Two Poems

Optimism

More and more I come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns to another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, intractable earth

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

The great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

by Jane Hirshfield
from Given Sugar, Given Salt
Harper Collins, 2001

Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta:

Seven years ago, researchers showed that they could strip cells down to their barest fundamentals, creating a life form with the smallest genome that still allowed it to grow and divide in the lab. But in shedding half its genetic load, that “minimal” cell also lost some of the hardiness and adaptability that natural life evolved over billions of years. That left biologists wondering whether the reduction might have been a one-way trip: In pruning the cells down to their bare essentials, had they left the cells incapable of evolving because they could not survive a change in even one more gene?

Now we have proof that even one of the weakest, simplest self-replicating organisms on the planet can adapt. During just 300 days of evolution in the lab, the generational equivalent of 40,000 human years, measly minimal cells regained all the fitness they had sacrificed, a team at Indiana University recently reported in the journal Nature.

More here.

Brendan O’Neill in Sp!ked:

Men, I have bad news: Caitlin Moran is coming for us. She comes not to man-bash, not to holler: ‘All men are rapists!’ It’s worse than that. She feels sorry for us. ‘I’m violently opposed to the branches of feminism that are permanently angry with men’, she writes at the very start of her very bad book. Instead she pities us. She frets over our toxic stoicism, our inability to be vulnerable, our unwillingness to be open about our fat bodies and small cocks. She wants to save us from all the ‘rules’ about ‘what a man should be’. From all that ‘swagger’ and ‘the stiff upper lip’. By the end I found myself pining for some good ol’ angry feminism.

What About Men? is, I’m going to be blunt, rubbish. I knew it would be from the very first page where Moran says that ‘when it comes to the vag-based problems, I have the bantz’. Imagine using the word bantz unironically in 2023. What she means is that she’s done all the vagina stuff. She’s completed feminism. She’s known as ‘the Woman Woman’, she says, in an arrogant timbre that puts to shame those cocksure blokes who stalk her nightmares. She wrote the bestselling pop-feminist tome, How To Be a Woman (2011), which contained such gems of wisdom as ‘don’t shave your vagina’ because it’s better to have a ‘big, hairy minge’, a ‘lovely furry moof’, ‘a marmoset sitting in [your] lap’, than a bald cooch. (Emmeline Pankhurst, I’m so sorry.) So now, naturally, she’s turning her attention to men. She’s discovered there is ‘a lot to say’ about ‘men in the 21st-century’. Lucky us.

More here.

Editorial in Nature:

Last month, researchers from 67 nations wrote an open letter to United Nations secretary-general António Guterres and World Bank president Ajay Banga, urging them to “redouble efforts to address rising extreme inequality”. The move was motivated, in part, by the lack of progress on the 10th of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Nature is examining each goal in a series of editorials.

The aim of SDG 10 is to “reduce inequality within and among countries”. That means narrowing the difference between the incomes of the richest and the poorest, on both a national and an international level. The goal also proposes ensuring equality of opportunity. Unfortunately, the world is clearly failing to meet SDG 10. The letter’s authors go further, saying that the goal is being “largely ignored”.

More here.

Intensive Sense

In the PICU . . .
I see bright lights,
But there is no sun,
And almost a loss of time.
I hear machines alarming,
Lives are not always saved.
I feel pain, intense at moments,
But I also feel the hurt of anxiety,
And neither anguish is good for the spirit.
Someday,
I will leave the PICU, again.
I will see the sun,
Rising into new days,
But I know it must set, too soon.
I will hear music sounding,
Ringing from so many instruments,
But most of it will be memories of my Heartsongs.
I will feel my spirit rejuvenated,
And I will be filled with hope again.
But, I will feel a sad sense of loss
For the children
Who will be Still
With the anguished sounding loss of time . . .
In the PICU.

by Mattie J.T. Stepanek
from Journey Through Heartsongs
VSP Books, 2001

PICU- Pediatric Intensive Care Unit

Adam Kirsch in Harper’s Magazine:

Smith’s latest book is, most obviously, a response to the paradoxical populism of the late 2010s, in which the grievances of “ordinary people” found champions in elite figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Rather than write about current events, however, Smith has elected to refract them into a story about the Tichborne case, a now-forgotten episode that convulsed Victorian England in the 1870s.

