Alastair Wilson at berfrois:

Suppose we ask: where did spacetime itself arise from? Then we can go on turning the clock yet further back, into the truly ancient “Planck epoch” – a period so early in the universe’s history that our best theories of physics break down. This era occurred only one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. At this point, space and time themselves became subject to quantum fluctuations. Physicists ordinarily work separately with quantum mechanics, which rules the microworld of particles, and with general relativity, which applies on large, cosmic scales. But to truly understand the Planck epoch, we need a complete theory of quantum gravity, merging the two.

We still don’t have a perfect theory of quantum gravity, but there are attempts – like string theory and loop quantum gravity. In these attempts, ordinary space and time are typically seen as emergent, like the waves on the surface of a deep ocean.

more here.

Stephanos Papadopoulos in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

On the acknowledgments page at the end of Homero Aridjis’s recently translated novel, Smyrna in Flames, the author admits:

“Almost a hundred years after the atrocities committed by Kemalist forces against Christians; before the demented pyromania of those who reduced Smyrna, the City of Tolerance, to ashes, along with its inhabitants; before the delirium of destruction that possessed the Turks during those days in September 1922, I still cannot find the words to explain, to myself or to others, the Turkish genocide of Asia Minor.”

Aridjis is not alone in this predicament, even after more than 100 pages of prose, the tragedy of the Greek Genocide (1914–’22) remains inexplicable. Few have been able to fully grasp the murderous scale of the events, paired with modern Turkey’s blanket denial, and the complete indifference of much of the rest of the world. But the facts remain: in the early century, Atatürk’s plan to unify the fractured Ottoman Empire under a modern Turkish regime resulted in the systematic extermination of its indigenous Pontic Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian citizens, whose people had lived in Asia Minor for millennia. What began as the Armenian Genocide in 1915 culminated in the forced deportations and final massacre of Pontic Greeks during the burning of Smyrna in 1922.

More here.

David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters in The Guardian:

Individual experiences and suffering are, of course, at the heart of the pandemic. But one way to understand what has happened is through putting those experiences together – and statistics are those personal stories writ large. And this pandemic has brought unprecedented demand to explain all the numbers that have been flying around.

This has not been without its problems and we’ve had to learn some hard lessons, such as the journalistic skill of brevity. Since January 2021, we’ve been writing a weekly column in this paper about Covid numbers, covering everything from infections to deaths, vaccines to mental health, masks to lockdowns.

It can be frustrating not being able to show all the graphs, but the same holds for radio and TV interviews and More or Less on Radio 4 has shown how much can be done to explain statistics without visual aids. Mathematical formulae and technical jargon need to be avoided, but we have also had to be sparing with numbers, which is harder when they are so precious to us.

More here.

Robert B. Talisse in The Conversation:

Polarization looms large in many diagnoses of America’s current political struggles. Some researchers warn of an approaching “tipping point” of irreversible polarization. Suggested remedies are available from across the partisan spectrum.

There are two types of polarization, as I discuss in my book “Sustaining Democracy.” One isn’t inherently dangerous; the other can be. And together, they can be extremely destructive of democratic societies.

More here.

My Mother

My mother writes from Trenton,
a comedian to the bone
but underneath, serious
and all heart. “Honey,” she says
“be a mensch and Mary too,
it’s no good to worry, you
are doing the best you can
your Dad and everyone
thinks you turned out very well
as long as you pay your bills
nobody can say a word
you can tell them to drop dead
so save a dollar it can’t
hurt—remember Frank you went
to highschool with? he still lives
with his wife’s mother, his wife
works while he writes his books and
did he ever sell a one
the four kids run around naked
36 and he’s never had,
you’ll forgive my expression,
even a pot to piss in
or a window to throw it,
such a smart boy he couldn’t
read the footprints on the wall
honey you think you know all
the answers you don’t, please try
to put some money away
believe me it wouldn’t hurt
artist shmartist life’s too short
for that kind of, forgive me,
horseshit, I know what you want
better than you, all that counts
is to make a good living
and the best of everything,
as Sholem Aleichem said
he was a great writer did
you ever read his books dear,
you should make what he makes a year
anyway he says someplace
Poverty is no disgrace
but it’s no honor either
that’s what I say,
…………………..love,
…………………………..Mother”

by Robert Mezey
from Naked Poetry
Bobbs-Merrill, 1969

Theresa Barger in Discover:

