Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

The road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but the roads to pretty much everywhere else are paved with the corpses of animals. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb explores the outsized yet underappreciated impacts of the, by one estimate, 65 million kilometres of roads that hold the planet in a paved stranglehold. These extend beyond roadkill to numerous other insidious biological effects. The relatively young discipline of road ecology tries to gauge and mitigate them and sees biologists join forces with engineers and roadbuilders. This is a wide-ranging and eye-opening survey of the situation in the USA and various other countries.

More here.

Ruth Scurr in The Guardian:

French author Mathias Énard, winner of the Prix Goncourt and nominated for the International Booker prize, begins his new novel by quoting the Buddha: “In our former lives, we have all been earth, stone, dew, wind, fire, moss, tree, insect, fish, turtle, bird and mammal.” The central conceit of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is the great “wheel of suffering” through which the souls of all living things are reincarnated in a new form immediately after death. Murderers, for example, come back as red worms slithering “cheek by jowl” under a dank shower tray in a rundown rural annexe rented by an anthropologist who is writing a thesis on “what it means to live in the country nowadays”.

The novel is also a long love letter to the Deux-Sèvres, where Énard spent his childhood: a predominantly rural area, situated east of the Vendée and 100km inland from the Atlantic seaport La Rochelle.

More here.

This shot of melt water pouring through the Austfonna ice cap on the Arctic island of Nordaustlandet, Norway, won the Nature category in the 2023 Drone Photo Awards. “I have visited this place several times before, but last year it was disheartening to witness the sea ice melting as early as June,” said photographer Thomas Vijayan.

More images here in Nature.

Stanley Fish in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

University administrators faced with the challenge of responding to the various (and opposed) constituencies invested in the Hamas-Israel war have come up with a number of strategies.

• • Condemn one side and express sympathy with the other, a sure loser.
  • Condemn both sides, an even surer loser; all parties will feel aggrieved.
  • Support the legitimate aspirations of both sides and reject violence; you will be faulted for occupying a perch so lofty that the pressing issues of the day disappear.
  • Issue a general statement in support of peace and diplomatic negotiation; you will be accused of trafficking in pious platitudes that provide no firm guidance.
  • Stay silent, say nothing.

Staying silent and saying nothing is the right thing to do, but it has been criticized by leaders like Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, who declared that “neutrality is a cop-out.” But staying silent, properly understood, is not neutrality. Neutrality is a position you take after considering the alternatives and affirmatively deciding not to come down in either direction. It is in the fray, even if it pretends to be above the fray. Staying silent, as I urge it, means refusing to have a position.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Sharon Cameron)

Ben Lerner in Harper’s Magazine:

At twenty-six, in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched, I found myself driving a red Subaru Outback—the color was technically “claret metallic,” the friend who’d lent me the car had told me, in case I ever wanted to touch up the paint—on Highway 12 in Utah. I was heading to the East Bay after a painful breakup in New York. I remember, wrongly, that I was listening to a book on tape, a work by a prominent linguist, as I moved through the alien landscape, jagged formations of red rock towering against a cloudless sky.

Consider the metaphorical association of argument and war, the linguist says in my memory, the way we speak of “attacking” or “defending” our “position.” If we frame an argument metaphorically as armed conflict then we will think of our interlocutor as an enemy. But what would happen, the voice asked me as I gripped the wheel with both hands, tense from fifteen hours of continuous driving, having pulled over only for gas and Red Bull and granola bars and Camels since departing Omaha, where I’d napped and showered at the childhood home of a college friend—what would happen if we shifted the metaphorical frame and thought of argument as a kind of dance, as a series of steps undertaken with the goal of mutual expression, satisfaction, even pleasure?

More here.

Dear Hermano

Again people are being taken away,
I read the news of kids
like your daughter & son,
like our family, our neighbors,

they wake in a state of temporary,
that lasts longer & longer &
longer than we can remember.
I read online the Smithsonian

purchased children’s drawings
of them in camps: grey beds,
red, black, & orange people in them,
archaeology happening in real time.

Is remembrance joy? I once asked abuela,
she said, “It takes work until it becomes
second nature to you, like breathing,
like knowing the earth gave you a voice

to sing across generations like this:
My voice, the land, my voice, the land
sings my story, my voice
the land, my voice, the land

the clouds look
like they’re going on forever;
do they ever die?
or are they constantly reincarnating?

Life, aqui, a deep possibility,
of memories: a translation of living,
a brief swell of air along a saguaro’s needles,
the way we eat: alive,

but Hermano, there are still camps,
& when I’m eating a fruit salad, I crunch
into the body of lettuce, the crispness
has a cost, but all of this always did, remember?

by Moncho Alvarado
from Split This Rock

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

Marco D’Eramo in Sidecar:

Aux armes, citoyens! So begins the refrain of ‘La Marseillaise’, adopted as the French national anthem by the Revolutionary Convention of 1795. No longer serfs, nor subjects, nor vassals, but equals. Citizen: a political category that had vanished with the ancient world (cives romanus sum) re-emerged to encapsulate the rights won by the Revolution and bind together the imagined community of the nation-state. The rights of citizenship would be augmented over time (the right to education, right to health, right to work…) along with their corresponding duties (conscription, jury duty, tax impositions…). Herein lies a key distinction with contemporary human rights: the aim to give positive content to an equality that is otherwise formal and theoretical, as expressed in the principle of ‘one person, one vote’.

