Jeffrey St. Clair in CounterPunch:

Usually Monk walked. He ambled across the city on feet as light as a tap-dancer. He weaved his way down block after block, whistling, humming, snapping his fingers. Monk liked to take different routes, but most of them led eventually to the Hudson River, where the large man in the strange hat would lean on the railing and watch the lights of the city dance on the black water.

Wordsworth said that many of his poems collected in the Lyrical Ballads were written to the rhythms of his long walks across the hills of the Lake District.  Thelonious Monk composed some the most revolutionary music of the 20^th century out on the streets of Manhattan, rambling down the sidewalks or staring out at the sluggish river. Those fresh new sounds just flowed through his head as he prowled the city: “Criss Cross,” “Coming on the Hudson,” “Brilliant Corners,” “Manhattan Moods.”

But on a steamy August night in 1951 Monk missed his evening walk. Instead he was sitting in a car outside his mother’s house with his friend Bud Powell.

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Jason Arunn Murugesu in New Scientist:

The average adult male has around 36 trillion cells in their body, while average adult females have 28 trillion, researchers have found. Unexpectedly, the mass of small cells in our bodies, such as blood cells, is roughly the same as that of large ones such as muscle cells – a finding that has puzzled researchers.

To count the number of cells in the human body, Ian Hatton at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany and his colleagues analysed over 1500 scientific papers, looking at factors such how many cell types are there in the body, how many of each type are in each tissue and the average size and mass of each cell type. They found over 400 known cell types across 60 different tissues.

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Mark Dunbar in The Hedgehog Review:

Madness in gigantic proportions. That’s how Austrian writer Stefan Zweig described Germany in the 1920s. Between French re-occupation, communist and fascist putsches, regional separatist movements, mass migration from Eastern Europe, and the popular introduction of television and radio, there was also the main event: hyperinflation. After World War I, the dollar-to-mark currency exchange rate was thirteen and a half. Less than five years later, it would reach into the trillions. When you ordered a half-glass of water, so the joke went, it would cost you a hundred thousand marks. By the time it was poured, it would cost two-hundred thousand. And without a stable financial value, all other values—moral, political, artistic—seemed to lose their footing. Vice became indulgence. Reality took on a dream-like quality. In response, the country became a seance. It begged for a voice from the deep to make sense of what was happening. And eventually that voice spoke.

Germany 1923 by best-selling German historian Volker Ullrich, is about this time period.

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J.M. Tyree at Bennington Review:

The previous week, I’d traveled with two of these American friends, both philosophers, Steven and Morgan, from Berlin to Hamburg to Lübeck because, again, why not. We ate chicken tikka on jacket potatoes at outdoor tables overlooking the warehouses near the city gates used as the abandoned building where Nosferatu lives in Murnau’s classic 1922 film. Just as I’d lined up my shot in my best imitation Expressionist light, with the setting sun pouring through a keyhole shape in the building, a paddle-boarder glided into the frame to ruin the picture, a 10/10 German prank on a film location tourist.

Never go on holiday with two philosophers, especially if one is a Hegelian. The dialectical reversals about where to get breakfast will make your head spin. Only the tour of the port container in Hamburg finally shut them up—global capitalism is infinitely complex and would continue to run on its own without us for a very long time. All kidding aside, these are lovely old friends, especially when they aren’t reminding you constantly that arts profs like me learn next to nothing about the history of aesthetic theory in the course of their education.

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Nick Warr at The Paris Review:

Watching a video of Sebald, at his desk, surveying his photographs with magnifying glass in hand, it is tempting to interpret his work—the prose fiction, the poetry, the essays—as existing, prior to the texts, as an assemblage of pictures. One imagines a pristine terrain of images being dissolved into the current of language, each photograph gradually written away until only the most unyielding ones remain. The jumble of photographs and manuscript pages obscuring and framing each other in the television image of Sebald’s desk are reflected in a similar mixed spatial and temporal aggregation on the printed page, where the whole is defined as much by overlapping and masking as by juxtaposition. Sometimes the edges of the photographs cause shadows to fall on the text and vice versa. Windows and lighthouses, doorways and gravestones: sometimes, the images protrude from the temporal plane of the writing (the time of the narrative); sometimes, they are visible from below the surface. The interruption of reading performed by the images confirms the irregular chronological dynamic of Sebald’s work. Constantly hindered, sent back into countless eddies and still backwaters, time, like the mineral water that is sieved through the salt frames of Bad Kissingen, percolates as much as it flows.

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From/For Lew

Lou Welch just turned up one day,
live as you and me. “Damn, Lew” I said,
“you didn’t shoot yourself after all.”
“Yes I did” he said,
and even then I felt the tingling down my back.
“Yes you did too” I said— I can feel it now.”
“Yeah” he said,
“There’s a basic fear between your world and
mine. I don’t know why.
What I came to say was,
teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. All the other cycles.
That’s what it’s all about, and it’s all forgot.”

Gary Snyder
from No Nature
Pantheon Books, 1992

—Lew Welch

From Slate:

Whether we’re living in the age of Peak TV or Trough TV, one thing is clear: There’s too much TV. Thankfully, not every show has to be watched in its entirety. One of the best things about television is its serialized nature, the continuous thread that strings viewers along from one episode to the next. It’s a cliché that prestige television is the new novel precisely because of the way that many dramas develop their characters and plots over many hours of storytelling. But an older virtue of TV is its brevity—the way a scenario can be introduced and resolved within the space of an hour, or half that—and some of the best episodes are less like chapters in a long-running novel than like short stories or short films. These are stand-alone episodes.

What makes a stand-alone? There’s been no shortage of debate about this question, but for our purposes, we’re defining it simply as an episode that stands up on its own, whether or not you’ve seen the rest of the show. Some are “bottle episodes,” which typically confine a small cast to one location to save money. Some are “departure episodes,” in which a show abandons  its usual format or style to suddenly become, say, silent, animated, a musical, or about a minor character it was never about before. But not all bottle episodes and departure episodes are stand-alones, and vice versa. It’s for this reason that you won’t find Breaking Bad’s celebrated “Fly” on this list: It may be a bottle episode, but it doesn’t stand alone, because the best thing about it—how the housefly is a metaphor for everything else going on in the series—is comprehensible only to those who have watched the show.

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

Graça Raposo was a young postdoc in the Netherlands in 1996 when she discovered that cells in her laboratory were sending secret messages to each other. She was exploring how immune cells react to foreign molecules. Using electron microscopy, she saw how cells ingested these molecules, which became stuck to the surface of tiny intracellular vesicles. The cells then spat out the vesicles, along with the foreign cargo, and Raposo captured them. Next, she presented them to another type of immune cell. It reacted to the package just as it would to a foreign molecule¹.

It was a demonstration that these extracellular vesicles (EVs, also known as exosomes) might be transmitting information between cells. “We knew that exosomes existed, but at that time they were generally thought to be a way of getting rid of a cell’s trash,” says Raposo. “It was exciting to find that some could have important biological functions — even if not everyone believed it at first.” Just two years later, together with her colleagues, Raposo, who is now at the Curie Institute in Paris, found that exosomes derived from antitumour immune cells could be enlisted to suppress cancers in mice².

Other scientists jumped on the concept, and began to find exosomes being spat out from all kinds of cell. Interest exploded after researchers discovered that the little packages could contain not only proteins, but also nucleic acids. In 2007, for instance, a Swedish team found that the vesicles harboured small RNA molecules³. That implied that exosomes might influence gene expression when they reached their destination cells. The number of EV-related publications rose steeply, and has tripled in the past five years.

More here.

Jackson Wald at GQ:

As James Grammer, the president of the New York Sumo Beya, prepared for practice one recent Saturday afternoon, he sensed that something was amiss. He’d spent the better part of a year turning his one-bedroom apartment in Queens into a makeshift beya, or training quarters. He’d removed all the furniture from the living room, including his mustard-colored couch, its frame now almost entirely concave from the regular stress of supporting the weight of the beya’s rikishi—its sumo wrestlers. He’d retrieved the equipment necessary for practice, including the mawashi, or sumo belts, and his 200-pound sandbag, used primarily as additional weight for power squats. He tuned his TV to highlights of the most recent grand sumo tournament in Japan, both for technical reference and athletic inspiration. Soon, a motley crew of sumo enthusiasts would crowd into the space to school themselves in the ancient art of sumo wrestling. But when Grammer walked into his living room-turned-dohyo from the kitchen, water, and energy drink in his hands, he noticed a pungent aroma filling the room. The source: His three-foot snake, Gu, had defecated in its shelter beneath the television set.

More here.

David Spratt at Mother Jones:

Would you live in a building, cross a bridge, or trust a dam wall if there were a 10 percent chance of it collapsing? Or 5 percent? Or 1 percent? Of course not! In civil engineering, acceptable probabilities of failure generally range from 1-in-10,000 to 1-in-10-million.

So why, when it comes to climate action, are policies like carbon budgets accepted when they have success rates of just 50 to 66 percent? That’s hardly better than a coin toss.

Policy-relevant scientific publications, such as those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), focus on the probabilities—the most likely outcomes. But, according to atmospheric physicist and climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “calculating probabilities makes little sense in the most critical instances” because “when the issue is the survival of civilization is at stake, conventional means of analysis may become useless.”

More here.

Damon Linker at Persuasion:

The Republican Party’s primary season officially gets underway four months from today, on January 15, 2024, the day the Iowa caucuses are held. That makes this a fitting moment to take stock of where things stand—and to reflect on the most astonishing and disturbing fact of America’s political present, which is that, short of a medical event that requires him to bow out of the race, the twice-impeached, serially indicted former president Donald Trump, who has led the field by a wide margin for over a year and is currently ahead by 43 points, is going to win the Republican presidential nomination by a mile.

It’s not as if Republican voters haven’t been given alternatives to supporting a man who’s been indicted four times and faces 91 felony counts in multiple jurisdictions for crimes ranging from the mishandling of classified documents to conspiracy to commit election fraud.

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Kristen Yee in the Asian Review of Books:

Anyone familiar with Fuchsia Dunlop’s work would surely take up any “Invitation to a Banquet” from her. For those unfamiliar with her oeuvre, she has previously written four cookbooks and a memoir covering her time apprenticing at a Sichuanese cooking school, where she was the only non-Chinese student and one of only a handful of women in training; several of these have been nominated for and won awards in the food and travel spheres. This most recent book is more of an exploration of the history and culture of food in China, with each chapter built around a particular ingredient or dish that reflects the principles she chooses to illuminate, tracing the development of Chinese cuisine through dynasties and regional distinctions, as well as through the diaspora in the West.

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Rebecca Onion in Slate:

I walk to and from my office daily. It takes 25 minutes, if you don’t stop at all to look at your phone. (It takes me 35 to 40.) That includes a few steep hills, of the kind I didn’t believe existed in Ohio before I moved here. (They do.) On the weekends, I go on at least one longer hike in our nearby state park, featuring a few more of those punishing Appalachian hills. These are, comparatively speaking, little baby walks, never longer than two hours.

This is a reasonable amount of aerobic activity, if falling slightly short in terms of the recommended amount of intensity, particularly given all the breaks for checking my emails and responding to social media pings. I used to do CrossFit, and part of the reason I stopped going to “the box” was the fact that the workouts included so much jumping and running—activities I’ve disliked for years. My current low-cardio routine—walks, weightlifting, and some yoga—suits me better. But I’ve still wondered if I could be getting a little more of the kind of exercise that makes you breathe hard.

Then I saw a blog post by Whole30 co-founder Melissa Urban, who made a very convincing case that a practice called “rucking”—walking with a backpack full of weights—could turn my little walks into more satisfying cardio.

More here.

Mary Williams in Salon:

Every day is not easy,” says  Jill Duggar Dillard, “and right now is one of those seasons.” As a member of one of reality television’s most familiar and unquestionably largest families, the fourth Duggar child spent her formative years playing the role she most wanted to fill, the “good girl,” the “Sweet Jilly Muffin.” But then she married and began to assert her adult independence. And then the revelations about her brother Josh’s abuse emerged.

In her new memoir, “Counting the Cost,” Duggar Dillard reveals a complicated, remarkably relatable story of faith and family loyalty — and of finding one’s own way forward in ways that diverge from them. The “cost” in her life has been contractual, financial and emotional. She reveals her protective, ambitious, controlling father, who in one stunning confrontation, she tells, “You treat me like the prodigal who’s turned her back on you. You treat me worst than my pedophile brother.” She reveals the “all encompassing, overwhelming sense of horror” when the details of her abuse investigation were published. And she remains steadfastly faithful and hopeful, a proud mother of three who tries to see with clarity both “the roses and the thorns.”

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Toby Green in Compact:

Since 2021, military coups have ousted governments across much of West and Central Africa. The wave of coups started in Chad (April 2021), then spread to Mali (May 2021), Guinea (September 2021), Burkina Faso (January and September 2022), Niger (July), and most recently Gabon, where the Bongo family was dislodged from power after ruling the country since independence. All of these are former French colonies, so this chain of events indicates that the postcolonial settlement that has prevailed across Françafrique—defined by a shared French-controlled currency, the CFA, and the presence of French military bases—is in crisis.

The overthrow of elected leaders has usually been greeted by widespread public approval—and the main exception to this is itself telling. In Chad, where there were large protests against the seizure of power, the coup was led by Mahamat Déby after the death of his father, Idriss, who had been in power for more than 30 years. In other words, Chadians didn’t protest because this was a coup, but because—like citizens of neighboring countries who celebrated the recent military coups—they wanted to be rid of the old elite.

Sixty years after political independence, in which promises of democratization and development have offered scant benefits for the vast majority of people, the Western-led global order has failed Africa. And this is where the wave of coups intersects with another story from the Global South: the growing clout of BRICS nations, lately on display in various attempts to develop alternatives to dollar hegemony.

More here.