Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

THE DAY AFTER a Manhattan jury held Donald J. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll nearly three decades earlier, the former president came out swinging on a CNN broadcast from St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. “She’s a whack job,” he said. “This is a fake story, a made-up story,” he insisted. The paltry bit of feminist satisfaction I and millions of other American women had felt when the verdict came down suddenly seemed transitory. How much of a victory was the verdict if the perpetrator could come out with statements like this mere hours after it was delivered?

The jury of six men and three women had awarded Carroll $5 million in damages, including almost $3 million for the reputational damage she suffered by the former president’s public statements against her. Another $2 million was awarded because the jury believed the evidence that Trump had sexually abused Carroll at an encounter at a department store in New York City. Appearing on MSNBC, Carroll called the verdict a victory for all women because “we did away with the perfect victim concept.” That imaginary perfect victim, Carroll added, “always screams” and “writes the date in her diary.”

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Joe Moshenska at The Guardian:

Reading Schulz’s works, it’s easy to see why he might have had such an effect on this array of creative minds. His stories defy description, explication, paraphrase. They are set in a phantasmagoric version of the city of Drohobycz (now in western Ukraine), where Schulz was born and died, and largely in and around the cloth shop on the market square that his parents owned, but in a version of these places where time and space have become molten and malleable. They take place in “years which – like a sixth, smallest toe – grow a 13th freak month” in “an illegal time… liable to all kinds of excesses and crazes”. The narrator’s father – a looming, manic, tragicomic version of Schulz’s own – at one point wastes away to nothing, leaving only “the small shroud of his body” and “a handful of nonsensical oddities”; at another he morphs into “a monstrous, hairy, steel blue horsefly”, a development that the narrator takes in his stride as just one of many “summer aberrations”. The stories read like the quintessence of the human imagination in its densest, strangest form, as if his language were a thick, sweet concentrate of the creativity that other writers dilute to a sippable weakness.

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Sure There Is Food

There is eating one’s self

There is even truth now and then—
Of course a lie can be made to go
Farther that way

The trick is to get truth and lies
To sound just the same

That way you’ve got it made
Everybody is mad after a while

Then you can come up with a world
where madness is the normal thing

Of course those who rig it that way
End up mad themselves

But—who’s to know the difference?
This world’s the best example I know

by Kenneth Patchen
from Collected Poems, 1968

Dwight Garner at the New York Times:

It’s rare to come across a new Vietnam War memoir from a major publisher in 2023. Most were written decades ago, when memories were fresh and wounds still raw. That generation of soldiers has begun to pass away.

Henry Threadgill’s “Easily Slip Into Another World” is an unusual entrant in the genre. For one thing, this astringent book is only in part about his war experience. The remainder is about his rebellious childhood in Chicago during the 1950s, his apprenticeship in that city’s pyretic music scene and — later, after the war — his variegated career as a composer, saxophonist and flutist touring the world and becoming, along with Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis, one of the few jazz artists to have won a Pulitzer Prize.

There’s more here than an insane war story, in other words.

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Francisco Toro in Persuasion:

The most dangerous political experiment in Latin America is underway in El Salvador. A strange breed of populism is tipping the scale in the region’s age-old tug of war between authoritarianism and democracy. Rather than dividing the country, like populism usually does, it’s uniting it solidly behind a new consensus. More than anything, though, it’s succeeding, and doing so in the kind of impossible-to-miss way that turns heads up and down the hemisphere.

At the top of it all is the self-described “coolest dictator in the world,” the startlingly energetic Nayib Bukele. Having rounded up tens of thousands of suspected gang members in a series of police and military actions that don’t even pay lip service to due process of law, Bukele has become something of a national hero, with approval ratings now north of 90%. Under his watch, one of the most violent countries on earth has become considerably safer: a startling transformation that nearly all Salvadoreans seem profoundly grateful for.

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James Fox in The Guardian:

For a long time, people believed that colours were objective, physical properties of objects or of the light that bounced off them. Even today, science teachers regale their students with stories about Isaac Newton and his prism experiment, telling them how different wavelengths of light produce the rainbow of hues around us.

