Like An Ant Carrying Her Bits of Earth and Sand

Like an ant carrying her bits of earth or sand
the poem carries its words.
Moving one, then another, into place.

Something in an ant is sure where these morsels belong,
but the ant could not explain this.
Something in a poem is certain where its words belong,
but the poet could not explain this.

All day the ant obeys an inexplicable order.
All day a poet obeys an incomprehensible demand.

The world changes or does not change by these labors;
the geode peeled open gives off its cold scent or does not.
But that is no concern of the ant’s, of the poem’s.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding.
What dissolves will dissolve—
you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.
The potato’s sugary hunger for growing larger.
The unblinking heat of the tiger.

No thimble of cloud or stone that will not vanish,
and still the rearrangements continue.

The ant’s work belongs to the ant.
The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.

by Jane Hirshfield
from Given Sugar Given Salt
Harper Collins, 2002

Jack Skeffington in Yale Campus Press:

In the introduction to Not Under Forty, Willa Cather’s 1936 collection of essays, she (in)famously writes that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” an opinion that, if nothing else, has fairly successfully separated her from the ranks of artists and authors we have come to call modernists.

…Cather’s The Professor’s House first saw print in 1925, in a post-Ulysses world whose literary landscape Cather no longer felt herself part of. The novel is largely concerned with one Godfrey St. Peter, the owner of the titular domicile, and his arrival at a point where his work, his marriage, his family, and (despite that title) both of his houses all enter a state of flux. Retreat into memory, especially memory concerning his favorite student, Tom Outland, forms a major portion of the Professor’s coping strategy, an so, in turn, the action of the novel.

In All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman writes that modernity “is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’”^[2] Cather’s novel, as much as any other produced on either side of her supposed divide, participates in this uncertainty, in the exploration of a culture’s perceived experience of unified disunity, of a totalizing fracture. Despite Cather’s claim to have “slid back into the previous 7000 years,” The Professor’s House bears the marks of its era, telling the tale of a broken man in a distinctly fractured way.

More here. (Note: Watching Mad Men and reading Willa Cather’s deeply disturbing and insightful comments on the human condition in The Professor’s House was strangely satisfying. The book is startlingly fresh for present times.)

Matthew Rose at Commonweal:

Robert Bellah was the last major thinker on the American Left to argue that shared religious beliefs are essential for democratic politics. In an era that saw liberalism grow progressively more secular, he defended views that dissented from elite opinion and the models of reality on which it rested. He argued that secularism is impossible, individualism is an illusion, and religious worship is inescapable. He made these arguments in best-selling books that combined learning and civility with a zeal for the ideals of democratic socialism and a dread for the practices of managerial capitalism. Bellah was the most celebrated American sociologist of his time, and it might seem absurd to suggest he was ignored. Presidents, clergy, scholars, and community leaders all sought his counsel. But if they had listened to him closely, as Bellah privately doubted they had, what would they have heard?

By the time he completed his final book, two years before his death in 2013, Bellah had concluded that America stood at the bleak end of a civilizational epoch. In its coming “time of trial,” as he called it, Americans would realize the values that had created their culture had also impaired their ability to understand or control it.

more here.

Damian Le Bas at Literary Review:

‘Roma’ and ‘Romani’ are words from the Romani language that have Indian etymologies – despite popular perceptions, they have no connection to Romania. People are commonly confused by the ordinariness of being Roma or part-Roma, and of seeming like ‘any old European’. It’s a confusion I and millions of others of Roma descent have dealt with all our lives. The reason for the confusion, as Europe and the Roma explains, is that six hundred years of cultural production have caused people to expect the opposite. The first four centuries following the earliest chronicled arrival of ‘Gypsies’ in Europe in about 1400 are covered by the opening third of the book. The remainder deals with the period since 1800. This lopsidedness of focus tells us something about the relative amounts of attention paid to Romani people by artists, writers and composers over time. Notwithstanding the subtler portrayals of Gypsies found, for instance, in the work of Emily Brontë and D H Lawrence, the tendency has been to use Gypsy characters as a kind of shorthand for savagery and nonconformity. When we read Prosper Mérimée’s appendix to his tale of Carmen, on which Bizet’s opera was based, we get a taste of this. ‘While they are still very young, their ugliness may not be unattractive,’ Mérimée wrote of Spanish Romani girls, ‘but once they have borne children they become positively repulsive.’

more here.

McKenzie Prillaman in Nature:

It’s rare to find a product so successful that its makers stop advertising it. But that’s what happened to the weight-loss drug Wegovy in May. In the United States, where prescription drugs can be advertised, developer Novo Nordisk pulled its television adverts because it couldn’t keep up with demand. The injectable medication, called semaglutide, works by imitating a hormone that curbs appetite and was approved as an obesity treatment by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2021. In a study, participants who took semaglutide for over a year lost more than twice as much body weight on average — almost 16% — as did people taking an older weight-loss drug that mimics the same hormone¹.

