Harriet Hall in Skeptical Inquirer:

Researchers have failed to find a uniform marker for aging. The aging process seems to be different for different individuals; it is varied, chaotic, and idiosyncratic. There is probably no single cause, but many causes have been proposed: collagen breakdown, UV light, oxidation, inflammation, insulin resistance, glycation, free radicals, accumulation of DNA copying errors, telomere shortening, accumulation of waste products, heterochromatin loss, and many others. I suspect that many of these factors are contributory and that they interact with each other.

Ray Kurzweil believes that science will soon discover the key to immortality, and if he can just stay alive until then, he believes he will be able to live forever. He optimistically takes 250 supplement pills a day, gets weekly IV infusions, uses acupuncture and Chinese herbs, and does other things that he thinks might help keep him alive. His approach is nothing but hope and speculation.

More here.

Dyani Lewis in Nature:

The largest ever study of primates has unveiled surprises about humanity and our closest relatives, providing insight into which genes do, and don’t, separate us from other primates. The huge international study has also yielded new data for a wide range of disciplines, including human health, conservation biology and behavioural science.

More than 500 species of primate exist today, including humans, monkeys, apes, lemurs, tarsiers and lorises. Many are threatened by climate change, habitat loss and illegal hunting. Researchers sequenced genomes from nearly half of all primate species, investigating more than 800 genomes from 233 species around the world, representing all 16 families of primate. The work has been published in a series of papers in Science and Science Advances this week^1–10.

“The more we understand about primate genomics, the more we’ll understand about human genomics,” says primatologist Alison Behie at the Australian National University in Canberra. “There’s a potential there to do a lot more really interesting work as they grow that sample size to bring in more species.”

More here.

Mike Jay in The Public Domain Review:

Those who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain — psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of mind and suffered Promethean consequences.

More here.

Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta:

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals from the eyes and purely mental pictures bubbling out of the imagination. Brain scan studies have repeatedly found that seeing something and imagining it evoke highly similar patterns of neural activity. Yet for most of us, the subjective experiences they produce are very different.

“I can look outside my window right now, and if I want to, I can imagine a unicorn walking down the street,” said Thomas Naselaris, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. The street would seem real and the unicorn would not. “It’s very clear to me,” he said. The knowledge that unicorns are mythical barely plays into that: A simple imaginary white horse would seem just as unreal.

So “why are we not constantly hallucinating?” asked Nadine Dijkstra, a postdoctoral fellow at University College London.

More here.

Simon Torracinta in the Boston Review:

Dreams of a guaranteed income are longstanding, but they leapt back into the public imagination in the wake of the dismal recovery from the 2008 financial crash, endorsed by a diverse array of figures on both the left and right. In 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang briefly managed to catapult himself into the media spotlight by pitching an eye-catching “Freedom Dividend” of $1,000 a month to every U.S. citizen over the age of eighteen. Building on this momentum, the massive social and economic dislocation of the pandemic and the nearly unprecedented use of fiscal firepower seemed poised to effect a permanent transformation of the welfare system in both the United States and across much of the Global North.

Yet as soon as the drastic recovery measures began to revive the U.S. growth engine and inflation began to tick upward as snarled supply chains creaked under new waves of consumer demand, a chorus of economists and employers began to scream that the emergency measures were responsible for overheating the economy. Today inflation anxiety continues to dominate headlines, the impact payments have entirely stopped, and every pandemic-era expansion of the transfer system has been allowed to quietly expire.

More here.

Dixie Burge in Big Band Swing:

“Oscar Levant is a character who, if he did not exist, could not be imagined.” These words were used by Levant’s great friend, S. N.(“Sam”)Behrman, to describe him. No truer words were ever spoken! In his lifetime, Oscar Levant flourished as (and subsequently gave up each, one by one) gifted composer, concert pianist, radio personality, movie star, successful recording artist, best-selling author, talk-show host and quiz show panelist. Whew! It was what he described as his Noel Coward Principal he managed “to break off his jobs at a certain interval.” He appeared in thirteen movies, including “An American In Paris”, “The Band Wagon”, “Humoresque” and the George Gershwin biograpy, “Rhapsody in Blue”, in which he played “an unsympathetic part… myself.”

…Levant was an astonishingly gifted concert pianist who, in his heyday of the 1940’s and early-to-mid 1950’s, earned more money than any other pianist in America. In the 1930’s, before he gained his real fame, Levant was dubbed “the wag of Broadway” by Michael Mok in the New York Post. In the 1940’s, at the height of his fame as a wit and bad boy, he was known as “the enfant terrible.” In the 1950’s and ‘60’s, after mental illness and drug abuse had taken their toll, Levant was known as “America’s favorite neurotic.” He sporadically appeared on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar to talk candidly about those subjects, being the first well-known personality to do so. He coined a now-famous phrase: “There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line.” Author Christopher Isherwood described Levant as a character created by Dostoevsky someone “completely unmasked at all times.”

…“It’s not what you are – it’s what you don’t become that hurts.” Oscar Levant

More here.

Daniel Levitin in Delancey Place:

“The big debate among memory theorists over the last hundred years has been about whether human and animal is relational or absolute. The relational school argues that our memory system stores information about the relations between objects and ideas, but not nec­essarily details about the objects themselves. This is also called the con­structivist view, because it implies that, lacking sensory specifics, we construct a memory representation of reality out of these relations (with many details filled in or reconstructed on the spot). The constructivists believe that the function of memory is to ignore irrelevant details, while preserving the gist. The competing theory is called the record-keeping theory. Supporters of this view argue that memory is like a tape recorder or digital video camera, preserving all or most of our experiences accu­rately, and with near perfect fidelity.

“Music plays a role in this debate because — as the Gestalt psycholo­gists noted over one hundred years ago — melodies are defined by pitch relations (a constructivist view) and yet, they are composed of precise pitches (a record-keeping view, but only if those pitches are encoded in memory).

More here.

Hanif Abdurraqib at The New Yorker:

In 2014, Christine and the Queens’ French album début, “Chaleur Humaine” (“Human Warmth”), became a runaway hit; the following year, a self-titled version appeared in the U.S., with many of the lyrics reworked into English. The songs had infectious hooks and shimmering electronic instrumentation. Back then, Letissier used feminine pronouns, but he was already casting off the strictures of gender. The opening song of the début album, “iT,” was a danceable tune in which bright drops of synthesizer rained into caverns of pulsating bass. The lyrics were a priapic fantasy: “I’ll rule over all my dead impersonations / ’Cause I’ve got it / I’m a man now.” I saw Christine and the Queens perform in 2015, in New York, and recall how hard-earned those declarations seemed to be. Christine—petite, lithe, androgynous—seemed at ease in a dark suit, standing at the front of the stage or dancing in a wash of blue light. But there were moments when the line between Letissier’s different selves blurred. During one rapturous wave of applause, he teared up, then apologized for the lapse, admitting, “I wanted to be fierce.”

more here.

Erik Hoel at The Intrinsic Perspective:

While GPT-4 does have a radically different architecture from our own biological brains (like being solely feedforward and synchronous, whereas our own organic brains have a lot of feedback and asynchronous processing), AIs are neural networks inspired from biological ones. AIs have a learning rule that changes the strengths of the connections between their neurons, just like us—except their learning rule is applied from the outside by their engineers during a training phase, unlike us, who are forever learning (and forgetting). When artificial neural networks are trained, they often develop the properties we associate with real neural networks like grid-cells, shape-tuning, and visual illusions, which is why researchers in 2019 proposed a “deep learning framework for neuroscience.” There are even some prominent arguments that our own brains follow learning rules not too dissimilar. This similarity is why I advanced the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis, which argues that dreaming is a form of data augmentation, like a noise injection, that makes our nighttime experiences sparse and hallucinatory, and evolved to prevent overfitting.

more here.

Acadian Lane

Indigo against ocher, Atlantic
Blue abutting shore cliffs, bluffs, and sand,
All of the earth on Prince Edward Island
The red of dried blood, of weather-worn brick,
Of this rutted, twisting road leading down
Through the fishing village to the harbor
Where lobster boats rock, scarlet as lobster;
The bay’s depth, smoked glass, reflecting the town.
A few dogs rustle in the heat of the noon;
The gulls, the bitterns lift, circling again.
A man is walking his Acadian
Lane, the fine red dust rising off his clothes;
He begins to sing a slow French tune—
La mer, la terre, le monde est seulement ces choses!

by David St, John
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986

David Sexton in The Guardian:

The Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most critically acclaimed authors writing in English today: the now 68-year-old was twice selected in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists issue, in 1983 and 1993, before going on to bag the Booker prize, the Nobel prize in literature and a knighthood. Earlier this year, he picked up Bafta and Oscar nominations too, for his adapted screenplay of Living, starring Bill Nighy. David Sexton suggests some good places to start for those who haven’t yet dipped in to his work.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

“Female hypergamy” (from now on, just “hypergamy”) is a supposed tendency for women to seek husbands who are higher-status than themselves. Arguing about educational hypergamy (women seeking husbands who are more educated than themselves) is especially popular, because women are now (on average) more educated than men – if every woman wants a more-educated husband, most won’t get them, and there will be some kind of crisis.

Freddie de Boer’s Demographic Dating Market Doom Loop presents an argument that educational hypergamy is lowering marriage rates.

More here.

Richard V Reeves in Persuasion:

One hundred and fifty years ago this month, John Stuart Mill died in his home in Avignon. His last words were to his step-daughter, Helen Taylor: “You know that I have done my work.”

He certainly had. During his 66 years of life, Mill became the preeminent public intellectual of the century, producing definitive works of logic and political economy, founding and editing journals, serving in Parliament, and churning out book reviews, journalism and essays, most famously his 1859 masterpiece, On Liberty. Oh, and he had a day job, too: as one of the most senior bureaucrats in the East India Company.

What is too often forgotten about Mill is that he was as much an activist as an academic. Benjamin Franklin exhorted his followers to “either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” Mill, like Franklin himself, is among the very few who managed to do both.

For Mill, liberalism did not only have to be argued for, it had to be fought for, too. He campaigned for women’s rights and was the first MP to introduce a bill for women’s suffrage into Parliament. He was a fiercely committed anti-racist, strongly supporting the abolitionist movement in the United States, and the North in the Civil War. Mill also led a successful campaign for the right to protest and speak in London’s public parks. In Hyde Park, the famous Speaker’s Corner stands today as a tribute to his victory.

More here.

Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker:

Perhaps the most fascinating thing here is the insistence that singing the song isn’t enough to help the supplicant who is in a crisis situation. It’s also essential to understand what the lyrics really mean. The Derveni author gets most irate when describing those who turn to other musical ritualists for enlightenment, for “they go away after having performed [the rites] before they have attained knowledge, without even asking further questions.”

So we are left with the surprising fact that not only is the oldest book in Europe about music criticism, but that this is not a trivial detail or mere happenstance. In this time and place, knowing the meaning of a song could be a matter of grave importance (no pun intended). Or even more to the point—the effects of making a wrong choice could last into the afterlife. Was there ever a music fan who made a more extreme claim for a favorite song?

more here.

When I saw a picture of the Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, I knew almost for certain that the brazen and sensuous façade, its concave and convex undulations, must have been designed by a restless spirit. A simple Google search confirmed my suspicion. The architect, baroque master Francesco Borromini, is thought to have suffered from a manic-depressive disorder. Combined with his obvious perfectionism, this must have been the generative force behind his large oeuvre of superhuman designs. But the creative ferment of his genius had a dark side: he went through pitch-black periods of utter dejection.

In a sense, Borromini’s entire career was dominated by that church, San Carlo, whose small footprint has given it the nickname San Carlino. Along with the adjacent monastery and sleeping quarters, it was Borromini’s first solo architectural commission—though anything but a routine job.

more here.

Bhav Jain and Simar Bajaj in Smithsonian:

Imagine you’re in a room with a hundred American young adults, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Over their lifetimes, about 25 of them will have a stroke; 40 will get cancer. And an astounding half the room will develop a mental illness, if they haven’t done so already.

The United States’ mental health epidemic has been simmering for decades, with Covid-19 both illuminating and exacerbating the crisis. Given the social isolation, job insecurity and weakened support systems over the past few years, the World Health Organization estimated a 25 percent increase in anxiety and depression worldwide, with women and young people worst hit. A large part of the challenge are the cavernous gaps in care: 158 million Americans live in an area with a shortage of mental health workers. And while the rise of telehealth and creation of the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline have helped, they are only Band-Aids, barely holding together a system failing at its seams. “We’re at a point in the U.S. where it almost couldn’t get worse,” says Kenneth Pages, a Florida doctor and former chief of psychiatry at Tampa General Hospital. “Describe worse to me at this point.”

More here.