Geneva Abdul in The Guardian:

Jhumpa Lahiri, 56, is the author and translator of three story collections, including the Pulitzer prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies, and three novels, The Namesake, The Lowland and Whereabouts. Whereabouts was her first novel written in Italian (Dove mi trovo), which she then translated into English. Her work also includes a volume of essays, Translating Myself and Others.

Born in London to Indian immigrants and raised in the US, Lahiri speaks – as well as Bengali, English and Italian – “some French and Spanish and I am learning modern Greek. I also read Latin and ancient Greek.” She is the translator of three novels by the Italian writer Domenico Starnone, and is co-translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Latin to English – a text “sacred” to Lahiri, and a project she describes as the most meaningful of her life. Her latest collection, Roman Stories, is translated from the Italian Racconti romani by the author and Todd Portnowitz.

More here.

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in developing the ability to illuminate reality on almost inconceivably brief timescales.

Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, the three physicists developed techniques for producing laser pulses lasting mere attoseconds — periods billions of billions of times briefer than a second. When viewed in such short flashes, the world slows down. The beat of a hummingbird’s wings becomes an eternity. Even the incessant buzzing of atoms becomes sluggish. On the attosecond timescale, physicists can directly detect the motion of electrons themselves as they flit around atoms, skipping from place to place.

More here.

David Introcaso & Eric Reinhart at Undark:

HEALTH CARE IN THE UNITED STATES — the largest industry in the world’s largest economy — is notoriously cost inefficient, consuming substantially more money per capita to deliver far inferior outcomes relative to peer nations. What is less widely recognized is that the health care industry is also remarkably energy inefficient. In an era of tightening connections between environmental destruction and disease, this widely neglected reality is a major cause behind many of the sicknesses our hospitals treat and the poor health outcomes they oversee.

The average energy intensity of U.S. hospitals is more than twice that of European hospitals, with no comparable quality advantage. In recent years, less than 2 percent of hospitals were certified as energy efficient by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, and only 0.6 percent, or 37 in total, have been certified for 2023. As a result, in 2018, the U.S. health care industry emitted approximately 610 million tons of greenhouse gases, or GHGs — the equivalent of burning 619 billion pounds of coal. This represented 8.5 percent of U.S. GHG emissions that year, and about 25 percent of global health care emissions.

If U.S. health care were its own country, it would rank 11th worldwide in GHG pollution.

More here.

Melvin Rogers in Lapham’s Quarterly:

Debates about the representation of African Americans circulated throughout the 1920s—what kinds of depictions should be encouraged, who should be responsible for them, and what role black artists had in responding to negative descriptions and uplifting the race. These themes served as the subject of W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1926 symposium, “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?” hosted in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Even a cursory glance at the responses to Du Bois’ question reveals that few believed African Americans were duty bound to direct their art to the cause of social justice. The unencumbered freedom of the artist, many argued, was far too important. As playwright and novelist Heyward DuBose argues, who himself was not an African American, black people must be “treated artistically. It destroys itself as soon as it is made a vehicle for propaganda. If it carries a moral or a lesson, they should be subordinated to the artistic aim.”

Du Bois’ essay “Criteria of Negro Art” is his answer to the symposium that he organized. But whereas most read this essay as the dividing line (and there is some truth in this) between Du Bois and many in the Harlem Renaissance, especially the writer and philosopher Alain Locke, the essay suggests closer proximity between these two figures. They each were seeking to avoid black artists needing to manage the unacceptable demands of what Langston Hughes called the “undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding” from black people and “unintentional bribes from whites.”

More here.

Olivia Waxman in Time Magazine:

As Jimmy Carter, America’s longest-living president, turns 99 on Oct. 1, his grandson shares what he believes is the secret to his grandfather’s long life: exercise. “If he got to a new city that he had never been to before, whether there was Secret Service or not, he would say, ‘Hey, is there a bike?’” Jason Carter, a lawyer and former Georgia state senator, told TIME in a video chat on Sept. 28. He says his grandfather would always make time to jog around places he visited, and when he couldn’t jog anymore as he got older, he switched to riding a bike. Jimmy Carter also used to play tennis every day. “Stay active,” Jason says.

Jason jokes that the one sport that the 39th U.S. President and Nobel Peace Prize winner didn’t excel at was fishing, recalling a time when they were fishing for grouper and his grandfather couldn’t catch any fish. He made his grandson switch sides with him on the boat to see if that would change his luck. But while Jason Carter attributes his grandfather’s longevity to an active lifestyle, he believes Jimmy Carter might have a different answer. Jason thinks that his grandfather would say that the secret to his long life is his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter. In 2015, the former President said, “The best thing I ever did was marry Rosalynn. That’s the pinnacle of my life.”

