Mariella Rudi in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Goo. Gunk. Gloop. Gak. By its own definition, slime is hard to grasp. As an object of disgust, it represents our fears and stigmas, the unknown Other. As a toy or sight gag, it’s a silly plaything. It’s easy to forget that slime permeates every living being on Earth, that, like the cosmos or fungi, slime’s existence is vital to our own, a biological imperative as much as oxygen or sunlight. Nebulous and omnipresent, deathless and primordial, slime is an essential link between nonliving matter and the first life that developed in the ocean 3.6 billion years ago. Slime molds are at least millions of years old and can thrive in outer space. The granddaddy of all mankind, slime is everywhere. It’s also easy to miss, which helps explain why we’re often so afraid of it.

Capturing the world’s most misunderstood, slippery substance is thus no easy task. Two books published in the last year have tried: Susanne Wedlich’s Slime: A Natural History, and File Under: Slime by Christopher Michlig. These books ooze praise thickened by arguments as far-flung and mutable as their shared subject. Both trace a sleek line through art, fashion, literature, film, science, commerce, and beyond, offering mature takes on a childhood fixation.

More here.

Robert Costanza in Nature:

The past year has given many of us reason to pause. We are losing in a race to prevent planetary tipping points — the climate is changing faster than expected, and humanity has already breached six of the nine sustainable planetary boundaries (for biodiversity loss; climate, freshwater and land-system change; biogeochemical flows; and novel entities)¹. Summer Antarctic sea ice shrank to its lowest recorded extent in 2023 (see go.nature.com/4f86req), a year that is on track to be the warmest on record (see go.nature.com/4f9ykdj).

People around the world recognize that life is not getting any better. As wars rage, runaway inequality and political polarization are eroding societies’ sense of cohesion. Eight individuals owned more than the poorest 50% of the world’s population, according to an Oxfam report in 2017². Levels of anxiety, depression and burnout are rocketing. Full-time employees are unable to pay rent and must turn to extra part-time work to make ends meet, while employers cut staff and increase workloads.

More here.

Advent

and the Angel of Attention
nudges my shoulder

see how above
the fallen gold leaves
of the apple tree
the last bees
hum about stalks
of sea-lavender,
drinking the last
sweetness of the last
year
to make
the first honey
for what will be
born again

by Nils Peterson

Mala Chatterjee in aeon:

In the surreal aftermath of my suicide attempt and amid the haze of my own processing, my best friend visited me in the hospital with a (soft-bound and thus mental-patient-safe) copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest under his arm. It was the spring of 2021. A couple months earlier, I had slipped in a tub, suffered a concussion, and triggered my first episode of major depression, and those had been the most difficult months of my life.

Though a lifelong ‘striver’ and ‘high achiever’, nothing I’ve ever done was harder than waging that war against myself while catatonic on that Brooklyn sofa. This was an inarticulable and so alienating war, one during which, at every moment, it was excruciating and terrifying to exist at all. I thought I knew the extent of my own mind’s capacity to torture itself, to hurt me, and what this thing we call depression can really be like. But I had been wrong.

For anyone who hasn’t experienced it at its worst, I now think it is psychologically impossible to imagine. It may even prove impossible for those who have experienced to still remember it after the fact, just as someone who temporarily perceives a fourth dimension wouldn’t really, fully remember what it was like once the perception is lost, only facets of the larger, unfathomable thing.

So maybe I can’t really remember, either: but I can recall thinking again and again these staggered reflections I’m writing now.

More here.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

The Supreme Court is on a collision course with itself, and it’s not clear that the justices even know it. We are now witnessing a five-car pileup of Trump–slash–Jan. 6 cases that will either be heard by the Supreme Court or land on their white marble steps in the coming weeks. The court has already agreed to hear the case of Joseph Fischer, the former Pennsylvania cop accused of taking part in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol and assaulting police officers, to determine the scope of prosecutions for obstructing an official proceeding. The court’s already flirting with hearing a direct appeal by special counsel Jack Smith to speedily resolve Trump’s claims to absolute immunity for his actions in attempting to overturn the 2020 election. And a game-changer of a case came out of the Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday that would knock the former president off of the Republican primary ballot in that state as a consequence of his involvement in the insurrection attempt on Jan. 6, which would also critically apply to the general election ballot next November. That ruling has to be settled by the high court in order to forestall, or affirm, other states’ efforts to do the same thing. Potential appeals of gag orders in criminal suits and doofy immunity claims in the E. Jean Carroll suit are all also winging their way to Chief Justice John Roberts’ workstation, and it’s not even 2024 yet.

