Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Why do people voluntarily hand over authority to a government? Under what conditions should they do so? These questions are both timeless and extremely timely, as modern democratic governments struggle with stability and legitimacy. They also bring questions from moral and political philosophy into conversations with empirically-minded social science. Margaret Levi is a leading political scientist who has focused on political economy and the nature of trust in government and other institutions. We talk about what democracy means, its current state, and how we can make it better.

More here.

Gerogina Rannard in BBC:

Joshua Sokol in Quanta Magazine:

One of the many times Lisa Kaltenegger’s dream jolted a little closer toward reality was on a cold April morning a decade ago at an astronomy conference. She was clutching what she recalls was a terrible, just awful cup of coffee, not because she was going to drink any more of it but because she had waited in line and it was warm in her hands. Then Bill Borucki veered in her direction.

She readied herself to tell him to avoid the coffee. But Borucki, head of NASA’s Kepler mission, a space telescope designed to hunt for planets orbiting other stars (or “exoplanets”), had something else to discuss. Kepler had glimpsed its first two Earth-size exoplanets with a decent chance of having liquid water on their surfaces. These were the sort of strange new worlds that everyone at the conference — and possibly most of the human race — had imagined at least once. Would Kaltenegger confirm that the planets might be habitable?

Kaltenegger, at the time an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, started running new climate models before the conference was over, incorporating basic facts like the planets’ diameters and the lukewarm glow of their star. Her ultimate answer: a qualified yes. The planets might be suitable for life, or at least for liquid water; they could even be water worlds, encased in endless oceans without a single rocky outcrop poking above the waves. The caveat was that she would need more advanced observations to be sure.

More here.

Madeleine Cuff in New Scientist:

Fresh from a narrow election victory earlier this month, Lula vowed to reverse the destruction of the Amazon rainforest that has accelerated under the current president, Jair Bolsonaro.

He promised the conference the Amazon would reach “zero deforestation” by the end of the decade. “There is no climate security for the world without a protected Amazon. We will do whatever it takes to have zero deforestation and degradation of our biomes by 2030,” said Lula.

His new administration will put climate change at the heart of his policy agenda, he said, by cracking down on deforestation, tackling inequality and rolling out renewable energy across the country.

More here.

Sofia Coppola at Lit Hub:

I’ve always loved Edith Wharton’s writing, but The Custom of the Country is my favorite, and I think her funniest and most sly. As I’ve worked on adapting it into a screenplay, I’ve found it interesting to hear some men say that Undine is so unlikable, while my women friends love her and are fascinated by her and what she’ll do next. We’ve all seen her before, the way she walks into the room, her focus on men, and her ease with their gaze. We admire and are annoyed by her. While I’ve often worked on stories with more sympathetic characters, it’s been so fun to dive into Undine’s world and pursuits.

Published in 1913, originally in serial form for Scribner’s Magazine, each book of The Custom of the Country ends with anticipation for what and who’s next on Undine’s social-climbing quest. Wharton paints the picture of the ultimate nouveau-riche climber. We watch her like a car crash while at the same time we root for her. She does things we would never dream of doing, and it’s such a delight to follow along. Mixed with empathy and disdain, Wharton manages to keep us captivated, and makes us look at ourselves along the way.

more here.

Pat Lipsky at The New Criterion:

With Paul Klee, the bad year was 1930, “when he started using thick black outlines,” Clem said. Picasso was clear until 1918, after which “he never did a good painting.” T. S. Eliot, the publication year of The Waste Land, 1922. Clem squinted above a thick exhale from his Camel, as if looking back across the years of disappointed production. Eliot had lost his stuff. On Van Gogh, the years were 1885–88, the era of Shoes and The Potato Eaters. The portraits especially “had too much paint and were not good.” For Pollock, whom Clem singled out early on as the most important Abstract Expressionist, the cutoff was 1951. It amused Clem when at Pollock’s 1951 show—the first not to succeed—people kept coming up to him and saying, “At last I get what you see in Pollock.”

I memorized these falling-off dates and couldn’t help thinking the idea obsessed Clem because he, too, had fallen off. He attributed his non-writing then to writer’s block, which I took as a generic term to mean he had ceased exerting any control over his schedule. What Clem did all day was see friends, read philosophy, and visit exhibitions, with his scowling instant discernment. He was nearing eighty.

more here.

Two poems by William Matthews:

Night Driving

You follow into their dark tips
those two skewed tunnels of light.
Ahead of you, they seem to meet.
When you blink, it is the future.

The Calculus

. . There is a culture which counts like this: “one,
two, many.” It is sufficient. They don’t use numbers
to measure. There are so many women your wife
gets pushed out of bed. Everyone knows without a
name for it how many dead men a camel can carry.
There is so little light the dark part of each eye
grows knuckle-size.
. . The invention of zero will end their life. They don’t
say “no moon tonight”; they say “the moon is
gone.” We can add this egg of absence to anything
—then we are richer.

from Sleek for the Long Flight
Random House, 1972, 1988

Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily:

Cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloans—the Anasazi to the Navajo Diné—haunt the desert Southwest. Mesa Verde, Chaco, Canyon de Chelly, and many other  sites and artifacts in the Four Corners region stand testament to six centuries of residency. However, they tell us little of the people that came and then went, leaving buildings, pottery, and bones behind. There have been more than 4,000 habitation sites detected in the Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado. Population estimates for this area alone in the mid-1200s CE run up to 19,200 people.

Yet these people abandoned the houses and villages more than two hundred years before the first Europeans arrived in the region. Did those newcomers, as many have since, gaze upon the sandstone, timber, and adobe constructions and wonder: who built these, where did they go, why did they go?

more here.

