Nahil Mohana at LitHub:

On the first day of November, I stopped writing my diary of this despicable war. Not because I was bored and desperate for it to end, nor because I was unable to preserve my memories amid all the trauma, but simply because my phone broke. I had been writing my diaries on the notepad app of my phone, when it went the way of so many things in this war—patience, hope, dreams for the future—and broke.

I am still in Gaza and haven’t yet been moved to the south, as thousands of other Gazans have been. My daughter, Habiba, and I left our place near the Al-Karamah Towers, in North Gaza City, and moved to Al Nasr Street, closer to the city centre. This was a joint decision made by the whole family, given the lack of relatives we could stay with in the south. We continue to bear the consequences of this decision, but often take pride in making it, especially when we hear about the difficult conditions of those in Rafah and elsewhere: the scarcity of basic resources, being crammed with dozens of others into a single apartment, or sometimes a garage.

more here.

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Ezra Klein in The New York Times:

Sometimes you stumble across a line in a book and think, “Yeah, that’s exactly how that feels.” I had that moment reading the introduction to Zadie Smith’s 2018 book of essays,
“Feel Free.” She’s talking about the political stakes of that period — Brexit in Britain, Donald Trump here — and the way you could feel it changing people. She writes: “Millions of more or less amorphous selves will now necessarily find themselves solidifying into protesters, activists, marchers, voters, firebrands, impeachers, lobbyists, soldiers, champions, defenders, historians, experts, critics. You can’t fight fire with air. But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.”

What Smith is describing felt so familiar. I see it so often in myself and people around me. And yet you rarely hear it talked about — that moment when politics feels like it demands we put aside our internal conflict, our uncertainty, and solidify ourselves into what the cause or the moment needs us to be, as if curiosity were a luxury or a decadence suited only to peacetime.

More here.

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Nick Thompson in Vice:

South Bronx-born, but raised in Long Island, Meryl Meisler returned to New York City in 1975 and fell in love with the place. Known for her intimate and evocative photography of New York’s late-night pavements and clubs, Meisler’s immersive work captures an America unlike today. In recent years, the renowned snapper has released a string of photo books from her early days: A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick (2014), Paradise & Purgatory: SASSY ’70s Suburbia & The City (2015), and New York PARADISE LOST Bushwick Era Disco (2021). Her latest limited edition book, Street Walker, features vivid images of NYC and other US cities taken in the 70s and 80s, and will be available on a made-to-order basis from November 1st via Italian publishers Eyeshot, so preorder before September 30 or miss out forever.

VICE: Is it strange to keep revisiting your youth through these shots?
Meryl Meisler: I didn’t really look at the photographs seriously before doing the books. This time, I looked through and discovered things I never even peeked at before. It’s like New York City: You sit on the subway, you could see someone reading the Bible, the Torah, whatever, and they’re reading it again and again and again, and they’re finding new meanings. I feel like I’m looking at my work and finding new meanings. I have barely touched upon my archival work from ‘73 till now.

More here.

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Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

by Wendell Berry
from Poetic Outlaws

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Adwait Patil in the New York Times:

On Oct. 27, 2022, the photojournalist Saiyna Bashir was interviewing the musician Michael Brook in his Los Angeles studio when she learned something that prompted an urgent text to Zakir Thaver, her filmmaker colleague in Pakistan:

“New undiscovered album.”

Bashir and Thaver were producing an upcoming documentary called “Ustad” about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — the celebrated Pakistani singer who died in 1997 at age 48 — and Brook, the silver-haired musician whose ambient work has crossed paths with Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno and Michael Mann, had just revealed that he was working on an unreleased Khan song.

It was part of “Chain of Light,” an album Brook recorded with Khan at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in England more than three decades ago. “Ya Gaus Ya Meeran,” the track in question, was an unreleased Khan qawwali, a song based on the devotional poetry of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam.

More here.

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Killian Fox in The Guardian:

What jumps to mind when you think about the impending AI apocalypse? If you’re partial to sci-fi movie cliches, you may envisage killer robots (with or without thick Austrian accents) rising up to terminate their hubristic creators. Or perhaps, a la The Matrix, you’ll go for scary machines sucking energy out of our bodies as they distract us with a simulated reality.

For Yuval Noah Harari, who has spent a lot of time worrying about AI over the past decade, the threat is less fantastical and more insidious. “In order to manipulate humans, there is no need to physically hook brains to computers,” he writes in his engrossing new book Nexus. “For thousands of years prophets, poets and politicians have used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now computers are learning how to do it. And they won’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. They could manipulate human beings to pull the trigger.”

