Samuel Moyn in Harper’s Magazine:

In Greek myth, Eos falls in love with Tithonus. She is the goddess of the dawn. He is a Trojan prince, yet still a mere mortal. Eos asks Zeus to give her mate the gift of eternal life—­but, foolishly, she forgets to ask for eternal youth too.

Tithonus never dies; he just grows older and older. “Ruthless age,” goes the Homeric hymn recounting his story, is “dreaded even by the gods.” Tithonus becomes more decrepit and wizened with each passing year. Eventually, when he can no longer move, Eos has to shut him away, in a place where “he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.” Eternal life amid the decline of one’s faculties is not a blessing but a curse. “Me only cruel immortality / Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,” Tithonus complains in Alfred Tennyson’s rendition of the myth (published in these pages in 1860), in a rare moment of lucidity that emerges from his everlasting gibberish.

More here.

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Sami Kent in The Guardian:

Thankfully, the attack left only black eyes and bloodied faces. It was in Karagümrük, a tough neighbourhood in Istanbul’s old city, once known for mafia types and Turks on the hard right. But, as Suzy Hansen explains, it had been transformed by an influx of Syrian refugees – until the locals apparently decided they’d had enough, and came for them with sticks, baseball bats and knives for carving doner kebab.

So begins From Life Itself, in which Hansen traces a story that illuminates a politics of mass migration and nationalist backlash that has resonances far beyond Turkey. It is a more ambitious book than that, too. An American who lived in Istanbul and visited Karagümrük for more than a decade – during which Turkey’s enfeebled democracy came under ever more sustained assault – she hoped to convey “how ordinary people experience authoritarianism in the 21st century – how our era feels”.

More here.

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Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

Is testosterone the next miracle drug? That seemed to be the consensus of an expert panel convened by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December. It argued for major changes in policy that would expand access to the hormone for people with a range of conditions. Committee members called testosterone replacement “a cornerstone of preventive health” and “a multibillion-dollar preventive-care opportunity”.

Testosterone is already available in the United States for people who have low levels of the hormone owing to a known medical issue, such as testicular damage. But evidence is growing that more men — and women — might benefit from the hormone, which is delivered through injections, patches, subcutaneous implants or gels. (This article uses ‘men’ and ‘women’ to reflect the language used by the panels and studies cited, while recognizing that trans, non-binary and intersex people are also affected by this issue.)

More here.

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Kevin Fenton at The American Scholar:

The first thing I noticed was the sentences. I’m not sure that, for all my teenage literary enthusiasms, I had ever thought of the sentence as a separate thing, as something that could be crafted, with a value distinct from other narrative components, such as plot or argument. But Sheed’s sentences were engines of insight and something I didn’t recognize at first: joy.

A few examples. On Evelyn Waugh’s fascination with the landed gentry: “A writer who would rather be dined by Lord Chowderhead than praised by [Edmund] Wilson is a genius or he’s nothing.” On the disgruntled NFL star Dave Meggyesy’s evocation of fans watching football in a state approaching sexual frenzy: “At my place, aphasic torpor would be closer to it.” I had to look up both “aphasic” and “torpor,” and, when I did, I realized they were perfect. On the Watergate hearings, which everyone I knew had taken very seriously: “And so it went, each man a marvelous specimen of political comedy, which occurs whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of doing nothing; i.e., all the time.”

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On a Day when Stillness Seems Possible

and the river is a long white stroke
of roiling and continuous surge,
and the grass, gone to seed,
wavers in the wind, then stills,
wavers, then stills, and the swallows
spiral, the leaf shadows spangle
and the ants braid a path
across the stones.

But I rhyme today with the cottonwood trunks,
my own body unmoving in the breeze.

It feels good in this moment
to be more tree than cloud,
more silence than song.

So easily, the stillness opens me,
softens me. How simple, really,
to do nothing. How is it I so often resist?
If there is no in me now, I do not notice it.

Stillness has made a home in me
and there seems to be nothing
the stillness refuses. Come,
it seems to say. There is room here
for everything. It opens me wider.
The world rushes in.

by Rosemerry Trommer

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Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:

Why do I drink? “I like the taste” is a wan excuse, but I do. With my birthday filet mignon and dark chocolate cake, I want a velvety cabernet sauvignon, not chalky milk. For our ritual Friday night pepperoni pizza, I prefer cold beer to water. I love a chilled white wine with Indian curry or Chinese food, a Guinness with a burger, and champagne for any celebration. The cork’s airy pop is triumphant, and even the bubbles seem excited for you.

