Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self
To Sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
that you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River, Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breath in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

by Joy Harjo
from Poetry Out Loud
The Poetry Foundation, 2005

Frank Rose in The New York Times:

David Byrne is all about connectedness these days. “Everybody’s  coming to my house/And I’m never gonna be alone,” he sings on Broadway in “American Utopia,” half joyful, half fretful, still open. His online magazine, “Reasons to Be Cheerful” — which bills itself as “a tonic for tumultuous times” — catalogs all the ways in which people are pulling together to make sure the world does not in fact go to hell in a handbasket. And on Feb. 2, he reprises this theme of connectedness at Pace Gallery in Chelsea with a show of 48 whimsical line drawings that span 20 years of art making, from his “tree” series of the early ’00s to the “dingbats” he made in lockdown in 2020-2021.

Byrne’s drawings are modest affairs, not much bigger than a standard sheet of paper. They compare perhaps with George Cruikshank’s illustrations for “Oliver Twist,” or John Tenniel’s for “Alice in Wonderland.” But when I dropped by the gallery two weeks ago to see them being hung, I found him some 15 feet up in the air, standing on a hydraulic lift as he labeled branches of an enormous tree he’d drawn on a wall that’s a good 20 feet high.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend JP Le Calvezjean)

From Phys.Org:

Researchers have explored the cellular changes that occur in human mammary tissue in lactating and non-lactating women, offering insight into the relationship between pregnancy, lactation, and breast cancer. The study was led by researchers from the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute (CSCI) and the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge. Breast tissue is dynamic, changing over time during puberty, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and aging. The paper, published today in the journal Nature Communications, focuses on the changes that take place during lactation by investigating cells found in human milk.

This research, led by Dr. Alecia-Jane Twigger of CSCI, found that the cells in milk, once thought to be dead or dying, are in fact very much alive. These living cells provide researchers with the chance to study not only the changes that occur in mammary tissues during lactation, but also insight into a potential early indicator of future breast cancer development.

More here.

Rosalind E. Krauss at Artforum:

In contrast with this array of translucence, viscosity, gleam, Johns exploits the matte, the opaque, the alkaline. His wax encaustic, charcoal, grease, paint stick all militate—it would seem—against sheen.

But that is to overlook the glassy gleam of the mirror, which holds the represented object apart from its suspended reflection on the surface of representation. When Johns worked with Samuel Beckett on the 1976 book Foirades/Fizzles, Johns refused to illustrate a well-known work, such as the suggested Waiting for Godot, instead requesting a new text. (Beckett responded, “A new work? You mean you want me to write another book?”) Beckett ultimately sent Johns five unpublished fragments, for which the artist created etchings of crosshatchings that serve as reinforcements of the planar surface of the page. Beckett chose these for the endpapers of the book, and Johns responded with the (inevitable) painting End Paper, 1976.

more here.

Graham Majin in Quillette:

McLuhan’s impact on journalism was significant. His message was that all the techniques and values of Victorian liberal journalism should be discarded. The old-fashioned search for truth, using the tools of balance, objectivity, and impartiality, no longer applied. Although greeted with indifference or derision by older journalists, McLuhan’s insight was a Damascene moment for many young writers. As one underground journalist explained in 1966:

One year ago, in the first issue of The Paper, I discussed the loyalty I felt I had to the traditional ideals of journalism. … In the year since we began publishing, a very significant evolution has taken place in and around the American press.

The writer adds that he attributes “a great deal of importance to McLuhan” who had been his guide on a journey of transformation and enabled him to abandon the old journalism: “[W]e really didn’t have the slightest idea what we were getting into last year, when we thought we cared mainly about journalistic ideals.” Having abandoned impartiality, the writer describes how he embraced “the tendency to enlightened and interpretative subjectivity.”

More here.

Elizabeth Svoboda in Undark:

In the fall of 1983, Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov was monitoring his country’s nuclear warning systems when alarm bells suddenly started ringing. The screen in front of him flashed the word “LAUNCH.” The alerts signaled what appeared to be a terrifying reality: The United States had lobbed five intercontinental missiles straight at the USSR.

Petrov knew what he was supposed to do next: pick up his phone and report the launch to the Soviet high command. Yet he hesitated as fear gripped him. He knew his report would mean the start of a nuclear World War III. Everything in him protested against such a possibility, and his fear mixed with an inchoate suspicion that the alerts might be wrong. So he waited, seconds ticking torturously away, until confirmation came that no missiles had been launched. Sunlight reflections, it turned out, had confused Soviet monitoring satellites and triggered the alert system. Petrov’s emotion-driven response had steered two world powers clear of mutually assured destruction.

