From Phys.Org:

We breathe, eat and drink tiny particles of plastic. But are these minuscule specks in the body harmless, dangerous or somewhere in between?

A small study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine raises more questions than it answers about how these bits—microplastics and the smaller nanoplastics—might affect the heart. The Italian study has weaknesses, but is likely to draw attention to the debate over the problem of plastic pollution. Most plastic waste is never recycled and breaks down into these particles. “The study is intriguing. However, there are really substantial limitations,” said Dr. Steve Nissen, a heart expert at the Cleveland Clinic. “It’s a wake-up call that perhaps we need to take the problem of microplastics more seriously. As a cause for heart disease? Not proven. As a potential cause? Yes, maybe.” WHAT DID THE STUDY FIND?

The study involved 257 people who had surgery to clear blocked blood vessels in their necks. Italian researchers analyzed the fatty buildup that the surgeons removed from the carotid arteries, which supply blood and oxygen to the brain. Using two methods, they found evidence of plastics—mostly invisible nanoplastics—in the artery plaque of 150 patients and no evidence of plastics in 107 patients. They followed these people for three years. During that time, 30 or 20% of those with plastics had a heart attack, stroke or died from any cause, compared to eight or about 8% of those with no evidence of plastics.

More here.

Kieran Setiya at The Point:

In the past decade or so, there’s been a flowering of philosophical self-help—books authored by academics but intended to instruct us all. You can learn How to Be a Stoic, How to Be an Epicurean or How William James Can Save Your Life; you can walk Aristotle’s Way and go Hiking with Nietzsche. As of 2020, Oxford University Press has issued a series of “Guides to the Good Life”: short, accessible volumes that draw practical wisdom from historical traditions in philosophy, with entries on existentialism, Buddhism, Epicureanism, Confucianism and Kant.

In the interest of full disclosure: I’ve planted seeds in this garden myself. In 2017, I published Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and five years later, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. Both could be shelved without injustice in the self-help section. But both exhibit some discomfort with that fact. When I wrote Midlife, on the heels of a midlife crisis—philosophy, which I had loved, felt hollow and repetitive, a treadmill of classes to teach and papers to write, with tenure a gilded cage—I adopted the conventions of the self-help genre partly tongue-in-cheek.

more here.

Norma Clarke at Literary Review:

Barbara Comyns (1907–92) was a true original. The word ‘unique’ was often applied to her writing, along with ‘bizarre’, ‘comic’ and ‘macabre’. Her characteristic tone of faux-naïf innocence was established in her first novel, Sisters by a River (1947), which, as the Chicago Tribune observed in 2015, mixed ‘dispassion, levity and veiled ferocity’. Her friend and fellow novelist Ursula Holden put it this way: ‘Barbara Comyns deftly balances savagery with innocence, depravity with Gothic interludes.’ That balance of savagery and innocence is the underlying theme of Avril Horner’s compelling biography of an extraordinary woman.

Sisters by a River was avowedly autobiographical. Comyns began it as an exercise in recalling scenes from her childhood for the benefit of her offspring. Virago reissued the novel in 2013 (complete with the misspellings that appeared in the original) and Barbara Trapido wrote an introduction. Trapido described family life in the book as a ‘minefield of lunacy and violence’, with adults ‘as arbitrary and dangerous as tigers’.

more here.

Piano Epistemology

I’m pretty sure this piano exists,
taking up a whole corner of this room as it
does
with its grand heaviness,
its black curviness,
and its 2 legs in front, 1 in back. 

But just to make sure,
instead of kicking it
or banging my forehead against it,
I’m going to sit down on the adjustable bench,
lift the long glossy cover,

and try to play “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”
in such a way that the notes will represent
the many undeniable things of the world
and the chords the way
we can’t help feeling about them.

by Billy Collins
from Plume Magazine

Sam Lansky in Time:

The filmmaker Greta Gerwig was in west London the other day when she walked past a movie set—not her own, but something that just happened to be filming on the street—and stopped for a moment to watch. A light was positioned in front of the house; a car pulled up and an actor got out, shaking the gates and yelling. There was an intensity to the scene, and a vulnerability to his performance. Then, abruptly, the spell was broken. Someone yelled: “Cut! Going again.” A groomer ran out to fix the actor’s hair, a mundane but crucial bit of business.