There is suspense in a slow corkscrew; poetry in a good wine list. God, I sound like a heroin addict rhapsodizing about the needle. But I do love all the accoutrements and arguments: how much foam should top a pilsner, is it better to age in a bourbon or sherry cask, and should that martini be shaken or stirred, dirty or pure? Over the centuries, drinking has accrued pearly layers of significance, becoming a symbolic and cultural ritual.

More here.

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Susan Dominus at the New York Times:

Why are babies born young? The most natural phenomenon on earth is actually hard to explain — at least on a cellular level. Consider this problem: The components of conception are old. When a woman gets pregnant, she has been carrying her egg cells since birth. The sperm that joins with the egg to form a zygote might have been just a few months in the making, but it inherits markers of age from the man who produced it. It only follows that the zygote would also show signs of age — and at first it does.

But then a mysterious metamorphosis begins: The cells of the zygote begin to reverse that damage, shaking off the metaphorical dust that the parents accumulated on their DNA. After two weeks, the cells of the embryo are back to a kind of ground zero of youth. Only then are they as young as they will ever be. To understand this process, which was discovered only recently and is known as “natural rejuvenation,” is to contemplate a mind-bending truth: We don’t start out young; we work our way back to it.

More here.

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Daniel Goodman at Plough:

The year was 1845. At the time, the country of Denmark was experiencing a cultural renaissance of sorts. This “golden age” swelled with nationalistic fervor, artistic innovation, and intense political debate. Among its many rising cultural voices was Peder Ludvig Møller, a romantic poet and critic who often clashed with the rigid Hegelian orthodoxy seeping into the academy. He fancied himself a public figure in the mold of Lord Byron – sophisticated, worldly, and drawn to art and scandal.

Rising alongside him was Søren Kierkegaard.

The two men shared surface-level similarities. They were close in age and both studied at the University of Copenhagen. Each also saw himself as a rebel against the rote conventions of the day, yet their defiance took strikingly different forms. Møller’s public notoriety stood in sharp contrast to Kierkegaard’s introspective methods, defense of fidelity, and relentless pursuit of religious truth.

A confrontation between these two would ignite one of the most notorious clashes in Danish literary history.

More here.

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Aaron Bornstein interviews Hanna Pickard at the LARB:

I remember you used to give an intentionally provocative talk. One slide listed all the “positive things that drugs do for us,” and then you said something like “The question isn’t why ‘those people’ use drugs but ‘Why aren’t we all doing drugs all the time?’” This isn’t the sort of question often asked in scientific settings. How did you get there?

I was trying to hammer home the point that drugs have tremendous value. We all know this if we stop and think about how and why we use drugs in our ordinary, day-to-day lives—remember, “drugs” are not just so-called “illicit” substances but also run the gamut from caffeine to alcohol to nicotine to opioids to sedatives to sleeping pills to amphetamines to khat to kratom and more. As a species, we have always used drugs. The reason is obvious—namely, their multiple and varied benefits, their value. But also, in using this line in my talks, I was trying to get people to stop and think about the invidious “us” versus “them” that permeates so much of our thinking about drugs and addiction—and to recognize that if you have a cup of coffee in the morning or a glass of wine in the evening, you yourself are using a drug.

more here.

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Hal Foster at the Paris Review:

As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. A washy blue covers the entire surface unevenly, and its space is traversed by several black vectors. A vertical line stretches the length of the canvas on the far right, where it intersects with two horizontal lines that cut across the center of the picture. In the lower half of the painting, three diagonal lines run roughly parallel to one another, also toward the right.

The main motif floats in the top third of the painting. Outlined heavily in black, its interior is made up of the same blue as elsewhere except for one white blotch and a few black planes, scratched to reveal the white underneath. Three thin, white planes also appear in the interior, each crossed with a horizontal black stripe; the central plane divides the space in two.

more here.

