Brooks Riley in Art At First Sight:

There are paintings that push beyond the confines of their chronology, with auras that have little to do with the orderly genre from which they emerge or even the painters who painted them. Obliterating the frames around them, they break through the fourth wall, headed straight for the viewer’s psyche like a parasite—settling into that part of the mind where we read and recognize ourselves.

I chanced on one of these wonders a few weeks ago—the portrait of Hans Burgkmair the Elder and his wife Anna, painted in 1529 by 24-year-old Lukas (Laux) Furtenagel. Burgkmair was 56 at the time, a successful printmaker and painter in Augsburg, a financial center of the Holy Roman Empire. He was also a friend of Albrecht Dürer, who had died a year earlier.

Before we’ve even had a chance to gawk at the two skulls bulging through the mirror’s own fourth wall, we feel eerily close in time to this couple.

More here.

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Tom Lathan in The Guardian:

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid struck Earth, causing the extinction of around 75% of all species. This event was so significant that we now use it to define the boundary between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. There had only been four extinction events of this magnitude up until then; today, we are living through the sixth – and we are its cause.

News of the sixth mass-extinction often comes in the form of statistics – 1 million species threatened with extinction; extinctions now occurring up to 1,000 times more frequently than before humans – and we are left none the wiser about what it is we are losing. A few years ago, I asked the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for a list of species that had recently gone extinct. I wanted to understand what was happening to the natural world, beyond the numbers. The list they sent back contained species from all over the world. One in particular, however, stood out to me.

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Daniel Immerwahner in The New Yorker:

It started, like many good things, as a joke. NBC was filming a preview of its 1984 lineup, and Selma Diamond, a comedian in her sixties, had been tasked with introducing “Miami Vice,” a flashy affair of Ferraris, cocaine cartels, and designer sports jackets. She pretended to misunderstand. “ ‘Miami Nice’?” At last, a show about retirees, with their mink coats and cha-cha lessons. She got a laugh. And some execs thought it might not be a terrible idea.

The network proposed Diamond’s concept to two producers, Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas. The show, an executive explained, should feature ostensibly “over the hill” characters who were nonetheless “young in attitude.” Witt brought the idea to the writer Susan Harris, his wife, who came up with a pilot script. Harris had already pushed television’s limits with a show featuring an openly gay character (“Soap”), a show about a lusty divorcée (“Fay”), and a controversial story line about abortion (on “Maude”). Having written four seasons of “Soap” episodes, she was drained and planning to leave television. Still, a sitcom about older women was hard to resist. Here was another barrier to smash, Harris felt—“a demographic that had never been addressed.”

More here.

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Figure For A Landscape

Look, the solitary walker
out on this coldest Sunday of the year
shoulders the whole burden of the fable
which winter is, the moral panorama
of a silence so vast that all sounds have meaning.

In summer the landscape was simply
itself, and concealment humanly possible
in grass and shadow and the living noise
of child singers and animal dancers,
baroque in their cultivation of opulence and

the green life. But now
even the lake is petrified out of sound,
and the sky, impartially plundered
of inessential leaves, birds, clouds,
throws back his face without kindly distortion

as if he alone could answer for winter.
The tracks of the dead and the dying accost him,
crossing his footprints wherever he walks,
stands, is alive; and the clamor of ice
comes down with a crash, like an unstruck bell,

splitting his ears. In this season,
while we stay home with coffee and morning
newspapers, sensible of the danger
confronting us in the sight of a branch
gloved by a child’s lost mitten,

he is the hero that bears all loss,
who, by no particular virtue
other than solitude, takes on himself
the full silence, the whole terrible
knowledge the landscape no longer conceals.

by Lisel Mueller
from Heartland
Northern Illinois University press, Dekalb, 1967

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Aarthi Vadde at Public Books:

Aarthi Vadde: Hello, and welcome to Novel Dialogue, a podcast sponsored by the Society for Novel Studies and produced in partnership with Public Books, an online magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. I’m one of your hosts, Aarthi Vadde of Duke University. Today, we have novelist Jamil Jan Kochai and critic Kalyan Nadiminti joining us. Jamil’s most recent collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, in some ways picks up where his first novel, 99 Nights in Logar, left off, with stories that crossed the border between the United States and Afghanistan. These stories are alternatively funny, terrifying, and heartbreaking, and seem to fracture collective memory by delving into the minds of Afghanis across generations. The Haunting was the finalist for the National Book Award and named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022. Welcome, Jamil. So glad to have you here.

Jamil Jan Kochai: Hey, I’m happy to be here.

