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Huw Price in Pearls and Irritations:

In 2012 I was in Cambridge, newly enthroned as the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy. The town had a new Duke and Duchess that year, too, in William and Kate. When they announced they were expecting their first child, I wrote a piece for The Conversation. Welcome as Baby Cambridge would be, I said, she or he was entitled to normal choices in life. 

I followed up with a second piece, after George’s birth. I pointed out that if we moved quickly, he could be allowed a comparatively normal childhood, with the opportunity to choose his own path. Like the then Prince of Wales, I became a grandfather that year. I congratulated him, but said that his grandson should not be denied freedoms that mine would take for granted.

I didn’t get much traction at the time, but the window has been shifting. In the wake of Harry’s book Spare, several writers made similar points. In the Guardian, for example, Jonathan Freedland compared the Windsors to the Truman Show. Kate Williams argued we don’t need a spare, and that Windsor children except the heir should be allowed a normal life. And Catherine Bennett said, “If the country can’t do without the family entirely, we could surely ration ourselves to one child victim per generation.”

This is progress, by my lights, especially Bennett’s use of the phrase ‘child victim’. But even she doesn’t spell out the important point.

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Erica Klarreich in Quanta:

A group of nine mathematicians has proved the geometric Langlands conjecture, a key component of one of the most sweeping paradigms in modern mathematics.

The proof represents the culmination of three decades of effort, said Peter Scholze, a prominent mathematician at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics who was not involved in the proof. “It’s wonderful to see it resolved.”

The Langlands program, originated by Robert Langlands in the 1960s, is a vast generalization of Fourier analysis, a far-reaching framework in which complex waves are expressed in terms of smoothly oscillating sine waves. The Langlands program holds sway in three separate areas of mathematics: number theory, geometry and something called function fields. These three settings are connected by a web of analogies commonly called mathematics’ Rosetta stone.

Now, a new set of papers has settled the Langlands conjecture in the geometric column of the Rosetta stone.

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Gary Saul Morson in Commentary:

Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead of recognizing how much he had missed when cut off from New York, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, this ex-Soviet dissident not only refused to accept superior American ideas but even presumed to instruct us. Harvard was shocked at the speech he gave there in 1978, while the New York Times cautioned: “We fear that Mr. Solzhenitsyn does the world no favor by calling for a holy war.”

For his part, Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that Westerners would not want to hear all he had learned journeying through the depths of totalitarian hell. “Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”

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Claire Dederer at The Guardian:

I know too much about Joan Didion. I’ve seen her image on tote bags and Celine ads; I’ve scrolled past her beautiful sulking face on countless Instagram feeds; I’ve streamed multiple documentaries about her. You’ll notice that I’m not describing her work; I’m describing her fame: the Didion spectacle. I’m impatient with this fame of hers. I believe she is famous for the wrong reasons; in other words, that she is loved wrongly and maybe too widely. I want her to be loved only the way I love her: as the author of a few specific pieces of writing.

I’m not alone in this feeling. My kid texted me the day Didion died: “I loved her but Twitter today is going to be unbearable.” So I came with some trepidation to The Uptown Local. Some reviewers have complained that the book – an account of Cory Leadbeater’s time working as Didion’s assistant – is a little too light on the Didion and a little too heavy on Leadbeater’s own experiences of joy and death.

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Robert Schmerling in Harvard Health Publishing:

Not so long ago, a friend texted me from a coffee shop. He said, “I can’t believe it. I’m the only one here without a tattoo!” That might not seem surprising: a quick glance around practically anywhere people gather shows that tattoos are widely popular. Nearly one-third of adults in the US have a tattoo, according to a Pew Research Center survey, including more than half of women ages 18 to 49. These numbers have increased dramatically over the last 20 years: around 21% of US adults in 2012 and 16% of adults in 2003 reported having at least one tattoo. If you’re among them, some recent headlines may have you worried:

Study Finds That Tattoos Can Increase Your Risk of Lymphoma (OnlyMyHealth)

              Getting a Tattoo Puts You At Higher Risk of Cancer, Claims Study (NDTV)

              Inky waters: Tattoos increase risk of lymphoma by over 20%, study says (Local12.com)

              Shocking study reveals tattoos may increase risk of lymphoma by 20% (Fox News)

What study are they talking about? And how concerned should you be? Let’s go through it together. One thing is clear: there’s much more to this story than the headlines.

