Aaron Shulman in Literary Hub:

“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.” This certain death came tragically early for the Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño, writer of that lapidary sentence, who died twenty years ago this month at the age of 50.

In the years after his death, though, his literary afterlife grew into one of the most extraordinary in recent memory, especially for an artist who wrote mainly about desperate poets and obscure writers—not material usually predictive of strong sales or worldwide fame. A writer with avant-garde origins who worked in almost total obscurity for most of his career, Bolaño somehow emerged as the first global publishing phenomenon of the 21st century, leaving behind a large body of posthumous work that is still expanding and a life story shot through with mythos and confusion.

Today, what might seem almost as surprising as Bolaño’s extraordinary success, is the fact that two decades after his death no one has yet written a biography of him.

More here.

Colin Dickey at Atlas Obscura:

Even today, no one is even sure precisely where the name originated. Some have traced it to an account from 1839, when a young Black man was caught “lurking” around the Capitol in Washington, D.C.—when asked how he got there, he said that he had been sent north by a “railroad which went underground all the way to Boston.”

Through a loose network of formerly enslaved and free Black Americans, along with their white allies, thousands of enslaved Americans made their way north in the decades before the Civil War, moving sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes out in the open, on railways and ships, in wagons and freight, toward freedom. It is impossible now to know for certain how many people made their way out of slavery on the Underground Railroad; both supporters and detractors had an investment in embellishing its impact. In the North, abolitionists dramatized the plight of those seeking refuge and to play up their own heroic efforts. In the South, enslavers argued that the Underground Railroad was nothing short of a grand conspiracy of subversive lawbreakers—the higher the numbers, the greater the threat to the country.

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Sam Sweet at The Baffler:

Gardena’s poker clubs were the product of a legal loophole in California’s 1872 gaming legislation, which outlawed gambling but made an exception for the specific style of draw poker. (Draw poker being the preferred game among nineteenth-century legislators.) No California localities abided poker except Gardena, where a savvy investor named Ernest Primm exerted enough pressure to earn a permit for his first club in 1936. By the 1960s, the Gardena clubs numbered six: the Rainbow, the Monterey, the Normandie, the Horseshoe, the Gardena, and the El Dorado.

With its free meals and cocktails and stage shows, Vegas catered to losers. Gardena catered to regulars. It offered them nothing but poker. Instead of taking a percentage, the clubs made money by selling time. Every half hour, a red light would appear on the clock and players would hand a few dollars in chips to roving “chip girls” who deposited the rent into their sagging aprons.

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Mattie J.T. Stepanak: Here

Andrew Leland at Literary Hub:

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges lost his vision—what he called his “reader’s and writer’s sight”—around the same time that he became the director of the National Library of Argentina. This put him in charge of nearly a million books, he observed, at the very moment he could no longer read them.

Borges, who went blind after a long decline in vision when he was fifty-five, never learned braille. Instead, like Milton, he memorized long passages of literature (his own, and those of the writers he loved), and had companions who read to him and to whom he dictated his writing.

Much of this work—he published nearly forty books after he went blind—was done by his elderly mother, Leonor, with whom he lived until her death at ninety-­nine, and who had done the same work for Borges’s father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, a writer who also went blind in middle age.

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Benj Edwards in Ars Technica:

If you feed America’s most important legal document—the US Constitution—into a tool designed to detect text written by AI models like ChatGPT, it will tell you that the document was almost certainly written by AI. But unless James Madison was a time traveler, that can’t be the case. Why do AI writing detection tools give false positives? We spoke to several experts—and the creator of AI writing detector GPTZero—to find out.

Among news stories of overzealous professors flunking an entire class due to the suspicion of AI writing tool use and kids falsely accused of using ChatGPT, generative AI has education in a tizzy. Some think it represents an existential crisis. Teachers relying on educational methods developed over the past century have been scrambling for ways to keep the status quo—the tradition of relying on the essay as a tool to gauge student mastery of a topic.

More here.

Jacob Mchangama in Persuasion:

In 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt, serving as the first Chairperson of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, was involved in a bitter dispute about the limits of free speech. Stalin’s Soviet Union fought tooth and nail to ensure that states should not only be permitted, but obliged to prohibit “hate speech” under international human rights law. Roosevelt issued a stark warning, as she found the Soviet proposal “extremely dangerous.” It would “only encourage Governments to punish all criticisms in the name of protection against religious or national hostility,” and she warned the commission “not to include… any provision likely to be exploited by totalitarian States for the purpose of rendering the other articles null and void.”

Fast forward to July 12, 2023, and a majority of the United Nations Human Rights Council proved Roosevelt prophetic. It did so by adopting a resolution that drives a stake through Roosevelt’s vision of an international human rights system that protects oppressed citizens against their oppressive governments.

