Crispin Sartwell in LA Review of Books:

I BOW TO few in my admiration for the anthropologist, economist, radical leader, and delightful prose stylist David Graeber, who died unexpectedly in 2020 at the age of 59. Since I read his little book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology in 2004, I’ve been telling anyone who seemed inclined to listen that he was the most important anarchist thinker since Peter Kropotkin, who died in 1921. His ideas, including those beautifully captured in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), helped motivate and shape the Occupy movement, which took inspiration from his commitments to radical democracy, egalitarianism, and “prefigurative politics”—the idea that people seeking to make a revolution should try to live and organize now in a way they’d want to arrange their lives together in the future.

Graeber studied at the University of Chicago under Marshall Sahlins and did his anthropological fieldwork in Madagascar in the early 1990s. When he returned, he published the still-neglected Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001), a work of high theory whose ambitions constituted a throwback to the eras of Marcel Mauss or Claude Lévi-Strauss, though its positions were strikingly fresh. On the strength of his early work, he got a job at Yale and at the same time became active in the “anti-globalization” movement (Graeber hated that term), with its demonstrations and actions against such organizations as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. When he didn’t get tenure at Yale, he believed it was because of his politics.

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Ajay Singh Chaudhary in The Baffler:

IN 1971, Aaron Antonovsky, an Israeli medical sociologist, led a small team conducting a survey with over one thousand participants concerning how women cope with the effects of menopause. A question on the survey asked, almost as an afterthought, whether the women were concentration camp survivors. In reviewing the findings, Antonovsky was astonished. “How the hell can this be explained?” he exclaimed to colleagues. What he had discovered would prove foundational not only to Antonovsky’s career but to an entire new field of research. Of the 287 women who reported that they had survived the camps, over two thirds qualified in the category of “breakdown”—still suffering from “the horrors,” as he termed it. Unsurprisingly, this was a vastly higher number than for the women who had not experienced the camps.

“What is, however, of greater fascination and of human and scientific import,” argued Antonovsky, “is the fact that a not-inconsiderable number of concentration camp survivors were found to be well-adapted . . . What, we must ask, has given these women the strength, despite their experience, to maintain what would seem to be the capacity not only to function well, but even to be happy?” The answer was nothing less than a set of psychological dispositions that produce an understanding and acceptance that external stimuli reflect a coherent world; that one has the internal resources to meet any demands from these stimuli; of an optimistic disposition that such demands are “challenges, worthy of investment and engagement.” With these it might be possible for a person to withstand life reduced to the absolute degradation and deprivation of the camps and still remain functional by existing social standards. Antonovsky would eventually call his science “salutogenesis,” but what he had really discovered is what we now call “resilience.”

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Merry-Go-Round

The holidays
go by on wheels.
The merry-go-round brings them
and takes them away.

Blue Corpus Christi.
White Christmas Eve.

The days leave their skins
behind, like snakes,
excepting alone,
the holidays.

These are the same as
of our old mothers’:
their afternoon long trains
of shimmering silk and sequins.

Blue Corpus Christi.
White Christmas Eve.

The merry-go-round turns,
hung from a star.
A tulip from the five
parts of the earth

On little horses
disguised as panthers
the children eat the moon
as if it were a cherry.

Rage, rage, Marco Polo!
On a wheel fantastic,
the children see horizons
unknown on all the earth.

Blue Corpus Christi.
White Christmas Eve.

by Frederico Garcia Lorca
from The Cricket Sings
New Direction Books, 1975

Jane Fonda in Time Magazine:

About a year ago, I was declared cancer-free after four months of chemotherapy at Providence St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif. I had been diagnosed with low-grade B cell non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. This was not my first encounter with cancer. I’d had breast cancer a number of years prior, which was treated with radiation and then a full mastectomy. I realize I’m lucky. I had caring, attentive doctors and nurses who saved my life. I also realize how much progress has been made in cancer research and I am deeply grateful.

Yet despite that, cancer has become epidemic. Approximately 40% of people in the U.S. will develop cancer and over 1.96 million new cases were expected to be diagnosed in 2023, according to the National Cancer Institute.

I’m a cancer survivor but also a climate activist and I’m very aware of the connection between the environment and health—especially cancer. The same fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis are driving this health crisis. The Environmental Protection Agency keeps finding cancer-causing chemicals derived from fossil fuels—such as dioxins, benzene, and naphthalene—in the air, in our water, our food, our furniture, our clothing, the utensils we cook with…. They are also in our bodies. These poisons are even found in the umbilical cords of newborn children.

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Katrina Miller in The New York Times:

I had two memorable experiences with the moon this year. The first was seeing the “blue supermoon” rise over Lake Michigan in August. The second, a few weeks later, was watching it quietly slip in front of our sun, casting the world below in an eerie, ethereal glow. Both of these moments left me with a sense of awe that I was not expecting. Frankly, I’ve always found the moon a bit boring. If you could study anything in the universe, I thought — the depths of black holes, faraway stellar explosions, or ghostlike particles called neutrinos, as I did — why on Earth would you ever pick the unmysterious moon?

