Hanif Abdurraqib at The New Yorker:

Nicki Minaj celebrated her forty-first birthday on December 8th, the same day that her new album, “Pink Friday 2,” was released. Through a rap career spanning a decade and a half, Minaj has always produced studio albums at a thoughtful pace. Her output includes three mixtapes and a long string of feature verses that could reasonably be considered their own distinct body of work. But “PF2” is only Minaj’s fifth studio project, and her first in five years. It is also a sequel, a callback to her 2010 début, “Pink Friday.” The original album produced an impressive run of singles and sold three hundred and seventy-five thousand copies in its first week alone, propelling Minaj to superstardom, a status that she’d seemed well suited for even before the album’s drop. A theatre kid at heart, who attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and acted Off Off Broadway before making the leap into music, she had an aesthetic theatricality (all those candy-colored dresses and wigs) and a dexterity of flow, weaving in and out of exaggerated vocal tones in a way that managed to be both playful and precise, vicious and cartoonishly appealing.

more here.

Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor:

Despite its initially disappointing reception in 1851, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” eventually earned a place in the American literary canon, leading to a tidal wave of biographies, doctoral theses, and spinoffs. The latest is Tara Karr Roberts’ beautifully conceived debut novel, “Wild and Distant Seas,” which deserves a prime spot on the shelf of Melvilleana.

Neither prequel nor sequel, “Wild and Distant Seas” – like Sena Jeter Naslund’s 1999 novel “Ahab’s Wife” – is an inventive, atmospheric, female-centric story spun from a minor character in “Moby-Dick.” It’s unlikely that readers will remember Mrs. Hosea Hussey, who, in her husband’s absence, serves Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, and his sidekick, Queequeg, some of her “surpassingly excellent” chowder before putting them up at the Try Pots Inn in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the “fishiest of all fishy places,” as Melville describes it.

Editorial in Nature:

The bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii is a portrait of resilience. The microorganism causes a range of infections, and its ability to survive desiccation means it can persist for weeks on hospital air vents, computer keyboards and human skin. Its metabolic and genetic flexibility have allowed it to become resistant to the few antibiotics that can make it through its two protective cell membranes. Antibiotic-resistant microbes kill more than one million people each year. The global threat posed by A. baumannii has put the microbe high on the list of priority pathogens drawn up by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Two studies published on 3 January in Nature report a new class of drug candidates for tackling A. baumannii infections (C. Zampaloni et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06873-0 (2023); K. P. Pahil et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06799-7; 2023). One of these compounds has already made it into clinical trials, but it is still a long way from being approved for clinical use.

More here.

Kinder Than Man

And God
please let the deer
on the highway
get some kind of heaven.
Something with tall soft grass
and sweet reunion.
Let the moths in porch lights
go someplace
with a thousand suns,
that taste like sugar
and get swallowed whole.
May the mice
in oil and glue
have forever dry, warm fur
and full bellies.
If I am killed
for simply living,
let death be kinder
than man.

by Althea Davis
from The Multan Book Club

Andrew Stanton in Newsweek:

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has reshaped the U.S. political landscape on immigration by busing migrants from Texas to Democratic-led sanctuary cities. Abbott, a Republican, in 2022 began busing migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border to sanctuary cities that protect undocumented immigrants from deportation, amid an influx of migrants arriving to the southern border. There were more than 2.4 million encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border during the 2023 fiscal year, up from roughly 1.7 million in 2021, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The governor has faced substantial backlash over the policy, as critics accuse him of using migrants as political pawns. The White House, for instance, has slammed it as a “cruel, dangerous, and shameful stunt.” Abbott, however, has defended the move as necessary, pointing to Texas’ border towns becoming overwhelmed with migrants, and that sanctuary cities should be prepared to take in more. The divisive tactic has upended the political discourse surrounding immigration, adding pressure to President Joe Biden, who faces new criticism from fellow Democrats over his handling of immigration as sanctuary city mayors plead with the federal government to provide more resources to grapple with the migrant influx.

More here.

