Julien Crockett interviews Robert Sapolsky at the LARB:

JULIEN CROCKETT: Most of the discoveries you reference in Determined are from the last 50 years, and half are from the last five, pointing towards a recent shift in biology and related fields. How has the answer to the fundamental question in biology—what is life?—changed during your career?

ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY: The main trend I’ve noticed is people arguing about whether viruses are alive or not. Which gets to the mechanistic point: they’re made of the same stuff as the organisms they infect, the same building blocks, all working by the same principles. So there is some sort of continuum with life. At the other end is deciding when something is dead—when does life end? And what does it mean? We have been able to get EEG waves out of a pig’s brain hours after it has been removed. There is also research suggesting that being in a coma is a heterogeneous experience. So brain death is not quite as straightforward as we used to think.

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Tanvir Khan in The Scientist:

Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer and contributes to 15 percent of all cancer-related deaths in women worldwide. Though 20–30 percent of patients with early-stage breast cancers eventually develop metastatic cancer, few effective treatments for preventing rapid metastatic progression exist.¹

Tumor cell motility and invasion are essential drivers of metastasis, as tumor cells must migrate away from the primary tumor and invade new sites. Tumor cells at the primary cancer site promote metastasis by recruiting immunosuppressive inflammatory cells, such as activated macrophages, neutrophils, and myeloid-derived suppressor cells, which facilitate tumor cell migration and survival.

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Geoffrey Bear in Time:

The Osage elders’ teachings about life and death were about both the seen and unseen. “We follow the drum,” they said. “This little drum helps make the big drum go,” they said. My generation knew the big drum as where we dressed in our finest traditional clothes and enjoyed the intimacy of our families. Across four-day long ceremonies, each of us carried into the day and night our own beliefs, as formed around the order of the dance. Our parents’ generation grew up during WWII and the Korea Conflict.

They ventured out into the world to seek the American Dream of a fine house, two cars to park in the garage, a large yard, good jobs, good schools for their children, and the freedom to dream and build on those thoughts, which in turn became hopes. When able, they traveled back to the dances to the sound of the big drum, and often, one of their parents rode along. My grandma, for example, would sit quietly in the back seat with my brother and me as she looked out the car window teaching us to count in Osage. She would say the names of things we could see and touch. She left it to her brothers to teach us the ways of the sweat lodge and much about what we could not see. None of them spoke of the “Osage Reign of Terror”—a time before my parents were born—a time in the 1920s and 30s when Grandma and her brothers were young and just starting to build their own lives.

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Coffee Shop in the late Afternoon

The beautiful woman gone
leaving the shop to young men making
their way in the January world
with cell phones and computers –

and me.

Outside, a sunny day.
too warm for the season.

A phone rings – a barista calls out
“Tall vanilla soy latte.”
Strange talk to one who grew up
with a nickel cup of joe.

There are fewer and fewer
native speakers of one’s born language.

You learn to live with translations.

by Nils Peterson

Adam Tooze in his Substack newsletter:

Whoever governs America, dysfunctionally or not, speculating about a post-American world, is a waste of time. And there a few key areas of global affairs in which American institutions today play a crucial organizational role. I have written often in this newsletter about the dollar system and its resilience. The dollar continues to be the basis for global finance. Though it dare not speak its name, the Fed acts as a global central bank.

It is also true that American leadership and military spending does hold structures like NATO together. But that is not “the world”. It is an exclusive military alliance.

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Editorial in Nature:

Early in 1993, a manuscript landed in the Nature offices announcing the results of an unusual — even audacious — experiment. The investigators, led by planetary scientist and broadcaster Carl Sagan, had searched for evidence of life on Earth that could be detected from space. The results, published 30 years ago this week, were “strongly suggestive” that the planet did indeed host life. “These observations constitute a control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial life by modern interplanetary spacecraft,” the team wrote.

The experiment was a master stroke. In 1989, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had launched on a mission to orbit Jupiter, where it was scheduled to arrive in 1995. Sagan and his colleagues wondered whether Galileo would find definitive evidence of life back home if its instruments could be trained on Earth. They persuaded NASA to do just that as the craft flew past the home planet in 1990.

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Daniel Callcut in Aeon:

The acclaimed British philosopher Bernard Williams, writing in the 1970s, showed that a common way of arguing for moral relativism is confused and contradictory. Nonetheless, he went on to defend a philosophical worldview that incorporated some of relativism’s underlying ideas. There is much to learn, when we think about the ongoing culture wars over moral values, from the encounters with relativism that recur throughout Williams’s work. First, however, it’s useful to understand why a prevalent feature of the culture wars, arguing over which words to use, itself quickly leads to arguments over relativism.

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Johnny Lyons at The Dublin Review Of Books:

The subtitle of David Edmonds’s biography of the English philosopher Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is liable to raise more than a few eyebrows. Surely a mission to save morality is something only a God-like being could take on. And since God is dead, or rather has ceased to be believable, the prospect of rescuing morality must have vanished too. So is the subtitle to suggest that Parfit really was blessed with superhuman powers? Or are we to read it ironically, perhaps as a satirical comment on one philosopher’s exaggerated view of his own importance?

The book’s first page leaves the reader in no doubt that the protagonist’s own view of what he was doing was seriously intended. Edmonds opens with an episode when Parfit, in his later years, found himself hospitalised following a sudden failure of his lungs. Observing the steady stream of visitors entering the patient’s room, one of the nurses grew curious and asked Parfit what he did for a living to which he replied: ‘I work on what matters.’

