Miri Davidson in Sidecar:

The far right wants to decolonize. In France, far-right intellectuals routinely cast Europe as indigenous victim of an ‘immigrant colonization’ orchestrated by globalist elites. Renaud Camus, theorist of the Great Replacement, has praised the anticolonial canon – ‘all the major texts in the fight against decolonization apply admirably to France, especially those of Frantz Fanon’ – and claimed that indigenous Europe needs its own FLN. A similar style of reasoning is evident among Hindu supremacists, who employ the ideas of Latin American decolonial theorists to present ethnonationalism as a form of radical indigenous critique; the lawyer and writer Sai Deepak did this so successfully that he managed to persuade decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo to write an endorsement. Meanwhile in Russia, Putin proclaims Russia’s leading role in an ‘anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony’, with his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov promising to stand ‘in solidarity with the African demands to complete the process of decolonization’.

The phenomenon goes beyond the kinds of reversal common to reactionary discourse. A decolonial perspective is championed by the two foremost intellectuals of the European New Right: Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin. In the case of de Benoist, this involved a major departure from his earlier colonialist allegiances. Coming to political consciousness during the Algerian War, he found his calling among white nationalist youth organizations seeking to prevent the collapse of the French empire. He praised the OAS for its bravery and dedicated two early two books to the implementation of white nationalism in South Africa and Rhodesia, describing South Africa under apartheid as ‘the last stronghold of the West from which we came’. Yet by the 1980s, de Benoist had shifted course. Having adopted a pagan imaginary and dropped explicit references to white nationalism, he began to orient his thought around a defence of cultural diversity.

More here.

Joe Moshenska at The Guardian:

In December 2021, the philosopher Yitzhak Melamed posted on social media a letter that he had received from the rabbi of the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. Melamed had written requesting permission to film there for a documentary on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who had been emphatically expelled by the 17th-century Jewish community. The rabbi sternly explained that the elders of that community had “excommunicated Spinoza and his writings with the severest possible ban, a ban that remains in force for all time and cannot be rescinded”. Furthermore, not only was the ban – known as a cherem – still apparently in full force, but it was contagious: because Melamed has “devoted his life to the study of Spinoza’s banned works”, he too was now declared “persona non grata in the Portuguese synagogue complex”. When Melamed was interviewed about these events on the BBC World Service, he wryly commented: “I don’t completely buy the image of this kind of zealotry, partly because the synagogue itself is selling puppets of Spinoza in their shop.” It’s true: I visited in early 2022 and bought what was then the last puppet in stock, which now sits on the mantelpiece in my office and looks down at me when I teach.

more here.

Dwight Garner at the NYT:

Come with me, down the rabbit hole that is the life and work of the Brooklyn-born poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-66). There are two primary portals into Delmore World. Neither involves his own verse. Reading about Schwartz is more invigorating than reading him, or so I have long thought. He was so intense and unbuttoned that he inspired two of the best books of the second half of the 20th century.

The first portal is James Atlas’s 1977 biography, “Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet.” Atlas’s book has more drama and critical insight than seven or eight typical American literary biographies. I would be hard-pressed to name a better one written in the past 50 years, in terms of its style-to-substance ratio and the fat it gets into the pan.

Atlas follows Schwartz, the bumptious son of Jewish Romanian immigrants, through his alienated childhood and into his early work in the 1930s, when he was considered America’s Auden, the most promising poet of his generation.

more here.

queer ancestor(s)

at most, you are a whisper
that my mother covertly deals
over the kitchen table, eyes shifting
looking out for all vengeful ghosts
both dead and alive

she thumbs through photographs nonchalantly
her index finger stopping briefly
to shine a light, so fast, I almost missed you
but there, my pupil widens
and swallows whole
the proof of your existence

trailed by a story of maybes,
of beliefs,
of secrets,
passing by, burning bright
small shooting star
on the horizon of my life
I want to look back and wish upon you
to ask for your unabashed truth and
yank it down so that I can
thread the glow of your being through mine

by Amanda Gómez Sánchez
from Bodega Magazine

Jerry Groopman in The New Yorker:

Several years ago, I fell at the gym and ripped two tendons in my wrist. The pain was excruciating, and within minutes my hand had swollen grotesquely and become hot to the touch. I was reminded of a patient I’d seen early in medical school, whose bacterial infection extended from his knee to his toes. Latin was long absent from the teaching curriculum, but, as my instructor examined the leg, he cited the four classic symptoms of inflammation articulated by the Roman medical writer Celsus in the first century: rubor, redness; tumor, swelling; calor, heat; and dolor, pain. In Latin, inflammatio means “setting on fire,” and as I considered the searing pain in my injured hand I understood how the condition earned its name.