But the science writer Rebecca Boyle proved me wrong. In “Our Moon,” Boyle walks the reader through a history of both Earth and humanity, from the formation of our planet and the evolution of life to the development of civilization, religion, philosophy and, eventually, science. And through it all, she argues, the moon has played a starring role in how we came to be, and who we are.

“The moon is more sibling than subordinate,” Boyle writes, explaining that it formed out of the same cosmic cloud of debris that made Earth. Its gravity not only stabilizes our climate — making the moon “captain of our seasons” — but also enabled life. As ruler of the tides, the moon pulled primitive organisms into early Earth’s nutrient-rich seas, then pushed them back onto shore where “the fish, out of water, walked.”

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Justin Smith-Ruiu at The Hinternet:

It struck me recently that it’s been quite some time since I last heard anyone speak of the importance of maintaining a “work/life balance”. Like co-dependency, like low blood-sugar,1 like cottage cheese atop pineapple rings, like “remembering to breathe”,2 like so many other things that once seemed central to the way we talk about ourselves and go about our lives, it may be that the idea of such a balance is in decline. If that is so, I suspect it has something to do with what has been called “work creep”, most noticeable since the pandemic and the concomitant rise of Zoom, which has thoroughly blurred the line between work and non-work. If work is the Vietnam War, our homes are now Cambodia under secret bombardment. Or, as I often say, my computer is my cloaca: the single opening to the world through which everything happens. Truly, the internet has turned us all into a bunch of scurrying monotremes, and it has left me, in particular, perpetually as prickly as an echidna.

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Anne Gulland in Nature:

This might sound as though Lincowski is a crime-fighting hunter of aliens in a Marvel superhero film, and that interpretation isn’t far off. Until the end of last year, Lincowski worked as a police detective in Casper, Wyoming, from Monday to Thursday. And on Fridays, he looked for signs of life on planets beyond the Solar System, as part of a research team at the University of Washington in Seattle. Earlier this month, he started working as a mathematician at Eastern Wyoming College in Torrington, where he will be teaching mainly 18–21-year-old students. However, he will continue his one-day-a-week planetary science research at Washington.

Lincowski admits his career has been characterized by fairly drastic changes of direction. “I think it’s a symptom of my generation — the constant changing of your mind about what you want to do,” he says.

More here.

Sarah Aziza in Jewish Currents:

GAZANS HAVE INDEED SOUGHT OUR EYES and attention amid these days of peril. Defying Israel’s targeting of journalists and their families—which has made this the most dangerous conflict for journalists on record—Palestinians have risked everything to document and share. From the first hours of the carnage, they have rushed towards bombed-out buildings, swinging cameras to capture arriving doom. An immediate, reflexive instinct: to record, expose. As if the scale of violence had shocked even siege-worn Gazans into thinking, this time, surely, Israel has gone too far. Surely this cannot stand . . .

And so, mere meters from strike sites, their hands still shaking from terror, these survivor-creators have broadcast the unmaking of their world.

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Witold Rybczynski at The Hedgehog Review:

Architectural historians can easily stray into advocacy. Consider Sigfried Giedion, the Swiss author of Space, Time and Architecture and a self-appointed propagandist of early Modernism, or Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who with Philip Johnson curated the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that launched the International Style in the United States. The late Vincent Scully, a Hitchcock student and longtime Yale professor of architectural history, was an advocate too, one of his early forays into advocacy being a book provocatively titled The Shingle Style Today: Or the Historian’s Revenge.

Scully’s book was based on a lecture he had given at Columbia University, and any reader who ever attended a Scully talk will hear his bardic tones in the lively text. Published by George Braziller in 1974 and still in print, the slim paperback—barely more than a hundred pages—is well worth revisiting. Scully captured a particular moment, when American architects, chomping impatiently at the bit, were feeling constrained by the straitjacket of the International Style and the heavy influence of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.

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Julia Bryan-Wilson at Artforum:

SAM GILLIAM’S 1980 painting Robbin’ Peter seethes with pigment. The colors densely clot in some areas and in others are scraped flat to reveal the weave of the raw fabric canvas. Reds and blues clump and splat and drip, interrupted by short linear marks dragged through the paint to create rhythmic grooves. The work is a puzzle-like collage of previous Gilliam paintings, which have been cut up, reassembled, and glued in patchwork-quilt fashion, and in fact it takes its name from a vernacular quilt pattern known as “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul”—conventionally, a two-color needlework with curved diamond seams and overlapping, interlocked quartered circles. The pattern is found on quilts across the United States from the nineteenth century to the present day and is sometimes called simply, as Gilliam’s title acknowledges, “Robbing Peter.”¹ Part of “Chasers,” a series of nine-sided works that Gilliam made between circa 1980 and 1982, pursuing in the process his always restless experiments with texture, shape, and surface, the quilt painting is muscular and assertive, pressing into space with its thick, built-up impasto excrescences.

