The great hum
you hear
is the universe
doing its work.
Listen:
it is echoed
in your heart
but
I cannot read this book the earth
I cannot reach this peak the sky
I cannot plumb this well my heart
I cannot fully open “I”
by Johanna Jordan
from Small Poems, 2006
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Pranab Bardhan at his own Substack:
Many Indians are never tired of telling others that theirs is the largest democracy in the world, just as many Americans, at least until very recently, would tell you that theirs is the ‘greatest’ democracy. There is considerable doubt now if either country can be called a democracy.
Much, of course, depends on what you mean by democracy. Even among democracy theorists there is a dispute about definitions. For example, for theorists like Robert Dahl or Adam Przeworski, as long as there are contested elections, and there is a chance of the incumbent losing and having lost, of accepting the electoral defeat, the country is definitely a democracy. For other theorists what happens in between elections, particularly on vital matters like freedom of expression and rights of minorities and dissenters, determines if a country is democratic or not.
By the first criteria it is arguable that the US is still a democracy, although elections have long been seriously circumscribed by widespread gerrymandering of electoral constituencies and by the role of big money in election funding that makes barriers to entry for neophytes rather high; and in spite of Trump’s atrocious denial of defeat in 2020, he after all left the White House at that time to come back to a more decisive victory in 2024.
More here.
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Henry Oliver in Liberties:
Virginia Woolf might be at once the English novelist who is the most accomplished and the most shrugged off. The characters of Mrs Dalloway were never going to appear on cigarette cards, as Dickens’ characters did. Orlando even irritated Elizabeth Bowen (because it had too many in-jokes for Vita Sackville-West). Admirers must admit that, as Penelope Fitzgerald said, Woolf’s techniques were taken as far as they could go. She had the genius to exhaust a whole line of artistic inquiry, and many have felt exhausted by her.
And she was personally unlikeable: racist, snobbish, uncharitable, snide, a malicious gossip. Perhaps her feminism rankled readers, but that her nastiness has put off a great many more is surely undeniable. This is the Virginia Woolf we think we know: hard to read, easy to hate. That is the image of her which has calcified in popular imagination. But the image of her is an artifact we have created, and the women, her books, and her world are stranger to contemporary readers than they have been to any previous ones.
More here.
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Gretchen Reynolds in The Washington Post:
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Michael Dirda in the Washington Post:
It’s said that when “War and Peace” was finished and about to be published, Tolstoy looked at the huge book and suddenly exclaimed, “The yacht race! I forgot to put in the yacht race!” At 1,174 pages, Ron Chernow’s “Mark Twain” is essentially the same length as “War and Peace,” but seemingly nothing has been overlooked or left out. Normally, this would be a signal weakness in a biography — shape and form do matter — but Chernow writes with such ease and clarity that even long sections on, say, Twain’s business ventures prove horribly fascinating as the would-be tycoon descends, with Sophoclean inexorability, into financial collapse and bankruptcy.
Overall, Chernow’s “Mark Twain” is less a literary biography than a deep dive into “the most original character in American history.” Born in 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who adopted the pen name Mark Twain, was by turns a printer, steamboat pilot, journalist, stand-up storyteller, best-selling author, publisher, political pundit, champion of racial equality and all-around scourge of authoritarianism.
More here. [Free registration required.]
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Sofia Quaglia in New Scientist:
Capuchin monkeys on a remote Panamanian island are abducting babies from howler monkey families, in a first-of-its-kind trend.
The wild population of white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus imitator) living on Jicarón Island has been monitored with 86 motion cameras since 2017 to capture their sophisticated use of stone tools to crack open hard fruits, nuts and shellfish. Five years into recording the footage, in 2022, a researcher noticed one of the young male capuchin monkeys with an infant monkey from another species clinging to its back. This capuchin, nicknamed Joker, picked up at least four baby howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata coibensis) over four months, sometimes holding onto them for more than a week.
At first, the researchers thought it was a case of “one individual who maybe is a little weird or a little quirky”, says Zoë Goldsborough from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, who spotted the behaviour. “We didn’t expect to find this.”
Then, five months after they saw Joker with an infant, four other young male capuchins were found carrying around howler babies. Over 15 months, the capuchin group took in 11 howler babies younger than four weeks old.
More here.
