J. Howard Rosier interviews Adam Shatz about solidarity, the art of the essay, and his recent collection Writers and Missionaries in The Nation:

In 2014, Adam Shatz’s “Writers or Missionaries” appeared in The Nation, a piece about his relationship, as a Jewish American journalist, to the political conflicts in the Arab-speaking world. The article features, among other anecdotes, a bracing summary of Shatz’s discussion with V.S. Naipaul following 9/11, in which the late novelist divided reporters and journalists into two camps. “Writers”—those who describe the world as it is—are, in this formulation, diametrically opposed to “missionaries,” or those who render a picture of the world as they want to see it, their work serving as advocacy for a specific cause. While discussing his experience covering Algeria in 2002, Shatz turns this paradigm on its head. The issue is not whether it’s a mistake for a reporter to identify with a particular cause or camp. Rather, the essay gains its energy from Shatz’s constant reevaluation—a vacillation between surety and the unknown. (“This was not a matter of finding the story,” Shatz writes, “but of allowing the story to find me.”)

In Shatz’s debut collection, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, this dichotomy is put to work. Examining novelists like Kamel Daoud, Michel Houellebecq, and Richard Wright, and scholars and pundits like Fouad Ajami, Edward Said, and Roland Barthes, the book serves as a series of case studies on how a writer’s relationship to politics shades both their decision-making and their work. A writer might gain notoriety or financial stability from a particular institution, but will it hinder what one is allowed to write? Does patriotism preclude saying certain things in public so as not to discredit political goals? What are the ethics of the personal becoming political (that is to say, outward), when a writer is putting forth bigotry and violence?

More here.

Branko Milanovic over at his Substack:

There has recently been lots of discussion of globalization, its effects, especially on poverty and inequality, and many contradictory statements, some even absurd, were made. Here are eleven theses on globalization.

First, inequality and poverty. Globalization is a force for the global good: the globalization of economic activity has enabled production of many commodities and provision of many services to be done in the places where it is cheapest to do. It has released previously used resources for other activities. It has also mobilized capital and labor that was misused or unemployed. The effect was a significant acceleration in global rate of growth (when measuring global growth by using democratic and not plutocratic measures, which have gone up too) and a dramatic decrease in global income inequality and global income poverty.

Second, China. The most important positive effects, largely due to globalization and international trade, have been achieved in China. China explains most of the decrease in global inequality and poverty. But these advances have been realized by the application of non-standard or non-neoclassical policies. This has created the first dilemma for the supporters of globalization and neoliberalism. To defend globalization they have to praise China, but they find Chinese policies distasteful. Thus their comments are most of the time contradictory.

More here.

Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp in Polycrisis:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Two types of images are key to understanding current debates about economic globalization: the hockey stick chart, representing the stunning and inexorable growth of some phenomenon; and the cross chart, whose lines represent changes in relative power and prosperity.

There are good and bad hockey sticks, and the job of policy makers the world over is to harness the former while curbing the latter. But the domestic and international politics of addressing these hockey sticks is complicated by their intersection with distributive conflicts—which can be seen in the form of crosses.

In Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters, we identify a series of narratives that dominate Western debates about the virtues and vices of economic globalization. These storylines are important because they offer different interpretations about what the problems are, how they came about, who is responsible, and what should be done. Here, we highlight some of the key hockey sticks and crosses on which these narratives rely.

No single narrative or image can capture the multifaceted nature of complex issues like economic globalization and the climate crisis. Understanding different perspectives and how they interact is crucial…

More here.

From Pink Mirror:

Do you know what makes you attractive? Your best features are the Nose Width, Bi-Temporal Width, and Bi-Temporal to Bi-Zygomatic Ratio. Also, you may want to know your features that need special attention. Your features that require improvements are Bi-Gonial Width.
The attractiveness of multiple facial features contributes to overall facial attractiveness. The American University of Beirut Medical Center study says beauty and facial attractiveness are easily identified but difficult to quantify.Despite its subjective nature, we can attempt to define, measure, and explain the captivating phenomenon of beauty by describing it numerically and geometrically.
Hence, a single feature does not determine attractiveness because it depends on how well that feature harmonizes with the face.The unit of measurement we used here is Interpupillary Distance (IPD).

