Elias Altman at Lithub:
You only meet a few people in your life who, like stars, exert a pull so strong that they alter its trajectory completely. I was lucky enough to enter the orbit of the legendary editor and essayist Lewis Lapham. A week ago, I attended his memorial service. He died on July 23 in Rome at the age of eighty-nine.
Lewis came into view in 2002, my junior year of high school—a chance meeting in the library. Having completed a U.S. history exam for which I’d pulled an all-nighter, I flopped out on a soft chair next to the periodical rack to doze it off. For plausible deniability, I reached for a magazine to lay across my lap. I hadn’t read Harper’s before, but that white cover stood out. On it, a painting of three horses paired with an essay by someone who sounded like a passionate preacher from the Second Great Awakening—a term that had been on the test—John Jeremiah Sullivan. The opening piece was titled “The Road to Babylon.” It was by Lewis H. Lapham, another name you don’t forget.
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Claire Devon, the protagonist of Missy Mazzoli’s seductively nightmarish opera “The Listeners,” is living contentedly as a suburban schoolteacher somewhere in the Southwest when she is beset by an inexplicable, inescapable sound. It is described as a “dull hum,” an “aggressive drone,” which renders daily existence intolerable. As she searches for the source of the noise, her life unravels by degrees. She develops an ill-defined, ill-fated attachment to one of her students, who also hears the hum. Her husband and her daughter move out; the school fires her. She falls in with a psychiatrist, Howard Bard, who presides over a cultish association of Listeners—people attuned to the hum. When one of them, a conspiracy theorist, fires a gun at a cell tower, the police spring into action and violence ensues. The ending is as unexpected as it is unsettling. Instead of fleeing the cult, Claire takes control of it, the hum having awakened charismatic powers within her. “We all need a family that understands us,” she intones, as Listeners crowd around her.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their “foundational discoveries” that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
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How do you prove something is true? For mathematicians, the answer is simple: Start with some basic assumptions and proceed, step by step, to the conclusion. QED, proof complete. If there’s a mistake anywhere, an expert who reads the proof carefully should be able to spot it. Otherwise, the proof must be valid. Mathematicians have been following this basic approach for well over 2,000 years.
The press and especially the news channels are constantly warning us that antisemitism is everywhere on the rise. They don’t point to specific episodes, content instead to denounce an ancient prejudice that in the context of a Middle East crisis is staging a resurgence. No, they describe a gigantic wave of antisemitism that has been sweeping across the globe since October 7. Its epicenter is on American college campuses, just as the epicenter of the anti–Vietnam War movement was on college campuses sixty years ago.
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One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells