Christenna Fryar in The Guardian:

If there is one thing that all historians must make peace with, it is that it is hard, often impossible, to know how people in the past felt. Historical fiction has the upper hand in its ability to render the complex yet plausible emotions and motivations of historical figures. Categorised by the publisher as creative nonfiction, Ekow Eshun’s The Strangers is foremost a work of imagination that sits somewhere between history and fiction. In lyrical prose, it presents the lives of five Black men: Ira Aldridge, 19th-century actor and playwright; Matthew Henson, polar explorer; Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and political philosopher; footballer Justin Fashanu; and Malcolm X. Through them, the book moves from the early-19th century to the late-20th. More connects these men than race. Eshun selects moments when each one is in an exile of some kind, geographically and emotionally far away from what they once knew, questioning their place in the world, estranged in some way from their previous life.

More here.

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Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:

Worldwide, more than three million people lose their lives each year to lung-damaging conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or cystic fibrosis.¹ In contrast, fewer than 5,000 individuals per year are fortunate enough to receive life-saving lung transplants.² Transplant recipients still face many challenges, however, including a lifetime of immunosuppressant medications with potentially severe side effects and a more than 40 percent transplant failure rate in the first five years.³

In a recent study in Science Translational Medicine, transplantation immunologist Rainer Blasczyk and his team at the Hannover Medical School presented a potential solution to these problems in a minipig model.⁴ Instead of administering immunosuppressants, which Blasczyk likened to blinding the patient’s immune system, leaving the individual vulnerable to infections and even certain types of cancer, the researchers suppressed key immune proteins in the donor lung, rendering it immunologically invisible.⁵ Modifying the organ instead of the recipient isn’t a new idea, but it is an important one, said Jeffrey Platt, a transplantation biologist at the University of Michigan Medical School who was not involved in this work. “If you can introduce something that will affect the donor organ, then you can preserve the immune system of the recipient. And in lung transplantation, that’s really important because the lung is one of the first targets of infectious organisms.”

More here.

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Carson McCullers

she died of alcoholism
wrapped in a blanket
on a deck chair
on an ocean
steamer.

all her books of
terrified loneliness

all her books about
the cruelty
of loveless love

were all that was left
of her

as the strolling vacationer
discovered her body

notified the captain

and she was quickly dispatched
to somewhere else
on the ship

as everything
continued just
as
she had written it

by Charles Bukowski
from Poetic Outlaws

Carson McCullers

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Srikanth Reddy at the Paris Review:

For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein—for all their many differences—enjoy a special status as “poets’ philosophers” in the annals of literary history. Other lofty thinkers fly under poets’ collective radar; I have yet to come across a volume of verse prefaced by a quotation from David Hume. What makes some philosophers, and not others, into poets’ philosophers remains a mystery to me. But I’ve never really thought of Hannah Arendt as one of them.

Unemotional, anti-Romantic, and doggedly insistent on expunging unruly feelings from collective life, Arendt may seem to possess the least lyrical of temperaments, but a new volume of her poetry reveals that the author of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours.

more here.

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Brian Patrick Eha in The Hedgehog Review:

If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning. Word order is, if not all, then nine tenths. I exaggerate, but I do so advisedly, as a corrective to the overemphasis on word choice, the unjust rule of the mot juste (recall here the old saying about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug) that dominates, to the detriment of other concerns, contemporary literature and creative writing. At times, this passion for the right—or the unusual—word reaps dividends; at others, it merely produces an uncalled-for flood of verbed nouns, portmanteaus, adjectives wrenched out of joint.

So in verse or prose you might find a sentence like “The jackdaw raises its head from the feeder, slipstreams away”—where that unusual verb, divorced from its usual meaning, is used in novel fashion to suggest fluidity of movement, speed. Or take the opening of “Pulse,” a short story recently published in The New Yorker: “He footed off his shoes, the logs balanced on an arm, and tugged the door shut.” Novelty is fine (so long as it’s not mistaken for originality), but it is hardly the only way to catch the reader’s eye, or, hold her attention. Word order all by itself can make a sentence new.

More here.

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John Naughton in The Guardian:

In 2011, the psychologist (and Nobel laureate) Daniel Kahneman proposed that we humans are bimodal animals capable only of two modes of thought. One (which he called “System 1”) is fast, instinctive and emotional. The other (“System 2”) is slower, more deliberative and more logical. The first doubtless evolved when we were hunter-gatherers, and served us well in that reality. The second, involving slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious thought, came later, as societies became more complex and uncertainty became an integral part of the human condition. Uncertainty is, says David Spiegelhalter, “all about us, but, like the air we breathe, it tends to remain unexamined”. Which is why he wrote a book about how to live with it.

Uncertainty, in Spiegelhalter’s view, is a relationship between an individual and the outside world. And, because of that, our personal judgments play an essential role whenever we are faced with it, “whether we are thinking about our lives, weighing up what people tell us, or doing scientific research”. And tolerance of uncertainty varies hugely among people: some are excited by unpredictability, while others are crippled by anxiety.