More here.

Joy Williams at Bookforum:

The Quick and the Dead, which is not set in Florida but in the West, is one of the weirdest, funniest, darkest novels you’ll ever read. It lost the 2001 Pulitzer Prize to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, thus fulfilling the promise of Luke 4:24. Williams’s new novel, Harrow, is Quick’s spiritual successor, perhaps even sequel, taking up that novel’s concerns and amplifying them by the full twenty years it took her to write it. Harrow reminds me very much of Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but, with apologies to the boys, it’s better than both of their novels put together. Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction, even as it refuses the basic premise (human survival is important) and the sentimental rays of hope (another world is possible!) that are the hallmarks of the genre. This novel doesn’t care who you vote for or if you recycle. It’s not bullish on green tech jobs or sustainable meat. It would leave Steven “Things Are Getting Better” Pinker and Matthew “One Billion Americans” Yglesias writhing in shame if guys like them were capable of reading novels or feeling shame. Harrow is a crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of uncompromised originality and vision. For all of its fragmentation and deliberate strategies of estrangement, Harrow feels coherent and complete, like a single long-form thought or a religious epiphany. It’s also funny as hell.

more here.

Holly Root-Gutteridge at Aeon Magazine:

After hundreds of hours listening to thousands of wolves for my PhD, the difference between howls was obvious. The voice of a Russian wolf was nothing like that of a Canadian, and a jackal was so utterly different again that it was like listening to Farsi and French. I believed that there must be geographic and subspecies distinctions. Other researchers had made this proposition before, but no one had put together a large enough collection of howls to test it properly. A few years later, my degree finished, I told my Dracula story to the zoologist Arik Kershenbaum at the University of Cambridge. He promptly suggested we explore how attuned to wolves I really am. Are there differences between canid species and subspecies and, if so, could these reflect diverging cultures?

When animals call to each other, they are communicating in a single stream of information from caller to listener. Until modern recording technology was invented, any acoustic communication lasted only as long as the echo.

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Lilly Tozer in Nature:

A study that followed thousands of people over 25 years has identified proteins linked to the development of dementia if their levels are unbalanced during middle age. The findings, published in Science Translational Medicine on 19 July¹, could contribute to the development of new diagnostic tests, or even treatments, for dementia-causing diseases. Most of the proteins have functions unrelated to the brain.

“We’re seeing so much involvement of the peripheral biology decades before the typical onset of dementia,” says study author Keenan Walker, a neuroscientist at the US National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland. Equipped with blood samples from more than 10,000 participants, Walker and his colleagues questioned whether they could find predictors of dementia years before its onset by looking at a person’s proteome — the collection of all the proteins expressed throughout the body. They searched for any signs of dysregulation — when proteins are at levels much higher or lower than normal.

The samples were collected as part of an ongoing study that began in 1987. Participants returned for examination six times over three decades, and during this time, around 1 in 5 of them developed dementia. The researchers found 32 proteins that, if dysregulated in people aged 45 to 60, were strongly associated with an elevated chance of developing dementia in later life. It is unclear how exactly these proteins might be involved in the disease, but the link is “highly unlikely to be due to just chance alone”, says Walker.

More here.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Life finds a way.

That’s the conclusion of a new study in Nature, which pitted synthetic bacterial cells against the force of evolution. Stripped down to a skeletal genetic blueprint, the artificial cells started with a losing hand for survival. Yet they thrived, evolving at a rate nearly 40 percent faster than their non-minimal counterparts. Over 2,000 generations, the streamlined cells regained their evolutionary fitness—the ability to survive, grow, and reproduce—that was initially lost after removing a large portion of their genes. The results could herald a next generation of synthetic bacteria that pump out insulin and other life-saving medications, produce biofuels, or bio-degrade hazardous chemicals—by tapping into, rather than fighting against, the power of evolution.

The crux was landing on a set of mutated genes that gave the minimal cell an advantage. The same technique might further refine artificial cells by guiding how next generations develop. Practical uses aside, we can now peek into natural selection itself. “It appears there’s something about life that’s really robust,” said study author Dr. Jay Lennon at Indiana University Bloomington. “We can simplify it down to just the bare essentials, but that doesn’t stop evolution from going to work.”

More here.