Your Nose Width is 37 PCI units and the ideal value is 39 PCI units. The smaller the value, the better it is. This feature dramatically impacts your perceived attractiveness, and you have a high score on this feature and that also means you won a genetic lottery.

More here.

Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times:

We could all use a hype man like George Henry Lewes.

George Henry Who’s?

Well, exactly. A “littérateur, physiologist and metaphysician,” as an obituary in The New York Times called him in 1878, Lewes is today most remembered as the longtime romantic partner and de facto agent of George Eliot: author of works consistently ranked among the best of Victorian literature — perhaps all of English literature. “A novel without weakness” was how the generally unsparing Martin Amis assessed her “Middlemarch,” the mistress-piece to which Rebecca Mead, a writer for The New Yorker, devoted an entire memoir.

For yes, in case you’ve been living under a giant rockery, George Eliot was a “her,” with several roles other than her nom de plume: daughter, sister, friend, wife, stepmother. There have been a gazillion biographies of the great woman, starting with the one assembled by her only legal, late-in-life husband, John Cross (who was 20 years younger and notoriously attempted suicide on their honeymoon, flinging himself into the Grand Canal of Venice from a balcony and getting fished out by a gondolier and hotel employee).

“The Marriage Question,” a careful but impassioned new book by Clare Carlisle, a philosophy professor who edited Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s “Ethics,” is different in its close focus on an idea: that the titular institution shaped Eliot’s identity and work — and has some affinity with Carlisle’s own current undertaking. “Perhaps a biographer’s devotion is a little like the devotion of a spouse,” she observes, in an especially apt analogy for this noble but sometimes plodding literary endeavor. “Writing a person’s life means living with them intimately, struggling to understand them, wondering how far they can be trusted, dealing with the ways they resist, annoy, disappoint, challenge and elude you.”

More here.

Samantha Harvey at The Guardian:

“All our body wants is to sleep, it wants to leave us, head back to the stable, a worn-out horse,” writes Marie Darrieussecq, at which I, a worn-out human, think yes. In a recent interview, Darrieussecq reflected on how much of her work is concerned with inhabiting. Who has a right to inhabit this planet, she asks, and who doesn’t? Though she was talking about her novel Crossed Lines, in which a Parisian woman finds her life becoming bound up with that of a young Nigerian refugee, she could just as well be referring to Sleepless (Pas Dormir in the original French), a book that is – what? A memoir/interrogation/painting/song of insomnia, her own and that of others. It’s a book about where, why, how we sleep and don’t sleep; about how to find a place in the world where sleep can happen, a stable for the worn-out horse.

Sleepless isn’t a book that’s straightforward to convey, at least not briefly. On the page it’s fragmentary, footnoted and studded with photos and illustrations.

more here.

Alex Johnson at the New York Times:

While recent events have provided a painful reminder of the very bad viruses that prey on us, Tom Ireland’s “The Good Virus” is a colorful redemption story for the oft-neglected yet incredibly abundant phage, and its potential for quelling the existential threat of antibiotic resistance, which scientists estimate might cause up to 10 million deaths per year by 2050. Ireland, an award-winning science journalist, approaches the subject of his first book with curiosity and passion, delivering a deft narrative that is rich and approachable.

In the hands of d’Herelle and others, the phage became a potent tool in the fight against cholera. But, in the 1940s, when the discovery of the methods to produce penicillin at an industrial scale led to the “antibiotic era,” phage therapy came to be seen as quackery in Europe and America, in part, Ireland suggests, because antibiotics, unlike phages, fit the mold of capitalist society.

more here.

Heaney in an Irish Pub, Washington, DC

To reach the bar, he’s got to angle sideways—
the whooping clusters of bureaucrats and staffers
and aspiring pols don’t naturally give way,
nor do they part for him as, jostled and unnoticed

in his wilted raincoat, he ferries the Guinness back
to his table of literary riffraff and strays.
But the touring band, turning their jigs and reels,
know him by sight:  as the squeeze box breathes,

the penny whistler’s fingers curl and splay,
their eyes return, through the blind crowd, to him.
Down from the stage at the break they shyly bend
to shake, to present in return, a gift, a tape.

