Daniel Marcus at Artforum:

WRITER CHRIS KRAUS devotes a long section of her 1997 book I Love Dick to artist Hannah Wilke, who had passed away from lymphoma a few years earlier. Identifying with Wilke’s reputation as a “female monster,” Kraus glimpsed what few other writers at the time could see. Over a career spanning more than three decades, from the late 1950s until her last days in the cancer ward, where she died at age fifty-two, Wilke treated her art as a vector of her desire, “continuously exposing [herself] to whatever situation occurs,” as she put it in a 1976 statement. Rejected as a shameless exhibitionist, she carried on unhindered, refusing to place her sexuality—or her body—under wraps. Her striptease was relentless and ruthless, never more so than in her final body of work, “Intra-Venus,” 1992–93, a series of large-scale color photographs and videos in which the artist, sick with cancer, stunts for the camera in the costume of illness, still every bit the goddess in bandages and with an IV drip.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZaxiassX48

Julia Kristeva at Bookforum:

The initiated had been familiar with the first edition for a long time, but with this new one, Bakhtin’s Dostoyevsky became a social phenomenon, a political symptom. At the center of this new furor was my friend and mentor, Tzvetan Stoyanov, well-known literary critic, anglophone, francophone, and obviously russophone. He had already introduced me to Shakespeare and Joyce, Cervantes and Kafka, the Russian formalists and the breakthrough postformalism of a certain Bakhtin. Now we could reimmerse ourselves, day and night, out loud and in Russian, Bakhtin’s book in hand, in the novels of Dostoyevsky. I heard the vocal power of tragic laughter, the farce within the force of evil, and that contagious, drunken flow of dialogues composed as story that Bakhtin calls slovo, translated as mot (word) in French. Through the vocabulary and syntax, I heard, as Logos incarnate, the Word stirring biblical deliverance into a new multivocal, multiversal narration…

more here.

Laith Al-Shawaf in Psychology Today:

Emotions are crucial to our lives, so you might be surprised to hear that psychologists don’t have a consensus definition of what they are or how they work.

Despite the chorus of different voices, there are some things emotion scientists agree on. Most researchers agree, for example, that all emotions have a physiological component, a phenomenological component (what it feels like to experience that emotion), and a behavioral component (for instance, some emotions prime you to fight, whereas others make you more likely to play).

There’s a prominent evolutionary view that expands on this idea. According to this view, an emotion is a coordinating mechanism or a “mode of operation” for the entire body and brain. In other words, when an emotion like fear takes hold, it affects everything in your body and mind: it influences what you can see, what you are able to focus on, what is readily available to your memory, where metabolic resources are distributed in your body, the manner in which you categorize objects as safe or dangerous, how you prioritize your goals, and pretty much everything else about the way you parse the world.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can’t kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There’s surely a kind of reality there. On the other hand, Luke Skywalker isn’t a real person, but we talk about him all the time. Maybe we can talk about unreal things in useful ways. Jody Azzouni is one of the leading contemporary advocates of nominalism, the view that abstract objects are not “things,” they are merely labels we use in talking about things. A deeply philosophical issue, but one that has implications for how we think about physics and the laws of nature.

More here.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in Areo:

A lifetime as an Oxford tutor has ingrained in me the Socratic habit of raising questions for discussion, often topics with a mildly paradoxical flavour, conundrums, apparent contradictions or inconsistencies that seem to need a bit of sorting out. I have continued the habit on Twitter, often ending my tweets with the word, “Discuss.” That tweet was one such.

More here.

“What is earth if not the mother
of mothers of which I’m born?”
…………………. —anonymous

Believe Me

when i say
the land is my
ancestor
believe me.

when i say
the land is my
grandmother
believe me.

when i say
the land is my
mother
believe me.

believe me when i say
my ancestors
are with me
mountains and all.

by Leilani Portillo
from Split This Rock

Jake Bittle in The Baffler:

DON’T LOOK UP, a new disaster comedy directed by Adam McKay, has debuted to rave reviews from media insiders and climate reporters. Ben Smith, writing in the New York Times, said it “nails the media apocalypse”; the climate writer Kate Aronoff said it was “so good in so many directions.” Jon Schwartz, writing for The Intercept, called it “the first film in fifty-seven years to equal the comedy and horror of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece” Dr. Strangelove. Perhaps the grandest praise came from the climate writer David Roberts, who called it “the first good movie about climate change,” a topic that he said “resists good art.” With due respect to all these accomplished writers, this critic must disagree. Don’t Look Up may have some good actors and some funny jokes, but regardless of what anyone says, or what its director intended, it is not a movie about climate change.

