Jesse Sheidlower at Literary Hub:

In all of English there are few words rich enough in their history and variety of use to warrant a dedicated dictionary that runs to hundreds of pages and multiple editions. That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and emotive words in the language makes it all the more fascinating—and deserving of the attention given to it in this volume.

There’s a good chance you have some story about your relationship to the word fuck. You asked a teacher what it meant; you used it inap­propriately in a professional situation; you were thrilled to learn a story about its origin (probably false—see “Where It’s Not From,” below); you were disciplined by a parent or guardian for saying it; you discov­ered that a romantic partner liked—or really did not like—hearing it, or used it in a way that had a strong effect on you.

How has this word, which has been around for many hundreds of years, maintained both its intense interest and its uncommon power?

More here.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Emergence is a centrally important concept in science and philosophy. Indeed, the existence of higher-level emergent properties helps render the world intelligible to us — we can sensibly understand the macroscopic world around us without a complete microscopic picture. But there are various different ways in which emergence might happen, and a tendency for definitions of emergence to rely on vague or subjective criteria. Recently Achyuth Parola and I wrote a paper trying to clear up some of these issues: What Emergence Can Possibly Mean. In this solo podcast I discuss the way we suggest to think about emergence, with examples from physics and elsewhere.

Transcript here.

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Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:

Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country.

More here.

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Lynne Peeples in Undark Magazine:

Living things began tracking the incremental passage of time long before the human-made clock lent its hands. As life grew in harmony with the sun’s daily march through the sky, and with the seasons, phases of the moon, tides, and other predictable environmental cycles, evolution ingrained biology with the timekeeping tools to keep a step ahead.

It gifted an ability to anticipate changes, rather than respond to them, and an internal nudge to do things when most advantageous and to avoid doing things when not so advantageous. Of course, that optimal timing depended on a species’ niche on the 24-hour clock. When mammals first arose, for example, they were nocturnal — most active during the hours that the dinosaurs slept. Now mammals occupy both their choice territories on a spinning planet and their preferred space on a rotating clock.

Timing is everything when it comes to seeking and digesting food, storing food, avoiding becoming food, dodging exposure to DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation, and many more vital activities, such as navigating, migrating, and reproducing.

More here.

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Kai Kupferschmidt in Science:

As a young boy growing up in the Netherlands in the 1990s, Sander van der Linden learned that most of his mother’s relatives, who were Jewish, had been killed by the Nazis, in the grip of racist ideology. At school, he was confronted with antisemitic conspiracy theories still circulating in Europe. It all got him wondering about the power of propaganda and how people become convinced of falsehoods.

Eventually, he would make studying those issues his career. As head of the Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge, Van der Linden is studying the power of lies and how to keep people from believing them. He has become academia’s biggest proponent of a strategy pioneered after the Korean War 
to “inoculate” humans against persuasion, the way they are vaccinated against dangerous infections. The recipe only has two steps: First, warn people they may be manipulated. Second, expose them to a weakened form of the misinformation, just enough to intrigue but not persuade anyone. “The goal is to raise eyebrows (antibodies) without convincing (infecting),” Van der Linden and his colleague Jon Roozenbeek wrote recently in JAMA.

More here.

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Barry Schwabsky at Art In America:

What abstraction does best is take painting apart and then put it back together differently. Paige Beeber understands that principle better than most artists, and she puts it into practice at both material and perceptual levels, melding physicality and illusion.

My first contact with Beeber’s paintings came via the computer screen. My impression then was that the paintings would be very dimensional, like montaged reliefs, so I was surprised when I finally saw the works in person—this would have been around three years ago—and realized that their layered patchwork of colors was mostly just painted rather than assembled. But let me accentuate that word: mostly. Beeber does use collage in her painting, but it is her conceptual or perceptual cutting and pasting that predominates. The literal collaging in her work complements and sometimes contradicts her purely painterly juxtapositions. At a certain distance, or in reproduction, the effect is almost trompe l’œil, but just a slightly closer or longer look is enough to dispel the momentary illusion: This is painting that always wants to keep the materiality of painting visible.

more here.

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Colm Tóibín at The Nation:

Fiction about young girls has often been in thrall to silence, secrecy, and evasion. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, for example, young Fanny Price moves on tiptoe, daring anyone to notice her. Instead, all the noticing is done by her. Her duty is not merely to stay in the shadows but also to remain quietly pleasant and accommodating. So, too, the young Catherine Sloper in Henry James’s Washington Square shares her feelings with no one, and thus her feelings deepen. She is at her most interesting when she is at her most silent and withdrawn.

In 1952, in the third chapter of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, there is a sudden jolt, a kind of shock. From now on it is clear that Therese, the 19-year-old shop assistant, is lesbian. This is established not because of what she says, or even because of what she thinks. Rather, it is done by her eyes. We learn about her because of how she returns the gaze when one of the customers, a woman called Carol, gazes at her. The woman’s “eyes were gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and caught by them, Therese could not look away.”

more here.

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The Way of It

punt

twilight
not yet supper
father not yet home
boy and brother
playing at football
in the front yard,
punting,
eight year old proud
he can kick it farther than
his five year old brother.

old car pulls up,
releases father
from another work day
he stops,
watches the boys for a while
asks for the ball,
looks at it,
and in an impossibly
sudden moment
kicks it,
all the difficulties
of a life swinging
from the axle of his hip
up the ball goes
and up and up,
up and up
into the gathering dark.

next morning
the boys find a football
in a neighbor’s yard
it looks like theirs
they’ll kick it some more
but know the real one
has sailed past the moon

by Nils Peterson

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Jinal Dadiya at Psyche:

In the 19th and early 20th century, under English and Unites States law, jilted lovers could sue former partners for breaking their hearts. ‘Heartbalm torts’, which continue to be on the rulebooks of some US states to this day, were a category of legal actions that could be brought against romantic misconduct. The underlying idea was that wrongful romantic or sexual behaviour could cause harm that should be compensated by its causer. The sufferer of such harm, in turn, was entitled to receive damages, or solatium, from the inflictor. Most popular among the heartbalm torts were actions for broken engagements, adultery, and seduction.

A ‘breach of promise to marry’ suit could be brought against a former partner for dishonouring an engagement to marry. Usually brought by women abandoned by their male fiancés, it was understood that broken engagements would result in women losing chances at stability, marriage and potential financial security. At a time when women had limited opportunities for financial independence outside of marriage, monetary recoveries offered by the tort were of economic significance.

More here.

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Adriana Craciun at The Conversation:

Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from just nine plants: sugar cane, maize (corn), rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet and cassava. In the past, farmers grew tens of thousands of crop varieties around the world. This biodiversity protected agriculture from crop losses caused by plant diseases and climate change.

Today, seed banks around the world are doing much of the work of saving crop varieties that could be essential resources under future growing conditions. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway supports them all. It is the world’s most famous backup site for seeds that are more precious than data.

Tens of thousands of new seeds from around the world arrived at the seed vault on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, in mid-October 2024. This was one of the largest deposits in the vault’s 16-year history.

And on Oct. 31, crop scientists Cary Fowler and Geoffrey Hawtin, who played key roles in creating the Global Seed Vault, received the US$500,000 World Food Prize, which recognizes work that has helped increase the supply, quality or accessibility of food worldwide.

More here.

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Ramin Skibba at Undark:

In the plains of western South Dakota, about 25 miles northeast of Mount Rushmore, the Ellsworth Air Force Base is preparing to receive the first fleet of B-21 nuclear bombers, replacing Cold War-era planes. Two other bases, Dyess in Texas and Whiteman in Missouri, will soon follow. By the 2030s, a total of five bases throughout the United States will host nuke-carrying bombers for the first time since the 1990s.

The planes are part of an estimated $1.7 trillion military program advancing the nuclear arsenal of the United States, as tensions continue to rise with nuclear-armed rivals Russia and China. In addition to the B-21s, the Pentagon is upgrading larger aging bombers and may also restore nukes to the ones that had their nuclear capabilities removed. Leaders within the U.S. Department of Defense, such as Air Force General Anthony Cotton, argue that the nuclear modernization program, as it is called, is a “national imperative.” While some nuclear and foreign policy analysts argue that the program is crucial to building — or rebuilding — a formidable arsenal that deters other nuclear powers, others say it raises questions for both nuclear deterrence and arms control.

Still, the costly and massive nuclear modernization program enjoys bipartisan support, said Geoff Wilson, a defense policy researcher at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “The United States has committed itself to one of the largest arms races in history. We’re spending about $75 billion a year on new nuclear weapons,” he said, citing figures from the Congressional Budget Office. In comparison, the entire Manhattan Project cost about $30 billion in today’s dollars, spread over multiple years.

More here.

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Ryan Smith in Newsweek:

Author JK Rowling has clarified her political views after a social media user accused her of having “far-right” sympathies over her views on transgender women. Over the past few years, the Harry Potter writer has sparked debate—and backlash—over her expressed statements on trans women, leading some activists to brand Rowling a “TERF”—an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

On Sunday, British-born Rowling responded to a person on X, formerly Twitter, who suggested that her politics were more aligned with right-wing ideologies. Newsweek has contacted a representative of Rowling via email for comment. “@jk_rowling is far right,” read the post. “[I don’t care] how many times she pretends she isn’t. She gets all of her information from [neo-Nazi] publications and far-right hate groups. [She] believes a far-right conspiracy theory that is basically just ‘the Protocols of the elders of Zion,’ but for trans [people].”

Sharing a lengthy response, Rowling wrote: “You can keep telling yourself this, but you’re simply wrong. I’m a left-leaning liberal who’s fiercely anti-authoritarian, and if you couldn’t deduce that from my work you haven’t understood a word of it. “I’m not an ideologue. I mistrust ideologies,” she continued.

More here.

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Zoe Corbin in Nature:

A scientist who successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses has sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation. Beata Halassy discovered in 2020, aged 49, that she had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy. It was the second recurrence there since her left breast had been removed, and she couldn’t face another bout of chemotherapy.

Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, studied the literature and decided to take matters into her own hands with an unproven treatment. A case report published in Vaccines in August¹ outlines how Halassy self-administered a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) to help treat her own stage 3 cancer. She has now been cancer-free for four years. In choosing to self-experiment, Halassy joins a long line of scientists who have participated in this under-the-radar, stigmatized and ethically fraught practice. “It took a brave editor to publish the report,” says Halassy.

More here.

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Abigail Tulenko at Aeon Magazine:

Austen’s keen observation extends to her rich aesthetic sensibility. And, yet, beauty figures strangely in a naturalist’s worldview. Darwin, who develops the naturalistic worldview to a new extreme, was deeply troubled by ‘ornament’ in the animal kingdom as a potential threat to his theory of natural selection. In Aesthetics After Darwin (2019), the philosopher Winfried Menninghaus describes Darwin’s decades-long enquiry into ornament as an obsession driven by a central question: how to explain instances of seemingly superfluous beauty within his empirical scientific worldview? In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin marvels that ‘The development, however, of certain structures’ – such as horns, feathers, and so on – ‘has been carried to a wonderful extreme; and in some cases to an extreme which, as far as the general conditions of life are concerned, must be slightly injurious.’ The peacock’s feathers are superfluous to its biologic fitness; their cumbersome size may actually be antithetical to any one bird’s individual survival. And so their existence seems to fly in the face of naturalistic explanation.

In his early writings, Darwin ‘conceived of beauty first of all as scandalous excess, as potentially self-destructive luxury,’ writes Menninghaus.

more here.

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India Ennenga and Kaveh Akbar at The Believer:

BLVR: You’ve said you want to honor all the poets “whose rapturous ecstasy overwhelmed even language’s ability to transcribe it.” Many of those, I imagine, are the authors you included as the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets and the Divine. Spiritual and religious writing offers some of the deepest considerations of the ineffable but feels a little taboo in our increasingly secular culture.

KA: It’s out of style, certainly. The standard belief is that if you’re smart, you have to be cynical. There’s an equivalency of skepticism with intelligence, and of belief with naivete, which is the height of hubris to me—as if we have suddenly landed upon an intelligence heretofore unavailable to Milton or Rabi’ah.

BLVR: That equivalency makes it easy to forget that spiritual verse is the origin of poetry—indeed, in many cultures there is no distinction whatsoever between poetry and prayer. Would you say that all poetry, even the most contemporary and secular, is still grappling with our earliest concerns of articulating a spiritual ineffability?

KA: In the anthology, I point to Enheduanna, born in 2286 BCE, a female priest who wrote often to the goddess Inanna, as the earliest attributable author in history. She was exiled from the Sumerian city-state of Ur by her brother when her dad, Sargon, died. So she was writing a lot of her hymns from exile, which immediately connected her to Ovid, and to Dante.

more here.

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Doug Henwood in Jacobin:

I often say that the Democrats’ political problem is that they’re a party of capital that has to pretend otherwise for electoral purposes. This time they hardly even pretended. Kamala Harris preferred campaigning with the inexplicably famous mogul Mark Cuban and the ghoulish Liz Cheney to Shawn Fain, who led the United Auto Workers to the greatest strike victory in decades. Those associations telegraphed both her policy instincts and her demographic targeting: Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs.

Like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, the strategy failed, only worse. At least Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million. Harris even lost among suburban white women, a principal target of this twice-failed strategy.

Like any major historical event, this defeat has many explanations. Preceding her disastrous campaign, there was the bizarre nature of Harris’s nomination. White House staff hid the severity of Joe Biden’s mental decline for his entire presidency, until his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump made it impossible to sustain the fiction of his competence any longer. There was no primary — not that the Democrats’ talent bench is deep, but it might have helped to have a competitive sorting — and, after a delusional bout of enthusiasm, we were quickly reminded why she crashed as a candidate in 2020.

More here.

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Peter E. Gordon in Boston Review:

From 2016 to 2020 Donald J. Trump served as forty-fifth president of the United States; now, he has secured his reelection and will assume office once again as president number forty-seven. It was Marx who left us with the memorable claim that events in history occur twice: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But today this slogan, memorable as it is, surely doesn’t apply, since Trump’s first term was already a farce, distinguished most of all as a spectacle of bluster and boasting that, despite his many plans, left the basic institutions of American democracy more or less intact. He said that he would build a wall across the full two thousand miles of the United States’ southern border and Mexico would pay for it. (His sadistic family separation policy destroyed the lives of thousands, but his administration built only about five hundred miles of the wall, much of it reinforcements to existing barriers, and American taxpayers bore the cost.) He said that he would dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. (He didn’t, and the ACA remains among the most popular achievements of the Obama administration.) He said that he would impose a ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. (He tried, with fitful success, though the courts dogged his efforts.) These promises came to us wrapped in the vacuous slogan that he would “Make America Great Again.” (Great? Hardly. It would be more accurate to say that America became an object of great derision and concern. Especially among our European allies, the fear arose that democracy in America, technically among the oldest democracies in the world, was showing signs of backsliding into autocracy.)

More here.

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