Semaglutide’s approval for treatment of weight loss came four years after the drug was approved for type 2 diabetes under the trade name Ozempic, also made by Novo Nordisk, based in Bagsværd, Denmark. Demand for Ozempic has skyrocketed as physicians prescribe it for weight loss outside its approved use. Now, even more-potent medications for obesity are on the way. The drug tirzepatide, which is FDA-approved for type 2 diabetes under the name Mounjaro and made by Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, Indiana, imitates two hunger-related hormones. And the company’s drug retatrutide, which mimics three hormones, showed promising results for weight loss in its mid-stage clinical trial, announced at a conference in June.

Neither of these newcomers has been approved for obesity. But treating the condition is more urgent than ever.

More here.

Mario Vargas Llosa in Liberties:

I consider Javier Cercas one of the best writers in the Spanish language, and I believe that, after oblivion has buried his contemporaries, at least three of his extraordinary books — Soldiers of Salamis, The Anatomy of a Moment, and The Imposter — will still have readers who turn to them to learn what our disordered present was like. He is also a man of courage. He loves his homeland of Catalonia, and his articles inveighing against the secessionist demagoguery of the Catalan separatists are persuasive and incontestable.

In an urbane debate some time back with Antonio Muñoz Molina on the subject of the nineteenth-century Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, Cercas admitted that he didn’t care for the prose of the author of Fortunata and Jacinta. As my grandfather Pedro used to say, entre gustos y colores, no han escrito los autores, which roughly translated is the old adage that there is no accounting for taste. Everyone has a right to his opinion, and writers do too, but to make such a declaration on the centenary of Pérez Galdós’ death, when everyone else was lauding and commemorating him, was certainly a provocation.

More here.

Ari Schulman in The New Atlantis:

Call it AI’s man-behind-the-curtain effect: What appear at first to be dazzling new achievements in artificial intelligence routinely lose their luster and seem limited, one-off, jerry-rigged, with nothing all that impressive happening behind the scenes aside from sweat and tears, certainly nothing that deserves the name “intelligence” even by loose analogy.

So what’s different now? What follows in this essay is an attempt to contrast some of the most notable features of the new transformer paradigm (the T in ChatGPT) with what came before. It is an attempt to articulate why the new AIs that have garnered so much attention over the past year seem to defy some of the major lines of skepticism that have rightly applied to past eras — why this AI moment might, just might, be the real deal.

More here.

Johann N. Neem in The Hedgehog Review:

One day early in the pandemic, when schools and colleges first went online, my undergraduate students and I had just finished discussing an essay on the rise and decline of the innovative and powerful Comanche empire. I logged off and walked downstairs, where my elementary school-aged child was sitting at the dining table. “What did you learn in school today?” I asked, as I always do. He recounted to me—not in these exact words, of course—that North America had been an Edenic paradise before the Europeans arrived. I was shocked. This was the racist myth of the noble savage repackaged by the antiracist left. In reality, Native Americans did not need Europeans to introduce them to warfare, imperialism, slavery, or violence. This does not diminish the significant impact European pathogens and ambitions had on Native American polities. But to teach such distortive myths about the past? That’s the kind of thing historians should be upset about.

So imagine my surprise when I opened Princeton historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer’s new edited volume on contemporary historical myths and found no essay—not a single one!—that challenged myths that came from the left.

More here.

Andrew Barron in Singularity Hub:

A honey bee’s life depends on it successfully harvesting nectar from flowers to make honey. Deciding which flower is most likely to offer nectar is incredibly difficult. Getting it right demands correctly weighing up subtle cues on flower type, age, and history—the best indicators a flower might contain a tiny drop of nectar. Getting it wrong is at best a waste of time, and at worst means exposure to a lethal predator hiding in the flowers. In new research published recently in eLife, my colleagues and I report how bees make these complex decisions.

…To take apart this question, we turned to a computational model, asking what properties a system would need to have to beat the speed-accuracy tradeoff. We built artificial neural networks capable of processing sensory input, learning, and making decisions. We compared the performance of these artificial decision systems to the real bees. From this we could identify what a system had to have if it were to beat the tradeoff. The answer lay in giving “accept” and “reject” responses different time-bound evidence thresholds. Here’s what that means—bees only accepted a flower if, at a glance, they were sure it was rewarding. If they had any uncertainty, they rejected it.

This was a risk-averse strategy and meant bees might have missed some rewarding flowers, but it successfully focused their efforts only on the flowers with the best chance and best evidence of providing them with sugar.

More here.

Katrina Miller in The New York Times:

It’s often viewed as a given: Men hunted, women gathered. After all, the anthropological reasoning went, men were naturally more aggressive, whereas the slower pace of gathering was ideal for women, who were mainly focused on caretaking. “It’s not something I questioned,” said Sophia Chilczuk, a recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University, where she studied applied human biology. “And I think the majority of the public has that assumption.”

At times, the notion has proved stronger than the evidence at hand. In 1963, archaeologists in Colorado unearthed the nearly 10,000-year-old remains of a woman who had been buried with a projectile point. They concluded that the tool had been used not for killing game but, unconventionally, as a scraping knife.

