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Charles C. Mann at The New Atlantis:

Sometime in the 1980s, an unprecedented change in the human condition occurred. For the first time in known history, the average person on Earth had enough to eat all the time.

Depending on their size, adult humans need to take in about 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day to thrive. For as far back as historians can see, a substantial number of Earth’s inhabitants spent much of their lives below this level. Famine and want were the lot of many — sometimes most — of our species.

Even wealthy places like Europe were not protected from hunger. France today is famed for its great cuisine and splendid restaurants. But its people did not reach the level of 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day until the mid-1800s. And even as the French left famine in the rear-view mirror, starvation was still claiming hundreds of thousands of Irish, Scots, and Belgians. As late as the winter of 1944–45, the Netherlands suffered a crippling famine — the Hongerwinter. More than 20,000 people perished in just a few months. Food shortages plagued rural Spain and Italy until at least the 1950s.

In poorer regions the situation was bleaker still.

More here.

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Srikanth Reddy at Poetry Magazine:

In 2021, the American poet Forrest Gander began to walk portions of the 800-mile San Andreas fault, north to south, with his companion, the South Asian artist Ashwini Bhat. Gander’s intended destination, he writes in Mojave Ghost (New Directions, 2024), the “novel poem” that recounts his journey, was the “desolate town where I was born”—Barstow, California, in the western Mojave Desert.

One of the great walkers in contemporary literature, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gander has embraced “a theory and practice of go” beginning with early books such as the collection Deeds of Utmost Kindness (1994). Walking, in Gander’s poetic imagination, is fundamental to what makes us human. “A Poetic Essay on Creation, Evolution, and Imagination,” from The Blue Rock Collection (2004), chronicles the discovery of “the most significant Paleolithic path, those Laetoli / footprints / which show that early hominids / were fully bipedal long before / they developed tool-making capabilities or / an expanded brain.” Core Samples from the World (2011) repurposes the walking tour of Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior to document the poet’s cosmopolitan travels through China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, and the United States in the form of serial haibun: “Arigato-meiwaku, Bashō would say as he hiked through villages accumulating gifts he could not humanly carry,” Gander notes from the road, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

more here.

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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

Fischer and his colleagues focused on detecting enzymes called proteases, which break down proteins and are active in tumours, even from the very early stages. They specifically looked at the activity of matrix metalloproteinases involved in chewing up collagen and the extracellular matrix, which helps tumours to invade the body.

To detect the presence of these proteases in the blood, the researchers developed nanosensors containing a magnetic nanoparticle attached to a small peptide that attracts matrix metalloproteinases and a fluorescent molecule. They then placed millions of nanosensors in a tiny sample of blood. If matrix metalloproteinases were present, and active, they would chop the peptide in the nanosensors, releasing the fluorescent molecule. The researchers then used a magnet to suck out all the unchopped nanosensors, and measure how many chopped fluorescent particles were left. The more active proteases were present in the blood, the brighter the sample was.

More here.

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More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Postcard from Michigan

from the aparmeh the dead clam
of snow in Kalamazoo stares back,
you gaze on milky knolls till eyes
become tired of the eggshell crust
underneath a pain of not traversing,
a fence in the mind pegged in reverie,
the Mackinac Bridge under a speckless
desert of whiteness, children cruise
vehicles and trucks like corpses unburied,
last night shining the party galloped on an
amazing pace, you are not busy negating
winter smacks off the skin, words freeze
longer when an unread text congeals,
back home power outage spill stories, love
is still a candle with moths and digital melting
old letters exhausted now this visual affair
an imaginary reverse hug, on the terrace.

by Rizwan Akhtar

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Barry Schwabsky at Artforum:

So-called outsider art is commonly valued for its idiosyncratic character and an originality of spirit—and therefore of form—unspoiled by convention. And yet, truth to tell, much of what is presented under this rubric looks remarkably similar. Singular inventors at the level of, say, Helen Rae or Martín Ramírez are as rare in this realm as they are in the domain of academically trained professionals. But to bend familiar tropes and traditionsto recognizably personal ends is also the mark of a genuine artist. To their number we can now add Franne Davids (1950–2022), whose work Ricco/Maresca presented to the public for the first time in a solo booth at the Art Dealers Association of America’sArt Show at New York’s Park Avenue Armory and, immediately afterward, in a full-scale exhibition of six large canvases and fifteen works on paper at the gallery’s Chelsea space.

