Galen Watts in The Point:

According to Alexandre Lefebvre, professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney and author of the new book Liberalism as a Way of Life, the allegory that best captures the liberal self-conception was given to us by the late David Foster Wallace, during his commencement speech at Kenyon College. I suspect you know it, but if not, here’s the truncated version: two younger fish are swimming by an older one. When the older fish politely asks, “How’s the water?”, one of the younger fish looks at the other and says, “What the hell is water?” Lefebvre would say the water is liberalism; I’m one of the younger fish.

This metaphor—liberalism as the water we swim in—dwells at the heart of Liberalism as a Way of Life. I write “we” because the book begins with a wager: there is a good chance that if you’re reading this, you are a liberal. That is, the norms you take for granted, the values you cherish, and even your basic way of being in the world have been comprehensively shaped by the tradition of liberalism.

More here.

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The Dugout

I’m learning a kind of skill
a delicacy in handling despair

It’s like the earth
that absorbs and absorbs
and turns and grows endlessly
and dies

fires burn through ten forests
huge pressures squeeze down
on so much carbon and
preserve it, fuse it. There are substances
under the surface no one knows
about and they go on evolving

there will always be sleep
and it will always be troubled
there will always be love
and it will rise and tumble
and subside like the ocean currents

the dugout carved from a cedar tree
and rowed by sixteen men
strokes along the inner river
and the rain falls steadily, like
grief, that we need for the deep,
heavy forests and the marsh
where the nests are.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997

Colm Tóibín in The Paris Review:

Baldwin’s imagination remained passionately connected to the destiny of his country. He lacked the guile and watchfulness that might have tempted him to keep clear of what was happening in America; the ruthlessness he had displayed in going to live in Paris and publishing Giovanni’s Room was no use to him later as the battle for civil rights grew more fraught. It was inevitable that someone with Baldwin’s curiosity and moral seriousness would want to become involved, and inevitable that someone with his sensitivity and temperament would find what was happening all-absorbing.

Baldwin’s influence arose from his books and his speeches, and from the tone he developed in essays and television appearances, a tone that took its bearings from his own experience in the pulpit. Instead of demanding reform or legislation, Baldwin grew more interested in the soul’s dark, intimate spaces and the importance of the personal and the private.

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Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction.

There’s a pattern in fake scammy alternative medicine. People get excited about some new herb. They invent a laundry list of effects: it improves heart health, softens menopause, increases energy, deepens sleep, clears up your skin. This is how you know it’s a fraud. Real medicine works by mimicking natural biochemical signals. Why would you have a signal for “have low energy, bad sleep, nasty menopause, poor heart health, and ugly skin”? Why would all the herb’s side effects be other good things? Real medications usually shift a system along a tradeoff curve; if they hit more than one system, the extras usually just produce side effects. If you’re lucky, you can pick out a subset of patients for whom the intended effect is more beneficial than the side effects are bad. That’s how real medicine works.

But GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel more like the magic herb. Why?

More here.

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Alexandre Lefebvre in Aeon:

John Rawls, the preeminent political philosopher of the 20th century whose masterpiece, A Theory of Justice (1971), fundamentally reshaped the field, lived a quiet and – I mean this the best way – boring life. After an eventful and sometimes tragic youth (more on this later), he settled into an academic career and worked at Harvard University for nearly 40 years. There, he developed ideas that transformed our thinking about justice, fairness, democracy and liberalism, and also trained generations of students who are now leading members of the profession. He died aged 81 in 2002, the year I began my graduate studies, so I never had the chance to meet him. Yet every single account I’ve heard from his students and colleagues attests to his genuine kindness. Decent is the word that comes up time and again, in the understated sense of unshowy goodness.

Still waters can run deep, however, and from archival research I’ve discovered charming eccentricities. Every year, for instance, his family would put on a Christmas play that worked in his famous concepts as minor characters. My favourite bit of oddness, though, comes from an interview he gave to mark his retirement.

More here.

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Isaac Butler at The Current:

When Philip Seymour Hoffman starred in Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages (2007), he had little left to prove. After breaking through in the 1990s with a series of scene-stealing performances in films like Boogie Nights, Happiness, The Big Lebowski, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, he had become an in-demand actor’s actor. Thanks to a 2000 Broadway production of True West and his work as co–artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company, he also garnered a reputation as one of the best stage actors of his generation. By the time he won the Best Actor Oscar for Capote in 2005, he had become a one-man symbol of quality. When The Savages was released, it was one of three Oscar contenders featuring Hoffman (along with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Charlie Wilson’s War) running in theaters at the same time.

