Michael W. Clune at Harper’s Magazine:

Despite some intriguing speculation, scientists haven’t yet come up with a clear, satisfying answer to the question of why we dream. Part of the reason is doubtless because, as any time spent studying neuroscience will show you, our knowledge of the brain is in its infancy. And part of it is due to the special limitations of dream research. Animal studies—sometimes referred to as the gold standard of neuroscientific research (think of the things one can do to rat brains that one can’t do to humans)—are of no help here. Like many pet owners, I believe that my dog dreams. But when I see her lying on the couch, muttering and growling with her eyes moving behind closed lids, I can’t wake her and ask her what she saw. When I spoke about the state of the field with the dream researcher Erin Wamsley, she described a kind of disappointment, a sense that the breakthrough insights into the nature of dreaming that seemed imminent a decade or two ago haven’t materialized.

more here.

Jackson Arn in the Boston Review:

While I was reading Magritte: A Life, I started to notice apples everywhere. I’d be on the train, learning about The Son of Man—the 1964 portrait of a bowler-hatted man whose face is masked by a floating green apple—and the woman sitting across from me would be wearing a T-shirt with a reproduction of same painting. Or I’d be in a café and someone a few seats away would be eating an apple in an identical shade of cat’s-eye green. I’d take notes on my laptop and catch a glimpse of the glowing apple on the back. The world suddenly seemed full of apples. This wasn’t an epiphany; it felt smaller and stranger, an itch I couldn’t quite scratch—in a word, Magritte.

René François Ghislain Magritte: born 1898, died 1967; noted fan of bowler hats and pipes; creator of some 1,100 oil paintings and another 850 works on paper, many of which now seem kitschy or lazily repetitive; and yet, I suspect, the twentieth-century artist whose work best anticipated the texture and tenor of life in the twenty-first.

More here.

Lawrence M. Krauss in Critical Mass:

The newest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report released in late February paints a bleak picture of the global and local effects of climate change in coming decades, and of the challenges that governments and citizens face as they work to address the problems that will arise due to human induced global warming.

Have things changed dramatically since I published “The Physics of Climate Change” last year at this time? Not really. Just a clearer sense of current issues, and a clearer statement of what needs to be done and the challenge of doing it.

The key points are pretty clear.

(1)  We are dumping about 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, about 50% of which will remain there for a millennium.

More here.

Yascha Mounk in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: It’s been a month since the beginning of the war. What is the state of war today, and how is that different from what we might have expected four weeks ago?

Anne Applebaum: We know exactly what the Russians expected four weeks ago. We know because the US Defense Department had a leak of some kind. There was a very specific battle plan, which involved the taking of Kiev in three to four days, and then the conquest of all of Ukraine (including Western Ukraine, all the way up to the Polish border) within four to six weeks. We know that after three or four days, already there were articles written celebrating the conquest of Ukraine and the reunification of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, one of which accidentally appeared on a Russian website and was quickly taken down. So we know what the plan was. And I have to say that that was also what most American analysts thought would happen.

More here.

More here.

My Sister Teaches Me How to Ululate

Yallah habibti, move your tongue like the sea
easy. My big sister teaches me to ululate, rolls
her tongue in waves. Dips thin fingers inside
my mouth to pull out mine, stretches it long
and pinches the tip. Watch, we move tongues
like this. I see the walls of our father’s house
collapse and we swim free leleleleleleleleleee

On the ferry to Tangier I shriek across the sea.
Practice how to sound like a real woman. Old
aunties grab my buttocks, smush their breasts
against my back and sing leleleleleleleleleleee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Don’t cover your mouth habibti! Only women
on the upper deck, only sea. We move tongues
like this to tell the waves stay back, tell men

stay back, tell the dead stay gone, tell runaway
wives stay gone. They turn me into wisteria
woman, limbs wrapped around poles and thighs
as they guide me. Throw back your head, epiglottis
to the breeze. Salt air burns my hot membranes,
scratches at the tight knots of my chords.
All my life I was told

women must swallow sand
unless we are sounding
a warning.

Seema Yasmin
from Foundry, Issue 8

Sunil Khilnani in The New Yorker:

At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. To the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement. Imperial tutelage, often imparted through the barrel of an Enfield, was delivering benighted peoples from the errors of their ways—child marriage, widow immolation, headhunting. Among the edifiers was a Devonshire-born rector’s son named Henry Hugh Tudor. Hughie, as he was known to Winston Churchill and his other chums, pops up so reliably in colonial outposts with outsized body counts that his story can seem a “Where’s Waldo?” of empire.