Listening to the Harvest

Harvest sounds hearty, sounds sure of itself — sounds like the record, sounds like “Heart of Gold,” but even then, Neil sings that it’s the searching for the heart of gold, and the more I harvest the more I realize I am searching, it is work: it is being harvested by insects, poked by thorny leaves, discerning the green of a bean from the green of a leaf, determining the shine on the skin of a jeweled eggplant — it’s finding everything in its exact time, plucking it from this into that; playing god, obeying God; in service of the harvest, on my knees, leaning into the garden, really prostrate before the growth, in adoration of the land — I learn to reap without violence; listen without taking; I yield in more and more colors. Eat with the salt of each season.
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by Lauren Turner
from The Ecotheo Review

Başak Çandar in Literary Hub:

“The problem that troubles the novelist [is] how to justify a concern with morally dubious people in a contemptible activity,” notes South African writer J. M. Coetzee, “ … how to treat something that, in truth, because it is offered like the Gorgon’s head to terrorize the populace and paralyze resistance, deserves to be ignored.” Here, in the essay “Into the Dark Chamber,” Coetzee points out that literature exposing political terror—in this case, torture, the existence of which is repeatedly denied by repressive regimes—can actually become an inadvertent tool of that terror.

We might assume that literature can be mobilized to resist oppression by exposing it. But, what Coetzee emphasizes is that, in exposing the crimes, literature can also replicate the terms of the “game” and intensify fear, quashing the possibility of resistance—in part what torture is designed to do. For Coetzee, then, the “true challenge” for the novelist becomes “how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one’s own terms.”

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Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker:

“How does this indictment affect his candidacy?” Bill Hemmer, of Fox News, asked the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley last week. The candidacy in question was, of course, that of former President Donald Trump. The indictment being discussed was one that Trump, in a Truth Social post last week, said he expected any day after receiving a so-called target letter from the special counsel Jack Smith, on charges related to Trump’s actions in the prelude to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. It would be his third criminal indictment in about four months. And, Haley told Hemmer, “it’s going to keep on going. I mean, the rest of this primary election is going to be in reference to Trump, it’s going to be about lawsuits, it’s going to be about legal fees, it’s going to be about judges, and it’s just going to continue to be a further and further distraction.”

Haley is herself running for the Republican nomination, so perhaps what she means is that Trump’s legal troubles are a distraction from her own campaign, or from the picture she wishes voters had of the Republican Party. “We can’t keep dealing with this drama, we can’t keep dealing with the negativity,” she said. (One wonders how she managed to spend almost two years in Trump’s Cabinet, as the Ambassador to the United Nations.) And yet, in a crowded primary field, Trump is polling around fifty per cent, while his closest competitor, Ron DeSantis, comes in at roughly twenty. Haley is hovering at about five per cent, somewhere between Senator Tim Scott and former Vice-President Mike Pence. Trump, for all his drama, isn’t a distraction from what the G.O.P. is; in many ways, he is the G.O.P. And the various cases against Trump aren’t a distraction preventing people from assessing him. Instead, they provide an almost encyclopedic guide to his political and personal character.

Haley is right that the cases, criminal and civil, are going to keep on coming.

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Lindsey Liles in Garden & Gun:

The bird has many names, often divinely inspired: the Lord God Bird, the Lazarus Bird, the Ghost Bird, the Grail Bird. Bobby Harrison is a religious man, but he doesn’t like any of them. He prefers to call it what it is: an ivory-billed woodpecker. “Well,” he says with a shrug, “it is just a bird, after all.”

That might seem like an undersell for someone who on this steaming August day is preparing to shove off into the humid, murky shade of an Arkansas swamp on his two-thousandth-plus search for the ivorybill, whose last-agreed-upon sighting in the United States occurred in 1944. But Harrison’s undersell has the ring of the believer: To him, the ivorybill is, like any other bird, made of hollow bones, feathers, a bill. It doesn’t have celestial powers; it’s not a messenger from on high. Instead, it’s still out in the Southern wilds, doing bird things, flying around as it always has. Harrison will tell you all this because he’s seen one. Other people will tell you, very firmly, that he has not—and the clock is now ticking for him to persuade them otherwise.

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Nilanjana S Roy at her own website:

I have learned much about your world in the three months since my form changed. That you swim in an ocean of language. Words pour from your mouths, your screens. Your cities are brightly lit and never silent, but you speak so much and so often, you have forgotten what it is to rest in quietness. The moon’s passage across the skies means nothing to you, carries no messages of comfort or danger. The earth’s speech, its invitations and enchantments, its tremors and its warnings, the whispers of tree roots snaking underneath the surface of your roads and apartments, these are lost to most of you. I have learned that you fear darkness and never seek to explore its many gifts. You can see, hear, feel, speak, but you do not live in your senses. You live like so many leaves in the storm, blown here, blown there.

I am a service provider, to use your language.

I provide a service, a rare and merciful one, to those who are too exhausted to run, whose blood has already grown cold in their veins, who have become too deadened to live.

More here.