Coffee

The only precious thing I own, this little espresso
cup. And in it a dark roast all the way
from Honduras, Guatemala, Ethiopia
where coffee was born in the 9th century
getting goat herders high, spinning like dervishes, the white blooms
cresting out of the evergreen plant, Ethiopia
where I almost lived for a moment but
then the rebels surrounded the Capital
so I stayed home. I stayed home and drank
coffee and listened to the radio
and heard how they were getting along. I would walk
down Everett Street, near the hospital
where my older brother was bound
to his white bed like a human mast, where he was
getting his mind right and learning
not to hurt himself. I would walk by and be afraid and smell
the beans being roasted inside the garage
of an old warehouse. It smelled like burnt
toast! It was everywhere in the trees. I couldn’t bear to see him.
I sometimes never knew him. Sometimes
he would call. He wanted us
to sit across from each other, some coffee between us,
sober. Coffee can taste like grapefruit
or caramel, like tobacco, strawberry,
cinnamon, the oils being pushed
out of the grounds and floating to the top of a French Press,
the expensive kind I get
in the mail, the mailman with a pound of Sumatra
under his arm, ringing my doorbell,
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Aisha Sarwari in Dawn:

The difference between good art and bad art is that good art is subtle. Pakistan struggles to do subtle. There is certainly your everyday slapstick comedy, the tragic heroine, and the flippantly violent hero. But no, Pakistan is not at all good at subtle, which is why Sarmad Khoosat’s Zindagi Tamasha is banned. To put it succinctly, this film is about how a non-minority becomes a minority. The protagonist is a religious devout, who gets an instant rogue status for the crime of loving to dance effeminately. Had our hero danced unnoticed, he would have survived, but he gets caught [on camera] by the ridicule-addicted world of viral social media take downs and cancel-culture. Zindagi Tamasha is old world meets new, but it’s also the worst of both worlds.

We are a country that prefers staying within social constructs. A daughter must be dutiful towards a father. The respectable must not have whims. The wives must be able-bodied. The community must have only men and women. This is the only script that the gatekeepers of morality will accept — the grossly hypocritical. The utterly unrealistic. The fashionable lie. The rest is punishable.

More here. (Note: Available on YouTube. Do watch this excellent film)

Julian Nowogrodzki in Nature:

A dad’s sperm records his diet — and this record affects his sons’ metabolism, according to a study of mice and humans¹. Giving male mice a high-fat diet raises levels of some types of RNA in their sperm, the study found. The research also showed that the male offspring of male mice on this unhealthy diet had metabolic problems such as glucose intolerance, a characteristic of diabetes. The sons of human dads with a high body mass index (BMI) exhibited similar problems, according to epidemiological analysis.

Studies have shown that mothers can pass on metabolic traits to their offspring. As for fathers, Qi Chen, a reproductive-biology researcher at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, and his team showed in 2016 that fertilized mouse eggs injected with sperm RNA from dads on a high-fat diet developed into mice with metabolic disorders². Research shows that the ripple effects of a parent’s diet are caused by changes not to the offspring’s genome but to their ‘epigenome’ — the collection of chemical tags hanging from DNA and its associated proteins.

More here.

Anthony Cummins in The Guardian:

Joseph O’Neill broke out with his third novel, Netherland, which made the Booker longlist in 2008 and was ecstatically reviewed in the New Yorker by James Wood, whose praise made it that summer’s hot book, propelling him into the literary A-list. But come autumn, O’Neill was the fall guy in Zadie Smith’s influential essay Two Paths for the Novel, which contrasted the smoothness of his post-9/11 scenario (“perfectly done … that’s the problem”) with the edgier experiment of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, branding Netherland an antiquated example of “a breed of lyrical realism [that] has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked”.

Although his next novel, The Dog (2014), about a New York attorney in Dubai, widely seen as a Netherland minus, was also Booker longlisted, O’Neill seemed to recede from view almost as suddenly as he’d emerged. So much the better, perhaps: his exceptional new novel, Godwin, coming 10 years after his last, would seem to represent time well spent.

More here.

