Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Human life expectancy dramatically increased last century. Compared to babies born in 1900, those born at the turn of the 21st century could live, on average, three decades longer—with many living to celebrate their 100th birthdays. In other words, for much of the century, each passing year added something like three months to a person’s potential time on Earth. To optimists in the longevity field, the rapid rise in life expectancy will likely continue at a steady, if not accelerated, pace.

Others have a more pessimistic view. In their predictions, humans will hit a natural ceiling, with the average person in developed countries living to an age far less than 100. A new study adds to the debate with analysis of data from 1990 to 2019. After examining life expectancy from eight countries with the longest living populations, plus those from Hong Kong and the US, the team reached a troubling conclusion: Despite innovations in healthcare, the increase in overall life expectancy is slowing down.

More here.

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Emilie Owens in Psyche:

It is midday on a Friday, and I am in a room with about a dozen teenagers at an international school in Oslo, Norway. We are talking about how and why they use TikTok, the digital video-sharing application. The prevailing mood is laid-back: though I am technically a media researcher, and they are technically my research participants, this group of 16- and 17-year-olds are joking around with each other and with me as we chat about the role of TikTok in their everyday lives. It’s a beautiful day – warm and summery – and everyone, including me, is in a fun weekend mood.

‘I dunno, it’s kind of hard to describe what I see on my For You page,’ says one of my participants.

‘Yeah, it’s like…’ another of them pauses, looking for the right word. ‘It’s just mostly brain rot, you know?’

I do not know. This is my first introduction to the term ‘brain rot’. Perplexed, I ask them what it means.

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Manuel Ansede in El País:

Terence Tao snorts and waves his hands dismissively when he hears that he is the most intelligent human being on the planet, according to a number of online rankings, including a recent one conducted by the BBC. He is, however, indisputably one of the best mathematicians in history. When he was two, his parents saw him teaching another five-year-old boy to count.

“That’s what my parents told me. I don’t remember this myself. They asked me who I had learned it from. I said, from Sesame Street,” says Tao, 49, who was born in the Australian city of Adelaide. When he was 11, he won a bronze medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. At 12, he took home silver. At 13, gold. At 21, he received his doctorate from Princeton University. At 24, he was already a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. And at 31, he won the Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize in his discipline.

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Seraj Assi in Jacobin:

The Palestinian Nakba produced, alongside death and displacement, a generation of writers who came of age in its aftermath. The moment seemed to demand a funereal tone from artists who had witnessed the tragedy. For them, a version of Theodor Adorno’s maxim, that to “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” rung true. Few broke the taboo.

Born in Haifa 102 years ago, Emile Habibi was an exception. His 1974 masterpiece, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, dared to approach the Nakba with irreverence; the Palestinian catastrophe was for him a tragicomic saga, which he depicted with a firm sense of irony. “Had it not been for your Shoah . . . then the calamity that remains the lot of my people would not have been possible,” he wrote in a 1986 article.

Habibi grew up under the system of military rule imposed on Palestinians within the newly established state of Israel between 1948 and 1966 and brought to an end in 1967, when Israel launched the Six-Day War against its Arab neighbors. This regime was, for Palestinians, a segregationist one: land appropriation and restrictions on movement as well as political and intellectual expression were its defining features.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

It’s not immoral to kick a rock; it is immoral to kick a baby. At what point do we start saying that it is wrong to cause pain to something? This question has less to do with “consciousness” and more to do with “sentience” — the ability to perceive feelings and sensations. Philosopher Jonathan Birch has embarked on a careful study of the meaning of sentience and how it can be identified in different kinds of organisms, as he discusses in his new open-access book The Edge of Sentience. This is an example of a question at the boundary of philosophy and biology with potentially important implications for real-world policies.

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David Mason at The Hudson Review:

For Christmas lunch, 1937, Virginia and Leonard Woolf hosted John Maynard Keynes and his wife, Lydia. Imagine the talk, which no doubt ranged widely, including gossip about younger writers like W. H. Auden, the recipient that autumn of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry from George VI himself. A lot of people were saying it: Auden was the man to watch. At only thirty, he was already regarded as England’s leading poet, head of a squadron of younger writers, including Louis MacNeice, C. Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender. According to Nicholas Jenkins’ important new book, The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England,^[1] Keynes was “offended by Auden’s standards of personal hygiene,” telling the Woolfs that the poet was “very dirty but a genius.”
 
We rarely associate Auden’s poetry with the slovenly and remember his tidy stanzas too often as something cold and oblique, iceberg verse. His early work has been published as The English Auden (1977), appearing to emphasize the national (even nationalist) poet, a thoroughly domesticated animal. As Jenkins argues in over 500 densely written pages, there is a lot of truth in this image.

more here.

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Social Security

No one is safe. The streets are unsafe.
Even in the safety zones, it’s not safe.
Even safe sex is not safe.
Even things you lock up in a safe
are not safe. Never deposit anything
in a safe-deposit box, because it
won’t be safe there. Nobody is safe
at home during baseball games anymore.

At night I go around in the dark
locking everything, returning
a few minutes later
to make sure I locked
everything. It’s not safe here.
It’s not safe and they know it.
People get hurt using safety pins.

It was not always this way.
Long ago, everyone felt safe, Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of wingéd dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

by Terence Winch
from Poetry 180
Edited by Billy Collins
Random House, 2003

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J. Hoberman at Artforum:

THERE’S A REASON why so many people regard Ronald Reagan as America’s last great leader. The further the monolithic Hollywood of the storied past recedes into the fragmented fun house of the media present, the more mythic the stellar avatars appear. One such divinity: straight-talking, honorable, unassuming, heroic Henry Fonda (1905–1982).

A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a “forgotten man” in the original “Bonnie and Clyde” film, You Only Live Once (1937). He was the protagonist of The Wrong Man (1956) and The Best Man (1964), and of 12 Angry Men (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and—thanks to his rebellious children—the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, Henry Fonda for President, the “quintessential American”? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary—what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life.

more here.

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Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

How does the brain process language—using sounds to form words, and assigning words their meaning? Recording the activity of single neurons in the language region of patients undergoing deep brain stimulation, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and MIT have been able for the first time to observe how semantic information is processed and represented by these cells during language comprehension. They’ve discovered that the brain uses contextual clues to decipher meaning, implying that understanding words and sentences is a dynamic, interpretive process.

Using tiny electrodes with radio antennas, they recorded neural activity from about 300 cells as participants (receiving treatment for conditions such as Parkinson’s and essential tremor dystonia) listened to stories read aloud. By tracking these neurons’ activity during natural speech processing, the scientists observed that individual cells responded selectively to specific word meanings, and reliably distinguished words from nonwords. And they found that the neurons’ activities were dynamic, reflecting the words’ meanings based on their specific sentence contexts (“He picked the rose” versus “He finally rose,” for example), rather than responding to the words as fixed memory representations. They were even able to show how the activity of ensembles of these cells could be used to accurately predict the broad semantic categories of related words (such as “rat” and “mouse”) as they were heard in real time during speech.

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Nic Fleming in Nature:

Reboot your immune system with intermittent fasting. Help your ‘good’ bacteria to thrive with a plant-based diet. Move over morning coffee: mushroom tea could bolster your anticancer defences. Claims such as these, linking health, diet and immunity, bombard supermarket shoppers and pervade the news. Beyond the headlines and product labels, the scientific foundations of many such claims are often based on limited evidence. That’s partly because conducting rigorous studies to track what people eat and the impact of diet is a huge challenge. In addition, the relevance to human health of results from studies of animals and cells isn’t clear and has sometimes been exaggerated for commercial gain, feeding scepticism in nutrition science.

In the past five or so years, however, researchers have developed innovative approaches to nutrition immunology that are helping to close this credibility gap. Whereas nutrition scientists have conventionally studied the long-term impacts of loosely defined Mediterranean or Western diets, for example, today they have access to tools that allow them to zoom in on the short-term effects — both helpful and harmful — of narrower food groups and specific dietary components, and to probe the molecular mechanisms underpinning the effects of foods on immunity.

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Witold Rybczynski at Literary Hub:

The car I bought in Hamburg had distinctive oval German export license plates, and an international registration sticker marked with a D, for Deutschland. As I drove through Holland on my way to Paris, more than once when asking for directions I received dirty looks, especially from older persons for whom the wartime German occupation was a living memory.

And, after all, my car’s godfather was Adolf Hitler himself. Opening the 1933 Berlin Motor Show as the newly appointed reich chancellor, he had announced a national policy to motorize Germany, which despite having invented the automobile a half century earlier, lagged other European countries in car ownership. Hitler called on the auto industry to produce an affordable people’s car, a volkswagen.

The automotive engineer who would realize Hitler’s vision was not a German native. Ferdinand Porsche (1875–­1951) was born in the small Bohemian market town of Maffersdorf in the Austro-­Hungarian Empire; after the First World War, he would become a citizen of the newly created Czechoslovak Republic.

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Daniel James Sharp at The Freethinker:

In The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (2008), Richard Dawkins writes:

Our ability to understand the universe and our position in it is one of the glories of the human species. Our ability to link mind to mind by language, and especially to transmit our thoughts across the centuries is another. Science and literature, then, are the two achievements of Homo sapiens that most convincingly justify the specific name.

And I think I am justified in saying that Dawkins himself is one of the few who have really managed to combine these two greatest achievements of humanity. In a corpus of work written over half a century, Dawkins has innovated and explained, and he has done so with the ear and eye of a poet. It is appropriate, then, that his new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, is a medley and a melody: a revisiting and extension of his previous ideas about evolution written with elegance and beauty. The very word ‘reverie’ suggests a pleasant and roaming meditation, which is exactly what The Genetic Book of the Dead is. Come to think of it, the quintessentially Dawkinsian phrase ‘a Darwinian reverie’ might just sum up Dawkins’s entire career. Call this book a Dawkinsian medley, or a Dawkinsian melody, then.

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Helena Kudiabor & Mark Buchanan in Nature:

Why are some countries richer than others? The 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to three researchers who have helped shed light on this fundamental question.

The income gap between the richest and the poorest nations has been widely documented. However, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and James A. Robinson from the University of Chicago in Illinois, have studied the evidence for why these inequalities persist.

The three economists, who will share the 11 million Swedish Kronor (US $1 million) prize for their findings, researched the impact of European colonization on various countries’ economies.

More here.

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Eliana Dockterman in Time Magazine:

Jeremy Strong is not known for his sense of humor. When getting dressed, he favors brown for its “monastic” connotation. He famously thought that Succession, the HBO show that shot him to stardom, was a straight drama when his co-stars believed it to be a comedy. When he sits down for our Zoom conversation in September—in a brown shirt, of course—he recites poetry and quotes Stella Adler, the godmother of Method acting. He describes Succession as reflecting “the Emersonian notion of the institution as the shadow of a man.”

But when I suggest that he could have capitalized on that show’s success by earning a hefty paycheck from a superhero movie—as many in his position have done—he cracks a self-aware smile. The notion that he, an actor who insists on disposing of his own personality in order to fully inhabit a character, would implement that extreme approach to play a spandex-wearing hero is, indeed, funny.

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Sneha Khedkar in The Scientist:

In 2019, the Food and Drug Administration approved Trikafta for patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) who have the most common disease-causing mutation. Trikafta targets the defective protein—a misfolded form of cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR)—produced as a result of this mutation.¹ However, people with other mutations in the CFTR gene, including those with variants that result in no proteins being made at all, cannot benefit from the drug. “Therefore, interest is being placed on genetic therapies,” said Daniel Siegwart, a chemist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Current gene therapy methods involve delivering mutation-correcting gene-editing tools directly to lung cells. However, such tools are often administered through inhalation and struggle to cross the thick, sticky mucus on their way to the cells.² Now, in a paper published in Science, Siegwart and his team showed that lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) delivered intravenously successfully delivered gene-editing tools to all lung cell types, including stem cells.³ This approach enabled long-lasting gene correction in a mouse model of CF and in patient cells. The LNP-based system offers new therapeutic avenues for delivering gene-editing tools to specific tissues.

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Aaron Neiman at Aeon Magazine:

Foucault was greatly disturbed by modern psychiatry’s ability to draw definitive lines between the ‘reasonable’ and the ‘unreasonable’. He came to see it as another way for society to punish and marginalise its most troublesome subjects. Deploying the metaphor of a circulatory system, he conceived of psychiatrists as figures of ‘capillary’ power – unlike the conspicuous, beating heart of the state, these authorities functioned as more subtle, distal agents of the status quo. Writing in the 1960s and ’70s, Foucault saw the psychoanalytic therapists of his day as the latest technicians managing ‘one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth of one kind or another’ – the confession. This is the idea that disclosing one’s inner darkness leads to salvation, truth, self-actualisation. There is an important similarity between how this dynamic plays out in the church and the clinic: ‘bravely confront and share the ugly things inside you’ equally describes the task of the confessional booth as it does the therapist’s couch. In both cases, there is more at play here than simple unburdening: it is not just that ‘shared sorrow is half sorrow’, as in the case of confiding in a friend, but also that having an adversarial encounter with yourself can be fruitful in some way.

This uneasy brush with the self, mediated through a person with social authority, is an essential feature of these confessional practices, and distinguishes them from other kinds of dialogue. Therapy is based on this same model: it is carefully choreographed around a highly skilled worker, one with the practical knowledge and symbolic authority to endow this interaction with the gravity it deserves.

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Maria Siciliano at The Millions:

Representing suffering—how to do it, when we should do it at all—has long been a subject of debate. At the center of that debate is the role of the audience: how do we, as readers and viewers, witness depictions of violence in images, films, plays, or literature?

In On Photography, Susan Sontag suggests that the act of looking, from a distance, is self-regarding. For writer and photographer Teju Cole, this visual and affective act is limited in what it can connote. Joining Sontag in conversation, Cole argues in Black Paper that the visual illustrates without condemning, becoming a collection of violence for consumption. But he ultimately concludes that in many ways, bearing witness to the existence of this suffering is better than ignoring its reality. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric—a hybrid work of poetry, prose, and visual art—boldly considered these questions, and many others, through its use of language and form. Recounting a series of mounting racial slights and aggressions, endured in daily life and in the media, the book has proven both prescient and timeless.

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So Live Your Life

So live your life that the fear of death
can never enter your heart. Trouble
no one about their religion; respect
others in their view, and demand
that they respect yours.

Love your life, perfect your life,
beautify all things in your life.
Seek to make your life long
and its purpose in the service
of your people.

Prepare a noble death song for the day
when you go over the great divide.

Always give a word or a sign of salute
when meeting or passing a friend, even
a stranger, when in a lonely place.

Show respect to all people
and grovel to none.

When you arise in the morning
give thanks for the food and for
the joy of living.

If you see no reason for giving thanks,
the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse
no one and no thing, for abuse turns
the wise ones to fools and robs
the spirit of its vision.

When it comes your time to die,
be not like those whose hearts
are filled with the fear of death,
so that when their time comes
they weep and pray for a little
more time to live their lives
over again in a
different way.

Sing your death song and die
like a hero going home.

Chief Tecumseh
from Poetic Outlaws

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