Sara Lippincott at Edge.org:

I got out of Wellesley in 1959, shortly after Lolita got out of Paris. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. (Na-bwak-awf: a trip down the stairs with a loud bump and a glorious sprawl at the bottom.) I fell in love with it.

I had majored in English, with a minor in Moby Dick, and now planned to become a full-time poet. So I looked for and found a garret in Cambridge, in a seedy gabled house on Kirkland Street. The third floor—two tiny bedrooms and a hall bath—was shared by me and a young woman of about my own age but not my aspirations who was drinking herself to death.

To support myself while writing poems, I took the first job the Harvard personnel office suggested—as secretary to Dr. Frank Carpenter, a paleoentomologist and recent chairman of Harvard’s Biology Department. The department was quartered in the Bio Labs on Divinity Avenue, an impressive pile whose front entrance was guarded by a pair of giant bronze rhinoceroses. Dr. Carpenter published a bug quarterly called Psyche. Now that he was through with his chairmanship, he wanted to turn more attention to it, and he needed someone who could spell and knew where the commas should go. I’d do fine.

More here.

Rupendra Brahambhatt in Ars Technica:

There are some insects that fly synchronously, meaning their wings on both sides flap together and in a coordinated manner. Others demonstrate asynchronous flight, in which each wing operates independently. A big difference between these two modes is that in synchronous flight, the nervous system of an insect has complete control over the wings’ motion.

The insects can command their muscles to beat on each wingstroke with their brains, just like you or I do when we command our leg muscles to move with each step. That is what the very first flying insects likely did, as it’s common in many groups of insects today, including moths, cockroaches, and others.

In asynchronous flight, the wings flap much faster than the insect’s brain can control.

More here.

George Scialabba in The New Statesman:

“The 7 October attack by Hamas was morally barbarous and strategically futile. Nothing justifies the killing of innocents, not even the denial of a people’s nationhood for 75 years, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of them to make way for colonial settlers, or the killing of thousands of their own innocents in scandalously disproportionate ‘reprisals’. And as for strategy, for the weak (and not only for them), nothing is less efficacious than such violence, which makes trust – the only reliable basis of lasting security – impossible. Better a people should suffer another 75 years of dispossession than that another such crime be committed in its name. Of course, those who would allow this people to go without justice for another 75 years, and who allowed it to go without justice for the last 75 years, share the murderers’ guilt, and with far less excuse.”

No one asked me for a public statement after the Hamas raid. If anyone had, this is roughly what I would have said, and I’ve used it as a kind of template in reacting to the innumerable public statements, solicited and unsolicited, that I’ve encountered since the event.

More here.

More here.

Ari Schulman at The New Atlantis:

As I have written elsewhere, we must begin again to see science as something people do. We must stop seeing science as an alien force and admit it as a full participant in human affairs — a messy enterprise like all others, with its own distinct yearnings and vices.

It is with no small trepidation that I suggest the spirit of a rather different story: the Manhattan Project, whose proof of success, the first detonation of an atomic bomb, happened seventy-eight years ago this weekend, and will be depicted in Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer, set to be released next week. Here was an episode where America spoke of science not with the passive but the full active voice, as a powerful — and dangerous — ally.

Science has led America well through crises when it has eagerly anticipated needs and set ambitious, specific, achievable goals. The vaccine development, backed by Operation Warp Speed, was the proudest example during the pandemic. The Covid Tracking Project, which became our national data dashboard, nimbly solved a dire problem that the CDC wouldn’t.

more here.

Louise Glück from the archives at The Paris Review:

I had left my passport at an inn we stayed at for a night or so whose name I couldn’t remember. This is how it began. The next hotel would not receive me. A beautiful hotel, in an orange grove, with a view of the sea. How casually you accepted the room that would have been ours, and, later, how merrily you stood on the balcony, pelting me with foil-wrapped chocolates. The next day you resumed the journey we would have taken together.

The concierge procured an old blanket for me. By day, I sat outside the kitchen. By night, I spread my blanket among the orange trees. Every day was the same, except for the weather.

After a time, the staff took pity on me. A busboy would bring me food from the evening meal, the odd potato or bit of lamb. Sometimes a postcard arrived. On the front, glossy landmarks and works of art. Once, a mountain covered in snow. After a month or so there was a postscript: X sends regards.

more here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

One of the greatest transformations in the history of life occurred more than 600 million years ago, when a single-celled organism gave rise to the first animals. With their multicellular bodies, animals evolved into a staggering range of forms, like whales that weigh 200 tons, birds that soar six miles into the sky and sidewinders that slither across desert dunes.

Scientists have long wondered what the first animals were like, including questions about their anatomy and how they found food. In a study published on Wednesday, scientists found tantalizing answers in a little-known group of gelatinous creatures called comb jellies. While the first animals remain a mystery, scientists found that comb jellies belong to the deepest branch on the animal family tree.

