Rowan Williams at The New Statesman:

In 1940, that great and idiosyncratic French philosopher Simone Weil published an essay on the Iliad as “the poem of force”. Despite a grating and drastically misconceived couple of paragraphs contrasting it with the imaginative world of Hebrew scripture, the essay has a good claim to be the most penetrating reflection on Homer’s masterpiece written in the 20th century, and still conveys an exceptional sense of moral and intellectual concentration.

What Weil argues is that the poem is about the actions and processes that reduce persons to things. Not only are we ourselves helpless in the face of fate, we are active in reducing others to greater levels of helplessness; and in so doing, we simply show ourselves to be unfree at a deeper and deeper level. Homer’s unsparing description of human conflict (not just battle and bloodshed but malice, rivalry and terror) shows us a world in which mechanism triumphs over grace – “grace” being understood by Weil as anything that leaves us free to step aside from the tyranny of the ego and make room for one another, free to absorb and not to transmit violence.

more here.

Jake Silverstein in Harper’s Magazine:

Summer in New Orleans is a long slow thing. Day and night, a heavy heat presides. Waiters stand idle at outdoor cafés, fanning themselves with menus. The tourists have disappeared, and the city’s main industry has gone with them. Throughout town the pinch is on. It is time to close the shutters and tie streamers to your air conditioner; to lie around and plot ways of scraping by that do not involve standing outside for periods of any length.

I was so occupied one humid afternoon when I came across a small newspaper notice that announced in large letters, “$25,000 poetry contest.” “Have you written a poem?” the notice began. I had written a poem. I had even considered submitting it to contests, but the prizes offered never amounted to much — a university might put up $100 in the name of a dead professor — and I hadn’t sent it off. This was a different proposition. With $25,000 I could pay off my debts, quit my jobs, and run the air on hi cool for a while. I submitted my poem that very day.

Two weeks later I had in my hands a letter from something calling itself the Famous Poets Society, based in Talent, Oregon. The Executive Committee of its distinguished Board of Directors, the letter informed me, had chosen my poem, from a multitude, to be entered in its seventh annual poetry convention, which would be held September 16–18 at John Ascuaga’s Nugget hotel and casino in Reno, Nevada. “Poets from all over the world will be there to enjoy your renown,” the letter boasted, “including film superstar Tony Curtis.”

This was not exactly what I had imagined.

More here.

Natalia Reagan in Scientific American:

A “Darwinian paradox” is that homosexual activity occurs even though it does not lead to or aid in reproduction. But if you visit three capuchin monkeys in Los Angeles, they’ll show you how beneficial their liaisons are.

Natalia Reagan: Animal Tracks Inc is located about 40 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. This animal sanctuary takes in former exotic pets and entertainment industry animals and gives them a new lease on life. The menagerie includes several capuchin monkeys, kangaroos, wolf hybrids, a baboon named Chrissy and my BFF, a six-banded armadillo called Frank the Tank.  And you might find something else at Animal Tracks.

That is the sound of a lesbian monkey love triangle: three monkeys, two species and one helluva love story. I’m Natalia Reagan, a primatologist and science comedian, and you’re listening to Science, Quickly.

More here.

La Tache 1962

—for Michael Cuddihy

Pulling the long cork., I shiver with a greed so
pure it is curiosity. I feel like the long muscles in a
sprinter’s thighs when he’s in the blocks, like a
Monarch butterfly the second before it begins mi-
grating to Venezuela for the winter—I feel as if I
were about to seduce somebody famous. Pop. The
first fumes swirl up. In a good year the Domaine de
la Romanée-Conti gets maybe 20,000 bottles of La
Tache; this is number 4189 for 1962. In the glass the
color is intense as if from use or love, like a book-
binding burnished by palm oil. The bouquet billows
the sail of the nose: it is a wind of loam and violets.
“La Tache” means “the task.” The word has impli-
cations of piecework; perhaps the vineyard workers
were once paid by the chore rather than by the day.
In a good year there would be no hail in September.
Work every day. Finally, the first pressing of sleep.
Stems, skins, a few spiders, yeast-bloom and dust-
bloom on the skins. . . . Now the only work is wait-
ing. On the tongue, under the tongue, with a slow
breath drawn over it like a cloud’s shadow—, the
the wine holds and lives by whatever it has learned from
3 ½ acres of earth. What I taste isn’t the wine itself,
but its secrets. I taste the secret of thirst, the longing
of matter to be energy, the sloth of energy to lie
down in the trenches of sleep, in the canals and
fibers of the grape. The day breaks into cells living
out their secrets. Marie agrees with me: this empty
bottle number 4189 of La Tache 1962 held the best
wine we have ever drunk. It is the emblem of what
we never really taste or know, the silence all poems
are unfaithful to. Michael, suppose the task is to
look on until our lives have given themselves away?
Amigo, Marie  and  I  send  you  our  love  and  this
poem.

by William Matthews
from Sleek for the Long Flight
White Pine Press, 19722

Gunnhild Øyehaug at The Paris Review:

Who is Sharon Olds? Sharon Olds is an American poet, born in San Francisco in 1942. She has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and made her debut as a writer in 1980 with the poetry collection Satan Says. Since then, she has established herself as one of the most read, most decorated, and most controversial North American contemporary poets. “Sharon Olds’s poems are pure fire in the hands,” Michael Ondaatje has said. She became particularly well known after she refused to take part in a National Book Festival dinner organized by Laura Bush, then First Lady, in 2005, and wrote in an open letter: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”

The way I discovered her was through a poem on a particular penis, which came as a recommendation from a Finnish Swedish colleague: “Read Sharon Olds’s ‘The Pope’s Penis’!”

more here.