The paintings (all untitled and made between 1979 and 2018, but not individually dated) featured constellations of women, exotically garbed and sporting elaborate headgear, crowded into densely patterned nonrepresentational environments.

more here.

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Elise Soutar at Paste:

For all the flowery adjectives and hyperbolic statements I’ve peddled through my writing over the past three years, I think that spur-of-the-moment assessment might be the most accurate statement about music I’ve ever verbalized. You could very well make the argument—as I suppose I am now—that the entire history of popular music (specifically in the U.K.) can be told through the life and career of Marianne Faithfull. There is a version of that history which I had been sold as a young person, just hungry to learn as much as I could. Yet, my reading and life experience over time have created a slow process of realizing I barely exist in that history—that the so-called “progressive” history of New Hollywood and the rock era mainly spelt freedom for those who already had it. I would never deny the importance or quality of so much of that work, but double-standards present themselves the second you start scratching away at the carefully-maintained patina of “rock history.”

more here.

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Anne Enright in The Guardian:

There are books in a writer’s life that gather all their previous themes and explorations in a great act of creative culmination, which both surpasses what had gone before and makes it more clear. We Do Not Part is one of those books. Published last year in Swedish translation, it helped to secure Korean writer Han Kang the 2024 Nobel prize in literature.

Those who know Han’s work will recognise previous themes and methods here. Like the eponymous character in The Vegetarian, the narrator of We Do Not Part, Kyungha, is fragile and resilient. She finds it hard to sleep or eat, suffers from summer heat and winter cold, and endures terrible physical suffering for reasons that can be hard to understand. Both stories feature video artists, sisterly bonds, and nightmares of murder and bloodshed set in Korean woodlands.

There are structural similarities, too. The Vegetarian (whose three distinct sections were originally published separately) moves from one to another point of view around the central, finally starving, figure of Yeong-hye. In We Do Not Part, each section gives way to something that feels stylistically very different, though there is only one narrator and the action takes place over the course of a few days.

More here.

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Lucie Elven at the LRB:

Goldin’s sharp eye makes her stories simple, but it doesn’t make them easy. Sisters, Saints and Sibyls (2004-22) is a tribute to her elder sister, Barbara, who was institutionalised when she hit puberty and killed herself aged eighteen. A few years later, Nancy – as she was then – ran away from home. She was fostered and in 1968 landed in a ‘hippy free school’ called Satya, in Massachusetts. She spent as much time as she could at the Brattle Theatre and the Orson Welles cinema in Cambridge. The school had a grant from Polaroid, which was based nearby, and Goldin was one of the students given a camera. ‘Photography,’ she said recently, ‘was a way to walk through fear.’ As a teenager she was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.

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Jonathan O’Callaghan at the BBC:

High in the skies of Earth, a new space race is underway. Here, just above the boundary where space begins, companies are trying to create a new class of daring satellites. Not quite high-altitude planes and not quite low-orbiting satellites, these sky skimmers are designed to race around our planet in an untapped region, with potentially huge benefits on offer.

Roughly 10,000 satellites are orbiting our planet right now, at speeds of up to 17,000mph (27,000km/h). Every one of these delicate contraptions is in constant free-fall and would drop straight back down to Earth were it not for the blistering speeds at which they travel. It’s their considerable sideways momentum, perfectly stabilised against the Earth’s gravitational pull downwards, that keeps satellites in orbit.

A new class of satellites is aiming to push the limits of this balancing act and plough a much more precarious, lower orbit that would skim the top of Earth’s atmosphere.

More here.

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Lucy Hooker & Chris Vallance at the BBC:

Google’s parent company lifting a longstanding ban on artificial intelligence (AI) being used for developing weapons and surveillance tools is “incredibly concerning”, a leading human rights group has said.

Alphabet has rewritten its guidelines on how it will use AI, dropping a section which previously ruled out applications that were “likely to cause harm”.

Human Rights Watch has criticised the decision, telling the BBC that AI can “complicate accountability” for battlefield decisions that “may have life or death consequences.”