He also had only seven years left to live. This is the struggle in writing about Hoffman: stories tend to derive their meanings from their endings, and his was tragic. But he was not a story—he was a man, filled with all the complexity and contradictions that any of us carry with us.

more here.

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For James Baldwin

Black cat, sweet brother,
Walk into the room
On cat’s feet where I lie dying
And I’ll start breathing regularly again.
Witch doctor for the dispossessed,
Saint dipping your halo to the evicted,
The world starts remembering its postponed loyalties
When I call out your name. I knew you hot nights
When you kept stepping
The light fantastic to music only the wretched
Of the earth could hear; blizzards
In New Hampshire when you wore
A foxskin cap, its tail red as autumn
On your shoulder. In the waters of the Sound
You jumped the ripples, knees knocking,
Flesh blue with brine, your fingers
Cold as a dead child’s holding mine.

You said it all, everything
A long time ago before anyone else knew
How to say it. This country was about to be
Transformed, you said; not by an act of God,
Nothing like that, but by us,
You and me. Young blacks saw Africa emerging
And knew for the first time, you said,
That they were related to kings and
To princes. It could be seen
In the way they walked, tall as cypresses,
Strong as bridges across the thundering falls.

………………………….. In the question period once
A lady asked isn’t integration a two-way
Street, Mr. Baldwin, and you said
You mean you’ll go back to Scarsdale tonight
And I’ll go back to Harlem, is that the two ways
You mean?

We are a race ourselves, you and I,
Sweet preacher. I talked with our ancestors
One night in dreams about it
And they bade me wear trappings of gold
And speak of it everywhere; speak of it on
The exultant mountain by day, and at night
On the river banks where the stars touch fingers.
They said it might just save the world.

by Kay Boyle
from No More Masks! and Anthology of Poems by Women
Anchor Press, 1973

Colm Tóibín at the NYRB:

I read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain just after my eighteenth birthday, at a time when I presumed that my Catholic upbringing would soon mean little to me. During my first year at university, which I had just completed, I told no one that I had come close to joining a seminary. Some of my memories of almost having a vocation for the priesthood were embarrassing. I wished they belonged to someone else. But now my religious feelings had not merely ended; I hoped they had been effectively erased. Such feelings, I noticed, were mostly absent from the books I was reading, the films I was watching, the plays I was seeing, the conversations I was having.

Even the religion in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man seemed remote. Joyce himself—and Stephen Dedalus in the novel—had attended the same university where I was now studying, but the campus had moved to the Dublin suburbs; the new buildings were glass and steel, worlds away from the intimacy of Newman House in the center of Dublin where Joyce (and Stephen) had studied.

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Emily Cataneo in Undark:

When the Godwin sisters would visit their grandmother Jeanne in Carson City, Nevada when they were growing up in the 1970s, Jeanne would pull out the dreaded juicer. She’d pulverize a mixture of carrot, celery, and spinach juice for the girls, then coax them to drink it. The sisters hated the concoction, but choked it down anyway, because they didn’t want to upset their grandmother: Jeanne had lost her husband and two of her three daughters to cancer, and she hoped that this healthy mixture would save her granddaughters from the rest of her family’s fate.

Jeanne didn’t know it at the time, but diet hadn’t caused her husband’s and children’s deaths. Her family were the unlucky carriers of a mutation on the p53 gene. When it’s working, p53 acts as a tumor suppressor, stamping out malignancies before they can grow and spread. This gene is so important that one scientist called it the “guardian of the genome.” People with the mutation, which causes an extremely rare disorder called Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, have a defective p53 gene, which means no brakes on tumors flourishing in their bodies. Families with this syndrome often lose a cascade of loved ones to breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and more.

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Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:

Beata Mierzwa studies cell division as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California San Diego. In 2013, she founded Beata Science Art, a science art brand where she produces science illustrations, fashion, and other interactive content to help bring out the beauty in science.

Could you please describe your science journey?

My interest in cell division began when I saw an image of a dividing cell during an undergraduate lab internship. I found it beautiful and was amazed by how much we still don’t know about this process. In graduate school at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, I studied the final steps in cytokinesis and the pathways that control the separation of the membranes. Now, in my postdoctoral work, I use CRISPR techniques to identify new genes involved in mitosis and cell division.

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Catherine Tumber in The Hedgehog Review:

It must be dismal to come of age in an era so drenched in utility as ours. What was once called soul hunger is now relentlessly thwacked aside by engines of ever greater efficiency, from effective altruism to generative AI. Even the animating realms of art and sex appear to have contracted to the merely serviceable, functional, and fair-minded.

