Piano

Midway in the concert,
the piano grew pensive,
ignored in its gravedigger’s frock coat;
but later it opened its mouth
—the jaws of leviathan:
the pianist then entered his piano
and deployed like a crow;
something happened, like a silvery
downfall
of pebbles
or a hand
in a pond,
unobserved;
a trickle of sweetness
like rain
on the smooth of a bell,
light fell
through the padlocks and bolts of a house,
to the depths,
an emerald crossed the abysses,
the sea gave its sound
the night
and the dews
and the meadows,
the steepest ascent of the thunderbolt,
the symmetrical rose sang aloud
and quietness circled the milk of the morning.

So melody grew
in a dying piano,
the naiad’s
investiture
rose on the catafalque
from a margin of teeth,
piano, pianist,
and the concerto plunged downward, oblivious,
till all was sonority,
torrential beginnings,
consummate gradation, a bell tower’s clarities.

Then the man in the tree
of his music came back to us.
He came down like
a blundering crow on its course
or a lunatic dandy:
the whale-mouth closed up
and the man walked away
to a silence.

by Pablo Neruda
from Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970
Grove Press, 1974

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Abigail Tulenko at Aeon Magazine:

The Hungarian folktale Pretty Maid Ibronka terrified and tantalised me as a child. In the story, the young Ibronka must tie herself to the devil with string in order to discover important truths. These days, as a PhD student in philosophy, I sometimes worry I’ve done the same. I still believe in philosophy’s capacity to seek truth, but I’m conscious that I’ve tethered myself to an academic heritage plagued by formidable demons.

The demons of academic philosophy come in familiar guises: exclusivity, hegemony and investment in the myth of individual genius. As the ethicist Jill Hernandez notes, philosophy has been slower to change than many of its sister disciplines in the humanities: ‘It may be a surprise to many … given that theology and, certainly, religious studies tend to be inclusive, but philosophy is mostly resistant toward including diverse voices.’ Simultaneously, philosophy has grown increasingly specialised due to the pressures of professionalisation. Academics zero in on narrower and narrower topics in order to establish unique niches and, in the process, what was once a discipline that sought answers to humanity’s most fundamental questions becomes a jargon-riddled puzzle for a narrow group of insiders.

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Eric Hoel at The Intrinsic Perspective:

Isaac Newton’s lifelong quest to transmute base metals into gold is normally forgiven as a symptom of the pre-scientific nature of his age. But “great minds holding eccentric, even kooky, beliefs” is a pattern that crops up throughout history. Even after there became strong social reasons for scientists to disguise even the faintest whiff of the irrational. William James, the godfather of psychology, believed in ghosts. Fred Hoyle, who came up with the idea that stars created chemical elements via nuclear fusion, thought that influenza came from space. Nikola Tesla was obsessed with the number three. Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli believed that his mere presence could drive laboratory equipment to malfunction. Kurt Gödel starved himself to death out of fear of being poisoned. Brian Josephson, a still-living Nobel laureate, thinks that water has memories.

Why?

In the “TV model” of science, scientists are pinnacles of rationality—socially inept, boringly nerdy, emotionless, and incapable of strong pre-evidence beliefs.

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Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:

Fussier friends would shiver in the mid-October wind, but Ann Mandelstamm is in her eighties and still hiking, so I grab a table on the patio. Just as I open the menu, she arrives, clad in a sporty navy sweater and jeans and wearing her trademark red lipstick, her red-gold hair pulled back with combs. She sits, her movements as lithe and graceful as ever. She has always had a quiet, midcentury glamour about her—the Kate Hepburn sort, impatient with frippery. Neither of us even mentions moving indoors.

It is good to see her; it has been more than a year. She is animated and fun, teasing the server as she orders: “I had authority in my voice, didn’t I? I used to teach high school.” We talk about books and, with a sigh, politics, then split a pizza. Somehow Ann has always managed to go deep—think hard, read tough stuff, fight for justice—yet remain delighted by the world.

