Freya Johnston at Literary Review:

Does anything ever truly happen in the Messiah? This extraordinarily popular tripartite choral work, first performed in Dublin in 1742, consists almost entirely of saying rather than of doing. Circling around the redemptive power of Christ, it combines declarations with questions, prophecies, injunctions and exhortations (‘Who is this King of Glory?’, ‘Behold, I tell you a Mystery’, ‘Daughter of Sion, shout’, ‘He shall speak’). Full of urgency, tribulation and momentum, the Messiah nevertheless lacks a plot – unless we class the perennial human emotions of hope and fear, and the movement between the two, as dramatic action. 

The oratorio is sometimes described as a commentary, but it is a compilation of sources rather than a work of analysis, its text splicing words (along with the occasional paraphrase) from the King James Bible. The passage with which it begins comes from the fortieth chapter of the Book of Isaiah, where the prophet – who has been denouncing the greed and moral turpitude of Hezekiah, king of Judaea – suddenly moves into a different register entirely.

more here.

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How I Read Gertrude Stein

—for Joseph Kepecs

The poem is not the heart’s cry
(Though it seems to be if you have craft enough)
The poem is made to carry the heart’s cry

And only to carry it. And the cry is always the
Same . . . for all times and every place the
Same perceptions met a hundred times, or once.

The rest is exuberance.
The force left over after dealing with
An undemanding planet in a square time . . .

No more or less mysterious than the juicing
Of the glands. The need to skip a stone
Across that pond. To yell among high mountains.

You think you read for the heart’s cry
But you do not. You read because no stone
Ever skips perfectly. Because that mountain

Always lets you down. Because no matter
How you yell the voice bounced back
Is flat. The words are puny.

The need for another world that always works right
Is the heart’s exuberance.
We don’t hide there. We spill over and

Make it.

by Lew Welch
from Ring of Bone
Grey Fox Press, 1960

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Patrick Jack in Inside Higher Ed:

Large numbers of biomedical scientists have tried and failed to replicate their own studies, with many not publishing their findings, a survey suggests.

Authors of the study warn that researchers’ failure to approach their own work rigorously creates “major issues in bias” and hampers innovation in science.Their survey, of about 1,600 authors of biomedical science papers, found that 72 percent agreed there was a reproducibility crisis in their field. Participants suggested a variety of factors, but the leading cause that most participants indicated always contributes to irreproducible research was the pressure to publish. The study found that just half (54 percent) of participants had tried to replicate their own work previously. Of those, 43 percent failed. Of those who had tried to replicate one of their own studies, just over a third (36 percent) said they had published the results, according to findings published in PLOS Biology on Nov. 5.

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Cal Flyn interviewed at Five Books:

What are the novels everyone is talking about in Fall 2024?

Well, the most obvious answer to this question is Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo. Every Rooney book is a major publishing event, and this latest offering—which centres on the fraught relationship between two Irish brothers—has received rave reviews almost across the board. NPR called it “her most moving novel yet”; The Guardian said it was “perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements.”

Intermezzo is set in Dublin, 2022, and unfolds over a period of around six months. Peter is a lawyer in his thirties; Ivan, his younger brother, is a chess player and data analyst in his twenties. Each has, as one might expect from a Rooney novel, a complicated love life. Peter’s unfolds as a triangle between himself, his former partner Sylvia, and a younger student, Naomi, who dabbles in sex work. Ivan falls for an older woman who fears the social repercussions of being seen together. “Is there a better novelist at work right now?” asked the Guardian reviewer, in exhausted admiration: “Rooney, author of four books in just seven years, has at this point already created more enduringly memorable characters than most novelists ever manage.”

Rooney fans may also be interested in her recent interview with The New York Times, a relatively rare opportunity to hear her discuss her work at length.

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Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Last week, technology giants Google and Amazon both unveiled deals supporting ‘advanced’ nuclear energy, as part of their efforts to become carbon-neutral.

Google announced that it will buy electricity made with reactors developed by Kairos Power, based in Alameda, California. Meanwhile, Amazon is investing approximately US$500 million in the X-Energy Reactor Company, based in Rockville, Maryland, and has agreed to buy power produced by X-energy-designed reactors due to be built in Washington state.