Rare to see, here where art is kept
or held apart, how tenderly they know him
as one of theirs, a fine voice, true, trained on home,
and him asking them to sign their tape!

Later, resuming, they’re chuffed, grinning broadly.
How can the crowd know why, but joy leaks
from the band’s leavened tone and stance and touch
and up we rise—the whole room—on a tune.

by Sandy Solomon
from Plume Magazine

Seamus Heaney at Salmagundi:

It is well, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coalbins, barrels and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth … The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

Neruda’s declaration that “the reality of the world … should not be underprized” implies that we can and often do underprize it. We grow away from our primary relish of the phenomena. The rooms where we come to consciousness, the cupboards we open as toddlers, the shelves we climb up to, the boxes and albums we explore in reserved places in the house, the spots we discover for ourselves in those first solitudes out of doors, the haunts of those explorations at the verge of our security—in such places and at such moments “the reality of the world” first wakens in us.

more here.

Lars Chittka at Scientific American:

The conventional wisdom about insects has been that they are automatons—unthinking, unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely hardwired. But in the 1990s researchers began making startling discoveries about insect minds. It’s not just the bees. Some species of wasps recognize their nest mates’ faces and acquire impressive social skills. For example, they can infer the fighting strengths of other wasps relative to their own just by watching other wasps fight among themselves. Ants rescue nest mates buried under rubble, digging away only over trapped (and thus invisible) body parts, inferring the body dimension from those parts that are visible above the surface. Flies immersed in virtual reality display attention and awareness of the passing of time. Locusts can visually estimate rung distances when walking on a ladder and then plan their step width accordingly (even when the target is hidden from sight after the movement is initiated).

Given the substantial work on the sophistication of insect cognition, it might seem surprising that it took scientists so long to ask whether, if some insects are that smart, perhaps they could also be sentient, capable of feeling.

more here.

Meg Tirrell in CNN:

Cheri Ferguson has traded her vape pen for an Ozempic pen. One day seven weeks ago, “I thought, ‘you’re doing something about your weight; leave your vape at home,’ ” Ferguson said. She hasn’t picked it back up since, she says. Ferguson is one of many people taking Ozempic and similar drugs for weight loss who say they’ve also noticed an effect on their interest in addictive behaviors like smoking and alcohol. A smoker for most of her life, Ferguson started Ozempic 11 weeks ago to try to lose about 50 pounds she’d gained during the Covid-19 pandemic, which had made her prediabetic.

She’d switched from cigarettes to vaping last summer in hopes of quitting but found vapes to be even more addictive. That changed, she said, once she started Ozempic. “It’s like someone’s just come along and switched the light on, and you can see the room for what it is,” Ferguson said. “And all of these vapes and cigarettes that you’ve had over the years, they don’t look attractive anymore. It’s very, very strange. Very strange.” Ferguson said she drinks less alcohol on Ozempic, too. Whereas she would have had multiple drinks in a pub while watching a football match in Buckinghamshire, UK, she’s now content with just one. Some doctors say that when it comes to addictive behaviors, an effect on alcohol use is the most common thing they hear from people taking Ozempic or similar medicines.

More here.

Jane Ciabattari at Literary Hub:

Lydia Kiesling’s first novel, The Golden State, begins with her stressed-out narrator Daphne grabbing her toddler from day care and taking off from her job at the Al-Ihsan Institute in Berkeley. She drives to the mobile home her late grandparents left her in Alta Vista in the high desert of Northern California, where she encounters a neighbor aligned with the radical right State of Jefferson movement and a sympathetic older woman who has spent time in Turkey. Meanwhile, Daphne’s husband is in immigrant limbo at his mother’s house in Istanbul after being tricked into giving up his green card. Based on this multi-textured and sparkling debut, Kiesling was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree.

Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, also tracks a single narrator on a journey. When we first meet Bunny Glenn she is a bored, boy-crazy fifteen year old “diplomat brat” living in Baku, on the oil-rich Caspian Sea, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her travels as she comes of age and becomes an aspirational worker in the oil industry carry her around the globe, ultimately back to Baku.

