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The Old Days

In the old days of the old God, demanding and full of blame,
there was such commerce between heaven and earth—
burning bushes, angels knocking at the door, high drama
at the Red Sea. But after centuries, tired and overwhelmed,
God moved into a book with black frayed covers;
this book lived in our shul. And so my mother
rose to the occasion—she was the one who warmed cold
waters, parted them, pinched my cheek, made my bed.
Now she’s like God, helpless and confused,
the miracles of Egypt are lost, like her recipes and opinions.
Here she would say, drink this, it’s good for you;
here, this way, and my hands would tie a shoe.

God and my mother have grown to resemble each other,
like a couple who’ve lived under the same roof
for a long time. And both seem to have forgotten me —
He spinning the world, she rinsing the dishes,
remote and distracted, the two of them moving, morning
and night, in little circles of water and air.

by Gene Zeiger
from Leaving Egypt
White Pine Press, Fredonia, NY, 1995

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Elisa Gabbert in the Georgia Review:

I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the site,” he writes, in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction; “Work on the site, stay on the site, let the site tell you its secrets.” Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm. It’s a place where all my best thinking can go for a period of time, a place where the thoughts can be collected and arranged for more density of meaning. This place necessarily has structure, if it feels like a place. There’s a classic architecture book called Why Buildings Stand Up. We call any building, or part of a building, or thing like a building, a structure, if it succeeds in standing up. The structure is the system of elements in the building that make things go up—the load-bearing elements, walls and beams and columns, that counteract gravity. They counteract quote-unquote nothing, so empty space becomes a place.

More here.

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Georgia Ray at Asterisk:

Recently, a team at Stanford University fished something new out of the vast, uncharted, and almost entirely unclassified world of genetic material sometimes known as biological dark matter. They called it an “obelisk,” a shell-less RNA of maybe 1,000 base pairs (shorter than any viral genome), which seems to self-organize into a rodlike shape. It appears to be the structural equivalent of a plant viroid or a fungal ambivirus, two other bits of self-replicating genetic material whose discovery widened the boundaries of what we know about microbiology. But the obelisks weren’t found in either plants or fungi. They were discovered in human intestines.

An obelisk, in other words, is a probably replicating entity, contained in a mere thousand or so letters of the genetic alphabet, with zero genetic similarity to anything known to exist already. What does it do? How did it get there? Does it cause disease? We have no idea. We first picked up the phone this year (the preprint announcing its discovery was published in January 2024¹ ). It is a complete stranger calling from inside the house.

More here.

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Matthew Flinders at Wiley:

The relationship between academe and society is shifting. Academics are increasingly expected to work through forms of co-design and co-production with potential research-users to address state-selected societal challenges and produce evidence of “impact”. The risk, however, is that this shift incentivises a form of Faustian bargain whereby scholars trade-down their traditional criticality and independence as the price they pay for access to large funding streams and to be demonstrably “impactful”. The “impotence through relevance” thesis seeks to capture this paradoxical possibility: those scholars hailed as most relevant – the “high-impact” academic superheroes – may in fact be almost completely irrelevant; while the most relevant scholars in terms of truly transformative socio-political potential are dismissed and set aside as unproductive and therefore of little value. The “impotence through relevance” argument raises distinctive questions about co-option and control, democracy and decline. These are particularly significant for political science.

More here.

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Cynthia Haven at the Book Haven:

Interest in René Girard from an unexpected source: the current issue of Air Mail, which describes itself as a “mobile-first digital weekly that unfolds like the better weekend editions of your favorite newspapers.” Dramatist, novelist, and poet Matthew Gasda writes: “We are all Girardians now—whether we know it or not. The concepts minted in the early 1960s by the late French literary critic and philosopher René Girard explain the pathologies of the smartphone age as elegantly as Freud’s explained bourgeois neuroses at the turn of the last century.”

Gaspa is a voice worth listening to. Two years ago, the New York Times noted: “Matthew Gasda spent years writing plays on his electric typewriter, and almost no one seemed to care. With Dimes Square, his depiction of a downtown crowd, he has an underground hit.” And so he’s been a voice worth listening to ever since.