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Jeanette Winterson at The New Statesman:

Invisible Cities is built like a Boolean Truth Table. The mathematical table shows all possible combinations of inputs, and for each combination the output that the circuit will produce. It’s a logic operation. The categories we find in Invisible Cities – Hidden Cities, Cities and Desire, Cities and Memory, Thin Cities, Dead Cities, and so on – aren’t random. Once chosen, these “inputs” will reveal their “outputs”. Think of a Truth Table as including a column for each variable in the expression and a row for each possible combination of truth values (or cities in our case). Then add a column that shows the outcome of each set of values. That’s the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

The mapping out of possible truth values is the hot debate sparred back and forth across the space the two men occupy whenever they meet. At first, Polo’s space is offered as places he has seen and been. Gradually, the emperor begins to describe the cities, and Polo must tell him if they are real – moving carefully around what the word “real” means.

more here.

Thinking Thought

“Oh, soul,” I sometimes—often—still say when I’m trying
… to convince my inner self of something.
“Oh, soul,” I say still, “there’s so much to be done, don’t want
… to stop to rest now, not already.
“Oh, soul,” I say, “the implications of the task are clear,
… why procrastinate, why whine?”
All the while I know my struggle has to do with mind being
… only sometimes subject to the will,
that other portion of itself which manages to stay so recalcitrantly,
… obstinately impotent.”
“Oh, soul,” come into my field of want, my realm of act, be
… attentive to my computations and predictions.”
But as usual soul resists, as usual soul retires, as usual soul’s
… old act of dissipation and removal.
Oh, the furious illusive unities of want, the frail, false fusions
… and discursive chains of hope.

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. William Selected Poems
The Noonday Press, 1994

Wilfred McClay in The New Criterion:

Back in the 1980s, an editor at Harvard University Press had the bright idea of asking some of the leading lights of the day to write their own version of a philosophical dictionary, modeled on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philo­sophique (1764). The project petered out rather quickly, presumably because there turned out to be so few scholars around who had the breadth and wit to write such a book. But the great sociologist Robert Nisbet rose to the challenge and produced a philosophical dictionary, with the saucy title Prejudices, that was infinitely more charming and enlightening than its French model. It appeared in 1982.

Among the topics appearing in the table of contents for Nisbet’s dictionary is the term “Humanities.” The essay on that subject provides us with an excellent starting place for the present inquiry. It begins as follows:

A faculty member was accosted by a colleague with the words, “I understand you spoke against the humanities the other day at faculty meeting.” “No indeed,” was the reply. “I love the humanities. I would die for the humanities. All I asked was, what the hell are the humanities?”

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Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

An international team of scientists has mapped the human brain in much finer resolution than ever before. The brain atlas, a $375 million effort started in 2017, has identified more than 3,300 types of brain cells, an order of magnitude more than was previously reported. The researchers have only a dim notion of what the newly discovered cells do. The results were described in 21 papers published on Thursday in Science and several other journals.

Ed Lein, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle who led five of the studies, said that the findings were made possible by new technologies that allowed the researchers to probe millions of human brain cells collected from biopsied tissue or cadavers. “It really shows what can be done now,” Dr. Lein said. “It opens up a whole new era of human neuroscience.”

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Amitava Kumar in his Substack newsletter:

During a public conversation with Salman Rushdie on stage in New York City, I asked if he had advice for postcolonial writers. Rushdie said he had a rule for young writers: “There must be no tropical fruits in the title. No mangoes, no guavas. None of those. Tropical animals are also problematic. Peacock, etc. Avoid that shit.” (More of that exchange is to be found here.) I have made it a practice of mine to ask writers for advice. Back in 2020, in the New York Times Book Review, I had published a few examples of what various writer-friends had written when signing copies of their books. Compiled in that list are the words of Lydia Davis, Yiyun Li, Tommy Orange, Zadie Smith, Colum McCann, Mark Doty, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jenny Offill. (Jenny Offill’s advice, for instance, is: “If you want to write, don’t have a backup plan. Also, always put a dog in your book.”) In the past few weeks, weeks during which I have continued to not write, I have been diligent about collecting advice from writers who have come through the Cullman Center.

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Steve Nadis in Quanta:

Eugenio Calabi was known to his colleagues as an inventive mathematician — “transformatively original,” as his former student Xiuxiong Chen put it. In 1953, Calabi began to contemplate a class of shapes that nobody had ever envisioned before. Other mathematicians thought their existence was impossible. But a couple of decades later, these same shapes became extremely important in both math and physics. The results ended up having a far broader reach than anyone, including Calabi, had anticipated.

Calabi was 100 years old when he died on September 25, mourned by his colleagues as one of the most influential geometers of the 20th century. “A lot of mathematicians like to solve problems that finish off work on a particular subject,” Chen said. “Calabi was someone who liked to start a subject.”

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Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

Two things are true: Israel must do something, and what it’s doing now is indefensible. So what’s the alternative?

I put this question to anyone I could think of: a large group ranging from retired Israeli officers to Palestinian intellectuals to counterterrorism experts to scholars of the ethics and law of war. I read everything I could find that on the topic, scouring reporting and the academic literature for better ideas.

The answer that emerged was deceptively simple: make the right choice where America made the wrong one. Israel should launch a targeted counterrorism operation aimed at Hamas leadership and the fighters directly involved in the October 7 attack, one that focuses on minimizing both civilian casualties and the scope of ground operations in Gaza.

More here.