Inflammation occurs when the body rallies to defend itself against invading microbes or to heal damaged tissue. The walls of the capillaries dilate and grow more porous, enabling white blood cells to flood the damaged site. As blood flows in and fluid leaks out, the region swells, which can put pressure on surrounding nerves, causing pain; inflammatory molecules may also activate pain fibres. The heat most likely results from the increase in blood flow.

More here.

Lindsey Doermann in Anthropocene:

In 2008, the biotech industry had fallen on tough times: capital was drying up and businesses were struggling to survive. That’s when Ryan Bethencourt saw an opportunity. A biologist with an entrepreneurial streak, he and a couple of friends started buying equipment from bankrupt companies and setting up their own small labs. By 2013, he had co-founded Counter Culture Labs, a “biohacker” space in Oakland, California. There, DIY-biology enthusiasts are now working on, among other projects, making real cheese in a way that bypasses the cow.

Bethencourt is part of a growing group of scientists, entrepreneurs, and lab tinkerers who are forging a bold new food future—one without animals. But they’re not asking everyone to give up meat and dairy. Thanks to advances in synthetic biology, they’re developing ways to produce actual animal products—meat, milk, egg whites, collagen—in the lab. And in doing so, they are shrinking the carbon footprint and slashing the land and water requirements of these goods with the goal of meeting the world’s growing protein needs more sustainably.

More here.

Nathaniel Rosenthalis in The Common Reader:

My first impression, upon opening Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem was admittedly delicious. A usual kind of epigraph greets us: “There is always another one walking beside you,” from Eliot’s poem, but then we turn the page, and on the back of the epigraph page is a quotation from Eliot, a meaty paragraph, and facing it, on the right-hand side, is a shorter passage from Pound. Right away, then, the two men are side by side, in the opening pages in a way that disrupts the usual front page material of a tome. It is a nice touch that not only forecasts the book’s focus on the relationship between the two men in the crafting of one of the inarguably influential English language poems of the twentieth century but also indicates the attention to detail and summoning of atmosphere that characterize the bulk of Hollis’s project, if not its achievement. Which is this: to demythologize, and at times painfully, re-animate the gross disturbances in Eliot’s life and character that, for better or worse, have bequeathed us the still-jarring title poem.

More here.

John Horgan at his own website:

Claude Shannon can’t sit still. We’re in the living room of his home north of Boston, an edifice called Entropy House, and I’m trying to get him to recall how he came up with information theory. Shannon, who is a boyish 73, with a shy grin and snowy hair, is tired of dwelling on his past. He wants to show me his gadgets.

Over the mild protests of his wife, Betty, he leaps from his chair and disappears into another room. When I catch up with him, he proudly shows me his seven chess-playing machines, gasoline-powered pogo-stick, hundred-bladed jackknife, two-seated unicycle and countless other marvels.

Some of his personal creations–such as a mechanical mouse that navigates a maze, a juggling W. C. Fields mannequin and a computer that calculates in Roman numerals–are dusty and in disrepair. But Shannon seems as delighted with his toys as a 10-year-old on Christmas morning.

Is this the man who, at Bell Labs in 1948, wrote “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” the Magna Carta of the digital age? Whose work is described as the greatest “in the annals of technological thought” by Bell Labs executive Robert Lucky?

Yes.

More here.

Rashid Khalidi in The Guardian:

For people everywhere, myself included, the awful images that have come out of Gaza and Israel since 7 October 2023 have been inescapable. This war hangs over us like a motionless black cloud that gets darker and more ominous with the passage of endless weeks of horror unspooling before our eyes. Having friends and family there makes this much harder to bear for many of us living far away.

Some have argued that these events represent a rupture, an upheaval, that this was “Israel’s 9/11” or that it is a new Nakba, an unprecedented genocide. Certainly, the scale of these events, the almost real-time footage of atrocities and unbearable devastation – much of it captured on phones and spread on social media – and the intensity of the global response, are unprecedented. We do seem to be in a new phase, where the execrable “Oslo process” is dead and buried, where occupation, colonisation and violence are intensifying, where international law is trampled on, and where long-fixed tectonic plates are slowly moving.