Which is especially good for All Desire is a Desire for Being, just out with Penguin Classics U.S. (The U.K. edition was published last year.) You can buy the book here. Meanwhile, read Gasda’s review of the book.

more here.

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Sean Williams at Harper’s Magazine:

One morning last November, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located some six hundred miles east of Moresby, across the Solomon Sea. Its southern shore is just three miles from the politically independent Solomon Islands, and its people share a culture, linguistic links, and dark skin tone with their Solomon neighbors. But thanks mostly to European colonizers, who drew the borders, Bougainville is the farthest-flung province of Papua New Guinea, whose lighter-toned inhabitants Bougainvilleans often call “redskins,” betraying a sense of otherness in their own country that partly explains why I am writing about them here.

I say partly because if not for the islands’ having fought a bitter, decade-long war against the Australia-backed Papua New Guinea—which remarkably they won—and demanding Papua New Guinea allow Bougainville’s independence by 2027, the story I am about to tell would likely never have happened, nor would it have piqued the interest of an American magazine.

more here.

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Paul Barbato in Newsweek:

I grew up on the north side of Chicago in a pretty diverse school district that had students with backgrounds hailing from all corners of the world. I remember hearing a classmate speak to his mom in Polish when she picked him up. Another classmate brought Pakistani Biryani his mom made for lunch. It was a quite riveting experience at a young age to have exposure to such a vibrant student body. Everyone had a story, a history, a culture, yet we were all American kids raised on a steady diet of pop culture and pop tarts. Nonetheless, these kids’ subtle yet unique cultural undertones first sparked my curiosity to know more about the world.

This curiosity would eventually evolve into me digging deeper into my own roots. From a young age I was always reminded of my half-Korean heritage; I even have pictures of me as a baby on my 100th day celebration wearing a Han-bok. Yet, my Korean heritage was usually more of a “lingering backdrop” to my identity, as it wasn’t pressured on me by my parents to “be more Korean” growing up.

More here.

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

An artificial-intelligence tool honoured by this year’s Nobel prize has revealed intimate details of the molecular meet-cute between sperm and eggs¹. The AlphaFold program, which predicts protein structures, identified a trio of proteins that team up to work as matchmakers between the gametes. Without them, sexual reproduction might hit a dead end in a wide range of animals, from zebrafish to mammals.

The finding, published 17 October in Cell, unravels the previous notion that just two proteins — one on the egg and one on the sperm — would be sufficient to ensure fertilisation, says Enrica Bianchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, who was not involved in the study. “It’s not the old concept of having a key and a lock to open the door anymore,” she says. “It’s more complicated.”

More here.

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Walking to School

Autumn, and I, not an especially
triumphant boy, descended in triumph
from Hillside down Evergreen where torches
of maple – yellows, oranges, fierce reds –
were lit for me. When the rains came, heavy
leaves fell, some gold like the cobblestones
of heaven, and I picked my way to school
from one to the next.  Home owners who didn’t
quickly sweep, owned a sidewalk abstract etched
by leaf. Brown November. Homeward in
the early dark, breathing the acid smell
of burning leaves, wanting to grow up to be
one of the men who leaned on iron-tined
rakes to tend the smoking pyres.

by Nils Peterson

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Stan Carey at Sentence First:

In ‘Dreams Must Explain Themselves’ (1973), Le Guin touches on the reference works that she consults for her writing (I’m a copy-editor: you can bet my attention spiked at this point), and adds a later note elaborating on the subject. Those works are strikingly, deliberately few:

All my life I have written, and all my life I have (without conscious decision) avoided reading how-to-write things. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary and Follett’s and Fowler’s manuals of usage are my entire arsenal of tools.*

* Note (1989). I use Fowler and Follett rarely now, finding them authoritarian. Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, corrected and supplemented by Miller and Swift’s Words and Women, are my road-atlas to English, and have never led me astray. A secondhand copy of the smallprint Oxford English Dictionary in volumes has been an infinite source of learning and pleasure, but the Shorter Oxford is still good for a quick fix.

