Emily Cataneo at Undark:

In “Seven Deadly Sins,” Leschziner, a neurologist and sleep physician, interrogates the evolutionary, neurological, and psychological underpinnings of the seven greatest transgressions in Dante’s “Inferno”: wrath, lust, pride, greed, envy, sloth, and gluttony. He concludes that these so-called sins are inextricably interwoven with the experience of being a person, and that to understand them is “to gain insights into why we do what we do: the biology of being human.”

Leschziner had several personal reasons for wanting to understand humanity’s darkest side. His family was defined by the trauma of his grandfather’s narrow escape from the Holocaust, a “supreme expression of human sin.” Leschziner’s curiosity about sin was also sparked by his 25 years as a doctor in London hospitals, where he’s seen the best and worst of humankind on display. In writing this book, he sought to push himself beyond merely observing and treating his patients’ issues and instead “to see beneath the surface, to delve into the depths.”

More here.

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Minouche Shafik at Project Syndicate:

It is a multipolar world, with China, Russia, India, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa, and the Gulf states challenging the old order, alongside other emerging powers demanding a greater voice in shaping the rules of the international system. Meanwhile, belief in “universal values” and the idea of an “international community” has waned, as many point to the hypocrisy of rich countries hoarding vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic and the response to the Ukraine war compared to the failures to act in response to humanitarian crises in Gaza, Sudan, and many other places.

Adding to these pressures, US President Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw the security guarantees that have been crucial for Europe and Japan, quit many international organizations, and impose trade tariffs on friends and foes alike. When the guarantor of the system walks away from it, what comes next?

We may be heading to a zero-order world in which rules are replaced by power – a very difficult environment for smaller countries. Or it may be a world of large regional blocs, with the United States dominating its hemisphere, China prevailing over East Asia, and Russia reasserting control over the countries of the former Soviet Union. Ideally, we can find our way to a new rules-based order that more accurately reflects our multipolar world.

To get there, we need to better understand why the old order failed.

More here.

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Christian Macedonia in Singularity Hub:

Most work using AI in drug development intends to reduce the time and money it takes to bring one drug to market—currently 10 to 15 years and $1 billion to $2 billion. But can AI truly revolutionize drug development and improve success rates?

…Between 2010 and 2022, 20 AI-focused startups discovered 158 drug candidates, 15 of which advanced to clinical trials. Some of these drug candidates were able to complete preclinical testing in the lab and enter human trials in just 30 months, compared with the typical 3 to 6 years. This accomplishment demonstrates AI’s potential to accelerate drug development. On the other hand, while AI platforms may rapidly identify compounds that work on cells in a petri dish or in animal models, the success of these candidates in clinical trials—where the majority of drug failures occur—remains highly uncertain.

More here.

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Guy Mount in Black Perspectives:

Slaves freed themselves.  With this majestic assertion in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois all but cemented Black Reconstruction as one of the most influential American history books of the twentieth century.   At the time of its publication, it was widely denounced.  Writing from the depths of the Great Depression, and amidst a burgeoning black communist internationalism, Black Reconstruction was Du Bois at his finest. By deftly applying classical Marxist analysis to a population so often overlooked by its orthodoxies, Du Bois’s general strike thesis emerged not only as a historical corrective, but as a stark critique of Western philosophy and modern academic inquiry itself.  It brought together the study of class with the study of race and foreshadowed what we now call intersectionality.  Yet, it also sat on the shelf for decades until, like so many great masterpieces, it was dusted off well after its creator’s death and celebrated only in Du Bois’s absence.  As the great American poet/sometimes performance artist Kanye West reminds us: “people never get the flowers when they can still smell them.”

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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Piki

I nicknamed this tiny girl Piki, “Cuckoo”
because she was furtive yet brave,
and had a distinctive cuckoo-like voice.
I would always see her upon landing
in Bangalore when I exited with my baggage.
She wore a see-through sleeveless pinafore and
no underwear. I guessed she was six and that she
was not raised by her parents, who I thought of
as cuckoos who plagiarize and lay their eggs
in another bird’s nest for rearing their babies.
In India, cuckoos are sacred to Kamadeva, the
god of desire and longing. Piki became holy to me
and full of desire to help. She would charge up to me
ahead of the other urchins seeking work and call out
“Cooey?” or “Coucou?” (“want help?” in French).
She learned these words as “Hi there!” from
disembarking French tourists.  The sound of her call
was like a soft knock or the gentle afternoon
murmuring of a morning dove. She was so small that
I might have held her in the palm of my hand.
Standing up she was a little taller than my bag. So,
try as she might, she could not carry it. Relinquishing
the effort of squeezing the handle, she would pat-pat
the sides of the suitcase as I made my way to the taxi
as if to assist me in getting aboard.