Kamal Nahas in The Scientist:

Peter Hegemann, a biophysicist at Humboldt University, has spent his career exploring interactions between proteins and light. Specifically, he studies how photoreceptors detect and respond to light, focusing largely on rhodopsins, a family of membrane photoreceptors in animals, plants, fungi, protists, and prokaryotes.¹ Early in his career, his curiosity led him to an unknown rhodopsin in green algae that later proved to have useful applications in neuroscience research. Hegemann became a pioneer in the field of optogenetics, which revolutionized the ways in which scientists draw causal links between neuronal activity and behavior.

In the early 1980s during his graduate studies at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Hegemann spent his days exploring rhodopsins in bacteria and archaea. However, the field was crowded, and he was eager to study a rhodopsin that scientists knew nothing about. Around this time, Kenneth Foster, a biophysicist at Syracuse University, was investigating whether the green algae Chlamydomonas, a photosynthetic unicellular eukaryote related to plants, used a rhodopsin in its eyespot organelle to detect light and trigger the algae to swim. He struggled to pinpoint the protein itself, so he took a roundabout approach and started interfering with nearby molecules that interact with rhodopsins.²

More here.

various authors at The Current:

Beloved for his poetic observations of domestic life and intergenerational conflict, Yasujiro Ozu is an icon of international art-house cinema whose patient, exquisitely restrained style has influenced filmmakers around the world. But even though he directed more than fifty features over the course of his nearly four-decade career, the Japanese auteur is still primarily associated with two midcentury classics, Tokyo Story and Late Spring, both of which regularly appear on lists of the greatest films of all time. To commemorate the 120th anniversary of the director’s birth, we invited six writers to explore the retrospective of his films now playing on the Criterion Channel and shine a spotlight on a lesser-known gem. Covering different periods in Ozu’s career, from his beginnings in the silent era to the end of his life in the early 1960s, this series of essays foregrounds underacknowledged elements of his artistry, including his love of classic Hollywood comedy, his flair for melodrama, the various forms of masculinity depicted in his work, and the queer resonances of his family portraits.

more here.

Ellen Peirson-Hagger at the New Statesman:

The development of his body of work is “completely collapsed and over-arching”, Tillmans said. To map out a logical timeline would be reductive. Though there are issues that recur, such as “the politics of representation”, women’s rights and gay rights. Tillmans came out as gay when he was 16, the summer Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” – which he describes as “the first fully out gay pop song” – was in the charts. “I feel a great sense of gratitude for having been born when and where I was,” he said, though his life has been touched by tragedy: his boyfriend, the painter Jochen Klein, died of Aids-related illnesses in 1997. Tillmans lives with HIV. He does not tend to make work specifically about the disease – 17 Years’ Supply (2014), which depicts a box full of empty pill bottles, is an exception – but his photographs have accrued a political significance in the public sphere. The Cock (Kiss), a 2002 portrait of two men kissing, was the subject of a homophobic attack when it was exhibited in Washington DC in 2006. Ten years later, when 49 people were murdered at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Florida, the image was widely circulated online by way of protest. The photograph was most recently used as the cover for Young Mungo, a gay love story by the Scottish Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart.

more here.

The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone’s got to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone’s got to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone’s got to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone’s got to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone’s got to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirt sleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens nodding
his unshattered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less
than nothing.

Someone’s got to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from The Vintage Book of
Contemporary World Poetry, 1996
translation: Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanaugh

Adam Tooze in Chartbook:

In 2023 the escalation of violence around the world was horrifying. As the FT remarked:

The anecdotal evidence that war is surging round the world is confirmed by the numbers. A recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies documented 183 ongoing conflicts around the world, the highest number in more than three decades. And that figure was arrived at before the outbreak of the war in Gaza.

How do we locate this surge in violence in contemporary history? One can, as the FT does, point to a variety of contingent causes, such as failures of intelligence and deterrence, weak state power and the perception that Western power is fading.

Whilst recognizing the diversity of causes, we should go deeper than this.

More here.

From Reasons to be Cheerful:

The ozone layer will be completely recovered within the next 40 years.

The Inflation Reduction Act set aside $1.5 billion for urban tree planting in 2023.

Four-day work weeks helped reduce commuting hours by 10 percent in the UK and 27 percent in the US, leading to a decrease in carbon emissions.

All 140 whisky distilleries in Scotland have pledged to be carbon-neutral by 2040.

More than 15 million people living in Brazil’s densely populated favelas are getting street addresses.