The attractive, two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was the first big dictionary I owned, followed over the years by comparable editions from American Heritage, Merriam-Webster, Macmillan, and Chambers (this one slang). I still consult them all, as well as more portable editions (and a bunch of online dictionaries); they form a lexically dense archipelago on the shelf.

More here.

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Beth Mole in Ars Technica:

The American Dental Association does not recommend annual routine X-rays. And this is not new; it’s been that way for well over a decade.

The association’s guidelines from 2012 recommended that adults who don’t have an increased risk of dental caries (myself included) need only bitewing X-rays of the back teeth every two to three years. Even people with a higher risk of caries can go as long as 18 months between bitewings. The guidelines also note that X-rays should not be preemptively used to look for problems: “Radiographic screening for the purpose of detecting disease before clinical examination should not be performed,” the guidelines read. In other words, dentists are supposed to examine your teeth before they take any X-rays.

But, of course, the 2012 guidelines are outdated—the latest ones go further.

More here.

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Luke Glowacki in Evolution and Human Behavior:

The role of warfare in human evolution is among the most contentious topics in the evolutionary sciences. The debate is especially heated because many assume that whether our evolutionary ancestors were peaceful or warlike has important implications for modern human nature. One side argues that warfare has a deep evolutionary history, possible dating to the last common ancestor of bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans, while the other views war as a recent innovation, primarily developing with the rise of sedentism and agriculture. I show that although both positions have some support warranting consideration, each sometimes ignores uncertainties about human evolution and simplifies the complex reality of hunter-gatherer worlds. Many characterizations about the evolution of war are partial truths. Bonobos and chimpanzees provide important insights relevant for understanding the origins of war, but using either species as a model for human evolution has important limitations. Hunter-gatherers often had war, but like humans everywhere, our ancestors likely had a range of relationships depending on the context, including cooperative intergroup affiliation. Taken together, the evidence strongly suggests that small-scale warfare is part of our evolutionary history predating agriculture and sedentism, but that cooperation across group boundaries is also part our evolutionary legacy.

More here.

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God Says Yes To me

I asked God if it was ok to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked if it was ok to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even ok if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

by Kaylin Haught
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

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James Campbell at The New Criterion:

I first met Thom Gunn in 1997 and last saw him in London in 2003, a year before his death. I’m not fool enough to contradict Nott and his well-informed witnesses, and maybe I was simply blinded time and again by Gunn’s charisma, but to me he was not the desolate figure who moves through the dismal second half of A Cool Queer Life. We sat for an entire afternoon on our first encounter in his house on Cole Street, me with his cat on my lap (immortalized in the poem “In Trust” from his last book, Boss Cupid) and a bottle of cheap white wine between us. (It had to be cheap: refined in so many ways, Gunn loved vulgarity in drink and music. “I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men,” he wrote in The Passages of Joy.) It counts as one of the most memorable conversations of my life. At intervals, he would rise to take down a book from the shelf, to read a poem in order to illustrate or affirm an enthusiasm. I remember him saying that he had a direct entry into poetry. Where he encountered barriers, he usually knew how to overcome them. He believed that Boss Cupid would be his final book, but his illuminating introduction to a short selection from Ezra Pound made in 2000 proves that his “writing life” continued in other forms.

more here.

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Tara Isabella Burton at The Hedgehog Review:

But if there was little obvious distinction between “religious” pilgrims and “regular” travelers, it was partly because the discourse of contemporary travel is so often geared toward the same ends as pilgrimage proper: a journey that results in the transformation, and ideally purification, of the searching self. This is the goal underlying, for example, travel-as-transformation narratives like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, an account of the author’s solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorce-and-self-actualization memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Travel, at least the kind of travel so often coded as “real” or “authentic” (as opposed to, say, the family resort vacation, the Instagram trip, or the perfunctory list-ticking of the much-derided “tourist”), is already treated as a kind of secular pilgrimage in which we find out who we really are only by untethering ourselves from those elements of our identities too closely linked to habit and home. Only when we are away from our daily routines, this ideology implies, from our bosses and spouses and children, when we are challenged by language barrier or public transit mishap or unexpected romantic chemistry, can we come to know who we really are.

more here.

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