Tadhg Hoey at The Millions:

Toward the end of Percival Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees, about a series of murders in present-day Money, Mississippi, the small town where 13-year-old Emmet Till was brutally lynched in 1955, a list of Black Americans who died by lynching is read aloud by an academic who is researching the origins of racial violence. The list, compiled by a local mystic, is only partial, but it is long and overwhelming. It contains many victims whose names remain unknown. One of the names on the list is David Walker, along with his wife and four small children, who are nameless. Walker and his family were murdered in front of their Kentucky home on October 3, 1908, by 50 members of the racist vigilante group the Night Riders, which accused Walker of swearing at a white woman. The lynching was well-documented, but the names of Walker’s wife and children are never mentioned.

After the publication of The Trees, a reader from Tennessee wrote to Everett to tell him that David Walker’s wife was named Annie. Everett reflected on what this correction meant to him during his acceptance speech after winning the PEN/Jean Stein Award for his 2023 novel Dr. No.

more here.

How To Build a Cathedral

The leaves outside my window shake with a deeper
movement than the continuing ripple of the morning,
midsummer breeze. “Squirrels,” I think, and think
of how I know they’re there although I cannot see them,
not a large movement, but enough if you paid
attention. This is how the ancients found the holy places,
then followed the ley lines that led from one to another.
Earth makes a gesture. Some subtle thing moves.
“Ah,” you say, then “Ah” again, if you are paying
attention and mark where you are. Maybe you leave
a stone you’ve carried because it felt good in your hand.
Another person does the same. Soon there’s a cairn,
then a cathedral where boys like me pay no
attention, but sing the mass beautifully anyway.

Nils Peterson
from A Letter

Suzi Ronson at Literary Hub:

Angie calls in a high state of excitement: they’re going to see Elvis at Madison Square Garden in New York City. “Come over, David must look wonderful!” I want to go with them…there’s no chance of that happening, but still, a girl can dream. As I drive to Haddon Hall, I can’t help but think over and over…they’re going to see ELVIS!

When I get there, David is full of nervous energy, pacing up and down, smoking one cigarette after another. All he talks about is meeting Elvis—how it will be, what he should say, what he should wear and, above all else, how can he look really young? He wants to be seen as the heir apparent; he’s planning a photo of him and Elvis where he’ll be looking up at the older man.

“I’d sell my soul to be famous.” It just comes out.

Angie and I look at each other in silence. I feel as if I’m in a melodramatic black-and-white 1940s movie. It doesn’t feel quite serious, like he’s trying out saying it. Elvis has been a huge star my whole life. Even before The Beatles there was Elvis, so it’s a surprise to me that David compares himself to Elvis and I marvel at his confidence. I mean, David’s good, he’s really good—but Elvis?!

More here.

Jason Castro in Aeon:

What is the distance between the scent of a rose and the odour of camphor? Are floral smells perpendicular to smoky ones? Is the geometry of ‘odour space’ Euclidean, following the rules about lines, shapes and angles that decorate countless high-school chalkboards? To many, these will seem like either unserious questions or, less charitably, meaningless ones. Geometry is logic made visible, after all; the business of drawing unassailable conclusions from clearly stated axioms. And odour is, let’s be honest, a bit too vague and vaporous for any of that. The folksy idea of smell as the blunted and structureless sense is at least as old as Plato, and I have to confess that, even as an olfactory researcher, I sometimes feel like I’m studying the Pluto of the sensory systems – a shadowy, out-there iceball on a weird orbit.

In recent years, however, things have changed dramatically, and understanding what one might call ‘the geometry of smell’ is a field that now enlists task forces of neuroscientists working together with mathematically trained theorists and artificial intelligence (AI) experts.

More here.

Abbas El-Zein in the Sydney Review of Books:

Arabic speakers are spoilt for choice when it comes to expressions of love. At least twenty-five Arabic words for different shades of love, affection and love-induced states of mind are in common usage, by my count. The actual number is said to be somewhere between fifty and one hundred, if formal Arabic words, less encountered in day-to-day speech, are included.

hub, hawaa, gharaam, walaa, hanaan, shaghaf, kalaf, shawq, walah, tatayyum, haneen …

No two words have the same meaning, and the vocabulary maps out a range of emotions, moods and relationships with the beloved, while conveying myriad kinds of love – sensual, carnal or chaste, profane or divine, joyful or melancholy.

From love as tenderness (atf or sababa), forlornness (wajd) or feelings of warmth towards someone (wod), through chaste (eeffa), eternal (rasseess) or unrequited (lajaa) love, to adulation (oshq), infatuation (wallah) and passionate love (hiaam). Love that leaves us burning is huraaq and love that stings is lathgh.

More here.

