Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In 1889, a French doctor named Francois-Gilbert Viault climbed down from a mountain in the Andes, drew blood from his arm and inspected it under a microscope. Dr. Viault’s red blood cells, which ferry oxygen, had surged 42 percent. He had discovered a mysterious power of the human body: When it needs more of these crucial cells, it can make them on demand. In the early 1900s, scientists theorized that a hormone was the cause. They called the theoretical hormone erythropoietin, or “red maker” in Greek. Seven decades later, researchers found actual erythropoietin after filtering 670 gallons of urine. And about 50 years after that, biologists in Israel announced they had found a rare kidney cell that makes the hormone when oxygen drops too low. It’s called the Norn cell, named after the Norse deities who were believed to control human fate. It took humans 134 years to discover Norn cells. Last summer, computers in California discovered them on their own in just six weeks.

The discovery came about when researchers at Stanford programmed the computers to teach themselves biology. The computers ran an artificial intelligence program similar to ChatGPT, the popular bot that became fluent with language after training on billions of pieces of text from the internet. But the Stanford researchers trained their computers on raw data about millions of real cells and their chemical and genetic makeup. The researchers did not tell the computers what these measurements meant. They did not explain that different kinds of cells have different biochemical profiles. They did not define which cells catch light in our eyes, for example, or which ones make antibodies.

More here.

Thomas Moynihan at Noema:

Despite vehement disagreement on almost everything else, proponents of AI safety and acceleration, alike, share the belief in a coming, potentially imminent, historic threshold beyond which all things recognizably human may dissolve. At least some accelerationists seem to welcome this outcome, though this may be more of an attempt (with predictable success) to court notoriety than any serious commitment. By stark contrast, those concerned with AI safety, fearing the construction of powerful AI systems not “aligned” with human interests and values emphatically want to avert any such fate.

It is, by now, trite to point out the resemblance of such belief to age-old apocalyptic and millenarian patterns of thought. But many cultures exhibit such strains. What remains hidden is a deeper, and more specifically Christian, consonance of convictions.

more here.

Rachel Andrews at The White Review:

The 10,000 women and girls (a conservative estimate) who were forcibly sent to reside in Ireland’s ten Magdalene Laundries between 1922 and 1996, when the last institution closed, washed the community’s clothes and sheets ten hours a day, six days a week, without pay. The dirty laundry symbolised the stain on their souls; the ‘penitents’, as the women were termed, were to render themselves morally spotless by scrubbing clean any trace of deviant behaviour, which often – but not always – involved sexual activity outside of marriage. The penal quality of the environment was also essential. The women’s names were changed when they went inside the institution. Their hair was cut short. They were dressed in a shapeless smocked uniform. The nuns have always said the women were not imprisoned, yet they were not allowed to leave. Maybe the sisters wanted to shield the Magdalene women from society’s prejudices, as the religious have claimed. But the Laundries were also money-making entities, so perhaps the nuns were also interested in holding onto their slave workforce. They were not interested in the wellbeing of that workforce. The women were cold; they were poorly fed; they were under constant fear of harsh punishment. They were scorned, ignored, beaten and brutalised. They believed they would die inside the Laundries, and many did, although the exact number is hard to quantify. The Irish State suggests there were around 900 deaths; campaigners argue it could be almost double. The documentary evidence is sparse, like almost everything to do with the Laundries, What we do have are the testimonies. The women from the Magdalene Laundries have begun to speak, finally, of their memories.

more here.

“Go back to what?”

Go back to storm warning and rain delay.
Go back to parchment, papyrus, vellum.
Go back to land line and gravel driveway.
Go back to blent, unbent light, pre-prism.
Go back to samekh, yodh, zayin, aleph,
great auk, ivory-billed, passenger pigeon.
Go back to cave painting and petroglyph.
Go back to mask, to God from the machine.
Go back to compacted cosmos, the size
of a penguin’s egg, steadied by webbed feet,
stayed from snow, against God’s belly feathers.
Go back to left hand does know what the right.
Go back to stage fright, recurring nightmare,
back to Houston, we’ve had a problem here.

Jennifer Atkinson
from Numéro Cinq

B. J. Hollars at The Millions:

I might’ve stayed away from David Foster Wallace forever were it not for Coco Gauff, whose U.S. Open win last year stirred within me some need to try to fall back in love with tennis—not as a player, but as a literary spectator. Steering clear of the courts, I stuck close to the page, reading what I could of the sport (John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, and a slew of biographies on Arthur Ashe and Andre Agassi) before facing off with the man I’d been avoiding, whom John Jeremiah Sullivan hailed as “the greatest tennis writer of his generation.”

More here.

