Ed Simon at Poetry Magazine:

In her exquisitely written, perceptive, and moving Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (FSG, 2022), the British scholar Katherine Rundell argues that Donne’s “writing is itself a kind of alchemy: a mix of unlikely ingredients which spark into gold.” No 17th-century poet still reads quite as shockingly new as Donne does. Not Ben Jonson, who is so clearly of the Renaissance, or sublime George Herbert, enmeshed in the theology of his day. Not Thomas Traherne, whose beautiful mysticism demands a high price of entry, or Andrew Marvell, a chameleon whose politics are now so distant. Even Shakespeare, with all those Ren-Faire jester hats and jigs, is more a subject of that far country of the past than is Donne. An uncertain Catholic and then a recalcitrant Protestant, Donne was a skeptic, an agnostic who knew that in doubt comes faith. His is a “quintessence even from nothingness, / From dull privations, and lean emptiness […] I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.” If his age saw the first glimmerings of such anxieties, then Donne reads as modern before modernity because his manuscripts circulated among courtiers and poets. Yet only God can generate from a vacuum, and Rundell explains that Donne’s family and their faith “would haunt him for life. … To read him is to know that we cannot ever expect to shake off our family: only to pick up the skull, the tooth, and walk on.”

more here.

Peter Orner at The Paris Review:

So many accounts of Chekhov’s death, many of them exaggerated, some outright bogus. The only indisputable thing is that he died at forty-four. That’s etched in stone in Moscow. I like to read them anyway. I’m not alone. Chekhov death fanatics abound.

His last sip of champagne. The whole thing about the popping of the cork, I forget what exactly. The enigmatic words he likely never said: Has the sailor left? But wouldn’t it be wonderful if he had said them? What sailor? Where’d he go?

His wife, the actress Olga Knipper, wrote that a huge black moth careened around the room crashing into light bulbs as he took his final breaths. Olga was present in the room, of course, but I don’t think she was above creating myths, either. They had only so little time together, less than five years.

more here.

Lynne Segal in the Boston Review:

Most of us have struggled to maintain our mental well-being throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Surrounded by fear and apprehension, it’s been hard to keep hope alive. In my experience, those who have managed to find ways to feel useful have fared better than most. I was lucky: well before the sudden appearance of COVID-19, I had already been writing about our shared forms of vulnerability, global interdependencies, and the need to place the complexities of care at the very heart of politics. Even timelier, four friends had joined me to study our culture’s historic refusal to value care work. Our resulting small Care Collective quickly produced a book for Verso, The Care Manifesto (2020), keeping us all busier than ever, as we connected with others around the world who were also addressing the politics of care. As we developed our vision of a truly caring world, we focused on how governments, municipalities, and media outlets might become more caring, working to promote collective joy rather than their current narrow and duplicitous concern with individual aspiration, knowing that so many will inescapably flounder. Understanding that we all depend on each other, and nurturing rather than denying our interdependencies, encourages us all to work to cultivate a world in which each of us can not only live, but thrive.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

If someone tells you a fact you already know, they’ve essentially told you nothing at all. Whereas if they impart a secret, it’s fair to say something has really been communicated.

This distinction is at the heart of Claude Shannon’s theory of information. Introduced in an epochal 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” it provides a rigorous mathematical framework for quantifying the amount of information needed to accurately send and receive a message, as determined by the degree of uncertainty around what the intended message could be saying.

Which is to say, it’s time for an example.

More here.

Hippolyte Fofack in Project Syndicate:

Overcoming the risk of “immiserizing” growth – an increase in aggregate national output that results in a net decline in national welfare – has been a perennial challenge as countries pursue economic development. It is also proving to be a major roadblock to achieving greater global income convergence.

Developing countries’ GDP growth has exceeded the global average over the past several years, and their economies are projected to expand by 3.6% on average in 2022, compared to world growth of 3.2%, according to the International Monetary Fund. But the income and welfare gaps between them and the advanced economies have widened, especially where GDP has consistently expanded at the expense of total wealth and future prosperity.

This counterintuitive development reflects a combination of factors.

More here.