The Silence

What must a man do to be at home in the world?
There must be times when he is here
as though absent, gone beyond words into the woven
…… shadows
of the grass and the flighty darknesses
of leaves shaking in the wind, and beyond
the sense of the weariness of engines and of his own heart,
his wrongs grown old unforgiven. It must be with him
as though his bones fade beyond thought
into the shadows that grow out of the ground
so that the furrows he opens in the earth opens
in his bones, and he hears the silence
of the tongues of the dead tribesmen buried here
a thousand years ago. And then what presences will rise up
before him, weeds bearing flowers, and the dry wind
rain! What songs he will hear!

by Wendell Berry
from Farming-A Handbook
Harvest Books, 1970

Christine Smallwood at Bookforum:

Writing explicitly about sex is provocative. Being too interested in food would be tacky, domestic. Debré’s narrator is comfortable with the upper classes and the down-and-out—“when your parents are upper-class junkies, you get good training”—but with Agnès has her first experience of a member of the “petty bourgeoisie.” She’s cast off the comforts of her class position, but she’s still rich on the inside. She tries to get used to Agnès’s mannerisms—the phrases like “Oh shoot” and “the little ones,” the habit of taking one’s shoes off at the door—and can’t. She admits to speaking with a “snobby accent.” She’s related to duchesses on her mother’s side; her grandfather on her father’s side was the prime minister. (Debré doesn’t spell it out, but the reference is to Michel Debré, who held office for three years under de Gaulle, and drafted the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.) She loves filthy language, and bourgeois striving and planning make no sense to her. She lives cheaply and insists that her change of station involves real risk, casting aspersion on the middle-class assumption that “when your family name’s in the dictionary you must automatically have money invested in mutual funds.” She writes that making money “stresses me out,” that “it’s only when I’m poor and the bailiffs are on my ass that I feel like I’m where I belong.” She seeks extremity. But no bailiff actually comes to call. She’s “so rich that I don’t care about being poor.”

more here.

James Womack at Literary Review:

The billing of Until August as Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘dementia novel’ is a simplification. Although García Márquez’s last years were marked by a falling away of his powers, and his brother confirmed a diagnosis of dementia in 2012, the manuscript was largely finished by 2004. An earlier version of the story, in a translation by Edith Grossman rather than Anne McLean, appeared in the New Yorker in 1999. The book as a whole seems to have been put away once García Márquez realised that he couldn’t pull off his intended structure: five stories of similar length, all with the same protagonist. Readers who want to examine this slip of a book pruriently, as a chance to see the shattered visage of a once-great writer, should look elsewhere.

This is not to say that there aren’t issues with its publication, as the preface to this translation makes clear. García Márquez himself was blunt: ‘This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.’ 

more here.

Simon Schuster in Time:

In Russian custom, the soul of the dead is believed to remain on earth for forty days, finishing its business among the living before it moves on to the afterlife. Surviving friends and relatives often spend this period in mourning and reflection. But the loved ones of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading dissident, did not have much freedom to abide by this custom after he died in an Arctic prison camp on February 16.

For them, and especially for his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, the days and weeks that followed his death rushed by in a blur of studio lights, airport terminals, hotel rooms and video calls. Somewhere in that time, between consoling their two children and being consoled by them, she met with President Joe Biden in San Francisco and addressed the European parliament in Strasbourg. She accused Vladimir Putin of killing her husband, and she implored the Russian people to help her get revenge. Along the way, to the surprise of many of her husband’s followers, Navalnaya took on a role she had never occupied before — no longer the first lady of the Russian opposition, but now its figurehead.

More here.

From NY Langone News Hub:

An experimental drug already tested as a potential treatment for cancer, lung disease, and Alzheimer’s disease may slow the progression of atherosclerosis that leads to heart disease, a new study shows.

Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study explored the mechanisms behind atherosclerosis, in which fatty deposits build up in blood vessels. As this buildup hardens into plaques and causes misplaced immune reactions, known as inflammation, it can block blood flow, causing heart attack or stroke.

Published on June 8 in the journal Nature Cardiovascular Research, the new study showed that plasma, the liquid part of blood, from patients with atherosclerotic disease triggers an unusually high inflammatory signal in immune cells. Further experiments then showed that the drug saracatinib reduced this inflammation signaling by more than 90 percent in human blood samples and diseased tissue samples.

More here.

Sarah Lyall in the New York Times:

Last May, nine months after the knife attack that nearly killed him, Salman Rushdie made a surprise appearance at the 2023 PEN America literary gala. His voice was weak and he was noticeably thinner than usual; one of his eyeglass lenses was blacked out, because his right eye had been blinded in the assault. But anyone wondering whether the author was still his old exuberant self would have been immediately reassured by the way he began his remarks, with a racy impromptu joke.

“I want to remind people in the room who might not remember that ‘Valley of the Dolls’ was published in the same publishing season as Philip Roth’s ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’” he said, riffing on an earlier speaker’s mention of Jacqueline Susann’s potboiler. “And when Jacqueline Susann was asked what she thought about Philip Roth’s great novel” — with its enthusiastically self-pleasuring main character — “she said, ‘I think he’s very talented but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.’”

