Lessons from Mahler

In Sage Hall 5 at Smith, spring 1980, our music theory professor
places the needle on the final band of the album of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder.
The voice of mezzosoprano Janet Baker emerges from the orchestra:

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen…
I am lost to the world…

She weaves her way among the delicately orchestrated lines, answers the English horn,
sings of how the world may think she is dead because she has set aside its tumult
to rest in a quiet place. In serenity:

Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied. 
I live alone in my heaven,
in my love, in my song.

As the English horn resolves a suspension at the final cadence, I look up from my score
to see our professor weeping.

Analysis of
chromatic chords failed that day.
Tears taught me Mahler.

by Joanne Cory
from the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center

From Medical News Today:

About 1 billion peopleTrusted Source around the world live with a mental health disorder. Examples of mental health disorders include depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A study published in September 2023 estimates that approximately half the world’s population can expect to develop one or more mental health disorders by age 75.

While there are treatment options like psychotherapy, medicationsTrusted Source, and lifestyle changesTrusted Source that can help lessen mental health disorder symptoms, these are not equally effective for everyone. For this reason, researchers have also been looking at alternative treatments that could help. One of these potential alternative treatments involved the use of psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin. Now, a study from the University of Southern Denmark has found that microdosing on — or taking very small doses of — psilocybin may have a beneficial effect on mental health disorders. The researchers conducted their study in rat models.

More here.

Max Kozlov in Nature:

Rich, high-fat foods such as ice cream are loved not only for their taste, but also for the physical sensations they produce in the mouth — their ‘mouthfeel’. Now scientists have identified a brain area that both responds to the smooth texture of fatty foods and uses that information to rate the morsel’s allure, guiding eating behaviour¹.

A tongue for texture

…To explore how food textures influence eating habits, Fabian Grabenhorst, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues set out to quantify the mouthfeel of fatty foods. The authors prepared several milkshakes with varying fat and sugar contents and placed a sample of each between two pig tongues procured from a local butcher. The researchers then slid the tongues across each other and measured the amount of friction between the two surfaces, providing a numerical index of each shake’s smoothness.

More here.

Leah Greenblatt in Esquire:

Even in the wilting heat of a late-stage New York summer, Adjei-Brenyah cuts a striking figure; a security guard pulls away from corralling unruly tweens just to compliment his hat, a trilby in rich forest green. The guard probably has no reason to know that this elegant, soft-spoken man who quite literally would not hurt a fly is the same one who’s published two of the most explosive and unlikely literary sensations of the past five years—the astonishing 2018 story collection Friday Black and his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, released in May and now short-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction. Both are brutal, maximalist, and often gorgeously profane missiles of dystopian satire: Joseph Heller meets Jordan Peele somewhere beyond Thunderdome. The Guardian called Chain-Gang “an exuberant circus of a novel,” while The New York Times sang that its fight scenes unfold “as if Joe Rogan had fallen into a trance and assumed the diction and rhythms of Toni Morrison.”

More here.

Sheon Han in Quanta:

Some scientific discoveries matter because they reveal something new — the double helical structure of DNA, for example, or the existence of black holes. However, some revelations are profound because they show that two old concepts, once thought distinct, are in fact the same. Take James Clerk Maxwell’s equations showing that electricity and magnetism are two aspects of a single phenomenon, or general relativity’s linking of gravity with a curved space-time.

The Curry-Howard correspondence does the same but on a larger scale, linking not just separate concepts within one field, but entire disciplines: computer science and mathematical logic. Also known as the Curry-Howard isomorphism (a term meaning there exists some kind of one-to-one correspondence between two things), it establishes a link between mathematical proofs and computer programs.

More here.

Ken Roth in Time:

Hamas’s random slaughter of Israeli civilians, its abduction of survivors as hostages, its indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel’s cities are all war crimes – egregious violations of international humanitarian law, which is designed to spare civilians as much as possible the hazards of war. Using that legal framework is important because it also binds the Israeli military, which is the best way to ensure that the civilian toll in Gaza from Israel’s aerial bombardment and possible ground invasion does not quickly surmount the deaths at the hands of Hamas.

More here.

Stuart Mills in Singularity Hub:

AI is developing rapidly. ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing online service in history. Google and Microsoft are integrating generative AI into their products. And world leaders are excitedly embracing AI as a tool for economic growth. As we move beyond ChatGPT and Bard, we’re likely to see AI chatbots become less generic and more specialized. AIs are limited by the data they’re exposed to in order to make them better at what they do—in this case, mimicking human speech and providing users with useful answers. Training often casts the net wide, with AI systems absorbing thousands of books and web pages. But a more select, focused set of training data could make AI chatbots even more useful for people working in particular industries or living in certain areas.

