Mayukh Sen at The New Yorker:

In March, 1929, when the twenty-four-year-old Chinese American actress Anna May Wong made her London stage début on the city’s West End, in a play called “The Circle of Chalk,” critics took issue with one aspect of her performance: her voice. Up to this point, Wong, five foot seven with dreamy eyes, had appeared primarily in American silent films that pandered to stereotypes of docile Asian women. Her live audience may have expected a dulcet trill. What she gave them instead was, to the ears of reviewers, “squeaky” and “uncultivated.” Wong was reared around Los Angeles’s Chinatown and had grown up speaking both Cantonese and English; she had an accent that was pure California. After the eight-week run of “The Circle of Chalk” concluded, Wong lunched with some journalists who probed her about her bad reviews. At first, she answered their questions in English. Then, catching them by surprise, she switched to Cantonese.

This episode arrives about halfway through the academic Yunte Huang’s searching new biography of the star, “Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History,” as evidence of what Huang calls Wong’s “defiance and playfulness.”

more here.

Michael Wood at Literary Hub:

Among the many dolls mentioned in Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie there is one associated with time and memory and literally named after Marcel Proust. It didn’t sell well. Perhaps Mattel got the wrong writer. They could have gone for the same Marcel, but as a comedian, a French, philosophical, disguised partner of Dickens. Critics have been finding Proust funny since 1928—he died in 1922. Christopher Prendergast’s Mirages and Mad Beliefs (2013) has a chapter on Proust’s jokes, and in 2015 Elizabeth Ladenson published a marvelous essay called “Proust and the Marx Brothers.”

And yet. This claim for comedy in Proust always comes as a surprise and is instantly forgotten. Why is this? I don’t know the answer to the question, but a guess or two about its grounds may help us to understand it a little better.

More here.

Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

Science fiction has long entertained the idea of artificial intelligence becoming conscious — think of HAL 9000, the supercomputer-turned-villain in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. With the rapid progress of artificial intelligence (AI), that possibility is becoming less and less fantastical, and has even been acknowledged by leaders in AI. Last year, for instance, Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT, tweeted that some of the most cutting-edge AI networks might be “slightly conscious”.

Many researchers say that AI systems aren’t yet at the point of consciousness, but that the pace of AI evolution has got them pondering: how would we know if they were?

To answer this, a group of 19 neuroscientists, philosophers and computer scientists have come up with a checklist of criteria that, if met, would indicate that a system has a high chance of being conscious.

More here.

Jared Starr in The Conversation:

About 10 years ago, a very thick book written by a French economist became a surprising bestseller. It was called “Capital in the 21st Century.” In it, Thomas Piketty traces the history of income and wealth inequality over the past couple of hundred years.

The book’s insights struck a chord with people who felt a growing sense of economic inequality but didn’t have the data to back it up. I was one of them. It made me wonder, how much carbon pollution is being generated to create wealth for a small group of extremely rich households? Two kids, 10 years and a Ph.D. later, I finally have some answers.

In a new study, colleagues and I investigated U.S. households’ personal responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2019. We previously studied emissions tied to consumption – the stuff people buy. This time, we looked at emissions used in generating people’s incomes, including investment income.

More here.

From Time Magazine:

As Borat, the first fake news journalist, I interviewed some college students—three young white men in their ballcaps and polo shirts. It only took a few drinks, and soon they were telling me what they really believed. They asked if, in my country, women are slaves. They talked about how, here in the U.S., “the Jews” have “the upper hand.” When I asked, do you have slaves in America?, they replied, “we wish!” “We should have slaves,” one said, “it would be a better country.” Those young men made a choice. They chose to believe some of the oldest and most vile lies that are at the root of all hate. And so it pains me that we have to say it yet again. The idea that people of color are inferior is a lie. The idea that Jews are dangerous and all-powerful is a lie. The idea that women are not equal to men is a lie. The idea that queer people are a threat to our children is a lie.

At other times, I’ve seen people make a different choice. As Borat, I once got an entire bar in Arizona to sing, “Throw the Jew down the well”—which revealed people’s indifference to anti-Semitism. But when I tried to film that same exact scene at a bar in Nashville, something different happened. People started to boo. And then they chased me right out of that bar. Those people made the choice that brings us all here today—they chose to belief the truth: the truth that we are all deserving of respect, dignity, and equality, no matter who we are, what we look like, how we pray, or who we love.

