From Literary Hub:

For the next few weeks, Literary Hub will be going beyond the memes for an in-depth look at the everyday issues affecting Americans as they head to the polls on November 5th. Each week at Lit Hub we’ll be featuring reading lists, essays, and interviews on important topics like Income Inequality, Climate Justice, LGBTQ Rights, Reproductive Rights, and more. For a better handle on the issues affecting you and your loved ones—regardless of who ends up president on November 6th (or 7th, or 8th, or whenever)—stay tuned to LitHub.com in October. Read parts one and two, Income Inequality, and The Importance of Labor.

Today we’ve gathered the best stories published at Lit Hub about one of the most important issues affecting Americans: the high costs (literal and figurative) of America’s for-profit approach to healthcare. With an introduction, below, from Maris Kreizman.

More here.

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Robert McCrum in The Independent:

Dear Hanif,

You and I have been friends and sparring partners in the beaten way of the London book, theatre and media world for about half a lifetime – more than 40 years. At Faber’s in the 1980s, I published quite a bit of your early work (notably The Rainbow Sign, My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album).

So when I heard, just after Christmas two years ago, that you’d fallen badly in Rome and been taken into intensive care with a broken neck, severe paralysis, and had almost died (there were many rumours: none of the stories about you were exactly the same), I was stunned and distressed.

When, finally, I was able to visit you in the Stanmore rehab centre on your return to the UK, you were already a veteran of many months of neuro-physiotherapy, acclimatising to a weird new world of disability. Possibly, I was more concerned on your behalf than some of your circle. As someone who is a long-term survivor of a stroke (in 1995), I know all about the brain injuries that induce paralysis, and the struggles, inner and outer, involved in getting back to health. I also understood, in my own way, the dreadful severity of your plight as a tetraplegic – in your words, “like a Beckett character”. At any age, the reminder that we live in our bodies can be a personal apocalypse, and a shock that many don’t get over.

More here.

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From Nature:

Science in the United States has never been stronger by most measures.

Over the past five years, the nation has won more scientific Nobel prizes than the rest of the world combined — in line with its domination of the prizes since the middle of the twentieth century. In 2020, two US drug companies spearheaded the development of vaccines that helped to contain a pandemic. Two years later, a California start-up firm released the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT and a national laboratory broke a fundamental barrier in nuclear fusion.

This year, the United States is on track to spend US$1 trillion on research and development (R&D), much more than any other country. And its labs are a magnet for researchers from around the globe, with workers born in other nations accounting for 43% of doctorate-holders in the US workforce in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM).

But as voters go to the polls in November to elect a new president and Congress, some scientific leaders worry that the nation is ceding ground to other research powerhouses, notably China, which is already outpacing the United States on many of the leading science metrics. “US science is perceived to be — and is — losing the race for global STEM leadership,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, in a speech in June.

More here.

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The Keeper of Sheep

—excerpt

I don’t believe in God because I’ve never seen him.
If he wanted me to believe in him,
He would doubtless come and talk to me
and walk in through my front door
Saying, Here I am!
(This may sound ridiculous to the ears
Of someone who, because he doesn’t know what it is to look at things,
Doesn’t understand someone who speaks of them
In the way that noticing things teaches us.)

But if God is the flowers and the trees
And hills and the sun and the moonlight,
Then I do believe in him,
I believe in him at all hours,
And my whole life is one long prayer and mass,
And a communion with the eyes and ears.

But if God is the trees and the flowers
And the hills and the moonlight and the sun,
Why do I call him God?

I call him flowers and trees and hills and sun and moonlight;
Because if, so that I might see him, he made himself
Sun and moonlight and flowers and trees and hills,
If he appears to me as trees and hills
And moonlight and sun and flowers,
It’s because he wants me to know him
As trees and hills and flowers and moonlight and sun.

