Jürgen Habermas in Constellations:

It was nearly 50 years ago when Dick called me for the first time and invited me to come over to Haverford for a discussion. It is not only because of the beginning of our longstanding friendship that I start with that phone call I got in 1972 at the Humanities Center of Cornell University. It moreover led, at this first encounter, to a memorable and rather improbable discovery. The two of us had been brought up on different continents and in different societies, with different backgrounds at different schools and different universities, not to speak of a childhood and youth we spent on opposite sides of a monstrous World War, in which Dick had lost a brother; but in spite of all of these obvious distances in origin and socialization we soon discovered a broad overlap in our philosophical background and also in our present research interests. Hegel, Marx and Kierkegaard, Sartre and existentialism, even Peirce and Dewey and our present research programs in action theory and communication are the catch words to indicate this unexpected convergence of our philosophical orientations. And my surprise was soon confirmed when I read Dick’s book Praxis and Action which I immediately recommended to Suhrkamp for translation.

However, the discovery of these intellectual family bonds is only half of the story; I would not have accepted the invitation to come to Haverford with Ute and our two daughters for a whole term, had Dick not been the impressive personality he indeed was—a host of overwhelming charm and an open-minded, spontaneous and inspiring partner in the ongoing ping-pong of arguments.

More here.

Anthony Quinn at The Guardian:

Here is the story of a wild folie à deux, or a dance of death in which both partners were tragically condemned to survive. Roger Lewis’s biography may not fulfil the promise of “everything” about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor but it surely contains more than you could ever wish to know. “I make no apology for this being a visionary book,” he explains, sonorously, and often the reader does hear a singular voice at work – fearless, funny, provocative, acute, insistent. But oh, it’s exhausting too. Lewis, a Welshman, understands his native weakness: “garrulity”. Or, as Taylor was once overheard to say, as her husband drunkenly dominated another evening with Dylan Thomas recitals and lectures: “Does the man ever shut up?”

Perhaps only an outsize book could comprehend the excess, “the magnificent bad taste and greed and money” that became the keynote of the Burton-Taylor partnership. Lewis, disdaining standard biography as “bogus” and “an affair of ghosts”, adopts an impish, even jesterish approach – bouncing back and forth between eras, zooming in on minor characters, speculating on omissions and obfuscations in the official story.

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NY Times:

If social media is to be believed, men can’t stop thinking about the Roman Empire, particularly its “alpha male” elements. Anyone similarly obsessed would do well to pick up a copy of “Emperor of Rome,” an erudite and entertaining new book by the redoubtable classics scholar and feminist Mary Beard.

Beard, whose previous books include “SPQR” and “The Fires of Vesuvius,” points to the conspicuous role played by women in the histories of the emperors that were handed down through the ages. Most enduring has been “the stereotype of the scheming woman,” who (supposedly) manipulated powerful men into doing her bidding (or else poisoned them when they didn’t). Beard, citing more recent examples of women who have been condemned for their husbands’ behavior, remarks that it is still fashionable to “blame the wife.”

more here.

My Grandfather’s Hat

—in memory of Basiliso Morot Cordero

I cannot stop thinking of that old hat
he is wearing in the grave: the last gift
of love from his wife before they fell
into the habit of silence.

Forgotten as the daughters chose
the funeral clothes, it sat
on his dresser as it always had:
old leather, aromatic of his individual self,
pliable as an old companion, ready to go
anywhere with him.

The youngest grandchild remembered
and ran after her father, who was carrying
the old man’s vanilla suit—the one worn to bodas,
bautismos, and elections—like a lifeless
child in arms: No te olvides
del somebrero de abuelo.

I had seen him hold that old hat in his lap
and caress it as he talked of the good times,
and when he walked outside, placed it on his head
like a blessing.

My grandfather, who believed in God,
the Gracious Host, Proprietor of the Largest Hacienda.
May it be so. May heaven
be an island in the sun,
where a good man may wear his hat with pride,
glad that he could take it with him.

by Judith Ortiz Cofer
from Paper Dance
Persea Books, 1995

—No te olvides del somebrero de abuelo:
Don’t forget grandpa’s hat.

Souria Cheurfi in Vice:

About ten years ago, I decided to become a journalist, mainly because I liked writing. The reason I still am today is because I realised the potential impact my work can have on public debates, and the responsibilities that come with that. Being a journalist means influencing people’s opinions and tipping the balance on important social issues; it’s a job that should be taken very seriously.

