Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They’ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning. It might carry spiders away from predators and competitors, or toward new lands with abundant resources. But whatever the reason for it, it’s clearly an effective means of travel. Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea.

It is commonly believed that ballooning works because the silk catches on the wind, dragging the spider with it. But that doesn’t entirely make sense, especially since spiders only balloon during light winds. Spiders don’t shoot silk from their abdomens, and it seems unlikely that such gentle breezes could be strong enough to yank the threads out—let alone to carry the largest species aloft, or to generate the high accelerations of arachnid takeoff. Darwin himself found the rapidity of the spiders’ flight to be “quite unaccountable” and its cause to be “inexplicable.”

More here.

Premilla Nadasen in Jacobin:

The starkest example of the many racist and anti-poor measures directed at African Americans and passed during his administration was the 1996 welfare reform bill, which transformed welfare from an exclusive and unequal cash assistance system that stigmatized its recipients into one that actually criminalized them.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act endedtraditional welfare by turning a federal entitlement, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), into block grants, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). TANF established tougher mandates on poor single mothers and gave states more flexibility in how they spent welfare dollars (opening the door for increased discrimination against minorities).

It prohibits anyone from receiving assistance for more than two consecutive years or for more than five years over the course of their life. The act also requires aid recipients to be employed, in most cases, at least thirty hours a week to get their welfare checks, amounting to an hourly wage well below the legal minimum.

More here.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

Emtithal Mahmoud was brimming with rage and misery when she sat down to write her poem Mama. Her grandmother had just died in Sudan, her mother was on a plane to the funeral and she felt consumed by anger. “I wrote it in one of the darkest times of my life,” she says. “It felt like my grandmother had survived everything, the war, famine, and in the end it was not just cancer, it was lack of access to proper medical research. It was a very dark time. And that poem helped me get through it.” Hours after writing Mama, Mahmoud – also known as Emi, who was born in Darfur but moved to the US from Yemen as a four-year-old – performed it at the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam Championship in Washington DC – and won the competition. Full of fury, Mama opens as a man asks Mahmoud: “Hey yo sistah, you from the motherland? … ’cause you got a little bit of flavor in you, / I’m just admiring what your mama gave you.” It becomes a paean to Mahmoud’s mother, who “can reduce a man to tattered flesh without so much as blinking”, who “walks into a war zone and has warriors cowering at her feet”.

“Don’t talk about the motherland unless you know / that being from Africameans waking up an / afterthought in this country. / Don’t talk about my flavor unless you know / that my flavor is insurrection, it is rebellion, / resistance,” Mahmoud recited, bringing the audience to their feet and receiving a perfect score

In London on a flying visit to the UK – she’s been in Birmingham speaking on Philanthropy Age’s How to Do Good tour – Mahmoud is overflowing with charisma. She has so much to talk about, from working in refugee camps in Greece (she pulls out a wallet made from a life jacket a boy on Lesbos gave her) to meetings with the Dalai Lama (“He said: ‘There’s a lot of pain in Darfur and in Sudan’ and I was like, ‘There is’. He held my hand for a bit and I said, ‘I’m working on it and we’re with you.’”) But she’s getting ahead of herself. She turned 22 shortly after winning the slam, at which point her life started to become a little surreal. Still a student at Yale, where she was studying molecular, cellular and developmental biology and anthropology, Mahmoud was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 most inspirational women in 2015, and wrote the poem The Things She Told Me to mark the honour.

More here.

Ramona Ausubel in The New York Times:

In the 12 wide-ranging stories of her latest collection, “Days of Awe,” A. M. Homes skillfully circles and tugs at the question of what it means to live in flawed, fragile, hungry human bodies. One character embeds rose thorns in her feet; several have very disordered eating habits; people die too young, go to war and hold in their cells and minds the memories of past trauma. The title story is about a war reporter and a novelist who meet at a conference on genocide and have a weekend affair. Here the body is death — the millions killed who haunt the conference attendees — but it’s also desire. The affair is vivid and real and yet there is a shard of violence in it, the everyday violence of two people using each other to counter pain they don’t know how to digest.