More here.

Kamal Nahas in The Scientist:

The immune system discriminates between the body’s own cells and foreign invaders largely by auditing proteins. Cells digest proteins into short fragments and load them onto the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which presents the peptide to T cells for inspection. Using a parallel strategy, cells can also present lipids to T cells via a protein called cluster of differentiation 1 (CD1).¹ Although scientists knew of the existence of lipid antigens, most immunology research has focused on protein antigens, leaving much to demystify about the role of CD1 and lipids.

In a study spanning 14 years, a team of immunologists took on the challenge of characterizing CD1. Published in the journal Cell, they showed that CD1 can onboard hundreds of lipids to present to T cells.² “We’ve never had such an in-depth map of the CD1 lipidome available,” said Patricia Barral, an immunologist at King’s College London who was not involved with the work. “It will enable us to start thinking about different types of lipids that may function as activatory or as inhibitory lipids, and whether they can control T cell responses in different contexts.”

More here.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say, in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost
from The Poetry of Robert Frost
Henry Holt and Company, 1969

Peter Brunt at White Fungus:

A well-known tourist attraction in Vanuatu is a large private compound near Port Vila on the island of Efate, belonging to local artist Aloï Pilioko. Situated beside Erakor Lagoon, the property — called Esnaar — was the shared studio home of Pilioko, a migrant from the island of Wallis in French Polynesia, and his French-Russian partner, the late Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, who passed away in 2010. After acquiring the property in 1961, the two artists pursued remarkable careers together, traveling, collecting, exhibiting, and making “Oceanic art” all over the world. In the 1990s, the property was converted into a tourist attraction with outdoor pavilions housing displays of travel memorabilia, a shop where they sold a line of hand-painted clothing, and ethnographic works from the collection distributed around the gardens and on display inside their studio homes.

more here.

Ashley Gardini at JSTOR:

Recognizing the work of Denise Scott Brown is necessary for understanding American architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. Scott Brown is an architect and urban planner who wrote, spoke, taught, and designed over the course of her career, creating a lasting influence on both the built environment and future generations of architects. Yet, when we think of her, the history highlighted is often the injustices she experienced as a woman working in the architectural field. Why? Because Scott Brown actually spoke about it. She’s used her position to highlight the professional difficulties she faced because of her gender and because of her role as “the wife.”

Scott Brown was born in Nikana, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1931. She studied architecture on three continents—Africa, Europe, and North America—before settling in Philadelphia.

more here.

Kim Ju-sŏng in The Guardian:

“By the way, how are you managing with the 100-copy collection?”

“Huh? What do you mean, the 100-copy collection?”

“The books in the safe. Don’t neglect your library duties. It’d be a disaster if anything leaked to the outside.”

I set off for the library at a run. There were books in that safe? I had no idea. I figured, at best, it would be a stash of treatises by the leaders on literary theory, or else records of secret directives for KWU eyes only. It turned out that the 100-copy collection was where the union stored translated copies of foreign novels and reference books that writers could access.

With the speed of a bank robber, I yanked out my key, turned the lock and opened the safe. Inside, tightly packed together, were nearly 70 translated copies of foreign novels. Seeing them, I crumpled to the floor in shock.

The first title to jump out at me was Seichō Matsumoto’s Points and Lines, a Japanese psychological thriller published in 1970. With growing excitement, I fumbled through the stack. There was Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, O Henry’s The Last Leaf, Alexandre Dumas fils’ The Lady of the Camellias, Takiji Kobayashi’s Crab Cannery Ship, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind; and, most exciting of all for me, Seiichi Morimura’s Proof of the Man, a Japanese detective novel that tells the story of a manhunt from Tokyo to New York.