During her first year of college, Elaina Cosentino bought a fitness band and began walking 10,000 steps a day. Through a friendly competition with friends, she kept it up for four years. But during her first semester of graduate school, her routine changed and she fell out of the habit. Then her mother passed away between her first and second semesters, and it “truly took everything out of me to just get up and go to class,” says Cosentino, a physical therapist.  “I did go for an occasional mind-clearing walk every now and then during that time, as walking was something familiar to me and I always loved the way I felt afterwards.” 

But the combined pressures of “the weight of the pandemic, not having family around, going through grad school virtually and still going through the grieving process” drove the Rhode Island resident to search for something more consistent. “When I went back to walking every day, reforming the habit was bringing myself back down to Earth. It’s the one thing I can control every day.”  The two major components necessary to start and stick to a habit are ease and reward, says research psychologist Wendy Wood, author of the book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, who has studied habits for three decades.  “If you’re trying to repeat a behavior, then willpower and motivation are not really the way to go. They’re what start you but they’re not going to help you persist,” she says. “Habits are not part of our conscious thought.”

By contrast, New Year’s resolutions are often touted by gyms or weight loss companies trying to sell memberships — and can be particularly tricky to adhere to. Starting a habit and sticking to it has to come from you, not external forces. We can’t fight human nature, but we change our behavior by understanding it. And while study results vary on how long it takes to form a habit, on average, according to research published in the British Journal of General Practice in 2012, forming a new habit takes 66 days.  So what’s the secret to getting through the months-long process and forging lasting, healthy habits?

More here.

From Nature:

It seemed like a very promising cancer immunotherapy lead. CHO Pharma, in Taiwan, had discovered that it was possible to target solid tumours with an antibody against a cell-surface glycolipid called SSEA-4.¹ This antigen is present during embryonic development, but not seen on human cells again — until they turn into cancer cells.² The company turned to Lan Bo Chen, a recently retired Harvard pathologist, to help develop this work into an anti-cancer therapy for solid tumours. “It is highly reasonable to imagine that we can use SSEA-4, overexpressed on cancer cells, as a target for CAR-T,” says Chen, now in his role as senior technology advisor for CHO Pharma.

CAR-T therapy works by genetically engineering a person’s own T cells in such a way that they recognize and attack cancer cells. This involves creating a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) from an antibody against a target on the cell. But CAR-T therapy was designed for blood cancers so it needs several adaptations to make it suitable for the treatment of solid tumours.³ The cells need to be directed to the site of the tumour, survive in the tumour’s local microenvironment, and act only on tumour cells, not on healthy cells nearby. But, when Chen tried to create CAR-T cells against SSEA-4, he hit a few obstacles. First it took him a long time to get his hands on a humanized SSEA-4 antibody suitable for adaptation. When he finally had one, he still had to find a way to turn that antibody into a CAR. And then to insert the CAR into a human T cell using lentiviral transduction.

More here.

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

Lisa Borst at n+1:

Eggers is hardly a systems novelist: his literary sensibilities, like his career, tend toward the monomaniacal. His writing in the past two decades has involved a suspiciously prolific series of smug morality tales fictionalizing or nonfictionalizing real people—a heroic Sudanese refugee, a heroic Yemeni coffee importer later accused of racketeering, Donald Trump—as well as novels about loners in perilous circumstances. He has also written children’s books, left-of-center comedic op-eds, and articles for the New Yorker about human rights and how much he loves wine. But evident throughout his literary output, as in his incoherent and self-congratulatory apparatus of publishing programs, bookselling platforms, and children’s literacy programs, is an ongoing fascination with epic, world-conquering ambition. The characters in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I was embarrassed to reread, are “sure that we are on to something epochal . . . sure that we speak for others, that we speak for millions”; in his 2006 foreword to Infinite Jest, Eggers lingers, enviously and, I think, not un-Bezosishly, on Wallace’s all-seeing book as an example of the “human possibility [for] leaps in science and athletics and art and thought.”

more here.

