Prometheus

I don’t want to live with your ghost
It’s you
you I love
the light in your eyes
in mine
your lips naming me
kissing me
the taste of your skin
the scent of your body
your fingers entwined
in my hair
your footsteps
showing me the way.
I don’t want to imagine you
in a cloud
or wait for you in my dreams
or chew on faded memories.
It’s you
you I love
your eyes
your lips
your hands.
Your absence is a crow
gnawing my entrails
and I am tied to time
and cannot escape.

by Claribel Alegría
from Sorrow
Curbstone Press
translation- Carolyn Forché
__________
The Spanish:

Prometeo

No quiero vivir con tu fantasma
a ti
a ti te quiero
a la luz de tus ojos
en los mios
a tus labios nombrándome
besándome
al sabor de tu piel
al odor de tu cuerpo
a tus dedos enredándose
en mi pelo
a tus pasos señalándome
el camino.
No quiero adivinarte
en una nube
ni acecharte en el sueño
ni masticar memorias
ya marchitas.
A ti
a ti te quiero
a tus ojos
a tus labios
a tus manos
es en cuervo tu ausencia
que me roe
y estoy atada al tiempo
y no puedo escapar.

by Claribel Alegría

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

If the number of on-camera screams is any indication, Kim Kardashian’s first encounter with epigenetics was a thrilling one. The reality-television star and her family shrieked and squealed in the season finale of The Kardashians in Los Angeles, California, last July as they each learnt the results of a commercial blood test that purportedly assessed their “biological ages”. Although Kardashian was 43, the placement of chemical markers on her DNA — her ‘epigenetic profile’ — matched that of a 34-year-old, according to the test. Her body, moreover, was ageing 18% more slowly than most people of her age. “You should give yourself a pat on the back,” said Matthew Dawson as he relayed the results. (Dawson is chief executive of TruDiagnostic in Lexington, Kentucky, the company that sells the test.)

On the other side of the country, neuropsychologist Terrie Moffitt says she was “mortified” when she saw the segment. Moffitt, who works at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, had spent decades with her colleagues collecting data from around 1,000 people to create the basis for one of the tests provided by TruDiagnostic. She had hoped that her work might one day inform medical decisions or provide a way for researchers to assess whether an anti-ageing treatment is having a positive effect on health. A stunt on a reality-TV show was not the kind of publicity she was aiming for. “I have a snob’s view of reality TV,” she adds.

More here.

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Aja Romano in Vox:

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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Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla at Asterisk:

I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I’ve lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship’s proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?”

The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those in the animal welfare space. I still spend my days analyzing returns (though they’re now measured in suffering averted). I still work to identify mutual opportunities with industry partners. Perhaps most importantly, I still view it as paramount to build trust with people who — initially — sit on opposite sides of the table.

After years of practicing my response to the inevitable raised eyebrows, I now sum it up simply: ignoring shrimp welfare would have been both negligent and reckless.

More here.

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Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

I have been experimenting with the first of a new generation AI models, Claude 3.7 and Grok 3, for the last few days. Grok 3 is the first model that we know trained with an order of magnitude more computing power of GPT-4, and Claude includes new coding and reasoning capabilities, so they are not just interesting in their own right but also tell us something important about where AI is going.

Before we get there, a quick review: this new generation of AIs is smarter and the jump in capabilities is striking, particularly in how these models handle complex tasks, math and code. These models often give me the same feeling I had when using ChatGPT-4 for the first time, where I am equally impressed and a little unnerved by what it can do. Take Claude’s native coding ability, I can now get working programs through natural conversation or documents, no programming skill needed.

More here.

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Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way in Foreign Affairs:

Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency in 2016 triggered an energetic defense of democracy from the American establishment. But his return to office has been met with striking indifference. Many of the politicians, pundits, media figures, and business leaders who viewed Trump as a threat to democracy eight years ago now treat those concerns as overblown—after all, democracy survived his first stint in office. In 2025, worrying about the fate of American democracy has become almost passé.

The timing of this mood shift could not be worse, for democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history. America has been backsliding for a decade: between 2014 and 2021, Freedom House’s annual global freedom index, which scores all countries on a scale of zero to 100, downgraded the United States from 92 (tied with France) to 83 (below Argentina and tied with Panama and Romania), where it remains.

The country’s vaunted constitutional checks are failing.