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Michael Kimmage in TNR:

Alcove 1 at the City College of New York is surely the most famous lunch table in American intellectual history. No Ivy League dining hall can compete. In the 1930s, a remarkable coterie of students gathered there. (The neighboring alcove, Alcove 2, was a meeting place for students who hewed closer to the party line in Moscow, for the “Stalinists” as they would have been called in Alcove 1.) By now many books and documentaries have been made and written about Alcove 1 and its legacy, which in miniature is the saga of the “New York intellectuals.” They were mostly Jewish, uniformly gifted, and fabulously influential at midcentury. Their history can have the aura of myth.

In Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, Ronnie Grinberg, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, has reconfigured the story of the New York intellectuals. As she notes, many of the most prominent New York intellectuals were not just Jewish—they were men. This circumstance has sociological implications. These intellectuals inhabited and created male spaces like Alcove 1 and mostly male institutions like Partisan Review and Commentary, their pivotal magazines. The writings of Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, and Norman Mailer, New York intellectuals all, showed an obsession with masculinity, their own and that of others. They developed an “ideology of secular Jewish masculinity,” Grinberg writes, which was expressed in a style of writing that merged “verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation.”

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A.O. Scott at the NYT:

Its canonical status is hardly in doubt, but at the same time, 20 years after its publication, “The Known World” can still feel like a discovery. Even a rereading propels you into uncharted territory. You may think you know about American slavery, about the American novel, about the American slavery novel, but here is something you couldn’t have imagined, a secret history hidden in plain sight. The author occupies a similarly paradoxical status: He’s a major writer, yet somehow underrecognized. This may be partly because he doesn’t call much attention to himself, and partly because of his compact output. (When I asked, he said he wasn’t working on anything new at the moment, though there was a story that had been gestating for a while.) Jones, who teaches creative writing at George Washington University, is not a recluse, but he’s not a public figure either. Our meeting place was his idea.

more here.

Ed Simon in The Hedgehog Review:

The Earth’s oceans remain a source of anxious uncertainty. For all that we’ve chartered upon the waves of the sea, that which lies beneath remains as dark as the impenetrable barriers through which surface light does not penetrate, a black kingdom of translucent glowing fish with jagged deaths-teeth and of massive worms living in volcanic trenches. More than even interstellar space, the ocean’s uncanniness disrupts because the entrance to this unknown empire is as near as the closest beach, where even on the sunniest days a consideration of what hides below can give a sense of what the horror author H.P. Lovecraft wrote in a 1927 essay from The Recluse, when he claimed that the “oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is a fear of the unknown.” The conjuring of that emotion was a motivating impulse in Lovecraft’s weird fiction, in which he imagined such horrors as the “elder god” Cthulhu, a massive, uncaring, and nearly immortal alien cephalopod imprisoned in the ancient sunken city of R’lyeh, located approximately 50 degrees south and 100 degrees west.

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Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

The inspiration for the titular device in last year’s blockbuster, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, was an actual archaeological artifact: the Antikythera mechanism, a 2,200-year-old bronze mechanical computer. It doesn’t have any mystical time-traveling powers, but the device has been the subject of fierce scientific scrutiny for many decades and is believed to have been used to predict eclipses and calculate the positions of the planets.

A new paper published in The Horological Journal found evidence, based on statistical techniques drawn from physics, particularly the study of gravitational waves, that the mechanism’s calendar ring was designed to track the lunar calendar. This contradicts a century-long assumption among scholars of the mechanism that the calendar ring had 365 holes, thus tracking with a solar calendar, but is in keeping with the conclusions of a 2020 analysis.

“It’s a neat symmetry that we’ve adapted techniques we use to study the universe today to understand more about a mechanism that helped people keep track of the heavens nearly two millennia ago,” said co-author Graham Woan, an astrophysicist at the University of Glasgow.

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Damon Linker at Persuasion:

It can be a comfort and consolation to believe one’s political opponents don’t really mean what they say. They’re liars. Hypocrites. Shameless opportunists who will say and do anything to gain power. It’s impossible to take them seriously.

So it’s been with the reaction of Democrats to news that the Republican nominee Donald Trump has chosen Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate. Because Vance was once a ferocious Trump critic and changed his views around the time he launched his Senate campaign in 2021, it’s easy to conclude that everything he’s said and done since then has been a cynical ruse. He’s just saying what he thinks he must in order to get ahead in a Trumpified GOP. None of it’s real. He’s faking it from top to bottom.