Ross Douthat at The New Statesman:

Over the Thanksgiving holiday the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh expressed a sentiment I hear from time to time among connoisseurs of punditry – that our era, the age of Trumpism and wokeness and Covid controversy, badly misses the words and wits of Christopher Hitchens, who was taken from the stage before his time. Ganesh offered a particularly interesting version of this take, because he went halfway to conceding something that Hitchens’ critics (I was one of them) might say has become more palpable since his passing in 2011: that his great talents were expended on causes that have not exactly stood the test of time. But Ganesh framed this reality as an indictment of the somewhat-empty – dare one say, decadent – times in which Hitch lived:

“The trouble is, the artist dwarfed his canvas. Hitchens had the misfortune to peak during one of world history’s blander interludes.

more here.

Joyce Carol Oates in Prospect:

Of all writers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky is the great artist of obsession. It is not surprising, therefore, that his monumental works—Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov—are seeded in his shorter works of fiction, as if in embryo. From the wildly romantic and effusive “White Nights” (1848) to the parable-like “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (1877), these tales explore themes taken up in minute detail in the novels, in which Dostoyevsky’s sense of the tragic predicament of humankind is given its fullest expression: that human beings recognise the good, but succumb to evil; that, though knowing that love is the highest value, they rejoice in their own wickedness, like the “ridiculous man,” a perverse saviour who corrupts the innocent:

“The dream encompassed thousands of years and left in me only a vague sensation… I only know that the cause of the Fall was I. Like a horrible trichina, like the germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so did I infect with myself all that happy earth that knew no sin before me.”

Dostoyevsky is a fierce Christian visionary for whom “social realism” holds little interest, except as a backdrop for powerful dramas of good contending with evil. Unlike his fellow Russian Leo Tolstoy—whose prose evokes an astonishingly lifelike world of men and women of virtually every social class, who could write as vividly of a young girl’s first ball as of a young soldier’s first battle—Dostoyevsky is all foreground, his settings (cramped and febrile interiors, sweeping and anonymous cityscapes) incidental to the histrionic nature of his prose.

More here.

Andrew Joseph and Helen Branswell in Stat News:

The Omicron wave in the United States is upon us.

If you were fortunate enough to tune out from Covid-19 news over the holidays, you’re coming back to startling reports about record high case counts and, in some places, increases in hospitalizations. The wave will crest, of course; the question is when.

For now, experts say, the country still has a ways to go to get through the Omicron surge. Below, STAT outlines what Omicron is already teaching us as this phase of the pandemic plays out.

A reminder: Scientists have known about this variant for just a little over a month. While a tremendous amount has been learned in a stunningly short amount of time, our understanding will continue to be refined as data pour in and key questions are answered.

More here.

Alice Dreger in Quillette:

Alice Dreger: I know you’ve spoken about it many times before, but I would like to begin by asking you about the session at the 1978 AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] conference during which you were rushed on the stage and a protester emptied a pitcher of water onto your head. By all accounts, the talk you then gave was very measured. How on Earth were you able to remain so calm after being physically assaulted?

Edward O. Wilson: I think I may have been the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea. The idea of a biological human nature was abhorrent to the demonstrators and was, in fact, too radical at the time for a lot of people—probably most social scientists and certainly many on the far-Left. They just accepted as dogma the blank-slate view of the human mind—that everything we do and think is due to contingency, rather than based upon instinct like bodily functions and the urge to keep reproducing. These people believe that everything we do is the result of historical accidents, the events of history, the development of personality through experience.