More here.

Will Sullivan in Smithsonian:

A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee met last week to discuss human trials of artificial wombs, which could one day be used to keep extremely premature, or preterm, infants alive. Artificial wombs have been tested with animals, but never in human clinical trials. The FDA has not approved the technology yet, but the advisory panel discussed the available science, as well as the clinical risks, benefits and ethical considerations of testing artificial wombs with humans.

“It’s a new treatment modality,” Matthew Kemp, an obstetrician at the National University of Singapore, tells Nature News’ Max Kozlov. “The bottom line is they’ve got to make a really strong case that it’s better and safer in the short and long term” compared to current treatments. In 2020, an estimated 13.4 million babies worldwide were born prematurely—or before 37 weeks of pregnancy—making up more than 10 percent of all births. Preterm birth is the leading cause of death for children under five years of age, according to the World Health Organization.

More here.

Pamela Paul in The New York Times:

One night in 1981, in the middle of bath time, Marty Gonzalez noticed a strange glow that seemed to emanate from inside one of the eyes of her 9-month-old daughter, Marissa. “It was really bizarre,” Gonzalez recalls. “It looked like a cat’s eye — like I could see all the way through.” Though Marissa’s pediatrician in Long Beach, Calif., assured Gonzalez it was nothing, she sought another opinion. While teaching her sixth-grade class, Gonzalez anxiously awaited news from her mother, who had taken Marissa to see a pediatric ophthalmologist. By lunchtime, with still no word from her mom, Gonzalez called the doctor directly. “I think it’s cancer,” the doctor told her.

Marissa, it turned out, had retinoblastoma, or Rb, a rare but aggressive cancer that almost exclusively affects children. Rb makes up only 3 percent of all pediatric cancer cases, which translates into about 300 children in the United States a year. Marissa had tumors in both eyes and needed immediate treatment: cryotherapy to freeze the malignancies and radiation to destroy them. Two days later, Marissa and her mother were on a flight across the country to see a specialist in retinoblastoma at Columbia University.

More here.

Autumn

Time now, Lord.  Summer was great,
but lay your shadow on the sundials,
free your winds over the open fields.

Bid the late fruit – Be Full. Give them
two more southerly days. Complete them,
make the wine heavy with last sweetness.

The one who has no house now, will
have no house. The one who is alone now,
will remain alone, lie awake, read,
write long letters, or wandering, blow
about the streets like the fallen leaves.

Poem, Herbsttag, by Rainer Maria Rilke
translation:  Nils Peterson

Amy Kapczynski, Reshma Ramachandran and Christopher Morten in Boston Review:

There have been no higher-stakes public investments recently than those the federal government made in biomedical research and production to make COVID-19 vaccines. Many commentators, conservatives and progressives alike, have seen the program that directed these investments, Operation Warp Speed (OWS), as a key example of how the government can enact new industrial policy—the deliberate attempt to shape different sectors of the economy to meet public aims. David Adler, for example, calls OWS “a triumph and validation of industrial policy,” concluding that the initiative “illustrates best practices in program design, as well as in government contracting” and should be a model for efforts to implement industrial strategy more broadly.

We think this view is seriously misguided. There is nothing new about industrial policy if it simply means public investments that yield vast benefits and outsized control for the private sector and comparatively little for the public. As historian Brent Cebul describes in his new book, Illusions of Progress, “supply-side liberalism”—a pattern of governance that directs federal money toward public aims but cedes critical aspects of policy, rules, and authority to the private sector—has a long history in the United States. In the late New Deal, ambitious federal spending programs like the Works Progress Administration gave significant control to local actors in order to overcome opposition of racist demagogues and business elites. This decentralized, deferential administrative model had staying power because it compensated for a lack of state capacity—and in turn, it helped ensure that no such capacity would be built. Cebul traces this template through the design of the postwar Federal Housing Administration and urban renewal into the 1980s and ’90s, when public-private partnerships and market-centered solutions became predominant during the Carter, Reagan, George H. Bush, and Clinton administrations.

The case of COVID-19 vaccines extends this pattern of political economy.

More here.

Jeffrey C. Isaac in LA Review of Books:

YOU CAN LEARN a lot about certain books from their covers.

The cover of Patrick J. Deneen’s latest features its two-word title—Regime Change—in caps across the center. The word “Change” appears larger, bolded in red beneath “Regime.” Below lies the disembodied head of an ancient Roman statue, knocked on its side with half of its face eroded.

What does it mean that Deneen’s newest volume is crowned by a phrase widely associated with failed, Bush-era neoconservative efforts to bring democracy to Iraq at the point of a gun? Does the destroyed image at bottom signify a tragic discarding of ancient wisdom, or does it suggest that regime change can be necessary and ennobling even if it requires smashing some idols? Or both?

Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed was a much-discussed philippic; its 2018 publication led to the author being hailed by some and reviled by others as “The Anti-Democratic Thinker Inspiring America’s Conservative Elites.” In Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, Deneen expands on the themes of his earlier book while developing a more robustly political account focused on liberalism’s failings and how it can—and must—be defeated.

Decades ago, a number of “communitarian” writers—including Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Bellah, Daniel Bell, Michael Sandel, Jean Elshtain, and Deneen’s revered mentor, Wilson Carey McWilliams—critiqued liberalism for its narcissism, possessive individualism, and animus toward traditions and moral limits. Read generously, Regime Change seeks to repurpose this critique for 21st-century America. Had this book appeared a decade ago, such a reading might at least seem tenable.

But the book appeared a few months ago, during a time in which a dark and authoritarian anti-liberalism has risen to prominence and power in many liberal democracies, including the United States. Read under the shadow of this new authoritarianism, the book registers as both insidious and dangerous.

More here.

Alvin Camba in Phenomenal World:

A pillar of Indonesia’s unprecedented economic growth over the last decade has been its ban on the export of raw nickel ore. This national experiment in downstream industrial policy began with the 2009 Mining Law signed by former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, which mandated the domestic processing of all commodities mined in the country. The export ban on nickel was only partially implemented in 2014 amid widespread opposition from the mining sector, and it came into full effect in 2020.

Before the ban, Indonesia predominantly exported raw nickel ore, which is minimally processed into nickel matte. The country’s nickel-related exports were a modest US$6 billion in 2013. By 2022, this figure had risen to nearly US$30 billion, propelled by the exports of higher value-added products such as stainless steel and battery materials.

Chinese firms that were large players in the downstream nickel-based production had no choice but to expand their operations within Indonesia to secure access to its abundant nickel resources. The rapid growth of the nickel sector was facilitated by direct investments under the Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese state-owned banks financed the construction of coal power plants and basic infrastructure, integral components of the industrial areas that fostered economies of scale and agglomeration.

The outcomes of these policies have been mixed.

More here.

William Callison in Sidecar:

Having led his libertarian party alliance La Libertad Avanza into Congress in 2021, the far-right Argentine politician Javier Milei has once again outperformed expectations. In the August presidential primaries he received 30% of the vote – beating the two candidates from the centre-left Unidad Ciudadana, who won only 27% between them, and those from the centre-right Juntos por el Cambio, who came away with 28%. Now, in the run up to the general election of 22 October, Milei sits alone atop every poll. The only uncertainty is whether he can break the threshold to avoid a second round.

For many onlookers, Milei’s politics have been difficult to classify. He is a former semi-professional footballer, rock musician, comic-con cosplayer, tantric sex guru and professor of economics. He is also a red-faced television pundit and self-made internet meme. Caricature of this admittedly cartoonish figure is the crutch of countless op-eds, which reduce him to a Trump knock-off with an even more eccentric hairstyle (his nickname is ‘The Wig’). Others view Milei as another iteration of Latin America’s amorphous ‘populist’ phenomenon. As an article in Foreign Affairs put it, the region’s socioeconomic volatility has a tendency to produce ‘radical iconoclasts’: ‘Milei, Castillo, Bolsonaro, Chávez, and Bukele would probably not have risen in a more stable setting.’ In this binary frame – liberal stability versus populist demagoguery – all variants of ‘anti-establishment’ politics are lumped together, with little sense of their local particularities.

More here.

Jesse Barron in Book Forum:

IN HIS 1980 ESSAY ON THE AMERICAN SCENE, “Within the Context of No Context,” George W. S. Trow supplies an anecdote from Harvard in the early 1960s. During an art history class on the Dutch masters, a Black student described Rembrandt as “‘belonging’ to the white students in the room.” The white students totally agreed with this. “They acknowledged that they were at one with Rembrandt,” Trow writes. “They acknowledged their dominance. They offered to discuss, at any length, their inherited power to oppress.”

At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that these students were expressing “white guilt.” A generation later, Trow thinks the prevailing wisdom was wrong. “No,” he writes, “it was white euphoria. Many, many white children of that day felt the power of their inheritance for the first time in the act of rejecting it.” One way to look at Trow’s revision is as a cynical teardown of ’60s idealism: it looked sincere in the moment but was actually just privileged self-indulgence. But guilt and euphoria are fully compatible moods, not mutually exclusive ones. You can usually detect both of them whenever the children of privilege try to describe their own experience.

More here.