In “Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking,” physicist and science writer Leonard Mlodinow explores our feelings’ power to spur this kind of intelligent, nuanced action, even if the world’s fate doesn’t hang in the balance.

More here.

Daniel Cole in Current:

Mis- and disinformation, partisanship and polarization, crisis points and public trust—the big problems of 2022 were tackled by Walter Lippmann in his book Public Opinion, published one century ago. Certainly, the book’s central image of an average citizen spending thirty minutes a day with a print newspaper now seems quaint. Political media has exploded since 1922, and thirty minutes per day may sound healthier than the relentless torrent from multiple sources available now. Even so, Public Opinion holds up remarkably well. While Lippmann’s remedies were lacking, his diagnosis was dead-on.

A towering journalist and public intellectual through most of the twentieth century, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) left a lexicon that is still with us. He coined the phrase “cold-war,” defining an era. In the pages of Public Opinion he repurposed the term “stereotype,” succinctly naming the simplistic preconceptions humans tend to rely on. The book’s similar notion of a “pseudo-environment” anticipates the concept of social constructionism. Although many associate the phrase “manufacture of consent” with Noam Chomsky, it first appeared in Public Opinion.

More here.

Alejandro Zamba at The Paris Review:

So without further ado, I decided to try to crawl. I managed to plant my elbows securely but not my knees, and then nailed my knees but not my elbows. This happened several times. I turned over repeatedly on the floor, remembering how I’d rolled down sand dunes at the beach as a child. I lay on my back and managed to drag myself over the floor with my heels, in a kind of inverse crawl. I lay on my belly again and tried using my toes and elbows, but I couldn’t move forward: a slug would have beat me in a hundred-centimeter sprint. Then I realized, or discovered, that I had never crawled as a baby. I’d asked my mother about this recently on the phone. “I’m sure you did. All children crawl,” she said. It bugged me that she didn’t remember. She remembered that I learned to talk very early (she said this as though referring to an incurable disease) and that I started walking before I turned one, but she didn’t have a memory of me crawling. “All children crawl,” she told me, but no, Mom: not all of them do.

more here.

The First Step

The young poet Eumenes
complained one day to Theocritus:
“I have been writing for two years now
and have done only one idyll.
It is my only finished work.
Alas, it is steep, I see it,
the stairway of poetry is so steep;
and from the first step where I now stand,
poor me, I shall never ascend.”
“These words,” Theocritus said,
“are unbecoming and blasphemous.
And if you are on the first step,
you ought to be proud and pleased.
Coming as far as this is not little;
what you have achieved is great glory.
For even this first step
is far from the distant common herd.
To set your foot upon this step
you must rightfully be a citizen
of the cities of ideas.
And in that city it is hard
and rare to be naturalized.
In her marketplace you find Lawmakers
whom no adventurer can dupe.
Coming as far as this is not little;
what you have achieved is great glory.”

by C.P. Cavafy
from The Complete Poems of Cavafy
Harvest Books, 1961
translation: Rae Dalven

Emily Mayhew in The Guardian:

Getting better is rarely something that happens all the time. Whether we’ve been seriously ill or injured, everyone has to experience the complexities of recovery as the aftermath. Aftermath is an old agricultural term meaning “a second crop” growing unexpectedly in the space left by the main harvest and it can entail difficult decisions about what should be done with these remnants.

Recovery can feel like a second crop, something to be welcomed because we have survived, but an unpredictable and strange new phase in our healing. The medical professionals who have guided us through the harvest of treatment have usually moved on, replaced by different kinds of responders to the changes in our health. We find our questions about what is happening to us are answered more slowly, with what seems like a lower priority than before. More of the work that is needed, it turns out, is up to us and it is likely to be slow going. Often, the field in which we have been left alone is vast and the ground is churned and the few green shoots growing there stand far apart and hardly seem worth gathering.

More here.

Tyler Irving in Phys.Org:

It doesn’t have a brain and survives on rotting vegetable matter—but it could offer valuable insights into city planning, according to a team of University of Toronto researchers. Physarum polycephalum is a slime mold, a single-celled amoeboid organism that grows as a greenish-yellow system of veins. These veins form a tubular network that is optimized to transfer nutrients efficiently throughout the entire organism.

Slime molds first “forage” broadly over an area, then refine their tubular network to optimize for transport of the nutrients. Now, researchers believe the slime mold’s efficient organic structure could provide a model for optimizing other networks—including those designed to move people and goods around a city.

More here.

Sabrina Mahfouz in The Guardian:

The Last One is French-Algerian writer Fatima Daas’s autobiographical debut novel, translated beautifully into English by Lara Vergnaud. Fatima Daas is both the pseudonym of the author and the name of the narrator in this hypnotising, lyrical book. Fatima lives in the majority-Muslim Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois, with her parents and sisters, who were all born in Algeria. She’s the only one born in France, the youngest child in the family; she is “the last one”.