Alina Chan in the New York Times:

For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a catastrophe that has touched us all. It has been estimated that at least 25 million people around the world have died because of Covid-19, with over a million of those deaths in the United States.

Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

More here.

Christopher T. Conner in The Conversation:

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, former NBA player Royce White became an outspoken advocate of defunding the police. Over those ensuing months, he appeared at a number of protests and marches in Minnesota – demonstrations that conservative politicians and pundits excoriated.

Four years later, White accepted the endorsement of the Minnesota GOP in the state’s 2024 U.S. Senate race.

In the interim, White had appeared on the show of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, where he decried the “establishment” and “corporatocracy.” While on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, he complained that women “had become too mouthy.” Elsewhere, he lambasted the LGBTQ+ movement as “Luciferian” and described Israel as the vanguard of a “new world order.”

White’s transition from an NBA player who advocated for progressive causes to an acolyte of Jones is more common than you might think.

More here.

R. K. Hegelman at Poetry Magazine:

When Schwartz comes up in conversation today, two things are typically remarked of him. First, he is a man whose reputation has eclipsed his work, his stature as a poet having surrendered to the clamor for myth. Second, this myth is one of vertiginous and scandalous decline. Delmore Schwartz: an American tragedy. Both commonplaces have the unfortunate merit of being true.

His biography easily lends itself to historical synecdoche: his star rose amidst the New Deal optimism of the 1930s, his decline was contiguous with the conflagrations of the 1940s, and his irrelevance was assumed by the sanitized postwar culture of the 1950s. That a man’s work may become an appendix to the idea of him is exacerbated in Schwartz’s case by the fact that he was at the epicenter of a golden era of American intellectual life—as an editor of Partisan Review, as a prolific critic and teacher, as a prodigious wit, and as an unflagging hobnobber, gossip, politicker, and squabbler.

more here.

Sam Kinchin-Smith at the LRB Blog:

The coincidence of the centenary of Kafka’s death, on 3 June, and the publication of the first complete, uncensored English translation of his diaries a month before, is less straightforward than it seems. There are more obvious texts through which to tell the story of his last days. Kafka’s final diary entry was written on 12 June 1923, almost a year before he died. Over the next eleven months, he wrote a lot of letters and a few stories, including one really substantial one, ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’. After he had been urged not to speak during the final stages of the tuberculosis that killed him, he communicated with Dora Diamant and his doctor, Robert Klopstock, by writing ‘conversation slips’ (the translation is Richard and Clara Winston’s):

Do you have a moment? Then please lightly spray the peonies.

A bird was in the room.

A lake doesn’t flow into anything, you know.

Tremendous amount of sputum, easily, and still pain in the morning. In my daze it went through my head that for such quantities and the ease somehow the Nobel Prize.

more here.

Thich Nhat Hanh in The Dewdrop:

What are the most basic elements of love and how can we manifest them in our lives and our relationships? This is the question that Thich Nhat Hanh tackles in his short book, ‘True Love’. Looking at human love through the lens of Buddhist teaching, he breaks it down into four aspects: loving-kindness, compassion, joy and freedom and uses his direct and simple style to advise us how to put these elements to work in our own lives. 

According to Buddhism, there are four elements of true love. The first is maitri, which can be translated as loving-kindness or benevolence. Loving-kindness is not only the desire to make someone happy, to bring joy to a beloved person; it is the ability to bring joy and happiness to the person you love, because even if your intention is to love this person, your love might make him or her suffer. Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice deep looking directed toward the person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha. If a husband, for example, does not understand his wife’s deepest troubles, her deepest aspirations, if he does not understand her suffering, he will not be able to love her in the right way. Without understanding, love is an impossible thing.

More here.

If I had just a little bit of wisdom

If I had just a little bit of wisdom
I should walk the Great Path and fear only straying from
…… it.
Though the way is quite broad
People love shortcuts.

The court is immaculate,
While the fields are overgrown with weeds,
And the granaries are empty.
They wear silk finery,
Carry sharp swords,
Sate themselves on food and drink
having wealth in excess.
They are called thieving braggarts.

This is definitely not the way.

