If the Reagan Airport crash was “waiting to happen,” why didn’t anyone stop it?

Ari Schulman in The New Atlantis:

Shocking if not surprising investigations from the Wall Street Journal and ABC News find that pilots at Reagan National Airport, also known as DCA, had been formally warning the Federal Aviation Administration for more than three decades of nearly hitting military helicopters traversing the same corridor. Pilots who had faced this exact situation filed these reports to the FAA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System:

    • In 2013: “I cannot imagine what business is so pressing that these helicopters are allowed to cross the path of airliners carrying hundreds of people! What would normally be alarming at any other airport in the country has become commonplace at DCA.”
    • In 2006: “Why does the tower allow such nonsense by the military in such a critical area? This is a safety issue, and needs to be fixed.”
    • In 1993: “This is an accident waiting to happen.”
    • In 1991: “Here is an accident waiting to happen.”

An investigation by the Washington Post is even more damning. Using simple, publicly available information, the Post’s reporters quickly discovered what the FAA had missed or ignored: The helicopter flight path and the airplane landing path at their closest point have a vertical separation of just 15 feet.

More here.

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‘Sexome’ microbes swapped during sex could aid forensic investigations

James Woodford in New Scientist:

Sexual partners transfer their distinctive genital microbiome to each other during intercourse, a finding that could have implications for forensic investigations of sexual assault.

Brendan Chapman at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, and his colleagues collected swabs from the genitals of 12 monogamous, heterosexual couples, then used RNA gene sequencing to identify microbial signatures for each participant. The researchers asked the couples to abstain from sex for between two days and two weeks, and took follow-up samples a few hours after intercourse.

“We found that those genetic signatures from the female’s bacteria were detectable in their male partners and vice versa,” says Chapman. This change in a person’s “sexome”, as the team has dubbed it, could prove useful in criminal investigations, he says.

More here.

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Bidenomics foundered on ten years of Democratic reluctance to declare war on inequality

Marshall Steinbaum in the Boston Review:

The year 2014 was a heady moment in the economic policy world. That spring, French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English to astounding commercial and intellectual success. The book painted a devastating picture of the post–Cold War economic order, uniting groundbreaking empirical evidence with a comprehensive theory explaining the vast accumulation of wealth and power at the top of the global economic pyramid. And it appeared at a moment when the apparatus of the Democratic Party needed just such a shock.

Recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, itself a consequence of Clinton-era financial deregulation, had been too long and too weak in the making; inequality ratcheted ever upward and jobs continued disappearing overseas. These trends signaled that the policies, rhetoric, and personnel of the Obama administration simply weren’t up to the task. Piketty’s reception, though not without pushback, helped cement consensus that something had to be done, kicking off a spirited effort within the progressive policy world to reform the Democrats’ approach to the economy.

Now that Trump has dealt a decisive deathblow to the post-Obama political system, it’s worth taking stock of where that moment went.

More here.

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Friday Poem

The Valentine is a Literary

The winter is still holding on, freezing moments.
A text congealed; a letter unopened is dramatic.
Dior’s burnt sienna lipstick, I purchased
from Amsterdam, is intact.
The lips slurp over coffee,
I recite Anna Akhmatova,
woodpecker-like, the cursor of dreams clicks
on the right stanza where we stop
made a vow to make an alternative interpretation
of her love poems.

The reason we are together after a year
is that lost interest in Austen,
and switched over to Lorca’s Ghazals,
and of Agha Shahid, who missed Kashmir,
like a beloved, still seeing in the mirror,
crumpled papers are in drawers,
an epistolary kiss, right where rhetoric begins,
letter writers indulge and boast about,
we are sending counter gazes,
passing through cold verandas,
it seems there is no epilogue.

by Rizwan Akhtar

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How The Moon Became A Place

Danny Robb at Aeon Magazine:

Centuries ago, a major reconceptualisation took place that made it possible for many to imagine the Moon as a world in the first place. New technologies enabled early scientists to slowly begin the process of mapping the lunar surface, and to eventually weave narratives about its history. Their observations and theories laid the groundwork for others to imagine the Moon as a rich world and a possible destination.

Then, in the 1960s, the place-making practices of these scientists suddenly became practical knowledge, enabling the first visitors to arrive safely on the lunar surface.

For much of history, the Moon was a mythological and mathematical object. People regarded the Moon as a deity or an abstract power and, at the same time, precisely charted its movement. It seemed to influence events around us, and it behaved in mysterious ways.

The Egyptians and the Babylonians were eager to understand and predict the motions of celestial objects, including the Moon.

more here.

