Praise of Learning

Learn the simplest things. For you
whose time has already come
it is never too late!
Learn you’re A B C’s, it is not enough,
but learn them! Do not let it discourage you,
begin! You must know everything!
You must take over the leadership!

Learn, man in the asylum!
Learn, man in prison!
Learn, wife in the kitchen!
Learn, man of sixty!
Seek out the school, you who are homeless!
Sharpen your wits, you who shiver!
Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.
You must take over the leadership.

Don’t be afraid of asking, brother!
Don’t be won over,
see for yourself!
What you don’t know yourself,
you don’t know.
Add up the reckoning.
It’s you who must pay it.
Put you finger on each item,
ask: how did this get here?
You must take over the leadership.

by Bertolt Brecht
from Collected Poems- Bertolt Brecht
Grove Press, 1947

Diana Kwon in Nautilus:

Jane McKeating never expected time to matter much in the liver.

About a decade ago, McKeating was examining medications to use during liver transplantation in patients with chronic hepatitis C infections. Hepatitis C can linger in the body for decades and cause severe liver damage—and in those days, the lack of drugs to combat the viral infection meant that when a patient received a replacement liver, the virus could immediately infect the new organ. McKeating, then a virologist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and her colleagues wanted to see whether an antiviral drug could stop the virus’ spread and save the new livers.

When the team initially assessed their data, they were stumped. It looked like the drug prevented infection in some patients, but not others—and it wasn’t clear what, exactly, was behind this difference. “We just couldn’t understand what was discriminating between the patients,” says McKeatin, now at the University of Oxford. After much head scratching, they noticed a perplexing pattern: Patients who received their liver transplants in the morning were more likely to be reinfected with the hepatitis C virus than those who had their operations in the afternoon.¹ “It turned out it was the time of day when they received the liver transplant,” she says.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCTRZDs4Evg

Forget ‘I think therefore I am’. In a new theory of embodied consciousness, the neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio propose that feelings are the source of consciousness. Long dismissed as secondary to reason, feelings are where consciousness begins. Without them, consciousness is impossible, they argue – with radical implications for the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness and the future of AI.

Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio at IAI News:

Please pause for a moment and notice what you are feeling now. Perhaps you notice a growing snarl of hunger in your stomach or a hum of stress in your chest. Perhaps you have a feeling of ease and expansiveness, or the tingling anticipation of a pleasure soon to come. Or perhaps you simply have a sense that you exist. Hunger and thirst, pain, pleasure and distress, along with the unadorned but relentless feelings of existence, are all examples of ‘homeostatic feelings’. Homeostatic feelings are, we argue here, the source of consciousness.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

It’s not an exaggeration to say that every major advance in physics for more than a century has turned on revelations about symmetry. It’s there at the dawn of general relativity, in the birth of the Standard Model, in the hunt for the Higgs.

For that reason, research across physics is now building to a crescendo. It was touched off by a 2014 paper, “Generalized Global Symmetries,” which demonstrated that the most important symmetries of 20th-century physics could be extended more broadly to apply in quantum field theory, the basic theoretical framework in which physicists work today.

This reformulation, which crystallized earlier work in the area, revealed that disparate observations physicists had made in the past 40 years were really manifestations of the same lurking symmetry. In doing so, it created an organizing principle that physicists could use to categorize and understand phenomena. “That’s really a stroke of genius,” said Nathaniel Craig, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

More here.

Ellen O’Brien in the Sydney Review of Books:

When I’m driving my car, I feel like I’m in my own private domicile, bitch! I’m the driver, so I’m in control: I choose the music, the temperature level, how fast or slow we go. I also suffer the consequences, but that’s fine—it’s my life! And yes, there are things I should consider—agreements between us, called ‘road rules’ and ‘traffic laws’—but if I disregard them, I can pretend that I’m the queen of my own little castle. So, vroom fucking vroom, baby! Let’s ride.

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

Imagine if you went outside and saw that it had started to rain, and that people on the street were opening their umbrellas. And imagine that you ran around waving your arms and saying “Stop! Stop! Umbrellas make rain worse!!” People would think you were a silly person, and rightly so.

But why don’t people think that umbrellas make rain worse? After all, everyone knows that rain typically starts to intensify shortly after people start opening their umbrellas. But we have a good causal theory of why rain happens, and we know that umbrellas have nothing to do with it; we know that the umbrellas are a response to the problem, rather than the cause.

The same should be true for market-rate housing construction and rising rents.

More here.