As the plates are whisked away, she says, “I have something for you,” and hands me a sheet of paper. “Not many people know,” she says. “I’m going to mail this to my dearest friends just before.”

“Before….?” I smile and take the sheet, wondering what she is up to. Skimming, I catch phrases: not something I arrived at without deliberation…. I have lived my life as well as I could…. limited resources on this planet…. what purpose could I serve by living on another five or ten years?

She has decided to end her life.

My mind goes blank with shock.

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Michael Hirsh in Foreign Policy:

Meanwhile, Carter, who died Sunday at 100, is remembered as a somewhat weak leader, preaching naively about human rights, lamenting energy shortages and malaise in his singsong Georgia accent, and practically being hounded from the White House by the 444-day-long Iranian hostage crisis.

So, it may seem strange that Carter, even more so than Reagan, is revered to this day among those who fought on the true front lines of the Cold War: the former dissidents of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. “They still see him as the messiah,” Svetlana Savranskaya, a scholar of the Soviet period at George Washington University, told me in an interview. “Their eyes shine when they talk about him.”

Perhaps the least understood dimension of Carter’s much-maligned, one-term presidency was that he dramatically changed the nature of the Cold War, setting the stage for the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse. Carter did this with a tough but deft combination of soft and hard power. On one hand, he opened the door to Reagan’s delegitimization of the Soviet system by focusing on human rights; on the other hand, Carter aggressively funded new high-tech weapons that made Moscow realize it couldn’t compete with Washington, which in turn set off a panicky series of self-destructive moves under the final Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

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Amber Dance in Knowable Magazine:

Billions of cells die in your body every day. Some go out with a bang, others with a whimper. They can die by accident if they’re injured or infected. Alternatively, should they outlive their natural lifespan or start to fail, they can carefully arrange for a desirable demise, with their remains neatly tidied away.

Originally, scientists thought those were the only two ways an animal cell could die, by accident or by that neat-and-tidy version. But over the past couple of decades, researchers have racked up many more novel cellular death scenarios, some specific to certain cell types or situations. Understanding this panoply of death modes could help scientists save good cells and kill bad ones, leading to treatments for infections, autoimmune diseases and cancer. “There’s lots and lots of different flavors here,” says Michael Overholtzer, a cell biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He estimates that there are now more than 20 different names to describe cell death varieties. Here, Knowable Magazine profiles a handful of classic and new modes by which cells kick the bucket.

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Jordan King in Newsweek:

The U.S. population will age and continue to see low growth in 2025, three experts have told Newsweek.

Population decline is an issue for many countries around the world, especially in Europe, and, while the U.S. is not technically one of them, its growth is slow. Last year, the population only increased by 0.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. While this is the most significant uptick since the Covid pandemic, “national population growth is still historically low,” the Bureau concluded, and 2025 is not expected to be much different, experts said.

“Next year will be much like this year, but with slightly more moderation from the recent pandemic disruptions,” Dowell Myers, a professor of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California, told Newsweek. “We know all the residents will be one year older—baby boomers moving deeper into retirement and still holding on to their houses, while most of the millennials spill across the 30-year age threshold, after which fertility can’t be delayed much further and when intentions for homeownership are strengthening even more.”

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Frank Bruni in the New York Times:

In his newsletter, Sam Harris marveled, back in early July, at the reluctance of President Biden and his closest advisers to end his re-election campaign: “They are not merely courting disaster now — they are having tantric sex with it.”

In The Baltimore Sun, Dan Rodricks explained the absence of any encore to the presidential candidates’ onstage encounter: “Donald Trump saying he won’t debate Kamala Harris a second time is like the Thanksgiving turkey saying he won’t be available for Christmas dinner.”

In The Wall Street Journal, Dan Neil bemoaned the mismatch of his aged endoskeleton and his assignment to review a low-lying, physically inaccessible car by alluding to the god of Graceland: “After a lifetime of swiveling and gyrating, my pelvis has left the building.”

More here.

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Ziyad Al-Aly in The Conversation:

Here are some of the most important studies to date documenting how COVID-19 affects brain health:

• • Large epidemiological analyses showed that people who had COVID-19 were at an increased risk of cognitive deficits, such as memory problems.
  • Imaging studies done in people before and after their COVID-19 infections show shrinkage of brain volume and altered brain structure after infection.
  • A study of people with mild to moderate COVID-19 showed significant prolonged inflammation of the brain and changes that are commensurate with seven years of brain aging.
  • Severe COVID-19 that requires hospitalization or intensive care may result in cognitive deficits and other brain damage that are equivalent to 20 years of aging.

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Agnes Callard at UnHerd:

Even if you haven’t read Robert Musil’s unfinished modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, you probably agree that it has a great title. If you have read it, I’m sure you agree, because the novel returns obsessively to the theme of how its main character, Ulrich, can’t quite get his act, or, more fundamentally, his personality, together. But I’ve come up with an even better title. I think Musil should have called his novel The Man Without Philosophy.

I acknowledge, in offering this improvement, that over the course of the novel Ulrich explicitly espouses a life-philosophy; moreover, he even fashions his own name for this philosophy, “essayism”. Essayism is a mode of living whose characteristic expression is a stretch of novel and insightful reflection, “explor[ing] a thing from many sides without encompassing it”. The essayist lives a life of thoughtful observations. Ulrich lives that life, and so does Musil, who is much more interested in filling his novel with thoughtful observations than with any of the usual contrivances of plot or character development. Ulrich recoils against being “a definite person in a definite world”, and instead leverages his mind’s bottomless capacity for re-evaluation to emulate the infinite changeability of “a drop of water inside a cloud”. Ulrich describes his relationship to ideas: “they always provoked me to overthrow them and put others in their place.”

For Ulrich, as for Musil, “there was only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live.” Isn’t that, in its very essence, a philosophical project? Yes. But there is good reason, nonetheless, to insist that Ulrich is a man without philosophy, namely, the fact that both Musil and Ulrich insist on it, over and over again.

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Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

“All Life Long,” the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: “The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, / All life long crying without avail, / As the water all night long is crying to me.” The poem appears as an epigraph in W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk,” which is where Malone found it. Beneath Symons’s lines, Du Bois supplies musical notation for the opening phrase of the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The topic, then, is sorrow, songs of sorrow, sounds of sorrow.

Malone’s album, a hushed, meditative collection of pieces for male vocal quartet, brass quintet, and organ, is steeped in melancholy, but it is not the kind of melancholy that you can absent-mindedly sink into, as if wrapping yourself in a comforter on a cold night. Malone and a group of collaborators recently presented a live rendition of “All Life Long,” at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, as part of the annual New York edition of the Polish festival Unsound. The titular work, vaguely in the key of A minor, was heard in versions for choir and for solo organ.

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Guian Mckee in Time Magazine:

In recent years, major new studies have tried to rehabilitate the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at age 100. They’ve emphasized a range of underappreciated accomplishments in everything from foreign policy to environmental protection and racial equity. These accounts still acknowledge Carter’s failures but balance them with a longer-term perspective on how his presidency changed the United States and the world.

This positive reappraisal, however, hasn’t extended to health care policy. This makes sense considering how devastating the battle over health care was to Carter during his presidency. Congress rejected his major health care policy initiatives, and his grudging support for a much more limited national health insurance plan in part spurred Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) to challenge the incumbent Carter from the left in the 1980 Democratic presidential primary.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Exosomes are tiny bubbles made by cells to carry proteins and genetic material to other cells. While still early, research into these mysterious bubbles suggests they may be involved in aging or be responsible for cancers spreading across the body.

Multiple clinical trials are underway, ranging from exosome therapies to slow hair loss to treatments for heart attacks, strokes, and bone and cartilage loss. They have potential. But a growing number of clinics are also advertising exosomes as their next best seller. One forecast analyzing exosomes in the skin care industry predicts a market value of over $674 million by 2030. The problem? We don’t really know what exosomes are, what they do to the body, or their side effects. In a way, these molecular packages are like Christmas “mystery boxes,” each containing a different mix of biological surprises that could alter cellular functions, like turning genes on or off in unexpected ways.