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Gerald Early at The Common Reader:
On February 24, 1947, Eugene Le Bar began a bus trip from Mexico City that would take him to New York. By March 1, when he arrives in New York he was not feeling very well but went sightseeing nonetheless, coming in contact with lots of people. On March 10, he died in Willard Parker hospital from the rare but extremely deadly hemorrhagic smallpox. Only five percent of smallpox cases take this intensely virulent form, so it is not surprising that Le Bar’s case was originally misdiagnosed. Overall, twelve persons were infected with traditional, not hemorrhagic, smallpox (with a much higher survival rate) from Le Bar’s ring of contacts; two died. The infection rate was low because New York embarked on a mass vaccination effort to prevent the spread of the disease. Six million New Yorkers were vaccinated against smallpox in the spring of 1947, an enormous accomplishment by the local public health service employees and hospital personnel as shots were given around the clock to prevent an epidemic.
More here.
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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:
Molecules in urine and blood can reveal how much of a person’s diet comes from ultra-processed foods, according to a study published in PLOS Medicine today1. The paper suggests that these measurements provide an objective way to track consumption of ultra-processed food — and would be useful for investigating links to diseases such as diabetes and cancer.
Ultra-processed foods are industrially manufactured and often contain ingredients, such as additives and emulsifiers, that are not typically found in home-cooked food. From sweetened yogurts to factory-made bread and packaged snacks, “it’s a really wide range of foods”, says study co-author Erikka Loftfield, an epidemiologist at the US National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland. Studies have linked high consumption of ultra-processed food to an increased risk of obesity2, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some types of cancer3. But these investigations have typically relied on asking individuals to remember what they have eaten, which can be unreliable. Studies have also shown the potential of studying the products of metabolism excreted in the blood and urine, but only for a small number of such metabolites4,5. Loftfield and her colleagues have now expanded that analysis to include more than 1,000 metabolites, which are produced when the body converts food into energy.
More here.
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You will not need the pieces of paper
that used to define
you: the deeds, the degrees, the diplomas.
Leave them behind.
Leave, too, your dollars and coins.
Now your currency will be clementines
and tangerines. The ferrymen
prefer fruit.
You spent decades struggling against your shape,
but now you will be grateful for the extra calories stored
in your hips, the strength
in your stocky thighs.
Dig into your long-neglected
backpacking equipment for your waterproof
matches and purification tablets.
Hope for the best.
Sew seeds into your hemlines.
Seeds will be the new gemstones.
Take all your needles and strong thread.
Cut your hair haphazardly.
Fill your small shampoo bottle with champagne.
You’ll need it for disinfectant.
Pour yourself a glass of wine; admire
the crystal in the candlelight.
Sink into sleep,
one last night of softness
before you strap your sturdy
boots to your feet to set forth.
by Kristin Berkey-Abbott
from Rattle Magazine
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Ella Creamer in The Guardian:
A novel about a Palestinian woman who participates in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.
Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut novel The Coin. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.
The Coin, chosen in a unanimous decision by judges, “is a borderless novel, tackling trauma and grief with bold and poetic moments of quirkiness and humour”, said writer and judging chair Namita Gokhale. “It fizzes with electric energy”, with Zaher bringing “complexity and intensity to the page through her elegantly concise writing”.
Born in 1991 in Jerusalem, Zaher studied biomedical engineering at Yale University and creative writing at the New School, where she was advised by the novelist Katie Kitamura.
More here.
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Matt Ridley at Rational Optimist Society:
The announcement last week that a nine-month-old baby in Philadelphia has been cured of a rare genetic disorder by gene editing is a great moment in medical history. For the first time, doctors have altered a gene inside many cells in the liver of a living human being using CRISPR, the molecular tool borrowed from microbes that can home in on particular DNA sequences and in some cases alter them.
It reinforces my view that biotechnology, applied to medicine, represents the greatest opportunity for innovation, and the greatest hope for rational optimism in the current generation. More so, perhaps, even than artificial intelligence (AI).
The baby, known as KJ, lacked a working copy of a gene vital for processing protein in food. This meant that even with a very low protein diet, he would probably die young or face mental and physical disability – even if he could get a liver transplant when a little older. Today, after the experimental treatment, he is thriving.
More here.
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Ryan Briggs at Asterisk:
Ideally, policy and program design is a straightforward process: a decision-maker faces a problem, turns to peer-reviewed literature, and selects interventions shown to work. In reality, that’s rarely how things unfold. The popularity of “evidence-based medicine” and other “evidence-based” topics highlights our desire for empirical approaches — but would the world actually improve if those in power consistently took social science evidence seriously? It brings me no joy to tell you that, at present, I think the answer is usually “no.”
Given the current state of evidence production in the social sciences, I believe that many — perhaps most — attempts to use social scientific evidence to inform policy will not lead to better outcomes. This is not because of politics or the challenges of scaling small programs. The problem is more immediate. Much of social science research is of poor quality, and sorting the trustworthy work from bad work is difficult, costly, and time-consuming.
