Rachel Lu in Law and Liberty:

J.K. Rowling is not a witch. She acquitted herself well in her recent “trial,” by which I mean the podcast series hosted by The Free Press, detailing the explosive controversy between history’s most famous children’s author and liberal progressive activists. It’s cleverly titled The Witch Trials, and it tells the story of Rowling’s rise to fame and her fall into (progressive) infamy. There is extended interview material from Rowling herself, along with some contributions from her detractors and critics. I should warn readers that this is the sort of podcast I had to turn off whenever my kids climbed into the car. Rowling’s battle with transgender ideologues has been exceedingly ugly, and the series makes no effort to sugar-coat this. Nevertheless, the whole story left me oddly hopeful.

More here.

Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

Adam Mastroianni was always bothered by anecdotal claims that people are becoming less kind, respectful and trustworthy over time. So he took a deep dive into such claims: he wrote a PhD dissertation.

Now Mastroianni and a collaborator have drawn on decades’ worth of survey results and other data to find that people around the world have perceived a general moral decline for at least the past 70 years¹. But the data also show that individuals’ evaluation of their contemporaries’ morality has remained largely unchanged during that time. Mastroianni, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York City, and his co-author Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conclude that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.

More here.

Lawrence Weschler in Wondercabinet:

I’ve recently been corresponding with the erudite, recondite and just plain delightful arts writer Morgan Meis, initially about our mutual passion for Vermeer, but more latterly about his specific passion for Franz Marc, and in particular for Marc’s astonishingly powerful and powerfully prophetic 1913 painting The Fate of the Animals (below), the title as well, as it happens, of Meis’s own superb monograph on same.

In the words of that book’s jacket copy, “In 1913, Franz Marc, one of the key figures of German Expressionism, created a masterpiece, The Fate of the Animals. With its violent slashes of color and line, the painting seemed to prefigure both the outbreak of World War I and, more eerily, Marc’s own death in an artillery barrage at the Battle of Verdun three years later.”

And Meis’s book takes off from there. I am somewhat ashamed to admit how till reading the book I had never spent any particular amount of time thinking about that painting, or even that much time thinking about Franz Marc—a state of affairs that in the mean-between has now been decisively upended (I can hardly wait to make it over to Basel to see the painting in person and in the flesh, as it were).

More here.

Matt Hrodey in Discover Magazine:

A new study estimates the weight of New York City’s buildings at 1.68 trillion pounds and says that, little by little, they’re sinking into the ground. The Big Apple could ultimately share the same fate as Venice, which is slipping into the Mediterranean Sea at a similar rate. Or it could see a reprise of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, during which ocean water flooded the city. Compounding the problem for both Venice and New York City is that the two cities will sink into rising waters – scientists expect sea levels to rise 20 to 60 centimeters by 2050. The math starts to look dire for lower Manhattan – the area rests 1 to 2 meters above sea level and is currently sinking at a rate of 1 to 4 millimeters. While the paper stops short of predicting when New York City will dip below sea level, it could happen in a matter of decades.

Much of Manhattan was built on sand and clay and “artificial fill,” which also means garbage and other material. The soils of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island also contain large amounts of fill, which seems to accelerate the sinking.

New York City’s decline may be due to the weight of its 1.08 million buildings, the study says.

More here.

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel in Science:

On a chilly holiday Monday in January 2020, a medical milestone passed largely unnoticed. In a New York City operating room, surgeons gently removed the heart from a 43-year-old man who had died and shuttled it steps away to a patient in desperate need of a new one.

More than 3500 people in the United States receive a new heart each year. But this case was different—the first of its kind in the country. “It took us 6 months to prepare,” says Nader Moazami, surgical head of heart transplantation at New York University (NYU) Langone Health, where the operation took place. The run-up included oversight from an ethics board, education sessions with nurses and anesthesiologists, and lengthy conversations with the local organization that represents organ donor families. Physicians spent hours practicing in the hospital’s cadaver lab, prepping for organ recovery from the donor. “We wanted to make sure that we controlled every aspect,” Moazami says.

That’s because this donor, unlike most, was not declared dead because of loss of brain function. He had been suffering from end-stage liver disease and was comatose and on a ventilator, with no hope of regaining consciousness—but his brain still showed activity. His family made the wrenching choice to remove life support. Following that decision, they expressed a wish to donate his organs, even agreeing to transfer him to NYU Langone Health before he died so his heart could be recovered afterward.

More here.

Licking the Dew off Roses

(for Laurie Lee and his daughter Jessy)

When she woke, at six in the morning,
gurgling, he’d creep silent from his
warm bed to lay her gently on a shawl.

Always the same way round they’d walk
the garden, listening to the peonies
and poppies open. He had never heard them

stretch and squeak until he walked
with her safe in his arms, laughing,
as she leaned to lick the dew off roses.

Even now she remembers frosty mornings
wrapped in a rough blanket, his flat vowels
curling in a tobacco tang, the stubble of his chin.

Oh why did you never walk with me, Daddy,
safe in your arms, under a waxing moon,
so  I too could lick the dew off roses?

by Sue Hubbard
from Everything Begins with the Skin
Enitharmon Press, London, 1994

Kitty Empire at The Guardian:

When the cult singer-songwriter Nick Drake’s third album, Pink Moon, was released in 1972 many of his friends were horrified. Now held to be a stone-cold classic, it is a spare, beautiful sequence of songs, many of which lay bare its 24-year-old author’s inner tumult. Drake’s two previous albums, Five Leaves Left (1969) and Bryter Layter (1971), had sold poorly. Although he was an English singer-guitarist whose unconventional tunings and numinous lyrics set him apart, even in a crowded folk revival field, a chasm had opened up between the promise of his talent and his meagre public profile.

