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Alec Wilkinson at the NYT:

In “The Secret Lives of Numbers,” Kate Kitagawa, a mathematics historian, and Timothy Revell, a science writer, intend by reasoned and scholarly means to overthrow the “assumption that the European way of doing things is superior.”

Their book begins with prehistoric counting methods (one of the earliest was based on the number 60, unlike our own base-10 system) and goes on to the fourth-century Alexandrian women Pandrosion, a geometer who solved the difficult problem of doubling the volume of a cube (ancient mathematicians lacked the algebra that makes this straightforward), and Hypatia, who wrote mathematical commentaries, including on Apollonius’ “Conics,” an investigation of circles, ellipses and other shapes. Kitagawa and Revell speculate that Johannes Kepler, who described the orbits of the planets in the 17th century, may have been influenced by her contributions.

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Temples of Smoke

Fire shimmied and reached up
From the iron furnace and grabbed
Sawdust from the pitchfork
Before I could make it across
The floor or take a half step
Back, as the boiler room sung
About what trees were before
Men & money. Those nights
Smelled of greenness & sweat
As steam moved through miles
Of winding pipes to turn wheels
That pushed blades and rotated
Man-high saws. It leaped
Like tigers out of a pit,
Singeing the hair on my head,
While Daddy made his rounds
Turning large brass keys
In his night-watchman’s clock,
Out among columns of lumber & paths
Where a man and woman might meet.
I daydreamed some freighter
Across a midnight ocean,
Leaving Taipei & headed
For Tripoli. I saw myself fall
Through a tumbling inferno
As if hell was where a boy
Shoveled clouds of sawdust
Into the wide mouth of doubt.

by Yusef Komunyakaa
from New American Poets of the ’90s
David R. Godine, publisher, 1991

John Simpson in The Guardian:

Anne Applebaum, as anyone familiar with her writing will know, is well-positioned to catalogue this new age of autocracy. Like her, Autocracy, Inc. is clear-sighted and fearless. I remember disagreeing with her genteelly at editorial meetings in the early 1990s, when she was writing about the danger that Russia’s post-communist implosion would one day present for the west, after Boris Yeltsin left office. She talked even then about the need for Nato to build up its defences against the time when Russia would be resurgent; while I, having spent so much time in the economic devastation of Moscow and St Petersburg, thought the best way for the west to protect itself was by being far more generous and welcoming towards Russia. Events have shown which of us was right, and it wasn’t me.

Autocracy, Inc. is deeply disturbing; it couldn’t be anything else. But Applebaum’s research is as always thoroughgoing, which makes it a lively pleasure to read.

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Grace Wade in New Scientist:

A newly identified brain pathway in mice could explain why placebos, or interventions designed to have no therapeutic effect, still relieve pain. Developing drugs that target this pathway may lead to safer alternatives to pain medications like opioids.

If someone unknowingly takes a sugar pill instead of a pain reliever, they still feel better. This placebo effect is a well-known phenomenon in which people’s expectations lessen their symptoms, even without effective treatment. “Our brain, on its own, is sort of able to fix the pain problem based on the expectation that a medication or treatment might work,” says Grégory Scherrer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

To understand how the brain does this, Scherrer and his colleagues replicated the placebo effect in 10 mice using a cage with two chambers. One chamber had a burning hot floor, while the other didn’t. After three days, the animals learned to associate the second chamber with pain relief.

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Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:

Once upon a time, Henderson argues, the upper classes used to signal their status by purchasing expensive material goods. But as the kinds of goods that used to be reserved for members of the upper classes have become available to a much wider stratum of society, the affluent and highly educated have resorted to different status symbols to signal their superior standing. This is why luxury beliefs—jargon-heavy political slogans calling for positions that are widely unpopular among the general population—have substituted for luxury goods.

The concept of luxury beliefs achieved a feat shared by few neologisms: it entered “the discourse.” It is now frequently invoked on social media. It has been used in a key speech by a British Home Secretary. It has its own Wikipedia page.

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Ed Simon at Lit Hub:

My desire to write a cultural history of the Faust legend goes back a few years earlier than my pilgrimage to the Deptford churchyard, around the time that I attended an adaptation of the play entitled faustUS staged by the theater collective 404 Strand in my hometown of Pittsburgh. Basing the script on the shorter, so-called “Text A” of Marlowe’s play, a tauter and more cryptic work that cuts the slapstick that mars more traditional productions of Doctor Faustus, the performance was hallucinatory, ritualistic, psychedelic, incantatory. A work of conjuration. With the audience invited to sit in an ad hoc theater-in-the-round constructed on the stage of the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, we all faced a rusted iron-cage in which the action of the play would be set. I was in the front row.

My most distinctive memory of that performance was the actor who played Faust, shirtless and sinewy, glistening with sweat beneath the oppressive stage lights, hoisting a shaggy, bestial mask of a horn-twisted ox over his head, and wildly gesticulating to thrash metal so loud that my fillings were humming, the necromancer then taking a full loaf of white bread out of its antiseptic bag and shredding it into the gapping maw of the bovine mask, bits of spongy whiteness spraying onto all of us sitting in the front row.

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H. Alan Scott in Newsweek:

If you ask Bette Midler how she got her part in the new film The Fabulous Four, it wouldn’t have anything to do with her legendary status as a performer, or that she’s an Oscar-nominated actor. “I think they needed a ham, a big ole ham. So, I got that part.” Midler plays Marilyn, a widow getting remarried who rekindles a friendship with her three college girlfriends, played by Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally. “No actor doesn’t like to chew the scenery, even if they don’t admit it. So, to have the permission to pull out all the stops is always great.” What was also great was working with her three costars. “Working with these these girls…girls, girls, oh my God, we’re 100! These women! Working with these women was really an eye-opener because everybody’s process is different.”

Part of what makes Midler’s performance so fun is that it gives longtime fans of hers another taste of her Divine Miss M stage persona, albeit through Marilyn. “Sometimes when I meet people, they expect me to be her, and I’m not her. I’ve got her, and then I’ve got me. And since I’ve taken a step back from that truly active life of touring and stage shows, I find myself getting quieter and quieter. I know people want her to come back. I do love her. And in a way, she’s still tweeting, but in real life, you can’t be on 24/7. You’ll die. You’ll just die.”

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Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

A climate scientist who was demoted for speaking out by the administration of former US president Donald Trump is seeking an investigation into her case and demanding changes to personnel policies to prevent similar retaliation against others in future. Her supporters say the proposed reforms could help her agency, the US Geological Survey (USGS), as well as others safeguard science in the event of a second Trump administration, which many fear will be even more efficient than the first at sidelining science and scientists.

“This is not about what happened to me, it’s about what could happen to others,” Virginia Burkett, the scientist, told Nature, emphasizing that stronger protections are needed regardless of who wins the US presidential election in November. Burkett, whose position and salary as chief scientist for climate and land use at the USGS have been upgraded under President Joe Biden, laid out her allegations in a 200-plus-page complaint filed today with a federal watchdog agency that represents whistleblowers. She is represented by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit organization based in New York.

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A.W. Moore at the LRB:

Ludwig Wittgenstein’​s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book he published during his lifetime, is one of the greatest philosophical works of the 20th century. It might have been expected, when it first appeared in 1921, to have limited appeal. It is very much the work of a philosophers’ philosopher, forbiddingly technical in places and esoteric throughout. Yet it has gone on to capture the public imagination as few other philosophical classics have.

It consists of 525 sections, or ‘propositions’, ranging in length from four words to about a page and a half of text and diagrams. Each is given a decimal number, with the numbers indicating subordination and interconnection. Thus propositions 2.21 and 2.22 are comments on proposition 2.2, which is itself a comment on proposition 2, which is one of the seven top-level propositions. The propositions have an aphoristic quality. They are written with great compression, hardly any examples, and little explicit argument. They are for the most part general and abstract. Wittgenstein makes few concessions to his reader. But there is something undeniably awe-inspiring about their cumulative effect and about the concision with which they encapsulate his elaborate system of thought.

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On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn, in New England

It is what he does not know,
Crossing the road under the elm trees,
About the mechanism of my car,
About the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
About Mozart, India, Arcturus,

That wins my praise. I engage
At once in whirling squirrel-praise.

He obeys the orders of nature
Without Knowing them.
It is what he does not know
That makes him beautiful.
Such a knot of little purposeful nature!

I who can see him as he cannot see himself
Repose in ignorance that is his blessing.

It is what man does not know of God
Composes the visible poem of the world.
…………………………. . . . Just Missed him!

by Richard Eberhart
from Poet’s Choice
Time Life Books. 1962

Tracy Fessenden in The Conversation:

Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a nearby charity hospital on evidence of drug use, then lay for hours on a stretcher in the hallway, unrecognized and unattended. Her estate amounted to 70 cents in the bank and a roll of bills concealed on her person, her share of the payment for a tabloid interview she gave on her deathbed.

Today, Holiday is revered as one of the most influential musical artists of all time. Time magazine named her 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit” the song of the 20th century. “In this sad, shadowy song about lynching in the South,” Time wrote in 1999, “history’s greatest jazz singer comes to terms with history itself.”

Abel Meeropol, a New York City teacher and songwriter who used the pen name Lewis Allan, wrote “Strange Fruit” after seeing a photograph of a lynching that shocked and haunted him: “Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

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Ethan Siegel at Big Think:

Perhaps the greatest quest in particle physics, for perhaps half a century now, has been to find a discrepancy between theory and experiment when it comes to the Standard Model. One fascinating place to look is at the magnetic moment of the muon: a heavy, unstable relative of the electron. A Fermilab experiment known as “muon g-2″ has revealed a discrepancy between theory and experiment at greater than the 4-sigma level: approaching the gold standard for discovery. But is this evidence for new physics?

According to a new theoretical calculation, the answer is no: it’s a flaw in the technique used by the majority of the theoretical community. Using new lattice QCD techniques, theory and experiment align, suggesting that the puzzle has finally been solved. Here’s how.

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Guido Núñez-Mujica at Persuasion:

Last Tuesday, President Biden signed into law America’s first comprehensive nuclear energy bill since 2005. The landmark ADVANCE Act provides incentives for new nuclear technologies, reduces licensing fees, offers prizes for deploying improved nuclear technologies, and extends protection from liability related to the nuclear industry through 2045. It’s a huge win for pro-nuclear advocates like me, and holds out the promise of abundant, reliable, safe energy that generates no carbon. In a rare sign of bipartisan agreement in these times of division, the ADVANCE act passed the Senate with a vote of 88-2 and passed the House by 393-13.

Even before the new law was signed, nuclear power was already making a comeback. Unit 4 in Georgia’s Vogtle Nuclear Power came online last April, a year after its twin reactor, Vogtle 3. Nuclear plants Diablo Canyon in California and Dresden in Illinois were saved from premature closures by rowdy pro-nuclear protesters, including your correspondent. Now, if the administration gets its way, these will be followed by a huge new raft of reactors. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has said that to achieve its climate goals, the United States needs to triple its nuclear capacity and build 200 more reactors by 2050.

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Jessie Kindig at The Point:

Here is Transcendentalism at its best, my favorite part, running wild with the imitative impulse. Like the German Romantic thinkers of whom they were quite fond, New England’s transcendentalists sought a kinship between body and mind, between the rational and the passionate, between—as Goethe’s science writing began to chart—the patterns of nature and the patterns of the human body and soul. In his famous 1836 essay “Nature,” Emerson alluded to the “occult relation between man and the vegetable”; in Thoreau’s journal from 1840, he concluded, “So the forest is full of attitudes, which give it character. In its infinite postures I see my own erectness, or humbleness—or sneaking.” 

As our veins branch so too do trees branch, as tides rise and ebb so too our blood beats; to accept nature is to become ourselves more fully, for already, we are of it. This was also a theology. Nature, Emerson says, is the route through which Man reaches God, because Nature is a metaphor for God. Nature is the tool and the occasion, Emerson says, not the revelation: “The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” Maybe. 

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Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist:

The gut’s sensory system is a touchy subject thanks to specialized epithelial cells that line the gut and behave like touch sensors in the skin.¹ These cells are sensitive to mechanical stimuli and communicate information about “gut feelings” to neurons in the gut as well as those that send messages to the brain.² To understand the neuro-epithelial connections that conduct the grand symphony of digestion, a team of scientists at the Mayo Clinic orchestrated a unique collaboration of their own, combining their expertise in microfluidics, organs-on-a-chip, epithelial organoids, enteric nerves, and gut sensing.

In a study published in Microsystems & Nanoengineering, the researchers described a new microfluidic coculture platform that mimics the anatomy of gut tissue by modeling neuro-epithelial connectivity.³ This device allows scientists to study the subtle ways in which neurons and epithelial cells interact, which until now has been challenging because of the variable cell culture conditions needed to grow these different cell types.

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Dante Stewart in Time Magazine:

America currently finds itself in a storm. A dreadful, at times unbelievable storm. A storm so dire and visceral that it seems to be the stuff of fiction and fantasy. From the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, the questions that aren’t being answered, the throwing the fist in the air, the Democrat fumbles and internal shambles, to the continuous bloodshed in Gaza, to an airmen burning himself alive, to students being tear gassed just days before graduation—everything is hard. We are tired. And each day, as we watch the clouds form and move closer this way, we feel a sense of impending doom and dread. We are not okay. Nothing feels safe. And I am praying for us, truly, because what’s ahead will be far worse than what’s behind.

In times of crisis, be it the 1870s, 1960s, or the 2010s—each era some form of racial and political reconstruction to their name—there was always the question of what type of country would we be “after this.” At all of these points, the American experiment—for that is what this country has always been—has been rocked and challenged to its core.

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