An important factor in this evolution will be the growing costs of amassing training data for advanced large language models (LLMs), the type of AI that powers ChatGPT. Companies know data is valuable: Meta and Google make billions from selling advertisements targeted with user data. But the value of data is now changing. Meta and Google sell data “insights”; they invest in analytics to transform many data points into predictions about users.

More here.

Warren Cornwall in Anthropocene Magazine:

When Charles Darwin made the famous voyage that took him to the Galapagos, he marveled at the giant tortoises that lumbered across the islands. He tried to ride them. He ate their flesh. He followed the paths they created in their ponderous travels. And he mused at their differing shapes on different islands, insights that helped steer him toward his theory of evolution by natural selection.

“It is the circumstance, that several of the islands possess their own species of the tortoise, mocking-thrush, finches, and numerous plants, these species having the same general habits, occupying analogous situations, and obviously filling the same place in the natural economy of this archipelago, that strikes me with wonder,” Darwin wrote in his account of the trip, The Voyage of the Beagle.

What he didn’t fully appreciate—at least judging by his writings—is the critical role the enormous reptiles played in shaping the plant communities of these islands. But the return of thousands of giant tortoises to the Galapagos island of Española is giving scientists new insights into the transformative power these behemoths wield. It is the latest in a long list of scientific discoveries emerging from the tiny cluster of islands off the coast of Ecuador. And it holds out the potential for restoring island ecosystems in part by reviving reptile herbivores.

More here.

Adam Piore in Newsweek:

For years, Alzheimer’s conferences were like the obituary pages in the local newspaper: It’s where clinicians and researchers in the field went to find out the names of the latest promising drugs to die. Between 1998 and 2017 alone, 146 clinical trials of new Alzheimer’s drugs failed.

So when Randall Bateman showed up outside a restaurant in Bar Harbor, Maine, one evening in the fall of 2022 during an industry confab and announced to a couple of tables full of his colleagues drinking on the patio that he had something important to share with them, no one was prepared for what came next. Bateman, a neurologist and Alzheimer’s researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, told them he had just received a phone call from his contact at the drug company running the trials of lecanemab, an experimental drug designed to facilitate the removal of the toxic plaques in the brain associated with the disease. The results, set for public release the following morning, were in: In a study of 1,800 Alzheimer’s patients over 18 months, the treatment had reduced the rate of cognitive decline by close to 30 percent.

More here.

Footnotes

Where does history go
when it hasn’t been tended?
I say it grows wild amongst
the Periwinkle, the Turkey-foot fern
and my mind. There it is
right alongside my heavy heart
like that mass of stones left on a hill
the only remnants left of the Kingdom
speaking of mountain royalty,
King Robert and Queen Louella
leased for ten cents a day
by a Civil War widow, named Serpta.
Their rule over 200 acres
of chopping, hauling and toting.
I understand this urgency
the need of self-appointment.
I hear it in the restless wind on the ridge
or are those ancestral voices crying out
about the uneasy quilt stitch hearsay
of their lives being left to myth and lore?
Where does history go when it dies?
When corn cribs and makeshift houses
no longer riddle the mountain slopes
and forty years of hands culling
Comfrey into a healing balm
along with Gospel Songs cease.
This silent edge is where I live
filled with heartache remembering history
and where it goes without a foothold.

by Glenis Redmond
from My Laureates Lasso, 3/11/2009

Rashid Khalidi in The New York Times:

Israel has ordered more than a million people to leave northern Gaza, presumably to prepare for an imminent ground offensive. Its military strategists appear to be planning the depopulation and reoccupation of at least part of an area home to around 2.3 million people — nearly half of them children — and most of them descended from people driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. We must understand that these are human beings at grave risk, not just numbers.

Consider what some in the Israeli defense establishment have said. “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in,” a reservist major general, Giora Eiland, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper. “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” He added, “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”

More here.

The Park

In that oblivious, concentrated, fiercely fetal decontraction
. . . . peculiar to the lost,
a grimy derelict is flat out on a green bench by the sandbox,
. . . . gazing blankly at the children.
“Do you want to play with me?” a small boy asks another,
. . . . his fine head tilted deferentially,
but the other has a lovely fire truck so doesn’t have to answer
. . . . and emphatically he doesn’t,
he just grinds his toy, its wheels immobilized with grit, along
. . . . the low stone wall.
The first child sinks forlornly down and lays his palms against
. . . . the earth like Buddha.
The ankles of the derelict are scabbed and swollen, torn with
. . . . arching varicose and cankers.
Who will come to us now? Who will solace us? Who will
. . . . take us in their healing hands?

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
The Noonday Press, 1994

Charlie McCann in 1843 Magazine:

The patient was about 16 weeks pregnant. As Donna stood by her bed, steeling herself to deliver the bad news, she tried to stifle the now-familiar feeling of helplessness. It was November 2022 and they were in the triage area of the hospital in Texas where Donna (a pseudonym) worked as an ob-gyn (obstetrician-gynaecologist). The pregnant woman’s waters had broken. At this stage in the pregnancy, the fetus’s lungs are months away from fully forming and stop developing as the amniotic fluid drains away. Doctors therefore usually recommend aborting the fetus or waiting to miscarry. The latter course can take days or weeks, during which time the mother is at high risk of infection – and must endure the trauma of carrying a non-viable fetus.

More here.

Jonathan Guyer in Vox:

In the Arab world, people have been as quick to show support for Palestine as most American politicians have for Israel. On Friday, after prayers at Egypt’s al-Azhar Mosque, protesters filled the streets. As did tens of thousands of Iraqis in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, thousands of Jordanians protesting in the capital and in major cities, and hundreds who gathered outside a central mosque in Qatar, along with protesters in Lebanon, Oman, Tunisia, and Yemen. Demonstrators burned Israeli flags and chanted against Israel’s military campaign.

Without understanding the full history of the conflict and the region, some American readers could dismiss everyone participating in these protests as “angry Arabs,” a repugnant trope that has permeated Western media for a century and was heightened after 9/11. It may still be jarring to watch for many, but the forces that drive the protests go deep — and will only deepen as the latest war unfolds.

More here.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner in The New York Times:

Section 301, in the second-to-highest tier of Levi’s Stadium, floats 105 feet above Santa Clara, Calif. It comprises 251 seats — a mere hamlet in the vast 64,000-seat general kingdom of the place, but it was our hamlet, and on the last Saturday in July, we took up each one of those seats and watched, our collective breath held, as Taylor Swift emerged from a bevy of billowing pastel parachutes and rose up on a platform to perform the 47th show of her Eras Tour. A few songs in, she announced, laughing, that her father told her that Santa Clara had named her its honorary mayor during her two-night stay there and that the entire town had been renamed Swiftie Clara. On the way in, we saw the Police Department cheerfully exchanging friendship bracelets with legions of Swifties. The microcosm of Section 301 offered this same sense of sorority. What a nice neighborhood we had moved into, my 15-year-old son, Ezra, and I. Within minutes of sitting down, we were already a community with a shared, ardent sense of purpose.

More here.

Michelle Orange in The New Yorker:

It was a more physical world, though we thought it quite advanced. There seemed nothing “terrestrial” about twisting a radio knob to some eccentric decimal point, dialling static into song. In the summer of 1985, we all knew someone, usually an older sibling, who owned a portable, cassette-playing stereo. The rest of us remained stuck catching Top Forty countdowns on AM radio, or playing, on our parents’ imperial turntables, the one or two LPs in our possession. Increasingly, we listened to music by watching it on TV, our dance parties often overseen by a strutting, tattered sprite who wore bangles like opera gloves and held the camera’s gaze with her entire being, as though locked in a dare she was not going to lose.

More here.

Taylor McNeil at Tufts Now:

In the book, Dennett describes his intellectual growth and the role he played in many philosophy developments over the years. There’s plenty of inside baseball, but it is lively reading even for those with no stake in the game.

Dennett also devotes a section to academic battles, including what he calls academic bullies, who he often called out when no one else would. “They have ended people’s careers—they have squashed really good people when they disagree with them,” he says. “I was pretty well immune to that, and recognized I should use my relative invulnerability to say what others were saying over drinks in the bar late at night, but didn’t dare say in public.”

More here.

Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

This is the second of a two-part review about ancient biomolecules; think of them as the other fossil evidence. Having just reviewed Jones’s Ancient DNA which gave an intellectual history of this young scientific discipline, I now turn to Dale E. Greenwalt’s book Remnants of Ancient Life. Beyond DNA, his book discusses what we can learn about extinct life forms from traces of other molecules, such as proteins, pigments, and metals.

This book is a good example of the kind of whistlestop tour normally written by science journalists: delve into a topic, read tons of academic papers, serve up interesting results in a digestible form for your reader, and profile some of the scientists involved. The difference is that Greenwalt is an insider, working as the curator of the fossil insect collection at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. It was actually the background research he did for a book chapter on the fossil record of blood that made him decide to write a popular book on ancient biomolecules.

More here.