The Pitchfork

Of all the implements, the pitchfork was the one
that came near to an imagined perfection:
When he tightened his raised hand and aimed with it,
It felt like a javelin, accurate and light.

So weather he played the warrior or the athlete
Or worked in earnest in the chaff and sweat,
He loved its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash
Grown satiny from its own natural polish.

Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain,
Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.
Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.
The springiness, the clip and dart of it.

And then when he thought of probes that reached the farthest,
He would see the shaft of a pitchfork sailing past
Evenly, imperturbably through space,
Its prongs starlit and absolutely soundless—

But has learned at last to follow that simple lead
Past its own aim, out to another side
Where perfection—or nearness to it—is imagined
Not in the aiming but the opening hand.

by Seamus Heaney
from Seeing Things
The Noonday Press, 1991

Elie Dolgin in Nature:

RNA-based vaccines were the heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic. They set records for the highest-grossing drug launches in history, and their development was recognized in this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But it was long known that this technology had a key shortcoming: RNA, in its usual linear form, is short-lived. Within hours, enzymes in cells descend on the molecule, chewing it to pieces. RNA’s fleeting nature isn’t a big problem for a vaccine: it needs to encode proteins only for a short time to trigger an immune response. But for most therapeutic applications, it would be much better to have RNA that could stick around for longer.

That’s where circular RNAs, or circRNAs, come in. Tie the ends of an RNA transcript together, and many RNA-munching enzymes have nothing to sink their teeth into. As a ring, RNA gains stability and longevity that, in theory, could increase its therapeutic potential, even at low dose levels. “With a single delivery, you can get quite durable protein production,” says Howard Chang, a molecular geneticist at Stanford University School of Medicine in California and a scientific co-founder of Orbital Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts — one of the dozen or more biotechnology firms that are now pursuing therapeutics based on engineered circular RNA. These biotech firms have collectively raised well in excess of US$1 billion in venture-capital funding over the past three years, and many big pharmaceutical companies are now dabbling in the technology as well. They are driven by the belief that whatever linear RNA can do, its more resilient circular counterpart can do better.

More here.

James Brown in the Public Domain Review:

In 1751, the engraver and satirist William Hogarth created Gin Lane, his celebrated visual retrospective about the devastating effects of this newfangled spirit on the lives of London’s poor. The print, a companion piece to Beer Street, offers a harrowing panorama of poverty, addiction, insanity, violence, infanticide, and suicide; the only people and institutions who thrive amongst the mayhem and despair are an undertaker, “Gripe” the pawnbroker, and the two purveyors of the “deadly draught”: a cellar gin shop and “Kilman” the distiller. In the words of Hogarth’s most recent biographer, Gin Lane’s “racked scene of dissolution . . . imprints itself indelibly on the mind”.¹ Derivatives are beloved of political cartoonists, and so frequent and dependable is its appearance at academic conferences on alcohol history that a “gin lane klaxon” is scurrilously sounded on social media. However grotesquely transfixing the image, its dominance within both the history of alcohol and art has occluded a wider and subtler range of representations of gin and the environments in which it was consumed, which flourished across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

More here.

Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

One summer’s day in 1976, the philosopher Daniel Dennett was driving along the Massachusetts turnpike when he had a disquieting thought. “If somehow my brain were moved into my chest cavity without destroying any connectivity, wouldn’t I still think my mind was right behind my eyes and between my ears?” Perhaps he could be decapitated and still be a professor of philosophy.

By the time he reached Poughkeepsie in New York state, Dennett recalls in his paradoxically engaging and annoying memoir, this thought experiment had become even wilder. What if his brain was kept alive in a vat connected to his body with radio links? Would his mind be in the vat? Bewitched by the possibility, he gave university talks in which he, like some philosophical PT Barnum, would toggle a switch on a metal box with a radio antenna and tried to convince his audience that he was being controlled by his remote brain.

The 1970s was the decade in which nutty professors such as Dennett regularly dreamed up thought experiments to explore the limits of what it is to be human.

More here.

Virginia Heffernan in Wired:

Maybe AI that aims to seem human is best understood as a tribute act. A tribute to human neediness, caprice, bitterness, love, all the stuff we mortals do best. All that stuff at which machines typically draw a blank. But humans have a dread fear of nonhumans passing as the real thing—replicants, lizard people, robots with skin. An entity that feigns human emotions is arguably a worse object of affection than a cold, computational device that doesn’t emote at all.

More here.