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Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:

The famous marketing slogan about how a diamond is forever may only be a slight exaggeration for a diamond-based system capable of storing information for millions of years – and now researchers have created one with a record-breaking storage density of 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimetre.

Previous techniques have also used laser pulses to encode data into diamonds, but the higher storage density afforded by the new method means a diamond optical disc with the same volume as a standard Blu-ray could store approximately 100 terabytes of data – the equivalent of about 2000 Blu-rays – while lasting far longer than a typical Blu-ray’s lifetime of just a few decades.

“Once the internal data storage structures are stabilised using our technology, diamond can achieve extraordinary longevity – data retention for millions of years at room temperature – without requiring any maintenance,” says Ya Wang at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei.

More here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

Regular Noahpinion readers will know that I’m not very excited about a second Trump term. I don’t think the next four years are going to be hell on Earth or that they’ll lead to the collapse of the nation, but I do think Trump is probably going to degrade our institutions, foment chaos, appease our enemies overseas, and appoint a lot of very unqualified people.

BUT, I also do have to admit that Trump’s first term turned out much better than I expected! Trump did foment social and political chaos, but consider the following:

• • The economy demonstrated strong growth, with workers at the bottom of the distribution reaping especially large wage gains.
  • Thanks to Trump’s rhetoric, the U.S. belatedly woke up to the various threats posed by China, and realized that unilateral free trade has many drawbacks.
  • Trump did not lock Hillary Clinton up, or persecute his political enemies in general.
  • Trump did great on Covid relief spending, carrying American households through the pandemic and propelling a rapid economic recovery after the pandemic.
  • Trump’s Operation Warp Speed was the best Covid vaccine development effort in the world, creating new and highly effective vaccines in a very short period of time, and saving a very large number of lives.
  • Very few U.S. government institutions suffered long-lasting damage as a result of Trump.

That’s not the best-case scenario for how Trump’s first term could have turned out, but it’s very far from the worst. All in all, if you told me in November 2016 that this is how Trump’s term would go, I would have breathed a sigh of relief (well, except for learning that we were going to have a giant pandemic, but that was hardly Trump’s fault).

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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

I ONCE ASKED Breyten Breytenbach, the exiled South African poet and painter, why, in his opinion, after the fiasco of his clandestine return to his homeland in 1975 (traveling incognito as a would-be revolutionary organizer), the calamity of his arrest (his cover having likely been blown before he even entered the country, such that not only was he arrested but virtually everyone he’d contacted was arrested as well), the debacle of his trial (his appalling, groveling breakdown, his operatic recantations and expressions of contrition, all to no avail), after his being sentenced to nine years’ hard time in the country’s notorious penal system, why, I asked him, why had the authorities who allowed him to go on writing in prison nevertheless forbidden him to paint?

At the time, we were sitting in Breytenbach’s airy, light-drenched studio, in Paris. (He had been released in 1982, a year and a half short of the completion of his nine-year term, and had immediately returned to his Paris exile.) We had been looking through a life’s worth of canvases, dazzlingly colorful paintings with surreal images by turns lyrical and profoundly unsettling. He paused for a moment to think about the question, then said, “They weren’t stupid. I think they must have realized that for me an empty canvas would have been an open field of freedom—and they weren’t going to allow me that.”

more here.

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Alice Gibbs in Newsweek:

Dreams can transport us anywhere—from soaring above treetops to reliving the grind of office life—but what do they truly reveal? A recent survey by Talker Research for Newsweek asked 1,000 U.S. adults about their most common dreams, uncovering nine recurring themes. “Dream content is always intriguing,” Dr. Shelby Harris, director of Sleep Health at Sleepopolis, told Newsweek. “I tend to approach the topic with a healthy dose of skepticism about specific ‘meanings.’ Dreams are less about symbolic messages and more about how the brain processes emotions, stress, and daily experiences.”

While pinning down exact meanings might be tricky, Dr. Harris offered insights into why these recurring dreams continue to surface—and what they might reveal about our waking lives.

1. Work

For many, the daily grind extends into sleep. Work-related dreams—whether about stressful deadlines, impossible tasks, or returning to the office after retirement—topped the list. “I dream I’m still working, even though I retired eight years ago,” shared one respondent, while another recounted struggling with “complicated tasks with nonsensical rules and directions.”

Why does this happen?
“Work dreams often reflect unresolved tension or concerns about productivity,” Harris told Newsweek. “They’re a clear sign that stressors are bleeding into sleep.”

More here.