And that’s why I obey him
(What more do I know of God than God knows of himself?),
I obey him, living spontaneously,
Like someone opening his eyes and seeing,
And I call him moonlight and sun and flowers and trees and hills,
And I love him without thinking about him,
And I think him by seeing and hearing,
And I walk with him at all hours.

by Fernando Pessoa
from The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro
New Directions Books, 2020

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Yung In Chae at The Yale Review:

On October 10, 2024—the day after Hangeul Day, which celebrates the invention of the Korean alphabet—I and millions of other Koreans were able to do something we had never been able to do before: read a novel by a Nobel Prize laureate in our native language.

And what extraordinary grace that the laureate should be Han Kang. Last year, I had the honor of interviewing Han about Deborah Smith and e. yaewon’s English translation of her novel Greek Lessons. We became friends who now meet up whenever I’m in Seoul, and I can testify that she embodies in real life the gentleness she demonstrates in her books. Beyond her individual worthiness, it is significant that South Korea’s two laureates—former president Kim Dae-jung received the Peace Prize in 2000—have both led careers shaped by the long fight for democratization. For decades, conservatives have denied or dismissed the Gwangju Uprising, the atrocity in which the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan killed hundreds of pro-democracy protesters, and wounded or maimed thousands more. Because of Han’s Nobel win, more of the world will know that it not only happened, but also that it continues to matter.

The Gwangju Massacre is central to Han’s magnum opus, Human Acts—a harrowing and clear-eyed yet somehow tender look at the weeks-long uprising against Chun that began on May 18, 1980, resulting in exorbitant death and enduring collective trauma. The novel also means a great deal to me personally: For as long as I can remember, my mother, who is four years older than Han, has resisted thinking about life under Chun in the 1980s, so much so that she avoids TV shows and movies set in that decade.

More here.

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Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

One afternoon in January 2011, Hussein Mourtada(opens a new tab) leapt onto his desk and started dancing. He wasn’t alone: Some of the graduate students who shared his Paris office were there, too. But he didn’t care. The mathematician realized that he could finally confirm a sneaking suspicion he’d first had while writing his doctoral dissertation, which he’d finished a few months earlier. He’d been studying special points, called singularities, where curves cross themselves or come to sharp turns. Now he had unexpectedly found what he’d been looking for, a way to prove that these singularities had a surprisingly deep underlying structure. Hidden within that structure were mysterious mathematical statements first written down a century earlier by a young Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan. They had come to him in a dream.

Ramanujan brings life to the myth of the self-taught genius. He grew up poor and uneducated and did much of his research while isolated in southern India, barely able to afford food. In 1912, when he was 24, he began to send a series of letters to prominent mathematicians. These were mostly ignored, but one recipient, the English mathematician G.H. Hardy, corresponded with Ramanujan for a year and eventually persuaded him to come to England, smoothing the way with the colonial bureaucracies.

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Noam Chomsky at Literary Hub:

The basic principles of contemporary American strategy were laid out during World War II. As the war came to its end, American planners were well aware that the United States would emerge as the dominant power in the world, holding a hegemonic position with few parallels in history. During the war, industrial production in the US more than tripled; meanwhile, its major rivals were either severely weakened or virtually destroyed.

The US had the world’s most powerful military force. It had firm control of the Western Hemisphere—and of the oceans. High-level planners and foreign policy advisers determined that in the new global system the US should “hold unquestioned power” while ensuring the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs.

Winston Churchill captured the dominant sentiment when he said that “the government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations,” because rich countries had no “reason to seek for anything more,” whereas “if the world-government were in the hands of hungry nations there would always be danger.” Leo Welch of the Standard Oil Company expressed a similar aspiration when he said the US needed to “assume the responsibility of the majority stockholder in this corporation known as the world,” and not just temporarily, but as a “permanent obligation.”

More here.

