Kermit Pattison in Scientific American:

No part of our body is as perishable as the brain. Within minutes of losing its supply of blood and oxygen, our delicate neurological machinery begins to suffer irreversible damage. The brain is our most energy-greedy organ, and in the hours after death, its enzymes typically devour it from within. As cellular membranes rupture, the brain liquifies. Within days, microbes may consume the remnants in the stinky process of putrefaction. In a few years, the skull becomes just an empty cavity.

In some cases, however, brains outlast all other soft tissues and remain intact for hundreds or thousands of years. Archaeologists have been mystified to discover naturally preserved brains in ancient graveyards, tombs, mass graves and even shipwrecks. Scientists at the University of Oxford published a study earlier this year that revealed that such brains are more common than previously recognized. By surveying centuries of scientific literature, researchers counted more than 4,400 cases of preserved brains that were up to 12,000 years old. “The brain just decays super quickly, and it’s really weird that we find it preserved,” says Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a molecular scientist at Oxford and lead author of the new study. “My overarching question is: Why on Earth is this possible? Why is it happening in the brain and no other organ?” Such unusual preservation involves the “misfolding” of proteins—the cellular building blocks—and bears intriguing similarities to the pathologies that cause some neurodegenerative conditions.

More here.

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Smiriti Mallapaty in Nature:

Scientists in Boston, Massachusetts have made reprogrammed stem cells from the blood of centenarians. They plan to share the cells with other researchers to better understand the factors that contribute to a long and healthy life. Early experiments are already providing insights on brain ageing. Centenarians offer an opportunity to study longevity. People who’ve lived to 100 have an amazing ability to bounce back from insult and injury, says George Murphy, a stem-cell biologist at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. One centenarian he knows recovered from the 1912 Spanish flu and COVID-19, twice. One theory that explains centenarians’ robust age is that they possess a genetic makeup that protects them from diseases.

But testing that idea is a challenge. People of that age are rare, which makes blood and skin samples from them a precious resource for research. That gave Murphy and his colleagues the idea to create a bank of centenarian cells that could be shared among scientists.

More here.

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Stephen Smith at Literary Review:

The maker of abstract grids enclosing lozenges of colour, Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was one of the two or three epoch-shaping artists of the last century. But his life story isn’t widely known and few of us would be able to identify him from a photograph. Because his work seems cool and smart, and designers have sampled it ad nauseam for that very reason, we tend to imagine that he was probably cool and smart too.

The reality is rather more complex and curious, according to Nicholas Fox Weber’s assiduous and sensitive biography. Mondrian lived alone in a series of rented flats which weren’t much more than bedsits. They were in crowded corners of big cities: Paris, London and New York. He could seldom afford to heat his digs, and he ate sparingly, even when he was entertained by his few loyal supporters. He was a hypochondriac (to be fair to Mondrian, he also enjoyed poor health). He expected his long-suffering friends to console him, but he could be glassily unavailable to them. As with a number of artists, there were difficulties with girls: broadly speaking, Mondrian avoided them, though he appreciated their company as dance partners. This frowningly serious man liked to comb out his toothbrush moustache, climb into an ensemble perilously close to a zoot suit and cut a rug to the latest dance style – the Charleston or the boogie-woogie, say.

more here.

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Julia Webster Ayuso in The Dial:

On the evening of October 16, 1984, the body of four-year-old Grégory Villemin was pulled out of the Vologne river in Eastern France. The little boy had disappeared from the front garden of his home in Lépanges-sur-Vologne earlier that afternoon. His mother had searched desperately all over the small village, but nobody had seen him.

It quickly became clear that his death wasn’t a tragic accident. The boy’s hands and feet had been tied with string, and the family had received several threatening letters and voicemails before he disappeared. The following day, another letter was sent to the boy’s father, Jean-Marie Villemin. “I hope you will die of grief, boss,” it read in messy, joined-up handwriting. “Your money will not bring your son back. This is my revenge, you bastard.”

It was the beginning of what would become France’s best-known unsolved murder case. The case has been reopened several times, and multiple suspects have been arrested. Grégory’s mother, Christine, was charged with the crime and briefly jailed but later acquitted. Jean-Marie also served prison time after he shot dead his cousin Bernard Laroche, who had emerged as a prime suspect. The investigating judge, Jean-Michel Lambert, who was assigned the case at age 32 and made critical mistakes early in the investigation, killed himself in 2017.

More here.

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Adam Greenfield in the The Ideas Letter:

On April 2, 2024, a white Briton named Callum Parslow entered the restaurant of a countryside hotel called the Pear Tree Inn, walked up to a dark-skinned man he found eating there — someone completely unknown to him, evidently chosen entirely at random — and asked where he was from. When the diner answered that he was from east Africa, Parslow pulled out a knife he had ordered from America specifically for the occasion, and stabbed him repeatedly.

Parslow’s chosen victim, an asylum seeker from Eritrea named Nahom Hagos, was fortunate to survive the attack. In Parslow, what he’d brushed up against wasn’t simply garden-variety racist hatred, but a form of hatred equipped with an ideology — and still more, as the attack itself suggests, one increasingly inclined to express itself in lethal action. Consider the justification Parslow later attempted to post to his social-media accounts:

“I just did my duty to England…They will call me a terrorist, they will call me an extremist: I am neither. I am but a gardener tending to the great garden of England. I removed the weeds; I exterminated the harmful, invasive species.”