But this theory isn’t really true. Different wavelengths of light do exist independently of us but they only become colours inside our bodies. Colour is ultimately a neurological process whereby photons are detected by light-sensitive cells in our eyes, transformed into electrical signals and sent to our brain, where, in a series of complex calculations, our visual cortex converts them into “colour”.

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Kathleen Merrigan in The Conversation:

For the 20th time since 1933, Congress is writing a multiyear farm bill that will shape what kind of food U.S. farmers grow, how they raise it and how it gets to consumers. These measures are large, complex and expensive: The next farm bill is projected to cost taxpayers US$1.5 trillion over 10 years.

Modern farm bills address many things besides food, from rural broadband access to biofuels and even help for small towns to buy police cars. These measures bring out a dizzying range of interest groups with diverse agendas.

Umbrella organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Farmers Union typically focus on farm subsidies and crop insurance. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition advocates for small farmers and ranchers. Industry-specific groups, such as cattlemen, fruit and vegetable growers and organic producers, all have their own interests.

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Stephanie Zackarek in Time:

The aging process is kind to no one, and that includes Johnny Depp.

On Tuesday, Depp was here in Cannes to walk the red carpet for the festival’s opening night film, Maïwenn’s misunderstood-mistress extravaganza Jeanne du Barry, in which Depp plays King Louis XV, whose devotion to his favorite extramarital squeeze brought scandal upon Versailles. When it was announced that a Depp film would be opening the festival, murmurs of “Sacre bleu!” were heard far beyond the kingdom, though perhaps not so much in France: the festival itself has opened its arms wide to Depp, who hasn’t exactly been untouched by controversy in the past few years, given his involvement in two high-profile defamation suits connected with allegations that he physically abused his former wife, Amber Heard. (The jury ruled that Heard defamed Depp on three counts and awarded him $15 million in damages; Depp was found guilty of one of three charges in Heard’s countersuit and she was awarded $2 million in compensatory damages.)

On Visiting Central Park Zoo

The animals, hanging around in forms,
are each resigned to be what each one is,
imprisoned twice, in flesh first, then in irons.
The Bactrian camel is adjusted or is not
as, with his humps collapsed for lack of need
for water and with useless tufts of hair
like hummocks on the great plains of his flanks,
he stands around in shape and chews
a curd of solace, whether bitter, bland, or sweet,
who knows? Such is his formal pride,
his gargoyle’s face remains a stone
assertion as he pisses in between his splayed,
seemingly rachitic legs and stays
that way, in place, for want of something else
to do, caught in his double prison all the time.
Whatever he is, he goes on being what he is,
although ridiculous in forced review,
perseverant in not doing what he need not do.

by Alan Duggan
from New and Collected Poems
Ecco Press, New York, 1983

Erik Stokstad in Science:

In early summer, unusual pollinators swoop over rice fields in Texas and Arkansas. Small, nimble helicopters fly low and steady so their rotors blow pollen from one row of plants to another. The flights help RiceTec, a plant breeding company, produce seed for high-yielding, robust varieties of rice grown across the southern United States. It’s an expensive and complicated way to create seed.

But the effort is worthwhile because the seeds sprout into plants with a mysterious robustness and resilience. The phenomenon, called hybrid vigor, comes from crossing two strains of inbred parents. Why hybrids are superior to normal plants is not clear, but one long-standing hypothesis is that favorable versions of genes from one parent dominate poor-performing, recessive genes from the other.

The development of hybrid varieties has boosted the yield of maize, sorghum, and other crops by up to 50% and has resulted in other valuable traits, such as better drought tolerance. But the method is only feasible in some species; there’s no practical way to produce hybrid wheat or soybeans, for example. And when it works, it’s extremely labor intensive.

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Ian Penman at Harper’s Magazine:

Berry never claimed that he invented rock and roll, and was always quite happy to point out where he’d gotten his inspiration: from the great hinterland and invisible college of rhythm and blues. He happily fessed up to his influences, such as Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker. There was a lot of guilt-free recycling involved—transplanting a riff or a lick, a line or a trope, into fresh new settings. (Jordan’s guitarist Carl Hogan was the source for the famous opening guitar riff of “Johnny B. Goode.”) Even the execrable (but insanely popular) late hit “My Ding-A-Ling” was a virtual xerox of a roiling 1952 R & B side by the marvelous Dave Bartholomew. He tinkered, customized, and retooled songs as if giving an old car a new coat of paint, adding horsepower, then taking them back out on the open road again.