Rachel Cusk in Harper’s Magazine:

Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did—the rest of her remained obstinately alive. She took a considerable time to die and outlasted the nurses’ predictions by many days, so that those of us who had been summoned to her bedside had to depart and return to our lives.

No one cried at her death, though among the congregation at the funeral there were some outbursts of shocked weeping, as though at the sight of death being surprised in the act of stealing from life. It was the entrance of the coffin, rather than the death itself, that constituted the violence of this act. The coffin was shocking, and this must always be the case, whether or not one disliked being confined to the facts as much as our mother had. The body inside the coffin was entirely factual. She had never seemed to take much notice of her body: it had been her vehicle, that was all. But its authority, it turned out, had been absolute.

More here.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Picture this: the setting sun paints a cornfield in dazzling hues of amber and gold. Thousands of corn stalks, heavy with cobs and rustling leaves, tower over everyone—kids running though corn mazes; farmers examining their crops; and robots whizzing by as they gently pluck ripe, sweet ears for the fall harvest.

Wait, robots?

Idyllic farmlands and robots may seem a strange couple. But thanks to increasingly sophisticated software allowing robots to “see” their surroundings—a technology called computer vision—they’re rapidly integrating into our food production mainline. Robots are now performing everyday chores, such as harvesting ripe fruits or destroying crop-withering weeds. With an ongoing shortage in farmworkers, the hope is that machines could help boost crop harvests, reliably bring fresh fruits and veggies to our dinner tables, and minimize waste. To fulfill the vision, robot farmworkers need to be able to traverse complex and confusing farmlands. Unfortunately, these machines aren’t the best navigators. They tend to get lost, especially when faced with complex and challenging terrain. Like kids struggling in a corn maze, robots forget their location so often the symptom has a name: the kidnapped robot problem.

More here.

The Heart of Herakles

Lying under the stars,
In the summer night,
Late, while the autumn
Constellations climb the sky,
As the cluster of Hercules
Falls down the west
I put the telescope by
And watch Deneb
Move toward the zenith.
My body is asleep. Only
My eyes and brain are awake.
The stars stand around me
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
The faint breeze in the dark pines,
And the invisible grass,
The tipping earth, the swarming stars
Have an eye that sees itself.

by Kenneth Rexroth
from News of the Universe, by Robert Bly
Sierra Club Books, 1995

Madeleine Connors in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

John Waters was kicked out of NYU film school for smoking marijuana. Even that incubator for original filmmakers couldn’t handle him. Now, among people I know, announcing yourself as a graduate of NYU film school is a shorthand for being an uppity, social-climbing brat (I should know, I’m one of them). It’s so much cooler to be John Waters. He’s a degenerate and an iconoclast, making even the most daring artists look like uninspired conformists. In fact, I don’t know anyone who dislikes John Waters. If I did, I would think it was an easy tell that they were boring and had bad sex.

Almost an hour into Multiple Maniacs, the protagonist—a murderous drag queen—gets raped by a giant lobster. The scene plays for slapstick laughs, and in the screening at the Academy Museum on September 21, the audience was cackling. (If a filmmaker attempted this today, he would naturally be crucified, but Waters pulls it off.) The 1970 film has not lost its sting, even decades later. Waters manages to violate every taboo.

More here.

Andrew Deck in Rest of World:

A string of job postings from high-profile training data companies, such as Scale AI and Appen, are recruiting poets, novelists, playwrights, or writers with a PhD or master’s degree. Dozens more seek general annotators with humanities degrees, or years of work experience in literary fields. The listings aren’t limited to English: Some are looking specifically for poets and fiction writers in Hindi and Japanese, as well as writers in languages less represented on the internet.

The companies say contractors will write short stories on a given topic to feed them into AI models. They will also use these workers to provide feedback on the literary quality of their current AI-generated text.

More here.

Zofeen T Ebrahim in The Guardian:

Deep in Pakistan’s countryside, Sindhi Chhokri and her teenage brother Toxic Sufi are raising a few eyebrows.

Under the banner the Pahnji Gang, the siblings have also been finding an audience for their rap music in rural Sindh. “Growing up, it was hard to navigate past a string of unsaid things that did not seem right. And when we did, we would be reprimanded by the village elders,” says Sindhi Chhokri, real name Urooj Fatima, speaking from her village in Yaqoob Kapri, near Jhuddo city.

Her 18-year-old brother, Mohammad Kapri, who raps as Toxic Sufi, says music has allowed them to “speak freely” about issues that are otherwise “conveniently shoved under the carpet because they make people uneasy”.

Songs around sexual violence, “honour” killings, police brutality, child labour, even enforced disappearances, are winning the pair a YouTube following although Fatima says they still cannot afford a studio to record videos.

More here.