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Lauren Rosati at Artforum:

IN THE SUMMER OF 1917, the Russian engineer and inventor Evgeny Sholpo (1891–1951) wrote “The Enemy of Music,” a polemical science-fiction essay describing a colossal instrument he called the Mechanical Orchestra. Combining miles of slatted black paper tape with a network of electrical wires, pipes, levers, tuning forks, sine wave oscillators, and horns, this fictional sound machine allowed a piece of music to unfold automatically, rendering the musical performer obsolete. “Now,” Sholpo proclaimed, “we will receive ready-made pieces of music according to a specific recipe.” Years later, while working at the Central Laboratory of Wire Communication, a Soviet film lab in Leningrad, Sholpo attempted to bring this speculative project to life, incorporating elements of the fictive Mechanical Orchestra into a functional device called the Variophone, a proto-synthesizer used for scoring films that could reproduce—theoretically—any spoken or musical sound using abstract visual forms cut from paper. The Bureau of Realization of Inventions at the state-run film production company Lenfilm Studios agreed to fund the project; Sholpo built the first prototype in late 1931.

more here.

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Bob Hirshon in Discover Magazine:

For thousands of years, people have been using fungi to bake bread and brew beer (yeasts), as nutritious foods (mushrooms and truffles), and, more recently, as a source of life-saving antibiotics (penicillin, neomycin and many more). And yet, an estimated 95% of all fungus species remain undiscovered. Fortunately, thousands of energetic citizen scientists like you can help explore this diverse and fascinating kingdom of organisms, thanks to projects like FUNDIS, Mushroom Observer and others featured in this newsletter. And in many parts of the world, October is prime mushroom season.

Also, October is the perfect time to contribute migratory bird sightings to help monitor and protect birds! Learn more at SciStarter.org/flyways and through our latest SciStarter podcast episode. Whether you’re looking down at shrooms or up at birds, this is the perfect month to enjoy nature and contribute to citizen science!

More here.

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Max Krupnick in Harvard Magazine:

With one minute left in Harvard’s last men’s basketball game of the 2023-2024 season, sophomore Chisom Okpara drove toward the basket, leaped, and released the ball. It clanked off the rim back into his hands. On the second attempt, he made the shot, his twenty-fifth point of the game. He did not know that would be his final Crimson bucket.

Okpara was happy with his team, academics, and social life. But in April, star first-year point guard Malik Mack entered the transfer portal, which allowed coaches from other schools to recruit him. Soon after, fellow Ivy League sophomores Danny Wolf (Yale) and Kalu Anya (Brown) followed suit. Anya, a childhood friend, counseled Okpara to “just enter your name,” Okpara recalls. “You don’t know what’s going to happen. You can always come back.” Once Okpara entered the transfer portal, schools ranging from Auburn and Texas to Stanford and Vanderbilt pursued him. These schools, he said, told him he could make between $200,000 and $500,000 by playing for their basketball team. On May 22, he committed to Stanford, where he will play against stronger competitors while earning a significant amount of money.

More here.

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Ritchie Robertson at Literary Review:

Unsuccessful in politics and war, Augustus turned to culture. He transformed Dresden into a city which, even after the notorious bombing raid of February 1945, is still handsome. The highlights include the Zwinger, a palace complex that served as a setting for festivities, the Frauenkirche and the 437-metre-long Augustus Bridge, which linked the centre with the New Town on the other side of the Elbe, helping to create an integrated urban landscape. Next door to the Zwinger, Augustus built the largest opera house in Germany. Blanning enthuses about his success in attracting architects, artists and musicians to Saxony, the most famous being Johann Sebastian Bach, who arrived in Leipzig, Saxony’s other main city, in 1723. 

Augustus was determined to outshine other Baroque rulers in the scale and splendour of the festivities he staged. In 1719, his only legitimate son, Frederick Augustus, married Archduchess Maria Josepha of Austria, daughter of the recently deceased Emperor Joseph I.