But the male-centric narrative has been slowly changing. On the first day of a college anthropology course, Ms. Chilczuk and her classmates listened to a podcast about the landmark discovery of a female hunter during an excavation in Peru in 2018. Among fragments of cranium, teeth and leg bones, archaeologists found a hunting kit with more tools — projectile points, flakes, scrapers, choppers and burnishing stones — than they had ever seen. This discovery led the team to review the findings from other burials in the early Americas; in 2020 they concluded that big game hunting between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago was gender-neutral.

More here.

Yes!

….Up ahead, in the twilight, the endless yes
that never can be reached.
…………………………………… “Yessss!”
………………………………………………… And the light.
colorless,
intensified, calling me . . .

…. It wasn’t from the sea . . . Reaching
the mouths of light that spoke it
infinitely drawn-out,
it vibrates, yet again, immensely faint
“Yessss!”
in a distance that the soul knows is high
and wants to believe is distant, only distant.

by Juan Ramón Jíménez
from The Poet & The Sea
White Pine Press, 2009

—Original Spanish at Read more Read more »

Rachel Browne in The Walrus:

PATRICE RUNNER was sixteen years old, in ­Montreal in the 1980s, when he came across a series of advertisements in magazines and newspapers that enchanted him. It was the language of the ads, the spare use of words and the emotionality of simple phrases, that drew him in. Some ads offered new products and gadgets, like microscopes and wristwatches; some ­offered services or guides on weight loss, memory improvement, and speed reading. Others advertised something less tangible and more alluring—the promise of great riches or a future foretold.

“The wisest man I ever knew,” one particularly memorable ad read, “told me something I never forgot: ‘Most people are too busy earning a living to make any money.’” The ad, which began appearing in newspapers across North America in 1973, was written by self-help author Joe Karbo, who vowed to share his secret—no education, capital, luck, talent, youth, or experience required—to fabulous wealth. All he asked was for people to mail in $10 and they’d receive his book and his secret. “What does it require? ­Belief.” The ad was titled “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches,” and it helped sell nearly 3 million copies of Karbo’s book.

This power of provocative copywriting enthralled Runner, who, in time, turned an adolescent fascination into a career and a multi-million-dollar business.

More here.

Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

One year ago today, the famous scientist, environmentalist, and futurist James Lovelock passed away at the age of 103. Amongst his many achievements, he is best known for formulating the Gaia hypothesis: the notion that the Earth is a giant self-regulating system that maintains conditions suitable for life on the planet. I have always been somewhat suspicious of this idea but have simply never gotten around to properly reading up on it. High time to inform myself better and substantiate my so-far thinly-held opinion. Join me for a four-part series of book reviews in which I delve into Lovelock’s classic Gaia; his follow-up The Ages of Gaia; Toby Tyrrell’s critical investigation of its scientific underpinnings, On Gaia; and Michael Ruse’s wider analysis of its reception and historical antecedents, The Gaia Hypothesis.

First up is the book that started it all, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. The publication history of this book is a bit convoluted, so bear with me. Gaia was originally published in 1979, reissued in 2000 with a new preface, and reissued again in 2016 with a second preface as part of the Oxford Landmark Science series which is the version I am reviewing here.

More here.

Scott R Stroud in Aeon:

When one thinks of American pragmatism, one often puts too much emphasis on the American part. It might even stunt our enquiry, irrevocably fixating on thinkers such as John Dewey, William James, and Jane Addams. But there is more to the story of pragmatism than what happened in the United States around the turn of the 20th century. Pragmatism itself was a flexible, loosely allied approach to thinking that held few maxims in common other than the idea that our theorising and arguing ought to come from lived experience and ought to return back to experience as the ultimate test of its value. Its advocates such as Dewey greatly affected nations such as China through his teaching and lecturing, leading us to see that pragmatism has a global narrative connected with it. Is there a similar tale to be told about pragmatism and its interactions with India?

More here.

Yascha Mounk and Susan Neiman in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: Your last book has the thesis in its title, it’s called Left Is Not Woke. What do you mean by that?

Susan Neiman: Well, I could also say that Woke Is Not Left. I wrote this book partly to figure out my own confusion. But it was a confusion that was reflected in conversations I have been having with friends in many different countries, all of whom, their whole lives, have stood on the side of the Left, and suddenly felt and said, “What is this? Maybe I’m not Left anymore.” And that struck me as wrong. But no one had quite teased out what the difference is and what the problems are. I didn’t want to give up the word “Left.” And I wanted to write a short book setting out what I consider to be left liberal principles as two different things and distinguishing them from the work in a nutshell. The very short thesis is that woke is fueled by traditional left-wing emotions, having your empathy for people who’ve been marginalized, wanting to correct historical discrimination and oppression. As you know, there’s a German saying that “your heart is on the left side of your body.” But the woke are undermined by what are actually very reactionary theoretical assumptions. And you do not have to have read Carl Schmitt or Michel Foucault in order to share those assumptions. Those assumptions have gotten into the water because every journalist went to college and picked up certain claims coming from these quite reactionary sources that are now often transmitted in the media as if they were self-evident truths. So, I wanted to show the gap between genuine left-wing philosophical assumptions and the premises that the woke are often acting on.

More here.