Vikram Murthi at The Nation:

The premise of Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener is, on paper, a provocation: A reformed white supremacist, living a secluded life in witness protection after flipping on his crew, falls in love with a young biracial woman during a period of shared crisis. The man in question, Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), toils away as a horticulturist employed by the estate of a wealthy, childless dowager, Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). His steadfast commitment to her land, and to the diurnal rhythms of gardening, helps him preserve order in his own life after spending much of it dedicated to death. In Narvel’s eyes, it’s an act of penance to give back to the earth with the same hands he previously used to poison it.

When Haverhill insists that Narvel take on her estranged grandniece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) as an apprentice, he cautiously agrees at first, but after warming up to her, he eventually sees it as another opportunity for atonement.

more here.

David Hering at The Point:

Éric Rohmer wasn’t his real name. He was born Maurice Schérer, the name by which his mother knew him her whole life. As far as she was concerned, Maurice was a teacher in a lycée in Paris. She never knew of the existence of Éric Rohmer, nor that her son was an internationally lauded filmmaker and one-time editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma. His cinema, too, was self-denying. Rohmer idolized André Bazin, the influential French film theorist who argued that cinema was the “culmination in time of photographic objectivity”—that film should forgo the artifice of its creation and instead claim to be a snapshot of reality, a reflection of the world taking place in front of the camera. Ignore the origins of the image and its mediation, said Bazin; the world one chooses to depict is the world itself.

Many of Rohmer’s productions followed this model closely. The cast and crew, including Rohmer, would live in shared accommodation, often extremely frugal and without basic amenities, near the filming location, and where possible scenes would be shot in sequence.

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Christian Kriticos in Quillette:

Setsuko Nakamura was 13 years old when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima. She remembers seeing “a blinding bluish-white flash” and then “having the sensation of floating” as the building around her collapsed. When she regained consciousness, she heard the faint cries of her classmates, trapped in the burning ruins: “Mother, help me. God, help me.” Three hundred and fifty-one of her schoolmates died—just a fraction of the overall death toll, which is estimated at anywhere from 70,000 to 140,000.

On the other side of the world, in the nation that launched the attack, the human impact of the atomic bomb was not widely understood at the time. The US imposed strict censorship, confiscating medical reports and photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and restricting the publication of survivor accounts. In any case, the American public was more in the mood for jubilation, as the bombings brought an end to almost four years of war with Japan.

Only a few citizens truly understood the destructive power of this new weapon and the existential threat it posed to humanity. Among them was a 28-year-old flight lieutenant named Roald Dahl, stationed at the British Embassy in Washington, DC.

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Giorgio Parisi in The Guardian:

The multi-prize-winning theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi was born in Rome in 1948. He studied physics at the Sapienza University in the city, and is now a professor of quantum theories there. A researcher of broad interests, Parisi is perhaps best known for his work on “spin glasses” or disordered magnetic states, contributing to the theory of complex systems. For this work, together with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe, he won the Nobel prize in physics in 2021. His first popular science book, In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems, which charts some of the highlights of his life’s work and makes a passionate case for the value of science, is published on 11 July.

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Jackson Lears in Harper’s:

The war in Ukraine has resurrected the ultimate technocratic fantasy: a winnable nuclear war. Intellectuals at the Hoover Institution are urging American strategists to “think nuclearly again,” reestablishing the idea that nuclear weapons are tools to assert U.S. primacy over Russia and China. This isn’t just talk. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently noted “steadily increasing U.S. bomber operations in Europe”—some near the Russian border. Though most Americans are unaware of it, escalation toward nuclear conflict is already under way.

In this strange atmosphere, I feel moved to revisit my own experience as a naval officer on a nuclear-armed ship more than fifty years ago. My story is all too relevant today. As Daniel Ellsberg demonstrates in The Doomsday Machine, the shape of U.S. nuclear strategy has remained unchanged since the early Sixties.

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Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is still an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner. What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a key study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference. “It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof,” says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn’t the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: “There’s been a lot of progress in the field.”

The great wager

Consciousness is everything a person experiences — what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says. Despite a vast effort — and a 25-year bet — researchers still don’t understand how our brains produce it, however. “It started off as a very big philosophical mystery,” Chalmers adds. “But over the years, it’s gradually been transmuting into, if not a ‘scientific’ mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically.” Koch, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, began his search for the neural footprints of consciousness in the 1980s. Since then, he has been invested in identifying “the bits and pieces of the brain that are really essential — really necessary to ultimately generate a feeling of seeing or hearing or wanting,” as he puts it.

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Saima Sidik in Nature:

Two new drugs for treating obesity are on course to become available in the next few years — and they offer advantages beyond those of the highly effective blockbuster drugs already on the market. The first, called orforglipron, is easier to use and to produce, and it will probably be cheaper than existing treatments. The second, retatrutide, has an unprecedented level of efficacy, and could raise the bar for pharmacological obesity treatment. “They’re both breakthroughs,” says endocrinologist Daniel Drucker at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the recent research on either drug. Results from phase II clinical trials of both drugs were announced at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association this month and in the New England Journal of Medicine^1,2. Phase II trials provide data on a drug’s efficacy and ideal dosage in a small group of participants.

Acting on appetite

Orforglipron and retatrutide both mimic hormones produced by the lining of the gut in response to certain nutrients. These hormones help to slow the passage of food through the digestive tract and lower appetite by acting on receptors in the brain — both effects that reduce people’s desire to eat and help them to lose weight.

More here.

Homesickness as Particle Theory

An atom cannot exist
if the center does not hold.

Matter cannot hold
if the atoms swing apart
too far—

that summer night:
I could feel the pieces of my life
circling away from me in distances so vast

the volume of separation
seemed infinite.