Of a plastic surgeon in “Brother on Sunday,” Homes writes, “He thinks about Botox and Restylane and lasering spider veins and resurfacing a face, and sometimes he feels like a conservator, like the guy he once sat next to at a dinner who worked at the Met, touching up artworks when they chipped or when the ceiling leaked on them.” The possibility of profound beauty presses from one direction; the certainty of imperfection, of shame, presses from the other. Between these forces, the characters are hardened, sometimes into coal, sometimes into diamonds. But Homes, the author of 11 other books, including the best-selling memoir “The Mistress’s Daughter” and the Baileys Women’s Prize-winning novel “May We Be Forgiven,” is interested in more than beauty or ugliness: She writes about the interaction between inner lives and outer lives and our attempts to be seen or to hide. In “Hello Everybody,” Homes writes of two teenagers: “They are forever marking and unmarking their bodies, as though it were entirely natural to write on them and equally natural to erase any desecration or signs of wear, like scribbling notes to oneself on the palm of the hand. They are making their bodies their own — renovating,

More here.

First Lesson

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Philip Booth
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986

Olivia Laing in The Times:

At the age of 39 I was fairly sure I would spend the rest of my life alone. I lived alone, I worked alone. No matter what I did, or who I dated, I didn’t seem to be able to find the relationship I longed for.

I’d first joined the vast ranks of the lonely five years earlier. In 2011, I moved to New York in the wake of a break-up. A new relationship had come to an abrupt end. I’d pinned far too much hope on it, and though lovers had come and gone before, this particular departure left me desolate, my self-esteem on the floor. In a strange city, 3,000 miles from my family and friends, I was rapidly overwhelmed by loneliness.

Being so lonely was agonising. Worse, it felt actively repellent. It didn’t take long to realise that one of the worst elements was the omnipresent shame — the gnawing belief that being lonely was bad and wrong, a humiliating failure that could never be confessed. But the more I thought about it, the more illogical this seemed. After all, millions of people are lonely. Why was it so unspeakable?

Mark Sagoff in The Breakthrough:

If the ICS  [International Commission on Stratigraphy] declares the Anthropocene as a new epoch, it will reverse at one stroke three great humiliations science has inflicted on humanity. First, it will restore humanity to the self-importance it knew when people believed that the Earth and humanity were created at about the same time. The Anthropocene, as Erle Ellis and colleagues have written, “will divide Earth’s story into two parts: one in which humans are a geological superpower — an epoch called the Anthropocene — and the other encompassing all that came before our species had a major influence on Earth’s functioning.”

Second, it will redress the humiliation imposed by Darwin, who saw humanity as a minor twig on the tree of life, by recognizing Homo sapiens as a colossus so powerful that it is relocating tens of thousands of species and causing as many extinctions as the world has ever known. Third, it will return the Earth to its Ptolemaic position. Ancient astronomers thought of the cosmos as an orderly system that revolved around the Earth, which they saw as tempestuous, turbulent, intemperate, violent, ferocious, and capricious. Earth system science turns the Earth into the cosmos — an orderly, self-regulating system that revolves around a capricious humanity. It accomplishes a counter-Copernican revolution.

The Anthropocene makes humanity great again.

More here.

Matthew Yglesias in Vox:

“Democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps” these days, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in How Democracies Die, cautioning Americans not to be complacent merely because there aren’t tanks in the streets. They rot from the inside thanks to demagogic leaders who “subvert the very process that brought them to power.”

Trump, in many respects, fits this bill. Earlier this summer, Trump began tearing children from their parents’ arms to throw them in cages, insisting the step was necessary to avoid an “infestation” of asylum seekers from south of the border. He backed away from portions of that policy, only to tweet that in the future deportations should be carried out “without judges or court cases” — a chilling reminder of the consistent, multifront threat posed to the rule of law by a president who’s undertaking a partisan purge of the FBI.

But identifying the threat too closely with Trump is ahistorical and myopic in ways that lead to analytic failure. Norms have been eroding in the United States, but the erosion began long before the rise of Trump and simply can’t be explained by him alone.

More here.