Drone: The Pilot’s Wife in Church

She wears a kind of doily hair-pinned to her crown,
her glory, the pastor says. She stands and the hymn
is sung along with the keyboard, the electric
guitar and the lead singer, heavy eyeliner, a tear
in the voice. The pastor stands at the rail, waiting
on sinners, scanning the congregation.
What should she pray? That her husband’s hands
should stop shaking? That he should stop working
on the Sabbath? That he should stop having those dreams,
stop getting up and playing video games in the dark?
Stop turning out the lights and then talking?
Stop not talking? Stop hating her for listening?
Stop killing those men who kill us? Stop killing
those children who cluster around them? Stop
the women who he must watch collect the bodies,
parts of bodies, who are themselves sometimes nothing
but bodies? Stop watching the bodies get into carts,
into trucks, into the trunks of cars? Stop being paid
for watching, for locating, for prosecuting,
for firing? Stop fighting for the insurance to pay,
for the VA to pay, for the government to pay.
What should she pray? How can God answer?

by Kim Garcia
from The Brooklyn Quarterly

Nancy Walecki in Harveard Magazine:

IS A GAS GUZZLER actually better for the environment than an electric vehicle? Sometimes. Ashley Nunes, Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program fellow, and undergraduate economics concentrator Lucas Woodley ’23 found that many electric vehicle (EV) owners—usually wealthy individuals incentivized by federal tax credits to purchase an electric vehicle as a second car—are doing more environmental harm than good. Why? They’re not driving enough.

To build an electric-car battery, manufacturers need lithium, and to find lithium, they need the high-altitude salt flats of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. There, beneath turquoise brine lakes, is mud rich in manganese, potassium, borax, and lithium salts. It’s chemical- and water-intensive to isolate lithium from all that mud, and it takes even more energy to make a functional car battery from it. As a result, building a clean-burning EV battery is twice as greenhouse-gas-intensive as making a conventional internal combustion engine.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

Evil: Lost and Found

Over the centuries, for people whose worldview was governed by the religions of Western civilization, it was reasonably straightforward to conceive of the existence of a “Force of Evil.” Judeo-Christian religion personified such a force in the figure of Satan, or the Devil.

The image of this Supernatural Being enabled people to form some intuitive conception of a powerful force that makes bad things happen: the Devil, with malevolent intent, was always working to get people to do what they shouldn’t do, and to degrade the human world generally.

Wielding his powers with diabolical cleverness, the Devil could make the world uglier. (Quoth Luther: “For still our ancient foe / Doth seek to work us woe;/ His craft and power are great/ And, armed with cruel hate./ On earth is not his equal.”)

The more recent historical emergence of a secular worldview has meant that — in the minds of a major component of the Western world —  this supernatural figure has disappeared from people’s picture of what’s real in our world, with nothing equivalent to take its place. And this disappearance of Satan left most of those people with no way of conceiving the possibility of anything existing that might reasonably be called a “Force of Evil.” Read more »

Sean Trott in Psyche:

Some words are much more frequent than others. For example, in a sample of almost 18 million words from published texts, the word can occurs about 70,000 times, while souse occurs only once. But can doesn’t just occur more frequently – it’s also much more ambiguous. That is, it has many possible meanings. Can sometimes refers to a container for storing food or drink (‘He drinks beer straight from the can’), but it also doubles as a verb about the process of putting things in a container (‘I need to can this food’), and as a modal verb about one’s ability or permission to do something (‘She can open the can’). It even occasionally moonlights as a verb about getting fired (‘Can they can him for stealing that can?’), and as an informal noun for prison (‘Well, it’s better than a year in the can’).

This multiplicity of possible uses raises a question: how do can, souse and other words each end up with the particular numbers of meanings they have? The answer could rest in fundamental, competing forces that shape the evolution of languages.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

More than 500,000 years ago, the ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans were migrating around the world when a fateful genetic mutation caused some of their brains to suddenly improve. This mutation, researchers report in Science^1,2, dramatically increased the number of brain cells in the hominins that preceded modern humans, probably giving them a cognitive advantage over their Neanderthal cousins.

“This is a surprisingly important gene,” says Arnold Kriegstein, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco. However, he expects that it will turn out to be one of many genetic tweaks that gave humans an evolutionary advantage over other hominins. “I think it sheds a whole new light on human evolution.”

When researchers first fully sequenced a Neanderthal genome in 2014³, they identified 96 amino acids — the building blocks that make up proteins — that differ between Neanderthals and modern humans in addition to a number of other genetic tweaks. Scientists have been studying this list to learn which of these helped modern humans to outcompete Neanderthals and other hominins.

More here.

Jessica Pishko in JSTOR Daily:

In September of 1994, the editors and writers of The Angolite sought to identify everyone in America who had served two decades or more in prison in a piece titled, “The Living Dead.” They did not mince words describing men like Christensen, who was 74 at the time of the story: “[They are] grey and withered by decades of imprisonment. Faded men who plod prison yards with halting steps, nursing a spark of ersatz hope while they wait to die.”