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Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

In January 2022, researchers at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, reported that these systems, when accidentally allowed to munch on data for much longer than usual, developed unique ways of solving problems. Typically, when engineers build machine learning models out of neural networks — composed of units of computation called artificial neurons — they tend to stop the training at a certain point, called the overfitting regime. This is when the network basically begins memorizing its training data and often won’t generalize to new, unseen information. But when the OpenAI team accidentally trained a small network way beyond this point, it seemed to develop an understanding of the problem that went beyond simply memorizing — it could suddenly ace any test data.

The researchers named the phenomenon “grokking,” a term coined by science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein to mean understanding something “so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed.”

More here.

Annie Jacobsen in New Scientist:

As an investigative journalist, I write about war, weapons, national security and government secrets. I’ve previously written six books about US military and intelligence programmes – at the CIA, The Pentagon, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency– all designed to prevent, or deter, nuclear world war III. In the course of my work, countless people in the upper echelons of US government have told me, proudly, that they’ve dedicated their lives to making sure the US never has a nuclear war. But what if it did?

“Every capability in the [Department of Defense] is underpinned by the fact that strategic deterrence will hold,” US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which is responsible for nuclear deterrence, insists publicly. Until the autumn of 2022, this promise was pinned on STRATCOM’s public Twitter feed. But to a private audience at Sandia National Laboratories later that same year, STRATCOM’s Thomas Bussiere admitted the existential danger inherent to deterrence. “Everything unravels itself if those things are not true.”

If deterrence fails – what exactly would that unravelling look like?

More here.

Nick Hunt in Noema:

Returning home after being away for any length of time is strange. The Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta, who journeyed 70,000 miles across much of the 14th-century Islamic world, wrote that “traveling gives you home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.” I’d venture that all travelers, whether they have been away for years, months or only weeks, know something of this estrangement. What gap year student hasn’t returned from their rite-of-passage journey to find that the “gap” now lies between them and their former life? This peculiar dislocation — a kind of out-of-body experience — might wear off after several days, or it might last much longer.

For me it lasted for at least the same period as my absence. During that time I tried and failed to slot back into my old life, but everything seemed misaligned. The familiar sights around me had become foreign. One of the most confounding things was that my mental map of London — a city I’d learned street by street in the era before Google Maps, cycling for hours each day with a battered A-Z map — had completely vanished, as if the data had been wiped. I constantly found myself lost in neighborhoods I had known for years.

This cartographic distortion was accompanied by a temporal one. Travel, as has often been noted, has a warping effect on time, elongating it in some ways while compressing it in others. Like Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the bigger the journey and the greater its gravitational pull on the trajectory of your life, the more the temporal field around it seems to become dilated. It can feel like you’ve been gone for a lifetime and have changed irrevocably, and yet when you return, time has apparently stood still.

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Paula Span in The New York Times:

Determining whether someone has Alzheimer’s disease usually requires an extended diagnostic process. A doctor takes a patient’s medical history, discusses symptoms, administers verbal and visual cognitive tests. The patient may undergo a PET scan, an M.R.I. or a spinal tap — tests that detect the presence of two proteins in the brain, amyloid plaques and tau tangles, both associated with Alzheimer’s. All of that could change dramatically if new criteria proposed by an Alzheimer’s Association working group are widely adopted. Its final recommendations, expected later this year, will accelerate a shift that is already underway: from defining the disease by symptoms and behavior to defining it purely biologically — with biomarkers, substances in the body that indicate disease.

The draft guidelines, Revised Criteria for Diagnosis and Staging of Alzheimer’s Disease, call for a simpler approach. That could mean a blood test to indicate the presence of amyloid. Such tests are already available in some clinics and doctors’ offices. “Someone who has biomarker evidence of amyloid in the brain has the disease, whether they’re symptomatic or not,” said Dr. Clifford R. Jack Jr., the chair of the working group and an Alzheimer’s researcher at the Mayo Clinic. “The pathology exists for years before symptom onset,” he added. “That’s the science. It’s irrefutable.”

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Gideon Lewis-Kraus at The New Yorker:

While one segment of Silicon Valley lamented the perpetual absence of flying cars, another, it turns out, was quietly building them—or, at least, something flying-car adjacent. Just three months after the Founders Fund manifesto appeared, a Canadian inventor named Marcus Leng invited his neighbors and a couple of friends to his rural property, north of Lake Ontario. Leng was in his early fifties, with a bowl cut of coarse graying hair. He instructed his guests to park their (conventional) cars in a row and cower behind them. He strapped on a helmet and boarded a device that he’d built in his basement. It had a narrow single-seat chassis and two fixed wings, one in front and one in back, each with four small propellers. It was at once sleek and ungainly, as if a baby orca had been hitched to two snowplows. Observers described it, for lack of a better comparison, as looking like a U.F.O. Leng called it the BlackFly.

Leng, who had been flying since he was a teen-ager, had long dreamed of the “perfect aircraft”—something “that didn’t require a pilot’s license, and could take off or land anywhere.” He’d paid close attention to past designs but suspected that their propulsion systems were too heavy, too complex, and too unresponsive.

more here.