H. Alan Scott in Newsweek:

If you ask Bette Midler how she got her part in the new film The Fabulous Four, it wouldn’t have anything to do with her legendary status as a performer, or that she’s an Oscar-nominated actor. “I think they needed a ham, a big ole ham. So, I got that part.” Midler plays Marilyn, a widow getting remarried who rekindles a friendship with her three college girlfriends, played by Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally. “No actor doesn’t like to chew the scenery, even if they don’t admit it. So, to have the permission to pull out all the stops is always great.” What was also great was working with her three costars. “Working with these these girls…girls, girls, oh my God, we’re 100! These women! Working with these women was really an eye-opener because everybody’s process is different.”

Part of what makes Midler’s performance so fun is that it gives longtime fans of hers another taste of her Divine Miss M stage persona, albeit through Marilyn. “Sometimes when I meet people, they expect me to be her, and I’m not her. I’ve got her, and then I’ve got me. And since I’ve taken a step back from that truly active life of touring and stage shows, I find myself getting quieter and quieter. I know people want her to come back. I do love her. And in a way, she’s still tweeting, but in real life, you can’t be on 24/7. You’ll die. You’ll just die.”

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Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

A climate scientist who was demoted for speaking out by the administration of former US president Donald Trump is seeking an investigation into her case and demanding changes to personnel policies to prevent similar retaliation against others in future. Her supporters say the proposed reforms could help her agency, the US Geological Survey (USGS), as well as others safeguard science in the event of a second Trump administration, which many fear will be even more efficient than the first at sidelining science and scientists.

“This is not about what happened to me, it’s about what could happen to others,” Virginia Burkett, the scientist, told Nature, emphasizing that stronger protections are needed regardless of who wins the US presidential election in November. Burkett, whose position and salary as chief scientist for climate and land use at the USGS have been upgraded under President Joe Biden, laid out her allegations in a 200-plus-page complaint filed today with a federal watchdog agency that represents whistleblowers. She is represented by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit organization based in New York.

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A.W. Moore at the LRB:

Ludwig Wittgenstein’​s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book he published during his lifetime, is one of the greatest philosophical works of the 20th century. It might have been expected, when it first appeared in 1921, to have limited appeal. It is very much the work of a philosophers’ philosopher, forbiddingly technical in places and esoteric throughout. Yet it has gone on to capture the public imagination as few other philosophical classics have.

It consists of 525 sections, or ‘propositions’, ranging in length from four words to about a page and a half of text and diagrams. Each is given a decimal number, with the numbers indicating subordination and interconnection. Thus propositions 2.21 and 2.22 are comments on proposition 2.2, which is itself a comment on proposition 2, which is one of the seven top-level propositions. The propositions have an aphoristic quality. They are written with great compression, hardly any examples, and little explicit argument. They are for the most part general and abstract. Wittgenstein makes few concessions to his reader. But there is something undeniably awe-inspiring about their cumulative effect and about the concision with which they encapsulate his elaborate system of thought.

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On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn, in New England

It is what he does not know,
Crossing the road under the elm trees,
About the mechanism of my car,
About the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
About Mozart, India, Arcturus,

That wins my praise. I engage
At once in whirling squirrel-praise.

He obeys the orders of nature
Without Knowing them.
It is what he does not know
That makes him beautiful.
Such a knot of little purposeful nature!

I who can see him as he cannot see himself
Repose in ignorance that is his blessing.

It is what man does not know of God
Composes the visible poem of the world.
…………………………. . . . Just Missed him!

by Richard Eberhart
from Poet’s Choice
Time Life Books. 1962

Tracy Fessenden in The Conversation:

Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a nearby charity hospital on evidence of drug use, then lay for hours on a stretcher in the hallway, unrecognized and unattended. Her estate amounted to 70 cents in the bank and a roll of bills concealed on her person, her share of the payment for a tabloid interview she gave on her deathbed.

Today, Holiday is revered as one of the most influential musical artists of all time. Time magazine named her 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit” the song of the 20th century. “In this sad, shadowy song about lynching in the South,” Time wrote in 1999, “history’s greatest jazz singer comes to terms with history itself.”

Abel Meeropol, a New York City teacher and songwriter who used the pen name Lewis Allan, wrote “Strange Fruit” after seeing a photograph of a lynching that shocked and haunted him: “Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

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Ethan Siegel at Big Think:

Perhaps the greatest quest in particle physics, for perhaps half a century now, has been to find a discrepancy between theory and experiment when it comes to the Standard Model. One fascinating place to look is at the magnetic moment of the muon: a heavy, unstable relative of the electron. A Fermilab experiment known as “muon g-2″ has revealed a discrepancy between theory and experiment at greater than the 4-sigma level: approaching the gold standard for discovery. But is this evidence for new physics?