Now, Drake is revered as a depressed romantic too fragile for the world. The Cure took their name from one of his songs. In the 80s, artists as diverse as Kate Bush and the Dream Academy cited him as an influence. Volkswagen used Pink Moon’s title track in an ad in 1999, prompting a fresh upsurge of interest in his oblique pastorals.

more here.

Emily Hart at the New York Times:

A spaceship lands near a small town in the Amazon, leaving the local government to manage an alien invasion. Dissidents who disappeared during a military dictatorship return years later as zombies. Bodies suddenly begin to fuse upon physical contact, forcing Colombians to navigate newly dangerous salsa bars and FARC guerrillas who have merged with tropical birds.

Across Latin America, shelves labeled “ciencia ficción,” or science fiction, have long been filled with translations of H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson and H.G. Wells. Now they might have to compete with a new wave of Latin American writers who are making the genre their own, rerooting it in their homelands and histories. Shrugging off rolling cornfields and New York skylines, they set their stories against the dense Amazon, craggy Andean mountainscapes and unmistakably Latin American urban sprawl.

more here.

Dave Granlund in ArcaMax:

More here.

Pandora Dewan in Newsweek:

A common nutrient found in everyday foods might be the key to a long and healthy life, according to researchers from Columbia University. The nutrient in question is taurine, a naturally occurring amino acid with a range of essential roles around the body. Not only does the concentration of this nutrient in our bodies decrease as we age, but supplementation can increase lifespan by up to 12 percent in different species. Our main dietary sources of taurine are animal proteins, such as meat, fish and dairy, although it can also be found in some seaweeds and artificially supplemented energy drinks. It can also be produced inside the body from other amino acids. In a study published in the journal Science, a team of researchers from around the world looked at the effects of this nutrient on health and lifespan. “This study suggests that taurine could be an elixir of life within us that helps us live longer and healthier lives,” Vijay Yadav, one of the leading authors of the study, said in a statement.

Yadav, assistant professor of genetics and development at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, first discovered the importance of taurine while researching osteoporosis, uncovering the nutrient’s essential role in regulating bone growth. Similar studies have also shown that taurine can benefit immune function, obesity and the nervous system. “We realized that if taurine is regulating all these processes that decline with age, maybe taurine levels in the bloodstream affect overall health and lifespan,” Yadav said.

More here. (Note: Congratulations to Dr. Abdullah Ali from my lab, a co-author on this Science article)

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker:

On November 4, 1963, the Beatles played at the Prince of Wales Theatre, in London, exuberant, exhausted, and defiant. “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help,” John Lennon cried out to the crowd. “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” Two weeks later, the band made their first appearance on American television, on NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report.” “The hottest musical group in Great Britain today is the Beatles,” the reporter Edwin Newman said. “That’s not a collection of insects but a quartet of young men with pudding-bowl haircuts.” And, four days after that, “CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace” broadcast a four-minute report from “Beatleland,” by the London correspondent Alexander Kendrick. “The Beatles are said by sociologists to have a deeper meaning,” Kendrick reported. “Some say they are the authentic voice of the proletariat.” Everyone searched for that deeper meaning. The Beatles found it hard to take the search seriously.

“What has occurred to you as to why you’ve succeeded?” Kendrick asked Paul McCartney.

“Oh, I dunno,” he answered. “The haircuts?”

More here.

For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October’s breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

So don’t gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying—friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Eugene McCarraher at The Hedgehog Review:

[W]ith the victories of science, technology, and capitalism, we discovered that the cosmos of enchantment was unreal, or at best, utterly unverifiable; we cast most of the spirits into oblivion, and made room for their withered but venerable survivors in our chambers of private belief. Among the North Atlantic intelligentsia, at least, this story in some form is so widely hegemonic that even religious intellectuals accept it. For instance, in A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor—a practicing Catholic—affirms, albeit in his own peculiar way, the consensus of “disenchantment.” In the pre-modern epoch of enchantment, Taylor explains, the boundary that separated our world from the sacred was porous and indistinct; traffic between the two spheres was frequent, if not always desired or friendly. “Disenchantment” began with the church’s rationalization of doctrine and the growing awareness that Christianity was not the world’s only religion. Now, having left the enchanted universe behind, we disenchanted dwell within the moral and ontological parameters of an “immanent frame”: the world as apprehended through reason and science, bereft of immaterial and unquantifiable forces, structured by the immutable laws of nature and the contingent traditions of human societies.

more here.

Walter Benn Michaels at nonsite:

Borges famously singles out for praise Menard’s description of “truth’ whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past …” (CF, 94). A rejected draft might have said something like this: “truth, whose father is history,” “preserver of time ….” Then “father” and “preserver” crossed out and replaced with “mother” and “rival,” the point of the revision being to express Menard’s thought better and also to make sure the text in which he expressed it coincided (“word for word and line for line”) with what Cervantes had written. Of course, it’s hardly likely that in expressing his own thoughts he would find himself doing so in Cervantes’s words, but that’s the problem that infinite time (like the monkeys and the typewriters or being “immortal” [CF, 91]) is supposed to solve. However, the idea that he could, in revising, check to see how he was doing is a deeper problem. You wouldn’t know that truth whose father is history was wrong unless you checked, but if you checked and then corrected, you’d be copying. So, you could never check. But if you didn’t know what the original said, how could you understand yourself to be trying to reproduce it? The difficulty of Menard’s project, in other words, is not exactly how hard it is to succeed in producing even a few sentences that coincide with rather than copy Cervantes but how hard it is even to try, how hard it is even to know what trying is.

more here.