Almost all of the numerous chapters, some less than a page, start with an iteration of “My name is Fatima Daas”, followed by a couple of words, or a few sentences, expanding on aspects of her identity or lineage. This rhythmic invocation is powerful, though occasionally I felt it contributed to an impression of explaining details of her existence specifically for a non-Muslim readership. For me, this is always unnecessary in a work of fiction, but seemed especially so considering the intimate specificity of Fatima’s world.

More here.

Aris Katzourakis in Nature:

The word ‘endemic’ has become one of the most misused of the pandemic. And many of the errant assumptions made encourage a misplaced complacency. It doesn’t mean that COVID-19 will come to a natural end.

To an epidemiologist, an endemic infection is one in which overall rates are static — not rising, not falling. More precisely, it means that the proportion of people who can get sick balances out the ‘basic reproduction number’ of the virus, the number of individuals that an infected individual would infect, assuming a population in which everyone could get sick. Yes, common colds are endemic. So are Lassa fever, malaria and polio. So was smallpox, until vaccines stamped it out.

In other words, a disease can be endemic and both widespread and deadly. Malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2020. Ten million fell ill with tuberculosis that same year and 1.5 million died. Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to ‘normal’.

More here.

Phillip Inman in The Guardian:

Embracing academia has provided a platform for the recently ennobled economist to air her views in a forthcoming book, What We Owe Each Other. Shafik has joined the campaign against a winner-takes-all business culture that offers the spoils of capitalism only to those that rise to the top, putting her in the company of some of the world’s most prominent political thinkers.

While she has come a long way from her Egyptian birthplace, her questioning of privilege has remained consistent. “The idea that you are successful because you are smart and hardworking is pernicious and wrong, because it means everyone who is unsuccessful is stupid and lazy,” she says. Referring to her friend Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher, she says the next phase of history should be characterised by a shared endeavour, ending the extreme individualism of the last 40 years.

More here.

on a hill

I’m lying on a hill within the Srebrzysko cemetery
it’s autumn and so above the clay on sand rusting needles

my first cry for help, my first scream
on the holy day of Our Lady of Perpetual Help
in Freie Stadt Danzig in Poland’s Pomerania district
on the day of my birth the 27th of June 1932

70 years of regimented living:
with a body I did not design
a war I did not declare
and a family I lost in this conflict

one of my forefathers must have had the gift of foresight:
I’ve only ever seen my closest in the animal light of their needs
which probably explains my isolation and loneliness

my last birthday observed in a rented bedsit
on the former Adolf Hitler Strasse in the Langhfur district
that day I took my life by turning on the gas taps

by Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
from Versopolis
© translated by Marek Kaźmierski
[Should Not Have Been Born – Trilogy, Off_Press, 2011]

Original Polish at Read More:

Read more »

Jim Davies in Nautilus:

Do we need artificial intelligence to tell us what’s right and wrong? The idea might strike you as repulsive. Many regard their morals, whatever the source, as central to who they are. This isn’t something to outsource to a machine. But everyone faces morally uncertain situations, and on occasion, we seek the input of others. We might turn to someone we think of as a moral authority, or imagine what they might do in a similar situation. We might also turn to structured ways of thinking—ethical theories—to help us resolve the problem. Perhaps an artificial intelligence could serve as the same sort of guide, if we were to trust it enough.

Even if we don’t seek out an AI’s moral counsel, it’s just a fact now that more and more AIs have to make moral choices of their own. Or, at least, choices that have significant consequences for human welfare, such as sorting through resumes to narrow down a list of candidates for a job, or deciding whether to give someone a loan.¹ It’s important to design AIs that make ethical judgments for this reason alone.

More here.

Michael Marshall in Nature:

The missing earthworms were a sign. As archaeologist Harvey Weiss and his colleagues excavated a site in northeast Syria, they found a buried layer of wind-blown silt so barren there was hardly any evidence of earthworms at work during that ancient era. Something drastic had happened thousands of years ago — something that choked the land with dust for decades, leaving a blanket of soil too inhospitable even for earthworms.

The drought hit in roughly 2200 BC, when the Akkadian Empire dominated what is now Syria and Iraq. By 2150 BC, the empire was no more. The central authority had disintegrated, and many people had voted with their feet, leaving the region. The overlap between an epic drought and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire was no mere coincidence, according to Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. When he and his colleagues discovered the evidence of drought in the early 1990s, they proposed that the abrupt climate disruption had brought the ancient empire down¹. This example has become a grim warning of how vulnerable complex societies can be to climate change.

More here.