Munk Dialogue with Daniel Dennett – March 17, 2022 from Munk Debates on Vimeo.

Alison Bentley in Nature:

Six boxes of wheat seed sit in our cold store. This is the first time in a decade that my team has not been able to send to Ukraine the improved germplasm we’ve developed as part of the Global Wheat Program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Texcoco, Mexico. International postal and courier services are suspended. The seed had boosted productivity year on year in the country, which is now being devastated by war.

Our work builds on the legacy of Norman Borlaug, who catalysed the Green Revolution and staved off famine in south Asia in the 1970s. Thanks to him, I see how a grain of wheat can affect the world.

Among the horrifying humanitarian consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are deeply troubling short-, medium- and long-term disruptions to the global food supply. Ukraine and Russia contribute nearly one-third of all wheat exports (as well as almost one-third of the world’s barley and one-fifth of its corn, providing an estimated 11% of the world’s calories). Lebanon, for instance, gets 80% of its wheat from Ukraine alone.

More here.

Elias Canetti at Salmagundi:

Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to it. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it. But now death has switched masks yet again. No longer content with its ongoing daily victory, death grabs whatever it can. It riddles the air and the seas; whether the smallest or the largest, it doesn’t matter, for it wants it all, and it has no time for anything else. Nor do I have any time. I have to nab it wherever I can, nail it here and there in first-rate sentences. At the moment I cannot house it in any coffins, much less embalm it, much less lay the embalmed to rest in a gated mausoleum.
Pascal was 39 years old when he died, I will soon be 37. That means I have barely two years left, which isn’t much time! He left behind his scattered defense of Christianity. I want to gather my thoughts on the defense of the human in the face of death.

more here.

Megan A. Sullivan at nonsite:

It is interesting to see how insistently Clark describes her artistic practice as oriented toward an “ethico-religious” goal—and not just to the making of “one surface or another”—as there are few signs of that central preoccupation in her earlier writings. This confession, I think, should be read as an exercise in self-criticism. In confronting Mondrian, Clark appears to be confronting herself, although at the same time she seems to expect recognition from a person she considers to be a kindred spirit—another mystic. To describe Mondrian as a mystic is of course not uncommon. Yet the term has been used rather loosely, either to refer to Mondrian’s interest in esotericism (especially the Theosophical teachings of Madame Blavatsky) or, more generally, to the sense of spirituality that infused many early projects of abstraction. In her letter, however, Clark invokes a rather different notion of mysticism. Neither school nor doctrine is involved in it but rather a particular kind of experience.

more here.

Passaway

deep sorrow for his passaway
………….. sorry we lost he

after your passaway
…………. I give you river,
…………. cloud reflected in river

You give back river
………… you give back cloud

sorry we lost he

I give you whirling dervish of house,
…………….half-mile of heron

You give them back,
………. you are passaway

I give you memory
………. of our weekdays and weekends
……………. and all the days in between

You give them back
……….. with or without sorrow
…………… I can’t tell

sorry we lost he

I give you hodgepodge of spiders,
………… Love’s dagger-proof coat,
………………….  myself when young

I give you river and cloud,
…………. you return them, unused,
………………….. don’t need them

…………. you are passaway

by Penelope Shuttle
from The Rialto, No. 65, Summer 2008

Chauncey Devega in Salon:

As the new Faith in America survey by Deseret News & Marist College highlights, the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that religion should influence a person’s political values, where as only 28% of Democrats and 45% of independents share that view. Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, also do not consume the same sources of information about news and politics. Conservatives now inhabit their own self-created media echo chamber, which functions as a type of lie-filled and toxic closed episteme and sealed-off universe. The creation of such an alternate reality is an important attribute of fascism, in which truth itself must be destroyed and replaced with fantasies and fictions in support of the leader and his movement.

America’s struggle for democracy and freedom against authoritarianism is taking place on a biological level as well. Social psychologists and other researchers have shown that the brain structures of conservative-authoritarians are different than those of more liberal and progressive thinkers. The former are more fear-centered, emphasizing threats and dangers (negativity bias), intolerant of ambiguity and inclined to simple, binary solutions. Conservative-authoritarians are also strongly attracted to moral hierarchy and social dominance behavior.

More here.

Steven Novella in Neurologica:

It is common to observe that one of the greatest unsolved questions of science is how life began. This is a distinct question from how the diversity of the species of living things emerged. It is well established that once life had established a self-replicating system capable of generating some variation, that evolutionary forces would kick in and could, and in fact did, create all life on Earth. But we are a long way from reverse-engineering in any detail how those first organic molecules transitioned from chemistry to life.

This is not a scientific question that will be meaningfully resolved with a single experiment or discovery. Answers will slowly yield over time, as they already are, and it will take decades and perhaps centuries for something approaching a complete picture to emerge. But this progress will be built one study at a time, and Japanese scientists have recently contributing a significant piece to the puzzle.

More here.

