Munro Price at Literary Review:

On 23 July 1945 the 89-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, until recently head of the French state, went on trial for his life before a specially convened High Court in Paris, accused of attacking national security and collusion with Nazi Germany amounting to treason. For four years, from the fall of France to the liberation, he had steered the Vichy regime created from the wreckage of defeat into collaboration with the new continental hegemon, Adolf Hitler. Now, after eight months of wandering to escape the advancing Allies through eastern France to the castle of Sigmaringen in Germany and finally to Switzerland, he was in the custody of General de Gaulle’s provisional government.

Pétain’s trial was about much more than the fate of one extremely elderly man. It was newly liberated France’s first opportunity to confront the traumas it had endured from May 1940 to August 1944: the catastrophic military defeat by Germany, the signing of the armistice, the dissolution of the Third Republic and its replacement by the authoritarian Vichy state, the deportations of Jews and the increasingly bloody civil war between the collaborationist regime and the Resistance.

more here.

Emily Wilson in the London Review of Books:

The​ first-century Stoic philosopher and teacher Epictetus was an enslaved person who succeeded in getting an education and, eventually, his freedom. Images of freedom, slavery and self-belonging (oikoiesis) recur in his teaching. ‘A slave is always praying to be set free,’ he writes. He evokes the horrors of enslavement by describing the suffering of caged animals and birds that refuse to eat in captivity and starve to death, though he also occasionally repeats a conventional set of ideas about slavery, claiming, for example, that runaway slaves are ‘cowards’, and that none of them ever dies of hunger. Slavery powered the Roman Empire; in the first century ce, between 10 and 20 per cent of the population were enslaved at any one time. But Epictetus was not an abolitionist in a political sense. Like other ancient philosophers, he assumed that slavery was normal and would always exist. He never suggests that those who claimed to own their fellow human beings were committing a moral evil. His aim was to free others from the ‘tyrannic sway’ not of literal enslavers, but of the emotional disturbance caused by false belief.

More here.

Ian Rose in JSTOR Daily:

For at least the last 400 million years, insects have ruled the world. The first insect fossils are nearly twice as old as the oldest dinosaur. They were the first animals to fly, and that adaptation helped them to spread to every corner of the planet. They survived four of the five mass extinctions in Earth’s history. Then, a mere 200,000 years ago, a new species appeared in East Africa and started to spread over the surface of their planet. In a geologic blink, modern humans were everywhere, hunting and farming and changing the world to fit our needs and desires. It was inevitable that these two dominant animals would come to affect each other in profound ways, both positive and negative.

For most of our history as a primarily hunter-gatherer and then agricultural species, insects were a natural force on par with the weather. We could no more summon their benefits or hold back their ravages than we could start or stop the wind. So, we lived with them, and adapted to them, as they did to us. Our relationship status has always been complicated, but insects fall into three major roles in terms of how they interact with humans—providers, destroyers, and vectors of disease.

More here.

Adam Rogers in Business Insider:

The inner workings of the large language models at the heart of a chatbot are a black box; the datasets they’re trained on are so critical to their functioning that their creators consider the information a proprietary secret. So Bamman’s team decided to become “data archaeologists.” To figure out what GPT-4 has read, they quizzed it on its knowledge of various books, as if it were a high-school English student. Then they gave it a score for each book. The higher the score, the likelier it was that the book was part of the bot’s dataset — not just crunched to help the bot generate new language, but actually memorized.

In a recent preprint, meaning it hasn’t been peer reviewed yet — the team presented its findings — what amounts to an approximation of the chatbot canon.

More here.

