Fiona Sturges at The Guardian:

In 2015, Monica Potts reconnected with an old friend named Darci on Facebook. The two of them had grown up in Clinton, a small rural town on the edge of the Ozarks in Arkansas, and had been best friends in high school. In their teens, both vowed they would leave and build a life away from the dysfunction and deprivation of their home town, but for Darci it didn’t pan out like that. While Potts, who is now in her 40s, gained a scholarship to a college in Philadelphia, and became an award-winning political journalist (she has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic, and is now senior politics reporter for FiveThirtyEight), Darci failed to graduate high school and, like many in their social circle, never left Clinton. Over the years, Potts heard on the grapevine that Darci was struggling. When she finally visited her friend on Christmas Eve, 2015, she found her in crisis: separated from her two children, battling addiction, living in a trailer with a man she barely knew and stuck in a repetitive loop of jail time, release, decline and rearrest.

Dwight Garner at the NY Times:

The Robert Johnson we meet in this book remains somewhat blurry and indistinct. He wasn’t a big personality, people tell McCormick. He was soft-spoken; he held people’s attention only when he played.

Johnson grew up in the Mississippi Delta with his mother and stepfather, an illiterate sharecropper. He hated farm work and fled to Memphis whenever he could. Early on he played a drugstore harmonica and a jaw harp, then annoyed older musicians by noodling on their guitars when they weren’t around. He got pretty good.

He was a slender man with tapering fingers. He was said to be shy, but sometimes recklessly bold around women. There was a strong music scene in the Delta and in Memphis, and he thrived in it, playing on street corners and in juke joints. People tend to remember him playing the popular songs of the time, more so than the somber and stabbing work that came to define him.

more here.

Jay Kang in The New Yorker:

One of the stultifying but ultimately true maxims of the analytics movement in sports says that most narratives around player performance are lies. Each player has a “true talent level” based on their abilities, but the actual results are mostly up to variance and luck. If a player has, say, the true talent to hit thirty-one home runs in a season, the timing of those home runs is mostly random. If someone hits a third of those in April, that doesn’t really mean he’s a “hot starter” who is “building off a great spring”—it just means that if you take thirty-one home runs and toss them up in the air to land randomly on a time line, sometimes ten of them float over to April. What does matter, the analytics guys say, are plate appearances: you have to clock in enough opportunities to realize your true talent level.

For much of my career, I was the type of journalist who only published a handful of magazine pieces a year. These required a great deal of time, much of which was spent on minor improvements to the reporting, structure, and sentences. I believed that long-form journalism, much like fiction or poetry, possessed a near-mystical rhythm that could be accessed through months of intensive labor. Once unlocked, some spirit would sing through the piece and touch the readers in a universal, truthful way.

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Stephanie Hershinow in PublicBooks:

Those who don’t already admire Hardwick’s writing likely know her from her marriage to poet Robert Lowell. It is at times a lurid story. A masterful poet, Lowell was also bipolar at a time when treatment was (as it still can be for many) uncertain and inconsistent. During manic episodes, he could be cruel to his wife. (“Everybody has noticed that you’ve been getting pretty dumb lately,” he told her during one episode.) While she worked to keep their household together, ensure bills were paid, and oversee his care, he would call her family to tell them he never loved her. His mania often coincided with brazen affairs; friends, colleagues, and even doctors sometimes suspected Hardwick of jealousy when she tried to get him help. When he finally left her after 20 years of marriage, he wrote a collection of poems—dedicated to his new wife, Caroline Blackwood—that excerpted his ex-wife’s plaintive letters to him and (perhaps the worse betrayal) fabricated others without noting the difference. The Dolphin was condemned by friends like Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, but it also won the National Book Award. (In a published review, Rich called the book “one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry.”) Years later, Lowell and Hardwick reconciled. Visiting her in New York not long after, he took a taxi from the airport and died before arriving. Summoned by the cab driver, Hardwick rode alongside Lowell to the hospital, knowing that he was already dead.

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Carrie Rickey at Sight And Sound:

May, by contrast, the elusive J.D. Salinger of comedy, was happy in the eddies writing and directing four films that have surprising consistency. In A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar, the viewer experiences something rare: a woman’s gimlet-eyed view of the varieties of male vanity and narcissism. Her movies are a series of seductions, negotiations and fights. Notable in May’s films, and in many of the screenplays she wrote for other people, is the introduction of a fourth kind of human encounter: betrayal. With her directorial debut, the black comedy A New Leaf, which May also wrote and starred in, she became the first woman since Ida Lupino (The Trouble with Angels in 1966) to direct a studio film. The central character is Henry, played by a surprisingly dapper Walter Matthau, a narcissistic playboy (is there any other kind?) who has burned through the family inheritance and is horrified by the prospect of working for a living.

