Michael O’Donnell at The Millions:

Is Salman Rushdie an artist or a symbol? Can he be one but not the other? Or perhaps it’s an all-or-nothing affair and he is both or else neither. Ever since Rushdie, the author of 13 novels, was violently attacked onstage in August 2022 at a literary event, one line of thinking has it that his books should perforce be celebrated. The New Yorker embodied this view when it made the case, with very little discussion of Rushdie’s work, to award him the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was not an unpersuasive editorial, but in it, what Rushdie’s work represented outweighed what it contained. Yet if that’s the “both” case, the “neither” perspective feels even less satisfactory. Six days after the attempted murder, the American Conservative poured disdain on Rushdie as a free-speech icon and as a novelist, suggesting that anyone who mocks religion deserves a punch at the least and crassly asserting, “the fact that someone tried to kill an author doesn’t make that author’s books any good.”

More here.

Kate Golembiewski at CNN:

“We were really motivated to try and develop a system where we could study the behavior of the African malaria mosquito in a naturalistic habitat, reflective of its native home in Africa,” McMeniman said. The researchers also wanted to compare the mosquitoes’ smell preferences across different humans, to observe the insects’ ability to track scents across distances of 66 feet (20 meters), and to study them during their most active hours, between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.

To tick all these boxes, the researchers created a screened facility the size of a skating rink. Dotting the perimeter of the facility were six screened tents where study participants would sleep. Air from their tents, carrying the participants’ unique breath and body odor scents, was pumped through long tubes to the main facility onto absorbent pads, warmed and baited with carbon dioxide to mimic a sleeping human.

More here.

Ken Roth in The Guardian:

In a terse statement, Joe Biden called the charges “outrageous”, stating that “there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas”. The German government, while saying it “respects the independence” of the court, echoed this “false equivalence” charge. But Khan made no claim of equivalence. He simply charged both Israeli and Hamas officials for their own separate war crimes. Indeed, given the severity of the offenses, it would have been outrageous had Khan ignored one side’s crimes. The dual charges underscore a fundamental principle of international humanitarian law: war crimes by one side never justify war crimes by another.

Ironically, Hamas responded to the proposed charges with a variation of this theme, saying that Khan’s action “equates the victim with the executioner”. But regardless of the perceived justness of one’s cause, it never justifies war crimes.

More here.

Casey Fiesler in The Conversation:

A parent asked a question in a private Facebook group in April 2024: Does anyone with a child who is both gifted and disabled have any experience with New York City public schools? The parent received a seemingly helpful answer that laid out some characteristics of a specific school, beginning with the context that “I have a child who is also 2e,” meaning twice exceptional.

On a Facebook group for swapping unwanted items near Boston, a user looking for specific items received an offer of a “gently used” Canon camera and an “almost-new portable air conditioning unit that I never ended up using.”

Both of these responses were lies. That child does not exist and neither do the camera or air conditioner. The answers came from an artificial intelligence chatbot.

More here.

Early Morning In Your Room

It’s morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-like
Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.
The gray light as you pour gleaming water–
It seems you’ve traveled years to get here.

Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve
It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery
Had its way, poverty, no money at least.
Or maybe it was confusion. But that’s over.

Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books:
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka’s Letter
to his Father, are all here. You can dance
With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling

With only one eye. Even the blind man
Can see. That’s what they say. If you had
A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton
Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home.

by Robert Bly
from Poetic Outlaws

Gillian Brockell in The Washington Post:

Oliver Eagleton in The Ideas Letter:

Intra-Marxist debates are famously irascible, even when their stakes are low. Yet in recent years this intellectual tradition has been further fractured, at the same time as it has been focused and reanimated, by the gravity of the climate crisis. The character of a future egalitarian society, and the most viable way to get there, have been contested by two environmentalist camps: degrowthers and eco-modernists. The first argues that capitalism’s drive for perpetual expansion is the cause of planetary breakdown, and demands a slower, “steady-state” alternative based on less production and consumption. The second claims that this expansionism has created the technological preconditions for a sustainable society, which the working class must now bring to full fruition, rather than aiming for any aggregate contraction. It remains to be seen whether these positions can be reconciled. Yet in broad terms, it is clear that they are clashing expressions of the same phenomenon: the reemergence of a utopian sensibility on the left – one that is determined to identify history’s direction of travel following the premature announcement of its end.