What he did do, indisputably, was visualize a whole new postwar landscape, and provide a soundtrack for its leisure time: a hybrid somewhere between white pop and black R & B. Smith has a lovely phrase for this: “Scraps and rags and things given away for free were pulled together and made into a brand new flag.”

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Donald Rayfield at Literary Review:

When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had predicted, in Stalin’s Gulag. His books had been removed from libraries and bookshops. Only braver readers kept them, sometimes hidden in saucepans at their dachas. From 1958, supported by the CIA, émigré scholars collected what they could from Russian publications of the writings of banned Russian authors; the works were so in demand that students like myself copied them out by hand. Impressionable readers were stunned by the hypnotic musicality of Mandelstam’s early poems, by the penetrating appreciation of the disaster that unfolded – the ‘ship of time going to the bottom’ – during the First World War and the Russian Revolution, by the fine love poems and by the use of biology to elucidate his times.

For a student of Russian literature, Mandelstam is a godsend. Every poem has memorable lines that could be quoted in many imaginable situations. 

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Cat Zakrzewski, Cristiano Lima and Will Oremus in the Washington Post:

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman delivered a sobering account of ways artificial intelligence could “cause significant harm to the world” during his first congressional testimony, expressing a willingness to work with nervous lawmakers to address the risks presented by his company’s ChatGPT and other AI tools.

Altman advocated a number of regulations — including a new government agency charged with creating standards for the field — to address mounting concerns that generative AI could distort reality and create unprecedented safety hazards. The CEO tallied “risky” behaviors presented by technology like ChatGPT, including spreading “one-on-one interactive disinformation” and emotional manipulation. At one point he acknowledged AI could be used to target drone strikes.

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Clarice D. Aiello in The Conversation:

Imagine using your cellphone to control the activity of your own cells to treat injuries and disease. It sounds like something from the imagination of an overly optimistic science fiction writer. But this may one day be a possibility through the emerging field of quantum biology.

Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly small scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering. And yet, the extent to which quantum effects influence living systems remains barely understood.

Quantum effects are phenomena that occur between atoms and molecules that can’t be explained by classical physics. It has been known for more than a century that the rules of classical mechanics, like Newton’s laws of motion, break down at atomic scales. Instead, tiny objects behave according to a different set of laws known as quantum mechanics.

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Yascha Mounk in Persuasion:

In January 1941, the world found itself in the darkest depths of World War II. Nazi Germany had conquered Poland and France. It remained allied with Japan and the Soviet Union, and now seemed on the verge of subduing the United Kingdom. The stakes were existential and the outlook increasingly bleak.

In the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt was pushing for America to come to the rescue of civilization. Against strong domestic opposition he supported Britain with the Lend-Lease Act and was readying the American armed forces for a potential entry into the war.

It must at the time have been tempting to condemn all Germans for the actions of the Nazis, who had after all gained power in good part because of their strength at the ballot box. But rather than ascribing collective guilt to all Germans—as, shamefully, his administration was soon to do in the case of Japanese-Americans—F.D.R. recognized the distinction between Germans who supported and Germans who opposed the Nazis. He courted exiled dissidents and, at the beginning of that fateful year, went so far as to invite one of the most famous of them for an overnight stay at the White House.

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Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

Ten paintings. Each engaging; each mysterious; each stranger than the next. Vivid color, erotic tension, mistrust, and atonement for what society has deemed are perverse games of sexual desecration. The figures in Kyle Dunn’s Night Pictures, now on display at P·P·O·W gallery, exist in suspended states of crisis, in the throes of jealousy and loneliness, withdrawn into shadow — burned out, exhausted, beautiful.

In Paper Angel, a naked male figure is crouching alone in a room, in front of a mirror, looking at a pile of books, food, and other paraphernalia. He personifies procrastination as a creative force. Is he the subject of an invisible painter, the painter himself, or an apparition for a painting? A paper cut-out of an angel adorns the wall, witness to a prayer of desire. The painting is also a superb topological map of open wounds. Here is a world without eros, no “other.” Just wistful longing.

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