Charlie Campbell in Time:

Political leaders often boast of inner steel. Imran Khan can point to three bullets dug out of his right leg. It was in November that a lone gunman opened fire on Khan during a rally, wounding the 70-year-old as well as several supporters, one fatally. “One bullet damaged a nerve so my foot is still recovering,” says the former Pakistani Prime Minister and onetime cricket icon. “I have a problem walking for too long.” The actual intrigue is purely Pakistani. Khan lost the backing of the country’s all-powerful military after he refused to endorse its choice to lead Pakistan’s intelligence services, known as ISI, because of his close relationship with the incumbent. When Khan belatedly greenlighted the new chief, the opposition sensed weakness and pounced with the no-confidence vote. Khan then took his outrage to the streets, with rallies crisscrossing the nation for months.

More here.

Sharanya Deepak in The Baffler:

WHEN JUNAID KHAN was a young boy, his mother, Saira Begum, would return home close to nightfall. She would squat next to an open fire to cook rotis for her hungry son, who would smear them with butter. “Junaid would eat rotis in whole gulps. I had to stop him before he ate too much,” Saira told me one summer evening in 2019. She lives with her relatives in a small brick house in Khandawali, a village in Haryana near New Delhi. When we spoke, she lay on her divan. In a corner stood a desk on which Junaid would study. Like many women in her village, Saira is a farm laborer whose income—four thousand rupees per month in 2019, or fifty-seven dollars—does not ensure food for her family at all times. She owns one buffalo, however, that she milks and uses to plow the land that she works. Food is scarce in her home, but the white butter she made with buffalo milk was delicious and filling for her children.

Junaid was sixteen years old when he, his older brother Hashim, and two friends were attacked on a train in Haryana in June 2017. The boys were commuting home from an Eid shopping trip and a visit to the mosque when they were asked to vacate their seats by a group of men. When I visited Saira’s home, Hashim explained that the men noticed they were Indian Muslims and threatened to beat them if they didn’t move. “They were older, larger, and Hindu,” he recounted, as he fiddled with a photograph of Junaid. “They kept calling us beef eaters,” he continued, along with other faith-based slurs.

More here.

Jeffrey C. Isaac in LA Review of Books:

ON APRIL 3, 2022, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz-MPP party won two-thirds of the National Assembly seats—a parliamentary supermajority—for the fourth consecutive time since 2010. In his 12 years in power, Orbán has revised the Hungarian constitution, transformed the state, substantially weakened the prospects for political opposition, and instituted a new quasi-authoritarian regime of “national cooperation” that he has billed as “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” In the coming years, it can be assumed that Orbán and his government will do their best to further entrench this regime and continue to promote its example—something Orbán has heretofore done with great success.

Orbán has been amply rewarded for his efforts. He has accumulated vast political power, which he has used to enrich his family, friends, and principal supporters, thus further reinforcing his kleptocratic rule. He has used his power to reshape electoral law, the media system, and the cultural and educational system; to marginalize critics and opponents; and to intimidate independent civil society institutions, most notoriously through the passage of a “Lex CEU” that forced Central European University to leave its Budapest home and reopen in Vienna. This has made him the scourge of the European Union—whose rule of law and transparency requirements he has regularly flouted—and the bane of supporters of civil and academic freedom everywhere.

It has also made him a hero of the transnational far right, a symbol of resistance to the supposed “tyranny” of human rights, gender equality, “woke elitism,” and liberalism more generally. He has long been lionized by the US populist right: fêted at Conservative Political Action Committee meetings; idolized by Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Patrick Deneen; and regarded as a pioneer of a new kind of “illiberal” regime that promises to save civilization from an evil humanistic overclass.

More here.

Ewald Engelen in Sidecar:

The shock among the Dutch chattering classes on 16 March was palpable. The right-populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – established in 2019 by a small communications firm, bankrolled by the powerful Dutch agrifood complex and led by a former meat industry journalist – had massively increased its vote share in the country’s provincial elections. It is now the largest party in all twelve provinces, and expected to achieve the same status in Senate elections next month. This would give BBB veto power at both national and local levels, potentially bringing an already hesitant green transition process to a standstill. Faced with this prospect, an irate commentariat has begun to denounce the farmers as enemies of environmental progress, and speculate that voting restrictions – on the elderly, the ‘undereducated’, those in rural constituencies – might be necessary to override their resistance.