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Casey Cep at The New Yorker:

It was a source of some annoyance to Charles Portis that Shakespeare never wrote about Arkansas. As the novelist pointed out, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, impossible: Hernando de Soto had ventured to the area in 1541, members of his expedition wrote about their travels in journals that were translated into English, and at least one of those accounts was circulating in London when Shakespeare was working there in 1609. To Portis, it was also perfectly obvious that the exploration of his home state could have been fine fodder for the Bard: “It is just the kind of chronicle he quarried for his plots and characters, and DeSoto, a brutal, devout, heroic man brought low, is certainly of Shakespearean stature. But, bad luck, there is no play, with a scene at the Camden winter quarters, and, in another part of the forest, at Smackover Creek, where willows still grow aslant the brook.”

Everything about this grievance is pure Portis. There’s the easy erudition—knowing that an English translation of de Soto’s journey was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime—and the sly allusion, relocating Gertrude’s lament for Ophelia to a tributary of the Ouachita River.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjSUJUL9ADw&ab_channel=StanfordeCorner

Jeff Weiss in the Los Angeles Times:

At 53, Suga Free still looks exactly like Suga Free. Honoring his commandment to be fly for life, his hair remains long and luxurious. He’s draped in a custom-made tracksuit with his name emblazoned on the back. The right questions elicit stanzas of profane one-liners, flamboyant slang and coldblooded wisdom. (“Every time I walk out of my house and turn that key in my car, that means I’m finna spend some money,” he laughs. “I’m trying to squeeze a quarter till the eagle screams.”) Ask the wrong question and you don’t want the answer.

The successes of the last quarter-century adorn his sanctuary. Gold and platinum plaques honor his collaborations with DJ Quik, Snoop Dogg and Lil Jon. A gilded disc celebrates “If You Stay Ready,” his pimpadelic ode to the art of preparation, which reached the top of Billboard’s Bubbling Under the Hot 100 list in May 1997.

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Dillon Amaya at The Conversation:

It’s coming. Winds are weakening along the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Heat is building beneath the ocean surface. By July, most forecast models agree that the climate system’s biggest player – El Niño – will return for the first time in nearly four years.

El Niño is one side of the climatic coin called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s the heads to La Niña’s tails.

During El Niño, a swath of ocean stretching 6,000 miles (about 10,000 kilometers) westward off the coast of Ecuador warms for months on end, typically by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius). A few degrees may not seem like much, but in that part of the world, it’s more than enough to completely reorganize wind, rainfall and temperature patterns all over the planet.

More here.

Rebecca Roache at IAI News:

It might feel pretty obvious to you that you’re weak-willed. You feel it, after all – every time you find yourself hitting the snooze button on the alarm when you know you ought to get out of bed; every time you scroll through cat videos on Instagram when you know you ought to be writing; every time you help yourself to a third slice of cake when you know you ought to order a kale smoothie instead. When you find yourself in these situations, there’s often a bit of shame, a bit of guilt, a bit of frustration. In many cases, the subsequent conviction that we’re weak-willed shapes our entire approach to motivating ourselves.

Yet it might not be that simple. There’s a very long history in philosophy of being puzzled by the mere possibility of weakness of will. If it’s really the case, as it seems to be in the sorts of situation I’ve just mentioned, that we sincerely believe that a particular choice is the right one to make, all things considered, then how is it possible that we can voluntarily do something else? How is it possible to hit the snooze button when the alarm goes off when what we really want, all things considered, is to get out of bed?

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Rebecca Porte in Bookforum:

Patterson, a poet, essayist, and translator, has a good ear for the sonic qualities of the Recherche’s prose. This is particularly notable in the opening of the volume. Finding Time Again begins with one of Proust’s analogies between nature and artifice, couched in a meandering, multiclausal sentence that is, nonetheless, beautifully balanced in its Byzantine way, culminating in one of Proust’s classic, grammatical course corrections in which, after drifting away from the initial subject in a metaphorizing reverie, the sentence begins all over again without ending, usually after the nominal concession of a semicolon: “Toute la journée,” it begins, “all day long” as Patterson renders it, before describing the “slightly too bucolic residence” where the narrator finds himself,

one of those houses where every sitting-room looks like a conservatory and where, in the bedroom wall-paper, either the garden roses or the birds in the trees are brought vividly before you and keep you company, in a rather isolated way—it being of the old-fashioned sort in which each rose was so clearly delineated that if it were alive one could have picked it, each bird so perfect that it might have been caged and tamed, without any of the exaggerated modern décor in which, against a background of silver, all the apple trees of Normandy are arrayed in profile, Japanese-style, to turn the hours you spend in bed into a hallucinatory experience;

This takes us up to the semicolon, after which things start over: “all day long I stayed in my room.”

