Michael Clune at the Paris Review:

I’ve been clean for over twenty years. Let me give you an example of the kind of problem addiction is, the scale of the thing. In April 2019 I went to the dentist. I had a mild ache in a molar. He said the whole tooth was totally rotted all the way through, that they couldn’t do anything more with it. It was hopeless. The tooth was a total piece of shit and would have to be extracted. He gave me the number of a dental surgeon and I called and made an appointment. I talked to my dad, who’d had many teeth extracted, and he told me it was no big deal. When I got to the dental surgeon’s office I told him that I’m a recovering addict, and that I wanted to avoid opiate painkillers. He looked in my mouth and when he got out he said, “You’re going to need opiate painkillers.”

Then he shot me up with Novocain and he went in there with a wrench, and I realized that dentists have soft, delicate hands and seem like doctors, like intellectuals, but when you really need dental care, you go to a dental surgeon and their main qualification is brute physical strength.

more here.

Oliver Balch at Literary Review:

For all mankind’s meddling, nature is obdurate. It didn’t stop evolving just because humans tried to keep it out. Wilson asks us to imagine our cities from the perspective of certain plants or animals. If you’re a seaside goldenrod or a strip of Danish scurvy grass, then the sodium-enriched verges created by winter salt trucks are a dream habitat. For a peregrine falcon, the difference between a twenty-storey skyscraper and a hundred-foot cliff is minimal: the dive-bombing potential is equally great. Nonetheless, not all natural species can adapt. As Wilson admits, our cities as they currently stand are the ‘site of eco-apocalypse’. Even putting the rights of nature aside, wilding our streets is in our self-interest. Just ask a psychologist or a physician. We’re happier, healthier and safer with nature near at hand.

Written in an authoritative yet accessible style, Urban Jungle contains a range of intriguing insights. Despite its non-hectoring tone, the book offers a clear warning. 

more here.

I Invent You

I invent you in the garden
I invent that you talk to me
that you call me
and in fact you do talk to me
and sometimes I don’t understand
what you say
and I am amazed at you
at your mystery
and I pretend that I understand
so that you won’t go away.
Day after day I invent you
and that’s my way
of confronting your absence
because if I don’t invent you
the joy of my hours
would vanish
and you as well.

by Claribel Alegria
from Sorrow
Curbstone Press, 1999

Regan Penaluna in aeon:

In 1696, Damaris Cudworth Masham, an Englishwoman and a reluctant philosopher, stepped from obscurity to publish a book whose title – A Discourse Concerning the Love of God – concealed the feminist gems within. For instance, she insisted, contrary to some philosophers and theologians of her day, that mothers were not corrupting forces but foundational to the pursuit of knowledge. Then in 1705 she entered the public sphere again with another work, more radical than the first, titled Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life, in which she argued that women should contribute to all intellectual subjects: ‘I see no Reason why it should not be thought that all Science lyes as open to a Lady as to a Man.’

Masham was also close to the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke. Their friendship endured for almost 20 years. It was an intellectual, personal and at times romantic exchange that began before her marriage and endured after Locke moved into her home with her husband and children. No need to write letters when you can share ideas near the fire in the evenings. This was a period of great philosophical flourishing for Masham, during which she wrote her two and only books.

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

Millions of Americans who are at high risk for heart attacks and whose LDL cholesterol levels are disturbingly high have been told over and over again by their doctors to take a statin. These cheap generic drugs have been shown repeatedly to slash cholesterol levels and prevent heart attacks, strokes and deaths. But many people cannot or will not take the drugs, often reporting that statins make their muscles ache.

Now, a study with 14,000 patients of a drug that lowers LDL levels and was designed to avoid muscle aches was found to modestly reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes and other complications from heart disease. It was published Saturday in The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology. The medication joins several statin alternatives that have been shown to reduce cardiac illnesses, and some experts say they doubt the drug is any more likely to be embraced by patients who are wary of statins and, often, other LDL-lowering drugs. The drug, bempedoic acid, is not new; the Food and Drug Administration approved it three years ago because it lowers LDL levels.

More here.

Carolyn Forché in Literary Hub:

In memory we are standing in the kitchen of the Treman Cottage at Breadloaf. It is late afternoon in the summer of 1976 and I have brought my copies of Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk and Dismantling the Silence for Charles Simic to sign. He is slouching a bit, leaning against the counter, and seems genuinely touched that I had carried the books, deeply penciled and dog-eared, all the way from home.