Lao Tzu
from Tao Te Ching
Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005

From the MIT Press Reader:

When Daniel Dennett’s essay collection “Brainstorms” was published in 1978, the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science was just emerging. Dennett was a young scholar who wanted to get philosophers out of their armchairs and into conversations with psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists. “I tried in ‘Brainstorms’ to write about the problems in language accessible to all serious thinkers, as jargon-free as possible, with lots of examples,” he writes in the preface to the 40^th-anniversary edition of the book.

Some of the chapters contained in the collection cast longer shadows than others. “Where Am I?,” featured below in its entirety, has had a remarkable trajectory.

More here.

Roselyne Min at Euronews:

Scientists have successfully developed a new, controllable prosthetic extra thumb designed to enhance productivity.

Researchers at Cambridge University say the robotic thumb can help expand the capacity of the human hand, from carrying multiple beverage glasses and shuffling playing cards to performing surgery.

“We are also really excited about potential opportunities of using the thumb to enhance productivity in work settings, especially those that are relying on their hand’s manual dexterity in order to accomplish their work,” said Tamar Makin, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.

“This can be anywhere between manual labourers that are trying to solder a complicated kit or even surgeons that have to negotiate between many instruments at the same time,” she added.

More here.  And check out the video at the link.

Prashant Kidambi in the Times Literary Supplement:

At the dawn of the twenty-first century India’s intellectual classes professed a cautious optimism – verging at times on self-congratulation – about the nation’s tryst with democracy. For many, the unruly coalition governments of the late 1990s and early 2000s reflected the deepening of democratic norms and a shared commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. Others pointed to high voter turnouts – especially among the poor – and the rise of elected representatives from hitherto subordinated castes as proof that democracy had been profoundly vernacularized.

To be sure, these accounts were cognizant of the deficiencies and contradictions of democratic politics in India, including the concomitant resurgence of exclusionary identities, the criminalization of politics, the elevation of performative equality over substantive redistribution and the deepening of social cleavages along lines of caste and religion. But there was nonetheless a broad consensus about the legitimacy of India’s democratic credentials. Today there are many who question, with good reason, the country’s inclusion in the roster of democracies at all.

More here.

Petra Loho at The Observer:

At the heart of Pop Art, Lichtenstein adeptly appropriated and reimagined iconic symbols, from Mickey Mouse to love and war comics, to popular advertising motifs. Through his masterful reinterpretations, he challenged conventional notions of high and low culture, inviting viewers to reconsider the significance of everyday imagery in the realm of art.

His distinctive style, characterized by the utilization of Ben-Day dots, infused these familiar images with irony, challenging societal constructs of femininity and masculinity entrenched within the post-war consumer landscape. His artworks served as a poignant commentary on the burgeoning American women’s, anti-Vietnam, and anti-nuclear movements, reflecting the zeitgeist of the era. During the inauguration of the exhibition, Albertina director Klaus Albrecht Schröder remarked on Lichtenstein’s art, stating, “In the 1960s, at the height of abstract expressionism, Roy Lichtenstein returned to representational, self-reflective art and, with a lot of irony, broke down the boundaries between high art and everyday culture.”

more here.

Kozlov and Wolf in Nature:

Anthony Fauci, the former head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), emphatically fended off allegations at a Republican-led hearing in Washington DC today that his agency funded research that created the COVID-19 pandemic or that he coordinated a cover-up of the pandemic’s origins, calling the claims “simply preposterous”. The 3 June session was one of the most anticipated hearings hosted by the US House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The subcommittee has held 27 hearings or briefings over the past 15 months to examine the federal government’s response to the pandemic and to uncover the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

As has been the case in most of the hearings, Fauci’s questioning reflected a deep political divide in the US government. Republicans criticized Fauci’s oversight of NIAID-funded research grants and of his staff members, and Democrats sang the praises of the former chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden, commending him on a distinguished career that has saved lives through his work advancing research on AIDS and developing COVID-19 vaccines. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, told Nature that the hearing was a Republican “attempt at revisionist history” to ignore the policy failures of the administration of former US president Donald Trump early during the pandemic and to “blame the scientists”.

More here.