But while much has changed in the past six months, the horrors we witness can only be truly comprehended as a cataclysmic new phase in a war that has been going on for several generations.

More here.

Lauren K. Watel at Salmagundi:

I force myself to watch videos of swarms. Swarms in flight, the frantic electricity of their communal passage, as if the air were awash in buzzing embers. And swarms at rest, noisy seething clumps clinging to branches and eaves and fire hydrants and bicycles. What is it that most alarms me about these images? The ominous rumble of the swarms’ wingbeats, for one thing. The nature of their flying, its chaotic zigzaggy suddenness. And their sheer, overwhelming numbers, the teeming mass of them, angry seeming, each of them with the potential to sting, like a vast force of tiny soldiers piloting tiny fighter jets.    All this footage, which I find terrifying, even menacing, has been captured and narrated and posted by enthusiastic beekeepers across the globe. Unlike me, they are far from terrified or menaced; quite the opposite, they are exhilarated, awed, grinning like children. Most extraordinarily, they talk about getting stung with the amused matter-of-factness of someone getting caught in a passing rainstorm.

more here.

Michael Hofmann at the LRB:

We are a small part of a shrinking thing, tail to a dwindling dog, or that thing that, in Yeats, is fastened to the dying animal. The heart; the soul. The dying animal is the English department, perhaps the humanities as a whole. When I started at the University of Florida, thirty years ago, the department offered sometimes thin but fairly uninterrupted coverage from the Middle Ages to modern times. Or even Modern Times. There were sidelines in film studies, gender studies, children’s literature. Some other things. There was a faculty of eighty. Now it is a little under half that. All idea of coverage has been binned. We have someone who teaches the 18th century. An impresario who sometimes does Shakespeare. One or two that teach poetry. We have been hollowed out. We have certain specialisations, called ‘concentrations’. These enable us, without directly competing with them, to draw students away from other universities. We follow the trend. We chase the customer.

And ‘we’, the tail or the soul, not in any spiritual sense, but as an appendage – an ornament, if you want to be nice about it – ‘we’ are two fiction writers and three poets.

more here.

Field Guide

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious element of all,

I found the pale gray curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly’
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That’s all.

I mentioned this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

by Tony Hoagland

—in the words of New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner:
“At his frequent best … Hoagland is demonically in touch
with the American demotic.”

Sunstein and Thaler in The New Yorker:

In 1968, Tversky and Kahneman were both rising stars in the psychology department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They had little else in common. Tversky was born in Israel and had been a military hero. He had a bit of a quiet swagger (along with, incongruously, a slight lisp). He was an optimist, not only because it suited his personality but also because, as he put it, “when you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.” A night owl, he would often schedule meetings with his graduate students at midnight, over tea, with no one around to bother them.

Tversky was a font of memorable one-liners, and he found much of life funny. He could also be sharp with critics. After a nasty academic battle with some evolutionary psychologists, he proclaimed, “Listen to evolutionary psychologists long enough, and you’ll stop believing in evolution.” When asked about artificial intelligence, Tversky replied, “We study natural stupidity.” (He did not really think that people were stupid, but the line was too good to pass up.) He also tossed off such wisdom as “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” Managers who spend most of their lives in meetings should post that thought on their office walls.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Inside the brains of people with psychosis, two key systems are malfunctioning: a “filter” that directs attention toward important external events and internal thoughts, and a “predictor” composed of pathways that anticipate rewards. Dysfunction of these systems makes it difficult to know what’s real, manifesting as hallucinations and delusions. The findings come from a Stanford Medicine-led study, published April 11 in Molecular Psychiatry, that used brain scan data from children, teens and young adults with psychosis. The results confirm an existing theory of how breaks with reality occur. “This work provides a good model for understanding the development and progression of schizophrenia, which is a challenging problem,” said lead author Kaustubh Supekar, Ph.D., clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

The findings, observed in individuals with a rare genetic disease called 22q11.2 deletion syndrome who experience psychosis as well as in those with psychosis of unknown origin, advance scientists’ understanding of the underlying brain mechanisms and theoretical frameworks related to psychosis. During psychosis, patients experience hallucinations, such as hearing voices, and hold delusional beliefs, such as thinking that people who are not real exist. Psychosis can occur on its own and is a hallmark of certain serious mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is also characterized by social withdrawal, disorganized thinking and speech, and a reduction in energy and motivation.

More here.

Uri Berliner at The Free Press:

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed.

More here.