Don’t Look Up’s premise has the simplicity of a megachurch parable. A pair of scientists (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover a large comet on a collision course with earth, due to strike in about six months and wipe out all of human civilization. The scientists try to inform the president (Meryl Streep), who doesn’t care, and the media, who won’t listen because they’re too focused on celebrity gossip. Eventually, though, the scientists rant and rave enough that the president reconsiders her decision and launches a mission to blow up the comet before it hits. Until, at the last second, a billionaire tech baron (Mark Rylance) convinces her to mine the comet for rare-earth metals instead. Soon, a certain segment of the population decides that the comet could be a good job creator, or that it isn’t even real. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

More here.

David Wilson in Nautilus:

I first met Edward O. Wilson in 1971 when I was a student in an ecology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Wilson, a famous Harvard professor, was sitting in on the student project reports. After I reported my experiments on food size selection in zooplankton, Wilson remarked, “That’s new, isn’t it?” I was so proud to have impressed the great E.O. Wilson that I have remembered his comment ever since!

Our next personal interaction came near the end of my graduate career at Michigan State University. I had constructed a mathematical model that provided support for the theory of group selection, which explains how altruism and other “for the good of the group” behaviors can evolve. This theory had been almost universally rejected by evolutionary biologists. Convinced of its importance, I wrote to Wilson asking if he would consider sponsoring it for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He invited me to visit him at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. After giving me a tour of his ant laboratory, he stood me in front of a blackboard, sat down in a chair, and said, “You have 30 minutes until my next appointment.”

I talked like an auctioneer, filling the board with my equations. Wilson was sufficiently intrigued to sponsor my article for PNAS after sending it out for review by two experts in theoretical biology. The article was published in 1975, the same year that Ed published his landmark book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. The article became my Ph.D. thesis, which is probably the shortest in the history of evolutionary science (four pages).

Wilson, who passed away at the age of 92 on Dec. 26, 2021, is widely recognized as a giant of both the sciences and arts, which he worked to unify. He regarded the creative dimension of science as an artistic endeavor, and wrote beautifully for the public, resulting in two Pulitzer Prizes in nonfiction.

More here.

Santiago Zabala and Claudio Gallo at Aljazeera:

The question that defined 2021 was perhaps the one Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, famously posed to Jesus in the Gospel of John: what is truth? Indeed, all the most debated issues of this dire year from vaccines to fake news were in the end about “verity”. Far beyond postmodernity, we appeared to have lost the shared set of values that constituted the mainframe of our societies in the past. This is not necessarily wrong. Philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger pointed out how traditional values systems are undermined by too-rigid structures for history. These structures, whether scientific or economical, are always shaped by epochs and societies that determine their outcomes. So as we enter a new year, the question about truth becomes: who can we trust in 2022?

We must put aside any pretence of immutability and search for an answer inside history. But in this effort, we cannot leave our lives in the hands of experts only, even though languages of techno-science do require in-depth knowledge of a hyper-specialised curriculum.

More here.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

One week ago, E. O. Wilson—the legendary naturalist and conservationist, and man who was universally acknowledged to know more about ants than anyone else in human history—passed away at age 92. A mere three days later, Scientific American—or more precisely, the zombie clickbait rag that now flaunts that name—published a shameful hit-piece, smearing Wilson for his “racist ideas” without, incredibly, so much as a single quote from Wilson, or any other attempt to substantiate its libel (see also this response by Jerry Coyne). SciAm‘s Pravda-like attack included the following extraordinary sentence, which I thought worthy of Alan Sokal’s Social Text hoax:

The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.

There are intellectually honest people who don’t know what the normal distribution is. There are no intellectually honest people who, not knowing what it is, figure that it must be something racist.

On Twitter, Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief now running SciAm into the ground, described her magazine’s calumny against Wilson as “insightful” (the replies, including from Richard Dawkins, are fun to read). I suppose it was as “insightful” as SciAm‘s disgraceful attack last year on Eric Lander, President Biden’s ultra-competent science advisor and a leader in the war on COVID, for … being a white male, which appears to have been E. O. Wilson’s crime as well. (Think I must be misrepresenting the “critique” of Lander? Read it!)

More here.

Noah Smith in his Substack newsletter, Noahpinion:

This blog started out a year ago as an explicitly techno-optimist blog, and I feel like I’ve gotten away from that a little bit. This isn’t because I’m less optimistic about technology, but because it’s very easy to get distracted by stuff like economic policy, social unrest, China’s economy, Covid, and so on. But it’s time to go back to my roots a little here.

It’s still too early to tell whether we’ll get the Roaring Twenties that some have predicted. There are certainly reasons for doubt. After a great first quarter, labor productivity is now actually falling, due mostly to supply chain snarls disrupting production, but also possibly due to Covid variants and the uncertain and chaotic process of workers partially returning to the office. Goldman Sachs, one of the early proponents of the Roaring Twenties thesis, is now forecasting anemic growth in the year ahead.

More here.

Esperanza of Manila

You, who rescued a boy-afflicted cat
from perishing in the gutters, toweling
its oiled pelt clean. Who rushed
a hound to the spigots to wash away
toad venom from its shocked mouth.
Who saved a blot of Dalmatians
from the chafe of pet store chains
and named them after pharaohs’ glittering
cities. Who tended to a canary in egg-
binding agony, careful not to crush
its juddered breast. Who released
a pigeon from its jailing grate, geckos
from dosed rooms. O holy steward,
minister to all living beings, pray for us
now as we tend to your feral body.

by Christina Loyd
from the Echotheo Review

Shilpi Suneja in Guernica:

My very first period came to me like a stranger on a train. My parents and I were taking an overnight sleeper from Delhi to Bombay to visit my paternal grandmother. Because of a feud between her and my mother, Dadi and I had never met, but the stories I’d heard had already caused me to fear her more than anyone else in the world. Perhaps it was the dread of seeing her that sent my organs into overdrive, but sometime around the break of dawn I felt the urge to pee, and even though using a toilet on an Indian train is an exercise in an extreme form of Buddhist tolerance, I had my mother rush me there. I lifted my shirt, and from the folds of my ochre salwar, a blossoming field of red stared back.

I was convinced that sometime during the night, while we were sleeping, a man had snuck into our compartment on the train, entered my body, and punctured my delicate innards. I was thirteen and obsessed with Nancy Drew; I believed I could solve the mystery of my body’s behavior like my auburn-haired hero, by making a list of all possible suspects. By then I’d already been molested more times than I had fingers on my hands. Strange men had offered me their penises behind bushes, watchmen at chai stalls had aimed stones at my breasts with remarkable precision, and a family friend, a boy just a few years older, had explored my vagina with his teeth. What if the man came back to finish the job? I’d have to make sure I wasn’t alone for the rest of the journey.

More here.

Sara Harrison in Wired:

JUST AS MEDICAL care has evolved from bloodletting to germ theory, the medical spaces patients inhabit have transformed too. Today, architects and designers are trying to find ways to make hospitals more comfortable, in the hopes that relaxing spaces will lead to better recovery. But building for healing involves just as much empathy as it does synthesizing cold, hard data. “Part of the best care might be keeping people calm, giving them space to be alone—things that might seem frivolous but are really important,” says Annmarie Adams, a professor at McGill University who studies the history of hospital architecture.

In the 19th century, famed nurse Florence Nightingale popularized the pavilion plan, which featured wards: big rooms with long rows of beds, large windows, lots of natural light, and plenty of cross-ventilation. These designs were informed by the theory that dank indoor spaces spread disease. But wards offered almost no privacy for patients and required plenty of space, something that became difficult to find in increasingly dense cities. They also meant a lot of walking for nurses, who had to trudge up and down the aisles.

Over the next century, that focus on natural light faded in favor of prioritizing sterile spaces that would limit the spread of germs and accommodate a growing raft of medical equipment. After World War I, the new norm was to cluster patients’ rooms around a nurses’ station. These designs were easier on nurses, who no longer had to trek long corridors, and they were cheaper to heat and build. But they retained some of the trappings of older-style residential treatment facilities, like sanatoria where patients would convalesce for long periods of time; both mimicked fancy hotels with ornate lobbies and fine food, measures intended to convince middle-class people that “they were better off in hospitals than at home when seriously ill,” Adams wrote in a 2016 article on hospital architecture for the Canadian Medical Association Journal. This design, she argued, was meant to give people faith in the institution: “a tool of persuasion, rather than healing.”

In the late 1940s and 1950s, hospitals transformed again, this time becoming office-like buildings without frills or many features meant to improve the experience of being there. “It was really designed to be operational and efficient,” says Jessie Reich, director of patient experience and magnet programs for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Many of these rooms had no windows at all, she points out.

More here.

contributors at Atlas Obscura:

In 1995, world-famous Russian mathematician Vladimir Igorevich Arnold proposed that a class of convex, homogeneous bodies, which, when resting on a flat surface have only one stable and only one unstable point of equilibrium, must exist. (In unstable equilibrium, the body will fall out of equilibrium no matter how you push it). A few years later in 2006, his idea was proven by Hungarian scientists, Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi, by constructing a physical example. Meet Gömböc.

Gömböc is basically one of the cutest superstars of mathematics. Its name comes from gömb, which means “sphere” in Hungarian.

more here.