In a blog post Google defended the change, arguing that businesses and democratic governments needed to work together on AI that “supports national security”.

Experts say AI could be widely deployed on the battlefield – though there are fears about its use too, particularly with regard to autonomous weapons systems.

More here.

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Sensual

The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind
quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs.
I refer to something much simpler and much less
fanciful. To be sensual, is to respect and rejoice in
the force of life, of life itself, and to be present
in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the
breaking of bread.

Something very sinister happens to the people of a
country when they begin to mistrust their own
reactions as they do here, and become joyless
as they as they have become. It is this individual
uncertainty on the part of white American men and
women, this inability to renew themselves at the
fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion,
of any conundrum—any reality, so supremely difficult.

The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone
for reality— for this touchstone can only be oneself.
Such a person puts between himself and reality nothing
less than a labyrinth of attitudes, historical and public,
that do not relate to the present any more than they
relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people
do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely what they
do not know about themselves.

by James Baldwin
from The Fire Next Time
Dell Publishing, New York, 1962 

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Elie Dolgin in Nature:

For Kristian Cook, every pizza box he opened was another door closed on the path to overcoming obesity. “I had massive cravings for pizza,” he says. “That was my biggest downfall.” At 114 kilograms and juggling a daily regimen of medications for high cholesterol, hypertension and gout, the New Zealander resolved to take action. In late 2022, at the age of 46, Cook joined a clinical trial that set out to test a combination of the weight-loss drug semaglutide — better known by its brand names, Ozempic or Wegovy — and an experimental drug designed to preserve muscle while shedding fat.

Muscle loss is a big concern for people on anti-obesity medications such as semaglutide. These ‘GLP-1 agonists’ mimic a natural gut hormone — glucagon-like peptide 1 — to suppress appetite and regulate metabolism. But reducing calories leads to an energy deficit, which the body often makes up for by burning muscle. The experimental drug that Cook received, called bimagrumab, seems to counteract this muscle loss.

It’s one of more than 100 anti-obesity drug candidates that are in various stages of development. The next wave of medications, which are likely to hit pharmacy shelves in the next few years, resemble drugs that are already on the market. But close behind are numerous therapies being developed specifically for their muscle-sparing weight-loss potential. Dozens more are aimed at different biological pathways and could redefine obesity treatment in decades to come.

More here.

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More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Grazie Sophia Christie at The Point:

Women have always had a special relationship with lies; often, we have relied on them for survival. But it was the aspirational feminism of the 2010s—individualistic, empowering, breathless, especially after SoulCycle—which first introduced many of us to the art of lying to ourselves.

In those years, women followed a noble ethics—or a maladaptive one, depending on who you asked. We tried to live by the rules of how things should be, rather than how things are. The premises from which we were not to budge could be found in children’s books. Like “boys and girls are made of much the same, except for little things.” Or that girls can “be anything … even president,” as one 2019 book put it, quoting Hillary Clinton after she learned otherwise. Misogyny was a feedback loop that would keep running unless we intervened in it: systemic, embedded in all our expectations and validated each time we played along. Since our actions and speech could either reinforce misogyny or undermine it, feminists fought the patriarchy conceptually, with the right words and behavior. We would not flirt at speed traps or interviews.

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Peter B. Kaufman at the LARB:

QUIETLY, ALMOST ELUSIVELY, video has become the dominant medium of human communication. There are hundreds of billions of cameras out in the world filming as you’re reading this article. Two-thirds of global internet traffic is video; that number continues to climb. If we date print back to 1455 and Gutenberg’s Mainz Bible, and the moving image to the Lumière brothers’ first public screening in Paris in 1895, print has had a 440-year head start. But Americans now get their news and information more often through screens and speakers and video-enabled media platforms than via ink on paper.

Even though the moving image has reached this juncture so quickly—indeed, perhaps because it has gotten here so quickly—there have been no mainstream usage guides that respect its leading role in our culture and our knowledge ecosystem or the rapidity with which it has arrived. There have been no popular manuals of style that focus on how we should be using video in modern communication, which is to say, how we should best be producing it, citing it, distributing it, and ultimately archiving and preserving it, especially given the vital roles it now plays in knowledge dissemination and in politics, culture, and society.

more here.

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