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Judy Berman in Time Magazine:

Lord of the Flies looms so large in the canon of English-language allegory that it’s easy to forget the book is only 72 years old. You could also be forgiven for failing to recall, from some high school lecture, that William Golding’s debut novel is rooted in timely elements of his own experience, from fighting in the Second World War to reading R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, an idealized tale of shipwrecked boys banding together to survive, to his young children. It might seem inconceivable, after decades of hit shows like Yellowjackets, Survivor, and Lost plundering its mythology, that the book had never been adapted for television before this year. Such appropriation has, perhaps, hastened our collective disremembering of its details. Lord of the Flies has become shorthand for civilization’s descent into anarchic violence. But that’s hardly all it is.

More here.

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Barbara Stagno in Science:

A recent essay in The Scientist by Americans for Medical Progress (AMP) claims that public mistrust of animal research is driven primarily by misunderstanding, not by substantive concerns. AMP attributes this confusion to the way animal advocates distort and present official records, arguing that improved communication from the industry would resolve the distrust. However, framing the issue as merely a communication challenge rather than a systemic problem fundamentally misrepresents the issue. The problem is not poor communication by researchers, but systemic lack of transparency and accountability in animal labs. You cannot whitewash an industry that is fraught with infractions that clearly document negligence and abuse of animals in labs.

Industry defenders claim that animal research is “heavily regulated.” In reality, oversight is largely dependent on self-policing. The cornerstone of federal oversight is built on voluntary compliance through an “assurance” document submitted by the laboratory. Once this is approved, the federal oversight agency “grants considerable authority to institutions for self-regulation.” Compounding this problem, inspections by federal authorities are infrequent, often occurring only once every few years and are typically announced in advance.

More here.

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Gavin Jacobson interviews Rahmane Idrissa in Equator:

To what extent is the current offensive in Mali unprecedented?

The violence itself isn’t unprecedented by the standards of the Sahel. What is spectacular is the way this particular insurgency was organised – the jihadists and rebels were able to strike multiple points simultaneously – particularly in Kidal, the symbolic capital of the region claimed by the Tuareg rebels, and Kati, the headquarters of the Malian army. These two places are 1,500 kilometres apart.

In Kidal, they managed to expel both the Malian army and their Russian auxiliaries. At Kati, they killed the defence minister – an extremely important figure, the man who brought the Russians in, who spoke Russian, and who had received military training in Russia. He drove that whole policy. The intelligence chief was also seriously wounded. So the insurgents have essentially decapitated the security apparatus of the Malian state. Assimi Goïta was in hiding until 29 April, leaving the state silent and its citizens disorientated. The junta can no longer offer a solution to this crisis, and it has in fact turned into an obstacle to a solution. People are now asking who is really in charge, and who might succeed them.

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Iza Ding in The Ideas Letter:

At last year’s climate summit COP30 in Belém, Brazil, a phrase I hadn’t thought about for years suddenly reappeared on my radar: “soft power.”

The venue was an enormous makeshift tent—thirty football fields’ worth of plenary halls, meeting rooms, restaurants, and ice cream shops. Upon entry, one passed into the “blue zone,” where seventy-eight countries had erected pavilions to showcase their climate achievements. At its center stood the Chinese and Saudi pavilions. The Saudi pavilion was almost always empty; I often found myself its only visitor, lured in by my newfound craving for Arabic coffee. China’s pavilion was packed from dawn to dusk. Its tchotchke line curled around the corner, with locals and delegates waiting restlessly for fridge magnets and stuffed pandas. A friend of mine, a tenured professor at a respected American university, wrestled a Brazilian security guard for the right to claim a much-coveted panda headband.

Around then I began noticing the resurfacing of “soft power” in public conversation. Earlier in the year Maria Repnikova had argued in Foreign Affairs that Chinese soft power was pragmatic, while America’s was ideological. This distinction has been neatly captured by an unattributed saying that supposedly goes around among African leaders: When the Chinese come, they build us a bridge; when the Americans come, they give us a lecture. In climate circles, people began speaking of China’s “green soft power” in reference to its blossoming EV industry. A consensus seemed to be forming: China wins influence through economic relations; the US through culture and the ideology of liberalism. A tidy division of labor.

After my professor friend prevailed in her jujitsu with the guard and generously gifted me the panda headband, she and I fell into an argument over soft power. Like most academic debates, ours got stuck on the definition. What on god’s green earth is soft power?

More here.

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