We always have a choice.

More here.

Liam Drew in Nature:

Ten years ago, a tech-savvy group of people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) decided to pursue a DIY approach to their own treatment. They knew that a fairly straightforward piece of software could make their lives much easier, but no companies were developing it quickly enough. What this software promised was freedom from having to constantly measure and control their blood-glucose levels. In people without T1D, when glucose levels rise, cells in the pancreas release insulin, a hormone that helps tissues to absorb that glucose. In T1D, these cells are killed by the immune system, leaving people with the condition to manage their blood sugar by taking insulin. “It is almost inhumane,” says Shane O’Donnell, a medical sociologist at University College Dublin, who, like everyone quoted in this article, lives with T1D. “You’re constantly having to think about diabetes in order to survive.”

Members of the nascent DIY community were using the most sophisticated technology available: insulin pumps and wearable devices called constant glucose monitors. But they still had to read the monitor’s data, forecast their diet and exercise and then calculate the appropriate insulin dose. What they wanted was automation — an algorithm that would analyse glucose data and program the pump itself. Coalescing around this aim in 2013, the community debuted a hashtag: #WeAreNotWaiting. Then, in February 2015, group member Dana Lewis shared the code for an algorithm that she and two collaborators had developed and tested.

More here.

Judith Finell at the LARB:

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951) was a pivotal figure in the development of 20th-century music. Of the thousands of composers who came before and after him, he stood alone both as the embodiment of the high Romanticism of the 19th and early 20th centuries led by Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner, and Richard Strauss, and as a rebel who broke down the gates of traditions that had ruled music composition for three centuries. After he spent his childhood in pre–World War I Vienna in a Jewish ghetto, Nazi antisemitism drove him from Europe, eventually to land in Los Angeles, where he stayed to the end of his life, teaching first at USC and then UCLA.

A generational original, Schoenberg forged an entirely new path and language for musical expression. He called it the 12-tone or dodecaphonic system, built on all 12 pitches in the Western scale, rather than the traditional hierarchical seven. Ironically, his impact even on his most ardent disciples, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, was so provocative that they built on his techniques in divergent directions.

more here.

Mario Barbatti at Aeon:

The camera zooms in on the person’s arm to reveal the cells, then a cell nucleus. A DNA strand grows on the screen. The camera focuses on a single atom within the strand, dives into a frenetic cloud of rocketing particles, crosses it, and leaves us in oppressive darkness. An initially imperceptible tiny dot grows smoothly, revealing the atomic nucleus. The narrator lectures that the nucleus of an atom is tens of thousands of times smaller than the atom itself, and poetically concludes that we are made from emptiness.

How often have you seen such a scene or read something equivalent to it in popular science? I am sure plenty, if you are fans of this genre like me. However, the narrative is wrong. Atomic nuclei in a molecule are not tiny dots, and there are no empty spaces within the atom.

The empty atom picture is likely the most repeated mistake in popular science.

more here.

The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

by Stanley Kunitz
from Poetic Outlaws

David Marchese in the New York Times:

For more than 50 years, Daniel C. Dennett has been right in the thick of some of humankind’s most meaningful arguments: the nature and function of consciousness and religion, the development and dangers of artificial intelligence and the relationship between science and philosophy, to name a few. For Dennett, an éminence grise of American philosophy who is nonetheless perhaps best known as one of the “four horsemen” of modern atheism alongside Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, there are no metaphysical mysteries at the heart of human existence, no magic nor God that makes us who we are. Instead, it’s science and Darwinian evolution all the way down. In his new memoir, “I’ve Been Thinking,” Dennett, a professor emeritus at Tufts University and author of multiple books for popular audiences, traces the development of his worldview, which he is keen to point out is no less full of awe or gratitude than that of those more inclined to the supernatural. “I want people to see what a meaningful, happy life I’ve had with these beliefs,” says Dennett, who is 81. “I don’t need mystery.”

More here.

Laith Al-Shawaf at Areo:

If you infect a rabbit with a virus or a bacterium, it’ll start to run a fever. Why? The surprising answer is that fever is not a disease; it’s a defence: a useful evolved mechanism that animals use to kill invading pathogens. Studies show that if you give fever-suppressing drugs to infected rabbits, they’re more likely to die.