Mooers and Greenberg in Nature:

The tropics are, like many cities, hot, busy and crowded. It was previously thought¹ that these conditions in the tropics generate a hotbed for the formation of new species (speciation). Species diversity is remarkably high in the tropics and declines toward the poles. However, newly developed tools to measure speciation rates, coupled with ever-growing global data sets, have enabled the surprising finding that terrestrial speciation rates for the past few million years are similar across different latitudes² or increase outside the tropics³. Writing in Nature, Rabosky et al.⁴ document a speciation rate for marine fishes at high latitudes that is twice the speciation rate in tropical seas. This high speciation rate in cold, species-poor waters poses an interesting conundrum for evolutionary biologists and ecologists.

There are two potential drivers of high speciation rates in the tropics. First, the elevated temperatures in the region both speed up metabolism, increasing the number of mutations, and decrease generation times. This is a potentially powerful combination, producing more of the variation necessary for evolution and the possibility of faster evolution. A second possible driver is ecological opportunity. The energy-rich tropics offer abundant resources that can support many different niches. And the tropics are so rich in species that the interactions of members of a single species with its competitors, predators and parasites might differ from place to place, leading to different adaptations and eventual divergence into new niches¹. Although this narrative makes for a compelling theory, Rabosky and colleagues’ discovery suggests a different story, at least for marine fishes.

More here.

Foundations

I built on the sand
And it tumbled down,
I built on rock
And it tumbled down.
Now when I build, I shall begin
With the smoke from the chimney.
.

Leopold Staff
from A Book of Luminous Things
translation from Polish by Czeslaw Milosz
Harcourt, 1996

Skye C. Cleary and John Kaag in the Paris Review:

Fireworks, hypnotic and sublime, are used to celebrate national independence around the globe, as signs of sovereignty or political autonomy. They are the window dressing of the modern state. The exploding rainbows are a tribute to the bloody wars that made the celebration possible. They are a reminder that—under that same sky and upon that same land to which the ashes float—we are kinfolk.

There is exactly one European thinker who could be considered the “philosopher of the firework”: Friedrich Nietzsche. “I am dynamite!” Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo. Dynamite, from dunamis, meaning power. Nietzsche, more than any other contemporary thinker, grappled with the draw and the danger of a fiery blaze.

Born into a nineteenth-century culture that throbbed with German nationalism, Nietzsche was well aware of how such a spectacle—beautiful and potentially disastrous—could influence people.

More here.

David Papineau in the Times Literary Supplement:

We are living in new Bayesian age. Applications of Bayesian probability are taking over our lives. Doctors, lawyers, engineers and financiers use computerized Bayesian networks to aid their decision-making. Psychologists and neuroscientists explore the Bayesian workings of our brains. Statisticians increasingly rely on Bayesian logic. Even our email spam filters work on Bayesian principles.

It was not always thus. For most of the two and a half centuries since the Reverend Thomas Bayes first made his pioneering contributions to probability theory, his ideas were side-lined. The high priests of statistical thinking condemned them as dangerously subjective and Bayesian theorists were regarded as little better than cranks. It is only over the past couple of decades that the tide has turned. What tradition long dismissed as unhealthy speculation is now generally regarded as sound judgement.

More here.

Sarah Perry in the London Review of Books:

In the small hours of a spring morning last year I asked for a hot-water bottle to be put on my calf: a ruptured disc was crushing my sciatic nerve, causing leg pain unappeased by opioids and benzodiazepines. I went back to sleep. When I woke up, I felt a damp substance on my leg, and when I wiped it off, I noticed a wet white rag was hanging from my fingertips. I thought little of it: pain was my sole preoccupation at the time, and there wasn’t any. Later that day, awaiting surgery, I was told the hot-water bottle had caused a burn clean through the epidermis, cauterising the nerves.

The burn became a black disc so tough you could rap it like the cover of a leather-bound book; I fretted about scarring, but what concerned the doctors was the possibility of my acquiring one of the antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that plague hospital wards. Two weeks later – the necrotic flesh had receded to reveal body fat resembling butter softened in the microwave – a GP peeled the dressing off, lifted it to her nose, and recoiled at the unmistakeable smell of infection. Swabs were taken, but it was merely the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, its name deriving from the Greek for ‘grape-cluster berry’, which it resembles. A course of antibiotics, frequent sluicings with saline, and all would be well.