Everyone Was In Love

One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus
appeared in the doorway naked and mirthful,
with a dozen long garter snakes draped over
each of them like brand-new clothes.
Snake trails dangled down their backs,
and snake foreparts in various lengths
fell over their fronts. With heads raised and swaying,
alert as cobras, the snakes writhed their dry skins
upon each other, as snakes like doing
in lovemaking, with the added novelty
of caressing soft, smooth, most human skin.
Maud and Fergus were deliciously pleased with themselves.
The snakes seemed to be tickled, too.
We were enchanted. Everyone was in love.
Then Maud drew down off Fergus’s shoulder,
as off a tie rack, a peculiarly
lumpy snake and told me to look inside.
Inside the double-hinged jaw, a frog’s green
webbed hind feet were being drawn,
like a diver’s, very slowly as if into deepest waters.
Perhaps thinking I might be considering rescue,
Maud said, “Don’t. Frog is already elsewhere.”

by Galway Kinnel
from Strong Is Your Hold
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006

Alissa Bennett in The Paris Review:

I briefly moved back to Rhode Island following the collapse of my first marriage. It was the summer before I turned twenty-seven, and I spent three months hiding away in my childhood bedroom, grief-damaged and humiliated by the task of trying to figure out who and how I was supposed to be. My husband and I had managed to stay married for only four years, the last of which I spent watching from the sidelines as he enjoyed an unexpectedly rapid and very public rise as an artist. His newly minted success introduced a host of newly minted problems, and I drifted through most of that winter and spring weeping in the utility closet at the boutique where I worked and asking him where I fit into his life so many times that I eventually didn’t fit into it at all.

By that July, we were completely estranged. I was living with my parents when his art dealer sent me a copy of The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s 1920 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel that lays bare the punitive cruelties of a leisure class as expert at collecting things as it was at discarding people. Partially set in the Gilded Age Newport where Wharton herself had summered from the late 1870s through the turn of the century, the book lifts a curtain’s edge on what once happened inside those hedgerow-protected compounds. I never asked the art dealer if he was suggesting that I was a May Welland or an Ellen Olenska, but maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe he was telling me that all bad marriages are exactly the same, that it makes no difference where you live or what you have, because even glamour cannot temper the pain of being left.

More here.

Benji Jones in Vox:

Plastic recycling doesn’t work, no matter how diligently you wash out your peanut butter container. Only about 15 percent of plastic waste is collected for recycling worldwide, and of that, about half ends up discarded. That means just 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled.

The rest — some 91 percent of all plastic waste — ends up in landfills, incinerators, or as trash in the environment. One report estimated that 11 million metric tons of plastic trash leaked into the ocean in 2016, and that number could triple by 2040 as the global population rises and lower-income countries develop. Plastic is now simply everywhere: at the deepest depths of the ocean, on the tallest mountains, in hundreds of species of wildlife, and even in human placentas. It’s hard to imagine meaningful solutions to a problem of such epic proportions. Campaigns to ban things like plastic straws almost seem like a joke when compared to the staggering amounts of waste produced by everything else we use — including the plastic cups those straws go in.

Now, however, there might actually be a reason to feel hopeful. Late last year, world leaders, scientists, and advocates started working on a global, legally binding treaty under the United Nations to end plastic waste. The second round of negotiations concluded last week in Paris with a plan to produce an initial draft of the deal.

More here.

Amy Raphael in The Guardian:

In conversation with the novelist Sally Rooney on the final day of Charleston festival, Ernaux was talking via an interpreter as she explained her tricky relationship with the prize.

She said: “So I’m going to be brutal and say that I obtained a prize I never wanted. The Nobel prize fell upon me. It fell into my life like a bomb. It was an enormous disruption; since winning it, I cannot write and the act of the writing was always my future.

“And so, to not be able to look forward to writing, is actually really painful to me. Yes, it’s a great recognition, a recognition of my work – I’ve been writing for 40 years.

“What touches me is not the prize itself, but my conversations with people – when they say to me that they see themselves when they read my work. It’s the feeling that the prize does not just belong to me, but to all of us; that matters to me.”

More here.

Dani Bostick in McSweeney’s:

WHITMAN: Are you the new person drawn toward me?

SWIFT: Saw you there and I thought, “Oh, my God, look at that face. You look like my next mistake.”

WHITMAN: To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different than what you suppose.

SWIFT: You’re the “kind of reckless that should send me running,” but I kinda know that I won’t get far.

WHITMAN: Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?

SWIFT: I knew you were trouble when you walked in.

WHITMAN: Do you think it is so easy to have me become your lover?

SWIFT: Got a long list of ex-lovers. They’ll tell you I’m insane ’cause you know I love the players and you love the game.