The casus belli for the farmers’ revolt was a 2019 ruling by the Dutch Supreme Court that the government had breached its EU obligations to protect 163 natural areas against emissions from nearby agricultural activities. This prompted the centre-right coalition government, led by Mark Rutte, to impose a nationwide speed limit on highways of 100km/h and cancel a wide array of building projects intended to alleviate supply shortages on the Dutch housing market. Yet it soon became apparent that such measures were insufficient, since transport and construction contributed a pittance to national nitrogen emissions. Agriculture, by contrast, was responsible for 46%. A structural solution would therefore have to involve substantial reduction of livestock. The suggestion long put forward by the marginal ‘Party for the Animals’, to slash half of the aggregate Dutch livestock by expropriating 500 to 600 major emitters, was suddenly on the table.

More here.

Fiona Sturges at The Guardian:

In 2015, Monica Potts reconnected with an old friend named Darci on Facebook. The two of them had grown up in Clinton, a small rural town on the edge of the Ozarks in Arkansas, and had been best friends in high school. In their teens, both vowed they would leave and build a life away from the dysfunction and deprivation of their home town, but for Darci it didn’t pan out like that. While Potts, who is now in her 40s, gained a scholarship to a college in Philadelphia, and became an award-winning political journalist (she has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic, and is now senior politics reporter for FiveThirtyEight), Darci failed to graduate high school and, like many in their social circle, never left Clinton. Over the years, Potts heard on the grapevine that Darci was struggling. When she finally visited her friend on Christmas Eve, 2015, she found her in crisis: separated from her two children, battling addiction, living in a trailer with a man she barely knew and stuck in a repetitive loop of jail time, release, decline and rearrest.

Dwight Garner at the NY Times:

The Robert Johnson we meet in this book remains somewhat blurry and indistinct. He wasn’t a big personality, people tell McCormick. He was soft-spoken; he held people’s attention only when he played.

Johnson grew up in the Mississippi Delta with his mother and stepfather, an illiterate sharecropper. He hated farm work and fled to Memphis whenever he could. Early on he played a drugstore harmonica and a jaw harp, then annoyed older musicians by noodling on their guitars when they weren’t around. He got pretty good.

He was a slender man with tapering fingers. He was said to be shy, but sometimes recklessly bold around women. There was a strong music scene in the Delta and in Memphis, and he thrived in it, playing on street corners and in juke joints. People tend to remember him playing the popular songs of the time, more so than the somber and stabbing work that came to define him.

more here.

Jay Kang in The New Yorker:

One of the stultifying but ultimately true maxims of the analytics movement in sports says that most narratives around player performance are lies. Each player has a “true talent level” based on their abilities, but the actual results are mostly up to variance and luck. If a player has, say, the true talent to hit thirty-one home runs in a season, the timing of those home runs is mostly random. If someone hits a third of those in April, that doesn’t really mean he’s a “hot starter” who is “building off a great spring”—it just means that if you take thirty-one home runs and toss them up in the air to land randomly on a time line, sometimes ten of them float over to April. What does matter, the analytics guys say, are plate appearances: you have to clock in enough opportunities to realize your true talent level.

For much of my career, I was the type of journalist who only published a handful of magazine pieces a year. These required a great deal of time, much of which was spent on minor improvements to the reporting, structure, and sentences. I believed that long-form journalism, much like fiction or poetry, possessed a near-mystical rhythm that could be accessed through months of intensive labor. Once unlocked, some spirit would sing through the piece and touch the readers in a universal, truthful way.

More here.

Stephanie Hershinow in PublicBooks:

Those who don’t already admire Hardwick’s writing likely know her from her marriage to poet Robert Lowell. It is at times a lurid story. A masterful poet, Lowell was also bipolar at a time when treatment was (as it still can be for many) uncertain and inconsistent. During manic episodes, he could be cruel to his wife. (“Everybody has noticed that you’ve been getting pretty dumb lately,” he told her during one episode.) While she worked to keep their household together, ensure bills were paid, and oversee his care, he would call her family to tell them he never loved her. His mania often coincided with brazen affairs; friends, colleagues, and even doctors sometimes suspected Hardwick of jealousy when she tried to get him help. When he finally left her after 20 years of marriage, he wrote a collection of poems—dedicated to his new wife, Caroline Blackwood—that excerpted his ex-wife’s plaintive letters to him and (perhaps the worse betrayal) fabricated others without noting the difference. The Dolphin was condemned by friends like Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, but it also won the National Book Award. (In a published review, Rich called the book “one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry.”) Years later, Lowell and Hardwick reconciled. Visiting her in New York not long after, he took a taxi from the airport and died before arriving. Summoned by the cab driver, Hardwick rode alongside Lowell to the hospital, knowing that he was already dead.

More here.