What Kind of Times Are These

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meetinghouse abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

by Adrienne Rich
from Collected Poems: 1950-2010
W. W. Norton & Company

Nicolas Pelham in New Statesman:

No one wanted to play football with Muhammad bin Salman. Sure, the boy was a member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, but so were 15,000 other people. His classmates preferred the company of his cousins, who were higher up the assumed order of succession, a childhood acquaintance recalls. As for the isolated child who would one day become crown prince, a family friend recounts hearing him called “little Saddam”.

Home life was tricky for bin Salman, too (he is now more commonly known by his initials, mbs). His father, Salman, already had five sons with his first wife, an educated woman from an elite urban family. mbs’s mother, Salman’s third wife, was a tribeswoman. When mbs visited the palace where his father lived with his first wife, his older half-brothers mocked him as the “son of a Bedouin”. Later, his elder brothers and cousins were sent to universities in America and Britain. The Bedouin offspring of Prince Salman stayed in Riyadh to attend King Saud University.

More here.

Nora Krug in The Washington Post:

My bookshelves are a mess. It’s not just that I have too many books and too little space. I’m also simply disorganized. It wasn’t always so. Shelves I put together years ago, pre-children, remain generally intact: a full bookcase of poetry, alphabetized by author, and several jam-packed bookcases of fiction, also by authors’ last names. These shelves now serve primarily as decoration or reference or as a lending library for guests. But there’s more, much more: the tumbling pile on my desk — propping up the computer I am typing on — and the volumes stuffed frantically in the bookcase in my bedroom and stacked in towers on and around my nightstand. These are the books that are part of my daily life — for work, for pleasure, sometimes both. There is no rhyme or reason to how I arrange them, but as I read in one of the books I consulted (then discarded) to help deal with my little problem: “If it’s where you meant it to be, then it’s organized.” I am adopting that as my book-organizing principle. Don’t tell my kids.

More here.

David-Antoine Williams in The Life of Words:

In the summer of 2012 Seamus Heaney wrote to me on some questions I had sent him about dictionaries and words and etymologies. Bits of what he had to say made it into a couple of talks I did around that time, but I recently rediscovered the original text, and thought it should see the light of day. So here’s a very lightly edited rendition of our exchange:

D-AW: An anecdote in ‘Feeling into Words’ describes having grammatical and lexical facts recited to you in the form of rhymes as a child. Do you have any early memories of consulting dictionaries?

SH: I cannot remember the words of my mother’s rhyme, but it was a chant that somehow incorporated the links to be found between Latin and English vocabularies. The first dictionary I remember was a red-backed old Chambers in the Mossbawn house. I must have been eleven or twelve when I used it – if I used it.  The physical book and the authority that was lodged in and around it are what stay with me most.

More here.

Erik Stokstad in Science:

By giving a Chinese rice variety a second copy of one of its own genes, researchers have boosted its yield by up to 40%. The change helps the plant absorb more fertilizer, boosts photosynthesis, and accelerates flowering, all of which could contribute to larger harvests, the group reports today in Science.

The yield gain from a single gene coordinating these multiple effects is “really impressive,” says Matthew Paul, a plant geneticist at Rothamsted Research who was not involved in the work. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like that before.” The approach could be tried in other crops, too, he adds; the new study reports preliminary findings in wheat.

More here.

Roger Pielke, Jr. in The New Atlantis:

In a recent interview in New York Times Magazine, energy expert and polymath Vaclav Smil found himself being pressured by his interviewer to acknowledge that climate change was either a catastrophe or not a problem. The famously cantankerous Smil bristled at the framing: “I cannot tell you that we don’t have a problem because we do have a problem. But I cannot tell you it’s the end of the world by next Monday because it is not the end of the world by next Monday. What’s the point of you pressing me to belong to one of these groups?”

For well over a decade, the American debate over climate change has largely been a battle between two extremes: those who view climate change apocalyptically, and those castigated as deniers of climate science. In institutions of science and in the mainstream media, we see the celebration of the catastrophists and the denigration of the deniers. Predictably, the categories map neatly onto the extremes of left-versus-right politics.