I caught
the wisp of my grandfather’s
pipe smoke,

the saturated indigo
of a green downstate summer evening,

every window open
to the chance of sleep

in deep humidity,
washed in waves of cricket song

and the far pungent howl of a coyote
edging the cornfields.

All in seconds
lifted away.

Read more »

Junot Díaz in the Boston Review:

Those of us who revere Octavia Butler’s work and have never stopped mourning her passing do so in part, I suspect, because we know that no matter what happens in this Universe there will never be anyone like Butler again—not as a person and certainly not as an artist. Like Toni Morrison, Butler was a literary eucatastrophe, (a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur), a literary Kwisatz Haderach (Butler loved Dune) that occurs so very rarely in a culture and only if it is lucky.

For those who do not know her (and apparently there are still plenty who don’t): Octavia Estelle Butler is one of our greatest writers, though in the larger culture she is described as the first Black woman to write science fiction professionally. That biographeme—Black Woman Science Fiction Writer—defined Butler her entire career in spite of the fact that her extraordinary and most well-known novel, Kindred (1979), was not science fiction at all, but a neo-slave narrative that Butler herself described as “grim fantasy.” Butler died in 2006, at the age of fifty-eight, far, far too young, publishing fourteen books (fifteen if we count the posthumous collection, Unexpected Stories). They radically transformed multiple canons—U.S. literature, African diasporic literature, feminist literature, science fiction, speculative fiction—but also radically altered the imaginaries of generations of readers and artists. Now with Kindred on television, in an eight-part series by FX on Hulu, a different set of audiences will have the opportunity to discover Butler for themselves.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

It’s somewhat amazing that cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, can make any progress at all. But it has, especially so in recent decades. Partly that’s because nature has been kind to us in some ways: the universe is quite a simple place on large scales and at early times. Another reason is a leap forward in the data we have collected, and in the growing use of a powerful tool: computer simulations. I talk with cosmologist Andrew Pontzen on what we know about the universe, and how simulations have helped us figure it out. We also touch on hot topics in cosmology (early galaxies discovered by JWST) as well as philosophical issues (are simulations data or theory?).

More here.

Jonathan Watts in The Guardian:

Ecological collapse is likely to start sooner than previously believed, according to a new study that models how tipping points can amplify and accelerate one another.

Based on these findings, the authors warn that more than a fifth of ecosystems worldwide, including the Amazon rainforest, are at risk of a catastrophic breakdown within a human lifetime.

“It could happen very soon,” said Prof Simon Willcock of Rothamsted Research, who co-led the study. “We could realistically be the last generation to see the Amazon.”

The research, which was published on Thursday in Nature Sustainability, is likely to generate a heated debate.

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Lisa Allardice in The Guardian:

‘Guilty!” American novelist Barbara Kingsolver says when I ask how she feels to become the first writer to win the Women’s prize for fiction twice. “Guilty and delighted,” she says over coffee in a London hotel, the morning after winning the prize for her tenth novel Demon Copperhead. “I don’t want to be greedy. I don’t want to take something that would be more helpful to someone else. It’s my upbringing, I was raised in a culture of modesty.”

With a Susan-Sontag silver streak in her hair and steely good humour, 68-year-old Kingsolver is a quiet titan of American literature. Best-known for her mega-selling 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna, which won the Women’s (then Orange) prize in 2010, she has taken on uncomfortable subjects such as American colonialism and climate change. She counts Hillary Clinton as a friend and was invited to lunch at the White House with Barack Obama – “One of the most magnetically attractive human beings” – who quizzed her for writing tips. And yet, she rarely leaves the farm in the mountains of south-west Virginia, where she lives with her husband. When she is not writing, she turns her hand to delivering breach lambs. “I’ve done things that risk my wedding band, I’ll just put it like that,” she says, laughing. “When I’m at home, I don’t talk like this,” she says of her east coast accent. “Do you want to hear how I talk? ‘How y’all doing? Ahm’a so sorry-ee,’” she sings with a Dolly Parton twang. Not bad for someone who says “they don’t make people more introverted than me”.

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Below the Hill of the Three Churches

The little oyster dragger swings out
on its hawser as far right
as the first flat run of tide in the channel
allows. It panics a frieze of willets into
running left away from its hull, or else
the hull is still and the shifting birds
suggest motion to it, as a ship departing
will seem to set the pier underway; but now
the dragger’s tending left where a
smoke-light skein of least sandpipers
just landed, a shoal creeping forward as
the willets step right, stiff-legged,
mimicking the bridge crossing mud on stilts
far down where a gull begins to slide
on a crawl of heat among exposed hummocks.
Taken with its own effortless riding, it
spins this way on the silt-lift, now that.
Come quick out the door of the Feed and
Grain and ground me with a sack of
sunflower seeds: under three spires
I’d believed rigid until now,
everything’s deviating from the mean.

by Brendan Galvin
from Sky and Island Light
Louisiana State University Press, 1996

Temple Grandin in The New York Times:

In “Planta Sapiens,” Paco Calvo, a philosopher of plant behavior, and his co-author, Natalie Lawrence, present the idea that flora are intelligent — that is, capable of cognition. In Calvo’s opinion, people pay more attention to animals than plants and this may explain why some of plants’ remarkable abilities have been overlooked. Our evolutionary history may also shape our reduced attention to the subject; plants are, after all, unlikely to attack people.

Research shows that we are more likely to focus on rapidly presented pictures of animals than those of plants. Studies also demonstrate that while children quickly learn that both humans and animals are living beings, it takes them longer to understand the same thing about plants — indeed, many children do not comprehend it until they are around 10 years old. Calvo refers to this human tendency by a term coined in the 1990s: “plant blindness.”

More here.