Liam Sherwin-Murray in The Paris Review:

There were less intimate places available, so it was odd when a woman took the seat directly facing mine across the subway aisle. I looked up from my book and right back down: a couple of months before, we’d gone home together. She had a Southern accent and a boy’s name she swore was given. Bobby. Probably spelled Bobbie or Bobbi but she didn’t say “Bobbi with an i,” which I thought cool of her. Good sex, great chemistry, and I promised but then failed to text; encountering her on the subway might have been awkward even if I weren’t reading What Were You Expecting?: A New Manual for New Parents by Drs. Laurie and Lawrence Shriver. No point hiding the cover now. Bobbi had seen it before she sat down—that much was clear when we made eye contact. She chose the seat to shame me.

The train stopped and neither of us got off. I tried to continue reading. I’d been pretending to read since noticing Bobbi, but now I made myself concentrate. Did you know that fetuses float in their own pee? That’s what my book said: After twenty weeks, the amniotic fluid is mostly urine. It had the feel of a fact everyone knew, like the Earl of Sandwich or you eat bugs in your sleep, but I hadn’t known unless I’d forgotten.

“Congratulations!”

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

The protein universe just got a lot brighter.

Researchers have mined a database containing the structures of nearly every known protein — more than 200 million entries predicted using Google DeepMind’s revolutionary AlphaFold neural network. The work has uncovered completely new shapes, surprising connections in the machinery of life, and other insights that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. “Thanks to AlphaFold we can now explore entire families of proteins we knew nothing about,” says Eduard Porta Pardo, a computational biologist at Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC) in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in a pair of studies published^1,2 on 13 September in Nature. Last year, Google DeepMind used AlphaFold to predict the structure of nearly every known protein from organisms with genome data, amassing some 214 million structures in the AlphaFold database, which is hosted by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK.

More here.

Holy Land

I want the earth to last
I want it to last beyond Saturday night
and the onion soup
Out beyond walks in the hills
among wild poppies and black dogs
Past Crusader castles and the Jordan River
past Arab guns and Jewish stubbornness
Through rivers and eucalyptus trees
and white horses standing in tall yellow clover
I want the earth to last.

by Natalie Goldberg
from Top of My Lungs
Overlook Press, 2002

Lachlan Summers at Noema:

“Geological time,” or “deep time,” as Robert MacFarlane describes it in his wonderful book “Underland,” is the vastness of planetary history that “stretches away from the present moment.” While the Scottish geologist James Hutton first described the idea in 1788, the term “deep time” is often attributed to the nature writer John McPhee, who wrote, a couple of hundred years later: “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”

And yet, despite the geological timescale ostensibly rendering humans obsolete, the warming climate has brought it into everyday politics. Deep time has become an analytic frame, albeit a contested one; some argue we ought to develop it to overcome short-termism, others that we should not in order to avoid flattening history or inflating the present, and still others that we cannot due to ontological limitations.

more here.

William Boyd at Literary Review:

Every time this happens I’m reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s unique and hilarious novel Pale Fire and the opening couplet of the 999-line poem that gives the book its title: 

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the window pane.

I’ve reread Pale Fire several times and regularly choose it as my favourite novel when the question arises. I have read almost everything Nabokov wrote and, as with any writer one reveres, when the work has been thoroughly consumed, one becomes more and more curious about the actual person.

I happen to have one thing in common with Nabokov. Both of us appeared on the legendary French book programme Apostrophes. In fact, I appeared three times on Apostrophes, but always with other writers. Nabokov – in the enduring glow of his post-Lolita fame – had the whole show to himself.

more here.

Jo Caird at JSTOR Daily:

“‘I have named the paper thus presented Calotype paper on account of its great utility in obtaining the pictures of objects with the camera obscura,’” he said, as quoted by Ellen Sharp, who notes, that “With his improved process, Talbot had reduced exposures from an hour to a few minutes, or even seconds, depending on the strength of the sun.”

Rather than offering this discovery (what Geoffrey Belknap, head curator at the UK’s National Science and Media Museum, has called “a critically important innovation in photographic history”) to the world for free, Talbot took a different approach. Just as Daguerre had done, Talbot took out a patent on the calotype process, hoping to earn a living in perpetuity from his ingenuity.

more here.

Pippa Bailey at The New Statesman:

When James Murray, the then editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), received the first bundle of quotations from a “Dr William Chester Minor” of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in 1883, he presumed the man worked there. In the first volume of the dictionary, published five years later, Minor is thanked as “Dr WC Minor, Crowthorne, Berks”. It was only in 1890 that Murray discovered the truth: that while Minor was an American surgeon, he was also a paranoid schizophrenic and probable sex addict who had been committed to Broadmoor after shooting a man dead.

