gallery representative, who had sent him color photocopies of works that had recently sold at an unrelated auction.

Morrisseau, then in his late 60s and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was the most important artist in the modern history of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the “Picasso of the North.” He had single-handedly invented the Woodlands school of art, which fused European and Indigenous traditions to create striking, vibrant images featuring thick black lines and colorful interiors of humans, animals and plants, as though they had been X-rayed and their insides were visible and filled with unusual patterns and shapes. He was one of the first Indigenous painters to garner national attention and the first to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. “Few exhibits in Canadian art history have touched off a greater immediate stir,” swooned the Canadian edition of Time magazine after Morrisseau’s sold-out 1962 debut exhibition in Toronto.

More here.

From PBS:

They are poets, playwrights, novelists and scholars, and together they helped capture the voice of a nation. They have fearlessly explored racism, abuse and violence as well as love, beauty and music. While their names and styles have changed over the years, they have been the voices of their generations and helped inspire the generations that followed them. What follows is a list of prominent Black authors who have left a mark on the literary world forever.

Maya Angelou

Acclaimed American poet, author and activist Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1928. Often referred to as a spokesman for African Americans and women through her many works, her gift of words connected all people who were “committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States.” [1] “I want to write so that the reader … can say, ‘You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.’ ” [2]

Influenced by Black authors like Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, her love of language developed at a young age. Her most famous work I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969 and became the first in seven autobiographies of Angelou’s life. A prolific poet, her words often depict Black beauty, the strength of women and the human spirit, and the demand for social justice. Her first collection of poems Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1972, the same year she became the first Black woman to have a screenplay produced. Writing for adults and children, Angelou was one of several African American women at the time who explored the Black female autobiographical tradition. Other female authors and contemporaries include Paule Marshall who published the novel Brown Girl, Brownstones and Illinois Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, many of whose poems lyricize the urban poor.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

Jordan Castro at Harper’s Magazine:

This, in so many words, is the activity that increasing numbers of us engage in on a regular basis—that has changed the lives of millions of Americans in recent years. Roughly half of Americans say they exercise at least a few times a week. Since 2010, the number of people with a gym membership has increased by 32 percent, to 66.5 million people, a growth that is expected to continue. And weight lifting is now the second most popular form of exercise in gyms in the United States. More people are exercising, and the way they are exercising has changed.

I will stick to “lifting” to describe what is in reality several types of exercise, each with its own distinct methods and goals, but with enough in common to be comfortably grouped together. Each involves moving one’s body against some kind of resistance (weights, exercise bands, bars, the floor), with the intention of changing one’s body (usually to become stronger, leaner, or both).

more here.

Susan Orlean at The New Yorker:

Probably the only people at the Oscar Nominees Luncheon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel last week who were out on bail were Bobi Wine, the Ugandan politician and musician, and his wife, Barbie Kyagulanyi. Their presence was seemingly the result of some rather cynical political calculations. Once the film about Wine’s Presidential campaign, “Bobi Wine: The People’s President,” was nominated for an Oscar, in the Best Documentary Feature category, the government of the authoritarian Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, was apparently in a pickle: If the government prevented Wine from travelling, his absence during the pre-Oscars festivities—not to mention the ceremony itself—would highlight its tireless campaign of harassment, torture, and detention against him. The alternative, of allowing Wine and Kyagulanyi to travel to Los Angeles and other cities, including London (where the film was nominated for a bafta), must have seemed the lesser of two evils. One day, Wine and Kyagulanyi were under house arrest in their home in Kampala, with three of their children, not sure if Museveni would drag Wine off to prison again, and a few days later they were in the Hilton. “I would sleep on the street and go without food to get attention for what’s going on in Uganda,” Wine said the other day. “Instead, I’m achieving that by sleeping in a nice bed in a nice hotel in Los Angeles. It’s very strange.”

more here.

He Thanks His Woodpile

The wood of the madrone burns with a flame at once
lavender and mossy green, a color you sometimes see in a sari.

Oak burns with a peppery smell.

For a really hot fire, use bark.
You can crack your stove with bark.

All winter long I make wood stews:

Poem to stove to woodpile to stove to
typewriter.     woodpile       stove.

and can’t stop peeking at it!
can’t stop opening the door!
can’t stop giggling at it

“Shack Simple”

crazy as Han Shan as
Wittgenstein in his German hut, as
as all the others ever were and are

                         Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers

who walked away from it, finally,
kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of
man-hooked Man

………….. …… (  Which was not, at last, estrangement )

by Lew Welsh
from Ring of Bone
Grey Fox Press, 1979

Justin Smith-Ruiu at The Hinternet:

A journal entry from me, dated January 1, 1984, records a list of what appear to be New Year’s resolutions. Most of them are unimaginative, and only testify to the common hopes and aspirations of an 11-year-old child. One however stands out: “No Beatles from after 1965”.

What was that all about? I have trouble reconstructing the whole scene, but a few additional facts can help us at least to contextualize this enigma. Along with a pair of friends, whom you can still track down in Tucson and Long Beach respectively if you wish to do some independent fact-checking, I was, from the ages of eleven to thirteen, absolutely obsessed with the Beatles. At the time of John Lennon’s assassination a few years before, I had been musically oriented towards more plainly childish tastes, Kenny Rogers, say, or Sha-Na-Na, but the news of his death insinuated itself into my burgeoning sensibility, and became a sort of foundational tragedy that soon enough led me to seek out any and all Beatles resources. A profile of “Paul and Linda at Home” in a 1983 issue of Marie Claire? If I saw that at the Safeway check-out counter, you could be sure it was going in the cart.

More here.

Rob Henderson in Persuasion:

Before my first classes were scheduled to begin, I was sitting in the courtyard of my residential college when a young woman asked for help lifting some boxes into her dorm room. She introduced herself and told me she was a senior. I explained that this was my first semester.

“What do you think of Yale so far?” she asked.

I was embarrassed to answer. “I keep waiting for them to tell me it was a mistake that they let me in,” I said, carrying boxes up the stairs as she guided me. “Walking around, it feels like I’m dreaming.”

“That’s such a great feeling,” she replied wistfully. “Enjoy it.”

We entered her room, and I set the boxes down. She opened the larger box and pulled out a large case of pills.

The medication rattled as she set it on her desk.

“Nice stash. Anything for sale?” I joked.

“Yeah, the Adderall is.” She didn’t appear to be joking.

More here.

Raiany Romanni in Palladium:

Twentieth-century science doubled the life expectancy of Homo sapiens, but our health still declines at nearly the same age today as it did in 300 BC. We’ve learned to keep chronically ill adults alive, and made some welcome progress in maintaining health. But in 2024, we’re about as likely to develop the diseases of aging—like cancers—if we live to age 60 as we were in the Iron Age. We’ve never actually extended the human lifespan. The oldest person to have ever lived (to an alleged 122) was born in 1875 and never saw the 21st century.

Yet attempts to increase health and lifespan have been successful in nearly every animal studied so far. In a 1993 study, changing just one gene (daf-2, a pathway humans share) in C. Elegans worms doubled their lifespan. Changing one additional gene (rsks-1) resulted in a five-fold lifespan increase—the equivalent of a 400-year-old human.

More here.

Terry Eagleton at the London Review of Books:

The​ Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle claimed he had once talked a student out of suicide by pointing out to him that the logic of ‘nothing matters’ is very different from that of, for example, ‘nothing chatters.’ For some who philosophise in this style, Hegel is not one of their tribe but an obscurantist, semi-mystical system-builder who ended up kowtowing to an autocratic Prussian state, and whose thought lies behind the totalitarianism of the 20th century. Philosophy consists in talking about certain things in a certain way; Hegel sometimes discusses the right kinds of thing (freedom, virtue, rationality), but doesn’t do so in the right kind of way. He writes about some subjects that don’t exist, such as the unity of identity and non-identity, as well as some that do (love, poverty, self-cultivation). But he wouldn’t count as philosophical at all for the likes of Ryle.

more here.

John Witfield at Aeon Magazine:

It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive.

In the new places, the old limits are missing. As their population grows and their reach expands, the animals lay claim to more territories, reshaping the relationships in each new landscape by eliminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they create the largest animal societies, in terms of numbers of individuals, that the planet has ever known. And at the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known.

This might sound like our story: the story of a hominin species, living in tropical Africa a few million years ago, becoming global. Instead, it is the story of a group of ant species, living in Central and South America a few hundred years ago, who spread across the planet by weaving themselves into European networks of exploration, trade, colonisation and war – some even stowed away on the 16th-century Spanish galleons that carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila.

more here.

Egyptian Archers

In Egyptian art, one archer stands
for all archers,

their contour drawn from his thigh, his shin, his chest,
his bow and quiver,

a deck of desires slightly spread.
Archers are technicians; this frieze

shows their discipline, how they draw
as one, their almond eye a blank,

calm as the strings unsmile,
sure of their mission

the moment their missiles
release.

They think: soon

I will recline with my lover and lyre again,
the bow’s tension gone,

the twang become strum
and gentle stroking, the hand that leads

not hungry for battle’s bloody plain, but
parting curtains, softly, to a bed

where my quiver will subside, incense slowly rise,
and the drum only of rain and conversation,

not war, nor plucked Assyrian eyes.
This arrow will save my life.

by  Derek Webster
from Mockingbird
Véhicule Press, 2015

Ajdina Halilovic in Nautilus:

Jessie Donaldson has played the flute for 26 years. One of her favorite pieces to play is “Romance No. 2” by Beethoven, a sweet and stately composition for flute, oboes, bassoons, horns, and violin. But mentally rehearsing the flute part is tricky for the occupational therapist, who lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Jessie lacks the ability to simulate sounds in her mind. When I ask her to conjure the music that she has mastered over decades, she says she can feel the fingerings she has practiced, but can’t hear the parts in her mind’s ear. In those moments, Jessie’s mind is filled with thoughts of the rhythm and structure of the music but none of the actual sounds her flute or the other instruments produce.

Going as far back as she can remember, this same silence permeates her memories, too. “I know what the sound of a laugh is,” she tells me, “but I can’t hear it in my mind. I have no memories with sounds.” Jessie only discovered that this was unusual when, by chance, she met a researcher who studies people like her.

More here.