When dealing with uncertainty, Spiegelhalter argues, Kahneman’s System 1 is bad news. It “tends towards overconfidence, neglects important background information, ignores the quantity and quality of the evidence, is unduly influenced by how the issue is posed, takes too much notice of rare but dramatic events, and suppresses doubt”.

More here.

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Elaine Scarry in the Boston Review:

The key structure of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is audible in the September 4, 2024, speech by U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Cara Abercrombie: “Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the United States or its allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime.” The doctrine, which the United States has embraced since the Cold War, aims to prevent an adversary from launching a nuclear weapon by assuring that any first strike will be followed by a retaliatory second strike, whose effects will equal or exceed the original damage and may eliminate the adversary altogether. This annihilating reflex of deterrence is equally audible in the quiet words of the Department of Defense in its web page on “America’s Nuclear Triad,” its sea-based, land-based, and air-based delivery platforms: “The triad, along with assigned forces, provide 24/7 deterrence to prevent catastrophic actions from our adversaries and they stand ready, if necessary, to deliver a decisive response, anywhere, anytime.”

Framed wholly as defensive and preventative (and from day to day, largely successful in deflecting our attention from the actual first use stance the country has had for nearly eighty years), deterrence would almost have the aura of peacekeeping, were it not the mental platform undergirding our fourteen Ohio-class submarines (each able to singlehandedly destroy one of Earth’s seven continents), four hundred land-based ICBMs, and sixty-six B-52 and B-2 stealth bombers. Although the physical act of unbuilding the nuclear architecture is easily within reach—it would take at most four weeks to dismantle all the nuclear triggers throughout the world, a decisive because disabling first step—the mental architecture of deterrence is the major impediment to doing so.

More here.

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Matthew James Seidel at The Millions:

Difficult relationships between fathers and sons have been fodder for writers for millennia. Sometimes these relationships are simply power struggles, as in so many Greek myths, such as the conflicts first between Uranus and his son Cronus and later Cronus and his son Zeus. Or their conflicts are representative of social strife, as in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. And other times, like in many of Franz Kafka’s most famous works, they’re about, well, Kafka. But no one writing today has explored the mercurial nature of the father-son relationship with more humor and fresh insight than Adam Ehrlich Sachs. Now, with the publication of his third book, Gretel and the Great War, Sachs is broadening his canvas to put this core dynamic in the context of social upheaval, obsession, and, above all, legacy.

For those unfamiliar with Sachs, reading his three books in chronological order offers an opportunity to see a writer honing his voice and developing a unique style. But perhaps the best way to appreciate Sachs, particularly his growth as a storyteller, is to examine the three literary father figures who have each had an increasingly significant influence on his works, beginning with Kafka.

more here.

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Belinda Luscombe in Time Magazine:

The early days of the pandemic were a complicated time for a lot of couples.

But it’s fair to say that in the sprawling, Pacific lodge-style home of Melinda and Bill Gates, the complexity was particularly acute. The foundation the couple co-led had been running a flu study in their hometown of Seattle, which had detected early cases of COVID-19 in the region. There were video calls with infectious-disease specialists they funded, world leaders, epidemiologists, journalists, and public-health officials. Two of their three children were home from school full time. Plus, the couple was secretly separated, trading off who lived at the family house and who was elsewhere while they tried to figure out if they could stay married.

“It was a super intense time for us as a foundation,” says Melinda French Gates, sitting in her industrial-chic office in Kirkland, Wash., three days after exiting the world-changing organization that bore her name for almost 25 years. “The other thing I would say, though, is, unusually, it gave us the privacy to do what needed to be done in private. You know, I separated first before I made the full decision about a divorce. And to be able to do that in private while I’m still trying to take care of the kids, while still making certain decisions about how you’re going to disentangle your life—thank God.”

More here.

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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells¹. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body. “I can eat sugar now,” said the woman, who lives in Tianjin, on a call with Nature. It has been more than a year since the transplant, and, she says, “I enjoy eating everything — especially hotpot.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.

James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.” The study, published in Cell today, follows results from a separate group in Shanghai, China, who reported in April that they had successfully transplanted insulin-producing islets into the liver of a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes². The islets were also derived from reprogrammed stem cells taken from the man’s own body and he has since stopped taking insulin.

More here.

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George Dunn at Compact Magazine:

George Parkin Grant, who died in 1988 at the age of 69, was world-famous in Canada—at least, that was the jest frequently made at the philosopher’s expense. The joke reflected his status as a public intellectual who made frequent appearances on Canadian Broadcast Corporation radio programs but never attracted much attention south of the 49th parallel. There are many reasons for his obscurity outside his home country, but one cause was surely his intense Canadian nationalism, coupled with his outspoken criticism of the form of liberalism he saw embodied in the hegemon to the south.

Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of one of Grant’s most influential works, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. In it, he rebuked Canada’s political establishment for bowing to pressure from the Kennedy administration to accept nuclear missiles on Canadian soil. This capitulation to Washington, he prophesied, heralded the demise of Canadian sovereignty and ensured its absorption into its southern neighbor as a “branch-plant satellite” of the emerging universal empire helmed by the United States. But the loss of Canadian sovereignty was only a local episode in a broader process that was erasing cultural particularity across the globe. Liberals trumpet diversity, but Grant argued that our global civilization would permit pluralism only in private pursuits.

more here. (h/t Cynthia Haven)

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Alexander Prescott-Couch in Aeon:

In Human, All Too Human (1878), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that ‘A lack of historical sense is the original failing of all philosophers.’ In accusing philosophy of lacking historical sense, Nietzsche was echoing broader trends in 19th-century thought. In comparison with the ‘philosophical’ 18th century, the 19th century is sometimes described as the ‘historical’ century, one in which investigation into more universal features of human reason gave way to increased focus on how particular historical trajectories influence language, culture and moral assumptions.

The 19th century is also what one might call the ‘philological century’. Philology is the critical study of written sources, including their linguistic features, history of reception and cultural context. Today, the term sounds outmoded, evoking dusty, learned tomes of fastidious source criticism. However, philology was a leading intellectual discipline in 19th-century Germany due to a flurry of methodological developments that revolutionised our understanding of ancient and sacred texts. New rigorous techniques of verifying sources were developed, merely speculative hypotheses were discouraged, more detailed comparative studies of language were conducted. While such methods were scholarly, sometimes bordering on scholastic, their application had significant cultural impact, spilling out of scholarly journals into broader public consciousness.

More here.

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Benjamin Kunkel in Sidecar:

The great Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, who died on Sunday at 90, cast a cold eye on death. Death in our society derives its glamour and pathos from representing the extinction of an allegedly unique, not just solitary but singular individual, once upon a time ideal-typically a ‘genius’ or ‘hero’ and today more often a celebrity. And Jameson would have none of this. What I mean will take a moment to explain.

Generally speaking, this determinedly utopian thinker adhered to the ban on graven images of utopia enunciated by Adorno, and refrained in his analysis of various classical and sci-fi utopias from speculation of his own about the lineaments of an ideal society. But his reticence was not absolute, and, in a handful of places within his massive body of writing, Jameson presents the deprecation of personal mortality as a feature of Utopia (his majuscule). One striking instance lies in his essay, in The Seeds of Time (1994), on Andrei Platonov and the Soviet novelist’s utopian picaresque Chevengur. The thought of Utopia, Jameson says, ‘obliges us to confront the most terrifying dimension of our humanity, at least for the individualism of modern, bourgeois people, and that is our species being, our insertion in the great chain of the generations, which we know as death. Utopia is inseparable from death in that its serenity gazes calmly and implacably away from the accidents of individual existence and the inevitability of its giving way: in this sense it might even be said that Utopia solves the problem of death, by inventing a new way of looking at individual death, as a matter of limited concern, beyond all stoicism.’

More here.

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Andrew Yamakawa Elrod in Phenomenal World:

The Biden administration first embraced the slogan of “modern supply-side economics” six months before anyone uttered the phrase “Inflation Reduction Act.” Speaking before the World Economic Forum in January 2022, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained that what distinguished the Biden administration’s “modern supply-side economics” from the Reagan-era variety was its program to raise labor-force participation and productivity through government spending and increased taxation of capital—to create a “supply-side expansion…that distributes expanding national income more equally.” “Three aspects of the Biden agenda” would address “longer-term structural problems, particularly inequality”: reform of key social-service industries such as elder and childcare, increased public expenditure on education, and corporate taxes. All that remained, Yellen declared, was passage of “the Build Back Better legislation that remains under consideration in Congress.”

Six months later, congressional reality parlayed “modern supply-side economics” into something else entirely. Speaking in Detroit in September 2022, Yellen outlined three different pillars that defined the administration’s “modern supply-side” approach. In place of increasing labor-force participation through paid-leave requirements, child-care price caps, public pre-K classes, and nursing-home reform, there was “resilience to global shocks.” Where there had been community-college funding to raise labor productivity, there were now business subsidies for “expanding productive capacity.” Rather than raising corporate taxes, there was now “economic fairness.” The meaning of “modern supply-side economics,” Yellen explained, was about “reducing economic and national security risks” posed by “countries like China.”

How did this transformation occur?

More here.

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Lighten

Most people live in almost total darkness… people,
millions of people whom you will never see,
who don’t know you, never will know you,
people who may try to kill you in the morning
live in a darkness which — if
you have that funny terrible thing which
every artist can recognize, and no artist can define
— you are responsible to those people to lighten,
and it does not matter what happens to you.

James Baldwin
from Poetic Outlaws

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