He’s Churchill’s garrison-mate in Bangalore in 1895—a time of “messes and barbarism,” the future Prime Minister complained in a note to his mum. As the century turns, Tudor is battling Boers on the veldt; then it’s back to India, and on to occupied Egypt. Following a decorated stint as a smoke-screen artist in the trenches of the First World War, he’s in command of a gendarmerie, nicknamed Tudor’s Toughs, that opens fire in a Dublin stadium in 1920—an assault during a search for I.R.A. assassins which leaves dozens of civilians dead or wounded. Prime Minister David Lloyd George delights in rumors that Tudor’s Toughs were killing two Sinn Féinners for every murdered loyalist. Later, even the military’s chief of staff marvelled at how nonchalantly the men spoke of those killings, tallying them up as though they were runs in a cricket match; Tudor and his “scallywags” were out of control. It didn’t matter: Churchill, soon to be Secretary of State for the Colonies, had Tudor’s back.

More here.

Frank Bruni in The New York Times:

Imogen Sara Smith at Current:

Bunker Hill was film noir’s favorite neighborhood. In the 1940s and ’50s, the once-exclusive area of downtown LA, with its rambling Victorian mansions, was attractively seedy and decaying, and supremely photogenic. The steep streets create natural Dutch angles, and the long stairways slice diagonally across the screen, vertiginous and crooked like something in a bad dream. Angels Flight, a whimsical funicular railway, is an instantly recognizable landmark. The houses have tall, narrow stoops with cagelike porch railings and flaking scrollwork, stained-glass transoms, and other emblems of scuffed and dingy grandeur. Most are cheap rooming houses, with sour, suspicious landladies and tenants whose faces and fortunes sag like the buildings. “Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town,” Raymond Chandler writes in his 1942 novel The High Window. Its tawdry charms lend flavor to Cry Danger (1951), Chicago Calling (1951), and The Turning Point (1952). In Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949), Burt Lancaster returns to his mother’s Hill Street home, convinced he has finally gotten over his ex-wife, only to immediately tumble back into the gravitational pull of their bruising relationship.

more here.

Agnieszka Dale at the LARB:

Hodrová was never associated with the dissident movement in the former Czechoslovakia, and none of her writing was published in the underground but half-tolerated samizdat form. As a scholarly woman writing in a rather recondite literary tradition, she probably wasn’t taken very seriously by more “political” (male) authors, and she didn’t really care for them either, it seems. As it turns out, all this has stood her in good stead. The many “banned authors” of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s were finally published in the early 1990s — and then the world basically lost interest in them, paving the way for “new voices” to emerge, including Hodrová’s. After she was awarded the Kafka Prize, whose winners include the likes of Harold Pinter and Margaret Atwood, Hodrová has even been proposed a few times to the Nobel Committee.

Although City of Torment is an experimental work, it is not a hard read.

more here.

Kenneth Rosen in Wired News:

THE ACT OF doomscrolling—spinning continuously through bad news despite its disheartening and depressing effects—and social media envy, like the fear of missing out, present greater risks to your health than were previously realized.

A tranche of research over the past few years, amid the global coronavirus pandemic, a rise in armed conflicts, and increased economic woes, has offered a glimpse into what leaves us restless at night and the ways social media and our phones exacerbate feelings of helplessness. Spawning from a sense of inadequacy about one’s appearance or a perceived lack of achievements, anyone scrolling their phones for extended periods and misusing social media faces an elevated risk of depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and suicide.

But when at least one in five Americans get their news through social media, it seems a near impossibility to disassociate from our digital avatars and the mobile computers we cart with us everywhere. Like most everything in life, moderation is key.

More here.

From Delancey Place:

Legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday’s autobiography is considered an American classic. Co-written with author and journalist William Dufty at a point when much had already been written about her, it is titled Lady Sings the Blues.

…”The opening line of the book, ‘Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married,’ was reshaped from the 1945 PM article. In it Billie was asked to talk about her life, and she began by saying that she was born in Baltimore in 1915 of parents who were ‘just a couple of kids.’ When asked what she meant by that, she replied: “‘Mom was 13 … and Pop was 15.’ She paused. ‘Mom’s and Pop’s parents just about had a fit when it happened. They’d never heard of things like that going on in our part of Baltimore. But they were poor kids, Mom and Pop, and when you’re poor you grow up fast.’ “Billie turned her eyes to us, smiled, and her frown disappeared. She lighted a Chesterfield, and began speaking rapidly, between short, reflective pauses. “‘Mom and Pop didn’t get married till I was three years old,’ she said …

“The British magazine the New Statesman later reprinted those sentences and offered prizes for the best ‘similarly explosive first or last sentences from a real or imagined biography.’ Over a hundred readers gave it a try, but the New Statesman awarded only consolation prizes and declared that the contest was more difficult than they had imagined:

“‘Miss Holiday’s explosiveness … is no simple formula. In 23 superbly chosen words, she has established her background, recorded at least five relevant facts, illustrated (by her method of doing so) one facet of her own character and made firm friends with the reader by a breathtaking and slightly naughty denouement. Too many of her imitators felt that vulgarity or sheer improbability were satisfactory substitutes for the artfully conjured impudence and shock which characterized the original.'”

More here.

Cerro Pelado Lookout Cerro

mid-april, first day

snow finally melted off 270 road
tho all the rocks right where I left’em last year
two turkey hunters already in the parking area
‘that you guys gobbling down Water Canyon?’
‘yeah we saw a flock of ’em way far away
took a Hail Mary shot but nothing’

clean all silverware + dishes
set in sun to dry
sweep + mop upstairs and down around radio repeater
wash windows all four directions
rattles + catwalk clinks + clanks
mustiness of moths and months

winds 10-15 out of the south
cloud cover 15% cirrus to the east over the Sangres
Barb over in Barillas LO not up yet but she did come back
working on her history of the lookouts of Santa Fe
46 degrees turn on oven + crack the door
make gluten free glop for breakfast
add yoghurt granola + nuts (+ honey!)

call Dispatch in-service for the summer
gonna be cold tonight up here at 10,000 feet
still things to unpack from truck:
guitar mandolin computer books clothes zafu
food for a week or more MREs agua

all my old friends: Redondo   Valle Caldera   el Rio Grande
la Sierra de Nacamiento   Cerro Griego   Cerro del Pino
San Diego Canyon   San Pedro Wilderness
Borrego Mesa     Paliza Canyon
Sandia + Mt Taylor across the flatlands
the pondos + PJ + goddamn rock squirrels
waiting to burrow up in my air filter

nothing but time
brew first cup of tea
sit down + look out

Read more »

Pico Iyer in Guernica:

Travel is, deep down, an exercise in trust, and sometimes I think it was you who became my life’s most enduring teacher. I had every reason to be wary when, in 1985, I clambered out of the overnight train and stepped out into the October sunshine of Mandalay, blinking amidst the dust and bustle of the “City of Kings.” I wasn’t reassured as you sprang out of the rickety bicycle trishaw in which you’d been sleeping, as you did every night, and I don’t think the signs along the sides of your vehicle — b.sc. (maths) and my life — put my mind very much to rest.

To me it seemed like a bold leap of faith — a shot in the dark — to allow a rough-bearded man in a cap to pedal me away from the broad main boulevards and into the broken backstreets, and then to lead me into the little hut where you shared a tiny room with a tired compatriot. Yes, you gave me a piece of jade as we rode and disarmed me with the essays you’d written and now handed me on how to enjoy your town. But I’d grown up on stories of what happens when you’re in a foreign place and recklessly neglect a mother’s advice to never accept gifts from strangers.

More here.

Philip Ball in Scientific American:

In case you had not noticed, computers are hot—literally. A laptop can pump out thigh-baking heat, while data centers consume an estimated 200 terawatt-hours each year—comparable to the energy consumption of some medium-sized countries. The carbon footprint of information and communication technologies as a whole is close to that of fuel use in the aviation industry. And as computer circuitry gets ever smaller and more densely packed, it becomes more prone to melting from the energy it dissipates as heat.

Now physicist James Crutchfield of the University of California, Davis, and his graduate student Kyle Ray have proposed a new way to carry out computation that would dissipate only a small fraction of the heat produced by conventional circuits.

More here.

Michael Galway at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:

Thousands of health workers around the world hunt for polio in two ways: By looking for signs of acute flaccid paralysis in children and testing the environment for the presence of the virus. In Pakistan, for the first time ever, both sets of data look promising: There hasn’t been a single child paralyzed by wild poliovirus in more than a year or any virus detected in the environment in more than two months.

This morning, I accompanied Bill Gates to Pakistan’s National Emergency Operations Center in Islamabad because he wanted to see the progress for himself. We got to listen in as the team leading Pakistan’s program pored over a huge trove of data and debated what it was telling them about how to reach more children in the next house-to-house vaccination campaign, which starts a week from now.

More here.

David Sloan Wilson and Dennis J. Snower in Evonomics:

DSW: Greetings, Dennis! I look forward to discussing the backstory of our article. Let’s begin with how we met, which says a lot about the need for paradigmatic change. It was a workshop organized by a major foundation to explore how to go beyond neoclassical economics. The participants were drawn from a number of academic disciplines such as law, political science, and sociology in addition to economics. Each discipline had its own table, so the layout of the room reflected the siloed nature of the disciplines. I was the only person with evolutionary training, so I was assigned to the sociology table. That’s ironic, because sociology is even further behind economics in embracing evolutionary science.

I learned a lot from the workshop, including how much the neoclassical paradigm has influenced law in addition to economics. But by the end I became depressed, as table after table reported that this kind of transdisciplinary endeavor would not be career-enhancing within their respective disciplines. It was clear that the siloed nature of the human-related academic disciplines was not going to break down anytime soon, no matter how much money was thrown at it.

More here.