According to a new theoretical calculation, the answer is no: it’s a flaw in the technique used by the majority of the theoretical community. Using new lattice QCD techniques, theory and experiment align, suggesting that the puzzle has finally been solved. Here’s how.

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Guido Núñez-Mujica at Persuasion:

Last Tuesday, President Biden signed into law America’s first comprehensive nuclear energy bill since 2005. The landmark ADVANCE Act provides incentives for new nuclear technologies, reduces licensing fees, offers prizes for deploying improved nuclear technologies, and extends protection from liability related to the nuclear industry through 2045. It’s a huge win for pro-nuclear advocates like me, and holds out the promise of abundant, reliable, safe energy that generates no carbon. In a rare sign of bipartisan agreement in these times of division, the ADVANCE act passed the Senate with a vote of 88-2 and passed the House by 393-13.

Even before the new law was signed, nuclear power was already making a comeback. Unit 4 in Georgia’s Vogtle Nuclear Power came online last April, a year after its twin reactor, Vogtle 3. Nuclear plants Diablo Canyon in California and Dresden in Illinois were saved from premature closures by rowdy pro-nuclear protesters, including your correspondent. Now, if the administration gets its way, these will be followed by a huge new raft of reactors. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has said that to achieve its climate goals, the United States needs to triple its nuclear capacity and build 200 more reactors by 2050.

More here.

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Jessie Kindig at The Point:

Here is Transcendentalism at its best, my favorite part, running wild with the imitative impulse. Like the German Romantic thinkers of whom they were quite fond, New England’s transcendentalists sought a kinship between body and mind, between the rational and the passionate, between—as Goethe’s science writing began to chart—the patterns of nature and the patterns of the human body and soul. In his famous 1836 essay “Nature,” Emerson alluded to the “occult relation between man and the vegetable”; in Thoreau’s journal from 1840, he concluded, “So the forest is full of attitudes, which give it character. In its infinite postures I see my own erectness, or humbleness—or sneaking.” 

As our veins branch so too do trees branch, as tides rise and ebb so too our blood beats; to accept nature is to become ourselves more fully, for already, we are of it. This was also a theology. Nature, Emerson says, is the route through which Man reaches God, because Nature is a metaphor for God. Nature is the tool and the occasion, Emerson says, not the revelation: “The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” Maybe. 

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Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist:

The gut’s sensory system is a touchy subject thanks to specialized epithelial cells that line the gut and behave like touch sensors in the skin.¹ These cells are sensitive to mechanical stimuli and communicate information about “gut feelings” to neurons in the gut as well as those that send messages to the brain.² To understand the neuro-epithelial connections that conduct the grand symphony of digestion, a team of scientists at the Mayo Clinic orchestrated a unique collaboration of their own, combining their expertise in microfluidics, organs-on-a-chip, epithelial organoids, enteric nerves, and gut sensing.

In a study published in Microsystems & Nanoengineering, the researchers described a new microfluidic coculture platform that mimics the anatomy of gut tissue by modeling neuro-epithelial connectivity.³ This device allows scientists to study the subtle ways in which neurons and epithelial cells interact, which until now has been challenging because of the variable cell culture conditions needed to grow these different cell types.

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Dante Stewart in Time Magazine:

America currently finds itself in a storm. A dreadful, at times unbelievable storm. A storm so dire and visceral that it seems to be the stuff of fiction and fantasy. From the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, the questions that aren’t being answered, the throwing the fist in the air, the Democrat fumbles and internal shambles, to the continuous bloodshed in Gaza, to an airmen burning himself alive, to students being tear gassed just days before graduation—everything is hard. We are tired. And each day, as we watch the clouds form and move closer this way, we feel a sense of impending doom and dread. We are not okay. Nothing feels safe. And I am praying for us, truly, because what’s ahead will be far worse than what’s behind.

In times of crisis, be it the 1870s, 1960s, or the 2010s—each era some form of racial and political reconstruction to their name—there was always the question of what type of country would we be “after this.” At all of these points, the American experiment—for that is what this country has always been—has been rocked and challenged to its core.