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Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

by May Swenson
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986

Ed Simon in The Millions:

As a sophomore in college, I completely earned the C+ that I received in a survey course called “British Literature.” There could be no blaming of the professor on my end, no skirting responsibility for those missed assignments, no excuse for having confused Belphoebe for Gloriana in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene on multiple choice tests. In the spring semester of 2004, I was more concerned with Yuengling than I was with Geoffrey Chaucer or the Pearl Poet, so I fully deserved the middling grade that I got.

Yet that class was also the site of an important discovery: the stern, austere, blind Puritan bard John Milton. For the past two decades, I’ve read and reread Milton, written about Milton, taught Milton, thought about Milton. I don’t know if I’m any closer to really understanding his greatest work, for that magisterial 1667 poem Paradise Lost is a cosmos unto itself, like Dante’s The Divine Comedy or Melville’s Moby-Dick, but I know that my life wouldn’t be as rich without it.

“Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe,” intones the poet in Paradise Lost, still resonating across nearly three-and-a-half centuries, a writer who even when he is dry or slow (and he can be dry and slow) still can turn a phrase and deploy it to stunningly dramatic effect in this epic tale about Satan’s rebellion against God in Heaven and the subsequent fall of humanity and all Creation.

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Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Researchers have used the protein-structure-prediction tool AlphaFold to identify¹ hundreds of thousands of potential new psychedelic molecules — which could help to develop new kinds of antidepressant. The research shows, for the first time, that AlphaFold predictions — available at the touch of a button — can be just as useful for drug discovery as experimentally derived protein structures, which can take months, or even years, to determine.

The development is a boost for AlphaFold, the artificial-intelligence (AI) tool developed by DeepMind in London that has been a game-changer in biology. The public AlphaFold database holds structure predictions for nearly every known protein. Protein structures of molecules implicated in disease are used in the pharmaceutical industry to identify and improve promising medicines. But some scientists had been starting to doubt whether AlphaFold’s predictions could stand-in for gold standard experimental models in the hunt for new drugs.

“AlphaFold is an absolute revolution. If we have a good structure, we should be able to use it for drug design,” says Jens Carlsson, a computational chemist at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

More here.

Amy McCarthy at Eater:

Your napkins need to be folded in a way that suggests you hold a degree in structural engineering.

Published in 1888, How to Fold Napkins by Jessup Whitehead remains a comprehensive guide to the most maniacal folded napkin designs. “The eye must be feasted as well as the palate,” Whitehead wrote. Within the book’s pages, you can learn how to fold crisp linen into a fleur-de-lys, a crown, a bridal serviette, or a Double Horn of Plenty (whatever that is). Notably, you will need a lot of starch to make most of these feats of napkin architecture happen.

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Adam Rutherford in The Guardian:

You might think, with the completion of the Human Genome Project 20 years ago now, and the discovery of the double helix enjoying its 70th birthday this year, that we actually know how life works. In physics, the quest for a so-called Grand Unifying Theory has preoccupied the most ambitious minds for generations, alas to no avail. But in the life sciences, we managed to find four grand unifying theories in the space of 100 years or so. Three are well known: cell theory – all life is made of cells, which only come from existing cells; Darwin’s evolution by natural selection; and universal genetics – all life is encoded by a cypher written in the molecule DNA. The fourth, no less important, goes by the chewy name chemiosmosis, and describes the way that all living things live by drawing fuel from their surroundings and using it in a continuous chemical reaction. In summary, life, made of cells that extract energy from their environment, comes modified from what came before. Job done; suck it, physicists!

However, biology is messy, and though we have these laws in place to describe all life on Earth, people like me remain gainfully employed because our understanding of how chemistry becomes biology is far, far from complete. These grand unifying ideas are unbeatable, but they lack detail, and in biology the devil lies at a molecular level of complexity that is hard to understand.

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Carole Hooven in The Free Press:

Since early December, the end of my 20-year career teaching at Harvard has been the subject of articles, op-eds, tweets from a billionaire, and even a congressional hearing. I have become a poster child for how the growing campus DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—bureaucracies strangle free speech. My ordeal has been used to illustrate the hypocrisy of the assertions by Harvard’s leaders that they honor the robust exchange of challenging ideas.

What happened to me, and others, strongly suggests that these assertions aren’t true—at least, if those ideas oppose campus orthodoxy.

To be a central example of what has gone wrong in higher education feels surreal. If there is any silver lining to losing the career that I found so fulfilling, perhaps it’s that my story will help explain the fear that stalks campuses, a fear that spreads every time someone is punished for their speech.

More here.