As he leafed through them, I blurted out that my family was from Czechoslovakia, and of course because it was a country that had been cobbled together in 1918, conjoining several parts of former Austro-Hungary, he wanted to know precisely where my ancestors had lived. I told him Slovakia, in Bardejov, in the eastern part of the country, in one of the oldest towns. “So you are Slovak!” he said, “and we are both peasants!” He laughed, then scrawled in his book with a fat pen: “Now that the Serbs and Slovaks have learned to read and write, look out world! Yours, Charlie.”

More here.

Roberto Casati & Patrick Cavanagh in The MIT Press Reader:

Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows — after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics — are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art.

Here, we embark on a journey that takes us through a number of extraordinary pictorial experiments — some successful, some less so, but all interesting. We have singled out some broad categories of solutions to pictorial problems: depicted shadows having trouble negotiating obstacles in their path; shadow shapes and colors that stretch credibility; inconsistent illumination in the scene; and shadow character getting lost. We also find some taboos, that is, self-inflicted limitations on where or what to depict of a shadow.

More here.

Matthew Yglesias in Slow Boring:

Earlier this month the CDC released the results of its Youth Risk Behavior Survey of American teenagers. The findings have been much discussed, with the focus largely and understandably on the fact that teenage girls are suffering from extraordinarily high levels of sadness and depression. But I think the conversation has overlooked a few things.

One possible culprit for this widespread sadness is that social media apps are especially damaging to girls’ psychological health, a thesis long championed by Jonathan Haidt. And even though on its face Haidt’s point seems left-wing (new technology has downside risks and big companies need to be regulated more), the idea has taken on a mostly right-wing inflection, with Josh Hawley as its most vocal champion in the Senate.

More here.

Amitava Kumar in Granta:

In Delhi the heat is chemical, something unworldly, a dry bandage or heating pad wrapped around the body. I sent a note to my friend Ravish, who was an anchor on NDTV’s Hindi show Prime Time. I asked Ravish that if Inuit supposedly have more than fifty words for snow (a specific word, for example, for snow used to make water), why don’t we Indians have more words for heat? Ravish asked members of his audience to respond to this question. Words and phrases that Ravish and I didn’t know, in a mix of Indian languages, came in from different cities and parts of the country, adding nuance and variety to what the newspapers were only calling a ‘heatwave’. Ravish concluded his monologue by saying that if you forget the many words for heat in your own language, you will also forget the names of your neighbors or the fact that people of two different religions used to live peaceably together. You will also forget why you are beginning to forget.

My publisher provided a car for me to go to bookshops and sign copies of my books. At one point I passed a billboard that showed a fighter jet in the sky and above it these words: Join IAF and give your career a flying start. That Indian Air Force ad hadn’t changed for forty years. I remember seeing it from bus windows in my late teens, and how, because I lacked any sense of direction, I would imagine myself in a jet, my head in the clouds.

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Will Douglas Heaven in the MIT Technology Review:

To get the inside story behind the chatbot—how it was made, how OpenAI has been updating it since release, and how its makers feel about its success—I talked to four people who helped build what has become one of the most popular internet apps ever. In addition to Agarwal and Fedus, I spoke to John Schulman, a cofounder of OpenAI, and Jan Leike, the leader of OpenAI’s alignment team, which works on the problem of making AI do what its users want it to do (and nothing more).

What I came away with was the sense that OpenAI is still bemused by the success of its research preview, but has grabbed the opportunity to push this technology forward, watching how millions of people are using it and trying to fix the worst problems as they come up.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

In this week’s New Yorker, the contributing writer Merve Emre examines the life and work of Italo Calvino, whom she describes as “word for word, the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century.” Born a hundred years ago in Cuba, Calvino relocated as a child to his parents’ native Italy, and eventually became the most-translated Italian author of his era. In 1983, The New Yorker published “The Jaguar Sun,” Calvino’s first story in the magazine and the only one to appear in its pages while he was alive. In the story, a couple enters an odd and rocky phase of their marriage while vacationing in Mexico—and while bonding over a sampling of dishes that contain the native hot chile pepper. With vivid descriptions of the dishes—and of the physical responses they elicit—the piece also opens “Under the Jaguar Sun,” Calvino’s unfinished collection of stories about the senses.