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Beer Bottle

In the burned-
out highway
ditch the throw-

away beer
bottle lands
standing up

unbroken,
like a cat
thrown off

of a roof
to kill it,
landing hard

and dazzled
in the sun,
right side up;

sort of a
miracle

by Ted Kooser
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986

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Brooks Riley in Art at First Sight:

A painting is not something we step into. We might crave a landscape, a room, a street, a scene or a background, but we can’t inhabit the painter’s vision of it. Our eyes inch closer as they focus on areas of the work, but the view stops there: We remain outsiders, left out in the cold.

Nowhere have I felt this as much as in the 10^th century Southern Tang era painted scroll The Night Revels of Han Xizai, a work I fell in love with for a special reason: I wanted to be there. I wanted to step inside that painted scroll and move among the participants in the low intimate light of a nighttime gathering—joining what looked to be a mondain salon where socializing was stirred with art and music as the guests sipped tea and other beverages, sat around an ancient booth designed for lively conversation, plopped casually on a king-sized daybed, arm propped on bended knee (a sitting pose I recognize from an old friend), or joined in the music-making with percussion or flute.

There is so much going on in this scroll—a 12^th-century copy of the original by Gu Hongzhong—only some of it mysterious.

More here.

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Dario Amodei at his own website:

I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.

In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like—what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses. But I am aiming for at least educated and useful guesses, which capture the flavor of what will happen even if most details end up being wrong. I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one.

More here.

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Jennifer M Morton in Aeon:

Alongside equality, freedom and opportunity, fear has long played a powerful role in political discourse. In ordinary life, fear is often a fitting response to danger. If you encounter a snake while out on a hike, fear will lead you to back away and exercise caution. If the snake is poisonous, fear will have saved your life. By contrast, the fears that dominate political discourse are less concrete. We are told to fear elites, terrorists, religious zealots, godless atheists, sexists, feminists, Marxists and the enemies of democracy. Yet even as these purported poisons are less obviously lethal, political rhetoricians have long understood that making them salient is a powerful way to shape citizens’ motivations. As Donald Trump told Bob Woodward: real power is fear.

It is tempting to think that political fear is largely manufactured – a cynical ploy to manipulate the masses. Trump’s dark vision of the United States would seem to be a prime example of this. Yet, fear can be fitting in politics. Citizens face real dangers from failed political leadership, as lethal to our livelihood as snake bites.

Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century political philosopher, understood fear.

More here.

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Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta Magazine:

Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers such as 50, 505 and 5,005. An elementary version of the concept of zero was born.

Hundreds of years later, in seventh-century India, zero took on a new identity. No longer a placeholder, the digit acquired a value and found its place on the number line, before 1. Its invention went on to spark historic advances in science and technology. From zero sprang the laws of the universe, number theory and modern mathematics. “Zero is, by many mathematicians, definitely considered one of the greatest — or maybe the greatest — achievement of mankind,” said the neuroscientist Andreas Nieder(opens a new tab), who studies animal and human intelligence at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “It took an eternity until mathematicians finally invented zero as a number.”

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

For the first time, an off-the-shelf CAR T cell therapy has been used to treat potentially life-threatening autoimmune disorders in three people. With a single shot, the treatment rapidly reversed their debilitating symptoms for up to a year. The treatment changed one recipient’s life. Diagnosed with systemic sclerosis—an autoimmune condition that wrecked his muscles and joints—the 57-year-old man, who the study identifies by his last name, Gong, regained his life just two weeks after the injection. He could move the muscles around his mouth to smile. His fingers again danced across a keyboard at work.

After a year, he told Nature, “I feel very good.”

Gong is part of an ongoing clinical trial to genetically reprogram healthy donor cells into a universal “living drug.” The trial, set to end in 2025, could upend current interventions for untreatable autoimmune disorders. These life-long diseases are mostly managed, but not cured, with immunosuppressant drugs. Though helpful, the medications drastically lower a person’s ability to battle infectious diseases, making it hard to fight off bacterial or viral attacks.

More here.

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