More here.

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Clarissa Brincat in Scientific American:

Do you think women are more invested in romance than men? Rom-coms and women’s magazines may push this stereotype, but psychological research is increasingly telling a different story: multiple studies have suggested that men may actually place a greater importance on romantic relationships. Now researchers have identified a key behavioral factor that explains this surprising difference.

Drawing on more than 50 studies of mixed-gender relationships, researchers at Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Minnesota and Vrije University Amsterdam proposed that men, compared with women, expect to gain more from being in a romantic relationship and are thus more motivated to find a partner. According to multiple anonymous surveys, men also tend to experience greater mental and physical health benefits from being in a relationship, are less likely to initiate breakups and struggle more with the emotional toll of a breakup, the researchers wrote in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Elaine Hoan, who studies social psychology at the University of Toronto, says these observations align with a trend she has seen in her own research: “that single men are typically less happy with their singlehood than single women, even across different Western and Eastern cultural contexts.”

More here.

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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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Michael Carson at The Hudson Review:

Valéry said we see only through effort after we see for the first time. This is its own sort of trauma. We repeat the seashore of our youth until we die. Yeats did too, with his Irish myths and hopeless love for Maud, his Symbolist trappings and occult obsessions, and all the insecurities of the accomplished autodidact (he once failed to get a teaching job at Trinity College because he couldn’t spell “professor”), but there is a point when we realize art can take us further: It can let us see everything. It is the effort that changes utterly. Owen grasped this as well as Yeats.
 
So, today, now, thinking this through, weighing it, what do we do with this violence? Do we carry it with us like a secret heart? Do we make it into myth so as to share the secret? “All men are dancers and their tread / Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong,” says Yeats in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Some men have eyes that glitter and some go dull to survive.

more here.

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Audrey Wollen at The New Yorker:

“The Edge of the Alphabet” is the third in a sequence of novels published after Frame left the hospital, following “Owls Do Cry,” in 1957, and “Faces in the Water,” in 1961. The novels’ deep-sea dive into her experience, the years of institutionalization, of forcible detachment from the social world, of being written off, made disposable—until she was suddenly holding the pen, writing, writing, writing. They haunt the alleys of the autobiographical, but never fully step onto the recognized thoroughfares of memoir, or even autofiction. Despite clear reference to the events of her life, the novels remain shadowy and irreverent, winding behind the normative façades of storytelling.

The loose trilogy begins with something like the truth, but molded by a stark counterfactual: in “Owls Do Cry,” for example, the protagonist, Daphne, undergoes the lobotomy that Frame herself narrowly avoided. The Withers family, presented first in “Owls Do Cry” and then picked up again in “The Edge of the Alphabet,” refracts Frame and her siblings: Daphne, locked up and deemed insane; her sisters, Chicks and Francie (who dies by falling into the fire pit at their local dump); and her brother, Toby, who struggles with epilepsy, are versions of Frame; her sisters Myrtle and Isabel, who each accidentally died by drowning, years apart; her surviving sister, June, and her brother, George, who was epileptic.

more here.

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Being In Time

Scotland, St. Andrews — cricket chirp of electric watch,
cry of waking gull. A far church sounds a sweet bell seven
times. Quiet. Now the near Presbyterian kirk’s seven, —
………………………….up, up,
………………………….up, up,
………………………….up, up, up,

………….. no going back
………….. cliff-face-climb in front
………….. beneath, the indifferent sea

….. Sitting backwards on a train — rain, low gray fog, Distant cathedral
resolving into stand of poplars. Smoke from a sudden stack disappears
into  low  cloud. Now  stack  gone  along  with  hedgerows, houses, and
field,  field,  field  of  sheep  — the where you have been unknowing,
always unrolling before your eyes.

by Nils Peterson
 from 1001 Words
Thinking of Scheherazade

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Amy Kurzweil & Daniel Story at Aeon:

In 2020, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson used a corpus of writing and lyrics from her late husband, Velvet Underground’s co-founder Lou Reed, to create a generative program she interacted with as a creative collaborator. And in 2021, the journalist James Vlahos launched HereAfter AI, an app anyone can use to create interactive chatbots, called ‘life story avatars’, that are based on loved ones’ memories. Today, enterprises in the business of ‘reinventing remembrance’ abound: Life Story AI, Project Infinite Life, Project December – the list goes on.

These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the data that people leave behind. These technologies will become more sophisticated and accessible as the parameters and popularity of large language models increase and as personal data expands into the seeming permanence of the cloud. To some, chatbots of the dead are useful tools that can help us grieve, remember, and reflect on those we’ve lost. To others, they are dehumanising technologies that conjure a dystopian world. They raise ethical questions about consent, ownership, memory and historical accuracy: who should be allowed to create, control or profit from these representations? How do we understand chatbots that seem to misrepresent the past? But for us, the deepest concerns relate to how these bots might affect our relationship to the dead. Are they artificial replacements that merely paper over our grief? Or is there something distinctively valuable about chatting with a simulation of the dead?

More here.

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Merry Wiesner-Hanks & Mathew Kuefler in the Politics & Rights Review:

The women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s inspired the first professional historians of sexuality. Many of them specialized in the modern histories of Europe and the United States, and they theorized mainly from the modern Western experience. This is beginning to change: the field has expanded to incorporate premodern histories and histories in all regions of the world, becoming increasingly transhistorical and global.

World and global history have encouraged broad cross-cultural comparisons and the study of longue durée trends, developments now also seen in the history of sexuality. Historians can now move beyond concentrated specializations in one time and place to create a more comprehensive image of sexuality throughout human history, which is what the Cambridge World History of Sexualities is designed to do.

More here.

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And also read the accompanying article here.

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The Editors of Project Syndicate:

With his unprecedented effort to push the limits of executive power, explains Richard K. Sherwin of New York Law School, Trump is “seeking to alter America’s constitutional framework of checks and balances among co-equal branches of government” – a change that he “lacks constitutional authority to execute.” With the Trump administration indicating that it will not listen to the courts, restoring the US “democratic republic” will require the American people to assert their “original sovereign power, through elections, mass protest, or other forms of collective action.”

But effective collective action requires the public to know what is going on, and as J. Bradford DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, points out, it is difficult to “inform the public and advance public reason” when 10% of Trump’s “performative con-artistry” is “destructive chaos,” and the rest is “mirage.” At the same time, the media is putting too little effort into discerning “which Trump pronouncements are backed by dedicated policymaking teams and bureaucracies with the intent to follow through, and which are not.”

Whatever the details, warns Ian Buruma, Trump’s second presidency will “test, and perhaps destroy, people’s faith in American democracy and its universalist claims.”

More here.

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Richard Van Noorden in Nature:

Data on retractions show that they are rare events. Out of 50 million or more articles published over the past decade, for instance, a mere 40,000 or so (fewer than 0.1%) have been retracted, according to the firms’ data sets. But the rise in retraction notices (by which journals announce that a paper is being retracted) is outstripping the growth of published papers — partly because of the rise of paper mills and the growing number of sleuths who spot problems with published articles.

In 2023, as Nature reported, more than 10,000 retraction notices were issued (Nature 624, 479–481; 2023). Most of these were from Hindawi, a now-closed London subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, which found that Hindawi journals were affected by a blizzard of peer-review fraud and sham papers. (Wiley told Nature at the time that it had scaled up its research-integrity teams, put in place more rigorous processes to oversee manuscripts and removed “hundreds” of bad actors, including some guest editors, from its systems). During the past decade, the annual retraction rate — the proportion of published articles in a particular year that have been retracted — has trebled (although fewer retraction notices were issued overall in 2024 than in 2022 or 2023; see ‘A tide of retractions’). The proportion reached around 0.2% for papers published in 2022, and will rise as more articles are withdrawn (see ‘Rates on the rise’).

More here.

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Larry Schwartz in ESPN:

Before Althea Gibson could play — much less win — major tennis tournaments, another opponent had to be defeated. But Gibson had less control against this foe, which went by the name segregation. Jackie Robinson played in the major leagues (1947) before a black was permitted to play tennis at the U.S. National Championships. But cracks soon developed in the lily-white sport. And finally, in 1950, when Gibson was 23 years old, she was permitted to play at the U.S. Nationals, becoming the first black to compete in the tournament.

She also later cracked the color barrier at Wimbledon.

In 1956, Gibson made history by becoming the first black person to win the French championships. The next year, she made more history by winning Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals, the first black to win either. She must have liked winning the world’s two most prestigious tournaments, too, because she repeated the accomplishments in 1958.

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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