This conception of citizenship – and thus of the state – peaked in the 1960s, and then began to decline. It continues to be considered a form of belonging, one that can be conferred by birth (ius soli), by bloodline (ius sanguinis) or by an extended period of residence. Yet citizenship has ‘thinned’, as the expression goes. Rights were diminished (the demise of the welfare state) and duties shrank (easing the tax burden), when they were not abolished entirely (conscription). With the triumph of neoliberalism it was transformed into a commodity, that is, into something that can be bought and sold. There is now, as the American sociologist Kristin Surak writes in The Golden Passport, a ‘citizenship industry’ spanning the globe. The book contains a treasure trove of information, data, and first-hand accounts of the history of this industry’s first forty years.

More here.

Ed Pavlić in Boston Review:

Now we are here not only to mourn those children, who cannot really be mourned,” said James Baldwin in his address to a crowd of seven thousand that filled Foley Square in lower Manhattan on September 22, 1963. It was the Sunday following the Sunday morning bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most heinous hate crimes since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board had sparked a modern Black protest movement—and with it, a resurgence of white backlash. Over the past year, the traditionally standoffish 16th Street Baptist congregation had increasingly engaged the freedom movement. During protests in April and May of that year the church served as a base from which thousands of marchers—many of them children—departed on their way to being intercepted and jailed by police. On the morning of Sunday, September 15, the inaugural Youth Day at the church, a small group of girls had stopped in the women’s lounge to attend to their hair and straighten each other’s outfits between sessions. At 10:22 a.m. a bomb hidden under the stairs the previous night by Klansmen blasted out the wall and stained-glass window of the lounge. Four girls, ages eleven to fourteen—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson—were killed in the explosion. Later that day, teenagers Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware were fatally shot in separate racist attacks. In one day, six Black kids in Birmingham were dead.

The crowd to which Baldwin spoke had gathered as part of a “National Day of Mourning for the Children of Birmingham,” as had crowds in three dozen other cities across the country, from Seattle to Pasadena to Tucson, from Chicago to Shreveport, from Miami to Bridgeport. “We are here to begin to achieve the American Revolution,” Baldwin continued, warning that if organized mass action wasn’t taken, “this country will turn out to be in the position, let us say, of Spain, a country which is so tangled and so trapped and so immobilized by its interior dissension that it can’t do anything else.”

More here.

Ignacio Silva Neira in Phenomenal World:

On September 11, 1980—seven years after Augusto Pinochet seized power from democratically elected Salvador Allende in a brutal US-backed military coup—the dictatorship passed a constitution that laid the groundwork for one of the world’s earliest and most enduring neoliberal experiments. The results of this experiment have been well documented: with the privatization of education, pensions, health, public transportation, and essential natural resources like water, Chile became one the most economically unequal countries in the OECD.

The protests that erupted over rising transportation fares in October 2019 forced a national reckoning around this political and economic infrastructure. Weeks of mass strikes and public protests reinvigorated discussion about Chile’s future. A year later, nearly 80 percent of the country’s citizens voted in favor of a new constitution in a nationwide referendum. With the 2021 election of social democratic candidate Gabriel Boric—a former student activist who gained prominence through the campaign for a Constitutional Convention—it seemed that a political transformation was underway.

But the path forward has proved meandering and vague. In September 2022, the Convention’s proposed constitution, one of the most progressive in history, was rejected by 62 percent of the public. A far-right Constitutional Council, elected in June of this year, has since proposed a new, right-led charter. On December 17, the country will return to vote on this constitutional proposal, marking the culmination of a fierce battle over Chile’s identity.

The Boric government’s dramatic reversal of fortune is the result of conflict over the position of indigenous communities within the Chilean state, the patriarchal mobilization against feminist demands, and the role of the state in economy and society. On this final point, the ongoing debates on the Chilean constitution reflect deep-rooted divisions that have plagued the country throughout its recent history.

More here.

Pratinav Anil at The Guardian:

This is, by my count, Robert Service’s 12th book that touches on the Russian Revolution, either substantively or tangentially. So far, we’ve had a biographical triptych on Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin; a trilogy on the last; two broad surveys of modern Russia; a monograph on the last tsar and another on the Bolsheviks; and a general account for students. By now, he could churn out another history on autopilot. He is, thankfully, too clever for that. What we have here is the work of a lifetime, a reflective volume alert to local and geopolitics, art and culture, high society and the affairs of ordinary people. If he had served up a larger slice of history, encompassing the consolidation of Stalinism rather than ending the narrative with Lenin’s demise, he could have claimed with some justification to have written the definitive word on the revolution.