He goes on to blame “the evil enemies of nature and of England,” whom he identifies as “the Jews, the Marxists and the globalists.” White-supremacist violence has, of course, been a sadly familiar feature of our world since time out of mind, and there’s nothing even remotely novel about that specific list of designated enemies. But the ecological language in Parslow’s pompous little screed is notable, especially its conflation of nature and nation, and it speaks to a current of thought we desperately need to understand as it not merely increasingly drives events like this unprovoked assault, but inches ever closer to mainstream currency.

More here.

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Sarah Scoles at Undark:

How autonomous and semi-autonomous technology will operate in the future is up in the air, and the U.S. government will have to decide what limitations to place on its development and use. Those decisions may come sooner rather than later—as the technology advances, global conflicts continue to rage, and other countries are faced with similar choices—meaning that the incoming Trump administration may add to or change existing American policy. But experts say autonomous innovations have the potential to fundamentally change how war is waged: In the future, humans may not be the only arbiters of who lives and dies, with decisions instead in the hands of algorithms.

For some experts, that’s a net-positive: It could reduce casualties and soldiers’ stress. But others claim that it could instead result in more indiscriminate death, with no direct accountability, as well as escalating conflicts between nuclear-armed nations.

More here.

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Christopher Caldwell in the NYT:

Who could have seen Donald Trump’s resounding victory coming? Ask the question of an American intellectual these days and you may meet with embittered silence. Ask a European intellectual and you will likely hear the name of Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist and theorist of capitalism.

In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.

Understand Mr. Streeck and you will understand a lot about the left-wing movements that share his worldview — Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. But you will also understand Viktor Orban, Brexit and Mr. Trump.

More here. See here Adam Tooze’s review of Streeck’s How Will Capitalism End? 

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Neil Warner in Phenomenal World:

The threat of a return to the 1970s has long been a rhetorical feature of the British establishment. From the New Labour government’s Third Way reforms, to Jeremy Corbyn’s ambitious manifestos, and through to the current Labour Government’s rather modest spending increases, any prospects of redistributive taxation and spending, resurrection of trade union power, more worker-friendly policies, or state direction of industrial policy have been relentlessly attacked as a return to that dreaded decade.

The accusations are peculiar because, on the face of it, recent years have been very different from the 1970s. Trade-union power and militancy in the UK remain far weaker than before, the state no longer controls capital flows as it did prior to 1979, and competing ideological systems no longer overlap with geopolitics as they did during the Cold War.

Talk about going back to the 1970s, then, isn’t prompted by any real prospect of returning to those years or the conditions that underpinned them. Rather the 1970s have come to stand as a kind of shorthand for catastrophe—a catastrophe that Labour governments are particularly prone to. It was in the 1970s—as few in Britain are allowed to forget—that the overwhelming power and intransigence of the unions paralyzed British life, crippled the economy, and fuelled uncontrollable inflation, while state control and ownership stifled innovation and created inefficiency. On both the left and the right, the crisis of the 1970s is perceived to have laid the ground for Thatcher’s rise; facing the spiralling crisis, the 1974–79 Labour Government—led first by Harold Wilson, then by Jim Callaghan—is either portrayed as having been helpless in the face of the economic crisis and union power, or as having advanced its own strand of neoliberal reform now seen as mostly indiscernible from Thatcherism.

More here.

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Branko Milanovic over at his Substack:

A simple-minded answer to the question is, No. The IMF is entirely dedicated to  preserving the world capitalist system and any socialist must disapprove of it.  I think this answer is wrong. But before I explain it, I have say a few words about the Fund.

Recently, I have been involved more with the IMF and have witnessed how keen they are to remain an influential player in the 21^st century. Moreover, to do that as a truly international organization under the conditions of extraordinary high worldwide tensions, threats of wars, and mercantilist trade policies.

My relations with the Fund go back to my early years in the World Bank. In those days, the Fund missions would ask the World Bank to provide one of their (junior) economists to join the Fund ostensibly to maintain communication and give to the World Bank the appearance of some decision-making role regarding social sectors and public expenditures. I thus went, very young, to about five or six Fund missions to Turkey.

The Fund missions were impressive. They benefited from an unparalleled access to government officials and to the data, but they also had excellent people to study these data. Their great advantage was (and is) access to government knowledge and information; their great disadvantage was/is lack of contact with the rest of the country. Yet, as I will argue, this never was the Fund’s mission—nor should it be.

More here.

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“Richard Feynman was one of the most influential physicists of his generation and in 1965, he and two colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize. In June of 1945, his 25-year-old wife and high-school sweetheart, Arline, passed away after succumbing to tuberculosis. 16 months later, Richard wrote his late wife a love letter and sealed it in an envelope. It remained unopened until after his death in 1988.”