In the days of Lister, Liston and Pasteur, such infections were thought to be an example of what was known as ‘hospitalism’, for the better prevention of which it was even proposed that all hospitals should be razed by fire and rebuilt every ten years or so.

More here.

Paul Bachelor at Poetry Magazine:

As many critics have noted, Hill established himself from the beginning as an elegist. The title For the Unfallen promises a 
memorial for the living, and the book itself contains “In Memory of Jane Fraser,” “Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings,” “Two Formal Elegies,” “In Piam Memoriam,” “Wreaths,” “Elegiac Stanzas,” and “Of Commerce and Society” (a series of memorials for Shelley, the Titanic, and St. Sebastian, among others). Each of these elegies is grounded in a particular historical moment. A close engagement with history — itself a form of respectful acknowledgment to the dead — will become another unifying characteristic of Hill’s career.

Such engagement moves center stage in Hill’s second collection, King Log (1968), with the astonishing sonnet sequence “Funeral Music,” which is dedicated to William de la Pole, John Tiptoft, and Anthony Woodville: aristocrats executed during the Wars of the Roses.

more here.

Terri Apter at the TLS:

Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of eight novels – published between 1932 and 1943 – about pioneer life in the American west, was the first recipient of a major children’s book award (which bestowed on her the additional honour of bearing her name): the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal.  On June 23, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) voted unanimously to strip her name from the award, stating that Wilder “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s values”.

My response – an uneasy sense of loss – is partly, but only partly, due to the role Wilder’s novels played in my own life.  As the less compliant little sister, I cheered Laura with her irritability and impatience, alongside the great love she had for the sister who seemed to outshine her.

more here.

Diane Mehta at The Paris Review:

Like many women, Baskin was buying things that male dealers weren’t interested in, such as women printers and artists, which put her under the radar. “In the sixties, I could be a ferret and find things,” she said, citing a late 17^th century-early 18^th century book by Maria Sibylla Merian, the first person of either gender to observe and draw the metamorphoses of insects in the field. “She made some of the most beautiful books,” Baskin said. “As a child, Merian was fascinated by watching caterpillars turn into moths. She made a book about the insects of Suriname and another about the insects of Europe.” Baskin purchased a copy of  Merian’s De Europische Insecten (1730);  copies of the book about the insects of Suriname go for hundreds of thousands of dollars now. “The issue is: Are women taken seriously as dealers and as collectors? I don’t think it’s a reflection on the works they sell or collect. I think these works were, and are, valued less,” says Baskin. She mentions J.P. Morgan’s (d. 1913) great Morgan Library, whose collection—of books by both men and women—was largely acquired by its director and librarian Belle da Costa Greene, daughter of the first African American to graduate from Harvard. “It was said that da Costa Greene had the brains and the wit and Morgan had the money,” Baskin says.

more here.

The Mother’s Seduction

—for Emily Dickinson

I christen you my mother, and you,
Like her, refuse to give straight answers-
She, silent; you, forever talking slant.

And I’ve exhausted all questions except
The one to which I am answer
And therefore cannot form.

You deal your words like blades or cards
And to keep the game mysterious
You won’t divulge the rules. I never win.
And if I come to you because much time
Has passed since my last meal, you tell a tale
About a crumb that you and Robin feast
Upon, leaving some for charity.

I know it is not true still I believe.

“There’s a pair of us,” you say, “don’t tell-”
And I will keep your secret much too long
Because the racket of this living shames
Me too. The guiltless are not innocent.
I want to lose this innocence, leave
All guilt behind, learn to live loudly,
Become someone, but you won’t tell me how.

I cannot live as you before me did.
It is another time, another place,
A different set of circumstances,
A different work to live.

We have no rest to give each other.
The leaves they turn and turn. With tenderness
I touch you out of sleep; I wake to your
Wild words: much madness is divinest sense.

We cannot reach each other now though I,
Too, dwell in possibility. Escape
Is on my tongue, still, I can no more run
Away from you than crawl into your arms

by Constance Merritt
from A Protocol for Touch
University of North Texas Press, 1999