Leanne Ogasawara in Aeon:

I am an accidental birder. While I never used to pay much attention to the birds outside my window, even being a bit afraid of them when I was a child, I have always loved making lists. Ranking operas and opera houses, categorising favourite books and beautiful libraries – not to mention decades of creating ‘Top Ten’ lists of hikes, drives, national parks, hotels, and bottles of wine. My birding hobby grew out of this predilection. Specifically, out of my penchant for writing down the birds I found in the paintings by the Old Masters.

Hieronymus Bosch, for starters.

More here.

Belén Fernández at Al Jazeera:

One recalls the days when sympathy was not reduced to a series of yellow crying faces – when people had more time to be human and condolences were not something to be fired off before scrolling on to the next Facebook post.

I personally will never forget an occasion some years ago when, in response to a Facebook friend’s post about a death in the family, another Facebook friend – a filmmaker for whom I normally have the utmost esteem – commented: “sorry for ur loss.” Modern communications have so warped our sense of propriety, it seems, that the commenter failed to consider the inherent disrespect, in such circumstances, of only typing half of an already very short word.

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Joel Whitney in the Boston Review:

In 1973 rookie reporter Kevin McKiernan smuggled himself onto the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in the trunk of a car, hoping to cover the takeover of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Embedded with activists of the American Indian Movement (AIM)—who clamored for control of their communities and an end to slum conditions, McKiernan filmed their conflicts with Tribal Chair Richard (“Dickie”) Wilson, his armed supporters who called themselves Guardians of Oglala Nation (GOONs), and the government agents backing them. Despite a media blackout, McKiernan sat in on AIM negotiations with the Nixon administration, earning on-camera glares from negotiator Kent Frizzell. As a settlement was hammered out between the groups, McKiernan buried his film in a hole and smuggled himself out of the encampment. Arrests followed, his included. Six weeks later, he returned to Wounded Knee to recover his footage.

In his 2019 documentary, which combines the footage of the seventy-one-day occupation with interviews conducted decades later, McKiernan crisply narrates these events, during which government agents shot and killed two Indigenous activists and wounded many more.

More here.

Erin Thompson at the LRB:

I met Gordon in Phnom Penh a year ago. He had agreed to take me and Ashish Dhakal, a journalist and repatriation activist from Nepal, to Koh Ker and Angkor. First, though, I spent nearly a week at the National Museum of Cambodia. It opened in 1920, designed by George Groslier, to hold the artefacts that archaeologists in French Indochina weren’t shipping back to Paris. He enlarged the architectural forms of Cambodian Buddhist temples to create a building that hadn’t previously been needed in a region where sacred artworks generally remained in place.

One morning I saw a member of staff bow towards a sculpture of a reclining Buddha before dusting it in long, gentle strokes. Another climbed a stepladder and ran a feather duster with rainbow-coloured bristles over the shoulders of a Krishna, long after all the dust had to have gone. One afternoon I watched an ant lay a clutch of eggs in a shallow cavity in a sculpture’s broken arm. The eggs fell to the floor and a woman swept them up, singing so quietly I could hear her voice only between strokes of her broom.

more here.

Rivka Galchen at The New Yorker:

Multiple sclerosis presents far more variously than most other illnesses; for that reason, it has been called “the great imitator.” Some of the conditions it can resemble are minor, and others are major. If you have ever Googled a random tingling or twinge or eyebrow twitch, you have probably spent at least one evening convinced that you have M.S. On the other hand, M.S. patients often think for a while that they don’t have much going on. One person’s first symptom might be numbness. A different patient might experience weakness. Or an unexplained fall, or fatigue, or difficulty urinating or walking. In the United States, the incidence is around three people in a thousand, which is either rare or common, depending on the emotional heft you ascribe to a third of one per cent of the population.

Until recently, patients weren’t given medication before they were in distress; now treatment tends to come early, with the highest-efficacy drugs available. Oh, of the Barlo center, told me, “When I went into neurology residency”—in 2005—“the field was still sometimes called ‘diagnose and adios,’ because it seemed like there was so little that could be done for patients with these chronic neurological diseases,” such as M.S., Parkinson’s, A.L.S., and Alzheimer’s.

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Nadira Goffe in Slate:

Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Christopher Nolan are known for being beloved by film bros around the world. If Hollywood makes “chick flicks” for women, these directors win prizes for providing what everyone believes to be the opposite thing—a type of film that, interestingly, doesn’t have a catchy, degrading name. (Gloria Steinem once wrote an entire op-ed dubbing them “prick flicks.”) This egregious misconception needs to be corrected, at least on one such filmmaker’s behalf. Despite what you might have heard, Christopher Nolan’s films are, in fact, for the girlies.

Nolan, who famously is one of the least accessible mainstream directors—I don’t mean least accessible in terms of a viewer’s ability to see or understand his movies, though that is sort of true; I mean least accessible in that this man doesn’t even have a damn smartphone—has, for years, managed to cast some of the absolute hottest men in Hollywood to talk about time travel or multiple dimensions or whatever. Considering that Nolan uses much the same roster of actors across his films, it’s almost impressive the different variations of sexiness that he can elicit out of one man. It’s so effective one would think his hiring tactic is whispering the lyrics of Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man out of You” into the ear of Hollywood’s hunkiest specimens.

More here.

Adam Piore in Newsweek Magazine:

Neuroscientists, educators and psychologists like Kathy Hirsh-Pasek know that play is as an essential ingredient in the lives of adults as well as children. A weighty and growing body of evidence—spanning evolutionary biology, neuroscience and developmental psychology—has in recent years confirmed the centrality of play to human life. Not only is it a crucial part of childhood development and learning but it is also a means for young and old alike to connect with others and a potent way of supercharging creativity and engagement. Play is so fundamental that neglecting it poses a significant health risk.

And yet Americans have been squeezing playtime out of their busy schedules for years—the average adult now logs more hours at work than a 14th-century English peasant. Although this trend was underway long before the pandemic struck, the two years of fear, illness and death that followed drove the nation’s level of loneliness and isolation to intolerable levels. Hirsh-Pasek, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a bestselling author, thinks the ordeal may have pushed already work-weary Americans over the brink—to the point where they are finally revising their attitudes toward work and play for the better. “People need joy in their lives,” she says.

Pulled Over in Short Hills, NJ, 8:00 AM

It’s the shivering. When rage grows
hot as an army of red ants and forces
the mind to quiet the body, the quakes
emerge, sometimes just the knees,
but, at worst, through the hips, chest, neck
until, like a virus, slipping inside the lungs
and pulse, every ounce of strength tapped
to squeeze words from my taut lips,
his eyes scanning my car’s insides, my eyes,
my license, and as I answer the questions
3, 4, 5 times, my jaw tight as a vice,
his hand massaging the gun butt, I
imagine things I don’t want to
and inside beg this to end
before the shiver catches my
hands, and he sees,
and something happens.

by Ross Gay
from Read Good Poetry

Chris Niebauer at IAI:

For most ordinary people, it is assumed that “we” exist somewhere within the skull, and this self is free to make decisions. This self is the “captain” of the body, controlling our behaviors and making our life choices. The problem is that neither this inner self nor free will exists the way most think that it does. Research conclusively demonstrates that these are just stories that we humans make up. Michael Gazzaniga’s groundbreaking research eventually concludes that the self is just a fiction created by the brain. Humans make up such stories, believe in them, and rarely question their validity. However, this isn’t the bad news it may appear to be. It is good news, but it will take a while to grasp.

More here.

George Blaustein in the European Review of Books:

Before pondering the locations of action cinema (and thus the vectors of our own nostalgias and aspirations), let us briefly rehearse the mystique of Tom Cruise’s action-hero Method-acting, and its storied relationship to cinema as art and industry.

The plot of Dead Reckoning (Part One) revolves around a fancy cruciform key that looks both antique and futuristic. It has two parts; when they’re locked fancily together, four jewel-like lights on the key’s bow glow, giving the key a Benjaminian aura of Unreproduzierbarkeit. Our protagonists have one part of the key; they need the other part. The key, we’re told, unlocks the as-yet-unrevealed device that will allow humanity to control or destroy an ominous artificial intelligence.

The AI — self-aware, rogue, malevolent — is Dead Reckoning (Part One)’s disembodied, inscrutably brilliant villain.

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Bruno Maçães in Time:

Palantir’s founding team, led by investor Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, wanted to create a company capable of using new data integration and data analytics technology — some of it developed to fight online payments fraud — to solve problems of law enforcement, national security, military tactics, and warfare. They called it Palantir, after the magical stones in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir, founded in 2003, developed its tools fighting terrorism after September 11, and has done extensive work for government agencies and corporations though much of its work is secret. It went public in 2020. But through its 20 years in business, the question has been just how capable are its systems and what could it achieve on a large scale conflict. Can it deliver in a war between large armies and with greater firepower?

More here.

Gloria Dickie at Lapham’s Quarterly:

There is an old temple at Chavín de Huántar. The archaeological site lies halfway between Peru’s tropical lowlands and the coast, near the confluence of the Mosna and Huanchesca Rivers, tucked between jagged mountain cordilleras. Inside the temple, a U-​shaped flat-​topped pyramid, intricate carvings of animals exotic to the highlands cover the stone passageways that form a labyrinth between chambers. Jaguars. Harpy eagles. Caimans. Anacondas. Devotees once came here to consult oracles and perform bloodletting rituals. In the middle of the central cruciform room, illuminated by a beam of sunlight, stands a fifteen-​foot-​tall, triangular granite monolith that connects the floor to the ceiling. A figure has been etched into the rock. Googly eyes sit above a broad snout with round nostrils. Curly hair ending in snake heads, like Medusa, frames a snarling face. One hand is raised in the air, palm forward, as if permitting passage to another world. The other lays down at its side. Five curving claws protrude from its feet, where worshippers once laid lavish gifts of food and ceramics. This is El Lanzón.

more here.

Alan Yuhas at the New York Times:

Armed with machetes and chain-saws, hacking through fallen trees and wading through dense scrub, the archaeologists cleared a path down rocky trails.

At last, they reached their destination in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula: a hidden city where pyramids and palaces rose above crowds over 1,000 years ago, with a ball court and terraces now buried and overgrown.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History hailed their work late last month, saying they had discovered an ancient Maya city in “a vast area practically unknown to archaeology.” “These stories about ‘lost cities in the jungle’ — very often these things are quite minor or being spun by journalists,” said Simon Martin, a political anthropologist who was not involved in the work. “But this is much closer to the real deal.”

more here.

Barbara Spindel in The Christian Science Monitor:

One can’t help but feel a sense of wonder reading about the bar-tailed godwit, a bird the size of a football, whose winter migration can take it from Alaska to New Zealand in one marathon flight across the Pacific Ocean. The ornithologists who’ve helped us understand the phenomenon of migration inspire wonder as well. Their ingenuity and zeal are at the heart of Rebecca Heisman’s delightful debut, “Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration.”

Heisman, a science writer who spent five years working for the American Ornithological Society, begins with an overview of the seasonal movement of birds. Some don’t migrate at all, while others are categorized as either short-, medium-, or long-distance travelers. “Flight Paths” focuses on the latter, birds that, once the urge to migrate is triggered, travel for improbably extended stretches, “chasing booms in the availability of insects and other key foods and the right conditions to nest and raise babies.”

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Detailed maps of the cells in human organs show how the placenta commandeers the maternal blood supply, how kidney cells transition from healthy to diseased states and how cells in the intestine organize themselves into distinct neighbourhoods. These atlases, published on 19 July in Nature^1–3, are examples of a powerful and increasingly popular approach to studying the organs of the body in both health and disease. Each comprises hundreds of thousands of data points about gene activity and protein production in individual cells, which are then mapped to their specific location in the organ.

The hope is that the atlases will eventually yield clues about how to diagnose and treat disorders that can arise when those cells become injured or dysfunctional. “These cells organize themselves into neighbourhoods, towns, countries,” says Michael Snyder, a geneticist at Stanford University in California and an author of the study looking at the intestine³. “And it affects their function.”

Cell atlases

Technologies that allow researchers to monitor gene activity in individual cells have helped to spur the production of many cell atlases in recent years, including maps of blood vessels in the brain⁴ and of various types of tumour⁵–⁷. With time, these technologies have become more sophisticated, allowing researchers to incorporate information about a cell’s location and interrogate gene activity more thoroughly. The latest papers take this further by evaluating the abundance of dozens of proteins in each cell. The research is part of a consortium called the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP), which is funded by the US National Institutes of Health and aims to develop tools to map out the cells of the human body.

More here.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging, I look down

Till his straining rump among the flower beds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug; the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving the cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away.

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests
I’ll dig with it.

by Seamus Heaney
from Death of a Naturalist
Faber and Faber, 1966