Both moves are part of a larger green trend that has arisen as tech companies deal with the escalating energy requirements of the data centres and number-crunching farms that support artificial intelligence (AI). Last month, Microsoft said it would buy power from a utility company that is planning to restart a decommissioned 835-megawatt reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

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Hafsa Kanjwali in Aeon:

Even as Nehru proclaimed the moral superiority of India for taking a stance against colonialism in all forms, he oversaw India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir. In Kashmir, Nehru said, ‘democracy and morality can wait’.

In the middle of the 20th century, a wave of anticolonial and national liberation movements gained independence from European powers, by exercising their right to self-determination. Nationalist leaders of the former colonies, however, remained committed to the ideals of the nation-state and its territorial sovereignty that derived from European modernity. Independence, it was widely accepted, came in the form of the nation-state, which outshone other forms of political organisation or possibilities. The borders of the nation-state became contested, as European powers often imposed boundaries that ill suited visions of what constituted the political community. This would have deleterious consequences for places where geography, demographics, history or political aspirations posed serious challenges to nationality. In turn, newly formed nation-states asserted their newfound sovereignty through violence and coercion, which had implications for Indigenous and stateless peoples within their borders whose parallel movements for self-determination were depicted as illegitimate to the sovereign nation-state order. Mona Bhan and Haley Duschinski call this process ‘Third World imperialism’.

More here.

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Dale Markowitz in Nautilus:

In 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes purchased a trove of Isaac Newton’s unpublished notes. These included more than 100,000 words on the great physicist’s secret alchemical experiments. Keynes, shocked and awed, dubbed them “wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value.” This unexpected discovery, paired with things like Newton’s obsession with searching for encrypted messages in the Bible’s Book of David, showed that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason,” Keynes concluded. “He was the last of the magicians.”

When it came to fascination with the occult, Newton was hardly alone. Many contemporary scientists may cast aspersions on spells, mythical tales, and powers of divination. Not so for many of the early modern thinkers who laid the foundations of modern science. To them, the world teemed with the uncanny: witches, unicorns, mermaids, stars that foretold the future, base metals that could be coaxed into gold or distilled into elixirs of eternal life. These fantastical beliefs were shared by the illiterate and educated elite alike—including many of the forebears of contemporary science, including chemist Robert Boyle, who gave us modern chemistry and Boyle’s law, and biologist Carl Linnaeus, who developed the taxonomic system by which scientists classify species today. Rather than stifling discovery, their now-arcane beliefs may have helped drive them and other scientists to endure hot smoky days in the bowels of alchemical laboratories or long frigid nights on the balconies of astronomical towers.

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Evan Grillon at the LARB:

LAST FALL, I was rereading Resentment: A Comedy (1997) on the train on the way to a screening of Sweet Smell of Success (1957), the most perverted Hays Code movie I know, and came upon a passage I knew was coming, where a man is, to put it mildly, fisted to death by the novel’s stuttering psychopath. I began to feel physically ill. I made it through an hour of Sweet Smell before having to head home because I was still feeling ill. Probably it was just something I ate, I told myself, willfully ignoring how deeply the viciousness, the casual cruelty Indiana put on display, had scared me.

It is moments like that fatal fisting which probably led Richard Bernstein (whoever that is), in a contemporary review of the novel, to write: “Mr. Indiana’s total immersion in the Gothic elements of the psychic tapestry provides us with no moral refuge.” I’m not exactly sure what a moral refuge is, but I’m sure it entails somehow being told that nothing is, in the end, your fault, and that we’re all human, and that kindness and empathy will save us.

more here.

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Mark Krotov at n+1:

Hadn’t it been dimming for years? Last weekend the Atlantic ran a juicy piece about the chaos and despair inside the Trump campaign. It should have reminded me more than it did at the time of the hundreds of similar articles published during his first term and during the 2024 campaign. He’s really cracking up this time, he’s lashing out at everyone in his orbit, he’s lost the thread. And then his defeat in 2020, his exile and prosecution after January 6, his increasing incoherence and paranoia, flagged even by his former staff. (“Once Top Advisers to Trump, They Now Call Him ‘Liar,’ ‘Fascist,’ and ‘Unfit’” went the title of the Times’s collection of interviews with the likes of John Kelly, James Mattis, and Mike Pence.) The pattern is so clear in retrospect: these cycles of marginalization and humiliation would have defeated anyone else, but Trump—through some combination of unprecedented luck and intuitive political genius—kept reemerging, impossible to count out no matter how outré the misdeed. Yesterday was a triumph greater than 2016. It wasn’t a fluke. Trump is America’s choice.