Murray Carpenter in Literary Hub:

Knopf announced March 8 that it will publish two novels by Cormac McCarthy this fall, his first in 16 years, but don’t expect a book tour. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author lives an entirely private life.

“He doesn’t give interviews, doesn’t give lectures, and doesn’t do book signings,” Michael Hall wrote in Texas Monthly in 1998. “He doesn’t like to talk about writing or his life, which, of course, makes other writers, his fans, and even non-fans more curious.”

There have actually been a few interviews—The New York Times Magazine in 1992, Vanity Fair in 2005, Oprah Winfrey in 2007, and The Wall Street Journal in 2009. McCarthy did a reading in Santa Fe in 2015, and offered science writing tips in the journal Nature in 2019. But that’s been about it. Some authors do more publicity in a week.

So I was skeptical when David Sudak told me he’d received details about the craft of writing directly from McCarthy. But Sudak is a teacher who is passionate about good writing, the sort of person who just might have the goods. He told a tale as convincing as it was improbable.

More here.

Dan Goodin in Ars Technica:

When we teach people how to avoid falling victim to phishing sites, we usually advise closely inspecting the address bar to make sure it does contain HTTPS and that it doesn’t contain suspicious domains such as google.evildomain.com or substitute letters such as g00gle.com. But what if someone found a way to phish passwords using a malicious site that didn’t contain these telltale signs?

One researcher has devised a technique to do just that. He calls it a BitB, short for “browser in the browser.” It uses a fake browser window inside a real browser window to spoof an OAuth page. Hundreds of thousands of sites use the OAuth protocol to let visitors login using their existing accounts with companies like Google, Facebook, or Apple. Instead of having to create an account on the new site, visitors can use an account that they already have—and the magic of OAuth does the rest.

More here.

Matt Taibbi in his Substack newsletter:

The New York Times ran a tepid house editorial in favor of free speech last week. A sober reaction [shown on right here]:

One might think running botched WMD reports that got us into the Iraq war or getting a Pulitzer for lauding Stalin’s liquidation of five million kulaks might have constituted worse days — who knew? Pundits, academics, and politicians across the cultural mainstream seemed to agree with Watson, plunging into a days-long freakout over a meh editorial that shows little sign of abating.

“Appalling,” barked J-school professor Jeff Jarvis. “By the time the Times finally realizes what side it’s on, it may be too late,” screeched Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch. “The board should retract and resign,” said journalist and former Planet Money of NPR fame founder Adam Davidson. “Toxic, brain-deadening bothsidesism,” railed Dan Froomkin of Press Watch, who went on to demand a retraction and a “mass resignation.” The aforementioned Watson agreed, saying “the NYT should retract this insanity, and replace the entire editorial board.”

More here.

Kimon de Greef in The New Yorker:

In 2013, a charismatic Mexican doctor took the stage at Burning Man, in Nevada, to give a tedx talk on what he called “the ultimate experience.” The doctor’s name was Octavio Rettig, and he would soon become known by his first name alone, like some pop diva or soccer star. He told the crowd that, years earlier, he had overcome a crack addiction by using a powerful psychedelic substance produced by toads in the Sonoran Desert. Afterward, he shared “toad medicine” with a tribal community in northern Mexico, where the rise of narco-trafficking had brought on a methamphetamine crisis. Through this work, he came to believe that smoking toad, as the practice is called, was an ancient Mesoamerican ritual—a “unique toadal language,” shared by Mayans and Aztecs—that had been stamped out during the colonial era. He announced that he’d restored a lost tradition, and that he had a duty to share it with others. “Sooner or later, everyone in the world will have this experience,” he told an interviewer after the talk.

At the time, Octavio, who was thirty-four, was virtually unknown within the world of psychedelics—as was smoking toad. But two years later Vice made him the subject of a laudatory documentary, calling him “a hallucinogenic-toad prophet.” (The film has more than three and a half million views on YouTube.) Octavio became, as Klaudia Oliver, the organizer of the tedx talk, put it, “the Pied Piper of toad.” By Octavio’s count, he has introduced toad smoking to more than ten thousand people.

More here.

Siobhan Roberts in The New York Times:

During a workshop last fall at the Vatican, Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist with the Collège de France, gave a presentation chronicling his quest to understand what makes humans — for better or worse — so special. Dr. Dehaene has spent decades probing the evolutionary roots of our mathematical instinct; this was the subject of his 1996 book, “The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.” Lately, he has zeroed in on a related question: What sorts of thoughts, or computations, are unique to the human brain? Part of the answer, Dr. Dehaene believes, might be our seemingly innate intuitions about geometry.

Organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Vatican workshop addressed the subject “Symbols, Myths and Religious Sense in Humans Since the First” — that is, since the first humans emerged a couple of million years back. Dr. Dehaene began his slide show with a collage of photographs showing symbols engraved in rock — scythes, axes, animals, gods, suns, stars, spirals, zigzags, parallel lines, dots. Some of the photos he took during a trip to the Valley of Marvels in southern France. These engravings are thought to date back to the Bronze Age, from roughly 3,300 B.C. to 1,200 B.C.; others were 70,000 and 540,000 years old. He also showed a photo of a “biface” stone implement — spherical at one end, triangular at the other — and he noted that humans sculpted similar tools 1.8 million years ago.

