Alex Skopic in Current Affairs:

In today’s Britain, the figure of Winston Churchill is all but deified. His face adorns the £5 note, where he glares sternly out at passersby, the only Prime Minister to be so honored; he is a perennial subject for BBC documentaries and high-budget biopics, and he even has his own series of Doctor Who radio dramas, where he routinely saves the world from alien invasion. (Yes, really.) To hear the cultural mainstream tell it, Churchill almost single-handedly defeated Nazi Germany with a few rousing speeches, and remained a beacon of British fortitude and “Blitz Spirit” throughout his public life. It’s an undeniably compelling image, but in the new book Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, Tariq Ali argues that it’s also a carefully constructed falsehood.

One of Ali’s central premises is that a “Churchill Cult” has become entrenched in British society, inflating the memory of its subject beyond all reason and shutting down well-deserved criticism before it can begin.

More here.

Stuart Ritchie in his Substack newsletter:

I love writing reviews of bad books. There’s nothing like the feeling when you’re halfway through a book and it dawns on you that this book is really bad, and that it deserves a pummeling in print for misleading the reader, spreading dodgy ideas, or getting tangled up in the barbed wire of its own prose.

Sometimes, though, a bad book review comes out that shames us bad book reviewers. A review that has all the snark of a good bad book review, but none of the substance. A review that displays not a sharp critical take, but a predictable argument based on its author’s political prejudices.

It happened earlier this month. The review in question, in the New York Review of Books, is by two Stanford University professors: Marcus Feldman, a biologist, and Jessica Riskin, a historian of science. It’s called “Why Biology is Not Destiny”, and it’s about Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery. In this post, I’m going to review the review.

More here.

Jeffrey Sachs at CNN:

There are countless problems with economic sanctions.

The first is that even as sanctions cause economic distress in Russia, they are unlikely to change Russian politics or policies in any decisive way. Think of the harsh sanctions the US has imposed on Venezuela, Iran and North Korea. Yes, they’ve weakened these economies, but they’ve not changed the politics or policies of these countries in the ways the US government has sought.

The second problem is that sanctions are easy to evade at least in part, and more evasions are likely to emerge over time. The US sanctions apply most effectively to dollar-based transactions involving the US banking system. Countries seeking to evade the sanctions find ways to make transactions through non-bank or non-dollar means. We can expect a rising number of transactions with Russia in rubles, rupees, renminbi and other non-dollar currencies.

The third and related problem is that most of the world does not believe in the sanctions — and also does not take sides in the Russia-Ukraine war.

More here.

Hicks and Martela in Scientific American:

Many scholars agree that a subjectively meaningful existence often boils down to three factors: the feeling that one’s life is coherent and “makes sense,” the possession of clear and satisfying long-term goals and the belief that one’s life matters in the grand scheme of things. Psychologists call these three things coherence, purpose and existential mattering.

But we believe there is another element to consider. Think about the first butterfly you stop to admire after a long winter or imagine the scenery atop a hill after a fresh hike. Sometimes existence delivers us small moments of beauty. When people are open to appreciating such experiences, these moments may enhance how they view their life. We call this element experiential appreciation. The phenomenon reflects the feeling of a deep connection to events as they transpire and the ability to extract value from that link. It represents the detection of and admiration for life’s inherent beauty.

More here.

Patrik Jonsson in The Christian Science Monitor:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is both a Trump follower and possible Trump opponent, as he’s declined to say whether he’d face off against the former president for the 2024 GOP nomination. He’s pushed through a number of state bills that deal with hot button partisan issues, such as the recently enacted Parental Rights in Education, dubbed by critics the “don’t say gay” law, that bans school teaching of sexual topics deemed non-age-appropriate. Florida is “becoming redder all the time, and it has a very arch-conservative edge – a culture war edge,” says Orlando-based historian James Clark, author of “Hidden History of Florida.”

In some ways, Florida – the land of the hanging chads, the bits of paper that dangled from Florida ballots and were a centerpiece of the disputed 2000 presidential election – remains a tightly contested battleground state. Political scientists call Florida voters a “rootless electorate” whose preferences can switch back and forth relatively quickly. Yet as the nation’s third-most-populous state, its bare-knuckled rightward swing has been unmistakable, wobbling the nation’s political gyroscope. The best-known governor in the country may now be Mr. DeSantis, a Harvard and Yale grad who served as a judge advocate general at Guantánamo Bay.

More here.

The Housewright’s Mercy

– excerpt

My brother wants a visionary’s house,
and reads and signs the housewright’s master plan:
in what we leave behind, a chiseled script,
we ask for mercy’s constant care, to keep
our names alive. This verse I’ve tried to plane
for strangers, hewn as faithfully as his,
this home I build, the labor of my life,
must be a place in which the world can live.

