Homesickness as Particle Theory

An atom cannot exist
if the center does not hold.

Matter cannot hold
if the atoms swing apart
too far—

that summer night:
I could feel the pieces of my life
circling away from me in distances so vast

the volume of separation
seemed infinite.

I caught
the wisp of my grandfather’s
pipe smoke,

the saturated indigo
of a green downstate summer evening,

every window open
to the chance of sleep

in deep humidity,
washed in waves of cricket song

and the far pungent howl of a coyote
edging the cornfields.

All in seconds
lifted away.

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Junot Díaz in the Boston Review:

Those of us who revere Octavia Butler’s work and have never stopped mourning her passing do so in part, I suspect, because we know that no matter what happens in this Universe there will never be anyone like Butler again—not as a person and certainly not as an artist. Like Toni Morrison, Butler was a literary eucatastrophe, (a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur), a literary Kwisatz Haderach (Butler loved Dune) that occurs so very rarely in a culture and only if it is lucky.

For those who do not know her (and apparently there are still plenty who don’t): Octavia Estelle Butler is one of our greatest writers, though in the larger culture she is described as the first Black woman to write science fiction professionally. That biographeme—Black Woman Science Fiction Writer—defined Butler her entire career in spite of the fact that her extraordinary and most well-known novel, Kindred (1979), was not science fiction at all, but a neo-slave narrative that Butler herself described as “grim fantasy.” Butler died in 2006, at the age of fifty-eight, far, far too young, publishing fourteen books (fifteen if we count the posthumous collection, Unexpected Stories). They radically transformed multiple canons—U.S. literature, African diasporic literature, feminist literature, science fiction, speculative fiction—but also radically altered the imaginaries of generations of readers and artists. Now with Kindred on television, in an eight-part series by FX on Hulu, a different set of audiences will have the opportunity to discover Butler for themselves.

More here.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

It’s somewhat amazing that cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, can make any progress at all. But it has, especially so in recent decades. Partly that’s because nature has been kind to us in some ways: the universe is quite a simple place on large scales and at early times. Another reason is a leap forward in the data we have collected, and in the growing use of a powerful tool: computer simulations. I talk with cosmologist Andrew Pontzen on what we know about the universe, and how simulations have helped us figure it out. We also touch on hot topics in cosmology (early galaxies discovered by JWST) as well as philosophical issues (are simulations data or theory?).

More here.

Jonathan Watts in The Guardian:

Ecological collapse is likely to start sooner than previously believed, according to a new study that models how tipping points can amplify and accelerate one another.

Based on these findings, the authors warn that more than a fifth of ecosystems worldwide, including the Amazon rainforest, are at risk of a catastrophic breakdown within a human lifetime.

“It could happen very soon,” said Prof Simon Willcock of Rothamsted Research, who co-led the study. “We could realistically be the last generation to see the Amazon.”

The research, which was published on Thursday in Nature Sustainability, is likely to generate a heated debate.

More here.

Lisa Allardice in The Guardian:

‘Guilty!” American novelist Barbara Kingsolver says when I ask how she feels to become the first writer to win the Women’s prize for fiction twice. “Guilty and delighted,” she says over coffee in a London hotel, the morning after winning the prize for her tenth novel Demon Copperhead. “I don’t want to be greedy. I don’t want to take something that would be more helpful to someone else. It’s my upbringing, I was raised in a culture of modesty.”

With a Susan-Sontag silver streak in her hair and steely good humour, 68-year-old Kingsolver is a quiet titan of American literature. Best-known for her mega-selling 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna, which won the Women’s (then Orange) prize in 2010, she has taken on uncomfortable subjects such as American colonialism and climate change. She counts Hillary Clinton as a friend and was invited to lunch at the White House with Barack Obama – “One of the most magnetically attractive human beings” – who quizzed her for writing tips. And yet, she rarely leaves the farm in the mountains of south-west Virginia, where she lives with her husband. When she is not writing, she turns her hand to delivering breach lambs. “I’ve done things that risk my wedding band, I’ll just put it like that,” she says, laughing. “When I’m at home, I don’t talk like this,” she says of her east coast accent. “Do you want to hear how I talk? ‘How y’all doing? Ahm’a so sorry-ee,’” she sings with a Dolly Parton twang. Not bad for someone who says “they don’t make people more introverted than me”.