Ted Nordhaus in The New Atlantis:

Discussions of weather-related natural disasters in recent years have largely focused on one particular human factor: the consequences of an anthropogenically warming planet. But the heavy concentration of catastrophic disasters prior to the period when climate change began to significantly warm the planet should remind us that the earth’s climate has always been highly variable, extreme, and dangerous. What determines whether hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and wildfires amount to natural disasters or minor nuisances, though, is mostly not the relative intensity or frequency of the natural hazard but rather how many people are in harm’s way and how well protected they are against the climate’s extremes.

Infrastructure, institutions, and technology mediate the relationship between extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the costs that human societies bear as a result of them. Air conditioning mitigates suffering during heat waves. Dams, reservoirs, and flood control systems keep water from inundating population centers during intense rainstorms. Building codes and hardened infrastructure help the built environment withstand hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events. Multi-day forecasts, early warning systems, and emergency response capabilities allow people to anticipate climatic extremes, prepare for them, and survive them.

The implications of this point will be counterintuitive for many.

More here.

William Deresiewicz in Persuasion:

The main thing that I learned in journalism school was that I didn’t belong in journalism school. The other thing I learned was that journalists were deeply anti-intellectual. They were suspicious of ideas; they regarded theories as pretentious; they recoiled at big words (or had never heard of them). For a long time, I had contempt for the profession on that score. In recent years, though, this has yielded to a measure of respect. For notice that I didn’t say that journalists are anti-intellectual. I said they were. Now they’re something else: pseudo-intellectual. And that is much worse.

The shift reflects the transformation of journalists’ social position. This phenomenon is familiar. Journalism used to be a working-class profession. I think of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, icons of the New York tabloids, the working people’s papers, in the second half of the twentieth century.

More here.

Annabelle Hirsch at Literary Hub:

Set out in search of the history of women’s relationship with sex and you will—with a bit of luck—find a very amusing engraving from the seventeenth century lurking in the shallows of the internet. It shows three young women standing at a sales counter.

You could be forgiven for thinking they’re at a regular weekly market, except that in the places where cheese, salami, fruit, and vegetables would normally go, there hang instead a selection of penises. Big and small, thick and thin, any shape you could ever imagine or wish for. Behind this display stands a woman who appears to be explaining each one in detail.

The two women at the front are pointing at a couple of examples with interest, no doubt asking, “Oh, and what can that one do?” while the third woman hovers in the background, tearing her hair in excitement and—one can only hope—anticipation.

More here.

Sophie Lloyd in Newsweek:

It’s that time of year again. On March 10, stars will gather in Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre to celebrate the best and brightest in filmmaking at the 96th Academy Awards. The awards ceremony is usually regarded as a classy affair, but with so many big personalities—and lots of alcohol—in one room, occasionally, there are a few unexpected fireworks. Whether it’s nudity, alleged incest on the red carpet or a deafening slap, here are 10 wild moments in Oscars history.

The Infamous Academy Awards’ Streaker

While introducing Elizabeth Taylor, who presented the award for Best Picture in 1974, host David Niven was interrupted by a man running naked across the stage to rapturous applause. Niven wasn’t bothered by the streaker, telling the crowd at the 46th Academy Awards, “Probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings.” The streaker was 34-year-old Robert Opel, an LGBTQ+ activist and photographer. Opel announced his bid for president in 1976 with the slogan “Nothing to Hide,” but he was murdered a few years later.

More here.

Danielle Gerhardt in The Scientist:

In the last two years, scientists achieved two genomic milestones: the complete sequences of the human non-Y genome and, just this past August, that of the Y chromosome.^1,2 With the final pages of the human genetic playbook complete, plenty of mysteries remain, including the function of many of the 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. To encourage research on these many mystery genes, a team of scientists have created a new publicly available database that ranks genes based on how little is known about them.³ Using this new directory, they selected more than 200 neglected genes that are evolutionarily conserved between fruit flies and humans. The systematic silencing of these genes in fruit flies revealed that many are essential for survival and other important biological functions, demonstrating that there is still much to be explored in the vast unknowns in the genome.

Sean Munro, a biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and coauthor of the paper, noted that the functional unknome—a portmanteau of unknown genome and a catchall coined by the authors to describe the collection of known genes with unknown function—has shrunk since the early 2000s, but scientists have plenty of ground to cover. “There’s still a couple thousand genes in the human genome, at least, for which essentially nothing is known, and then there are some where a little is known, but not very much,” said Munro.

More here.

The Endless Journey

Man instinctively regards himself
as a wanderer and wayfarer,
and it is second nature for him
to go on pilgrimage in search
of a privileged and holy place,
a center and source of
indefectible life.

This hope is built into his psychology,
and whether he acts it out or simply
dreams it, his heart seeks to return
to a mythical source, a place
of “origin,” the “home”
where the ancestors came from,
the mountain where the ancient
fathers were in direct communication
with heaven, the place of the
creation of the world, paradise
itself, with its sacred
tree of life.