It’s not just rabbits—all warm-blooded creatures use fever to kill invasive parasites. Animals that can’t regulate their body temperature internally take a different approach. For example, infected lizards seek a hot rock on which to sunbathe, raising their body temperature and killing the invaders that way—and research shows that disrupting their ability to do this increases their likelihood of death. Infected fish and reptiles exhibit this kind of “behavioural fever,” too. In humans, some studies find that administering fever-suppressing drugs to children may worsen outcomes and prolong the period of illness.

These findings suggest that fever is not a symptom of a disease; it’s an evolved defence that our bodies use to kill harmful invaders. Discoveries like this represent one small part of a larger picture emerging from the new science of evolutionary medicine. There’s a scientific revolution brewing, catalysed by the idea that considering how our bodies evolved will help us better understand and treat disease.

More here.

Moeen Farrokhi at Literary Hub:

I have never told this story in its entirety to anyone: not to my therapist, not to my closest friends, and not even to my family. I’ve divulged bits and pieces of it to different people. When my friends back home in Iran asked me why I was leaving, I made up a thousand different reasons. When my friends in Istanbul asked me what happened and why I came, I said that a part of me had died, that my ambition, courage, and hope for the future had dried up. But I didn’t explain why. I couldn’t connect the single moments into a coherent narrative.

More here.

Sarah Nicole Prickett at Bookforum:

WHEN A DEER, A DOE, STEPPED INTO THE ROAD perhaps a hundred and twenty feet ahead of the car I was driving, it seemed for a moment that she would die, even though, during the same moment, I did not feel afraid that I would hit her. I was calm; I returned my smoking hand to the steering wheel; I braked. The deer seemed to be looking at me. There was a chance she might actually run toward me. I switched off the high-beams. All of this happened in two and a half seconds, before the deer continued across the road, safely to the other side, in a single bound. It was then that, exhaling, I realized the extent to which I had felt for—on behalf of—the animal, and for days after I dwelled on the feeling.

Why, in my memory of the moment, was my thought so precisely that the deer would die? Without being afraid, I had made a leap. I had ascribed to her something like a death wish, or, in more properly psychoanalytic terms, a death instinct.

more here.

Barbara Spindel in The Christian Science Monitor:

Drew Gilpin Faust’s memoir is both a moving personal narrative and an enlightening account of the transformative political and social forces that impacted her as she came of age in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s an apt combination from an acclaimed historian who’s also a powerful storyteller.

“Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury” describes Dr. Faust’s upbringing as a privileged white girl in segregated Virginia, where she chafed at constraints placed on her because of her gender and was outraged by the racial discrimination she saw around her. (The book opens with a copy of her handwritten letter to President Dwight Eisenhower, penned at age 9, asking him to end school segregation.)

By the time “Necessary Trouble” concludes in 1968, with Dr. Faust’s graduation from Bryn Mawr College, she had rejected the culture in which she was raised, embracing the civil rights and anti-war movements and daring to imagine a different future for herself. She went on to become a scholar of the American South and, later, the first woman president of Harvard University, a position she held from 2007 to 2018. She recently spoke with the Monitor.

More here.

Mitch Leslie in Science:

When the diabetes treatments known as GLP-1 analogs reached the market in 2005, doctors advised patients taking the drugs that they might lose a small amount of weight. Talk about an understatement. Obese people can drop more than 15% of their body weight, studies have found, and two of the medications are now approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for weight reduction. A surge in demand for the drugs as slimming treatments has led to shortages. “This class of drugs is exploding in popularity,” says clinical psychologist Joseph Schacht of the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

But patient reports and animal studies have yielded tantalizing signs that the drugs may spur another unexpected and welcome effect: fighting addiction. Most early trials were disappointing, but they used less potent versions of the drugs. Now, at least nine phase 2 clinical trials are underway or being planned to test whether the more powerful compound semaglutide and its chemical cousins can help patients curb their use of cigarettes, alcohol, opioids, or cocaine. Hopes are high. Semaglutide (sold under the trade names Wegovy, Ozempic, and Rybelsus) “is truly the most exciting drug for the last few decades,” says neuropharmacologist Leandro Vendruscolo of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.

If the results of the new trials are positive, addiction science could have its own “Prozac moment,” says clinical neuroscientist W. Kyle Simmons of the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences. In the 1980s, that drug brought a sea change to psychiatry, becoming part of popular culture and leading to the wider use of antidepressants.

More here.