More here.

Homi Kharas, Wolfgang Fengler, and Lukas Vashold at Brookings:

2023 will be the year with the highest emissions ever recorded, according to new projections from the World Emissions Clock put out by the nonprofit arm of World Data Lab. The world is expected to emit almost 59 Gigatons of carbon-equivalent greenhouse gases; about 2,000 tons per second. The global average citizen now emits around 7.4 tons of these emissions, which can be disaggregated into 2.7 tons for energy, 1.8 tons for industry, 1.5 tons for agricultural production and land-use change, 1 ton for transport, and 0.4 tons for heating and cooling buildings (see Figure 1). This trend of growing emissions means that current levels are now about one-third higher than the levels that would have limited global warming to 1.5 degrees had an appropriate global program been put in place in 2021. This means that per capita emissions need to come down to below 5t per capita over the next decade and move towards 2.5t by 2040.

More here.

Lawrence Lessig at Slate:

Donald Trump is an astoundingly dangerous candidate for president. He is a pathological liar, with clear authoritarian instincts. Were he elected to a second term, the damage he would do to the institutions of our republic is profound. His reelection would be worse than any political event in the history of America — save the decision of South Carolina to launch the Civil War.

That fact has motivated many decent lawyers and law professors to scramble for ways to ensure that Trump is not elected. On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court gave these lawyers new hope by declaring that Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment bars Donald Trump from the Colorado ballot. That decision will certainly reach the United States Supreme Court as quickly as any. And if that court is to preserve its integrity, it must, unanimously, reject the Colorado Supreme Court’s judgment. Because Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment does not apply to Donald Trump.

More here.

Yumna Kassab in the Sydney Review of Books:

I remember where I was when Edward Said died.
           I was in a neuropsychology tutorial and upon seeing my face, a classmate asked me what was wrong.
           I tried to explain to her who Said was and what he meant. I could not articulate my ideas properly and she ended up telling me that people in countries such as ours had no business commenting on events in the Middle East.
           I thought of Said throwing a rock from the south of Lebanon, an act he said was symbolic, and how he was denounced anyway.
           In a massive clear out, I donated so many of his books, but I returned to him in July this year. I refer to The Edward Said Reader and now I pore over the interview at the back.
           It is from 1999 and I wonder what questions I would ask him if he were alive today. Are the questions any different and would his answers differ from what he’s said before?

More here.

Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist:

Sune Lehmann Jørgensen at the Technical University of Denmark and his colleagues used a rich dataset from Denmark that covers education, visits to doctors and hospitals, any resulting diagnoses, income and occupation for 6 million people from 2008 to 2020.

They converted this dataset into words that could be used to train a large language model, the same technology that powers AI apps such as ChatGPT. These models work by looking at a series of words and determining which word is statistically most likely to come next, based on vast amounts of examples. In a similar way, the researchers’ Life2vec model can look at a series of life events that form a person’s history and determine what is most likely to happen next.

In experiments, Life2vec was trained on all but the last four years of the data, which was held back for testing. The researchers took data on a group of people aged 35 to 65, half of whom died between 2016 and 2020, and asked Life2vec to predict which who lived and who died. It was 11 per cent more accurate than any existing AI model or the actuarial life tables used to price life insurance policies in the finance industry.

More here.

Daniel James Sharp at The Freethinker:

In your memoir, you say that it is important to know the history of philosophy because it is the history of very—and still—tempting mistakes. Do you mean, in other words, that philosophy can help us to avoid falling into traps?

Exactly. I love to point out philosophical mistakes made by those scientists who think philosophy is a throwaway. In the areas of science that I am interested in—the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality, the nature of explanation—they often fall into the old traps that philosophers have learned about by falling into those traps themselves. There is no learning without making mistakes, but then you have to learn from your mistakes.

What do you think is the biggest and most influential philosophical mistake that has ever been made?

I think I would give the prize to Descartes, and not so much for his [mind-body] dualism as for his rationalism, his idea that he could get his clear and distinct ideas so clear and distinct that it would be like arithmetic or geometry and that he could then do all of science just from first principles in his head and get it right.

More here.