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David Caplan in Ivy Style:

Students, colleagues, and friends all saw how seriously Edward Said took clothes. “Our usual ritual upon meeting after some time apart,” a friend remembers, “was for him to look me up and down and pass withering judgments on the condition of my shoes, and to berate my obstinate reluctance to engage a proper tailor.” Said insisted another friend, a colleague at Columbia University, buy a jacket he “didn’t need (and couldn’t afford) . . .. but I couldn’t withstand the force of Edward’s solicitude, and finally went and bought one. Black. Cashmere. Very nice. I wore it for ages.” In all these accounts, Said’s clothes set him apart. “[O]ne of the features that distinguished him from the rest of us,” a fellow seminar participant recalls, “was his immaculate dress sense: everything was meticulously chosen, down to the socks. It is almost impossible to visualize him any other way.”

…After the publication of Orientalism, Said and the leading scholar of the academic field he condemned, Bernard Lewis, filled pages upon pages of The New York Review of Books with charges and countercharges. “The tragedy of Mr. Said’s Orientalism is that it takes a genuine problem of real importance, and reduces it to the level of political polemic and personal abuse,” Lewis asserted. Said responded, “Lewis’s verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong.” Said also launched ad hominem attacks against less prominent scholars who disagreed with him, ridiculing their professional accomplishments and impugning their sanity, even their humanity. “They let me get away with this because I dress so well,” Said was fond of saying, referring to his employer, Columbia University. Even when I disliked Said’s politics, I loved the way he dressed.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Not too long ago, Brad Pitt and Eric Bana starred in a (loose) adaptation of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad; next month, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche will headline a film based on The Odyssey. Given that the originals were written (or at least written down) in the 8th century BCE, that is some impressive staying power. But they were also written in a very different time than ours, with different cultural context and narrative expectations. We talk about the issues of translation in general, and these Greek classics in particular, with Emily Wilson, whose recent translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey have garnered worldwide acclaim.

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Jonathan Lambert at Quanta:

If you follow any path of ancestry back far enough, you’ll reach the same single point. Whether you begin with gorillas or ginkgo trees or bacteria that live deep in the bowels of the Earth — or yourself, for that matter — all roads lead to LUCA, the “last universal common ancestor.” This ancient, single-celled organism (or, possibly, population of single-celled organisms) was the progenitor of every varied form that makes a life for itself on our planet today.

LUCA does not represent the origin of life, the instance whereby some chemical alchemy snapped molecules into a form that allowed self-replication and all the mechanisms of evolution. Rather, it’s the moment when life as we know it took off. LUCA is the furthest point in evolutionary history that we can glimpse by working backward from what’s alive today. It’s the most recent ancestor shared by all modern life‚ our collective lineage traced back to a single ancient cellular population or organism.

“It’s not the first cell, it’s not the first microbe, it’s not the first anything, really,” said Greg Fournier, an evolutionary biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In a way, it is the end of the story of the origin of life.”

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Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times:

Who could have seen Donald Trump’s resounding victory coming? Ask the question of an American intellectual these days and you may meet with embittered silence. Ask a European intellectual and you will likely hear the name of Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist and theorist of capitalism.

In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form.

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Jamil Zaki in Time Magazine:

In a letter to his wife, Olga, the playwright and political dissident Václav Havel wrote, “Hope is a dimension of the spirit. It is not outside us, but within us.” Havel sent the note from a Prague jail, after being imprisoned for criticizing his country’s regime from 1979 until 1983. Havel could have been forgiven for rejecting hope. After the Prague Spring, a brief period of political protest and social liberalization, Czechoslovakia had veered back towards Soviet rule.  Authoritarians had tightened their grip on law, media, and culture, Havel forced to survey it all from a tiny cell. Some Americans might feel that the current moment runs parallel with Havel’s, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to a second term as President. Many Democrats have abandoned hope in favor of cynicism: deciding that most of the voting public are selfish, bigoted enemies of democracy.

This is an understandable response, but perhaps not a helpful one. Writing off vast swaths of Americans fuels trends most of the nation abhors. Research finds that people who mistrust their fellow citizens are most likely to support “strong man” leaders who promise to protect people while stripping away their freedoms. Donald Trump capitalized on this phenomenon, offering a fever dream of American carnage that beguiled many people into his camp. For instance, violent crime has been declining across the U.S. for decades, but many Americans—especially if they watch conservative media—falsely believe it’s on the rise. People who held that dark view favored Trump by more than 25 points. It’s not just crime. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans’ faith in institutions—including education, science, and government—has plummeted, but this drop is steepest among Republicans.

More here.

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