Still, Murray continued to value Minor’s offerings. Only in 1902, when Minor, suffering delusions of a sexual nature, cut off his own penis, did his work cease (he survived, and died in 1920 in Connecticut).

more here.

John Rosenberg in Harvard Magazine:

CLAUDINE GAY arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1992 as a first-year graduate student, lugging the things that seemed most essential to her success: a futon, a Mac Classic II, and a cast iron skillet for frying plantains. The futon, no doubt, was standard grad-student gear. The computer pertained to her status as a nascent social scientist in an era of increasingly quantitative scholarship. And the plantains traced back to her roots, as the daughter of immigrants from Haiti.

Accompanying those things were mental constructs that would really be essential to her success. Higher education figured strongly in her parents’ narrative. They came to the United States with little but managed to put themselves through college while raising their son and daughter. Gay’s mother became a registered nurse, and her father, a civil engineer, “and it was the City College of New York that made those careers possible,” she said when her election as the University’s thirtieth president was announced last December 15. That step up the ladder was accompanied by strong views about the ensuing rungs: “College was always the expectation for me,” she continued. “My parents believed that education opens every door. But of course they gave me three options—I could be an engineer, a doctor, or a lawyer—which I’m sure other kids of immigrant parents can relate to!”

Then, as so often happens, a student given access to outstanding education found her trajectory rerouted. After Phillips Exeter Academy and a year at Princeton, Gay transferred to Stanford (B.A. ’92) and then came back east for her Ph.D. in government, conferred in 1998. Her undergraduate studies “ignited everything for me,” she said in December. “That’s where I discovered the reach of my own curiosity, where I experienced firsthand the detective work that is research and learned for the first time that knowledge is created and not just passed on. And it’s where I found what I wanted to do, what I felt born to do with my life.”

More here.

Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:

Ian Wilmut, the embryologist most known for cloning Dolly the sheep, passed away at age 79 from complications of Parkinson’s Disease, according to news from the University of Edinburgh. Wilmut’s work represented a milestone in the field of regenerative medicine and stem cell research.

Born to teachers in a Warwickshire village in 1944, Wilmut was originally interested in agriculture but later switched to animal science studies at the University of Nottingham. After a summer job with biologist Christopher Polge at the University of Cambridge, Wilmut became fascinated with cryopreservation. He pursued a doctoral degree studying freezing techniques for animal semen and embryos with Polge. Wilmut and Polge applied the knowledge they gained to help the first live birth from a frozen embryo: a calf named Frostie. In 1973, Wilmut joined the Animal Breeding Research Organization , which would later become the Roslin Institute. He initially worked on genetically modifying sheep to produce milk that contained therapeutic proteins. This led him to search for a more efficient method of sheep breeding using a nuclear transfer method, or animal cloning.

More here.

Romanticism 101

Then I realized I hadn’t secured the boat.
Then I realized my friend had lied to me.
Then I realized my dog was gone
no matter how much I called in the rain.
All was change.
Then I realized I was surrounded by aliens
disguised as orthodontists having a convention
at the hotel breakfast bar.
Then I could see into the life of things,
that systems seek only to reproduce
the conditions of their own reproduction.
If I had to pick between shadows
and essences, I’d pick shadows.
They’re better dancers.
They always sing their telegrams.
Their old gods do not die.
Then I realized the very futility was salvation
in this greeny entanglement of breaths.
Yeah, as if.
Then I realized even when you catch the mechanism,
the trick still works.
Then I came to in Texas
and realized rockabilly would never go away.
Then I realized I’d been drugged.
We were all chasing nothing
which left no choice but to intensify the chase.
I came to handcuffed and gagged.
I came to intubated and packed in some kind of foam.
This too is how ash moves through water.
And all this time the side doors unlocked.
Then I realized repetition could be an ending.
Then I realized repetition could be an ending.

by Dean Young
from Poetry, July/August 2014
The Poetry Foundation, 2014

Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

A number of things have changed regarding climate change over the last 13 years. On the negative side, annual emissions continued to increase slowly or maybe plateau, leading to continued warming. This has increased the risk of wildfires, extreme heat events, and floods, and it means that the dream of holding warming below 1.5C is now basically gone. On the positive side, better climate models have all but ruled out the more extreme “apocalypse” scenarios. And more Americans believe in the reality of climate change and are concerned about its impacts.

But the most important change, by far, is the advent of cheap renewable energy, particularly solar power and batteries.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

The study of cognition and sentience would be greatly abetted by the discovery of intelligent alien beings, who presumably developed independently of life here on Earth. But we do have more than one data point to consider: certain vertebrates (including humans) are quite intelligent, but so are certain cephalopods (including octopuses), even though the last common ancestor of the two groups was a simple organism hundreds of millions of years ago that didn’t have much of a nervous system at all. Peter Godfrey-Smith has put a great amount of effort into trying to figure out what we can learn about the nature of thinking by studying how it is done in these animals with very different brains and nervous systems.

More here.

Liesl Schwabe at Literary Hub:

In 1958, the young Indian poet Purushottama (P.) Lal was living in Calcutta, writing in English, and looking for a publisher. Unable to find one, he gathered a small group of college friends who were also convinced that English was a legitimate Indian language for creative writing, including Anita Desai, and started an independent press, known still as Writers Workshop. During what became their legendary Sunday morning adda—a Bengali word often translated as a “chat,” but that actually invokes a much more spirited and sustained way of life—Lal, Desai, and others swapped feedback, wrote prefaces for what became one another’s first books, and adopted a “constitution,” outlining their mission to “define” and “sustain” the role of Indian writing in English.

That Sunday morning adda continued every week for forty years. The press, which now almost exclusively focuses on poetry, is currently in its sixth decade, having published more than 2,500 titles, including early work by luminaries such as Vikram Seth, Agha Shahid Ali, Asif Currimbhoy, Meena Alexander, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, among others who would become globally celebrated.

More here.

Erik Guzik in Singularity Hub:

Of all the forms of human intellect that one might expect artificial intelligence to emulate, few people would likely place creativity at the top of their list. Creativity is wonderfully mysterious—and frustratingly fleeting. It defines us as human beings—and seemingly defies the cold logic that lies behind the silicon curtain of machines. Yet, the use of AI for creative endeavors is now growing.

New AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are increasingly part of creative production, and some have started to win awards for their creative output. The growing impact is both social and economic—as just one example, the potential of AI to generate new, creative content is a defining flashpoint behind the Hollywood writers strike. And if our recent study into the striking originality of AI is any indication, the emergence of AI-based creativity—along with examples of both its promise and peril—is likely just beginning.

When people are at their most creative, they’re responding to a need, goal, or problem by generating something new—a product or solution that didn’t previously exist. In this sense, creativity is an act of combining existing resources—ideas, materials, knowledge—in a novel way that’s useful or gratifying. Quite often, the result of creative thinking is also surprising, leading to something the creator did not—and perhaps could not—foresee. It might involve an invention, an unexpected punchline to a joke, or a groundbreaking theory in physics. It might be a unique arrangement of notes, tempo, sounds, and lyrics that results in a new song. So, as a researcher of creative thinking, I immediately noticed something interesting about the content generated by the latest versions of AI, including GPT-4.

More here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

As Warhol was patron saint of the New York night, Ed Ruscha is the quintessential artist of Los Angeles and its heartbreaking light. His paintings, books, photographs, films, and works on paper — made with ingredients as disparate as gunpowder, sulfuric acid, chocolate, urine, Pepto-Bismol, tobacco, and rose petals — could only come from someone who embodies L.A.’s glamour and chaos, its self-consciousness and banal hopes. Peter Plagens once described Los Angeles as “all flesh and no soul, all buildings and no architecture, all property and no land, all electricity and no light, all billboards and nothing to say, all ideas and no principles,” a sentiment that Ruscha — 85 years old and still a dreamboat — both embraces and turns on its head.

Consider three works by this multidisciplinary genius of Pop Conceptualism, now on display at “Now Then,” a career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. One of his masterpieces, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, epitomizes Sol LeWitt’s observation that successful works of art are often “ludicrously simple.”

more here.

Miranda Brown at Literary Review:

Collectively, the book’s chapters present Chinese cuisine as diverse and dynamic. Dunlop describes how, in the ninth century, the majority of the Chinese population switched from millet to rice, their present staple, after losing the millet-growing north of the country to nomads. She also explains the impact of the chilli pepper. Brought from the Americas in the late 16th century, it imparted a fiery character to the cooking of Sichuan and Hunan, further distinguishing these regional cuisines from the milder fare of coastal cities like Canton. We also hear about borscht, a legacy of the Russians who settled in Shanghai after the Bolshevik Revolution. Shanghainese cooks subsequently put their own spin on the dish, now known as luosongtang, replacing the beetroot with tomatoes to make a dense soup comprising ‘squares of cabbage, slices of carrot and potato and a few tiny fragments of beef’.

One of Dunlop’s chief interlocutors is A Dai, proprietor of Dragon Well Manor in Hangzhou, who offers ‘cooking rooted in the local terroir’. But as Dunlop suggests, one does not have to be a chef to be a gourmand.

more here.