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Below the Hill of the Three Churches

The little oyster dragger swings out
on its hawser as far right
as the first flat run of tide in the channel
allows. It panics a frieze of willets into
running left away from its hull, or else
the hull is still and the shifting birds
suggest motion to it, as a ship departing
will seem to set the pier underway; but now
the dragger’s tending left where a
smoke-light skein of least sandpipers
just landed, a shoal creeping forward as
the willets step right, stiff-legged,
mimicking the bridge crossing mud on stilts
far down where a gull begins to slide
on a crawl of heat among exposed hummocks.
Taken with its own effortless riding, it
spins this way on the silt-lift, now that.
Come quick out the door of the Feed and
Grain and ground me with a sack of
sunflower seeds: under three spires
I’d believed rigid until now,
everything’s deviating from the mean.

by Brendan Galvin
from Sky and Island Light
Louisiana State University Press, 1996

Temple Grandin in The New York Times:

In “Planta Sapiens,” Paco Calvo, a philosopher of plant behavior, and his co-author, Natalie Lawrence, present the idea that flora are intelligent — that is, capable of cognition. In Calvo’s opinion, people pay more attention to animals than plants and this may explain why some of plants’ remarkable abilities have been overlooked. Our evolutionary history may also shape our reduced attention to the subject; plants are, after all, unlikely to attack people.

Research shows that we are more likely to focus on rapidly presented pictures of animals than those of plants. Studies also demonstrate that while children quickly learn that both humans and animals are living beings, it takes them longer to understand the same thing about plants — indeed, many children do not comprehend it until they are around 10 years old. Calvo refers to this human tendency by a term coined in the 1990s: “plant blindness.”

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Patrick Bigger and Federico Sibaja in Phenomenal World:

A brewing sovereign debt crisis threatens to engulf as many as sixty-one countries in debt distress over the coming year. Aid flowing from the global North—which carries the most responsibility for the atmospheric carbon stock—to the global South—which bears the brunt of its impacts—must be dramatically scaled up. Despite professing the need for global climate solutions, governments in the more prosperous countries have responded to this threat with lassitude and indifference, as evidenced by the slate of unambitious, unserious, and demonstrably ineffective responses issued from their recent summits. Meanwhile, democratic deficits within the institutions of multilateral governance show the difficulty of grappling with the pronounced asymmetries in our international financial architecture. Even the most ambitious reforms slated for discussion at week’s Summit on a New Global Financing Pact in Paris fail to confront the fundamental role of debt in that asymmetrical architecture.

There is a growing consensus among global South governments, civil society organizations, and even some staff within the twin pillars of the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs), the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, that a thoroughgoing overhaul is required to contend with twenty-first century problems. New governance of the institutions, new trade conditions, and a new debt architecture should all be part of reforms that acknowledge that the main barrier is not access to finance, but who sets the terms and defines the processes of the current economic framework.

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Tim Sahay in Foreign Policy:

While campaigning for the U.S. presidency, Joe Biden sharply criticized the Modi government’s human rights record, writing how two of its landmark laws are “inconsistent with the country’s long tradition of secularism and with sustaining a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy.” Today, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads a country that is suddenly at the center of U.S. strategy in Asia. And Biden has changed his tune, inviting the prime minister to a state visit this week.

It’s widely understood that when U.S. elites refer to India having a functional free press, judiciary, and democracy, they are either dishonest or in denial about how the country’s political system has developed under Modi. But the same is true when they praise India’s economy. The U.S. government seems to be operating under the assumption that Modi’s India can sustain the country as it decouples from Chinese manufacturing. There is little reason to believe that is true.

Modi’s “Gujarat model” shot him to the prime ministry in 2014. As chief minister in Gujarat, he had led a developmentalist state: midwifing new industries, repairing bureaucracies, and making huge electricity and infrastructure investments. The state’s growth rate boomed as subsidies were given to politically connected conglomerates and to state-owned players.

But the model has failed when extended to the national stage. While Modi has succeeded in selling himself to his constituents and the world as India’s great modernizer, builder, and attractor of capital, the country’s growth under Modi has flagged.

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Timothy Andersen in Aeon:

hen I was in my mid-30s, I was faced with a difficult decision. It had repercussions for years, and at times the choice I made filled me with regret. I had two job offers. One was to work at a very large physics experiment on the West Coast of the United States called the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Last year, they achieved a nuclear fusion breakthrough. The other offer was to take a job at a university research institute. I agonised over the choice for weeks. ­There were pros and cons in both directions. I reached out to a mentor from graduate school, a physicist I respected, and asked him to help me choose. He told me to take the university job, and so I did.

In the years to come, whenever my work seemed dull and uninspiring, or the vagaries of funding forced me down an unwelcome path, or – worse – the NIF was in the news, my mind would turn back to that moment and ask: ‘What if?’ Imagine if I were at that other job in that other state thousands of miles away. Imagine a different life that I would never live.

Then again, perhaps I had dodged a bullet, who knows?