On the outskirts of Mexico City, the unnamed narrator and his wife, Olivia, visit a former convent’s cloister and eat chiles en nogada, “somewhat wrinkled little peppers, swimming in a walnut sauce whose harshness and bitter aftertaste were drowned in a creamy, sweetish surrender.” In Oaxaca, a folkloric painting of a nun, who died of love, seems to make the couple hungry; at the hotel restaurant, they snack on guacamole, “scooped up with crisp tortillas that snap into many shards and dip like spoons into the thick cream.” After the pair visit the sacred and spooky ruins of Monte Albán, the menu turns fleshy and visceral: over roast goat and shrimp soup, the narrator imagines being chewed up, swallowed, and digested by his wife, who is openly bored and annoyed by him. (He should, he thinks, eat her instead.) Can two individuals—by sharing a flavorful meal, or through another activity—ever completely unite? As the trip continues, the narrator searches for the answer not in his wife’s eyes but in her teeth.

More here.

“Spring and All”

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches–

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind–
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined–
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance–Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

by William Carlos Williams
from Spring and All
Contact Publishing Co., 1923

Devaka Gunawardena , Niyanthini Kadirgamar, and Ahilan Kadirgamar in Phenomenal World:

Massive demonstrations that swept Sri Lanka last year exposed the serious challenges at the heart of the global economy. In July 2022, former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced to flee the country, only a few months after announcing a hasty default of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt obligations. He faced a wall of opposition as the nation suffered infamous kilometers-long fuel queues, power outages, and food and medicinal shortages, crippling everyday life.

In the months since, the current government led by Ranil Wickremesinghe—allied with the party of the disgraced Rajapaksa family—has appeared savvier than its predecessor, implementing a quota system to manage fuel distribution and end the queues. However, the government has also tripled fuel prices, which has severely dampened demand. Fuel consumption is half of what it was a year ago, bringing economic activity to a grinding halt. Inflation has skyrocketed, with food inflation peaking at 94 percent in September 2022. A quarter of Sri Lankans are facing severe food insecurity; household incomes across the board have decreased. The Central Bank dramatically doubled interest rates, making access to credit for economic activity extraordinarily difficult. Rural livelihoods have been disrupted. Many small businesses are collapsing.

More here.

Perry Anderson in New Left Review:

Since the composition of the last issue of the journal, nlr has lost the two most gifted political writers to have ignited its pages over the years, Tom Nairn and Mike Davis. Both were magnitudes whose life and work extended far beyond this journal, requiring consideration by others on another scale. Only that portion of what they achieved which is connected with nlr, not to be exaggerated, and some of the differences between them, are in place here. Death claimed them close together. Did they touch in any other respect? Each was a mind so entirely original that, virtually by definition, it would seem they had little in common. Generation, class, nationality, formation, temperament—all set them quite radically apart. Tom was fourteen years older, born in a small Scottish village, his father headmaster of a nearby school. A natural polymath, he won a privileged education, first in an art college, then studying philosophy at two universities in Britain—Edinburgh and Oxford—thereafter spending time at the apex of higher education in Italy, the Scuola Normale in Pisa, where he acquired fluent Italian.

Returning to England in the early sixties, he earned post-graduate awards and lectured in an art college in London. There he supported the student revolt of 1968, and was dismissed for doing so. For a quarter of a century he never had a teaching job again, and for the rest of his life was always in difficult straits, often in poverty, scraping a nomadic living in places as remote from each other as Amsterdam, Washington, Prague, and finally Melbourne—where, in his seventies, he found employment for a decade in a university ten thousand miles away from where he lived in West Lothian. A Scot to whom conventional English forms of conviviality were foreign in ways that could be mistaken for shyness, he was generally quiet and reserved, and avoided publicity. He could be fierce in print, his mockery scalding; yet he was warm and gentle as a person. Italian released the high spirits in him.

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Kenda Mutongi in Boston Review:

You need to do a police investigation,” wrote one of my siblings on our family group chat, “a thorough investigation.” On January 17, 2023, someone set fire to my brother Jumba’s five-acre sugarcane garden. Three days after the fire, my brother received a phone call informing him that thieves had gotten into his compound and broken the cement cover on his borehole and stolen the electric pump.

Jumba’s land is in western Kenya, about sixty miles from the village where we grew up. The area, known as the western highland plateau during the colonial period, was occupied by white settlers who confiscated land from the local Nandi people. After independence the land was redistributed to Kenyans but somehow Luyias (my family is Luyia) and Kikuyus ended up buying most of it, further displacing the original Nandi owners. Since the 1970s the Nandi people have intermittently fought these “outsiders” in attempts to reclaim their land; some of the ethnic tensions have resulted in the loss of life.

More here.