Language – and the human ability to spin it into vast, globe-encircling yarns – is fundamental to how the Israeli historian, now on his fourth popular science book, understands our species and its vulnerabilities.

More here.

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Joya Chatterji at Literary Hub:

How did we become ‘Indians’, ‘Pakistanis’ and ‘Bangladeshis’ after the two divisions of the subcontinent? Given that national identity was so fragile and contested before 1947, how did it become a matter so ‘natural’ after it? Or did it? Did nation-making projects succeed?

Partition is often thought of as a physical process, a massive earthquake that sent different segments of the subcontinent hurtling apart in different directions. Because India and Pakistan (and later Bangladesh) evolved differently in certain important respects, and because the chatter about these differences has been so loud, the facts of their shared predicaments in the early years of nation-building have been all but drowned out. India and Pakistan evolved similar strategies in the face of comparable challenges, albeit on different scales. Common patterns were formed and persist across South Asia, partition notwithstanding. On both sides of the Radcliffe Line, nation-building shared similar premises. It tried, but failed, to produce ersatz citizenries. It is as well that we remember this.

More here.

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Ryan Gilbey at The Current:

The Long Good Friday whisks audiences across late-1970s London, taking in everything from the Concorde landing at Heathrow Airport to the desolate undeveloped Docklands, from the chauffeur-driven cars at the Savoy Hotel to the beat-up jalopies south of the Thames. The film’s heart, though, is in the East End, and so are its roots. By 1964, when Barrie Keeffe joined the Stratford Express as a cub reporter, the area was a hotbed of organized crime. Its figureheads were the twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray, notorious gangsters who insinuated themselves into the celebrity set. Keeffe had witnessed too much of their carnage to be dazzled. At eighteen, he interviewed a man who had been nailed to a warehouse floor by the brothers over a territorial dispute: “Put it down as a do-it-yourself accident,” the man said, refusing to snitch even as he nursed his stigmata. When Keeffe came to write his first film, he put in a crucifixion scene, fittingly for a story set over Easter.

That script, which Keeffe pitched as “terrorism meets gangsterism,” pitted Harold Shand, a Krays-style East End gang lord, against the IRA.

more here.

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Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

In “Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World,” Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of science, asks about the relationship between human beings and nature. He starts by considering our place in the broader time line. Scientists often emphasize our belatedness: a biologist might stretch her arms wide, explain that the tip of her left middle finger represents the beginnings of planet Earth, and then say that all of human history could fit into the tip of the opposite finger. “If we stick to our species, then we do rush on in a half-dressed flurry at the very end,” Godfrey-Smith concedes. “But suppose we think of ‘us’ as life as a whole.” Earth is four and a half billion years old, and life has existed here for 3.7 billion; meanwhile, the universe is about fourteen billion years old. This means that we’ve been around for “over a quarter of the total span,” Godfrey-Smith writes. From this perspective, we’re not freshmen, but seniors.

A lot separates us from the kind of life that existed billions of years ago.

More here.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

A drug that slows aging may already be on the market.

Scientists have long been interested in metformin, a widely prescribed drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes, for its potential to delay aging. In worms, fruit flies, and rodents, the drug—on average less than a dollar per pill—shows promising anti-aging effects.

Last week, a study in Cell added to the evidence that metformin could slow the ravages of time. Scientists gave male monkeys aged the equivalent of 52 to 64 in human years a daily pill for three years and monitored their physical health and cognition. Compared to naturally aging monkeys, metformin preserved their learning and memory abilities, reduced brain shrinkage, and restored their neurons to a more youthful state. The monkeys’ “brain age” was dialed back by almost 6 years, or around 18 human years.

Metformin’s effects extended beyond the brain. The drug reduced chronic inflammation—a hallmark of aging—in multiple tissues, slowed liver aging, and boosted cellular mechanisms that protect the liver. Kidneys, lungs, and muscles were also “rescued” from age-related problems, their gene expression profiles reverting to more youthful ones. The study bridges the gap between rodents and primates. The dosages of metformin given were on par with those for diabetes management and could inform upcoming clinical trials.

More here.

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Certainty

If it is real the white
light from this lamp, real
the writing hand, are they
real, the eyes looking at what I write?

From one word to the other
what I say vanishes.
I know that I am alive
between two parentheses.

Certeza

Si es real la luz blanca
de esta lámpara, real
la mano que escribe,  ¿son reales
los ojos que miran lo escrito?

De una palabra a la otra
lo que digo se desvanece.
Yo sé que estoy vivo
entre dos paréntesis.

by Octavio Paz
from The Collected Poems 1957-1987
Carcanet, 1983

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Cory Oldweiler at the LARB:

ABOUT TWO HOURS south of the grandiose architectural amalgam that is Zagreb lies the equally impressive natural wonder of Plitvice Lakes National Park, a network of waterfalls and lakes serenely carving its way through the lush limestone plain. The park, at the northeastern edge of Croatia’s largest and least-populated county, Lika-Senj, is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the region, and also the site of the first casualties of the succession of Balkan wars in the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s disintegration in the 1990s.

Lika-Senj, and indeed much of the region, had been on edge for almost a year when, on Easter Sunday, March 31, 1991, a group of rebellious Serbian forces ambushed a bus full of Croatian police officers sent to reassert control of Plitvice. Two men were killed in the shoot-out—one Serb and one Croat—and seven weeks later, the Croatians took a page from the Slovenians and overwhelmingly voted to secede from Yugoslavia. Implementation of the independence declaration was delayed until October, in a futile attempt to avert escalation of the conflict, but by the following year, the half-century experiment that was Yugoslavia remained in name only, as the lingering union between Serbia and Montenegro.

more here.

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Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian:

Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking anthology My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies was first published in the US in 1973, though Gillian Anderson only read it for the first time when she took on the role of sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education. “Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me,” she says of Friday’s letters and interviews in the introduction to Want, a new collection billed as the 21st-century update. Considering the issues raised by Friday’s book – what women want, and how that relates to the gender roles imposed on us – led Anderson to question how much might have changed in the intervening half-century, and to issue an appeal for answers.

Where Friday put an anonymous advertisement in a newspaper, the Dear Gillian project’s online portal had the potential to reach a global audience, and the responses amounted to nearly 1,000 pages. Anderson’s role has been to curate these into a more manageable selection, organised thematically: “Kink”, “Strangers” and “Power and Submission” are among the more obvious headings.

More here.

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Michael Le Page in New Scientist:

The number of global deaths directly attributable to antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections is forecast to rise from a record 1.27 million a year in 2019 to 1.91 million a year by 2050. In total, antibiotic resistance is expected to kill 39 million people between now and 2050 – but more than a third of that toll could be averted if we take action.

Resistance occurs when microbes evolve the ability to survive drugs that were deadly to them, meaning they no longer clear up infections. Because of the widespread use of antibiotics, in farming as well as healthcare, a growing number of microbes are becoming resistant and spreading globally, but the full scale of the problem is unclear.

To address this, Eve Wool at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle and her colleagues have tried to estimate the annual number of deaths due to antibiotic resistance from 1990 to 2021. “Our estimates are based on more than 500 million records,” says Wool. “We have a lot of coverage geographically and across time.”

More here.

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Ajantha Subramanian & Lori Allen at Public Books:

Amid ethno-nationalism’s current worldwide rise, India and Israel have witnessed new manifestations of authoritarianism and state capture by far-right movements championing ethno-religious dominance and purity. Both have seen a sharp uptick in state and vigilante violence, suppression of press freedom, and scapegoating of political opponents and minorities. Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu have also been bolstered by support from European and American governments and from (respectively) Hindu and Jewish Americans. Crafting effective strategies of containment in such cases demands comparative analysis. In that spirit, this three-part series of Recall This Book conversations offers insight into Hindu and Israeli ethno-nationalisms as distinct but comparable phenomena.

The two subsequent pieces will focus on Israeli ethno-nationalism and on the parallels to be drawn between these two cases. Here, Ajantha and Lori talk with anthropologist Balmurli Natrajan about different aspects of the Hindu nationalist movement. The conversation explores its ideological pillars, caste as disruptive of the Hindutva project, the instrumentalization of religion, and divergent strategies used to incorporate or scapegoat Dalits, Muslims, the Left, and the US Hindu diaspora. The exchange is particularly relevant now in the immediate aftermath of India’s 2024 general election, which saw mixed results for the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP.

More here.  And here are Part 2 and Part 3.

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Joanna Pocock at Aeon Magazine:

Seeing Tomoko’s young, contorted body was the moment I realised there was such a thing as horror and that those who are most affected are often victims of chance or fate. Here was a girl who, by dint of being born in Minamata rather than Ottawa, had been poisoned. All these years later, I am unnerved by the fact that Tomoko’s appearance was so unlike a healthy teenager that Sontag, writing about this very picture, could not make out that she was female, and referred instead to ‘Smith’s photograph of a dying youth writhing on his [sic] mother’s lap’. The youth was not male nor was she dying – she lived another five years. The composition of this photo echoes the classic pose of the Virgin Mary holding a dying Christ. Sontag sees it as a ‘Pietà for the world of plague victims’. Tomoko died for us all, is the subtext here – but it is important to note that she did not die from an uncontainable virus. She died because of a human-made environmental catastrophe.

more here.

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