With her new essay collection, Becca Rothfeld has launched a spirited campaign to reverse this state of affairs. Its title, All Things Are Too Small—drawn from the writings of a spiritually enthralled thirteenth-century mystic—is misleading, though, for her soundings do not apply to all things. As troubled as she is by growing wealth inequality and other policy offenses, Rothfeld steers away from political-economic affairs. Her intent is to revel in the shameless precincts of want and to protect its extravagances from a rising tide of minimalism, prudery, and justice seeking. Democracy has its place, Rothfeld argues, but nowhere near the wilds of erotic love or art.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Being rational necessarily involves engagement with probability. Given two possible courses of action, it can be rational to prefer the one that could possibly result in a worse outcome, if there’s also a substantial probability for an even better outcome. But one’s attitude toward risk — averse, tolerant, or even seeking — also matters. Do we work to avoid the worse possible outcome, even if there is potential for enormous reward? Nate Silver has long thought about probability and prediction, from sports to politics to professional poker. In his his new book On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, Silver examines a set of traits characterizing people who welcome risks.

More here.

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Karman Lucero at Project Syndicate:

Central to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was a rivalry to develop the technologies of the future. First came the race to deploy nuclear weapons on intercontinental missiles. Then came the space race. Then came US President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program, which seemed to launch a new race to build missile-defense systems. But it soon became clear that the Soviet economy had fallen decisively behind.

Now, a new struggle for technological mastery is underway, this time between the US and China, over artificial intelligence. Both have signaled that they want to manage their competition through dialogue over the development, deployment, and governance of AI. But formal talks on May 14 made it painfully clear that no grand bargain can be expected anytime soon.

That should come as no surprise. The issue is simply too broad – and governments’ perspectives and goals too different – to allow for any single “treaty” or agreement on transnational AI governance. Instead, the potential risks can and should be managed through multiple, targeted bargains and a combination of official and unofficial dialogues.

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Cara Blue Adams at The Baffler:

OVER THREE DAYS in October 1974, the French experimental writer Georges Perec sat in cafés and a tabac in a Parisian public square called Place Saint-Sulpice and jotted down everything he saw. His observations became a book called An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris, in which he sought to capture the small details that often elude us: “that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.” Long invested in a playful embrace of constraint, Perec was a member of the Oulipo movement, which used radically restrictive rules to shape literature; for example, Perec wrote an entire novel without using the letter e, an absence that referenced the loss of his mother in the Holocaust and his father in the fighting that preceded it. Perec was also a champion of what he called the “infra-ordinary”: the more than ordinary, the ordinary observed so closely that it becomes transcendent, edging closer to life itself. He wanted to widen art’s vision; he wanted to accomplish this by focusing it.

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John Adamson at Literary Review:

Ever since Thomas Carlyle first launched his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell on the world in 1845, the Lord Protector’s published words have exercised an almost mesmeric hold on posterity. Overnight, they transformed a figure who had hitherto been a byword for villainy – was he not the killer of King Charles I? – into a hero for the new Victorian age: a God-fearing, class-transcending champion of ‘russet-coated captains’ who became Britain’s first non-royal head of state. His words resonated with a newly politically ascendant and morally earnest middle class. And in Hamo Thornycroft’s vast sculpture installed outside Westminster Hall in 1899, the Carlylean transformation of Oliver begun by the Letters and Speeches found its embodiment in bronze.

Cromwell’s letters and speeches have long beguiled and frustrated the great man’s biographers. Most concur that they hold the key to the inwardness of this most inscrutable and turbulent of souls, even if, so far, that key has never quite turned in the lock. Ever more scholarly editions of his collected writings have followed.

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Julian Nowogrodzki in Nature:

An age ‘clock’ based on some 200 proteins found in the blood can predict a person’s risk of developing 18 chronic illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. The clock’s accuracy raises the prospect of developing a single test that could describe a person’s risk of many chronic conditions, says the project’s lead scientist Austin Argentieri, a population-health researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “Ultimately, wanting to live longer will come down to preventing chronic diseases,” he says. The study was published in Nature Medicine on 8 August¹.

Well-aged

A person’s chronological age is key to determining their risk of many age-related conditions. But chronological age is not a perfect predictor of disease. Some 60-year-olds, for example, are frail and have heart disease, whereas others are the picture of health. Argentieri and his colleagues sought to build a ‘clock’ that would accurately reflect a person’s disease status. To do so, they used data from 45,441 people, selected at random, in the UK Biobank, a repository of biomedical samples. That sample size is roughly 30 times larger than that used in a previous protein-clock study², making it statistically more powerful.

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