“Movies!” Gerwig says, almost in the manner of an old-timey studio executive, recalling the moment. “Love ’em!” We’re having lunch in Soho; she’s in London while her husband, the writer-director Noah Baumbach, preps production on his next film, and while she works on a new adaptation of the first book in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series. It’s one of the biggest pieces of intellectual property of all time, but that’s a fitting thing to tackle after what’s been, for Gerwig, a remarkable year. Her dazzling, subversive Barbie, which she co-wrote and directed, grossed more than $1.4 billion at the box office, making it the biggest movie of the year, and the highest-grossing film ever directed by a woman. Barbie has since become a pop-culture phenomenon, from I Am Kenough hoodies to discourse over a third-act monologue delivered by America Ferrera about the impossible pressures women face. Alongside Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Barbie was credited with keeping the theatrical model afloat last year; in January, the film received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture as well as Best Supporting Actress for Ferrera.

More here.

Elizabeth Barber in Harper’s Magazine:

In the summertime, Alex and Dietz decided to take a road trip. The two had met years earlier on Instagram, as fellow animal-rights activists, and had discovered that they agreed on much more than veganism. Actually they agreed on basically everything, including that new human life is not a gift but a needless perpetuation of suffering. Babies grow up to be adults, and adulthood contains loneliness, rejection, drudgery, hopelessness, regret, grief, and terror. Even grade school contains that much. Why put someone through that, Alex and Dietz agreed, when a child could just as well never have known existence at all? The unborn do not appear to be moaning at us from the void, petitioning to be let into life. This idea—that having children is unethical—has come to be known as antinatalism, and in 2021 Dietz set up an Instagram account for a new organization he called Stop Having Kids. By then, the two were dating, although most of the time still living apart. Every so often, they met to hold demonstrations for Stop Having Kids, which Dietz has over time built into a real operation with donors who fund billboards that say things like procreation is not a responsibility and make love not babies.

For their road trip, Alex and Dietz met up in Tucson. Their itinerary was ambitious. They would do outreach from Texas to the East Coast and up through Ontario, occasionally demonstrating with like-minded people. But the trip ran into trouble right from the start. An hour out of El Paso, Dietz lost all his weed, more than two hundred dollars’ worth, at a highway checkpoint.

More here.

Michiko Kakutani at Literary Hub:

In the mid-1960s, network TV was suddenly awash in what scholars would later call “supernatural sitcoms.” My Favorite Martian featured an anthropologist from Mars who crash-lands in Los Angeles and hides out at a newspaper reporter’s apartment while he tries to repair his spacecraft. Mister Ed starred a talking horse who only speaks to his bumbling owner, Wilbur, and constantly gets him in trouble. Bewitched depicted a nose-twitching witch named Samantha who marries a nervous ad executive who insists she refrain from using her magical powers.

I Dream of Jeannie recounted the story of a genie named Jeannie who falls in love with an astronaut who finds her bottle when his space capsule splashes down near a deserted island. And The Addams Family concerned a macabre family with supernatural gifts who don’t understand why their neighbors think they are weird.

At the time, such shows were regarded as simple ditzy, escapist fun. Later, academics would argue that the sitcoms were products of the civil rights era of the day: They metaphorically examined the subjects of “mixed marriages” and integration; and in the case of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie they reflected growing tensions between empowered women and men who want them to just be ordinary, stay-at-home housewives.

More here.

Michael J. Totten in City Journal:

Last summer, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Ross Anderson at The Atlantic that releasing ChatGPT in November 2022 was a necessary public service because, five years from now, AI capabilities will be so “jaw-dropping” that springing it on us all at once would be profoundly destabilizing. “People need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships.”

Some people are worried about unprecedented AI-driven job loss, a supernova of disinformation, the implosion of education and the arts, the dethroning of humanity by an alien intelligence—and possibly even our extinction. Others foresee a golden age of drastically reduced work hours, a shockingly low cost of living, medical breakthroughs and life-span extensions, and the elimination of poverty. Which camp is most likely right?

More here.

Peter Pomerantsev in The Guardian:

Thirty percent of Americans claim, despite all evidence to the ­contrary, that the last presidential elections were “rigged”. Millions are sure that the “deep state” is plotting to import immigrants to vote against “real ­Americans” in the future. Meanwhile in Russia, the majority of people claim that the Kremlin is the innocent party in its brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Ukrainians call their relatives in Russia to tell them about the atrocities, all too often they hear their own kin parrot the Kremlin’s propaganda lines: the atrocities are faked, or false flags, or necessary in order to impose Russia’s greatness.

Across the world we see the growth of propaganda that promotes an alternative reality where black is white and white is black, and where truth is cast away in favour of a sense of superiority and ever more murderous paranoia. How can we defeat it? It’s easy to despair when fact checking is rejected by the millions who don’t want to hear the truth in the first place; when worthy journalism that preaches the virtues of “democracy” crumples in the face of suspicion, seeded purposefully for decades, that the media are actually “enemies of the people”.

We are not, however, the first generation to confront the challenge of authoritarian propaganda.

More here.

Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

Hollis envisions these shifting identities as a change of axes, moving from the parent-child axis of early life to the ego-world axis of young adulthood to the ego-Self axis of the Middle Passage — a time when “the humbled ego begins the dialogue with the Self.” On the other side of it lies the final axis: “Self-God” or “Self-Cosmos,” embodying philosopher Martin Buber’s recognition that “we live our lives inscrutably included within the streaming mutual life of the universe” — the kind of orientation that led Whitman, who lived with uncommon authenticity and made of it an art, to call himself a “kosmos,” using the spelling Alexander von Humboldt used to denote the interconnectedness of the universe reflected in his pioneering insistence that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation.” The fourth axis is precisely this recognition of the Self as a microcosm of the universe — an antidote to the sense of insignificance, alienation, and temporality that void life of meaning.

more here.

Sean Michaels at The Baffler:

Literary Theory for Robots is mainly concerned with an alternative view—the “Aristotelian,” instrumental idea that intelligence represents the ability to successfully do shit—and not some internal, mental model. Intelligence is a set of mechanisms that one applies to one’s problems. It doesn’t matter what’s contained in those mechanisms, how conscious or self-conscious or “correct” they are, just that they work. Negotiating a ceasefire; completing a jigsaw puzzle; shifting gears; turning bread into toast—each of these requires intelligence to solve, and the degree of this intelligence is evaluated by (a) how well the set of mechanisms performs; and (b) how capably the same cocktail can be applied to other problems. A toaster is intelligent, Tenen argues, because its mechanism succeeds at turning bread into toast. And it sits at the bottom rung of a ladder, incapable of applying its wits to any other test.

more here.

An Early Spring Moment

Still dark. Far off, a seagull’s cry,
then a car off to work and another
and another and another just outside
my window. I’m comfortable in bed,
listening, somewhere in my head, to
the comforting, lovely Welsh song,
“All Through the Night” assuring me
that a guardian angel had been there
all night long. Suddenly a morning one
comes as the red light from thermostat
flashes on to tell me a warmth is waiting
beyond my thick comforter.

I read for a while. Here’s a quotation.
“The best sex, probably, was the sex
people had when they really believed
they would go to hell for it–but craved
it so badly that they had it anyway.”
Later, with my coffee, I read a quotation
from Plato’s Republic, the famous one about
a soul waiting for reincarnation. It is told
by the Fates that its destiny is of its own
choosing, “Your daemon or guardian spirit
will not be assigned to you by lot; you will
choose him….Virtue knows no master;
each will possess it to a greater or less
degree, depending on whether he values
or disdains it. The responsibility lies with
the one who makes the choice; the god
has none.” I think of Achilles choosing
fame not happiness and while brooding
over destiny, I look out of my window
across the top of a tree just getting comfortable
with its new green, see a seagull turn
in a great curve above the 7-11, wonder
why I chose the one that got me here now.

by Nils Peterson
3/2024

Rachel Altman in The New Atlantis:

Young women’s social media feeds are flooded with plugs for Botox. By our early twenties, modernity is already dangling opportunities in front of us to flee from a universal fate: to age, to wrinkle, and to transition into new stages of life. Sometimes we all need to be shaken by the shoulders and reminded that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie does just that. The hot pink blockbuster about a perfectly beautiful plastic doll is actually an affirmation of the complex beauty of human life.

More here.

Ziyad Al-Aly in The Conversation:

From the very early days of the pandemic, brain fog emerged as a significant health condition that many experience after COVID-19.

Brain fog is a colloquial term that describes a state of mental sluggishness or lack of clarity and haziness that makes it difficult to concentrate, remember things and think clearly.

Fast-forward four years and there is now abundant evidence that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – can affect brain health in many ways.

In addition to brain fog, COVID-19 can lead to an array of problems, including headaches, seizure disorders, strokes, sleep problems, and tingling and paralysis of the nerves, as well as several mental health disorders.

More here.

John Halpin in Persuasion:

Donald Trump made an entire career out of whining about the mainstream media and still lives on nuggets of outrage dispensed to the faithful about how unfairly the media covered his glorious rule and the election he says was stolen from him. Democrats constantly gripe about the press identifying obvious weaknesses with Joe Biden, such as his age, his abysmal poll numbers, the lackluster support for his economic agenda, and his inability to hold together a basic coalition. Meanwhile, ideological outsiders and self-described “truth-tellers” have turned complaints about the media into a full-time business model of caterwauling about supposed censorship of their out-of-the-mainstream or conspiratorial views.

Politics used to be about “who gets what, when, how” in Harold Lasswell’s famous formulation. But today it’s more about who said what, when, and how—and why everyone is so upset about it.

More here.