In particular, Smith is interested in how the case challenges the views of her protagonist, Eliza Touchet. Eliza is a woman with the sharp judgment and keen perceptions of a novelist, though her era has deprived her of the opportunity to exercise those gifts. Her surname—pronounced in the French style, touché—evokes her taste for intellectual combat. But she has spent her life in a supportive role, serving variously as housekeeper and bedmate to her cousin William Harrison Ainsworth, a man of letters who churns out mediocre historical romances by the yard. (Like most of the novel’s characters, Ainsworth and Touchet are based on real-life historical figures.)

More here.

Jackson Arn in The New Yorker:

Go to the Guggenheim Museum. Climb past the gift shops and walls of Gego and Picasso. Awaiting you on the top floor is the niftiest migraine you will ever experience. The artist responsible, Sarah Sze, has contributed a set of site-specific pieces that look like a single shantytown of projectors, plastic bottles, potted plants, paintings, photographs, papers, and pills, to name only a handful of the “P”s. There are thousands of other bits, many of them mass-produced tools doing any job but the one they were made for. Everything is stacked or fanned or strewn, and looks a sneeze away from collapse. Red clamps and blue tape take credit for the hard work done by secret dabs of glue, while other yips of color compete with the gray floors, and lose. Most of the installations are lit by the museum’s glow, and one isn’t lit at all, but for some reason I imagine the entire set in the prickly glare of a conference room.

Clutter is Sze’s medium. She can infuse it with any flavor and play it at any volume. Some of what happens in her work is accidental—“P” is also for “pedestal fans,” which blow through the exhibition, rustling threads and scraps—but even accident is just another one of her ingredients, measured out to the milligram. A team of assistants keeps things in a permanent state of fussy disarray, dropping by thrice a week to adjust threads, refill plastic bottles to make up for evaporation, and so on. The results are less a parody than a triumph of micromanagement: much of the fun in these installations comes from seeing how thin they can stretch, how many different things and ideas and tones they can keep going at once. Images from every land and clime hint at the absurdity of an interconnected planet, as well as the glory. A little circle of rocks, matches, and other stuff reminded me both of Stonehenge and the Stonehenge replica my fifth-grade class built out of blocks and paper-towel rolls.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

On a muggy June night in Greenwich Village, more than 800 neuroscientists, philosophers and curious members of the public packed into an auditorium. They came for the first results of an ambitious investigation into a profound question: What is consciousness?

To kick things off, two friends — David Chalmers, a philosopher, and Christof Koch, a neuroscientist — took the stage to recall an old bet. In June 1998, they had gone to a conference in Bremen, Germany, and ended up talking late one night at a local bar about the nature of consciousness.

For years, Dr. Koch had collaborated with Francis Crick, a biologist who shared a Nobel Prize for uncovering the structure of DNA, on a quest for what they called the “neural correlate of consciousness.” They believed that every conscious experience we have — gazing at a painting, for example — is associated with the activity of certain neurons essential for the awareness that comes with it.

Dr. Chalmers liked the concept, but he was skeptical that they could find such a neural marker any time soon.

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

The collectives formed by social insects fascinate us, whether it is bees, ants, or termites. But it would be a mistake to think that the individuals making up such collectives are just mindless cogs in a bigger machine. It is entirely reasonable to ask, as pollination ecologist Stephen Buchmann does here, what a bee knows. This book was published almost a year after Lars Chittka’s The Mind of a Bee, which I reviewed previously. I ended that review by asking what Buchmann could add to the subject. Actually, despite some unavoidable overlap, a fair amount. Join me for the second of this two-part dive into the bee brain.

More here.

Jon Askonas in The New Atlantis:

There have been two dominant narratives about the rise of misinformation and conspiracy theories in American public life.

What we can, without prejudice, call the establishment narrative — put forward by dominant foundations, government agencies, NGOs, the mainstream press, the RAND corporation — holds that the misinformation age was launched by the Internet boom, the loss of media gatekeepers, new alternative sources of sensational information that cater to niche audiences, and social media. According to this story, the Internet in general and social media in particular reward telling audiences what they want to hear and undermining faith in existing institutions. A range of nefarious actors, from unscrupulous partisan media to foreign intelligence agencies, all benefit from algorithms that are designed to boost engagement, which winds up catering misinformation to specific audience demands. Traditional journalism, bound by ethics, has not been able to keep up.

The alternative narrative — put forward by Fox News, the populist fringes of the Left and the Right, Substackers of all sorts — holds almost the inverse.

More here.

Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

We just want to call everyone’s attention to the rolling nationwide release this week and over the next several (for a complete list of cities and venues see here) of a terrific new film on the life and project of Bobi Wine, the vividly bracing and charismatic Ugandan Afro-pop musician who went from the Kampalan slums to continent-wide celebrity before running afoul of thuggish dictatorial regime of the country’s longtime dictator Museveni (initially by refusing to buckle under to forced-march participation in a music video celebrating the tyrant’s umpteenth presidential run back in 2016). As the regime responded by beginning to forbid his holding concerts in his home country, Wine instead ran for parliament and against all odds won his seat and began flipping other seats by way of his endorsements, till he decided to run himself for president the next time round, in 2020-21, notwithstanding a whole slew of harrowing assassination attempts, arrests and sieges of torture.

more here.

Philip Maughan at Noema:

Over the last few years, there has been a groundswell of podcasts, wellness apps and self-improvement social media videos alerting a mass audience to the potential of applying circadian science. It was a slightly non-PC meme in which an anxious party attendee plans to head home “to protect my circadian rhythm” that made me think new, younger audiences were taking note.

We’ve progressed from what was really fringe science in the 1980s “to a truly exquisite mechanistic understanding of how these rhythms are generated,” Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford, tells me. Foster’s book “Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health,” has been a surprise best seller. “It’s very satisfying for me to see how it’s exploded,” he says.

For example, a viral YouTube video entitled “The Optimal Morning Routine – Andrew Huberman” by After Skool animates advice from the wildly popular Stanford professor, who recommends viewing outdoor light within an hour after waking, even if it’s cloudy.

more here.

Eden Medina at Cabinet Magazine:

In July 1971, the British cybernetician Stafford Beer received an unexpected letter from Chile. Its contents would dramatically change Beer’s life. The writer was a young Chilean engineer named Fernando Flores, who was working for the government of newly elected Socialist president Salvador Allende. Flores wrote that he was familiar with Beer’s work in management cybernetics and was “now in a position from which it is possible to implement on a national scale—at which cybernetic thinking becomes a necessity—scientific views on management and organization.” Flores asked Beer for advice on how to apply cybernetics to the management of the nationalized sector of the Chilean economy, which was expanding quickly because of Allende’s aggressive nationalization policy.

Less than a year earlier, Allende and his leftist coalition, Popular Unity (UP), had secured the presidency and put Chile on the road toward socialist change. Allende’s victory resulted from the inability of previous Chilean governments to resolve such problems as economic dependency, economic inequality, and social inequality using less drastic means.

more here.

I Want to Write a Poem to Celebrate

my father’s arms, bulging and straining while he carries
the wooden box of dark purple grapes down the crumbling,
uneven cement steps into the cellar of the old house
on 19^th street. The cellar, whitewashed by my mother,
grows darker as my father lumbers past the big coal
furnace and into the windowless wine room
at the very back where he will feed the grapes,
ripe and perfect and smelling of earth,
into the wine press. The grape smell changes
as they are crushed and drawn out into the fat
wooden barrels, and for weeks the cellar
will be full to the brim with the sweet smell
of grapes fermenting into wine, a smell I recognize
even forty years later each time I uncork a bottle,
an aroma that brings back my father
and his friends gathering under Zio Gianni’s
grape arbor to play briscole through long July
nights, small glasses before them, peach slices
gleaming like amber in the ruby wine.

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
from What Saves Us—
Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the age off Trump
editor: Martín Espada

Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist:

People have complicated relationships with hairy skin moles. For some, they symbolize individuality and good fortune. For others, a bothersome blemish. Maksim Plikus, a professor of developmental and cell biology at the University of California, Irvine regards these mounds of wild-growing hair as islands of knowledge. His curiosity and astuteness compelled him to look closer at a biological anomaly that others overlooked. “Nothing exists for no reason. There is some really interesting biology hidden in everything,” Plikus said. Skin moles are common growths that contain clusters of melanocytes, the skin’s pigment producing cells. These melanocytes are senescent¹—they are old and no longer reproduce.

…Plikus and his team used genetically engineered mouse models of skin moles and single cell RNA-sequencing to study hair follicle stem cell activity. They discovered that senescent melanocytes in hairy moles secrete a signaling molecule called osteopontin, which stimulates dormant hair follicle stem cells and triggers hair growth. When they examined human samples of hairy skin moles, Plikus’ team found higher levels of osteopontin compared to nearby non-mole skin, and when they injected osteopontin into hair follicles of human skin grafts, new hair grew.

More here.

Shelley Fan in Singularity Hub:

The components sound like the aftermath of a shopping and spa retreat: three AA batteries. Two electrical acupuncture needles. One plastic holder that’s usually attached to battery-powered fairy lights. But together they merge into a powerful stimulation device that uses household batteries to control gene expression in cells.

The idea seems wild, but a new study in Nature Metabolism this week showed that it’s possible. The team, led by Dr. Martin Fussenegger at ETH Zurich and the University of Basel in Switzerland, developed a system that uses direct-current electricity—in the form of batteries or portable battery banks—to turn on a gene in human cells in mice with a literal flip of a switch. To be clear, the battery pack can’t regulate in vivo human genes. For now, it only works for lab-made genes inserted into living cells. Yet the interface has already had an impact. In a proof-of-concept test, the scientists implanted genetically engineered human cells into mice with Type 1 diabetes. These cells are normally silent, but can pump out insulin when activated with an electrical zap.

The team used acupuncture needles to deliver the trigger for 10 seconds a day, and the blood sugar levels in the mice returned to normal within a month. The rodents even regained the ability to manage blood sugar levels after a large meal without the need for external insulin, a normally difficult feat.

Called “electrogenetics,” these interfaces are still in their infancy. But the team is especially excited for their potential in wearables to directly guide therapeutics for metabolic and potentially other disorders. Because the setup requires very little power, three AA batteries could trigger a daily insulin shot for more than five years, they said. The study is the latest to connect the body’s analogue controls—gene expression—with digital and programmable software such as smartphone apps. The system is “a leap forward, representing the missing link that will enable wearables to control genes in the not-so-distant future,” said the team.

More here.

Amor Towles in the New York Times:

For over 100 years the cadaver, that unsung hero of murder mysteries, has been accommodating, gracious and generally on time. There is no other figure in crime who has proved more reliable. Since the murder mystery first gained popularity, there have been two world wars, multiple economic crises, dance crazes and moonshots, the advent of radio, cinema, television and the internet. Ideas of right and wrong have evolved, tastes have changed. But through it all, the cadaver has shown up without complaint to do its job. A clock-puncher of the highest order, if you will.

More here.