More here.

Ricky Moody at Salmagundi:

Pretexts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh17jXzgI1E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWGLRx5wIsQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJFMAfYoWYo&t=144s

1.  First, let it be known that the first single from the new Regina Spektor album¹ is not “new” in the sense that an early live performance, available on YouTube, dates to November 2014 or eight years ago (as of this writing). In the recording of this 2014 performance, Spektor ad libs in a prefatory way: “Here’s another new song—well, new to you anyway.”
2.  If “Becoming All Alone,” the “new” single is not from “now” (from the time of BA.2, the time of the Ukrainian invasion and subsequent war, the time of renewed gun violence, the time of the imminent Supreme Court decision overruling Roe v. Wade), then from when? If it is from earlier than 2014, which it could be as Spektor implies it is not new to herself (like others on the new album), then from when? Could it be from the earliest years of her career? Could it be from the beginning of her career? Could the beginning of her career be defined as the moment in which “Becoming All Alone” is written, such that we can define the notion of songwriting as a becoming alone, dating this idea to the earliest time of a songwriting Spektor? Could it be from her childhood? Could it be “primordial?”

more here.

From Phys.Org:

Researchers in the Biomedical Engineering Department at UConn have developed a new cardiac cell-derived platform that closely mimics the human heart, unlocking potential for more thorough preclinical drug development and testing, and model for cardiac diseases. The research, published in Cell Reports by Assistant Professor Kshitiz in collaboration with Dr. Junaid Afzal in the cardiology department at the University of California San Francisco, presents a method that accelerates maturation of human cardiac cells towards a state suitable enough to be a surrogate for preclinical drug testing.

“There is a very strong need to create human cardiac constructs for all sorts of applications. Small animal models just do not recapitulate human heart biology, and human samples are scarce,” says Kshitiz. “This matters because all drugs need to be tested for their toxicity to heart. It is widely believed that a large number of them unnecessarily fail clinical trials because we do not have human samples to test them with.” Kshitiz and Afzal first identified the need to create a matured human cardiac tissue during their time together at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “When methods were developed to differentiate human pluripotent stem cells to cardiac cells, it created a big hope that finally we will have human heart constructs to work with,” said Afzal. “While it is straightforward to get human cardiac cells, they are similar to fetal cells. What we need is adult cells.”

More here.

Nathan Heller in The New Yorker:

Around you, there is piracy and chaos. But you’re enterprising, and keep to your path. At university, you hardly sleep, and you eat what you can afford. Why do you work yourself this way? It’s not as if you’re getting paid for it. Another version of yourself, in another time, though, is. Now, living in the California sun with some success, you reflect on your poor, wan, sleepless younger self and feel a wave of gratitude, and then of prickly regret. The kid you were had different dreams; it strikes you as unfair that you sit pretty on the spoils of that person’s efforts. If you could take some of your wealth and send it backward in time, to your younger self, you would.

We usually think of inequalities as extending from bottom to top: I earn a little wealth over eight hours; Bill Gates earns much more. But there are also inequalities that extend longitudinally, from the past into the future. Your young self does labor for which your older self collects rewards. Such timing issues—how much money you receive or can spend now and later—have effects on your financial fate. In a more equal world, you cannot help but think, people would draw on their lifetime wealth throughout their lives, not merely at the pinnacle of their careers. You notice that older generations and big corporations rule the roost in the United States, but it’s not clear why this should be so.