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Isabella Weber and Elie Mystal debate the matter in The Nation:

[Weber] As the dust settles on the 2024 elections, stunned Democrats are struggling to understand why the country voted the way it did. In the run-up to November 5, survey after survey showed that Americans were concerned about the cost of living, but many economists and pundits shook their heads in disbelief. They blamed a “vibecession.”

James Baldwin once said that anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. People’s experience of inflation differs based on factors like race, income, gender, where you live, whether you have a car to drive to cheaper stores, whether you can buy in bulk to take advantage of discounts, whether you rent or own your home, whether you have a mortgage from before interest rates went up, whether you depend on credit-card debt, how many assets you hold, and so on. This diversity of lived experiences is not captured in the headline numbers. For many people, the favorable economic data and booming stock market belied the reality of exorbitant grocery prices, sky-high rents, prohibitive healthcare costs, and spiking interest rates.

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Herman Mark Schwartz in Phenomenal World:

Forty years ago, in 1984, Michael Piore and Charles Sabel published a MacArthur award-winning book, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity, that shaped a decades-long debate about the future of markets and the social orders supporting them. Piore and Sabel characterized the 1970s and early 1980s as a second critical inflection point in the history of capitalism. The first shift had been from craft to mass production in the early 1900s. Mass production matched large fixed investments in product-specific production equipment with semi-skilled workers struggling for long-term employment stability. P&S argued that those investments had created an overly rigid production structure vulnerable to almost any shock. And the 1970s and early 1980s presented a multitude of shocks—strikes, unstable oil prices, rising inflation, intensifying conflict between the US and Soviet Union in terms of nuclear threats and proxy wars, the beginning of deregulation and privatization, and new global public health challenges like the AIDS epidemic. Political struggles to reorganize society created an opening for a watershed in economic relations that gave their book its name: a second industrial divide. They argued that enterprises could and would increasingly shift towards what they termed “flexible specialization”—smaller, more equally sized firms using newer general-purpose equipment, run by a more egalitarian workforce, in a more competitive market—because this form was more resilient in the face of shocks. The rules of the game everywhere were about to be re-written, and their speculative sketch of a possible future won their place in intellectual history.

The big questions about the re-written rules were, of course, by whom, how, and with what outcomes? Forty years later, we now know P&S were wrong about how the second industrial divide eventually played out. They were right, however, about the fact of a historical divide in the interaction of labor relations and the supply side of the economy, and about the stakes inherent in the massive shift in the organization of production, consumption, and innovation this entailed. Today we face a similar inflection point—a third industrial divide.

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Christopher Clark in the LRB:

For​ more than fifty years, Perry Anderson has been the most erudite and compelling voice on the British Marxist left. His writing has always been marked by prodigious reading across the widest possible front, a commitment to clarity and analytical rigour, and fidelity to a materialist reading of history. The style is cool and forensic, its austere surfaces set off by a sprinkling of recherché locutions (mouvance, primum movens, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, coup de main, plumpes Denken, kataplexis, animus pugnandi, lapsus calami, ante diem, to cite just a few from this book). Two great works of historical synthesis, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, both published in 1974, earned Anderson wide renown for the brilliance and complexity of their conceptual architecture, though the empirical soundness of their arguments was challenged by some historical specialists. The epochal disappointments of the 1980s, when it became clear that the political hopes of the radical left were not going to be realised any time soon, had a muting effect. The mordancy of the early decades made way for the realism of the mature Anderson style, marked by long and probing critical essays focused on individual issues and thinkers.

There was a mid-19th-century moment when critics emerged as arbiters of the present, applying a science of discernment whose purposes were no less (and sometimes were more) ambitious than those of the works they examined. Anderson is a critic in this mould. His attention falls not just on works, but also on the persons who fashion them. This is not because he is in the business of augmenting or destroying reputations, but because he sees writing as a way of being active in the world.

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