More here.

Cameron J. Sabet, Alessandro Hammond, Simar S. Bajaj, and Belson Rugwizangoga at Think Global Health:

The people of Rwanda have been tested by tragedy. Nearly thirty years ago, when ethnic Hutu extremists sought to exterminate the country’s Tutsi minority, more than one million lives were lost. The violence strained the nation’s fragile health-care system, which was already inaccessible to rural residents, who made up 83 percent of the population.

When the COVID-19 struck, it encountered a decidedly different health-care system. Although Rwanda reported more than 33,194 cumulative cases and 1,468 deaths, it also weathered the pandemic uniquely well. The country was prepared to allocate vaccines by region as soon as donations from China and the United States began arriving in March 2021. Within two years, 82 percent of the population had received at least one dose, far outshining neighboring countries like Tanzania (52 percent), Uganda (41 percent), the Democratic Republic of Congo (10 percent), and Burundi (0.26 percent). Rwanda’s ability to bring everyone in the Ministry of Health and partner institutions together to track vaccination rates, reach communities most at risk, and dispel misinformation helped the nation become a world leader in the vaccine rollout.

What did Rwanda change between the genocide and the pandemic to improve its health-care accessibility, and what lessons can other low-income countries adopt to strengthen their own health-care systems?

More here.

Alissa Wilkinson in Vox:

In 1989, a redheaded mermaid made her big-screen debut. She wanted to be part of the above-surface world, where people walk around on (what do you call ‘em?) feet, to wander free on the sand in the sunshine. She fell in love with a handsome, kind prince. After some terrifying obstacles and a near-miss, they married. Ariel got her feet. For Disney, The Little Mermaid was a big hit, the start of a new era for the studio’s animated entertainment. She launched a hot streak that would continue through the 1990s: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998), and Tarzan (1999). They were hits then, the early films in particular, and form a foundational plank in billions of lives. A tremendous percentage of people walking around on the planet can sing snatches of “Part of Your World” or “A Whole New World” or “Circle of Life” at the drop of a hat.

Yet 30 years after these films defined an era, Disney seems determined to make sure its most beloved movies — including The Little Mermaid — feel like the emblem of a world that’s run out of ideas.

More here.

Natasha Gilbert in Nature:

Scientists might be able to keep tabs on the world’s flora and fauna by analysing DNA floating through the air. That’s the conclusion of a study published on 5 June in Current Biology¹, in which a team identified more than 180 types of organism, including plants, fungi, insects and animals, using DNA captured by filters from air-pollution monitoring stations. The researchers say that, because of the ubiquity of such stations, the method could transform the monitoring of biodiversity on Earth, and might even be able to detect rare species.

Global biodiversity is plummeting — some estimates suggest a 69% drop in wildlife populations since 1970. Scientists struggle to keep track of changes in ecosystems and rates of species decline because they lack infrastructure to measure biodiversity on large scales. Typically, researchers or conservation volunteers monitor a few terrestrial species in small regions using labour-intensive methods such as camera surveillance, in-person observations and examining traces including footprints and faeces. Over large scales, only very general measurements are possible, such as assessments of forest cover.

More here.

Border

I’m going to move ahead.
Behind me my whole family is calling,
My child is pulling my sari-end,
My husband stands blocking the door,
But I will go.
There’s nothing ahead but a river.
I will cross.
I know how to swim,
but they won’t let me swim, won’t let me cross.

There’s nothing on the other side of the river
but a vast expanse of fields,
But I’ll touch this emptiness once
and run against the wind, whose whooshing sound
makes me want to dance.
I’ll dance someday
and then return.

I’ve not played keep-away for years
as I did in childhood.
I’ll raise a great commotion playing keep-away someday
and then return.

For years I haven’t cried with my head
in the lap of solitude.
I’ll cry to my heart’s content someday
and then return.

There’s nothing ahead but a river,
and I know how to swim.
Why shouldn’t I go?