Every life contains pain. Even the perfect life, the life where you have everything you want, hides its own unique struggles. Writing in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche said: ‘Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering.’ A life apparently perfect but devoid of meaning, no matter how comfortable, is a kind of hell.

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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

Vowell’s unforgettable early contribution to a relatively early incarnation of This American Life (back in 1999), in which she performed a similar feat, though that time unfurling the entire history of the United States drawing on the 720 degree panorama (360 degrees of space compounded by 360 degrees of time) available from just one street corner in Chicago. To wit, this one here: Michigan Avenue as it courses over the Chicago River and intersects with Wacker Drive.

If you’ve already heard that piece, as many of you will have, you should need no reminding: you won’t likely have forgotten it. If not, though, do yourselves a favor and pause right here right now to listen to it right here. (I’m not kidding, just twenty minutes and it may well change how you think about everything from now on—and besides, it’s just so much fun.)

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Gabriel Hart at the LARB:

One of the strangest, most audacious winks Fear of Kathy Acker bestows is the fact that its contents have little to do with her. Yet Skelley pays substantial tribute to Acker in his introduction, pointing to his own literary puberty in which she was a catalyst: “[H]er vastly funny, scary, sexy portals to expression opened at a susceptible period. […] It was a nascent and fertile moment when Kathy, at the peak of her powers, disrupted me, erupted in me.” After hearing the chapbook discussed on the radio in the 1980s, Acker sent Skelley a postcard that would become a crowning endorsement of the work: “[D]espite my dislike of seeing my own name I think you’re a good writer […] Never what’s expected,” she wrote.

About one-fourth of FOKA’s 135 pages consists of commentary by poet Amy Gerstler, author/critic Sabrina Tarasoff, and Skelley himself, taking the rare opportunity to fully contextualize his work.

more here.

Interview with a Birangona

—8. After the war was over, what did you do? Did you go back home?

I stood in the dark
doorway. Twilight. My grandfather’s

handprint raw across my face. Byadob,
he called me: trouble-

How could you let them
touch you? he asked, the pomade just

coaxed into his thin hair
a familiar shadow of scent

between us even as he turned
away. Don’t come

back, he said I walked past his
turned-away back. Past fresh-plucked

lychees brimming
yellow baskets. Past Mother

on the doorstep sifting through rice flour,
refusing or told not

to look up, though the new
president has wrapped me in our new

flag: a red sun rising
across a green field. You

saved our country, he said. I said
nothing. The dark rope

of Mother’s shaking arm was what
I last saw before I walked away.

No. No. Not since.

by Tarfia Faizullah
from Seam
(Southern Illinois Press, 2014)

Birangana

Eyal Press in The New York Times:

Some years ago, a psychiatrist named Wendy Dean read an article about a physician who died by suicide. Such deaths were distressingly common, she discovered. The suicide rate among doctors appeared to be even higher than the rate among active military members, a notion that startled Dean, who was then working as an administrator at a U.S. Army medical research center in Maryland. Dean started asking the physicians she knew how they felt about their jobs, and many of them confided that they were struggling. Some complained that they didn’t have enough time to talk to their patients because they were too busy filling out electronic medical records. Others bemoaned having to fight with insurers about whether a person with a serious illness would be preapproved for medication. The doctors Dean surveyed were deeply committed to the medical profession. But many of them were frustrated and unhappy, she sensed, not because they were burned out from working too hard but because the health care system made it so difficult to care for their patients.

In July 2018, Dean published an essay with Simon G. Talbot, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, that argued that many physicians were suffering from a condition known as moral injury. Military psychiatrists use the term to describe an emotional wound sustained when, in the course of fulfilling their duties, soldiers witnessed or committed acts — raiding a home, killing a noncombatant — that transgressed their core values. Doctors on the front lines of America’s profit-driven health care system were also susceptible to such wounds, Dean and Talbot submitted, as the demands of administrators, hospital executives and insurers forced them to stray from the ethical principles that were supposed to govern their profession.

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David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times:

Hype springs eternal in medicine, but lately the horizon of new possibility seems almost blindingly bright. “I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “And I can say that throughout that period of time, I’ve just never experienced what we’re seeing over just the last five years.”

A Nobel laureate, Doudna is known primarily for Crispr, the gene-editing Swiss Army knife that has been called “a word processor” for the human genome and that she herself describes as “a technology that literally enables the rewriting of the code of life.” The work for which Doudna shared the Nobel Prize was published more than a decade ago, in 2012, opening up what seemed like an almost limitless horizon for Crispr-powered therapies and cures. But surveying the recent landscape of scientific breakthroughs, she says the last half-decade has been more remarkable still: “I think we’re at an extraordinary time of accelerating discoveries.”

More here.