More here.

Hannah Gold at Bookforum:

IN AN ESSAY ABOUT NATALIA GINZBURG, the Chilean novelist and critic Alejandro Zambra writes, “When someone repeats a story we presume they don’t remember that they’ve already told it, but often we repeat stories consciously, because we are unable to repress the desire, the joy of telling them again.” Of course the compulsion to retell a story is not always situated in joy’s lofty terrain. We might repeat a story in the hopes of shrinking it to a manageable bite, or because it reminds us of another story, or to shine up disagreeable aspects of our lives, or to mock it, perhaps secretly wishing it will deflect mockery from our more vulnerable, foolish selves. All of this is present, for me, in Zambra’s writing, and has been since the first time I read his work, which was around four years ago on the recommendation of someone I’d been on a few dates with. In the desultory landscapes of Bushwick and Greenpoint the snow was comically high, but only in retrospect. Everyone suddenly knew what an NDA was and wondered how to get out of theirs. We talked haughtily and agreeably about literature, and then I said something cruel about his dog, which turned out really to be the only thing, years later, we still talked about. The dog was named after a writer who composed several books of poetry but is best known for his novels.

more here.

Carrie Battan at The New Yorker:

The Spanish pop star Rosalía is the rarest kind of modern musician: a relentlessly innovative aesthetic omnivore who also happens to have a decade of Old World, genre-specific formal training under her belt. As a teen-ager living on the outskirts of Barcelona, she was introduced to flamenco music by a group of friends from Andalusia, a region in the south of Spain where the style originated. Hearing the music of the flamenco giant Camarón de la Isla, she once told El Mundo, made her feel as if her “head exploded.” The discovery prompted Rosalía to throw her entire being into the practice of flamenco, an elemental genre built around hand-clapping, acoustic guitar, and a fierce and improvisational vocal style. She took flamenco dance classes; she learned guitar and piano, and, most important, she enrolled at the Catalonia College of Music, under the tutelage of the decorated flamenco singer and teacher Chiqui de la Línea. Pioneered by the Romani people (the term for Spain’s Gypsy population), the vocals of traditional flamenco are like kites—they follow unpredictable and precarious paths but sound as if they’re being buoyed by an invisible force of nature. Rosalía did not merely train to become a singer; she strove to master the intense and distinctive styles of flamenco’s beloved cantaores and cantaoras.

more here.

Maureen Plays Bach

—on Bach’s birthday, 1^st day of spring

Outside, above tulips, sea lavender –
hummingbirds, wingbeats
swift and sweet as a trill.

In here – Bach wants Maureen’s fingers
to move just so on a quick trip
from earth to heaven.
She cannot think them
where to go,

so he waves his baton
from the swelling
at the top of the spine
where Will shows Desire
how to enter the World.

It’s where we store the learned,
the practiced virtues –
riding a bicycle,
a chip shot,

the feel of a pinch of salt.

by Nils Peterson

Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Guardian:

At the beginning of Elena Ferrante’s last novel, The Lying Life of Adults (2020), the narrator recalls a moment of shame from early adolescence that left her feeling permanently untethered. “I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story,” she writes. Describing herself as “only a tangled knot”, she says: “Nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.”

The sense of self-estrangement, the ugly-beautiful imagery, the mood of anguish – these are the constants in Ferrante’s fiction, from her early first-person stories about desperate women whose lives are going to pieces to her Neapolitan Quartet that made Ferrante an international phenomenon – as well as the world’s most famous literary recluse. She has always been fascinated by the way reality is transformed into art. Who gets to tell whose story? What if the story I’m telling leads nowhere? Is fiction more truthful when seen behind a veil of lies?

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

When we experience shame, we feel bad; and when we inflict shame, we feel good. Those seem to be among the few points of consensus when it comes to what the historian Peter N. Stearns calls a “disputed emotion.” Unlike fear or anger, shame is “self-conscious”; it doesn’t erupt so much as coil around itself. It requires an awareness of others and their disapproval, and it has to be learned. Aristotle thought of it as fundamental to ethical behavior; Confucius saw it as essential to social order.

But it can also be harmful, even ruinous. Recall children in dunce caps, perjurers in pillories, adulterers branded with scarlet letters. Last fall, Vivian Gornick published an essay in Harper’s Magazine that described the most extreme experiences of shame as tantamount to annihilation. “Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries forever,” she writes. “It allows people to brood for decades on end, often deforming their inner lives.” No surprise that it’s such a rich subject for novelists. In addition to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Gornick lists many others, including George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” and Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” There’s Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth,” snubbed to the point of addiction and suicide.

More here.