The debate over the origin of animals has endured for decades. At first, researchers relied largely on the fossil record for clues. The oldest definitive animal fossils date back about 580 million years, although some researchers have claimed to find even older ones. In 2021, for example, Elizabeth Turner, a Canadian paleontologist, reported finding 890-million-year-old fossils of possible sponges. Sponges would make sense as the oldest animal. They are simple creatures, with no muscles or nervous system. They anchor themselves to the ocean floor, where they filter water through a maze of pores, trapping bits of food.

More here.

Layal Liverpool in Nature:

The group behind the radical open-access initiative Plan S has announced its next big plan to shake up research publishing — and this one could be bolder than the first. It wants all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports to be published openly from the outset, without authors paying any fees, and for authors, rather than publishers, to decide when and where to first publish their work.

The group of influential funding agencies, called cOAlition S, has over the past five years already caused upheaval in the scholarly publishing world by pressuring more journals to allow immediate open-access publishing. Its new proposal, prepared by a working group of publishing specialists and released on 31 October, puts forward an even broader transformation in the dissemination of research. It outlines a future “community-based” and “scholar-led” open-research communication system (see go.nature.com/45zyjh) in which publishers are no longer gatekeepers that reject submitted work or determine first publication dates. Instead, authors would decide when and where to publish the initial accounts of their findings, both before and after peer review. Publishers would become service providers, paid to conduct processes such as copy-editing, typesetting and handling manuscript submissions.

More here.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres,
… to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

by Walt Whitman
from The Poetry Foundation

Colin Barras in New Scientist:

Some of our actions have near-instant consequences. Even young children learn for themselves that drinking water is a great way to quench your thirst. But sex doesn’t immediately lead to babies. It generally takes weeks to even register a pregnancy. Months pass before the act of childbirth.

In all of the world’s human societies, there is a strong understanding that sex makes babies. But it presumably required careful observation, deep thinking and an ability to reliably and accurately track the passage of time for ancient people to make the link between the two. It may also have required language so that individuals could discuss and refine their ideas.

And this brings us to non-human animals. Given that no other animal species has our capacity for language and abstract reasoning, do any of the rest of them understand where babies come from?

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

In polls, 25 – 50% of Americans say they would donate a kidney to a stranger in need.

This sentence fascinates me because of the hanging “would”. Would, if what? A natural reading is “would if someone needs it”. But there are 100,000 strangers on the waiting list for kidney transplants. Between 5,000 and 40,000 people die each year for lack of sufficient kidneys to transplant. Someone definitely needs it. Yet only about 200 people (0.0001%) donate kidneys to strangers per year. Why the gap between 25-50% and 0.0001%?

Some of you will suspect respondents are lying to look good. But these are anonymous surveys. Lying to themselves to feel good, then? Maybe. But I think about myself at age 20, a young philosophy major studying utilitarianism. If someone had asked me a hypothetical about whether I would donate a kidney to a stranger in need, I probably would have said yes. Then I would have continued going about my business, never thinking of it as a thing real-life people could do.

More here.

Joanna Thompson in Undark:

In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic rampaged across the globe, the World Health Organization declared that we had plunged into a second, simultaneous catastrophe: an infodemic. This global crisis was characterized by the rapid spread of false information, or misinformation, mostly in digital spaces. The fear was that such inaccuracies would leave the public unmoored, adrift in a sea of untruth. Eventually, this mass disorientation would cause people to harm themselves and one another.

In an effort to combat the rising tide of misinformation, certain agencies, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.K. Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee, have poured resources into quantifying its spread and impact online. Some of the resulting reports have spawned legislation aimed at limiting online fake news.

But some psychologists and sociologists aren’t convinced that misinformation is as powerful as all that — or that it is a substantially different issue now compared with in the past. In fact, they think that we may be prematurely whipping ourselves into a misinformation moral panic.

More here.

Leonard Benardo in The Ideas Letter:

Welcome to the second edition of The Ideas Letter, where heterodox ideas come to life. Our spotlighted podcast this issue focuses on a long-forgotten 1972 cause célèbre book.  At the time of its release, the tract was fodder for household conversations across the US. Anthony Lewis of The New York Times called it “likely to be one of the most important documents of our age,” arguing that it showed “the complete irrelevance of most of today’s political concerns” to the world’s existential plight. Sound familiar in 2023? It should.

We are also featuring a video panel from the recent Vienna Humanities Festival, chaired by yours truly, which brings out lesser-heard dimensions of the identitarian debate. The politics of identity is front and center in the disagreements you’ll see. Identity (not to mention democracy, human rights, international law, and occupation) are never far from the vexing and toxic debates on Israel/Palestine. And nobody gets more to the heart of the problem with dispassionate passion and analytical chops than Adam Shatz, whose tour de force raises the necessary questions around which debate can advance.

More here.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

by Billy Collins

Ty Burr in The Washington Post: