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Wesley Morris in The New York Times:

On today’s show, Wesley reveals his favorite film performances of the year — but his list is not an ordinary best-of list. He zeroes in on the specific details that make a performance great. Like, who did the best acting in a helmet this year? Who were the most convincing on-screen best friends? And who refused to play it safe? Find out in our first annual Cannonball Great Performers special.

More here.

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Harriet A. Washington at The American Scholar:

“Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem … cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty.” So wrote Langston Hughes in his landmark 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Today, Paul Robeson—singer, actor, athlete, lawyer, antiracism icon—needs no introduction. But who was Rudolph Fisher?

You would not have had to ask in 1926. Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher was one of the brightest figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes described him as the “wittiest of these New Negroes of Harlem whose tongue was flavored with the sharpest and saltiest humor. … [He] always frightened me a little, because he could think of the most incisively clever things to say—and I could never think of anything to answer.” Although his star has been eclipsed by Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Hughes himself, Fisher once blazed at the center of this pantheon as a masterly author of short fiction and novels; as a polymath who excelled in science, music, and oratory; and as a physician.

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Bailey Trela at The Nation:

Forrest Gander is on good terms with the mineral world, and he’s made a habit in his poetry of displaying a deep familiarity with the layers of sediment below our feet. His expertise—Gander is a geologist by training—has allowed him to convert technical terms (such as rift zone, ilmenite, and olivine) into lyrical tools that capture rarefied emotional states and complex systems of relation. So it’s natural that his latest collection, Mojave Ghost, opens with an act of geophagy. “The first dirt I tasted was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert,” Gander writes in a brief preface. The dirt, the rocks, the minerals that make up the earth around him are an index of intimacy, of a time and place that shaped his fluid sensibility. Melding the human and nonhuman realms becomes an act of self-recognition for Gander, granting a deeper understanding of himself and the setting of his birth.

But Mojave Ghost is an elegy, too, and the grief Gander expresses here is another form of intimacy we might develop with the earth.

more here.

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Eliot Weinberger at the Paris Review:

Thomas Manning arrived in Lhasa in 1811, having walked for months across the Himalayas from Calcutta, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim and accompanied only by a single Chinese servant, with whom he spoke in Latin. He was the first Englishman to enter the city, the only one to do so in the entire nineteenth century, and the first European to meet the Dalai Lama, then still a child.

In the orbit of the Romantics, Manning was the best friend of Charles Lamb, close to the mad poet Charles Lloyd, and friendly with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. He knew Tom Paine and Madame de Staël in Paris, and was considered a handsome charmer in its aristocratic and intellectual salons. He spent twelve years in China, India, Vietnam, and Malaysia, and was attached as a freelance interpreter to Lord Amherst’s disastrous expedition to Peking, which was expelled from the Forbidden City after one day, as Amherst had refused to “kowtow” to the emperor. He was perhaps the greatest English Sinologist of his time, before Sinology existed in England, and was the only one for most of the century who was not a missionary or religiously motivated.

more here.

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Latin class

Alphabetical seating.
Peterson, Nils.
Desk behind –
Plummer, Patience.
Amo, Amas, Amat.
Pageboy bob. Brown eyes.
Complexion – adolescent.
No words between us.
Her eyes burned holes
into my back.
Too great a gulf.
I’d skipped a grade,
she an older woman.

I did not know who I was
until she taught me desire
and then I did not know who I was.

earth loves the new
enough to kill the old, loves
spring enough to invite
winter, is kind enough
to give us autumn apples
to help some make it
through the long night

by Nils Peterson

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Gregory Hickok in Psychology Today:

How is it that words can be so common, so fundamental, yet so elusive? A key discovery is that words are not just a sound pattern (cat, gato, neko) and a meaning (furry-domesticated-meows), but also contain something in between, a kind of “middle word,” which psycholinguists refer to as a lemma. The name comes from mathematics, where it refers to an intermediate step in a theorem. You can think of word lemmas as the hidden network that computes the translation between word sound and word meaning. How do we know lemmas exist? There are several bits of evidence, including computational arguments, neural network simulations, and behavioral studies showing that when people get themselves into tip-of-the-tongue states—a failure to access the sound pattern of a word—they know more about the word than just its meaning, such as fragments of its syntactic properties. There’s another fascinating source of evidence, though: neurological cases in which people appear to have lost their middle-word realm altogether.

More here.

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Matthew L. Wald at The EcoModernist:

A container ship looks like a perfect place for a nuclear reactor, from a technology standpoint. But a lawyer might call it the worst. It’s a good example of the divergence between what the world needs, and what the world can get.

Here’s the engineer’s view:

A container ship has a steady energy demand of tens of megawatts, and consumes a lot of oil to cross the oceans. Many ships are “slow steaming,” cutting speed to reduce fuel burn, and a 10 percent reduction in speed cuts fuel consumption by 30 percent.