For each subject, the choice of tone, angle, the number of articles you write, and every word in them really matters. I don’t necessarily enjoy having this power, but I’ve decided to use it to give a voice to people who don’t often have one in the media, or who are represented in ways that are unfair to them. Today, when I read mainstream coverage of this war, I almost feel ashamed to be a journalist, to be “one of them”. I’m part of a sector that has clearly contributed to the continued oppression of the Palestinian people – and of many others, for that matter.

More here.

Peter Diamandis in Singularity Hub:

Existing healthcare institutions will be crushed as new business models with better and more efficient care emerge. Thousands of startups, as well as today’s data giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, etc.) will all enter this lucrative $3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today’s bureaucratic and inefficient system.

Biometric sensing (wearables) and AI will make each of us the CEOs of our own health. Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning will allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease and what to do about it. Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die.

More here.

Mollie Wilson O’Reilly at Commonweal:

In discussing Eliot’s work, it is tempting to pass over the messy details of her private life in delicate embarrassment. (That late-in-life marriage to John Cross, for example, is truly weird.) But Clare Carlisle’s excellent new book The Marriage Question dares to take Eliot’s personal life seriously, as the field in which her finest work was cultivated. And, coming at the end of Carlisle’s empathetic portrait of the woman who called herself Mrs. Lewes, a woman who crowned each of her manuscripts with a sincere dedication to her beloved “husband,” Huxley’s verdict on Eliot’s life lands as an outrageous insult. He had been asked to support her interment in the Abbey, but replied with his reasons for opposing it. “One cannot eat one’s cake and have it too,” he sniffed. “Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters.”

Could any woman hope to be “free in thought and deed” in 1850s England?

more here.

Liz Rosenberg at Lit Hub:

Her essays are rich with unerasable moments, and as in her greatest works of fiction, they strike the intersecting point between tragedy and comedy. If she tugs on heart-strings in her essays—and most assuredly she does—she also demonstrates a clear awareness of the funny side of life.

Alcott understood that habitual use of humor and exaggeration might incline readers to doubt the veracity of her non-fiction.  At the end of Hospital Sketches she urges the reader to believe what is only partly true: “such a being as Nurse Periwinkle does exist, that she really did go to Washington, and…these Sketches are not romance.” Her fiction found its roots in real-life experiences and her non-fiction always contained kernels of invention.  She largely shrugged off strict distinctions between fact and fiction.

more here.

Richard van Oort at Scroll.in:

Each day brings a reminder of another threat to our peace and security. War, political instability and climate change send migrants and refugees across national borders. Cybercriminals hack networks of public and private institutions. Terrorists use trucks and planes as weapons.

And hanging grimly above us all, like the sword of Damocles, lurks the threat of total nuclear annihilation.

At the root of these threats is a problem that is as old as humanity itself.

In the domain of survival and reproduction, human intelligence stands out for one specific reason. We are the only species on earth for whom intelligence is also an ethical liability. As the anthropological critic Eric Gans has argued, we are the only species for whom the problem of our violence is also our greatest existential threat.

Insights from Western literature and myth point to the ethical problem at the core of human intelligence.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

A brain-inspired computer chip that could supercharge artificial intelligence (AI) by working faster with much less power has been developed by researchers at IBM in San Jose, California. Their massive NorthPole processor chip eliminates the need to frequently access external memory, and so performs tasks such as image recognition faster than existing architectures do — while consuming vastly less power.

“Its energy efficiency is just mind-blowing,” says Damien Querlioz, a nanoelectronics researcher at the University of Paris-Saclay in Palaiseau. The work, published in Science¹, shows that computing and memory can be integrated on a large scale, he says. “I feel the paper will shake the common thinking in computer architecture.”

NorthPole runs neural networks: multi-layered arrays of simple computational units programmed to recognize patterns in data. A bottom layer takes in data, such as the pixels in an image; each successive layer detects patterns of increasing complexity and passes information on to the next layer. The top layer produces an output that, for example, can express how likely an image is to contain a cat, a car or other objects.

More here.

Ezra Klein in the New York Times:

We are used to thinking of our ideological divide as cleaving conservatives from liberals. I think the Republican Party’s collapse into incoherence reflects the fact that much of the modern right is reactionary, not conservative. This is what connects figures as disparate as Jordan Peterson and J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. These are the ideas that unite both the mainstream and the weirder figures of the so-called postliberal right, from Patrick Deneen to the writer Bronze Age Pervert. This is not a coalition that cares about tax cuts. It’s a coalition obsessed with where we went wrong: the weakness, the political correctness, the liberalism, the trigger warnings, the smug elites. It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize softness and punish hardness.