I think that’s wrong—and Democrats affirm it at their peril.

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Gary Saul Morson at The New Criterion:

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation appeared in 1973, its impact, the author recalled, was immediate: “Like matter enveloped by antimatter, it exploded instantaneously!” The first translations into Western languages in 1974—just fifty years ago—proved almost as sensational. No longer was it so easy to cherish a sentimental attachment to communism and the ussr. In France, where Marxism had remained fashionable, the book changed the course of intellectual life, and in America it helped counter the New Left celebration of Mao, Castro, and other disciples of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

What was it that made this book so effective? And what did Solzhenitsyn mean by calling it “literary,” even though everything in it was factual? To answer these questions is to grasp why Gulag towers over all other works of the Soviet period and, indeed, over all literature since the middle of the twentieth century.

Before Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals of course knew that the Soviet regime had been “repressive,” but for the most part they imagined that all that had ended decades ago. So it was shocking when the book described how it had to be written secretly, with parts scattered so that not everything could be seized in a single raid.

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Dan Falk in Undark:

THE WORD CENSORSHIP might bring to mind authoritarian regimes, book-banning, and restrictions on a free press, but Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been studying censorship in science, is interested in another kind. In a recent paper published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Clark and 38 co-authors argue that, in science, censorship often flows from within, as scientists choose to avoid certain areas of research, or to avoid publishing controversial results. As they write in the paper: “Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups.”

Disagreements between and among scientists are not new, nor is the struggle to maintain public trust in science. Still, Clark believes many disputes could be resolved if scientists with differing viewpoints worked together. To that end, she serves as director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at Penn. The project, based on ideas first articulated by Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton professor and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, seeks to bring scientists with differing ideologies together. As the project’s website puts it, the goal is “to stimulate a culture shift among social and behavioral scientists whose work touches on polarizing topics with policy significance by encouraging disagreeing scholars to work together to make scientific progress.”

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Henry Grabar has had enough battling knotweed. All he wanted was to build a small garden in Brooklyn—a bit of peace amid the cacophony of city life. But a plant with beet-red leaves soon took over his nascent garden. The fastest growing plant he’d ever seen, it could sprout up to 10 feet high and grow thick as a cornfield. Even with herbicide, it was nearly impossible to kill. Invasive plant species and weeds don’t just ruin backyard gardens. Weeds decrease crop yields at an average annual cost of $33 billion, and control measures can rack up $6 billion more. Herbicides are a defense, but they have their own baggage. Weeds rapidly build resistance against the chemicals, and the resulting produce can be a hard sell for many consumers.

Weeds often seem to have the upper hand. Can we take it away?

Two recent studies say yes. Using a technology called a synthetic gene drive, the teams spliced genetic snippets into a mustard plant popular in lab studies. Previously validated in fruit flies, mosquitoes, and mice, gene drives break the rules of inheritance, allowing “selfish” genes to rapidly spread across entire species.

But making gene drives work in plants has been a headache, in part due to the way they repair their DNA. The new studies found a clever workaround, leading to roughly 99 percent propagation of a synthetic genetic payload to subsequent generations, in contrast to nature’s 50 percent. Computer models suggest the gene drives could spread throughout an entire population of the plant in roughly 10 to 30 generations. Overriding natural evolution, gene drives could add genes that make weeds more vulnerable to herbicides or reduce their pollination and numbers. Beneficial genes can also spread across crops—essentially fast-tracking the practice of cross-breeding for desirable traits.

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Lina Abascal at the LARB:

THERE ARE SOME things the American mind can’t fully grasp: a certain way of smoking a cigarette, a particular fit of track pant, Rita Ora as a genuine celebrity. But above all, we struggle with the reality that the largest cultural event in the world happens entirely off of our radar and outside of our influence. The Eurovision Song Contest’s essence is European in ways that can only be defined by the same parameters our Supreme Court once used for pornography: you know it when you see it.

At the bar of a chain restaurant inside Los Angeles International Airport, I overhear a bored bartender run the same jokes. A diner wants chopsticks. “Are you right- or left-handed?” Someone says “hi” after sitting on an empty stool. “Not yet, but I will be after this.” By the end of my bowl of sticky chicken, it’s my turn to repeat the lines I’ve been practicing for a month.

“I’m flying to Copenhagen to write about something called the Eurovision Song Contest,” I tell him.

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