I’ll go.

by Taslima Nasrin

Richard Hughes Gibson in The Hedgehog Review:

What exactly separates the short story from the novel? As the contemporary Scottish writer William Boyd has observed, the issue is more complicated than it might at first appear. Novelists and short story writers, Boyd points out, rely on the same “literary tools,” including character, plot, setting, title, and dialogue, and their outputs—sentences and paragraphs—look the same on the page. The tempting answer is to fall back on the obvious difference: short stories are just shorter than novels.

Already in the late nineteenth century, critics argued that that answer wasn’t good enough. In one of the earliest attempts to define the genre, “The Philosophy of the Short-Story” (1885), Brander Matthews made the case that the short story’s distinctive trait is not length per se. (“The story which is short can be written by anybody who can write at all.”) In Matthews’s view, the short story is defined by its originality, ingenuity, and, above all, “vigorous compression.”

More here.

Ed Yong in Aeon:

In the 1870s, German physician Robert Koch was trying to curtail an epidemic of anthrax that was sweeping local farm animals. Other scientists had seen a bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, in the victims’ tis­sues. Koch injected this microbe into a mouse – which died. He recovered it from the dead rodent and injected it into another one – which also died. Doggedly, he repeated this grim process for over 20 generations and the same thing happened every time. Koch had unequivocally shown that Bacillus anthracis caused anthrax.

This experiment, and those of contemporaries like Louis Pasteur, confirmed that many diseases are caused by microscopic organisms. Microbes, which had been largely neglected for a couple of centuries, were quickly cast as avatars of death. They were germs, pathogens, bringers of pestilence. Within two decades of Koch’s work on anthrax, he and many others had discovered that bacteria were also associated with leprosy, gonorrhoea, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, tetanus, and plague. Microbes became synonymous with squalor and sickness. They became foes for us to annihilate and repel.

Today, we know this view is wrong – as I explain in my new book I Contain Multitudes.

More here.

Imogen West-Knights in The Guardian:

It is strange to think of Guinness World Records – a business named after a beer company, which catalogues humanity’s most batshit endeavours – as the kind of entity that could sell out. At first glance, it seems like accusing Alton Towers or Pizza Express of selling out. But the deeper I delved into the world of record breaking, the more sense it made. In spite of its absurdity, or maybe because of it, record breaking is a reflection of our deepest interests and desires. Look deeply enough at a man attempting to break the record for most spoons on a human body, or the woman seeking to become the oldest salsa dancer in the world, and you can find yourself starting to believe that you’re peering into humanity’s soul.

More here.

Michael Hirsh in Politico:

Ellsberg, snowy-haired but energetic despite the cancer — renowned for his eloquence, he still speaks in perfect paragraphs — was calm, even jovial, during what his son, Robert Ellsberg, said would be his last interview. Based on his experience in the covert world, Ellsberg sees a direct line between the deceptions and lies that led to the Vietnam War — and 58,000 American deaths — and the deceptions and lies that justified the Iraq war. This high-level deceit, Ellsberg says, extends to America’s current drone war policy around the world, in which the government has allegedly covered up the number of civilian deaths it causes.

“The need for whistleblowing in my area of so-called national security is that we have a secret foreign policy, which has been very successfully kept secret and essentially mythical,” he says. “I’m saying there’s never been more need for whistleblowers … There’s always been a need for many more than we have. At the same time, it’s become more and more dangerous to be a whistleblower. There’s little doubt about that.”

More here.

Bread and Salt

If it was a wedding instead of war,
Dobropillia would be welcoming us
with a kobzar, bread, and salt.
Wheat fields would be glowing like golden flames
beside the road, alight with dignity and freedom.

The loam in those fields is free.
But now deep trenches as high as one man standing
on top of another extend from one end to the other
while craters just as deep pock the chornozem
from so many rounds of howitzer shells.
Europe, what more evidence, what more words do you need?
Humanity has always been divided into those
who love life and those who kill.

We’ve never been against giving grain to the hungry,
but we have always been against expropriations,
violence, and robbery.
Europe!
You need to choose between MV and BAU
without it being the kiss of Judas.

by Volodymyr Tymchuk
from Plume Magazine, Issue #142 June 2023
Translation from Ukrainian, Dzvinia Orlowsky and Chard deNiord

*MV: moral values, BAU: business as usual