In a special issue on “The Living Dead,” the publication details the stories of people who had served an unthinkable number of decades behind bars and astutely points out that the number of people serving sentences of two decades or more was only growing. That prediction proved painfully accurate, as Hope Reese writes in, “What Should We Do about Our Aging Prison Population?”

In 1994, the problem of prison sentences that constituted life or de facto life (50 years or more) felt dire to theI writers of The Angolite article. They counted 2,099 “long-timers” compared to the then 775,624 total number of incarcerated people, or 0.3%. But those statistics pale in comparison to today’s. Now, that number is over 200,000 out of the 1.4 million total people in prison.

More here.

Lisa Allardice in The Guardian:

Although not originally part of the notorious gang of writers – Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and the late Christopher Hitchens – who made their names in the 70s and dominated the literary scene for much longer (too long, according to their critics), Rushdie arrived a few years later with the publication in 1981 of Midnight’s Children, which transformed both British and Indian writing, and won the Booker prize that year. “It was amazing, it expanded horizons,” McEwan says. “Salman is a great conversationalist, with a great taste for fun and mischief,” he adds. “So we all got on straight away.”

McEwan’s ambition with Lessons, his 18th novel, was to show the ways in which “global events penetrate individual lives”, of which the fatwa was a perfect example. “It was a world-historical moment that had immediate personal effects, because we had to learn to think again, to learn the language of free speech,” he says. “It was a very steep learning curve.”

More here.

All the Carefully Measured Seconds

Back then I still believed it was possible
to prevent certain things, until that hot afternoon.
It was the middle of grain harvest, August of ’54,
when Fred climbed down from his stalled combine
and took off to Montrose to buy a part.
Later I realized the part was a ruse of fate, like
something made up to get someone to a surprise party.
So many times I reran those last hours,
adding or subtracting a few seconds here or there.
Lingering a moment in the field, he could have
noticed the grain shiver as a cloud passed by,
he could have paused by the barn to admire the blue
and lavender flecks adorning the pigeon’s throats,
he could have stopped by the house to finger
the soft leaves of the African violets
on the sill, he could have slipped his arm
around Ella’s waist as she stood at the sink,
her hands in the dishwater.
But, he swatted the grain dust from his overalls
and climbed into his green Buick to keep
his appointment on Highway 38. Even then,
it was not too late. He could have floored
the car just this once, he could have let
the wind rush in, raising his sparse strands
of matted hair to dance in the breeze.

When I saw Fred’s car again, it looked as if
had been punched by the fist of some god
though surely not the same one who keeps
the earth spinning, the sun and moon rising,
passion ascending to fuse new life,
the rose unfolding with tenderness,
the worm tilling the orchard floor,
all the carefully measured seconds
adding up exactly to us.

by Josephine Redlin
from Ploughshares
publisher: Emerson College, Boston, Ma. 1995

Stephen Humphries in The Christian Science Monitor:

Statesman, majored in women’s studies. During her university years, she believed that hookup culture, pornography, and rough sex were all OK for consenting adults. A decade later, she’s changed her mind. Ms. Perry’s experience of working at a rape crisis center made her question the narrative she’d been taught that “rape is about power, not sex.” She then began to rethink other tenets of second-wave academic feminism.

Ms. Perry is grateful that the birth control pill and modern contraceptives have given women greater control over their lives. But, she argues, it’s come at a cost. Modern feminism has encouraged women to feel empowered by having “sex like a man.” Ms. Perry believes that many women can’t just unyoke sex from emotion and a desire for committed relationships, including marriage. She says there’s a power imbalance in today’s sexual marketplace that can make women feel devalued.

More here.

Katherine Rundell in The New York Times:

The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man.

It was the spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne, long a struggling poet, had finally secured for himself celebrity, fortune and a captive audience. He had been appointed dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral two years before. He was 51, slim and amply bearded, and his preaching was famous across the whole of London. His congregation — merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole of the city’s elite — came to his sermons. Some carried paper and ink to write down his finest passages and take them home to relish and dissect them. Donne often wept in the pulpit, in joy and in sorrow, and his audience would weep with him.

That morning he was not preaching in his own church but 15 minutes’ easy walk across London at Lincoln’s Inn, in the center of town. Word went out: Wherever he was, people came flocking to hear him speak. But too many flocked, and as the crowd pushed closer to hear his words, some men were shoved to the ground, trampled and badly injured. A contemporary wrote in a letter, “Two or three were endangered, and taken up dead for the time.” There’s no record of Donne halting his sermon; so it’s not impossible that he kept going in his rich, authoritative voice as the bloodied men were carried off and out of sight.

More here.