More here.

More here.

From Slate:

I grew up around pumpkins. My dad grew big ones that were 80- or 100-pounders, and I always thought it was neat. Every kid loves pumpkins. We would also go to the state fair and see the giant pumpkins there, and I thought, “That’s kind of cool. I want to grow one.” When I was 14, I grew a 470-pounder. That was three decades ago, and I’ve been growing pumpkins ever since. I’m just now starting to get the hang of it. I didn’t even win a contest until 2020, but that year, I set the North American record with a 2,350-pound pumpkin.

It’s all about figuring out the right recipe. This year, I started in mid-April, with my plants indoors because it’s easier to control the temperatures and germination. I started with two seeds, hoping that I’d get two pumpkins—you start with two to increase your chances of success. Hopefully, you have two at the end, but it doesn’t always work out that way. After the seeds germinated, I transferred them outside to a little hoop house in my backyard, right out my bedroom window, so I could be right there as they grew. They had good soil, heating, cables, and grow lights. I spent two or three hours a day with them. My friends thought I was nuts, especially because I skipped the opening day of fishing to take care of a giant pumpkin.

More here.

Dittmar and Hass in Int J Mol Sci:

Fusion among different cell populations represents a rare process that is mediated by both intrinsic and extracellular events. Cellular hybrid formation is relayed by orchestrating tightly regulated signaling pathways that can involve both normal and neoplastic cells. Certain important cell merger processes are often required during distinct organismal and tissue development, including placenta and skeletal muscle. In a neoplastic environment, however, cancer cell fusion can generate new cancer hybrid cells.

Following survival during a subsequent post-hybrid selection process (PHSP), the new cancer hybrid cells express different tumorigenic properties. These can include elevated proliferative capacity, increased metastatic potential, resistance to certain therapeutic compounds, and formation of cancer stem-like cells, all of which characterize significantly enhanced tumor plasticity. However, many parts within this multi-step cascade are still poorly understood. Aside from intrinsic factors, cell fusion is particularly affected by extracellular conditions, including an inflammatory microenvironment, viruses, pH and ionic stress, hypoxia, and exosome signaling.

More here.

Poem

and greenhouse and topsoil and basil greens
and cowshit and snowfall and spinach knife
and woodsmoke and watering can and common thistle

and potato digger and peach trees
and poison parsnip and romaine hearts
and rockpiles and spring trilliums and ramp circles

what song of grassblade
what creak of dark rustle tree
and blueblack wind from the north

this vetch this grapevine
this waterhose this mosspatch

sunflower gardens in the lowland
dog graves between the apple trees

this fistfull of onion tops
this garlic laid silent in the barn
this green this green this green

sweet cucumber leaf
sweet yellow bean

and all this I try to make a human shape
the darkness regenerating a shadow of a limb

my tongue embraces the snap pea
and so it is sweet

how does the rusted golfcart in the chickweed
inform my daily breath

I’m sorry I want to say
to the unhearing spaces
between the dogwood trees

for my tiny little life
I have pressed into
your bruising green skin

by Lucy Walker
from  Pank Magazine

Molly Young in the New York Times:

People who dislike Vladimir Nabokov tend to find his dexterity stressful, like watching a circus performer juggle torches for hours. The solution to this is to chill out. It’s not your job to worry that an elective juggler is going to light his shorts on fire! Let the performer assess his own risks!

A more pragmatic solution for skeptics is to administer Nabokov in modest doses, a page or two at a time, before working up to full chapters. Even with tiny bites you’ll immediately perceive the way he hops between material realms and metaphysical ones as freely as a bunny in a meadow. You’ll notice the way synesthesia guides his pen, and you’ll pick up his themes of exile, wonder, the afterlife and the privacy and primacy of marriage.

More here.

McKenzie Prillaman in Nature:

An imbalance of fungi in the gut could contribute to excessive inflammation in people with severe COVID-19 or long COVID. A study found that individuals with severe disease had elevated levels of a fungus that can activate the immune system and induce long-lasting changes.

The work, published on 23 October in Nature Immunology¹, raises the possibility that antifungal treatment could provide some relief to people who are critically ill with COVID-19.

“We know inflammation is driving severe disease,” says Martin Hönigl, a clinical mycology researcher at the Medical University of Graz in Austria, who was not involved in the study. This work, he says, provides a potential mechanism of disease-causing inflammation that might have been overlooked.

More here.

And a response to criticism for this statement here.