That was firmly believed in 1978 by a wide part of the population, but particularly by the political Left. And it was thought at the time that raising the specter of a biological basis for human behavior was not only wrong, but a justification for war, sexism, and racism.

More here.

Jonathan Gottschall in the Boston Globe:

Stories are celebrated by great artists, thought leaders, and scientists as our best hope for reducing bigotry, building empathy, and ultimately encouraging us to behave more humanely. But how does this match up with the current state of the world?

We are living inside a digitally driven big bang of storytelling — a stunning expansion of the universe of stories across all media and genres. A 2020 Nielsen study reported that average Americans now consume a whopping 12 hours of media per day, much of it in narrative form, including hours upon hours of fiction. Now that we have more storytelling than ever, has empathy increased apace? Are we doing a better job of understanding each other across ancient divides of race, class, gender, religion, and political orientation? If stories have such sunny effects, why has the big bang of storytelling coincided with an explosive growth of hostility and polarization rather than harmony and connection?

More here.

Joanna Cresswell in lensculture:

Night has the power to change things, doesn’t it? Not just appearances, but atmospheres too. The way we feel, the thickness of the air, the intensity of sounds, our imaginations. Darkness—real, enveloping darkness—is a shaping force, and even the scenes we know the most can metamorphose within its depths.

In Paul Guilmoth’s new publication At Night Gardens Grow, the night becomes a stage for a strange, folkloric story, unfurling from the landscape the artist calls home. Concentrating on one field in particular, the book is a constellation of black and white images depicting ghostly figures and glowing foliage, spiderwebs and moths, baptisms and waterfalls glistening at night. It’s a careful, deliberate edit, one that builds in an intense and palpable way, transporting us to a dark fictional world that teeters on the brink between dream and reality. There are symbols we know from age-old fables here—rabbits feet and wooden cabins, nymph-like, bathing women and mirrors in forests—but they’re different somehow, transformed in the darkness, like fairytales gone awry.

More here.

Parul Sehgal in The New Yorker:

It was on a train journey, from Richmond to Waterloo, that Virginia Woolf encountered the weeping woman. A pinched little thing, with her silent tears, she had no way of knowing that she was about to be enlisted into an argument about the fate of fiction. Woolf summoned her in the 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” writing that “all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite”—a character who awakens the imagination. Unless the English novel recalled that fact, Woolf thought, the form would be finished. Plot and originality count for crumbs if a writer cannot bring the unhappy lady to life. And here Woolf, almost helplessly, began to spin a story herself—the cottage that the old lady kept, decorated with sea urchins, her way of picking her meals off a saucer—alighting on details of odd, dark density to convey something of this woman’s essence.

Those details: the sea urchins, that saucer, that slant of personality. To conjure them, Woolf said, a writer draws from her temperament, her time, her country. An English novelist would portray the woman as an eccentric, warty and beribboned. A Russian would turn her into an untethered soul wandering the street, “asking of life some tremendous question.”

How might today’s novelists depict Woolf’s Mrs. Brown? Who is our representative character? We’d meet her, I imagine, in profile or bare outline. Self-entranced, withholding, giving off a fragrance of unspecified damage. Stalled, confusing to others, prone to sudden silences and jumpy responsiveness. Something gnaws at her, keeps her solitary and opaque, until there’s a sudden rip in her composure and her history comes spilling out, in confession or in flashback. Dress this story up or down: on the page and on the screen, one plot—the trauma plot—has arrived to rule them all. Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?). “For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge,” Sylvia Plath wrote in “Lady Lazarus.” “A very large charge.” Now such exposure comes cheap.

More here.

After Lorca

The church is a business, and the rich
are the businessmen.
……………………………. When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when the poor man dies, he has a wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when the rich man dies, they
drag out the sacrament
and the golden cross, and go doucement, doucement
to the cemetery.

And the poor love it
and think it’s crazy.

by Robert Creeley
from Naked Poetry
publisher: Bobbs-Merrill, NY, 1969

doucement: slowly, gently