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In the Dark Time

—excerpt

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

by Theodore Roethke

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Quico Toro in Persuasion:

Political scientists have thought carefully about the kind of situation we’re in. Back in 2011, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote a paper together with Ragnar Torvik titled “Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances?” that doubles as a Rosetta Stone to our political moment.

Acemoglu, Robinson and Torvik built a model to show there are circumstances where it is rational for voters to prefer leaders who reject democratic institutions. This doesn’t normally happen in well-functioning democracies. But where unelected elites have outsized power, checks and balances can function to hem politicians in, preventing them from enacting policies a majority of voters want. In those circumstances, voters can rationally interpret a leader’s disdain for democratic institutions as a feature, not a bug: checks and balances come to be seen as the eggs you have to crack to make the democratic omelet.

More here.

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Charlie Wood at Quanta:

Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one infamous estimate, an Earth-size apparatus orbiting the sun might pick up one graviton every billion years. To snag one in a decade, another calculation (opens a new tab) has suggested, you’d have to park a Jupiter-size machine next to a neutron star. In short: not going to happen.

A new proposal overturns the conventional wisdom. Blending a modern understanding of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves with developments in quantum technology, a group of physicists has devised a new way of detecting a graviton — or at least a quantum event closely associated with a graviton. The experiment would still be a herculean undertaking, but it could fit into the space of a modest laboratory and the span of a career.

More here.

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Yascha Mounk at his eponymous Substack:

Back in 2016, the whiff of aberration hung over Trump’s success. His opponents could claim that his victory was some strange historical fluke. They could put it down to foreign interference or to Russian hackers. Political scientists confidently pronounced that he represented the final, Pyrrhic victory of a declining electorate—the last, desperate stand of the old, white man.

But aberrations tend not to happen twice, and 2024 puts the last nail in the coffin of that distorted interpretation. Though some cable news hosts may be tempted to replay their old hits in months to come, only a few diehards will believe Trump to be the Manchurian Candidate this time around. Perhaps most interestingly, it is now clear that Trump put into action the advice which Reince Priebus gave Republicans after their second consecutive defeat to Barack Obama, to court minority votes the party had traditionally conceded to Democrats. His victory is not due to old white men but rather due to his success in building a deeply multiethnic coalition—as his crushing victory in Florida, a state that long ago became “majority minority,” attests.

How could this possibly have happened?

More here.

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There is no escape from the angst outside
but the world within; find it. — Roshi Bob

Hiding Places

There are hiding places in my room
where beautiful poems are hidden
Poems hidden away in boxes
on sheets of brown paper
Poems of spirit and magic
workers hands hidden in boxes
beautiful thighs
there are blue skies hidden in my room
dolphins and seagulls
the heaving of breasts and oceans
there are skies in my room
there are flies in my room
there are streets in my room
there are a thousand nights hidden in boxes
there are drunks in my poems
there are a million stars on the roof of my room
all hidden away in boxes
there are steps down side streets
there is a crazed eye of a poet in my room
there are old Arabs exploring the desert near Escalon
there are sparrows and bluebirds and wildcats in my room
there are elephants and tigers
there are skinny Italian girls in my room
there are letters from Peru and England
and Germany and Russia in my room
There are the steps of Odessa in my room
the Volga river in my room
there are dreams in the night of my room
there are flowers
there is the dance of affirmation in my room
the steps of young poets carrying knapsacks full of poems
there are the Pictures of an Exhibition in my room
Moussorgsky and Shostakovich
and Charlie Mingus in my room
Composers and painters all singing in my room
all hidden away in boxes
one night when the moon is full
they will come out and do a dance

by Jack Micheline
from Poetic Outlaws

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