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Brooks Riley in Art At First Sight:

There are paintings that push beyond the confines of their chronology, with auras that have little to do with the orderly genre from which they emerge or even the painters who painted them. Obliterating the frames around them, they break through the fourth wall, headed straight for the viewer’s psyche like a parasite—settling into that part of the mind where we read and recognize ourselves.

I chanced on one of these wonders a few weeks ago—the portrait of Hans Burgkmair the Elder and his wife Anna, painted in 1529 by 24-year-old Lukas (Laux) Furtenagel. Burgkmair was 56 at the time, a successful printmaker and painter in Augsburg, a financial center of the Holy Roman Empire. He was also a friend of Albrecht Dürer, who had died a year earlier.

Before we’ve even had a chance to gawk at the two skulls bulging through the mirror’s own fourth wall, we feel eerily close in time to this couple.

More here.

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Tom Lathan in The Guardian:

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid struck Earth, causing the extinction of around 75% of all species. This event was so significant that we now use it to define the boundary between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. There had only been four extinction events of this magnitude up until then; today, we are living through the sixth – and we are its cause.

News of the sixth mass-extinction often comes in the form of statistics – 1 million species threatened with extinction; extinctions now occurring up to 1,000 times more frequently than before humans – and we are left none the wiser about what it is we are losing. A few years ago, I asked the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for a list of species that had recently gone extinct. I wanted to understand what was happening to the natural world, beyond the numbers. The list they sent back contained species from all over the world. One in particular, however, stood out to me.

More here.

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Daniel Immerwahner in The New Yorker:

It started, like many good things, as a joke. NBC was filming a preview of its 1984 lineup, and Selma Diamond, a comedian in her sixties, had been tasked with introducing “Miami Vice,” a flashy affair of Ferraris, cocaine cartels, and designer sports jackets. She pretended to misunderstand. “ ‘Miami Nice’?” At last, a show about retirees, with their mink coats and cha-cha lessons. She got a laugh. And some execs thought it might not be a terrible idea.

The network proposed Diamond’s concept to two producers, Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas. The show, an executive explained, should feature ostensibly “over the hill” characters who were nonetheless “young in attitude.” Witt brought the idea to the writer Susan Harris, his wife, who came up with a pilot script. Harris had already pushed television’s limits with a show featuring an openly gay character (“Soap”), a show about a lusty divorcée (“Fay”), and a controversial story line about abortion (on “Maude”). Having written four seasons of “Soap” episodes, she was drained and planning to leave television. Still, a sitcom about older women was hard to resist. Here was another barrier to smash, Harris felt—“a demographic that had never been addressed.”

More here.

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Figure For A Landscape

Look, the solitary walker
out on this coldest Sunday of the year
shoulders the whole burden of the fable
which winter is, the moral panorama
of a silence so vast that all sounds have meaning.

In summer the landscape was simply
itself, and concealment humanly possible
in grass and shadow and the living noise
of child singers and animal dancers,
baroque in their cultivation of opulence and

the green life. But now
even the lake is petrified out of sound,
and the sky, impartially plundered
of inessential leaves, birds, clouds,
throws back his face without kindly distortion

as if he alone could answer for winter.
The tracks of the dead and the dying accost him,
crossing his footprints wherever he walks,
stands, is alive; and the clamor of ice
comes down with a crash, like an unstruck bell,

splitting his ears. In this season,
while we stay home with coffee and morning
newspapers, sensible of the danger
confronting us in the sight of a branch
gloved by a child’s lost mitten,

he is the hero that bears all loss,
who, by no particular virtue
other than solitude, takes on himself
the full silence, the whole terrible
knowledge the landscape no longer conceals.

by Lisel Mueller
from Heartland
Northern Illinois University press, Dekalb, 1967

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Aarthi Vadde at Public Books:

Aarthi Vadde: Hello, and welcome to Novel Dialogue, a podcast sponsored by the Society for Novel Studies and produced in partnership with Public Books, an online magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. I’m one of your hosts, Aarthi Vadde of Duke University. Today, we have novelist Jamil Jan Kochai and critic Kalyan Nadiminti joining us. Jamil’s most recent collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, in some ways picks up where his first novel, 99 Nights in Logar, left off, with stories that crossed the border between the United States and Afghanistan. These stories are alternatively funny, terrifying, and heartbreaking, and seem to fracture collective memory by delving into the minds of Afghanis across generations. The Haunting was the finalist for the National Book Award and named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022. Welcome, Jamil. So glad to have you here.

Jamil Jan Kochai: Hey, I’m happy to be here.

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Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:

The famous marketing slogan about how a diamond is forever may only be a slight exaggeration for a diamond-based system capable of storing information for millions of years – and now researchers have created one with a record-breaking storage density of 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimetre.

Previous techniques have also used laser pulses to encode data into diamonds, but the higher storage density afforded by the new method means a diamond optical disc with the same volume as a standard Blu-ray could store approximately 100 terabytes of data – the equivalent of about 2000 Blu-rays – while lasting far longer than a typical Blu-ray’s lifetime of just a few decades.

“Once the internal data storage structures are stabilised using our technology, diamond can achieve extraordinary longevity – data retention for millions of years at room temperature – without requiring any maintenance,” says Ya Wang at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei.

More here.

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