But it is necessary.
More here.
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Michael Marshall in Nature:
It was the finger seen around the world. In 2008, archaeologists working in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, Russia, uncovered a tiny bone: the tip of the little finger of an ancient human that lived there tens of thousands of years ago. The fragment didn’t seem remarkable, but it was well preserved, giving researchers hope that it harboured intact DNA. A team of geneticists led by Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, removed 30 milligrams of bone and managed to extract enough intact DNA to analyse it. They were able to sequence the entire mitochondrial genome — and were shocked by what they found. The DNA did not match that of modern humans, or of Neanderthals, the other likely candidate1. It was a new population, which they dubbed the Denisovans, after the cave.
When the team announced this result in March 2010, it caused a sensation. Up to that point, researchers had used preserved bones to identify every species or population of hominin — the group that includes modern and ancient humans and their immediate ancestors. “Denisovans were created from DNA work,” says palaeoanthropologist Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London. Nine months later came the second bombshell. Krause and his colleagues had obtained the entire nuclear genome from the finger bone, which yielded much more information. It showed that the Denisovans were a sister group to the Neanderthals, which lived in Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years.
More here.
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What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?
The moments
between hard pleasant tasks
To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.
—the first Calochortus flowers
and in all the land,
it’s spring.
I point them out:
the yellow petals, the golden hairs,
to Gen.
Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,
you pass it on.
by Gary Snyder
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Alan Burdick et al in The New York Times:
Science seldom works in straight lines. Sometimes it’s “applied” to solve specific problems: Let’s put people on the moon; we need a Covid vaccine. Much of the time it’s “basic,” aimed at understanding, say, cell division or the physics of cloud formation, with the hope that — somehow, someday — the knowledge will prove useful. Basic science is applied science that hasn’t been applied yet.
That’s the premise on which the United States, since World War II, has invested heavily in science. The government spends $200 billion annually on research and development, knowing that payoffs might be decades away; that figure would drop sharply under President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget. “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” Vannevar Bush, who laid out the postwar schema for government research support, wrote in a 1945 report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Look no further than Google, which got its start in 1994 with a $4 million federal grant to help build digital libraries; the company is now a $2 trillion verb.
Here are nine more life-altering advances that government investment made possible.
The first commercial GPS unit, a $3,000 brick for hikers and boaters, was made in 1988. The technology is now so ubiquitous — in cars, planes, phones, smartwatch running apps — that its existence can seem almost preordained.
More here.
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Hakim Bishara at Hyperallergic:
Art criticism is thriving. It’s taking on new forms, shedding old skin, and adapting to novel venues. It’s as alive and relevant as ever, still generating conversation and controversy. Instead of fizzling out, it’s being embraced by new generations of critics, whether in these pages or on Substack, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok (no matter the platform, it always comes down to writing). It’s a buzzing genre that attracts readers of all ages, from septum-pierced college students to cigar-puffing art collectors.
Yes, gone are the days when an insular clique of critics had the ability to make or break artists’ careers — and good riddance. That was more power than anybody deserves. The quality of a critic’s work now carries more weight than their cult of personality. That’s not a bad thing. Insightful, incisive, and inventive writing will always have a future and an audience. So long as there’s art, there will be art criticism.
Art criticism is not in crisis. Good art criticism is the crisis.
More here.
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Zack Savitsky in Quanta:
After her adventures in Wonderland, the fictional Alice stepped through the mirror above her fireplace in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass to discover how the reflected realm differed from her own. She found that the books were all written in reverse, and the people were “living backwards,” navigating a world where effects preceded their causes.
When objects appear different in the mirror, scientists call them chiral. Hands, for instance, are chiral. Imagine Alice trying to shake hands with her reflection. A right hand in mirror-world becomes a left hand, and there’s no way to align the two perfectly for a handshake because the fingers bend the wrong way. (In fact, the word “chirality” originates from the Greek word for “hand.”)
Alice’s experience reflects something deep about our own universe: Everything is not the same through the looking glass. The behavior of many familiar objects, from molecules to elementary particles, depends on which mirror-image version we interact with.
More here.
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Seventeen years ago, Eric Topol, a cardiologist and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, set out to discover why some people age so well, when others don’t. Aged 53 at the time, Topol considered healthy aging to be of deep scientific — and personal — interest. He also suspected the answer was genetic. So, with colleagues, he spent more than six years sequencing the genomes of about 1,400 people in their 80s or older with no major chronic diseases. All qualified, Topol felt, as “Super Agers.”