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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Philip Ball in The Guardian:

Along the driveway to James Lovelock’s remote house of Coombe Mill was a warning one might hardly expect amid the tranquil Devon hills: a radiation hazard sign. It was not there simply to deter unwanted snoopers, for what lurked in Lovelock’s private laboratory adjoining his house was truly hair-raising: radioactive sources, TNT and semtex. If there had ever been a fire, Lovelock laughed, “it would’ve blown up the house”.

For most of his career, almost until he became a centenarian, this scion of the environmental movement conducted work for the British security establishment, including explosives research for the forces in Northern Ireland. When he met the queen to receive his CBE in 1990, he responded to her famous question “And what do you do?” with “I’m sorry, I can’t talk about it.” The incongruity of Lovelock and his second wife, Sandy, standing reverently in their garden before a statue representing the Earth goddess Gaia, yards away from research given to Lovelock by MI5 because it was too dangerous for official channels, exemplifies the contradictions of the man and his extraordinary life. In The Many Lives of James Lovelock, Guardian environment journalist Jonathan Watts does it justice.

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Nina Pasquini in Harvard Magazine:

Reading didn’t come naturally for Abigail, a seventh grader at a public middle school in Cambridge. “It was challenging when I started early on, when I was in kindergarten, learning the ABCs,” she remembers. English is her second language, Arabic her first, and when she was younger, the letters and sounds of English weren’t intuitive.

By middle school, she could read individual words and short passages, but struggled to comprehend longer texts. Then, during sixth grade and the first half of seventh grade, she worked with literacy coach Emma Weinreich, Ed.M. ’19, who helped her to understand what she read. Abigail learned strategies for what Weinreich called “reading with a purpose”: asking herself questions before and after reading a passage, or watching relevant videos before tackling a text about an unfamiliar topic. Intervention also provided her a space to focus and receive one-on-one help, Abigail says. (To protect their privacy, Abigail and other students interviewed for this story have been given pseudonyms.)

Today, Abigail is out of intervention and reads at grade level. Her reading skills have not only made school easier, but provided her with new ways of understanding herself, other people, and the world. Her favorite part of reading is “imagining what’s happening in your head,” she says. This is why she prefers chapter books over graphic novels: she gets to direct the scenes. “Sometimes, I change the characters’ looks a little bit in my imagination,” she says. “I imagine them how I like. It makes reading books more fun for me, which is how I read a lot of books this year.”

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Nina’s Blues

Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.

What you can’t know
is that after you died
All the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching

On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.

You won’t be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.

Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.

by Cornelius Eady

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Alexander Manshel in The Nation:

The novels recognized by major literary prizes have largely abandoned the present in favor of the past. Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary.

If we look back to the middle of the 20th century, we can see that the kinds of books that were short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award then were mostly about contemporary life: J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and a host of others by the likes of Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and John Updike. And these aren’t outliers. Between 1950 and 1980, about half of the novels short-listed for these and the National Book Critics Circle Award were set in the present, narrating “the way we live now” in all its complexity.

Fast-forward to the present, and the past has taken over. A historical novel has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 12 out of the last 15 years, and historical fiction has made up 70 percent of all novels short-listed for these three major American prizes since the turn of the 21st century.

More here.

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Steve Nadis in Quanta:

“Neural networks are currently the most powerful tools in artificial intelligence,” said Sebastian Wetzel(opens a new tab), a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “When we scale them up to larger data sets, nothing can compete.”

And yet, all this time, neural networks have had a disadvantage. The basic building block of many of today’s successful networks is known as a multilayer perceptron, or MLP. But despite a string of successes, humans just can’t understand how networks built on these MLPs arrive at their conclusions, or whether there may be some underlying principle that explains those results. The amazing feats that neural networks perform, like those of a magician, are kept secret, hidden behind what’s commonly called a black box.

AI researchers have long wondered if it’s possible for a different kind of network to deliver similarly reliable results in a more transparent way.

An April 2024 study(opens a new tab) introduced an alternative neural network design, called a Kolmogorov-Arnold network (KAN), that is more transparent yet can also do almost everything a regular neural network can for a certain class of problems.

More here.

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From Project Syndicate:

Kishore Mahbubani: Western diplomats must first understand how much power has shifted from Europe to Asia. In 1980, the European Union’s GDP was ten times larger than China’s. Today, the two are roughly equal. Goldman Sachs projects that China’s GDP will be nearly double that of the EU by 2050. When power shifts, behavior must change. European diplomats have become addicted to sanctions and threats. They must now break that addiction, and return to the traditional means of diplomacy: persuasion and compromise.

Also, it was foolish of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to suggest the expansion of NATO to Asia. NATO’s militaristic culture would pose a threat to the longstanding peace in the region. More broadly, Europeans need to change their attitude toward Asia, learning from the region, instead of lecturing it.

More here.

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Alexander Zaitchik in The New Republic:

In the 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke was the face of futurism. A deep-sea explorer, inventor, and science-fiction author, Clarke dazzled Anglophone audiences with visions of global computer and satellite networks, space travel, and artificial intelligence. Against his boundless technological optimism, the Cold War could appear but a blip. This sleight of exuberance drove interest in his Wellsian articles and essays, collected in 1962’s Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible. The adages that anchor that book—“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—appeared just as a 14-year old prodigy named Ray Kurzweil was teaching himself to build computers in his family home in Queens, New York. Six decades later, Kurzweil still quotes Profiles of the Future in his lectures and writing. And when it comes to understanding Kurzweil’s signature idea—the merging of human and artificial intelligence that he calls the Singularity—it’s useful to look at the screenplay Clarke wrote with Stanley Kubrick a few years later.

More here.

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Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:

When Julie Moreno arrived at Texas A&M University as a first-generation student in 2000, she wanted to work in veterinary medicine. But the opportunity to work in a research laboratory during her time as an undergraduate ignited her passion for science and changed the course of her life. “Before that, I was never exposed to research,” said Moreno. “I didn’t even know it was an option.”

Once she had discovered this career path, she never looked back. After completing her undergraduate degree, she applied to a PhD program at Colorado State University (CSU), where her interest in neuroscience began to blossom.  “I love the brain,” she enthused. “It’s super exciting because there’s so many unknowns—like a big puzzle that we haven’t figured out yet.” In her graduate work, Moreno investigated the neurotoxic effects of manganese exposure on brain development, exploring the roles of glial cells and neuroinflammatory pathways in mediating these effects and identifying estrogen as a potential protective factor.^1,2 She impressed fellow lab members, including Katriana Popichak, an undergraduate researcher at the time, with her dedication to her research as well as her unflagging commitment to helping others.

More here.

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