Agnes Callard at The Point:

There are many complex theories about the nature and function of art; I am going to propose a very simple one. My simple theory is also broad: it applies to narrative fiction broadly conceived, from epic poems to Greek tragedies to Shakespearean comedies to short stories to movies. It also applies to most pop songs, many lyric poems and some—though far from most—paintings, photographs and sculptures. My theory is that art is for seeing evil.

I am using the word “evil” to encompass the whole range of negative human experience, from being wronged, to doing wrong, to sheer bad luck. “Evil” in this sense includes: hunger, fear, injury, pain, anxiety, injustice, loss, catastrophe, misunderstanding, failure, betrayal, cruelty, boredom, frustration, loneliness, despair, downfall, annihilation.

more here.

Says The Reason

Says the reason: let’s look for the truth.
And the heart: vanity,
we already have the truth.
The reason: oh, who can reach the truth!

The heart: vanity;
the truth is hope.
The reason says: you lie.

And the heart answers: who lies
it’s you, reason, ‘cause you say
what you don’t feel.

The reason: we will never understand each other,
heart. The heart: we will see.

by Antonio Machado
from 10 Poems by Antonio Machado

[Original Spanish at Read More below]

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Nate Chinen at The Current:

The music of Henry Mancini—sprawling across a forty-year filmography, written in a profusion of modes and moods—can be easy to misapprehend as the pinnacle of style over substance. It’s easy because he makes it so, enchanting generations of moviegoers with the appealing shape of his melodic line, the steady glide of his harmonic movement, and the faceted sparkle of his orchestration. Like so much of the postwar American cinema he helped bring to life, Mancini embodied a dawning age of new freedoms and anxieties, but always with a breezy air of self-possession. He worked tirelessly to make it seem as if his scores had just magically emerged, sensuous and guileless, like Botticelli’s Venus.

But Mancini’s stylistic command, with its magical balance of effortlessness and extravagance, was rarely indulged in for its own sake.

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Julia Lovell at Literary Review:

Adam Brookes’s thrilling new book tells for the first time in English the epic story of a sixteen-year quest by curators, archaeologists, scholars and politicians to protect the irreplaceable artistic treasures of the Forbidden City from the ravages of invasion and civil war. He has uncovered the kind of history deserving of a cinematic blockbuster. Approximately 250,000 priceless artefacts – porcelain, silks, paintings, bronzes – somehow escaped destruction by fire, water, moths and termites on a journey of 15,000 miles, being transported by train, boat, lorry, raft and carrying pole ‘up rivers and across mountain ranges, through famine and war’.

The story begins amid the turmoil of early 20th-century China, with fights over the ownership of the Forbidden City’s peerless collection.

more here.

Ryan Patrick Hanley in Psyche:

Speaking broadly, Leibniz’s rules fall into three basic categories: advice on how to communicate with others, advice on how to carry oneself with others, and advice on the sorts of subjects one ought to study. On the first front, Leibniz argues that effective communication requires us to engage our audience’s attention in such a way that others will feel connected to and included in our conversation. In this vein, we’re told that ‘small commonplaces’ that ‘can be told or recounted with flair’ get noticed. Later, we’re told we ought to ‘intermix some charm into business negotiations and meetings’, and that, in more casual conversations, we should make sure to give openings so that ‘every person recounts something’ and has an opportunity to speak their mind. The lesson here is that when we speak with others, we should ‘work to bring new things up’ in such a way that others are ‘drawn into conversation’.

These maxims are interesting for at least two reasons. The first is that they come from Leibniz. Leibniz is famous for having argued that proper reasoning is based on ‘two great principles’: the principle of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason. But the Lebensregeln attests to his awareness that even the best logical reasoning falls flat if it can’t interest people and draw them in. Second, and especially important for today’s world, Leibniz suggests that effective communication is both open and participatory, and creates an environment that allows the voices of others to be heard.

More here.

Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman, and Jeremy Wallace in Foreign Affairs:

In policy circles, discussions about artificial intelligence invariably pit China against the United States in a race for technological supremacy. If the key resource is data, then China, with its billion-plus citizens and lax protections against state surveillance, seems destined to win. Kai-Fu Lee, a famous computer scientist, has claimed that data is the new oil, and China the new OPEC. If superior technology is what provides the edge, however, then the United States, with its world class university system and talented workforce, still has a chance to come out ahead. For either country, pundits assume that superiority in AI will lead naturally to broader economic and military superiority.

But thinking about AI in terms of a race for dominance misses the more fundamental ways in which AI is transforming global politics. AI will not transform the rivalry between powers so much as it will transform the rivals themselves. The United States is a democracy, whereas China is an authoritarian regime, and machine learning challenges each political system in its own way.

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

Pakistan has two things: very high mountains, and a very flat plain.

The plain, in turn, is either desert or the Indus Valley.

The Indus Valley is where the population is most concentrated. You can easily tell by just looking at the map of nightlights.

So when the Indus floods, it does so on the most fertile areas of its valley. The most fertile areas are also the most populous, and so a big share of Pakistan’s 220 million people is affected.

So why the floods? Why is the monsoon so aggressive this year? We need to understand the mechanics of the monsoon.

