Steven Shapin in London Review of Books:

The​ tragedy of Thomas Kuhn’s life was to have written a great book. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, when he was forty, and he spent the rest of his life distressed by its success. It has sold 1.7 million copies, and has been translated into 42 languages. Very few academic books sell in those numbers and scarcely any are still seen as state of the art sixty years after publication. Structure crosses disciplines. It is read by historians, sociologists and philosophers whose business is thinking about what science is and how it changes, and also by scientists with a reflective turn of mind. It is read by theologians pondering the differences and similarities between science and religion, and by anthropologists considering the characteristics of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ thought. The book has insinuated itself into everyday language. Kuhn plucked the word ‘paradigm’ from linguistics – where it referred to the permutation of forms having a common root, like the conjugation of verbs or the declension of nouns – and repurposed it as the term for a key regulative resource in scientific inquiry, a concrete model of ‘the right way to go on’. Eventually, lots of things meant to be thought of as ‘innovative’ and ‘good’ were branded as ‘paradigm shifts’: new ways of producing factory-farmed chicken, the latest solution to the difficulties posed by Brexit for trade arrangements in Northern Ireland, the emergence of celebrity chef culture.

A New Yorker cartoon shows tramps leaning against a wall: ‘Good news – I hear the paradigm is shifting.’ Another has two men, their clothes billowing out in the wind, speculating that there must have been a ‘paradigm shift’. You can buy a bumper-sticker: ‘Shift Happens: Buddy Can You Paradigm?’

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Clare Watson in The Scientist:

In medieval times, long before there were bathrooms in private homes, bathing was a social affair. Visitors to Dutch and German bathhouses in the late Middle Ages emerged from such spaces cleansed of more than just their grime: They also received basic medical care from “baders,” bathhouse proprietors who were also licensed health practitioners, skilled at lancing abscesses and pulling teeth. Steam rooms, mineral baths, cupping, and herbal concoctions were also commonly used to alleviate ailments from scabies and leprosy to migraines and miscarriages.

Not until Victorian times would bathhouses become a little noticed but influential item in public health policies. But according to Janna Coomans, a historian at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who studies public health in medieval cities, bathhouses provided access to more affordable medical care as baders charged less than doctors for their services. Sweating, bloodletting, and lancing were attempts to correct an imbalance in the four “humors”—phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile—that were thought to cause ill health. While these practices may seem unhygienic by modern standards, bathhouses enabled “a large part of the population to maintain health and hygienic norms, according to their ideas of health,” Coomans says.

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Jonathan D. Teubner in The Hedgehog Review:

Around noon on March 9, I learned that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had shut down the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), where my company has some of its accounts. My co-founder and I were in the middle of a call with some of our advisors, all experienced hands in the tech startup world actively advising and investing in tech startups like ours. The Zoom room was empty within seconds. We all immediately knew what that meant: The cash we pay our employees and vendors was now locked up—perhaps indefinitely.

Rumors, and rumors of rumors, that SVB was teetering on the edge of collapse had been circulating in private chat groups throughout the week. On Tuesday, I began receiving nervous calls asking what I thought. By Thursday, the dam had finally broken. CEOs, CFOs, and anyone with signature privileges spent large portions of the day attempting to transfer as much cash as possible to their other accounts—or to set up new ones, if they had accounts only at SVB, as many startups did. We were fortunate to have started out with good old-fashioned community bank accounts, but others weren’t so lucky. Their money was likely stuck in financial purgatory for some time.

We had a bank run on our hands, of course. Some of the wealthiest corporations and investors in the world attempted to withdraw $42 billion in a single day, nearly a quarter of the bank’s $200 billion of deposits.

More here.

Leila Sloman in Quanta:

On Sunday, February 5, Olof Sisask and Thomas Bloom received an email containing a stunning breakthrough on the biggest unsolved problem in their field. Zander Kelley, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, had sent Sisask and Bloom a paper he’d written with Raghu Meka of the University of California, Los Angeles. Both Kelley and Meka were computer scientists, an intellectual world apart from the additive combinatorics that Sisask and Bloom study.

“My mind was just blown. Like, wait, have they really done this?” said Sisask, a lecturer at Stockholm University. Kelley and Meka, outsiders to the field of combinatorics, said they had found a new — and dramatically lower — limit on the size of a set of integers in which no three of them are evenly spaced (ruling out combinations like 3, 8 and 13 or 101, 201 and 301).

More here.

Leanne Ogasawara in The Rumpus:

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is probably the first book that comes to mind when one imagines a pilgrim’s travels in paradise. A virtual best-seller since it was penned in the early fourteenth century, the book is divided into three parts: hell, heaven, and the intermediary realm of purgatory. It’s interesting to consider how it has always been the part about hell that has garnered the most attention. Not just by scholars either—it seems most people are, as a general rule, more interested in hell than in heaven.

Why is it so seemingly difficult for us to imagine paradise?

Pico Iyer, in his new book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, embarks on a journey to find out. The first thing he realizes is that many of the Shangri-Las of the world are places fraught with issues. And some of these –like the Holy Land and Kashmir—are more like warzones. Iyer explains in the opening pages of the book that “after years of travel, I’d begun to wonder what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict—and whether the very search for it might not simply aggravate our differences.”

More here.

Curtis White at Lapham’s Quarterly:

As Fernando Pessoa reminds us, our lives are lived inside social fictions: “I tried to see what was the first and most important of those social fictions…The most important, at least in our day and age, is money.” But money is just part of a much larger complex, what Wilde called “the slavery of custom,” in which we have no choice but to live. As the January 6 insurrection and its aftermath have shown, we tell ourselves stories about patriotism—patriotism with no content other than its own fury. Whether it comes from the rioter in chief, the rioters themselves, or the House members impaneled to investigate them, uncritical love of the nation-state generates unfreedom, violence, and, too often, death, as dear Mother Russia has shown once again, in Ukraine. As John Dos Passos dramatized in The 42nd Parallel, patriotism and the rioting that too often attends it are no new thing, as when a “cordon of cops” sweeps up ideological combatants of left and right: “Look out for the Cossacks.”

Of course, knowing that we live in social fictions and knowing how to escape them are different things.

more here.

Lawrence Weschler at The Atlantic:

Fifteen years ago, a distinguished academic publisher brought out a densely argued, lavishly illustrated, wildly erudite monograph that seemed to completely reconceive the study of Johannes Vermeer. The author, an art historian named Benjamin Binstock, said that he had discerned the existence of an entirely new artist—Vermeer’s daughter Maria, the young woman Binstock had also identified as the likely model for Girl With a Pearl Earring—to whom he attributed seven of the 35 or so paintings then conventionally ascribed to Vermeer. To hear Binstock tell it, Maria’s paintings include one of the most popular: Girl With a Red Hat, at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. He believes that painting and another at the National Gallery are self-portraits by Maria, and that she is also the artist behind two out of the three Vermeers at the Frick, in New York; two out of the five at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also in New York; and one in the private Leiden Collection.

more here.

When I Am 19 I was a Medic

…. —for Lee, who sculpts Light

All day I always want to know
the angle, the safest approach.
I want to know the right time
to go in. Who is in front
of me, who is behind.
When the last shots were fired,
what azimuth will get me out,
the nearest landing zone.

Each night I lay out all my stuff:
morphine, bandages at my shoulder,
just below, parallel, my rifle.
I sleep strapped to a .45,
bleached into my fear.
I do this under the biggest tree,
some nights I dig
in saying my wife’s name
over and over.

I can tell true stories
from the jungle. I never mention
the fun, our sense of humor
embarrasses me. Something
warped it out of place
and bent I drag it along—
keeping track of time spent,
measure what I think we have left.

Now they tell me something else—
I’ve heard it all before
sliding through thee grass
to get here.

by D.F. Brown
from Unaccustomed Mercy, Soldier-Poets
……. of the Vietnam War
Texas Tech University Press, 1989

Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker:

Seven years ago, during the Republican Presidential primary, Donald Trump appeared onstage at Dordt University, a Christian institution in Iowa, and made a confession of faith. “I’m a true believer,” he said, and he conducted an impromptu poll. “Is everybody a true believer, in this room?” He was scarcely the first Presidential candidate to make a religious appeal, but he might have been the first one to address Christian voters so explicitly as a special interest. “You have the strongest lobby ever,” he said. “But I never hear about a ‘Christian lobby.’ ” He made his audience a promise. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power,” he said. “You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well.”

By the time Trump reluctantly left office, in 2021, his relationship with evangelical Christians was one of the most powerful alliances in American politics. (According to one survey, he won eighty-four per cent of the white evangelical vote in 2020.) On January 6th, when his supporters gathered in Washington to protest the election results, one person brought along a placard depicting Jesus wearing a maga hat; during the Capitol invasion, a shirtless protester delivered a prayer on the Senate floor. “Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you, and that love Christ,” he said.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Researchers have hijacked a molecular ‘syringe’ that some viruses and bacteria use to infect their hosts, and put it to work delivering potentially therapeutic proteins into human cells grown in the laboratory. “It’s astonishing,” says Feng Jiang, a microbiologist at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing. “It is a huge breakthrough.” The technique, published in Nature on 29 March¹, could offer a new way to administer protein-based drugs, but will need more testing before it can be used in people. With further optimization, the approach might also be useful for delivering the components needed for CRISPR–Cas9 genome editing.

…While Zhang and his collaborators searched for ways of transporting proteins into human cells, microbiologists were learning more about an unusual group of bacteria that use molecular spikes to pierce a hole in the membranes of host cells. The bacteria then transport proteins through the perforation and into the cell, exploiting the host’s physiology in their favour.

More here.

Sarah Miller at The Paris Review:

My bathroom is ugly. My bathroom is so ugly that when I tell people my bathroom is ugly and they say it can’t be that ugly I always like to show it to them. Then they come into my bathroom and they are like, Holy shit. This bathroom is so ugly. And I say, I know, I told you.

Let me list the elements of my ugly bathroom: the sink has plastic handles and it’s impossible to clean behind the faucet. Or, you can clean behind it but it’s difficult, so it’s always grimy. The sink itself, the basin, is made of some sort of plastic material that probably used to be white and is now off-white.

The water pressure in the sink is almost nonexistent. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with the sink itself but when your bathroom looks like this you don’t think, Oh wow, I really want to improve the water pressure, because bad water pressure goes with the decor.

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Matthew Mead at Cabinet Magazine:

To my eye, the clock looked like a ruin. Frostbitten shards of its face lay about in the weeds. In places, northerly winds had worn the gilt ornamentation around the dial’s circumference to a sandy, amorphous mass. Everywhere, paint flaked. Mold grew on a slender lip above the lower numerals. At around fourteen feet high, the clock was only just accommodated on the side of the old barn. Brickwork was visible beneath the whitewash at the center of its face. The clock’s movement had stopped months before my arrival, but the downward-dragging force of ruination continued to act on the clock’s hands, pulling them from five-after to half-past three. There, the hands had finally seized. All else moved on: vines crept over the top of the barn and down the north face of the pitched terracotta; weeds grew seven or eight feet tall; cracks ran in the walls of the barn.

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Claire Heywood at The Millions:

In the early fifth century BC, the Olympic boxer Kleomedes was disqualified from a match after killing his opponent with a foul move. Outraged at being deprived of the victory and its attendant prize, he became “mad with grief” and tore down a school in his hometown, killing many of the children who were studying there. Kleomedes managed to escape the angry mob that soon pursued him, and disappeared without trace. When the community sought answers from the oracle at Delphi, they were told that Kleomedes was now a hero, and should be honored accordingly with sacrifices. This the people did, and continued to do for centuries to come.

This story, recorded by the ancient writer Pausanias, feels bizarre to modern readers. But to the ancient Greeks who honored Kleomedes, even after he had murdered their children, the oracle’s answer may not have seemed strange at all.

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Jessica Hamzelou in the MIT Technology Review:

A unique form of brain stimulation appears to boost people’s ability to remember new information—by mimicking the way our brains create memories.

The “memory prosthesis,” which involves inserting an electrode deep into the brain, also seems to work in people with memory disorders—and is even more effective in people who had poor memory to begin with, according to new research. In the future, more advanced versions of the memory prosthesis could help people with memory loss due to brain injuries or as a result of aging or degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, say the researchers behind the work.

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Mark Rollins in The Common Reader:

In 1961, the Jaguar E-type sports car (called the XKE in the United States), designed by Malcolm Sayer, premiered at a major auto show in Geneva Switzerland. Enzo Ferrari declared it to be the most beautiful car ever made. Ferrari himself is, of course, a legendary figure in the history of car design. Ferrari’s judgment was thus stunning in a certain respect. It is very common for cars to be put into stereotypical national, cultural, or ethnic categories. So, for example, there are sleek Italian sports cars, elegant but staid British sedans, and powerful American “muscle” cars. Ferrari’s assessment unsettled these standard categories. This was an Italian expert heaping praise on the beauty of a British car.

About 35 years later, Ferrari’s assessment would seem to have been vindicated. A version of the original Jaguar E-type was put on display in the Museum of Modern Art. It could be argued then that what Ferrari called the most beautiful car ever made—a functional design object—had finally come to be seen as a work of art.

More here.