The degrowth school, which has long asserted that humanity’s material impact exceeds the planet’s biophysical capacity, has gained ground with several recent eco-socialist tracts. Kōhei Saitō’s Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), which sold half a million copies in Japan and has been translated into English as Slow Down (2024), describes an apparent shift in Marx’s late thought: away from a naïve faith in the infinite potential of technology towards a sober recognition of ecological limits. The contemporary environmental movement, writes Saitō, must heed this rejection of Prometheanism and abandon the notion of developing the “productive forces” (which, in the lexicon of historical materialism, means the machinery and infrastructure used in the production of goods). It should rather advocate a reduction of resource use in the Global North, establishing a new model of democratic planning to decide what’s needed and what isn’t.

More here.

Sam Adler-Bell in The Baffler:

THERE’S A GAME my girlfriend and I sometimes play. Well, really, it’s more of an argument: “Fuck, Marry, Kill” with the past, present, and future. My answer, which I take to be a good, solid American answer, is fuck the present, marry the future, and kill the past. My reasoning is that you should always want to fuck the present, to live in the moment (as the advertisers say), screw every hole of the now. Likewise, marrying the future is admirable, like monogamy, and prudent, like monogamy; it’s a wish, and a promise, for stability and grace. You have to believe in the future, be loyal to what comes next, to what and who you are always becoming. And that leaves only the past to kill. Which, so what? It’s the past. It’s already passed.

My girlfriend—who is also an American, but an American writer and lover of fiction—has a different answer. She says you should fuck the future, marry the past, and kill the present. I definitely see the appeal of fucking the future; it’s where the action is, the excitement, the unknown. The future is a stranger, and we all want to fuck strangers. And for her, the past is too precious and monumental to kill. Memory is a repository, a treasured burden worth bearing; it’s what you can’t seem to get rid of, even if sometimes you want to. So, you marry it. But here’s where the trouble starts: I can’t allow her to kill the present. When we get going on this topic, she says, “Well, what’s the present? Isn’t it always slipping away? Isn’t it gone the moment you try to do something in it?” And I say, “No! The present is this,” slicing my hand through the air, as if to catch it. “Isn’t this precious?”

More here.

Suzanne Schneider in Strange Matters:

When John McCain selected former Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate in 2008, it was the gift that kept on giving to the United States’ media and entertainment establishment.

For the mostly liberal chattering classes, her folksy mama bear affect, ignorance about basic geopolitical facts (the existence of two Koreas among them), and possible illiteracy were far more interesting than John McCain’s platform. Fifteen years later, Palin’s candidacy is far less amusing than it was to noughtie-era Daily Show writers, recognized instead as a pivotal moment in the emergence of movements that today constitute the New Right. From the Tea Partiers and Obama birthers to Trump stans, white nationalists, and anti-vaxxers, Sarah Palin walked so they could run (into the Capitol).

Outside observers peering into the abyss that is the New Right often envision it as a coherent force. The real divide, we hear, is between the conservative establishment – “respectable” Republicans of the George W. Bush type – and upstarts like J.D. Vance and lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene. If you’re able to forget the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, CIA black sites and the routinization of domestic surveillance, one might indeed prefer the oil-painting ex-president to Greene’s fleet of Jewish space lasers. But this divide is not the only fault line that runs through contemporary right-wing politics. Indeed, we find that the coalition of New Right Forces – a motley crew of techno-libertarians, America Firsters, post-liberals, economic nationalists, monarcho-fascists, vitalists, social conservatives, conspiracy theorists, incels, racists, and anti-Semites – is hardly proceeding in lockstep formation. In the words of one of its leading funders, Peter Thiel, the New Right is “a very ragtag Rebel Alliance. It’s like we have diversity on our side.”

Mitch Leslie in Science:

The tails were a clue. As some kinds of mice get old, their tails can stiffen and kink. But the aged rodents in the lab of molecular biologist Shin-Ichiro Imai at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis sported tails that were limber and nearly straight. The genetically altered mice seemed to defy aging in other ways, too. They were more robust than control mice and spent more time scampering in their exercise wheels. Most dramatic, the animals lived about 7% longer than their normal counterparts, gaining an extra 58 days of life, Imai and colleagues reported earlier this year in Cell Metabolism.