More here.

Steven Novella in Neurologica Blog:

One of the major challenges of space travel is that there are no ready-made resources there. Mars, for example, has no food, shelter, oxygen, fuel, or power. It likely has water, but it’s not certain how much and how accessible. So for now any human mission to Mars will have to bring all recourses from Earth. Getting stuff to Mars is massively expensive, and resupply can take 6-9 months, during optimal launch windows. Keeping humans alive on Mars for any length of time is therefore a very tenuous and expensive endeavor.

One obvious solution is what NASA calls “in-situ resource utilization,” – using stuff that is already there. The Perseverance rover on Mars contains an experiment called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) that has taken the first step toward the goal of in-situ resource use. MOXIE was developed by engineers at MIT, it is a lunch-box sized experiment onboard the Perseverance that makes oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. It is essentially a proof-of-concept, and if it works may be the forerunner of far larger machines in the future.

More here.

Ian Millhiser in Vox:

If all the criminal investigations into former President Donald Trump end in conviction, then Trump will be a true renaissance man of crime.

The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida residence because, as federal prosecutors said in a fiery court filing Tuesday, they believed not only did the former president possess “dozens” of boxes “likely to contain classified information” but also that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.” In that search, the FBI said it did remove over 100 classified documents, some of which reportedly contained information about nuclear weapons. That’s all part of just one investigation into possible violations of the Espionage Act, the improper handling of federal records, and obstruction of a federal investigation. Meanwhile, a second federal investigation is looking into the January 6 attack on the Capitol and broader efforts to overturn the 2020 election, an issue that obviously could implicate the man who spent most of the 2020 lame-duck period trying to erase his loss to President Joe Biden.

More here.

The Gust

In the mind
there comes a moment
when shadows fall back … like men
from a gust of something,
when the brain is light
as a fly on your wrist—

and in the jeweled eyes of that fly
you see your own six-legged self
white-shoed, dancing,
being on parade—
the gold tuba grown from your lips:
Um-pah-dah .. cha-cha .. huuh!

Meet me there.
.

by Tim Seibles
from Ploughshares at Emerson College
Spring, 1995

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He’s been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.

But what is “long-termism”? I’m unusually well-placed to answer that, because a few days ago a copy of What We Owe The Future showed up on my doorstep.

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Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

When considering environmental issues, the usual rallying cry is that of “saving the planet”. Rarely do people acknowledge that, rather, it is us who need saving from ourselves. We have appropriated ever-larger parts of Earth for our use while trying to separate ourselves from it, ensconced in cities. But we cannot keep the forces of life at bay forever. In A Natural History of the Future, ecologist and evolutionary biologist Rob Dunn considers some of the rules and laws that underlie biology to ask what is in store for us as a species, and how we might survive without destroying the very fabric on which we depend.

More here.

Marilyn Berger in the New York Times:

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.

His death was announced on Tuesday by Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital. The reports said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness.”

Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, Mr. Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain, decisively altering the political climate of the world.

More here.

Benji Jones in Vox:

Much of Pakistan is now underwater.

A series of extreme floods has utterly devastated the South Asian nation, which is home to some 225 million people, washing away roads and buildings, destroying farms, and stranding hundreds of thousands. Over the weekend, which brought another bout of torrential rain, government officials said the death toll had soared past 1,000 and water had inundated as much as a third of the country. The main fuel for these catastrophic floods is rainfall. Summer is monsoon season, and this has been a particularly wet and wicked one, perhaps made worse by climate change. But there’s another culprit behind the recent devastation: melting glaciers and snow.

More here.

One Year After My Dying Father and I Stop Speaking to Each Other Again

Someone on the internet is mourning
her dad—that old goat—with a goldmine

of anecdotes. Scraps of fondness I scrape off
her tweet—his beef wellington, her frogs. I want

my frown-scored mouth loaded with her clean vocabulary
of love. The way she holds her father’s hand, no pinch

of humiliation. Like the time I saw a teenager
sitting on her father’s lap. How I couldn’t

take my eyes off the alarming purity of it.
How my mouth dried at the sight like I had been drinking

the wrong water all this time. When I pull
the ocherous leaves from my thirsty pothos, it is

too easy. No satisfactory rip. Too ready
to let go. I covet the reels of the lucky ones going on

about their dead. Everyone I have lost
I have lost before the end.

by Eugenia Leigh
from Split This Rock

From Nature:

Can messenger RNA (mRNA) train the immune system to attack cancers that resist conventional treatments? To find out, researchers at Atlantic Health System are conducting a clinical trial, alongside other centres, to evaluate the efficacy of an experimental mRNA vaccine for patients with late-stage melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer. “This trial really resonates with patients,” says oncologist, Eric Whitman, medical director of Atlantic Health’s oncology service line, who is leading the study locally at Morristown Medical Center (MMC) in New Jersey. “They’ve heard how effective mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are; using a similar technology to help their body recognize and destroy melanoma makes sense to them.”

There is a dearth of effective treatments for melanoma, which kills about 8,000 people in the United States annually. Standard therapies fail to halt cancer progression in about 50% of patients, leaving them with no FDA-approved options.

More here.