More here.

Two Poems

Optimism

More and more I come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns to another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, intractable earth

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

The great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

by Jane Hirshfield
from Given Sugar, Given Salt
Harper Collins, 2001

Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta:

Seven years ago, researchers showed that they could strip cells down to their barest fundamentals, creating a life form with the smallest genome that still allowed it to grow and divide in the lab. But in shedding half its genetic load, that “minimal” cell also lost some of the hardiness and adaptability that natural life evolved over billions of years. That left biologists wondering whether the reduction might have been a one-way trip: In pruning the cells down to their bare essentials, had they left the cells incapable of evolving because they could not survive a change in even one more gene?

Now we have proof that even one of the weakest, simplest self-replicating organisms on the planet can adapt. During just 300 days of evolution in the lab, the generational equivalent of 40,000 human years, measly minimal cells regained all the fitness they had sacrificed, a team at Indiana University recently reported in the journal Nature.

More here.

Brendan O’Neill in Sp!ked:

Men, I have bad news: Caitlin Moran is coming for us. She comes not to man-bash, not to holler: ‘All men are rapists!’ It’s worse than that. She feels sorry for us. ‘I’m violently opposed to the branches of feminism that are permanently angry with men’, she writes at the very start of her very bad book. Instead she pities us. She frets over our toxic stoicism, our inability to be vulnerable, our unwillingness to be open about our fat bodies and small cocks. She wants to save us from all the ‘rules’ about ‘what a man should be’. From all that ‘swagger’ and ‘the stiff upper lip’. By the end I found myself pining for some good ol’ angry feminism.

What About Men? is, I’m going to be blunt, rubbish. I knew it would be from the very first page where Moran says that ‘when it comes to the vag-based problems, I have the bantz’. Imagine using the word bantz unironically in 2023. What she means is that she’s done all the vagina stuff. She’s completed feminism. She’s known as ‘the Woman Woman’, she says, in an arrogant timbre that puts to shame those cocksure blokes who stalk her nightmares. She wrote the bestselling pop-feminist tome, How To Be a Woman (2011), which contained such gems of wisdom as ‘don’t shave your vagina’ because it’s better to have a ‘big, hairy minge’, a ‘lovely furry moof’, ‘a marmoset sitting in [your] lap’, than a bald cooch. (Emmeline Pankhurst, I’m so sorry.) So now, naturally, she’s turning her attention to men. She’s discovered there is ‘a lot to say’ about ‘men in the 21st-century’. Lucky us.

More here.

Editorial in Nature:

Last month, researchers from 67 nations wrote an open letter to United Nations secretary-general António Guterres and World Bank president Ajay Banga, urging them to “redouble efforts to address rising extreme inequality”. The move was motivated, in part, by the lack of progress on the 10th of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Nature is examining each goal in a series of editorials.

The aim of SDG 10 is to “reduce inequality within and among countries”. That means narrowing the difference between the incomes of the richest and the poorest, on both a national and an international level. The goal also proposes ensuring equality of opportunity. Unfortunately, the world is clearly failing to meet SDG 10. The letter’s authors go further, saying that the goal is being “largely ignored”.

More here.

Intensive Sense

In the PICU . . .
I see bright lights,
But there is no sun,
And almost a loss of time.
I hear machines alarming,
Lives are not always saved.
I feel pain, intense at moments,
But I also feel the hurt of anxiety,
And neither anguish is good for the spirit.
Someday,
I will leave the PICU, again.
I will see the sun,
Rising into new days,
But I know it must set, too soon.
I will hear music sounding,
Ringing from so many instruments,
But most of it will be memories of my Heartsongs.
I will feel my spirit rejuvenated,
And I will be filled with hope again.
But, I will feel a sad sense of loss
For the children
Who will be Still
With the anguished sounding loss of time . . .
In the PICU.

by Mattie J.T. Stepanek
from Journey Through Heartsongs
VSP Books, 2001

PICU- Pediatric Intensive Care Unit