How Things Happen
Rain comes when it will. It doesn’t care for us.
It’s hitchhiking its way to the sea on a cloud.
The sun is interested in its own fires. If light
comes, so be it. Bees feel an itch on their legs
only nectar can sooth. So many gifts from indifferent
givers. We walk through the world and smile,
remembering an old love, and Ramona, passing by,
thinks That man thinks I’m pretty, and walks in a way
that makes her more beautiful – and Henry,
walking down the street notices, makes a pass,
and they end up having a good marriage.
by Nils Peterson
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From the Christian perspective, the hyphen is a sign of Jewish translatability; but the same sign, read, we might say, from right to left, also points to a more confrontational reality, that of Jewish resistance to being translated (elevated) into a (higher) Christian register. The Jewish insistence on reading “the Bible” in Hebrew every week, in synagogue, to congregations whose first language was (and is) probably not the language of the patriarchs but the language of their non-Jewish neighbors, is a performance of otherness. We can see what is at stake in this attachment to the original when we appreciate the difference between reading Hebrew texts in Greek—from right to left—and reading the Bible as a Greek text, from left to right. From the perspective of the former, the Alexandrian translation of 
Fish Tales, released this spring in a new edition and still pioneering decades after its first run, slices into the flesh of the novel of ideas with events and characters who loom so large they leave no room for indulgent ideological abstractions; they are busy being sluts and disasters at the exact moment you might expect more recognizable or coherent archetypes to buckle begrudgingly into the routines of adult life and surrender to them for the sake of reputation, supposed stability, or ego. Transgressive to the point of exhilarating, Nettie Jones’s prose avoids etiquette or the impulse to virtue signal: this perspective of a girl molested by her schoolteacher, whose life subsequently becomes so centered on male approval she pretends she’s sexually liberated instead of a victim of circumstance and tragic hero, makes no excuses for the procession of orgies and nervous breakdowns that becomes the novel’s plot. Hedonism grows banal as we’re trapped in bed with the protagonist, her demons, and the doom disguised as suitors, flatterers, and one husband, Woody, who after a brief attempt at real union becomes Lewis’s overseer and benefactor, allowing her to hire prostitutes or travel to New York to meet with lovers while he takes his own new girlfriend. All the while he sustains Lewis, “his favorite woman,” with an allowance and a roof over her head.
In the recent K-Drama Our Unwritten Seoul, a simple wooden chair emerges as the iconic stand-in (or sit-in) for a young farmer’s late grandfather, whose favorite chair it had once been. Broken and mended multiple times, patched together with tape, glue, and hastily hammered braces, the chair, on its last legs, gets tossed out by an over-zealous new employee. The young farmer is devastated.
To generate images, 
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After a train carrying chemicals derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023, residents were exposed to carcinogens such as vinyl chloride, acrolein and dioxin. Since tumors are typically slow to develop, it could take decades to know what that did to the locals’ cancer risk, but there may be a quicker route to an answer: The residents’ dogs were also exposed, and dogs develop cancer more quickly.
Vast swathes of the human genome remain a mystery to science. A new AI from Google DeepMind is helping researchers understand how these stretches of DNA impact the activity of other genes. While the 
On June 5, 1975, on the seedy stage of CBGB on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a band named Talking Heads took the stage for the first time. Unlike the Ramones, for whom they were opening, they weren’t sporting black leather jackets or edgy haircuts. David Byrne and Chris Frantz had met at art school a few years before, and the bassist, Tina Weymouth, had only learned to play her instrument six months prior. But within a few weeks, Talking Heads would be plastered on the cover of The Village Voice, well on their way to utterly transforming the downtown New York music scene. After Jerry Harrison joined Talking Heads in 1977, the band would go on to radically alter rock music’s relationship to avant-garde art and performance. In his new book, Burning Down the House, Jonathan Gould tells the story of how Talking Heads experimented their way to a singular musical style over the course of eight studio albums and one incredible concert film, Stop Making Sense, and he discusses their enduring influence despite having disbanded more than 30 years ago.
Dissenting — again — on the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, in its most high-profile case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not mince words. She had for months plainly criticized the opinions of her conservative colleagues, trading the staid legalese typical of justices’ decisions for impassioned arguments against what she has described as their acquiescence to President Donald Trump. She returned to that theme again in the final case, ripping the court for limiting nationwide injunctions.