Carl Miller  at Literary Review:

So the race for attention has shaped the products and these products have shaped what we see. This has created nothing less than ‘a wholly new era in the human experience’. Fisher’s point is that wiring platforms to grab attention has had a series of vast and ultimately ruinous consequences for the world we live in. For what the machines learned was that across an array of cultures and societies, more extreme content wins more engagement. The charge is not simply that YouTube and Facebook have allowed polarising, extremist, conspiracist, hateful material to persist on their platforms; it is also that they have actively pushed people’s attention towards it. Their products haven’t just reflected reality for us all but actually created it.

This is a story not only of technology but also of what happens when it commingles with fragile psychologies and vulnerable societies. The algorithms learned how to nourish dark and dangerous human impulses. People were pulled in as much by anomie as by hate – by ‘content’, Fisher writes, ‘that spoke to feelings of alienation, of purposelessness’.

more here.

Leanne Ogasawara in the Dublin Review of Books:

Why do Americans read so few books in translation? Well, compared with the German or Japanese markets, which see about ten times as many books in translation published in any given year, not a lot of work in translation gets published. Crime fiction might be one notable exception to this since English readers have an unquenchable appetite for them. While Onda writes all types of fiction, from genre to literary, it is her mysteries that are getting picked up. First was New York Times 2020 Notable Book, The Aosawa Murders, and this year it is her Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight.

Both books have been expertly translated by prize-winning literary translator Alison Watts. Translators’ names need to be on the covers by default. Of course they are making these works available to us by reworking them in a different language. Moreover, when there are questions about whether an author is writing in English or not ‑ such as in the case of Kazuo  Ishiguro or Salman Rushdie, for example ‑ readers would be clued in by the absence of a translator’s name on the cover.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Quanta:

The development of relativity is usually attributed to Albert Einstein, but he provided the capstone for a theoretical edifice that had been under construction since James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism into a single theory of electromagnetism in the 1860s. Maxwell’s theory explained what light is — an oscillating wave in electromagnetic fields — and seemed to attach a special significance to the speed at which light travels. The idea of a field existing all by itself wasn’t completely intuitive to scientists at the time, and it was natural to wonder what was actually “waving” in a light wave.

Various physicists investigated the possibility that light propagated through a medium they dubbed the luminiferous ether. But nobody could find evidence for any such ether, so they were forced to invent increasingly complicated reasons why this substance should be undetectable. Einstein’s contribution in 1905 was to point out that the ether had become completely unnecessary, and that we could better understand the laws of physics without it. All we had to do was accept a completely new conception of space and time.

More here.

Leah Aronowsky at Public Books:

This past August marked 30 years since Hurricane Andrew pummeled the Caribbean and south Florida. On August 23, 1992, Andrew made landfall on the Bahamas’s Eleuthera Island as a Category 5 hurricane. It briefly weakened as it passed over the rest of the Bahamas, but quickly regained intensity. At 5 a.m. the next day, Andrew landed in the Florida Keys—again, as a Category 5 hurricane, with winds sustaining speeds of 165 miles per hour. Andrew leveled entire neighborhoods as it moved across the Florida coast; in Dade County alone, 160,000 people were rendered homeless. For weeks after the storm, thousands of Floridians were left without power, water, telephone connection, or other basic services, while groceries and gas remained in short supply. Andrew quickly became the costliest hurricane in US history, racking up $27 billion—roughly $56 billion in today’s dollars—in damage.

Facing historic losses and payouts, nearly a dozen insurance companies became insolvent in Andrew’s wake. But, in another corner of the insurance world, the storm became a business opportunity.

More here.

In the Light of Dreaming Rinny

She was a lens in the sun
in a corner fitting into herself
settling in like batter. Smooth and easy.

And music. Oh, the music everywhere.

Romantic Russian anguish
splaying loud—
like hearing your dreams
turned up loud for all to read.

At night in a quiet room
she sank into a light of dreaming

her dreams she now thinks
were black and white
photographs of a stilled history.
Of the wars–D-Day, Dachau, Hiroshima
All that drama frozen in those faces looking.

Like she is
Her coffee eyes staring out
into the flat-screens of time.

And now– closed doors and the whispers,
Horrible hush of  home movies happening.
Large photos of Jews pressing against each other gasping for space,
Joe Stalin looming terrible and gritty in his large wool clothes.
And her mother hiding alone by herself
For hours here in the afternoon. Kooklah Fran and Ollie.

Pain prick-points. Where she is
in a corner.  Not knowing how to.
Her thick braids itching against this quiet.

Holding on to the sun. Which she can taste fading on her lips.
Sometimes in those pictures, some times,
dark women with bright bandanas.
She thinks she sees the sister she never knew, fitting into herself.

Guessing into all this past, her paprika eyes mazing
about how to know the bold darkness of this light.
and the tremulous force driving all the flowers of all her feeling.

by Linda E. Chown
from Numéro Cinq Magazine

Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:

Almost exactly a year ago, on November 18, 2021, I went to interview Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago. In the second of two conversations, which totalled more than three and a half hours, for a book about his White House years that I wrote with my husband, Peter Baker, the former President had little to say about his agenda, past or future, and a lot of grievance to share. Regardless of the question, Trump often turned it back to a rant about the “rigged election” and the faithless betrayal of Republicans, such as Mitch McConnell, a “disloyal son of a bitch,” “schmuck,” “stupid person,” and “stiff” with “no personality.”

That same week, Trump had been publicly criticized by the Fox News chairman, Rupert Murdoch, for his backward-looking obsession with 2020—a political loser, Murdoch warned. When we pointed out Murdoch’s comments to Trump, the ex-President snapped back. “I disagree with him one hundred per cent,” Trump said. “I don’t speak to him.” When we noted that Trump did, in fact, bring up that election a lot, he was defiant. “I always will,” he said.