Volunteers have given new life to more than 100,000 abandoned bicycles, shipping them across the globe to people who need them.

More here.

Aaron Gell in The New Republic:

Ali Zaidi, the White House’s thirtysomething national climate adviser, stood before a lectern in a packed conference hall at the NYU School of Law wearing a crisp navy suit, a blue tie, and just enough stubble to look roguish and anti-establishment but not slovenly. It was September 18, day 2 of Climate Week NYC, and Zaidi was in town to tout the administration’s environmental accomplishments. He began by highlighting the critical role the nation’s youth, like the law students arrayed before him, were playing in the climate movement. “It’s really been the voices of young people who have organized and agitated for change—” he was saying when audience member Sim Bilal, 21, rose to his feet.

A member of the newly launched pressure group Climate Defiance, Bilal, an L.A.-based community organizer, wearing a black watch cap and an overstuffed backpack, had come to make his own voice heard. He was young. He was agitating.

“Will you publicly ask Biden to oppose the Willow project?” he demanded, referring to Conoco­Phillips’s plan to drill for oil in a 499-acre patch of Alaskan tundra. “You guys have protected 13 million acres of the Arctic, but that’s not enough. So, yes or no?”

More here.

Marzio G. Mian at Harper’s Magazine:

Russia has become, to observers in the West, a distant, mysterious, and hostile land once again. It seems implausible, in the age of social media, that so little should be known about the country that has shattered the international order, but the shadows surrounding Russia have only grown since the days of the Soviet Union. Of course, it is one thing to observe the country from the outside; it is another to try to understand how Russians experience the war and react to sanctions from within, and what they hope the future holds. If Russia seems to have become another planet, it is largely because its regime has also waged war on foreign journalists, preventing them from straying beyond established perimeters.

Over the summer, hoping to do precisely that, I spent a month traveling down the Volga River. In a land of great rivers, the Volga is the river. They call it matushka, the mother; it flows from the Valdai Hills to the land of the Chuvash, the Tatars, the Cossacks, the Kalmyks, and into the Caspian Sea.

more here.

Adrienne Raphel at The Paris Review:

In 1974, Harry Stein and Thomas Moore, young editors who’d worked together at New Times, a glossy biweekly in New York, had an idea: Let’s start a magazine—in Paris. Moore had recently come into a windfall when one of his articles, about an bank robbery in Brooklyn, became the basis for the film Dog Day Afternoon. He moved to Paris, following his then girlfriend; the relationship ended, but he stayed. Stein had previously lived in Paris, writing features for the International Herald Tribune, and also had a European girlfriend at the time. At first, the idea seemed impossible: Maybe we should sell baseball caps instead of starting a magazine, Stein thought. But Moore had a vision. He stole the name from the café outside his living room window, stole the masthead logo from the subway sigh, and their publication was born: The Paris Metro.

Stein and Moore called Joel Stratte-McClure, a fellow journalist then in Paris on assignment, to tell him that they had a “scoop” on a nuclear meltdown and ask him to meet them in the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz. (There was no meltdown.) Several martinis in, Stratte-McClure joined the Metro team.

more here.

Ellen Wexler in Smithsonian:

On her 25th birthday in February 1947, Felicia Montealegre sent a giddy letter to her new fiancé. “Lenny, my darling, my darling!” she wrote. “I am a quarter of a century old, a very frightening fact!” Recent developments, she went on, included the arrival of a black cocker spaniel puppy (“She’s mine, my very own!”) and an impending driver’s license exam (“I drive alone all over the place, up hill and down dale, heavy traffic and all—and I’m great! So there!!”).

Felicia, an actress, had been engaged to Leonard Bernstein, the 28-year-old wunderkind composer and conductor, for two months. She was, like most everyone in the man’s orbit, perilously in love with him. Still, beneath the bubbly, starry-eyed adoration, she felt something was amiss. “What’s with you?” she wrote. “You never really tell me how you feel—is it that difficult?” Come fall, the engagement was off. Then, after a four-year interlude, it was back on. A wedding quickly followed.

Yet the biggest obstacle remained: Bernstein, a closeted bisexual man, had always conducted numerous affairs with both men and women. In 1947, the secrecy had been evidently too heavy for the relationship to bear.

More here.

Alice Callahan in The New York Times: