Max Kozlov in Nature:

Breaking a fast carries more health benefits than the fasting itself, a study in mice shows¹. After mice had abstained from food, stem cells surged to repair damage in their intestines — but only when the mice were tucking into their chow again, the study found. But this activation of stem cells came at a price: mice were more likely to develop precancerous polyps in their intestines if they incurred a cancer-causing genetic change during the post-fasting period than if they hadn’t fasted at all. These results, published in Nature on 21 August, show that “regeneration isn’t cost-free”, says Emmanuelle Passegué, a stem-cell biologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, who wasn’t involved in the study. “There is a dark side that is important to consider.”

Fast way to health

Researchers have been investigating the potential health benefits of fasting for decades, and there is evidence that the practice can help to delay certain diseases and lengthen lifespan in rodents. But the underlying biological mechanisms behind these benefits have been a mystery. In 2018, Ömer Yilmaz, a stem-cell biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and his colleagues found that stem cells are likely to be implicated. During fasting, these cells begin burning fats rather than carbohydrates as an energy source, leading to a boost in their ability to repair damage to the intestines in mice².

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Cynthia Zarin at The Paris Review:

A myth about Yoko Ono is that she came from nowhere and became a destroyer of worlds. The truth is otherwise. Yoko Ono—now ninety-one—was born in 1933, in Tokyo. Her father was a successful banker and a gifted classical pianist; her mother an art collector and philanthropist. Ono attended a progressive nursery school where the emphasis was on music: the children were taught perfect pitch and encouraged to listen to everyday sounds and translate them into musical notes. In 1943, she and her brother were evacuated to the countryside. Basic provisions were scarce. For hours, they lay on their backs looking at the sky. They said to each other: “Imagine good things to eat. Imagine the war is over.” She returned to Tokyo in 1945. She was president of her high school drama club; in a photo taken at the time, her hair is bobbed and she is wearing what looks like a cashmere sweater set. At Gakushuin University, she was the first female student to major in philosophy. Her family relocated to Scarsdale, in Westchester County; she enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied music. After three years, she dropped out and moved to New York, supporting herself by teaching traditional crafts at the Japan Society. In 1960, she rents a loft downtown, at 112 Chambers Street, and begins to host musical performances.

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James Butler and Malin Hay at the London Review of Books:

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Fernando Rugitsky in Phenomenal World:

A recent visitor to the Amazon rainforest was surprised by the animal that was most conspicuous: instead of exotic jaguars, the region was populated by “the humpbacked, floppy-eared, glossy white Nelore cow, the ultimate conqueror of the frontier.” As the Brazilian economy was transformed into the world’s main provider of beef in the last two decades, the rainforest that houses 10 percent of the world’s animal species has been set alight to open the way for millions of grazing cows. Current estimates suggest that there are more than twice as many cows as people in the Brazilian part of the Amazon—around 63 and 28 million, respectively.

When President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva started his first term in office in 2003, Brazilian exports of frozen beef ranked third in the world by volume, representing around 11 percent of the total. By the end of his second term in 2010, Brazil ranked first, accounting for 23 percent of all frozen beef exported worldwide. In quantity, these exports increased from 317 to 781 thousand tonnes. Over the following decade, Brazilian beef supremacy deepened: in 2022 Brazil was the origin of 32 percent of all frozen beef traded internationally, exporting almost twice as much as India, the second largest exporter. The rise of Brazil as the stockyard of the world was tightly connected to the rise of China as an economic superpower: Chinese imports of frozen beef surged between 2002 and 2022 from eleven thousand to over two million tonnes.

A yet more dramatic story can be told about soya.

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Jamieson Webster in LA Review of Books:

IT’S WELL-WORN KNOWLEDGE that Freud was pessimistic. Add to pessimism, elitism. Freud thought a more truthful relation to one’s true motives was only possible to the select few who were willing to interrogate themselves at all costs. In fact, he was so grandiosely pessimistic that he counted his theories as one of the great blows to mankind along with Copernicus and Darwin: we are not the center of the universe, we are not some unique species set apart from the rest of life on earth, and we are not masters in our own house. Freud’s message is often watered down to mean that there are processes in the mind that we don’t know about, like the way computer software runs in the background, or that there are parts of ourselves that are hidden and only need to be carefully revealed. These gloss the extremity of his actual message that we fundamentally cannot know ourselves—but for the tip of an iceberg.

How does our lack of self-knowledge tip the scales of history? It is important that we know what we don’t know, and what we can’t know. There is no better curb to human hubris. Actions we take might be more ethical if undertaken with a strong sense of our human limitations. As we begin to reckon with the failures of Western democracy, especially regarding the rationality of politics and the fitness of political leaders, could we have a better sense of how little shared knowledge there is?

This is a timely moment for Patrick Weil’s The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (2023), which provides a reassessment of the much-disputed book that Freud and American ambassador William C. Bullitt wrote about Woodrow Wilson, speculating about the president’s mental health.

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Leo Robson in Sidecar:

Is there a ‘Seventh Generation’ of Chinese film-makers? It has not materialised in any formal sense, and the term is not in use. As a mode of classification, the idea of succession, one cohort following another – with no gaps in between – encompasses more than a century of cinema. But its ubiquity, at least among Western festival organisers and cinephiles, goes back forty years, to the emergence of the directors who were identified as the Fifth Generation though were, more significantly for descriptive purposes, the first to appear since the end of the Cultural Revolution and, with it, the reopening of the Beijing Film Academy. The graduating class of 1982 announced itself almost immediately, with Tian Zhuangzhuang’s September, Zhang Junzhao’s One and Eight, and – above all – Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, about a soldier’s relationship with a teenage girl set on Loess Plateau in Shanxi Province and shot by Zhang Yimou, who emerged as a director with the Mo Yan adaptation Red Sorghum (1988), which won the Golden Bear at Berlin. During the next five years, Zhang received a Silver Lion at Venice for Raise the Red Lantern, then a Golden Lion for The Story of Qiu Ju, while Chen shared the Palme d’Or – with Campion’s The Piano – for Farewell, My Concubine.

These films, a rejection of the socialist-realist habits that had dominated earlier practice, were dramatic and pictorial, not dialogue-driven, and usually historical and rural in setting, literary in source. What came next, reflecting differences of social attitude as well as aesthetic inclination, was altogether harder-bitten, more self-conscious and self-consciously abrasive, carnal, lo-fi, ad hoc. Films like Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days, Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards, Lou Ye’s Weekend Lover, and Guan Hu’s Dirty, set in the capital in the modern day or recent past, and typically concerned with members of the post-Tiananmen generation working as artists, musicians, or petty criminals, began to appear less than a decade after the first films of the Fifth Generation, and coincided with the height of its international renown.

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Samuel Bagg in Boston Review:

In late 2018 a massive protest movement shook French society. Named for the yellow vests, or gilets jaunes, worn by demonstrators, the movement was initially sparked by opposition to a fuel tax hike, but its demands soon expanded. Among them were reforms to enable more direct popular input into political decisions.

Within weeks, President Emmanuel Macron rescinded the fuel tax increase. He soon offered ambitious democracy initiatives of his own: first, a “Great Debate” involving more than 10,000 local meetings and 2 million online comments, and second, a Citizens’ Convention on Climate (CCC), which asked 150 randomly selected citizens to propose solutions to the climate crisis, with the promise that their proposals would be put directly to a referendum.

Each side in this drama claimed the mantle of democracy. Defenders of the fuel tax pointed out that it was implemented by representatives who had been duly elected by the people of France; the gilets jaunes, they complained, were attempting to circumvent this legitimate process. Meanwhile, protesters criticized modern representative government, charging that it favors wealthy elites and insisting that genuine popular rule requires direct input via tools such as initiatives and referendums. And Macron’s own proposals aimed at transforming adversarial confrontation into respectful deliberation—reflecting an ideal of democracy as a process of reason-giving, collaborative discussion, and mutual learning.

These three visions—representative democracy, direct democracy, and deliberative democracy—represent intuitive and popular ways of thinking about what democracy means. Each has clear virtues, highlighting certain decision-making tools—elections, referenda, and citizen’s assemblies—that can help to ensure public power serves genuine public interests. By placing so much emphasis on the search for the right procedures, however, all three visions ultimately sell democracy short.

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Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post:

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The QPP

The quietly pacifist peaceful
always die
to make room for men
who shout. Who tell lies to
children, and crush the corners
of old men’s dreams.
And now I find your name,
scrawled large in someone’s
blood, on this survival
list.

by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1996

Kimberly Przeszlowski in The Conversation:

In 2021, a driver in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ran a red light, striking and killing a 7-year-old and injuring his father. The suspect fled the scene and eventually escaped to Mexico. Using camera footage and cellphone data, the Albuquerque Police Department’s real-time crime center played a crucial role in identifying, apprehending and charging the person at fault. The driver was ultimately sentenced to 27 years in prison, providing a measure of justice to the grieving family.

Real-time crime centers are specialized units within police departments that use the latest technology to monitor public spaces and record incidents. The New York City Police Department was the first to institute a real-time crime center in 2005.

Real-time crime centers often focus on video surveillance, using closed-circuit television systems, license plate scanners, body cameras worn by officers and drone cameras. The centers sometimes also include gunshot detection and computer-aided dispatch systems, live or static facial recognition, cellphone tracking and geolocation data, and access to probation, parole and arrestee information. Police departments are adding the latest innovations, such as video analytics driven by deep learning artificial intelligence, to identify objects and assess subjects’ behavior.

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Jan H. J. Hoeijmakers in Nature:

We are born; we grow up; we become an adult and perhaps reproduce. Then we might increasingly develop ailments or chronic diseases, before we decline and eventually — inevitably — die. These are the facts of life, at least hitherto, however much many of us might wish for them to be otherwise.

Perhaps things could be different. Progress in ageing research has opened up the prospect that ageing and death might be deferred, possibly even for hundreds of years, according to some people. Is that wishful thinking? The timely, illuminating book Why We Die by 2009 chemistry Nobel co-laureate Venki Ramakrishnan explains the science — and, importantly, separates fact from fiction.

Over the past century or so, better hygiene, improved living conditions and health-care innovations, such as antibiotics and vaccines, have seen human life expectancy more than double. But the maximal lifespan has hit a ceiling at about 120 years.

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Stephen Holmes at The Ideas Letter:

Today’s disheartening resurgence of authoritarianism, xenophobia, race-baiting, brazen sexism and religious zealotry, not to mention homicidal rampages in the name of ethnic identity, makes rallying to the defense of a beleaguered liberalism into an intellectual and moral imperative. Even Alexander Lefebvre, a delightfully entertaining Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sidney, acknowledges in an aside that “liberal institutions and values are threatened worldwide.”  But his stylishly chatty and evangelizing new book aims to defend liberalism against a threat less grimly consequential than those making newspaper headlines.  The danger to which he draws our attention is more bookish and professorial than blood-dimmed and existential.  In making his eloquent case for liberalism, he says little about the malignant movements of the far right thriving on political confusion and division in the United States and the European Union.  Instead, he concentrates his hostile fire on a fashionable but unjustifiably cramped interpretation of the teachings of his philosophical hero, John Rawls.

The mission he sets himself is to present Rawls’ thought in a new light and thereby overturn “the reigning orthodoxy of how to do political philosophy within the Anglophone academy.”

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A Kind of Biography

All night the language dog
gnaws at the meaning bone.
Soon the sea begins
to question its shuffling
from east to west, and the stars
their vast, ordinary circuits.
So my friend has fled into his father’s fields.
He leans against a fence
and wonders what the ant means
and the moonlit grasses as they bend
and spread and flow beneath
a wind whose beginning seems obscure
and whose end, uncertain.
He notices that something of himself
has set off with the wind
and that he is now two.
He wonders at this doubleness.
Back home, he sits in the kitchen,
and ordinary boy watching
his mother cook breakfast,
but something of him is in
another place, and some other thing
is with him even here.

by Nils Peterson
from The Dear Time of Our Talking
Frog On The Moon, Small Press, 2020

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Sahana Sitaraman in The Scientist:

When someone catches a lung infection, be it viral or bacterial, they usually show tell-tale symptoms, such as weakness, breathing difficulties, or brain fog. These indicators signal others to keep a safe distance from the contagious individual. But Pseudomonas aeruginosa can cause a range of lung infections, from mild bronchitis to life-threatening pneumonia, that are acutely asymptomatic yet cause inflammation and destruction of tissue.¹

In chronic infections, these bacteria form a biofilm of extracellular polymer matrix around themselves that shields them from antimicrobials, enzymes, and neutrophils.² Now, in a paper published in Cell, a group of scientists investigated the underlying mechanism and reported that the biofilm hides Pseudomonas bacteria from sensory neurons in mice, preventing signals from reaching the brain and reducing sickness symptoms.³ These findings provide a deeper understanding of how biofilm-forming bacteria evade the lung-to-brain communication channel, a potentially crucial tactic in persistent infections.

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