Gus Mitchell at JSTOR Daily:

It is a very different story in Arabic, where Gibran is held to be a crucial modern innovator, a transitional bridge between the conventions and strictures of a more classical tradition and a newer, freer, romantic sensibility. In Gibran’s case, the adage of the prophet without honor in his home country is inverted. In the West (where Gibran made his home and sought recognition) academic and “literary” opinion regards his concerns and their treatment as utterly anti-modern. He is, indeed, heretically retrograde: fancily faux-Biblical, extravagantly overwritten, vague, naïve, sentimental, and whole lot of other things, terms often directed in baffled rage at Gibran’s apparently undeserved popular appeal. The year 1923, after all, saw the debuts of Wallace Stevens and other modernist high priests in the United States and came hot on the heels of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses the year before. In his adopted tongue, at least, Gibran was an artist out of time.

more here.

Lynn Hallarman at Aeon Magazine:

Not everybody who studies and treats dystonia agrees on the cause or solutions. The medical literature reveals a disorder that for decades has existed in the hinterlands between psychological and neurological. Descriptors such as ‘elusive’, ‘perplexing’, ‘intriguing’, ‘baffling’, ‘fascinating’ and ‘enigmatic’ pepper the research – signifiers that a unifying theory has yet to be discovered. On one side is the exploration of dystonia as a physical expression of internal mental conflict or defences (hysteria, neurosis); on the other, the search for identifiable structural changes in the brain. One focuses on subjective experiences and personal history, emphasising personality traits; the other aims at diagnostic precision primarily using scientific techniques like brain imaging. Neither approach in isolation has satisfactorily explained the complexities of the disorder, or why some people get dystonia and others don’t, despite similar personal characteristics, genetics or environmental conditions. This remains a mystery.

more here.

Plenty of Time

…… “The best tasting cup of coffee is the one you don’t have
time to finish,” sighed Mother.
……”That’s true of a great many things,” father said from the
hammock.
……”Would you say it’s true of marriage?” asked Mother.
……Father pondered, while Mother brought them both tall
glasses of iced tea with lemon.
……Sipping slowly, Father remarked. “It doesn’t seem to be
true of this iced tea. Even though I have plenty of time, it
couldn’t be more delicious.”
……”Maybe time never runs out,” Mother ventured. “Maybe
it just melts last, like ice cubes.”
……Father shifted in his hammock. The wind moved him back
and forth just enough so he didn’t have to ask for a push.

by Nancy Lagomarsino
from Sleep Handbook
Alice James Books, 1987

Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian:

“I have a lot of opinions and I come by them honestly,” Roxane Gay writes in the introduction to a new anthology of her essays. The academic and author, whose 2014 collection, Bad Feminist, became a bestseller and cultural touchstone, has gained a devoted fanbase for her insightful, witty and accessible prose. Whether her subject is sexual assault or cookery programmes, Gay has an ability to blend the personal and political in a way that feels simultaneously gentle and brutal.

Opinions brings together previously published columns from the Guardian, New York Times and Harper’s among others – alongside a few celebrity profiles and advice pieces from the past decade. The collection, which is divided into themed sections with titles such as Man Problems and Civic Responsibilities, covers everything from musings on the Fast and Furious franchise, to the legacy of Toni Morrison, to cancel culture. It is a testament to Gay’s writing, as well as an indictment of our politics, that nothing here feels dated. Her first piece, “Tragedy plays on an infinite loop”, was originally published in 2014, in the wake of the killing of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It’s about how technology has transformed tragedy into spectacle. “We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.”

More here.

Benjamin Mueller and Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who together identified a chemical tweak to messenger RNA, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday. Their work enabled potent Covid vaccines to be made in less than a year, averting tens of millions of deaths and helping the world recover from the worst pandemic in a century.

The approach to mRNA the two researchers developed has been used in Covid shots that have since been administered billions of times globally and has transformed vaccine technology, laying the foundation for inoculations that may one day protect against a number of deadly diseases like cancer. The slow and methodical research that made the Covid shots possible has now run up against a powerful anti-vaccine movement, especially in the United States. Skeptics have seized in part on the vaccines’ rapid development — among the most impressive feats of modern medical science — to undermine the public’s trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the shots unfolded little by little over decades, including at the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Weissman runs a lab.

More here.

Merve Emre in The New Yorker:

In 2019, the literary magazine NOON published a story by Lydia Davis called “The Language of Armagnac,” a quietly comic meditation on the difficulties of translating “the patois of the city of Auch, which is a local form of the language of Gascon, which is in turn a dialect language of Occitan.” A second version of the story much like the first was included in Davis’s “Essays Two,” a collection of her writings on translation, a career that parallels her work as a writer of fiction. A third and notably different version appears in her story collection “Our Strangers,” under the title “Bothered Scholar on Train.” It refashions Davis’s elaborate philological commentaries as the tirade of a scholar whose attempt to read in the language of Armagnac is disrupted by noisy passengers. Davis designed the story to open with an exclamation—“Oh, can’t you quiet down, please!”—and end with an exclamation mark, too (“So, please!”). This symmetry would clue readers in to an irony underlying the scene. The bothered shouts at others to be quiet. He—or she—annoys strangers while insisting that they are the annoying ones.

