“There are 47 percent who are with [the president], who are
dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims,
who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them,
who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing,
to you name it . . . That’s entitlement.”  —Mitt Romney to the
roomful of people at the private fundraiser for Mitt Romney, May 2012

“All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should
do unto you, even so do ye also unto them.” — Matthew 7:12

“Who is here so vile that will not love his country? If any,
speak: for him I have offended.”  —Julius Caesar, act 3, scene 2

Unto Others

Who there knows how good it is to know
a warm bed and a roof? If any, speak.

Who there knows how good it is to know
a schoolroom? If any, speak.

Who there knows how good it is to know
the stiffness of new shoes? If any, speak.

Who there knows how good it is to know
the steam of a meal on your cheeks? If any, speak.

Who there knows how good it is to know
some God hears you weep? If any, speak.

Who there knows how good it is to know?
All of you know, so speak.

So you know how good it is to know.
All of you know, so speak. Say it’s OK

for others to know how good it is to know.
Say it. Speak. You lose nothing

if others know how good it is to know.
Go ahead. Speak.

If you know how good it is to know,
why then don’t you speak?

Why then don’t you speak?
Say something. Speak. Speak. Speak.

by Lauren Marie Schmidt
from Filthy Labors
Curbstone Books, 2017

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

A FEW WEEKS AGO, I could not have thought of any scenario where I would watch former president Donald Trump announce his presidential bid and feel smug about it. Yet, as the midterm vote counts from the near and far reaches of the United States continued to trickle in and a strangely subdued Donald Trump took the stage on Tuesday, I was watching. And it felt like we were looking at a loser.

Not only had the Red Wave of a triumphant Republican comeback failed to materialize, Trump’s cherry-picked MAGA candidates had underperformed other Republicans by about five percentage points, according to a New York Times report. One of the first to fall was Mehmet Oz, his choice for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, who lost to John Fetterman, who had suffered a stroke during the campaign. And in Arizona, Kari Lake, a former anchorwoman who had managed to charm Trump and his legion of MAGA voters, lost to Katie Hobbs, a woman who had stood up to the MAGA machine during the extended vote count in 2020—though in true Trumpian style, Lake refused to concede and announced she was assembling a legal team to investigate the breakdown of voting machines.

More here.

Christopher Mason in Delancey Place:

Every multicellular organism begins as one cell, which contains all of the intricate instructions to synthesize, organize, and regulate not only this cell but the development and maintenance of all cells that will inevitably comprise the organism. All of these instructions are encoded in the first cell’s DNA. This underscores the complexity of the genome and how each cell’s expression must be controlled in specific ways depending on its function. The cells hailing from each tissue in the human body (e.g., muscle, lung, heart, liver) harbor a unique epigen­etic signature, which enables the maintenance of tissue-specific func­tions through the control of gene regulation, as just discussed.

Our knowledge of the total number of unique cells, or cell types, is still growing. Previous estimates put the number of unique cell types in the human body at ~300, but new estimates from the Human Cell Atlas have shown that we may have thousands of cell types and subtypes, each harboring a unique function for a specific physiological state or response to stimuli. But even cells of the same cell type will not be identical.

More here.

Charles T. Rubin at The New Atlantis:

As the story is often told, even before the era of manned lunar exploration ended, policymakers and the public were losing interest. It was enough to have fulfilled the promise of President John F. Kennedy, and to have “beat the Russians.” President Richard Nixon may have paid lip service to bigger and bolder goals when he announced the space shuttle program, but he was also clear about the shuttle’s less-than-inspiring purpose — to “revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.” Perhaps we should better appreciate the wonders of the commercial world, but to make something routine is precisely to suck the wonder out of it, to make it uninteresting. And indeed, that is pretty much what happened.

It may seem odd that things should have turned out this way. For while many are the wonders of our technological powers, surely few are more wonderful than our ability to reach outer space, and to survive there for extended periods. And getting into space is just the beginning of the wonders.

more here.

Vikram Murthi at The Current:

The Feelies never quite belonged to the “blank generation,” a term coined by punk rocker Richard Hell that describes the midseventies New York punk scene. They certainly played alongside the likes of Television, the Patti Smith Group, the Shirts, and other CBGB and Max’s Kansas City mainstays, but they never quite gelled with that crowd. Their sound was more angular and percussive than the shambolic style of their peers. They were the jangly alternative to the alternative culture, exemplifying a vibrant sonic quality that strongly influenced early R.E.M. and almost every other band that critics would eventually label “college rock.” Perhaps the twin rhythm guitar and percussion sections contributed to their outsider status. Or maybe they never quite belonged because Glenn Mercer and Bill Million, the founding members, hail from suburban New Jersey.

more here.

Richard Hughes Gibson in The Hedgehog Review:

In his 1987 book Die Schrift, the Czech-born Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser posed the question of whether writing had a future (Hat Schreiben Zukunft? reads Flusser’s subtitle). As he surveyed the media landscape of the late twentieth century, Flusser observed that some aspects of writing (“this ordering of written signs into rows”) could already be “mechanized and automated” thanks to word processing, and he foresaw that artificial intelligence would “surely become more intelligent in the future” allowing the mechanization of writing to proceed further.