Thomas Merton
from Poetic Outlaws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtiuIrQrKn8&ab_channel=ExtrassChannels

Julian Coman at The Guardian:

Robinson illustrates how the ancient Hebrew authors borrowed liberally from the Babylonian mythologies created by their near-east neighbours. But with a crucial distinction. Great narratives such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish feature fickle, rivalrous deities who turn their ruthless gaze on mortals only when it serves their interest. In stark contrast, Genesis portrays a troubled love story between humanity and a divine creator who is described as, extraordinarily, “having created man in his own image”.

The vision of a single omniscient and benevolent God is a staggering new departure in ancient literature, with implications all the way down to design details. In the Garden of Eden, Robinson points out, “the beauty of the trees is noted before the fact that they yield food”. Here is a world packed with signs of a divine desire that the first humans feel at home. Compared with the surrounding myths on offer, this vision “is from the beginning an immeasurable elevation of status”.

more here.

Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times:

Modern art can baffle and intimidate. Keith Haring strove to democratize it.

Haring, who died at 31 of complications from AIDS after a brief but dizzyingly productive international career, drew and painted for the masses and the kids, sometimes getting handcuffed and fined for his trouble. In the garbage-and-graffiti-weary New York of the 1980s, his creations — first chalked on blank advertising boards in subways, then bolder and more enduring, like the safety-orange “Crack Is Wack” mural that still stands in an East Harlem handball court — were like a fresh new roll of wallpaper. As his canvases and sculptures began selling to private collectors for big bucks, he carried on doing public work, notably for a children’s hospital in Paris. He loved children, and his more G-rated drawings — with faint inflection of Robert Hargreaves’s Mr. Men and Little Miss series — have been grafted onto many books for them, one by his sister Kay Haring.

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Ed McNally in Sidecar:

‘It’s coming ever more sharply into focus’, declared Anthony Blinken on a recent trip to Doha, speaking of a ‘practical, timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel’. America’s Arab clients have also been invoking the two-state paradigm, with both the Saudis and Qataris stressing the need for such a ‘comprehensive settlement’. In the UK, David Cameron has declared his firm support for Palestinian statehood, while in Brussels Josep Borrell has insisted that this is ‘the only way to establish peace’. These statements can be seen as a frantic attempt at imperial containment. If the Palestinians cannot be ignored entirely, as in the Abraham Accords framework, better to push for a demilitarized, segmented Palestinian quasi-‘state’ so that Israeli normalization can proceed apace. Biden, personally and politically minutes to midnight, is desperate to put Jared Kushner’s agenda for the Middle East back on track after its derailing on 7 October.

How should we respond to the inglorious return and cadaverous persistence of two-statism? The most common reflex is to dismiss it as dangerous imperial ‘fantasy’, premised on the diplomatic formalization of the apartheid regime, and to advocate for one state as the only realistic alternative. This latter position was first formally put forward by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the aftermath of the Naksa. It was then adopted by Arafat and Abu Iyad as the official line of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In Oslo’s wake, Palestinian intellectuals – Edward Said, Ghada Karmi, Lama Abu-Odeh, Joseph Massad, Ali Abunimah, George Bisharat and Yousef Munayyer, among others – returned to this framework.

More here.

Jonathan Kirshner in Boston Review:

Renoir himself claimed that a film director should have the arrogance to believe that he can change the world but the modesty to believe that if he succeeds in deeply moving four people, it’s a victory,” the great French director Bertrand Tavernier once observed. That wisdom may apply to Tavernier’s own 1992 documentary, La Guerre sans Nom (The War with No Name). Made in collaboration with historian Patrick Rotman, this four-hour film about the Algerian war—the most notable of the handful of documentaries Tavernier shot—did not make much of a splash in France, and it barely managed a few arthouse screenings in the United States before essentially disappearing from circulation. Its viewership stands to expand considerably, however, with its timely release to streaming as part of a larger Tavernier retrospective now available on the Criterion Channel.

Tavernier is best remembered in North America for two dozen disparate, often dazzling, feature films, among them his astonishing debut, The Clockmaker of Saint Paul (1974), the profoundly moving ’Round Midnight (1986), the subtle contemplation A Sunday in the Country (1984), and Dirk Bogarde’s final film (opposite Jane Birkin), Daddy Nostalgia (1990). Tavernier was also an irresistible interview subject, rapturous raconteur, and voracious cinephile, as reflected in his late-career landmark My Journey through French Cinema (2016) and the ten-part television series Journeys through French Cinema (2017–18). With The War with No Name (also known as The Undeclared War), he sought to breathe life into a largely nonexistent national conversation about the blood-soaked military conflict that the French government refused to call a war, in a land that it refused to recognize as a colony. The fighting brought down the fourth French Republic, elicited two attempted military coups, implicated one-time heroes of the resistance in the systematic practice of torture—and in the ruins of its aftermath, in the eyes of most, it was an unpleasant upheaval best forgotten.

Though thirty years old, La Guerre remains a remarkable film—and not only for its evocation of current conflicts, from Gaza to Ukraine.

More here.