Over the years, Service has acquired a reputation for impeccable, almost smug, even-handedness. This has strengths and weaknesses.

more here.

Zachary Issenberg at The Millions:

The Latin American Boom of the 1960s and ‘70s is associated with some of contemporary Spanish-language literature’s most towering figures, among them Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. But of all the giants translated, American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso.

The Latin American Boom, of course, was somewhat artificially constructed—a marketing term by U.S. publishers to name and corral the Spanish-language arts, for which the ‘60s and ‘70s were especially fecund years. How else could writers as stylistically and geographically diverse as García Márquez, Silvina Ocampo, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante fit under the same tent, if not for the efforts of editors and publicists at highly regarded American publishing houses?

more here.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

A tiny ball of brain cells hums with activity as it sits atop an array of electrodes. For two days, it receives a pattern of electrical zaps, each stimulation encoding the speech peculiarities of eight people. By day three, it can discriminate between speakers. Dubbed Brainoware, the system raises the bar for biocomputing by tapping into 3D brain organoids, or “mini-brains.” These models, usually grown from human stem cells, rapidly expand into a variety of neurons knitted into neural networks.

Like their biological counterparts, the blobs spark with electrical activity—suggesting they have the potential to learn, store, and process information. Scientists have long eyed them as a promising hardware component for brain-inspired computing. This week, a team at Indiana University Bloomington turned theory into reality with Brainoware. They connected a brain organoid resembling the cortex—the outermost layer of the brain that supports higher cognitive functions—to a wafer-like chip densely packed with electrodes.

The mini-brain functioned like both the central processing unit and memory storage of a supercomputer. It received input in the form of electrical zaps and outputted its calculations through neural activity, which was subsequently decoded by an AI tool. When trained on soundbites from a pool of people—transformed into electrical zaps—Brainoware eventually learned to pick out the “sounds” of specific people. In another test, the system successfully tackled a complex math problem that’s challenging for AI.

More here.

Molly Young in The New York Times:

“Class consciousness takes a vacation while we’re in the thrall of this book,” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote in the Book Review in 1985, in her evaluation of the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt’s memoir “Once Upon a Time.” To be clear, Harrison was referring to the class consciousness of the reader, not the author. Vanderbilt demonstrates perfect awareness throughout her book that most young children don’t play with emerald tiaras and alligator jewel boxes lined in chestnut satin, or rely on the services of multiple butlers, or lose count of their own houses. Harrison’s point was that Vanderbilt’s talent with a pen — and perspective on her own economic altitude — allowed consumers of her tale to suspend their envy and engage with the reality of growing up in opulent neglect.

Memoirs by the rich have always been major publishing events. Readers love to prowl wide-eyed through gilded corridors, and I am no exception. A cherished portion of my shelf is devoted to the self-accounts of Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Pells, Guggenheims and other names familiar from banks, art museums and city centers. It wasn’t until trying to get through this year’s big contributions to the genre — Prince Harry’s “Spare” and Paris Hilton’s “Paris: The Memoir” — that I noticed two curious facts about my collection. One, the shelf contained nothing published after 2020. Two, and more crucially, it featured no authors born after 1937, which suggests that 1937 was the last year rich people were manufactured to my precise specifications.

More here.

Oshan Jarow in Vox:

Sometimes when I’m looking out across the northern meadow of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, or even the concrete parking lot outside my office window, I wonder if someone like Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson could have taken in the same view and seen more. I don’t mean making out blurry details or more objects in the scene. But through the lens of their minds, could they encounter the exact same world as me and yet have a richer experience? One way to answer that question, at least as a thought experiment, could be to compare the electrical activity inside our brains while gazing out upon the same scene, and running some statistical analysis designed to actually tell us whose brain activity indicates more richness. But that’s just a loopy thought experiment, right?

Not exactly. One of the newest frontiers in the science of the mind is the attempt to measure consciousness’s “complexity,” or how diverse and integrated electrical activity is across the brain. Philosophers and neuroscientists alike hypothesize that more complex brain activity signifies “richer” experiences.

More here.

W. Wayt Gibbs in Anthropocene Magazine:

“Earthrise, that iconic photograph snapped from the Apollo 8 space capsule 50 years ago on a Christmas-eve orbit around the Moon, forced a self-absorbed species to reflect on its fragility. “Prior to that image, people had a perception of the planet being essentially infinite in its capacity to take all the damage we dish out,” recalls John Amos. A geoscientist who worked for years helping oil companies scout prospects from space, Amos was among a generation inspired by the “overview effect” to shift into activism. He left industry to launch an environmental-surveillance nonprofit called SkyTruth.

“Seeing that vanishingly small green-and-blue dot surrounded by the absolute, almost horrifying blackness of open space—that made a lot of people think we need to be wielding our awesome power more wisely,” he says. Along with aerial views of an enormous oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara the following month, ‟Earthrise” helped spur the creation of Earth Day and the major environmental-protection laws of the 1970s. Such is the power of a transformative shift in perspective enabled by a major leap in engineering.

More here.