In fact, Flusser anticipated that AI would soon exhibit the hallmark cognitive traits of the mental world inaugurated by writing. Of that mental world, Flusser writes, “Only one who writes lines can think logically, calculate, criticize, pursue knowledge, philosophize.” Above all, Flusser credits writing with giving humans “historical consciousness,” which he defines as the ability to see and describe the world in terms of goal-oriented processes—as opposed to the unchanging cycles that marked prehistorical societies. AIs, in Flusser’s view, will soon “possess a historical consciousness far superior to ours,” allowing them to “make better, faster, and more varied history than we ever did,” with the result that we’ll leave the business of history-writing to them. Writing may indeed have a future, Flusser believed, but that future won’t be an entirely, or even primarily, human one.

More here.

David Nirenberg in The Nation:

Unlike his much more famous colleague Albert Einstein, John von Neumann is not a household name these days, but his discoveries shape the possibilities of life for every creature on this planet. As a teenager, von Neumann provided mathematics with new foundations. He later helped teach the world how to build and detonate nuclear bombs. His invention of game theory furnished the conceptual tools with which superpowers today decide whether to wage war, economists model the behavior of markets, and biologists predict the evolution of viruses. The pioneering programmable computer that von Neumann and his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., completed in 1951 established “von Neumann architecture” as the standard for computer design well into the 21st century, making first IBM and then many other corporations fabulously wealthy.

More here.

Editorial in Nature:

For warming to be limited to 1.5 °C, emissions need to fall by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030. According to the latest UNFCCC report, published in October, they are set to increase by more than 10%. There is still no coordinated plan to turn these figures around. With some 45,000 people registered to attend COP27 — a record — many are questioning whether a planetary emergency can be tackled in this way.

One undoubted step forwards, however, came with the historic agreement to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund. For the first time, countries that have suffered devastation as a result of climate change will be helped with the associated costs, such as those of rebuilding homes and businesses destroyed by floods. This represents a totally new kind of fund, going beyond existing (if imperfectly implemented) mechanisms for funding the costs of mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change.

More here.

Brandon Keim in The New York Times:

It’s easy to look at a forest and think it’s inevitable: that the trees came into being through a stately procession of seasons and seeds and soil, and will replenish themselves so long as environmental conditions allow. Hidden from sight are the creatures whose labor makes the forest possible — the multitudes of microorganisms and invertebrates involved in maintaining that soil, and the animals responsible for delivering seeds too heavy to be wind-borne to the places where they will sprout. If one is interested in the future of a forest — which tree species will thrive and which will diminish, or whether those threatened by a fast-changing climate will successfully migrate to newly hospitable lands — one should look to these seed-dispersing animals.

“All the oaks that are trying to move up north are trying to track the habitable range,” said Ivy Yen, a biologist at the University of Maine who could be found late one recent afternoon at the Penobscot Experimental Forest in nearby Milford, arranging acorns on a tray for mice and voles to find.

More here.

Meal Ticket

We’ve made the turkey’s breast
so large it’s an obstacle to mating,
the birds artificially imbued,
lots of creatures these days
needing an assist with things
they used to do for themselves.
No other earthlings consume as we do,
the planet’s tender rotations
always tempting, commerce
done to a last turn. And the turkeys,
their so-called stupidity
a kind of innocence, stand in
crowded metal pens,
rain falling on those outside,
snoods and wattles trembling,
yellow bills turned up to sky
that once meant promise.
Instinct stirs, hope nesting
in a dark branch of cloud,
just enough to drown them.

by Sally Molini
from Rattle, Winter 2009
Whitson Publishing

Katherine Rundell in Delancey Place:

Donne was not sent to school. He was missing very little; the schools of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were grim, ice cold metaphorically and literally. Eton’s dormitory was full of rats; at many of the public schools at the time, the boys burned the furniture to keep warm, threw each other around in their blankets, broke each other’s ribs and occasionally heads. The Merchant Taylors’ school had in its rules the stipulation, ‘unto their urine the scholars shall go to the places appointed them in the lane or street with­out the court’, which, assuming the interdiction was neces­sary for a reason, suggests the school would have smelled strongly of youthful pee. Because smoking was believed to keep the plague at bay, at Eton they were flogged for the crime of not smoking. Discipline could be murderous. It became necessary to enforce startling legal limits: ‘when a schoolmaster, in correcting his scholar, happens to occa­sion his death, if in such correction he is so barbarous as to exceed all bounds of moderation, he is at least guilty of manslaughter; and if he makes use of an instrument improper for correction, as an iron bar or sword … he is guilty of murder.’

Instead, Donne was educated at home.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

Is any product of bourgeois consumer ideology more noxious than the “bucket list”? At just the moment a person should be adjusting their orientation, in conformity with their true nature, to focus exclusively on the horizon of mortality, they are rudely solicited one last time, before it’s really too late, for a final blow-out tour of the amusement parks and spectacles that still held out some plausible hope of providing satisfaction back in ignorant youth, when life could still be imagined to be made up of such things. “Travel is a meat thing”, William Gibson wrote, to which we might add that the quest for new experiences in general is really only fitting for those whose meat is still fresh.

But our economic order cannot accept this. Capitalism obscures from view first the meaning of life, which properly understood is a preparation for death, and then it obscures the meaning of death, which properly understood is the all-surrounding horizon of a mortal life.

More here.

Carissa Wong in New Scientist:

An experimental vaccine has generated antibody responses against all 20 known strains of influenza A and B in animal tests, raising hopes for developing a universal flu vaccine.

Influenza viruses are constantly evolving, making them a moving target for vaccine developers. The annual flu vaccines available now are tailored to give immunity against specific strains predicted to circulate each year. However, researchers sometimes get the prediction wrong, meaning the vaccine is less effective than it could be in those years.

Some researchers think annual flu jabs could be replaced by a universal flu vaccine that is effective against all flu strains. Researchers have tried to achieve this by making vaccines containing protein fragments that are common to several influenza strains, but no universal vaccine has yet gained approval for wider use.

Now, Scott Hensley at the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues have created a vaccine based on mRNA molecules – the same approach that was pioneered by the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna covid-19 vaccines.

More here.

Christopher Leslie Brown interviewed at Asterisk Magazine:

Asterisk: Your book Moral Capital is about why the movement to abolish the slave trade in Britain happened in the late 1780s and not earlier. Would you mind briefly walking through the thrust of that argument?

Christopher: While it’s not easy to boil down the entire book, essentially, there’s a group of people who gather in the late 1780s and commit themselves to convincing British authorities to abolish Britain’s slave trade. The book explains how that group came together, who they were and why they chose that particular issue. The broad answer is that the circumstances of the American Revolution and its aftermath created an environment with new political, moral and cultural values that did not exist before. I don’t argue that the American Revolution caused the antislavery movement, but that it created the conditions that made the movement possible.

More here.

Richard Marshall at 3:16 AM:

3:16: What made you become a philosopher?

David Hume: When I turned my eye inward, I found nothing but doubt and ignorance. Truth is, Richard, all the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho’ such is my weakness that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Can I be sure, that, in leaving all established opinions, I am following truth? and by what criterion shall I distinguish her, even if fortune should at last guide me on her footsteps? After the most accurate and exact of my reasonings, I can give no reason why I should assent to it; and feel nothing but a strong propensity to consider objects strongly in that view under which they appear to me. The memory, senses, and understanding, are all of them founded on the imagination. No wonder a principle so inconstant and fallacious should lead us into errors, when implicitly followed (as it must be) in all its variations. The understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition either in philosophy or common life. We have no choice left, but betwixt a false reason and none at all. Should I endeavor to banish these sentiments, I feel I should be a loser in point of pleasure; and this is the origin of my philosophy.

More here.

Return to Sibiu

After a year of absence
I find my house strewn with feathers.

From the paintings, what first disappeared
was the sea.
Only a fish’s gasping mouth remained alive,
bubbling words.

Moon rays curled obediently
in my coffee cup
and an invisible bird measured invisible time
inside a clock where she’d built her nest.

“Georg,” she whispered.
“Philipp,” the echo sang back.
“Telemann,” I say aloud
while the record is spinning
and the violin strings
accompany your body
a world away.

Like an unseen orchestra:
                       Presto, say your fingers
                       Corsicana, answer my fingers
Allegrezza, say your eyes
                       Scherzo, answer my eyes
                       Gigue, say your patent-leather shoes
                       Polacca, answers my white dress
                       Menuet, answer our bodies, dancing in a ring
                                                on the perfect Street of the Bards . . .

by Lilliana Ursu
from Blackbird

Original Romanian: Here
Audio rendition: Here

Charles Arrowsmith in The Washington Post:

Peter Attia in peterattiamd.com:

I recently shared a graph on Instagram representing whom we spend time with across our lifetime, collected from 2009 to 2019 as part of the American Time Use Survey (Figure 1). For the most part, the numbers make intuitive sense. The amount of time we spend with our coworkers starts dropping in our mid-fifties as we begin to retire, and time with partners rises concurrently. Time spent with children spikes during the typical child-bearing years of our twenties and thirties and falls again as we reach the “empty nest” stage.

Figure 1: Who Americans spend their time with, by age.

These data demonstrate that most of us enjoy a diversity of social connections daily, and yet, throughout virtually all of our lifespan, we spend more time alone than with any given relationship. Especially eye-catching is the rapid increase in time spent alone after the age of forty, and beyond our early sixties, we spend, on average, more than seven waking hours alone.

Guaranteed loneliness?

The same article, published by Our World in Data, interestingly shows that the percentage of Americans living alone across all age groups has been increasing throughout history, as shown in Figure 2 (one exception being a recent decline in the age 75 group, though this is likely an artifact of increased life expectancy). In just the past half-century, the proportion of people living alone has almost doubled. In fact, more than 40% of people over the age of 89 live alone. So not only do we spend more time alone as we age, we also spend more time alone than our historical counterparts at all ages. These combined trends raise the question: are we growing lonely? 

Despite these statistics, time spent alone does not reflect a loss of meaningful social connection and does not predict loneliness.

More here.