Ellen Peirson-Hagger at The New Statesman:

“Barbenheimer saves cinema!” declared a Daily Mail headline in late July. The tabloid wasn’t the only publication wildly exaggerating the impact of the summer blockbuster releases Barbie and Oppenheimer: two very different works appealing to very different audiences, both released on 21 July, that social media gleefully christened under the portmanteau. Almost every outlet heralded the films as saviours of a dying industry. “Barbenheimer has saved cinema from the jaws of streaming – and not a moment too soon,” announced the i. The “Barbenheimer bonanza” insisted the Guardian, “saved the summer box office”. “Barbenheimer may just have saved London’s cinemas,” claimed Time Out.

On the surface, the box office figures showed a boom in cinema-going. As of 13 August, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and playfully challenges ideas of the patriarchy, had taken $1.18bn at the worldwide box office. It is the highest-grossing movie in the US made by a female director. Meanwhile Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s biographical thriller starring Cillian Murphy as the scientist who developed the atom bomb, has grossed $649m worldwide, making it the highest-grossing Second World War film.

more here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

Morgan Meis: Borromini is a name probably not immediately familiar to your average reader. Can we start with a brief explanation of who he was and why his work is of interest?

Jed Perl: Francesco Borromini is the mystery man of seventeenth-century Roman architecture. Both during his life and after his death – in 1667, possibly a suicide – this great architect was often overshadowed by another artist, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who was not only a great architect but also a transcendent sculptor and a painter of consequence. Bernini’s Rome is all about grand gestures, crowds, spectacles — a place to see and be seen. He did much to shape the public face of Rome as we know it even today, through major commissions that included St. Peter’s in the Vatican and the Four Rivers Fountain in the Piazza Navona. Borromini brought other dimensions to seventeenth-century Rome – qualities of intimacy, fantasy, and interiority in buildings that include the churches of S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and S. Ivo della Sapienza and the Oratorio dei Filippini.

Deborah Rosenthal: Borromini, like all seventeenth-century Italian architects, used a classical vocabulary of columns, capitals, pediments, arches, and domes that dated back to ancient Greek and Roman times. But he took the stately and sometimes even static Euclidean geometry that those forms suggested to many great architects, and replaced it with a dancing, careening geometry of ovals and spirals and enigmatically torqued spaces.

More here.

Saugat Bolakhe in Quanta:

Memory doesn’t represent a single scientific mystery; it’s many of them. Neuroscientists and psychologists have come to recognize varied types of memory that coexist in our brain: episodic memories of past experiences, semantic memories of facts, short- and long-term memories, and more. These often have different characteristics and even seem to be located in different parts of the brain. But it’s never been clear what feature of a memory determines how or why it should be sorted in this way.

Now, a new theory backed by experiments using artificial neural networks proposes that the brain may be sorting memories by evaluating how likely they are to be useful as guides in the future. In particular, it suggests that many memories of predictable things, ranging from facts to useful recurring experiences — like what you regularly eat for breakfast or your walk to work — are saved in the brain’s neocortex, where they can contribute to generalizations about the world. Memories less likely to be useful — like the taste of that unique drink you had at that one party — are kept in the seahorse-shaped memory bank called the hippocampus.

More here.

John Simpson in The Guardian:

Even people around President Biden now accept that pulling out of Afghanistan in the way the US did two years ago was an utter disaster. It ruined the lives of millions, destroyed the social and economic advances of 20 years, and returned the country’s women to a state of slavery. The result was to make the US look weak and pathetic; no wonder Vladimir Putin decided he could safely invade Ukraine, only six months later.

The suffering of ordinary Afghans as they panicked and tried to escape the Taliban shocked the entire world. The scenes in the approaches to Kabul airport on those 17 boiling hot August days were unbearable. People tore at one another and trod the dying underfoot in order to get to the barbed wire that separated them from the airfield, screaming and waving the bits of paper they hoped would get them out of the country. The Taliban fighters lost all control, hitting out indiscriminately with their rifle butts, and firing into the air or at people’s feet. Some women tried to throw their babies over the barbed wire to the British and American soldiers on the other side; more than one baby landed on the wire itself.

More here.

Meat Market

—after Lebanon, a country with one of the worst economic crises since the 19th century

the price of bread has gone up again. Throngs of cars
slouch toward shuttering gas stations. The currency, a farce

with each swing of the gavel, numbers
soar. Fifty thousand pounds by day’s end.

what’s another ten thousand? Or a hundred thousand?
a hundred and forty thousand pounds to the dollar

my mother’s aged laugh thunders about the
price of rice. I worry myself out of an appetite

I want to believe in miracles, instead
I starve gratitude with guilt.

how much for meat today? There are
no lambs left to sacrifice in the afterlife.

the tomatoes wilt into speckled
wax. I bury them in the mountains.

my mother’s aged laugh thunders about the price
of olive oil. I swallow glass in small gulps.

look, the crops melt into a starved earth
peppered with griefs my people speak like spells.

behold, a nation where time itself is a construct.
where every day is simultaneously 1975, 2003, and 2020.

few things are as grotesque as survival but what if
we made this life so beautiful it has no choice but to bend.

by Lara Atallah
from Split This Rock

From Nature:

In a recent study published in Nature, Serger et al. connected intermittent fasting (IF) to gut microbiome alterations and enhanced peripheral nerve regeneration following injury.¹ Fasting has been purported to have neuroregenerative effects, but the underlying mechanisms remained unclear. The authors found that IF-induced elevation of IPA (a microbiome-derived metabolite) promotes neutrophil infiltration into the dorsal root ganglia (DRG), which enhances the regeneration of sciatic nerve fibers.

Peripheral nerve injuries, acquired through mechanical stress to the nerve, affect more than 20 million people in the US alone, leading to an enormous social and economic burden.² Treatment for nerve injuries involves microsurgery and despite advancements there are still major challenges that prevent a full recovery.² The peripheral nervous system has self-regenerative properties; however, these intrinsic properties are often insufficient and complete recovery is not achieved.² As a consequence, more than 50% of affected individuals are not satisfied with their sensory recovery, have limited motor recovery, and neuropathic pain often develops.² Thus, the need for new therapeutic strategies to promote nerve regeneration is urgent. The regenerative effects of environmental factors like diet and calorie restriction have been previously investigated. In their recent study, Serger et al. make an elegant connection between fasting, the gut microbiome, and neuroimmune pathways, which together improve regeneration in a mouse model of nerve injury.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Tanya Bush in Guernica:

Italy would be where I would whisk, mix, and knead my way into an idealized self. If I could get there, I would shed my anxious energy and compulsive need for affirmation, my nasty addiction to the cool-mint vape. I would slow down; I would journal. I would become tan and strong from simple pastas. I would eat intuitively — no more take-out burritos in the middle of the night, no more nubby cheeses scrounged from the bowels of the fridge. If I could find a way to go to Italy, I would become a real baker.

More here.

R. Douglas Fields in Quanta:

One day, while threading a needle to sew a button, I noticed that my tongue was sticking out. The same thing happened later, as I carefully cut out a photograph. Then another day, as I perched precariously on a ladder painting the window frame of my house, there it was again!

What’s going on here? I’m not deliberately protruding my tongue when I do these things, so why does it keep making appearances? After all, it’s not as if that versatile lingual muscle has anything to do with controlling my hands. Right?

Yet as I would learn, our tongue and hand movements are intimately interrelated at an unconscious level. This peculiar interaction’s deep evolutionary roots even help explain how our brain can function without conscious effort.

More here.

Angus Deaton in the Boston Review:

Smith was not only a great thinker but also a great writer. He was an empirical economist whose sketchy data were more often right than wrong; he was skeptical, especially about wealth; and he was a balanced and humane thinker who cared about justice, noting how much more important it was than beneficence. But the story I want to tell is about economic failure and about economics failure, and about how Smith’s insights and humanity need to be brought back into the mainstream of economics. Much of the evidence that I use draws on my work with Anne Case as well as her work with Lucy Kraftman on Scotland in relation to the rest of the UK.

In her recent book Adam Smith’s America (2022), political scientist Glory Liu reports that in 1976, at an event celebrating the bicentenary of the publication of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, George Stigler, the eminent Chicago economist, said “I bring you greetings from Adam Smith, who is alive and well and living in Chicago!” Stigler might also have noted that the U.S. economy was flourishing too, as it had been for three decades, and might have been happy to connect the flourishing of Smith and the flourishing of the economy.

More here.

David Shariatmadari in The Guardian:

Halfway through my interview with the co-founder of DeepMind, the most advanced AI research outfit in the world, I mention that I asked ChatGPT to come up with some questions for him. Mustafa Suleyman is mock-annoyed, because he’s currently developing his own chatbot, called Pi, and says I should have used that. But it was ChatGPT that became the poster child for the new age of artificial intelligence earlier this year, when it showed it could do everything from compose poetry about Love Island in the style of John Donne to devise an itinerary for a minibreak in Lisbon.

The trick hadn’t really worked, or so I thought – ChatGPT’s questions were mostly generic talking points. I’d asked it to try a bit harder. “Certainly, let’s dive into more specific and original questions that can elicit surprising answers from Mustafa Suleyman,” it had trilled. The results still weren’t up to much. Even so, I chuck one at him as he sits in the offices of his startup in Palo Alto on the other end of a video call (he left DeepMind in 2019). “How do you envision AI’s role in supporting mental health care in the future,” I ask – and suddenly, weirdly, I feel as if I’ve got right to the heart of why he does what he does.

More here.