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Rohini Subrahmanyam in The Scientist:

Sophisticated, effective drugs to treat diseases and other conditions aren’t any good if they can’t reach the part of the body or the specific cells that they’re designed to target. However, scientists have found a new way to deliver tiny proteins into specific cells, using small syringelike structures naturally found on certain bacteria. The study, published in Nature on March 29, could lead to better drug-delivery systems in medicine. “Delivery remains a critical bottleneck in medicine,” said study coauthor and MIT researcher Joseph Kreitz. “Although many powerful new therapies have been developed over the past several decades, we will need a deep bench of options to get these therapies into the right cells in the body.”

In the study, Kreitz, Broad Institute researcher Feng Zhang, and the rest of their team took inspiration from nature, relying on tiny microbes that have found a way around this problem. Endosymbiotic bacteria, or bacteria that depend on their host cells for survival, have developed tools such as the extracellular contractile injection system (eCIS), in which the bacteria use tiny syringelike nanomachines to inject protein payloads into their host cells. The host cells, in the case of the bacterium Photorhabdus asymbiotica, are the cells lining the gut of nematodes. In the new study, Zhang and the team re-engineered these so-called nanosyringes from Photorhabdus to target and deliver a wide variety of proteins into human and animal cells.

More here.

Those Who Take the Meat From the Table

Teach contentment,
Those for whom the taxes are destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.

by Bertolt Brecht
from Selected Poems Bertolt Brecht
Harcourt Brace, 1947

Leanne Ogasawara in The Rumpus:

In Jo Walton’s 2019 fantasy novel Lent, Renaissance friar Girolamo Savonarola goes around Florence using his gift of prophecy to root out and banish demons. They do not exactly hide from him. Loud and in his face, the demons are detected first and foremost by their cacophony. Boldly bellowing in his ears, they are impossible for him to ignore. It is a swarming shrieking that fills up all the space in the rooms in which he finds himself.

For Savonarola, hell is an assault of sound.

In her new book, Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us, Kim Haines-Eitzen thinks about the way hermits and monks in antiquity used to take to the hills and flee to the desert to remove themselves from the noise of everyday life; for in the midst of the city, how can a person hear the voice of God?

It wasn’t just the Christian mystics and desert fathers either. The Stoic philosopher Seneca described in great detail the noises coming from a bathhouse just below the room where he was writing, expressing his irritation at the distracting “babel” all around him.

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Matthew A. Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman, and Barbara Mellers in PNAS:

Can money buy happiness? Two authors of this article have published contradictory claims about the relationship between emotional well-being and income. We later agreed that both studies produced valid results and that it was our responsibility to search for an interpretation that explains both findings. We engaged in an adversarial collaboration and asked Barbara Mellers to be the facilitator. This article reports the outcome of our work.

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Arie Kruglanski in The Conversation:

The year 2023 is still young, and already there have been at least 146 mass shooting events in the U.S. on record, including the killing of five people in a Louisville, Kentucky, bank that the shooter livestreamed. There were 647 mass shootings in 2022 and 693 in 2021, resulting in 859 and 920 deaths, respectively, with no respite in sight from this ghastly epidemic. Since 2015, over 19,000 people have been shot and wounded or killed in mass shootings.

In the wake of most shootings, the news media and the public reflexively ask: What was the killer’s motive?

As a psychologist who studies violence and extremism, I understand that the question immediately pops to mind because of the bizarre nature of the attacks, the “out-of-the-blue” shock that they produce, and people’s need to comprehend and reach closure on what initially appears to be completely senseless and irrational. But what would constitute a satisfactory answer to the public’s question?

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Jaime Green at LitHub:

I first read Carl Sagan’s Contact and Cosmos in high school, when I was working at a bookstore that let us borrow any book we had at least two copies of on the shelves. I loved them then and was excited to revisit these books in the course of my research for The Possibility of Life. A scene from Cosmos had stayed with me—and confounded me—for almost twenty years, and I was ready to make new sense of it. But when I got to the place in the book where the scene should have been, the chapter just ended.

Luckily, I was reading an e-book, so I could search anus… Zero results.

Let me explain.

The scene I remembered is in a classroom—I don’t know if Sagan was teacher or student—and the class is split into groups, each tasked with designing an alien life-form. The professor looks at their anatomy sketches and chides, “Where’s its anus?” What had haunted me across the decades was my confusion: Was the professor closed-minded, or were the students being careless?

more here.