As always in Davis’s fiction, an almost imperceptible line divides pedantry from precision, enthusiasm from solipsism. When I met Davis at her house in East Nassau, New York, this August, she eyed the galley of “Our Strangers” that I had brought with me and noticed that, in it, the final exclamation mark was missing from “Bothered Scholar on Train.” “You’ve got to have the exclamation mark there,” she said. When we looked at a finished copy of the U.K. edition that she’d been sent, we discovered that someone had blundered: the exclamation mark was still missing. “Well, that’s too bad,” she said. “That was important.”

More here.

Marcela Valdes in The New York Times:

‘We’re getting no support on this national crisis,’ Mayor Eric Adams said in September at a town-hall-style gathering on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He was talking about the influx of transnational migrants who have landed in the city’s shelter system: more than 118,000 since the spring of last year, with about 10,000 more arriving each month. There are now about 115,000 people in the city’s care, and more than half of them are migrants. In August, the city projected that it would spend $5 billion caring for migrants during this fiscal year.

“This issue will destroy New York City,” Adams told his audience. “Every service in this city is going to be impacted.”

Responding to the sense of crisis in New York and around the nation, the Department of Homeland Security recently announced that it would grant temporary protected status to about 472,000 Venezuelans, allowing them 18 months to live and work in the United States. This measure may help New York because many of the migrants there have traveled to the state from Venezuela (via Texas). But as Adams pointed out on the Upper West Side, New York now also shelters migrants from “all over the globe,” including Ecuador, Eastern Europe and West Africa — so the Biden administration’s decision on temporary protected status is, at best, a partial and fleeting solution.

More here.

David Chaffetz in the Asian Review of Books:

In 1868, as now, the Middle East seemed to be a place where fortunes could be made from the region’s mineral resources and from its central location between Europe and India. The Persian empire was slowly recovering from decades of invasion, civil war, banditry, and plagues. A new monarch, Naseroddin Shah, made a good impression in the capitals of Europe, which he visited frequently beginning in 1873. Yet “the well-protected realm” remained mysterious. A lack of information about its people and geography challenged international investors, who still relied on John Chardin’s accounts of 150 years earlier. They were greedy for up-to-date insights into the country. Albert Houtum Schindler was their providential man.

Daniel Potts calls him a polymath. He started off as a simple telegraph engineer in 1868. But he had to learn everything about Persia.

More here.

Tara C. Smith in Quanta:

This varies by pathogen and is known as a microbe’s “infectious dose.” Usually it takes quite a few, but some microbes require an incredibly small number of organisms to start an infection. Take norovirus for example, the stomach bug notorious for spreading whenever people are in close contact and touch the same surfaces, such as on cruise ships. Its infectious dose can be as small as 18 individual viruses, making it incredibly easy to transmit. It is also very hardy even outside the body, so an infected person who’s oozing the virus may leave a large amount of it behind — enough to easily infect others, even several days later.

More here.

Lynzy Billing in Undark:

Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land.

Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war.

Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have carried down from the mountains. A gritty wind stings their chapped cheeks as they load the heavy trucks beside them. In these parts of Achin, nothing else moves in the bleached landscape. For years, locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination.

More here.

Emily Zarevich in JSTOR Daily:

Flamboyant, swashbuckling cross-dressing was nothing new in late nineteenth-century France. Paris’s unique and bohemian lesbian subculture allowed these women to thrive, though it was still illegal for French women to wear pants in public. Yet despite the dangers and the occasional assaults, Belle Époque aristocrat and performer Mathilde de Morny (1863–1944)—better known by her alias “Missy”—still committed to her daring butch look, cutting her hair short, donning tailored three-piece suits, and smoking as many cigars as she pleased.

Missy built her artistic career on the publicity raked in from her mannish attire and character, her queer-coded tendencies, and her adoption of masculine nicknames.

More here.

Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper
stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 P.M., the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
Then the glue would sting,
hands oozing
till both palms burned
at the punchclock.

Ten years later, in law school,
I knew that every legal pad
was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,
that every open lawbook
was a pair of hands
upturned and burning.

by Martín Espada
from Alabanza
W.W. Norton, 2003