If the energy were cheap, ships could be designed to travel at 35 knots instead of the 16 to 25 knots that is now standard. That could make one cargo ship do the work that now requires two. In addition, each ship would have more space for cargo. Container ships today have big tanks for millions of gallons of fuel oil, and the engines can be more than 40 feet high and nearly 90 feet long.

And technological progress makes the idea of powering ships with nuclear energy even more attractive.

More here.

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Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by numbers:

My argument is simple: for the first time in history, we can improve human wellbeing while reducing our environmental impact.

It’s common to think that sustainability — or, rather, our lack of sustainability — is a new problem. For most of human history, our ancestors lived sustainably, and only recently has that been knocked off-balance.

Coming from an environmental background, I would have said the same. Look at any series of graphs on environmental pressure, and it’s not hard to see why people would frame it as a new problem. Plot global curves of carbon dioxide emissions, land use, air pollution, global temperatures, or fertiliser use, and they all rise sharply in the last century. It creates the impression that things were fine, but now they’re really not. It’s these curves that often make people — especially young people — feel fatalistic about the future. I was certainly one of them.

By this definition of environmental pressure, it is true that the world has become much less sustainable in modern history. But that only captures half of the story.

More here.

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So Be It. Amen.

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Victoria Craw in The Washington Post:

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Sheon Han at Asterisk:

The long tradition of carceral creativity goes back centuries: John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy, and Oscar Wilde De Profundis all while behind bars. The lineage continued into modern times with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote an entire novel on toilet paper in his prison cell.

Confinement in the military, it turns out, can also be a boon to literary output. James Salter packed a typewriter to write between flight missions, and Ludwig Wittgenstein drafted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the trenches of World War I.

Because I’m no genius, writing philosophical treatises would be a tall order. But I figured I could at least read them. The bleak summer before enlistment felt less grim when I realized I could make it a reading retreat. Twenty-one months of service were ninety-one weeks — in my economy, six academic semesters, or three years of college.

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Sarah Kuta in Smithsonian Magazine:

For the study, scientists combined nine previously collected datasets to look at the brain scans of almost 4,000 “neurotypical” individuals, from newborns to 90-year-olds. Specifically, they looked at diffusion MRI scans, which measure the microscopic movements of water molecules inside the brain. These scans show how the organ’s tissues are structured and can also be used to detect subtle changes, allowing the researchers to see how average brain architecture evolves over a lifetime.

The scientists measured brain wiring changes using 12 different metrics, including the efficiency of connections between regions and the extent of compartmentalization. This analysis revealed the five epochs, each with its own pattern of brain architecture trends.

The first phase occurs from birth to age 9, during which connections between different regions of the brain are relatively inefficient. During this period, the brain also begins consolidating and pruning those connections.

The second era takes place from ages 9 to 32.

More here.

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Nathan Gardels at Noema:

In Jim Fishkin’s new book, “Can Deliberation Cure The Ills of Democracy?,” the pioneering practitioner of deliberative polling surveys the whole array of such practices from citizens’ assemblies to policy juries and independent citizen reviews of ballot measures that are taking place from Brazil to Europe to the U.S. state of Oregon.

The aim in each endeavor is to convene a gathering of citizens that is indicative of the body politic as a whole to consider issues outside the fever of the electoral arena. In those nonpartisan “islands of goodwill,” knowledgeable experts provide verified information. Pro and con positions are presented, as in a jury trial. On that informed basis, citizens deliberate choices and seek consensus to guide policymakers. Fishkin’s experience over 30 years consistently demonstrates how the polarization sparked by the partisan rancor of electoral competition dissipates and how common ground is found through structured deliberation.

The limitation of most of these efforts is that they are advisory and not binding on the powers that be. In recent years, that is beginning to change as citizen-driven deliberative practices are being integrated into political systems through institutions that foster “government with the people,” which directly impacts policy choices.

More here.

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David Vichnar at 3:AM Magazine:

Writing à propos of Louis Armand’s recent opus magnum, A Tomb in H-Section (2025), critic Ramiro Sanchiz called it “a necromodernist tour de force which animates every remain of (un)dead XXth century literature,” thus invoking the spectre of necromodernism, a modernism long-buried but still somehow living on, its undead corpse back again for yet another zombie standoff. In a similar vein, the publisher note described the tome as “a vast, complex book object that concentrates the synergies of Louis Armand’s Golemgrad Pentalogy, of which it is at once a crowning achievement and a jocoserious deconstruction — an ‘Armandgeddon,’ if you will.”

Common to both assessments of Armand’s writing — to reverse a well-known Lyotard maxim regarding postmodernism — is a notion of a type of modernism in its posthumous state, a necromodernist condition in which writing persists in the ruins of literature’s once-modern ambitions. Necromodernism neither celebrates the new nor nostalgically mourns the old, inhabiting instead a space where cultural memory, media saturation, and infrastructural collapse converge into textual practice. It is neither an elegy for modernism nor a prophecy of what comes next, but rather a practice of endurance.

more here.

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