More here.

the poem requires

A long time ago
A brilliant woman once told me
“The poem requires what the poem requires.”
I carried it with me
Trying to write the shackles off my wrists
Loosen the gag from my tongue
Wedging a pen between my past and future
Yet it is only now I realize
That I was the poem all along

Do you know what it feels like
To stretch the lyrics laced across your shoulders until they fit
One line of prose to be cut and devoured and reassembled again
To make metaphor of the little fires dancing behind your eyes
Praying that they don’t melt everything unrecognizable
To make hyperbole of the salt water bodies hiding in your lungs
Until the fight feels better fought from the outside looking in

Do you know what it feels like
To have the hand of God quiver ever so slightly in the midst of your midnight tremor
To wait for the chain of despair to sink to the bottom of the bloodied ink on the page
To hope that the tears streaming from every pore don’t give away the very last of what is left

I always thought
The poem didn’t know what it required
It was my job to manipulate it beautiful
Twist and bend it until its acrobatic instinct overwhelmed the scales
Stack mountains within its stanza so the valleys no longer exist
The plateau never comes
The limits never return
I always thought it was my job to carve the poem
Line by line
Until the bittersweet taste felt like a psalmist praise
Shake the fruit from its limbs
So that when it reaches the ultimate resting place
It forges ahead alone

But the poem requires what the poem requires
Without the personification of fear
Without the seamless perfection of imagery in the ghost of a former self’s likeness
Without the internal rhymes internal destruction
Without the word play no longer having fun

The poem requires what the poem requires
And now
Life can finally begin

by Najya Williams
from Split This Rock

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

I met a researcher who works on “aligning” GPT-3. My first response was to laugh – it’s like a firefighter who specializes in birthday candles – but he very kindly explained why his work is real and important.

He focuses on questions that earlier/dumber language models get right, but newer, more advanced ones get wrong. For example:

Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror?

Dumb language model answer: The mirror is broken.

Versus:

Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror?

Advanced language model answer: You get seven years of bad luck

Technically, the more advanced model gave a worse answer. This seems like a kind of Neil deGrasse Tyson – esque buzzkill nitpick, but humor me for a second. What, exactly, is the more advanced model’s error?

More here.

L. Benjamin Rolsky in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Intellectual histories of recent American public life typically foreground disintegration in order to capture the mood of a country on the brink. These moments are not only about the United States’s ongoing culture wars or its “hyper-politics” but also evidence of how the nation explains social and political change to itself with a turn of phrase or analytical framework.

For historian Gary Gerstle, such moments of rupture and conceptual birth are fundamental to understanding what he calls “the neoliberal order” in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. He is less interested in partisan explanations and more concerned with developing an academic category for measuring political shifts over multiple election cycles, arguing that there have been two phases of the American polity: the New Deal order and the neoliberal order. Party affiliation dating back to the 1920s becomes relative once compared to more capacious neoliberal assumptions shared by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in the name of economic freedom.

More here.

Erica Klarreich in Quanta:

In 1868, the mathematician Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) proclaimed that an encryption scheme called the Vigenère cipher was “unbreakable.” He had no proof, but he had compelling reasons for his belief, since mathematicians had been trying unsuccessfully to break the cipher for more than three centuries.

There was just one small problem: A German infantry officer named Friedrich Kasiski had, in fact, broken it five years earlier, in a book that garnered little notice at the time.

Cryptographers have been playing this game of cat and mouse, creating and breaking ciphers, for as long as people have been sending secret information. “For thousands of years, people [have been] trying to figure out, ‘Can we break the cycle?’” said Rafael Pass, a cryptographer at Cornell Tech and Cornell University.

More here.

Pearce Wright and Tim Radford in The Guardian:

The scientist James Lovelock’s discoveries had an immense influence on our understanding of the global impact of humankind, and on the search for extraterrestrial life. A vigorous writer and speaker, he became a hero to the green movement, although he was one of its most formidable critics.

His research highlighted some of the issues that became the most intense environmental concerns of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, among them the insidious spread through the living world of industrial pollutants; the destruction of the ozone layer; and the potential menace of global heating. He supported nuclear power and defended the chemical industries – and his warnings took an increasingly apocalyptic note.

“The planet we live on has merely to shrug to take some fraction of a million people to their deaths,” Lovelock wrote in 2006. “But this is nothing compared with what may soon happen; we are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back into the hot state it was in 55m years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will die.”

More here.