The genetic modification the researchers had made boosted a key communication signal from the animals’ brain to their body. Thanks to the tweak, a specific group of neurons in the hypothalamus, a physiological control center deep in the brain, remained active as the animals got older. Imai’s team discovered that those neurons send signals to the animal’s fat stores via the sympathetic nervous system, a network of nerves carrying messages from the brain throughout the body. In response to the signal, the mouse fat burns lipids and secretes a long-distance signal known as NAMPT that forestalls aging-related damage in other parts of the body, including the hypothalamus itself.

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

Despite Steve Bannon’s Wall Street pedigree, his taste for five-star hotels and billionaire-owned yachts, he is truly a man of the people — that, at least, is the impression he strains to convey each time he appears in “Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy,” a new book by Isaac Arnsdorf, a journalist at The Washington Post. As far as Bannon is concerned, anyone who complains that Donald Trump’s far-right supporters are on the fringes of the fringe, an extremist minority bent on undermining what most Americans actually want, is just a whiner who can go cry some more. As he put it at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the summer of 2022: “All they talk about on MSNBC is ‘democracy, democracy, democracy.’ We’re gonna give them a democracy suppository on Nov. 8!”

The line was classic Bannon: gleeful, bombastic, mildly disgusting. It would also turn out to be wrong. The “red wave” that he and other MAGA enthusiasts envisioned for that year’s midterm elections never materialized; a number of Trump’s handpicked candidates had sailed through their primaries but struggled to prevail in the general election. Still, Bannon would not be deterred. In the book, he keeps insisting to Arnsdorf that most of the country is MAGA, even if some of those MAGA supporters don’t know it yet. “Bannon believed the MAGA movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalized by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years,” Arnsdorf writes.

More here.

Simon Usborne at The Guardian:

One might feel short-changed to read a book about death by Sebastian Junger that did not include some battlefield drama. After 1997’s The Perfect Storm, his bestselling account of a trawler disaster that became a blockbuster starring George Clooney, the American writer received even more acclaim for his war reporting. His narrative gifts earned him comparisons with Hemingway.

Sure enough, bullets do fly in Junger’s seventh book, a gripping exploration of the liminal space between life and death. In Afghanistan, he hid behind a meagre holly bush while “bits of leaves drifted down from bullets that were chopping through the foliage over our heads, and gouts of dust erupted around my feet”. There’s also an account of the death, in Libya in 2011, of British photo­journalist Tim Hetherington, the colleague and friend with whom Junger had just made Restrepo, an Oscar-nominated documentary for which they spent a year at a US army outpost deep in Taliban territory.

more here.

Benjamin Balint at the NYT:

In his novella “The Prague Orgy,” Philip Roth has a Czech writer say: “When I studied Kafka, the fate of his books in the hands of the Kafkologists seemed to me to be more grotesque than the fate of Josef K.” Just as Franz Kafka’s prose both demands and evades interpretation, something about his legacy has both solicited and resisted claims of ownership.

Despite his astonishing clairvoyance about the impersonal cruelty of the bureaucratic state and the profound alienation of contemporary life, Kafka could not have foreseen how many admirers would read and misread his enigmatic fictions after his death, nor how many would-be heirs would seek to appropriate him as their own in the century since. Competing claims began to swirl almost as soon as Kafka died of tuberculosis, 100 years ago this June, a month short of his 41st birthday. Max Brod — close friend, betrayer of Kafka’s last instruction to burn his manuscripts, heavy-handed editor of his diaries and unfinished novels, and author of the first Kafka biography — depicted him as a modern-day “saint” whose stories and parables “are among the most typically Jewish documents of our time.”

more here.

Latent Prints

I don’t know how people live
without me. No, really. Everyday
I live with myself.
I’ve never not.

In the living room I cut
Aliya’s hair, and when she stood
a dark crescent moon
outlined where she sat.

Everything leaves something
behind, I’m told. Rope fibers,
gunshot residue, boot prints in mud
and muddy boot prints. If I were to step

outside my body and walk away,
I could see what shape
my absence takes.
Surely, it has a shape.

by Madusen Gummer
from Bodega Magazine