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on Literary Freedom as an Essential Human Right

Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New York Times:

“The freedom to write”: PEN America’s always resonant motto has a special resonance for Black authors, because for so many of them, that freedom was one they fought hard for. “Liberation” and “literacy” were inextricable. “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language,” as James Baldwin once noted. Recall, first, that in many states it was illegal for an enslaved person even to learn how to read and how to write. Then the barbarities of the slave trade, the Middle Passage and cradle-to-grave bondage, were followed by another century of lynching, Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement and officially sanctioned forms of violence. Does the English language fail us, Baldwin wonders, in the face of racist terror? No, he decides; we must embrace it, occupy it, refashion it in our images, speak it in our own voices. We must deploy it to redress this terror. “To accept one’s past — one’s history,” as Baldwin insisted, “is not the same as drowning with it; it is learning how to use it.” This, surely, is integral to the freedom to write — the freedom to bear witness to the full range of our common humanity, and all that that entails, no matter how uncomfortable the process can be.

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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Schelling Vs. Hegel

Kyla Bruff at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Questions concerning the differences between Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophical systems have always been of intense interest. This has been the case since Hegel decisively ended their friendship and collaboration by critically describing the early Schelling’s concept of the Absolute (the identity of identity and non-identity, or A=A [Dews, 75–76]) as the night “in which all cows are black” in the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 (Hegel 1977, 9, cf. Dews 75). Schelling’s Absolute, on Hegel’s account, was an abyss of darkness within which the dynamic development of real difference did not emerge. In contrast, Hegel thought his own dialectical system could lift difference out of the night, capturing the “reality of the finite” and the dynamic process of becoming (77). While Schelling quickly moved on from the “Identity System” in question, Hegel nevertheless remained an inescapable shadow haunting Schelling’s philosophical career.

After Hegel’s death in 1831, Schelling publicly criticized him on numerous occasions, most notably in Berlin, where he took up Hegel’s chair in 1841 to expel “the dragon-seed of Hegelian pantheism” from Prussia (Matthews 2012, 6). The late Schelling, foreshadowing Kierkegaard, saw Hegel as unable to philosophically ground his own system, and accused him of employing circular reasoning when attempting to describe the beginning of pure being in thinking (132, 191).

more here.

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Thursday, February 13, 2025

Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King

Tim Riley at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The further we get from Elvis Presley’s death, the more a crude music industry frame takes hold: the blinding flash of his Sun Records youth, the snowballing Hollywood banality, and the celebrity pill junkie slumped on his toilet, dead at 42. Praise Allah for recent documentaries like Elvis Presley: The Searcher (Thom Zimny, 2018), and the Reinventing Elvis: The ’68 Comeback (John Scheinfeld, 2023), where the performer’s radical charisma speaks for itself. In the same way that historic recreations always comment on their contemporary context, the Elvis Presley of Sun Studios and early RCA singles between 1954 and 1958 will always sound tantalizingly out of reach to 21st-century ears—another 80 years of laissez-faire racism will do that.

Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King, the latest title from music scholar Preston Lauterbach, gives this story a major course correction. In a voice both confident and wry—without ever talking down to the reader—Lauterbach portrays a lively and complicated Memphis scene during the pre-Elvis era: regional radio personalities, Black churches where whites gathered to hear gospel quartets, and a series of progressive-minded figures that pressed against the hard lines drawn by figures like E. H. “Boss” Crump, the local segregationist enforcer.

More here.

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AI-Assisted Academic Writing: Adjustments in Quantitative Social Science

A research paper written by OpenAI’s GPT-o3:

The advent of advanced AI systems capable of generating academic text — including “chain-of-thought” large language models with test-time web access — is poised to significantly influence scholarly writing and publishing. This review discusses how academia, particularly in quantitative social science, should adjust over the next decade to AI-assisted or AI-written articles. We summarize the current capabilities of AI in academic writing (from drafting and citation support to idea generation), highlight emerging trends, and weigh advantages against risks such as misinformation, plagiarism, and ethical dilemmas. We then offer speculative predictions for the coming ten years, grounded in literature and present data on AI’s impact to date. An empirical analysis compiles real-world data illustrating AI’s growing footprint in research output. Finally, we provide policy and workflow recommendations for journals, peer reviewers, editors, and scholars, presented in an exhaustive table. Our aim is to inform a balanced approach to harnessing AI’s benefits in academic writing while safeguarding integrity
and transparency.

More here.

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Fertilization, irrigation, genetics: the three practices that let us feed the whole world for the first time in history

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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An 800-mile Poem

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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Cheap blood test detects pancreatic cancer before it spreads

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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Thursday Poem

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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The Art Of Franne Davids

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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