Who knows what heaven is? Or if we’re left
with Joseph shouldering his ax, the girth
of ringed infinity’s elm—to try and glimpse
through darkness Martha’s incandescent lamps.
Does broken Carthage most resemble death,
or do those workmen on the roof who lift
a horizontal beam, stripped to the waist,
still forge the final crosspiece of the West?

by Mellisa Green
from The Squanicook Eclogues
The Pen & Anvil Press, Boston, 2010

Madison Bloom at Pitchfork:

Van Etten often counters the sonic immensity of her new album, stacked with towering choruses, moody synths, and a lingering sense of despair, with lamplit views of the hearth. On the festival-ready “Anything,” she presents an image glowing with the warmth of an Edward Hopper painting, bellowing, “You love him by the stove light in your arms.” Talking about the song’s origin story, she remembers cooking dinner one night, and as the jazz pianist Bud Powell’s “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” filled the kitchen, Hutchins dipped in and led her in a dance. “It was supposed to be our wedding song,” Van Etten says. She and Hutchins were scheduled to get hitched in May of 2020, and they haven’t been able to set a new date since the world overturned. “Shit on shit,” she says, referring to the past few years. “I have my ups and downs in my real life, but my partner’s amazing. He knows when it’s hard, and he just embraces it, and we get through it.” She smiles at the revelation. “Even when I’m a mess.”

more here.

Kevin Power at the Dublin Review of Books:

Roughly speaking, “The White Negro” contends that, in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the human race as a whole now finds itself in the same psychic and physical predicament experienced by black people in America in the 1950s – that is, deindividualised, oppressed by violent systems of control, risking their lives every time they walked down the street. To live authentically in such a world, Mailer suggests, we must become “white Negroes”, or hipsters. Our morality must be psychopathic – radically free from inherited codes. Our philosophy must be existentialist. We must live like teenage hoodlums – weighing up the “therapeutic” value of “beat[ing] in the brains of a candy store keeper”.

“The White Negro” is a strikingly paranoid piece of work. It is also racist, though in a more or less well-intentioned sort of way: unlike, say, the viciously and openly anti-Black Alabama politician George Wallace, Mailer had actually spent time with, and had thought carefully about the lives of, Black people.

more here.

Manvir Singh in Aeon:

The idea goes like this. Once upon a time, private property was unknown. Food went to those in need. Everyone was cared for. Then agriculture arose and, with it, ownership over land, labour and wild resources. The organic community splintered under the weight of competition. The story predates Marx and Engels. The patron saint of capitalism, Adam Smith, proposed something similar, as did the 19th-century American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Even ancient Buddhist texts described a pre-state society free of property. But The Origin is the idea’s most important codification. It argued for primitive communism, circulated it widely, and welded it to Marxist principles.

Today, many writers and academics still treat primitive communism as a historical fact.

More here.

Benjamin Mueller in the New York Times:

“We’re doing a really terrible job of communicating risk,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “I think that’s also why people are throwing their hands up in the air and saying, ‘Screw it.’ They’re desperate for some sort of guidance.”

To fill that void, scientists are thinking anew about how to discuss Covid risks. Some have studied when people could unmask indoors if the goal was not only to keep hospitals from being overrun but also to protect immunocompromised people.

Others are working on tools to compare infection risks to the dangers of a wide range of activities, finding, for instance, that an average unvaccinated person 65 and older is roughly as likely to die from an Omicron infection as someone is to die from using heroin for a year-and-a-half.

More here.

Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. in Foreign Affairs:

In developing a nuclear arsenal that will soon rival those of Russia and the United States, China is not merely departing from its decades-old status as a minor nuclear state; it is also upending the bipolar nuclear power system. For the 73 years since the Soviet Union’s first nuclear test, that bipolar system, for all its flaws and moments of terror, has averted nuclear war. Now, by closing in on parity with the two existing great nuclear powers, China is heralding a paradigm shift to something much less stable: a tripolar nuclear system. In that world, there will be both a greater risk of a nuclear arms race and heightened incentives for states to resort to nuclear weapons in a crisis. With three competing great nuclear powers, many of the features that enhanced stability in the bipolar system will be rendered either moot or far less reliable.

There is nothing the United States can do to prevent China from joining it and Russia as the world’s top nuclear powers, but there are things that U.S. strategists and defense planners can do to mitigate the consequences.

More here.