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Deepa Bhasthi at The Paris Review:

Anthe (ಅಂತೆ) is one of my favorite words in the Kannada language. Somewhat meaningless by itself, it adds so much nuance and emotion when appended to a sentence that we Kannadigas cannot carry on a conversation without using it. Depending on the context and the speaker’s tone, anthe can convey an expression of surprise or the understanding that gossip is being shared. It could mean “so it happened,” “that’s how it is,” “apparently,” or “it seems.” The latter comes closest to a direct translation, but is a frustratingly simple choice. Anthe will only ever half-heartedly migrate to English. Banu Mushtaq, whose short stories I have been translating recently, and whose “Red Lungi” appears in the Summer 2024 issue of The Paris Review, employs anthe generously. Mushtaq’s characters use anthe when reporting something someone said verbatim or when guessing how something might have happened. In another instance, she uses echo words with anthe, another common characteristic of the Kannada language: one character utters anthe-kanthe to refer to hearsay. There are also a whole lot of ellipses in Mushtaq’s stories … her sentences often trail off … like so … She mixes up her tenses here and there.

more here.

Dream Variations

Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:

Yascha Mounk: What I’ve learned all of my life is that it’s good for people to be politically engaged. We want a politically active citizenry. We want people to care about politics.

You don’t completely disagree with that, but you worry that too many Americans and perhaps too many people in other democracies have become political hobbyists, that they care about politics in the wrong ways. What do you mean by that?

Eitan Hersh: I think that the way that 95% of people who are engaged in politics are engaged is not really politics. It’s like if we imagine that all football fans were actually football players. Of about a third of the country that pays attention to politics, nearly all of them are just engaging for some sort of emotional connection or for intellectual gratification. They want to learn stuff. And they’re not building the right skills or getting the right knowledge for them to inform votes or activism. They’re just doing a totally different thing.

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Daniel Kehlmann in The Guardian:

The great discoveries of humanity have always taught us that we are not masters in our own house: Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the cosmos, Darwin spoiled our species’ idea of divine creation, Freud showed that we neither know nor control our desires. The humiliation by AI is subtler but just as profound: we have demonstrated that for intellectual activities we considered deeply human, we are not needed; these can be automated on a statistical basis, the “idle talk”, to use Heidegger’s term, literally gets by without us and sounds reasonable, witty, superficial and sympathetic – and only then do we truly understand that it has always been like this: most of the time, we communicate on autopilot.

Since I’ve been using the large language model, I can actually perceive it: I’m at a social event, making small talk, and suddenly, sensitised by GPT, I feel on my tongue how one word calls up the next, how one sentence leads to another, and I realise, it’s not me speaking, not me as an autonomous individual, it’s the conversation itself that is happening.

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From Project Syndicate:

Joseph E. Stiglitz: There are four additional inflation risks associated with another Trump administration. The first is a tightening of immigration rules: as the US population ages, the labor force shrinks – a trend that, in the context of a tight labor market, will put further upward pressure on wages. Second, a second Trump administration would likely exercise little fiscal discipline – implementing, for example, unfunded tax cuts for corporations and billionaires; this could raise inflationary expectations and possibly even lead to an excess of aggregate demand. Third, a Trump administration would almost certainly abandon Joe Biden’s anti-monopoly policy, effectively giving corporations free reign to increase prices. Lastly, Trump’s likely interference with the US Federal Reserve might spook the markets, again leading to higher inflationary expectations.

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Derek King in The Hedgehig Review:

College campuses have a literacy problem. According to many humanities professors, the current crop of students demonstrates significantly less interest in reading books, and they are generally unprepared to meet the reading expectations that were once the norm. Educators typically lay the blame on a culture-wide attention deficit disorder driven by smartphone and social media use.

If that’s right, this failure to read is, ultimately, a failure of attention. Formed by Silicon Valley and productivity advice, most of us reflexively conflate attention and focus. But attention can refer to something richer and deeper than this—and, faced with the potential collapse of a robust reading public, we would do well to give more attention to what it means to pay attention.

English writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, borrowing from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, thought attention should not be reduced to mere focus. Attention is the central moral category—“the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent,” as she put it. Her emphasis on attention came in response to what she deemed a failure of modern moral philosophy. Moral philosophy, she claimed, was mired in discussions about will, action, and moral deliberation. But for Murdoch, morality is fundamentally, prior to any act, a matter of seeing. Moral agents are only able to will and act in the world that they “see”—the world, that is, we attend to. But that is not just looking at the world, either. Attention, for Murdoch, expresses “the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” In comparison, our contemporary concept of attention looks emaciated.

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