by Deacon Lucien Miller
from The Hidden Side of the Mountain
—Encounters with Wisdom’s Poor and Holy
Fons Vitae, Louisville Kentucky, 2021

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John Banville at The Guardian:

A time there was, and a recent time, when big beasts stalked the groves of academe. This was in the last quarter or so of the 20th century, the leafy days of Althusser and Paul de Man, of the terrible twins Guattari and Deleuze, of Foucault, Derrida and Sollers, of Susan Sontag and the delightful Julia Kristeva. It was the age of theory, after the demise of the new criticism and before even a shred of cannon smoke was yet visible above the battlefields of the coming culture wars.

How sure of ourselves we were, the heirs of Adorno and Walter Benjamin. We knew, because Nietzsche had told us so, that there are no facts, only interpretations – sound familiar, from present times? – and that danger alone is the mother of morals. We listened, rapt, to the high priests of structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, und so weiter. We pored in anxious excitement over the hermetic texts of the new savants, encountering sentences such as this, from the pen of a German-born academic who had been long settled in Britain, and who in the last decade of his life would mutate into a world-famous novelist: “The invariability of art is an indication that it is its own closed system, which, like that of power, projects the fear of its own entropy on to imagined affirmative or destructive endings.”

more here.

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Alexandra Alter at the New York Times:

In December 1999, around her 65th birthday, Joan Didion started writing a journal after sessions with her psychiatrist. Over the next year or so, she kept notes about their conversations, which covered her struggles with anxiety, guilt and depression, her sometimes fraught relationship with her daughter, and her thoughts about her work and legacy.

Shortly after Didion’s death in 2021, her three literary trustees found the diary while going through her papers in her Manhattan apartment. There were 46 entries stashed in an unlabeled folder and addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Didion left no instructions about how to handle the journal after her death, and no one in her professional orbit knew of its existence. But her trustees — her literary agent Lynn Nesbit, and two of her longtime editors, Shelley Wanger and Sharon DeLano — saw that she had printed and stored them in chronological order. The notes formed a complete narrative, one that seemed more intimate and unfiltered than anything she had published.

more here.

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Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian:

Coates’s The Message grapples with the question of whose stories get told, and how that forges our reality. As he writes halfway through: “Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.” Known for his searing critiques of racial injustice, he came to wider attention with a 2014 essay The Case for Reparations, followed by a 2015 book, Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his son. According to Toni Morrison, he filled “the intellectual void” left by James Baldwin’s death.

The Message starts with a reflection on Coates’s obsession with words. Aged five, he recited Eugene Field’s poem The Duel over and over: “The gingham dog and the calico cat / Side by side on the table sat”. As a young adult, he was captivated by rapper Rakim’s use of alliteration in his 1990 classic Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em: “I’m the arsenal, I got artillery, lyrics are ammo / Rounds of rhythm, then I’mma give ’em piano.”

As a student at Howard University it dawned on him that words, however beautifully arranged, “must serve something” beyond themselves: “They must do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing,” he writes. In his view, language – its arsenal, artillery and ammo – must be “joined to politics”. This linguistic responsibility falls particularly on Black writers, and writers of all “conquered peoples”, he says.

More here.

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Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

In early February 2020, China locked down more than 50 million people, hoping to hinder the spread of a new coronavirus. No one knew at the time exactly how it was spreading, but Lidia Morawska, an expert on air quality at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, did not like the clues she managed to find.

It looked to her as if the coronavirus was spreading through the air, ferried by wafting droplets exhaled by the infected. If that were true, then standard measures such as disinfecting surfaces and staying a few feet away from people with symptoms would not be enough to avoid infection.

Dr. Morawska and her colleague, Junji Cao at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, drafted a dire warning. Ignoring the airborne spread of the virus, they wrote, would lead to many more infections. But when the scientists sent their commentary to medical journals, they were rejected over and over again.

“No one would listen,” Dr. Morawska said.

More here.

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Nicholas Carr at After Babel:

Self-expression is good, we tell ourselves, and it’s good to hear what others have to say. The more we’re able to converse, to share our thoughts, opinions, and experiences, the better we’ll understand one another and the more harmonious society will become. If communication is good, more communication must be better.

But what if that’s wrong? What if communication, when its speed and volume are amped up too far, turns into a destructive force rather than a constructive one? What if too much communication breeds misunderstanding rather than understanding, mistrust rather than trust, strife rather than harmony?

Those uncomfortable questions lie at the heart of my new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. Drawing evidence from history, psychology, and sociology, I argue that our rush to use ever more powerful online media technologies to ratchet up the efficiency of communication has been reckless. Even as the unremitting flow of words and images seizes our attention, it overwhelms the sense-making and emotion-regulating capacities of the human nervous system.

More here.

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What is There, Where is Nothing?

The two interpretations of time
(the measure of “when” with regard to
events Aristotle wanted; the entity
that runs even when nothing happens,
according to Newton), can be
repeated for space.

This is what we speak of when we ask “when?”
Space is what we speak of when we ask “where?”

If I ask “Where is the Colosseum?” One
possible answer is: “It’s in Rome.”
If I ask “Where are you?” a possible answer
might be: “At home.”

To reply to the question “Where is something?” means
to indicate something else that is around that thing.
If I say “In the Sahara,” you will visualize me
surrounded by sand dunes.

Aristotle was the first to discuss in depth and with
acuity the meaning of “space,” or “place,” and to
arrive at a precise definition: the place of a thing
is what surrounds that thing.” As in the case of time,
Newton suggests that we should think differently.

The space defined by Aristotle, the enumeration of
what surrounds each thing, is called
“relative, apparent, and common” by Newton, but he

calls space itself  “absolute, true, and mathematical”
which exists even where there is nothing.

by Carlo Rovelli
from The Order of Time
Riverhead Books, NY, 2018

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Laura Tran in The Scientist:

Micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) are everywhere—from the air we breathe to the food we eat—but their impact on human health is not entirely clear. While cell culture and animal studies hint at potential harm, understanding what this means for people is far more complex. Researchers like Matthew Campen, a biochemist and environmental scientist at the University of New Mexico, investigate how inhaled pollutants, including MNPs, affect cardiovascular and neurological health. He and his team focused on these particles’ accumulation and distribution in human organs.

Their findings, published in Nature Medicine, revealed that MNPs accumulated at higher levels in the brains of deceased individuals compared to livers or kidneys with a greater buildup in individuals with dementia.¹ In addition, plastic concentrations were higher in 2024 than in 2016 across these organs, suggesting a steady rise in environmental plastic exposure. These results underscore the urgent need to understand exposure routes, uptake, clearance pathways, and the potential health consequences of MNPs, particularly in the brain.

More here.

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From National Education Association:

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955)

Born during Reconstruction to parents who had been enslaved, Mary McLeod Bethune grew up walking five miles to a Presbyterian mission school where a teacher noticed her dedication and recommended her for a college scholarship—setting Bethune on a path to change her career and the world. In 1904, with $1.50 and five young students, the now-legendary Mary McLeod Bethune started a school for Black girls in Florida that became today’s Bethune-Cookman University. Two decades later, Bethune was elected as the first woman president of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools (NATCS), later renamed the American Teachers Association (ATA), which would eventually merge with the National Education Association to become the union we know today.

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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J. M. Tyree at the New England Review:

Celebrating film anniversaries always seems ephemeral, but when a film has been part of your life for three decades, there are good reasons to pause, rewind, review, and reassess both the film and your memories of it. You notice new things. The movie’s changed, you’ve changed, and the world has changed. Revisiting Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express on the thirtieth anniversary of its release in 1994, I rediscovered a film that is itself obsessed with dates and numbers. Expiration dates on tins of pineapple. Police badge numbers. Distances between people brushing past one another in crowded markets.

It isn’t necessary to know the movie’s plot before reading this collection of creative writers, who I asked to respond to Chungking Express at age thirty using any genre, length, or style they preferred. If you watch or rewatch the film, you’ll see actors who look good in their work clothes sharing meals and attempting to connect, chasing dreams of love that always fall just out of their reach, living in a painful and gorgeous world designed to separate everyone and wreck the timing of their yearnings.

more here.

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Nicholas Carr at The New Atlantis:

With its emphasis on media’s formative role in a society’s development, “Minerva’s Owl” would come to be seen as a founding document — maybe the founding document — of the academic discipline of media studies that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1964, the celebrated media savant Marshall McLuhan, who like Innis was a professor at the University of Toronto, wrote that he saw his own recent book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, as “a footnote to the observations of Innis.” The distinguished American educator and media theorist James Carey called Innis’s work “the great achievement in communications on this continent.”

Innis would not live to hear such praise. In 1952, the year after publication of The Bias of Communication, he died of prostate cancer, just fifty-eight years old. Unlike McLuhan, whose provocative work maintains a cultural currency, Innis and his more esoteric musings are today unknown to the general public. His name is rarely heard outside academic offices, conferences, and journals. But his ideas deserve a fresh look. Even though he died before he was able to complete his study of communication and civilization, his writings from seventy-five years ago shed an unexpectedly clear light on the media-induced cultural disturbances that trouble us today.

more here.

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