Alison George in New Scientist:

Genetic analysis of a Neanderthal fossil found in France reveals that it was from a previously unknown lineage, a remnant of an ancient population that had remained in extreme isolation for more than 50,000 years. This finding sheds new light on the final phase of the species’ existence.

The fossil, dubbed Thorin after a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, was discovered in 2015 at the Grotte Mandrin in the Rhône Valley in southern France when Ludovic Slimak of the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse uncovered some teeth in the cave’s soil. The skeleton was painstakingly excavated over the next nine years to reveal 31 teeth, the jawbone, part of the skull and thousands of other bone fragments.

This was an incredible discovery in itself, as remains of Neanderthals – who lived in Eurasia from around 400,000 years ago until they went extinct around 40,000 years ago – are exceedingly rare.

Even more surprising was that Thorin’s genome could be obtained from a fragment of one of his teeth, as DNA isn’t typically preserved in warm climates. This revealed that the fossil was from a male, but opened up a mystery that took years to solve.

More here.

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Jarod K. Anderson at Atmos:

I have difficulty interpreting the nature of my own life, a thing I feel intimately and continuously, so it’s not surprising that we can’t all agree on the nature of herons.

What, then, is a blue heron?

They live about 15 years. They stand around four feet tall. They walk the shoreline, delivering an overt message to me about quiet contemplation and self-determination.

The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.

You might get the impression that I’m saying herons are meaningless, but that’s not what I’m saying at all.

More here.

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Chloe Nannenstad in Reader’s Digest:

Love ’em or hate ’em, there’s a reason sarcasm quotes are all over the internet. Like funny sayings, sarcasm quotes play with the interpretation of words and tone in a way that can stretch your brain if you’re not expecting it. To use sarcasm, you have to say something that’s the opposite of what you mean (kind of like uttering a funny inspirational quote when you’re trying to be anything but inspiring). To understand sarcasm, you have to pick up on both the literal meaning and the underlying sentiment. Sarcasm is a true lie.

1. “I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.” —Fred Allen

2. “If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.” —Groucho Marx

3. “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.” —Abba Eban

4. “I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.” —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

5. “When one door closes, another opens. Or you can open the closed door. That’s how doors work.” —Unknown

More here.

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Paula Span in The New York Times:

About a month ago, Judith Hansen popped awake in the predawn hours, thinking about her father’s brain.

Her father, Morrie Markoff, was an unusual man. At 110, he was thought to be the oldest in the United States. His brain was unusual, too, even after he recovered from a stroke at 99.

Although he left school after the eighth grade to work, Mr. Markoff became a successful businessman. Later in life, his curiosity and creativity led him to the arts, including photography and sculpture fashioned from scrap metal.

He was a healthy centenarian when he exhibited his work at a gallery in Los Angeles, where he lived. At 103, he published a memoir called “Keep Breathing.” He blogged regularly, pored over The Los Angeles Times daily, discussed articles in Scientific American and followed the national news on CNN and “60 Minutes.”

More here.

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Judith Thurman at The New Yorker:

The French philosopher Simone Weil was a soul at odds with herself and with a world of affliction. The causes she espoused as a social activist and the faith she professed as a mystic were urgent to her and, as she saw it, to humanity. Little of her work was published in her lifetime, but since her death, at thirty-four, in 1943, it has inspired an almost cultlike following among readers who share her hunger for grace, and for what she called “decreation”—deliverance from enthrallment to the self.

Eminent theologians have revered Weil (Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Pope Paul VI), and so have writers of the first rank, especially women (Hannah Arendt, Ingeborg Bachmann, Anne Carson, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag). Albert Camus hailed her as “the only great spirit of our time.” T. S. Eliot credited her with a “genius akin to that of the saints.” But Weil herself might have objected to these consecrations as a form of “idolatry,” which she defined as a misguided thirst for “absolute good.” Nothing is so absolute about her as the difficulty of parsing her contradictions.

more here.

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The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone’s got to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone’s got to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone’s got to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone’s got to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone’s got to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame,

No sound bites, no photo opportunities
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirt sleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And at last nothing less
than nothing.