Natasha Leibbrandt in The Guardian:

How do you like to pay? Do you prefer to tap, wave, insert, single-click or double-click – or are you a hold out for hard cash? If it’s the latter, you’re fast becoming the exception. Between our growing enthusiasm for online shopping, the ease and speed with which we can now make electronic bank transfers, and the inexorable rise of cards and the advent of digital wallets, more and more of us are shunning physical money. This is still a relatively recent trend. Cards only overtook cash as the consumers’ preferred mode of payment in the UK in 2017 – with contactless accounting for 40% of transactions. The shift has been dizzyingly rapid.

The big advantages of non-cash payments are that they are seamless, efficient, convenient. This clearly matters a lot to us. But has it been our decision to adopt these new habits, or have we sleepwalked into them, with a little help from those who stand to profit? The truth is, it’s a bit of both. Merchants are keen to reduce cost and increase spend: the less friction we experience at the till, the less chance there is for second thoughts. Payment providers sell their equipment and services to merchants, so the merchants’ appetites are their primary consideration. On the other hand, we are the ones who have chosen to use cards and engage in e-commerce.

More here.

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they’re light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscious is Number One.

Wistlawa Szymborska
from View With a Grain of Sand
Harcourt Brace, 1993

From Phys.Org:

Kinase inhibitors are a type of targeted drug that block chemical messengers (enzymes) called kinases within cells. Kinases activate proteins in cells that are needed for a variety of normal cellular functions, including metabolism, growth, division and survival; however, kinases can become dysregulated in cancer, helping cancer cells to grow and survive. Although kinase inhibitors have shown success in the treatment of some tumor types, many cancers fail to respond or develop resistance against these targeted drugs. In this study, Professor Pedro Cutillas and his team found it was possible to overcome kinase inhibitor resistance in leukemia cells by manipulating the cellular pathways that the cells use to survive.

Kinase inhibitors work by blocking components of different signaling pathways that cancer cells use to grow and survive. However, similar to how satellite navigation devices suggest an alternative route to reach a destination if there is a road closure; cells can learn to use other routes to carry out a function when a drug blocks their usual pathway. These alternative routes, or ‘intrinsic resistance,’ compensate for the effects of the drug and can prevent the drug from killing the cancer cell.

More here.

Shui-yin Sharon Yam reviews Karen Cheung’s poignant memoir about life in Hong Kong, in the Hong Kong Review of Books:

“What is writing good for if we can’t write a way out of this darkest timeline?” (264), Karen Cheung asks in this hauntingly moving memoir of her life in Hong Kong over these last two decades. Since the passage of the National Security Law (NSL) in the summer of 2020, “Hong Kong is dead” has become a common refrain in international news. Amid constant crackdowns and arrests, Hong Kong no longer fits the image of a vibrant cosmopolitan city where foreign corporations, tourists, and expatriates can enjoy unbridled freedom. Beginning with a scathing and acute interrogation of this narrative, Cheung’s memoir cannot write Hong Kong out of its darkest timeline, but it has succeeded in lifting up the deeds and voices of Hongkongers who have always dared to imagine and work towards a better collective future for the city.

Part personal narrative and part reportage, The Impossible City covers the contentious period between 1997 to 2020, during which Hongkongers experienced the return of sovereignty to China, waves of student activism, the Umbrella Movement, the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill protests, and the implementation of the NSL.

More here.

Steven Johnson in the New York Times:

Inside one of the buildings lies a wonder of modern technology: 285,000 CPU cores yoked together into one giant supercomputer, powered by solar arrays and cooled by industrial fans. The machines never sleep: Every second of every day, they churn through innumerable calculations, using state-of-the-art techniques in machine intelligence that go by names like ‘‘stochastic gradient descent’’ and ‘‘convolutional neural networks.’’ The whole system is believed to be one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet.

And what, you may ask, is this computational dynamo doing with all these prodigious resources? Mostly, it is playing a kind of game, over and over again, billions of times a second. And the game is called: Guess what the missing word is.

The supercomputer complex in Iowa is running a program created by OpenAI, an organization established in late 2015 by a handful of Silicon Valley luminaries, including Elon Musk; Greg Brockman, who until recently had been chief technology officer of the e-payment juggernaut Stripe; and Sam Altman, at the time the president of the start-up incubator Y Combinator. In its first few years, as it built up its programming brain trust, OpenAI’s technical achievements were mostly overshadowed by the star power of its founders. But that changed in summer 2020, when OpenAI began offering limited access to a new program called Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3, colloquially referred to as GPT-3. Though the platform was initially available to only a small handful of developers, examples of GPT-3’s uncanny prowess with language — and at least the illusion of cognition — began to circulate across the web and through social media.

More here.