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.

Peter Singer at Project Syndicate (also pieces by Shlomo Ben-Ami, Barak Barfi, Richard Haass):

Hamas’s brazen and vicious attacks within Israel have rightly drawn condemnation from around the world. If this is a war, as both sides agree it is, then Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians counts as a major war crime.

But the brutality demonstrated by Hamas did not emerge in a vacuum. The lesson of what is currently happening in Israel and Gaza is that violence breeds more violence.

The last real chance of avoiding the tragic conflict being waged between Israel and Hamas was destroyed by a single killing: the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

More here.

Welcome to Paradise

The mother sits within her palm-thatched hut
Surrounded by stray dogs, their shit, and flies.
She sells blond surfers unripe coconut
For crypto underneath rich tropic skies.

Her children spear for fish and build their toys
From plastic bags, they surf on driftwood planks.
They wear clothes left behind by expat boys
And girls, ripped rash guards reading “f*ck the banks.”

The tourist tree-pose on the sand while wading
In the sea. Taking Insta pics, they lie
In hammocks day-drinking and day-trading
On Macbooks stickered with “live free or die.”

It’s paradise on Bitcoin Beach, they say,
Just learn to smile and turn the other way.

by Maya Clubine
from Rattle Magazine, 6/30/23

Jo Livingstone in Book Forum:

AMONG THE OLDEST REFERENCES to menstruation in literature is in the book of Genesis, in a story about a lie. Rachel stole her father’s household gods, it goes, and when he came to retrieve them, she threw a covering over the objects and sat on it. She couldn’t stand, she apologized to her father, because she was in “the way of women.” At the end of the sixteenth century, an English clergyman clarified in his guide to Genesis that Rachel wasn’t pretending to be incapable of standing, just uncomfortable, due to her “monethly custome,” an ancestor to our contemporary “period.” As Jenni Nuttall explains in her new book Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words, “period” has been in use to name a quantity of time since the Middle Ages, but “only at the end of the seventeenth century”—so, a little after the clergyman’s time—“does the phrase ‘monthly period’ appear in medical books as a name for menstruation.”

More here.

From The Paris Review:

In an interview published in The Paris Review no. 171 (Fall 2004), Tobias Wolff pinpointed the radical power of a well-written story. “Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being.”

The Paris Review has always sought out just this kind of writing, of which Wolff’s own body of work is an extraordinary example. We are thrilled to honor him with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature. Previous recipients include Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, and Vivian Gornick. 

Over the last several decades, Wolff has established himself as a virtuosic storyteller across several forms. His memoirs, novels, and short stories express, in infinite variety, the human struggle to reconcile the truth we wish for with the one we get. In This Boy’s Life (1989), his memoir about a peripatetic childhood—which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize—and Old School (2003), his novel modeled in part on his own disastrous attempt to fit in at an elite prep school, he captures the vulnerability of youth with precision and delicacy.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

How we grow old gracefully—and whether we can do anything to slow down the process—has long been a fascination of humanity. However, despite continued research the answer to how we can successfully combat aging still remains elusive.

…As we get older, our cells produce inflammatory proteins that further promote aging. Cancer treatments also cause this same inflammatory process by damaging cells, which can then prevent treatments from working well in patients. The new research, which is co-led by Professor Stephen Tait and his team at the School of Cancer Sciences, reports a key inflammatory role for our cells’ energy-producing organelles, mitochondria. The researchers found that in old cells—or following cancer therapy—mitochondria become leaky, releasing DNA that promotes inflammation and, as a result, aging. The team then discovered that if they could prevent the mitochondria from becoming leaky, this in turn blocked inflammation and improved health during aging.

Their discovery suggests that targeting mitochondrial-driven inflammation may offer a new way to promote healthy aging, as well as improve the response to cancer therapies.

More here.

Dani Blum in The New York Times:

Over the last several decades, the rates of new cases of lung cancer have fallen in the United States. There were roughly 65 new cases of lung cancer for every 100,000 people in 1992. By 2019, that number had dropped to about 42.

But for all that progress, a disparity is emerging: Women between the ages of 35 and 54 are being diagnosed with lung cancer at higher rates than men in that same age group, according to a report published Thursday by researchers at the American Cancer Society. The disparity is small — one or two more cases among every 100,000 women in that age range than among men — but it is significant enough that researchers want to know more. The report adds to a mounting body of evidence that emphasizes the lung cancer risks for women in particular. Overall, lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that, nationwide, around 197,000 people are diagnosed with the disease each year.

More here.

Paul Nurse in The Guardian:

The prize changed our lives. It is the one scientific prize everyone knows. Suddenly you become a public figure being asked to do all sorts of things: to give lectures, quite often on topics you know little about; to sit on committees and reviews you are not always well qualified to be on; to visit countries you have barely heard of; to sign endless petitions on what are probably good causes, but you never know. It is like having a whole new extra job, with upwards of 500 requests a year. It is impostor syndrome on steroids.

A big problem is that people think you have something sensible to say about nearly everything. Over time it can become dangerous, as you start to believe that perhaps you do know about nearly everything.

More here.

Randy Boyagoda in the New York Times:

I have for years been an evangelist for Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. And “evangelizing” is an apt word, given the vibrant, mirror-dark religious feeling of his books. Fosse converted to Catholicism in 2012, when he was already a well-established playwright and fiction writer in his native Norway, which celebrates Fosse with a biannual festival dedicated to his work. (The most recent took place this past summer, over 12 days.) His international stature and popularity in a generally secular country is a strong indicator that Fosse’s books aren’t just for the faithful: Indeed, many religiously minded readers of the Chesterton, Lewis and Tolkien club may be put off by Fosse’s formal and stylistic demands, and also by his obscure, at times even willfully inchoate writing about human and divine life.

The Nobel announcement comes only a few weeks before his latest novel, “A Shining,” will be published in English (beautifully and brilliantly translated, as was “Septology,” by Damion Searls), and it affords an excellent occasion to make a stronger case for why reading Fosse is a singular and transporting experience. In the words of the Nobel committee, he received the prize “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

The 2023 Econ Nobel went to Claudia Goldin for her work on women’s labor market outcomes. I can’t say I’m particularly surprised to see Goldin get the nod, here. Economists generally recognize Goldin as one of the key pioneers of the “credibility revolution” in empirical economics.

The main thing you have to understand about the Econ Nobel (or, if you prefer, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel) is that it’s typically a methods prize; instead of specific discoveries, like in chemistry or medicine, the Econ Nobel is typically awarded to researchers who invent new ways of making discoveries. In recent years, the prize has been awarded more and more to researchers whose primary focus is empirical analysis rather than pure theory.

More here.

Someone Should Start Laughing

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:

How are you?

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:

What is God?

If you think that the truth can be known
From words,

If you think that the Sun and the Ocean

Can pass through that tiny opening
Called the mouth,

O someone should start laughing—

Someone should start laughing—
Now!

Hafiz
from I Heard God Laughing-
Renerings of Hafiz
by Daniel Ladinsky

Stephen Humphries in The Christian Science Monitor:

Humans are at war with machines. In the near future, an artificial intelligence defense system detonates a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles. It deploys a formidable army of robots, some of which resemble people. Yet humans still have a shot at victory. So a supersoldier is dispatched on a mission to find the youth who will one day turn the tide in the war.

No, it’s not another movie in “The Terminator” series.

In “The Creator,” opening Sept. 29, the hunter is a human named Joshua (John David Washington). He discovers that the humanoid he’s been sent to retrieve looks like a young Asian child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). It even has a teddy bear. As Joshua bonds with the robot, he wonders whether machines are really the bad guys.

More here.