Someone’s got to be there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from Contemporary World Poetry
Vintage Books, 1996

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Jerry Saltz at Vulture:

Abigail Goldman’s micro-renderings of scenes of carnage, created at 1:87 scale, are a testament to the pull of the small, especially at a time when art is getting bigger and more elaborately produced. In one tableau that could have come out of Breaking Bad, a shipping storage container in a gravel field contains a bloody corpse and a woman with her hands up as two gunmen nearby take aim. Another features a powder-blue van in a desert and two men warming their hands over an oil-drum fire, a mutilated corpse splayed between them. A third features a machine-gun-toting Queen Elizabeth and her two corgis standing over a dead man. Behind her, the paintings, the china in the cabinet, the upholstered chairs, the patterned wallpaper — all are perfect.

Goldman calls her works “Die-o-ramas.” I call them a cross between nightmares, documentary, and horror. In her day job, she is an investigator for a public defender outside Seattle, researching horrendous incidents of death, murder, and suicide.

more here.

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Costică Brădăţan in Commonweal:

When history is about to take an abrupt turn, is there something in people’s eyes or in their secret longings that pre-announces it somehow—and that minds of a particular cast (poets and visionaries or perhaps psychiatrists) can read clearly and even put into words? If the world were to end next year, who would know about it today, and how? When we look back on the past, we say sometimes that there were “clear signs” that this or that event would happen, that the “writing was on the wall.” But how many of these signs were really there, and how many are projected back by hindsight? The problem is of special importance to historians. How can the historian single out a past event, focus on it exclusively, and pretend not to know what came after? How can a scholar fake ignorance?

Florian Illies doesn’t answer these difficult questions, but he does something even better: he takes them further, complicates and deepens them, and in so doing points to their unanswerability. In 1913: The Year before the Storm, he transports us to a point in time when history was about to make such a dramatic turn. We know that now, but those he writes about—artists, writers, politicians, philosophers—did not and could not. They lived their lives as innocently as we live ours and could not have cared less about the state of the world, dancing blindly on the edge of a volcano.

More here.

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Christian Sonne in Nature:

The Arctic is under stress, that much is known. Between 1979 and 2021, the region warmed four times faster than the global average, with effects — as yet poorly understood — on its ecology and ability to store carbon, on global sea levels and on wider ocean-circulation and weather patterns.

Add in the effects of biodiversity loss and pollution, and people often refer to a triple planetary crisis. I think we should actually be talking about a quadruple crisis. Since starting research in the Arctic in 1997, I have spent nearly all of my summers there, monitoring changes in pollution levels, habitats and food webs using a ‘One Health’ approach that integrates effects on wildlife, humans and ecosystems. And it’s becoming clear that, as the Arctic warms, its environment degrades and human activities increase, new health threats are emerging. In particular, the Arctic is likely to become a hotbed for zoonotic diseases that spill over into humans from other animals. That threat was brought home to all of us by the COVID-19 pandemic. We need to take seriously the possibility that the next pandemic could come from the north.

More here.

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Matt Glassman in Matt’s Five Points:

In 2016, Nate Silver was panned in the press and on social media for his presidential election forecast. His model gave Clinton a 71% chance of winning, and she lost. He and other forecasters totally missed the Trump phenomena; the polls were off and Trump was more popular than expected. For many people, the bloom was off the rose. Silver—who had so brilliantly predicted all the details of the 2008 and 2012 elections—got it wrong. He wasn’t infallible after all.

The catch is that it was actually a great forecast. The 29% chance Silver’s model gave Trump was significantly higher than most of the other prediction models—some of which gave Clinton as much as a 99% chance to win—and, crucially, much more bullish on Trump than public betting markets in gambling houses around the globe, which thought Trump had about a 17% chance to win. If you believed Silver’s model, it was a blaring siren to bet on Trump and against the conventional wisdom. Those who followed Silver’s advice got a massive return on their investment.

This analytical split—between people who saw Silver’s 2016 forecast as a huge miss and those who understood it as astute and financially lucrative—goes to the core of his fantastic new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.

More here.

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Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving to the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

by Billy Collins
from Poetry 180
Random House 2003

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Alexander Menden at Prospect Magazine:

In the spring of 1961, Gerhard Richter, a young East German artist noted mainly for his portraits and socialist wall paintings, slipped through the last chink in the Iron Curtain—West Berlin—and fled to the Federal Republic of Germany. A few weeks later, he justified this move in a letter to his former teacher at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts: “My reasons are mainly professional. The whole cultural ‘climate’ of the West can offer me more, in that it corresponds better and more coherently with my way of being and working than that of the East.”

Richter, 29 at the time and deeply impressed by the works of Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock, which he had seen during a visit to the contemporary art exhibition Documenta in Kassel two years earlier, wanted the same stylistic and thematic freedom of those artists. He intended to settle in Munich. But an old friend from Dresden, the sculptor Reinhard Graner, who had moved to the West before Richter, strongly advised him against it, saying: “No, for God’s sake, Düsseldorf is the city of art!”

more here.

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Elica Le Bon in Newsweek:

My first visceral memories of the regime in Iran were formed before I was born. My mother had been in the notorious Evin prison in the 1980s, when hanged bodies were lined up along the entrance path so that prisoners knew what to expect. Although naturally apolitical, my mother was seen with a dissident. She narrowly escaped lynching, only because the dissident learned of my mother’s arrest and turned herself in.

The dissident was, of course, hanged.

Perhaps this is just a Persian mother’s retelling, notorious for its embellishment, but according to her, back then, she was one of the “only people to make it out alive.” When she left the prison, she demanded that a guard walk behind her so she wouldn’t be shot in the back. The regime was never more brutal than in its nascent years of life. Anyone caught with anti-regime materials—books, articles, publications, or anything of the sort—was executed. I often marvel at how miraculous my own existence is. It wasn’t just one time that my mother narrowly escaped death; it happened three times.

More here.

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Linda Carroll in Time Magazine:

With multiple game-changing developments over the past two decades, kidney cancer patients are now living longer and better. A big part of the reason is that many are being diagnosed at earlier stages of the disease, when it can often be more easily treated and sometimes cured. Even when cancers are caught later, advances in medications and in methods of targeting cancer cells are significantly extending survival.

“When I started two decades ago, the average survival for patients with advanced kidney cancer was one year,” says Dr. Brian Rini, a professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. “Now, the median survival is between five and six years. It’s amazing.” The growing use of scanning technologies in medicine overall has been one of the most important changes over the last couple of decades: Tumors are being detected during scans for non-cancerous conditions.

More here.

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Joseph M Keegin at Aeon Magazine:

The prairie schools of philosophy were not just local curiosities; over the course of their roughly three decades of existence, they exerted a lasting influence on US intellectual culture, however much they themselves have been forgotten. They encouraged the growth of similar philosophical societies from the Midwest to the Eastern seaboard, in places like Chicago, Philadelphia and Massachusetts; they established a model for small-group adult education, contrasted with, for instance, the popular Lyceum model of the large public lecture; and they rekindled an interest in the study of classical, Medieval and early modern philosophy and literature among US thinkers who, influenced by transcendentalism and pragmatism, were all too often focused on what was simply useful or new.

‘We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson had bemoaned in his speech ‘The American Scholar’ (1837). The philosophers of the prairie had no such complaint with the minds of the Old World.

more here.

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Rachel Cooke in The Guardian:

Twenty-five years ago, my father and I were out walking in the Peak District. Beside us was his dog; ahead of us was a familiar fell, low and craggy and bare. My dad was boasting, as he often did, about the cairn at its top, a pile of rocks he claimed to have nurtured into existence, when from nowhere the silhouette of a man suddenly appeared beside it: first a head, then a torso, and finally a pair of legs. “Ah,” said my dad, sage where I was startled. “A caver.” We stood and squinted. Moments later, another man materialised, and then another: a human string of sausages, pulled from the limestone’s darkest reaches as if from a top hat.

The memory of this came to me as I read The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness, a new study of the poet and his world. In part, this was because Auden visited the same hills as a schoolboy; even before he famously became transfixed by the abandoned lead mines of the northern Pennines, he had seen – in 1919, when he was 12 – the Blue John Cavern near Castleton in Derbyshire, a place he would later refer to as one of the names on his “numinous map” of sacred spots. Mostly, though, it was because caving is a good metaphor for the experience of reading Nicholas Jenkins’s book, which runs to 543 pages (minus its extensive notes). Headlamp at the ready, I thought, whenever I opened it.

En route, there are lovely moments.

More here.

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