Justin E. H. Smith in Unherd:

Among the most ingenious moments in Kraftwerk’s admirable oeuvre is the point in 1981’s “Pocket Calculator” when a human voice self-contentedly sings: “By pressing down a special key / It plays a little melody.” The melody follows in confirmation. The genius here seems to lie in the blunt honesty of the singer, owning up to the contemporary condition of music as an art form that has largely been outsourced to machines. It’s not that the German electronic band invented the technology, nor that they were the first to make use of it. They are simply among the first to figure out how to elevate it to self-awareness, and to press it into a gesture of timely irony and potentially timeless beauty; that is, to make art out of it.

The little melody in question is of course a pre-set. Its sequence of notes is planned in advance, and once the key is pressed, the machine may be relied upon to do only the thing it has been programmed to do. The melody, it goes without saying, is no Bach fugue. It is simple, naïve, kind of dumb; and within the context of the song, it is utterly compelling.

Several conditions — technological, cultural, historical — had to fall into place in order for this melodic interlude, with its verbal introduction, to come across to the critical listener as an expression of genius. All of these conditions might be cited in response to any philistine tempted to declare, of the pressing down of that special key, that “I could have done that too”. We are used to hearing such petulant ressentiment, especially in connection with the 20th-century avant-garde in the figurative arts: “I could have entered a urinal in an exhibition, too”; “I could have painted an all-white monochrome, too”; etc. The simplest response is, “Yes, but you didn’t”.

More here.

Jeremy Walton in Sidecar (image credit: Stable Diffusion):

On 1 January, Croatians entered the latest EU-mandated experiment in whether monetary ‘portrayal can be convincing’, when they substituted their national currency, the kuna, for the euro, becoming the first member-state to do so since Lithuania in 2015. Like all EU states other than Denmark, Croatia formally accepted the obligation to enter the eurozone with its accession as the Union’s 28th – and still most recent – member in 2013. Its relatively prompt adoption of the currency contrasts with the persistent euro-scepticism of countries such as Sweden, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which continue to maintain their own currencies despite being much older members of the EU. This is largely attributable to the unflagging enthusiasm for Brussels emanating from the centre-right government of Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and his party the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ; Hrvatska demokratska zajednica). Under Plenković, the HDZ has refashioned itself as a Christian Democratic party of the sort that is increasingly rare in the epoch of ascendant right-wing populism in Europe and beyond.

Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, visited Zagreb to sanctify Croatia’s definitive embrace of the euro. (She and Plenković pointedly paid for their coffees with them). Such political fanfare has not been a panacea to apprehension about the new currency regime; Croatian citizens are well-acquainted with the contortions and consternations that the euro can involve.

More here.

Daniel Driscoll in Phenomenal World’s Polycrisis (image credit: Stable Diffusion):

Amidst the turbulence of the Second World War, hundreds of delegates from the Allied Nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to construct a post-war economic system. While it might strike one as odd that post-war choreography began in 1944, a year before the war ended, the truth is that states were planning peacetime from the moment the war began. The West feared replicating the blunders of the Treaty of Versailles and wanted to establish the next post-war order with prudence.¹ One principal task for Bretton Woods attendees was to implement an international monetary system. Several proposals existed, including Keynes’ Bancor, which would have established an International Clearing Union to issue a supranational currency, oversee currency exchanges, and correct global imbalances. The war had weakened Europe, however, and strengthened the US. US negotiators exploited their influence. While the adoption of the dollar as the global reserve asset would hand the US a significant upper hand, Europeans eventually relented because they could still convert dollars to gold and were assured that the arrangement was temporary.

Twenty-seven years later, a new crisis fractured the postwar economic peace enjoyed by the West. Rising inflation drove many countries, particularly European ones, to convert their US dollar reserves into gold. President Richard Nixon faced a choice between devaluing the dollar or pumping it up through perilous austerity measures. Global markets predicted that Nixon’s political savvy would drive him toward the former, but he shocked the world by taking a surprise third route, severing the dollar from the gold standard. There is a great deal of disagreement as to his decision’s long-term ramifications, but little debate about the global economic turmoil that immediately followed. Through it all, the dollar’s global hegemony endured, and it remains to this day.

More here.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce at The Guardian:

This is an extraordinary novel about two extraordinary women, the books they wrote and how those books survived. In 1934, while looking for a ping pong ball in the house of Lieutenant Colonel William Butler-Bowdon, a guest stumbled upon the only complete manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe. Butler-Bowdon threatened to throw it on the bonfire, saying “then we may be able to find ping pong balls and bats when we want them”. Fortunately he changed his mind, and the manuscript of the earliest English autobiography is now safely in the British Library.

Born in 1373, one-time brewer Margery Kempe had visions of Christ which set her off on a series of rambunctious, incident-packed pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Santiago de Compostela and Prussia. She dressed in white, like a virgin, despite having at least 14 children. She was tried for heresy several times but always managed to successfully rebut the charges. In her debut novel Victoria MacKenzie has distilled this chaotic, episodic rampage of a life into a beautifully lucid account of a spiritual adventure. The Margery who emerges is boastful, vulnerable, courageous, confused, mouthy, libidinous, attentive and impossible not to love.

more here.

Joumana Khatib at the NYT:

Rome, 1950: The diary begins innocently enough, with the name of its owner, Valeria Cossati, written in a neat script.

Valeria is buying cigarettes for her husband when she is entranced by the stacks of gleaming black notebooks at the tobacco shop. She’s not permitted to buy one there on Sundays, she’s told, but the tobacconist gives her one anyway, which she stashes under her coat. She doesn’t yet know there’s a devil hiding in its pages.

This deception begins the Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Céspedes’s novel FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK (Astra House, 259 pp., $26), first published in 1952. Valeria is married with two adult children; the family is under financial strain, compelling her to work in an office and manage her household without the help of a maid. She has coped with these pressures handsomely, she believes. She is a “transparent” woman, simple, “a person who had no surprises either for myself or for others.”

more here.

Photographer’s Song

Standing in the shade,
looking at the light,
I know that I can make
something clear and smart.

I know that I can catch
something they can’t see
as they cross the bridge.
I scour them with my eye.

As they live their lives,
blind, mundane and rich,
I wait until it’s time
and make my little click.

Through the dimming light
I watch them from the shade,
still, in my perfect spot
as they walk away.

I use my longer lens
to bring them close to me.
Their thoughts are in my hands.
I check them on a screen.

If I make a print,
I know what it will show.
When daylight ends,
my camera feels cold.

by Don Bogen
from Plume Magazine

Kelly Oakes in BBC Magazine:

When British brain surgeon Henry Marsh sat down beside his patient’s bed following surgery, the bad news he was about to deliver stemmed from his own mistake. The man had a trapped nerve in his arm that required an operation – but after making a midline incision in his neck, Marsh had drilled out the nerve on the wrong side of his spinal column.

Preventable medical mistakes frequently involve wrong-sided surgery: an injection to the wrong eye, for example, or a biopsy from the wrong breast. These “never events” – serious and largely preventable patient safety accidents – highlight that, while most of us learn as children how to tell left from right, not everyone gets it right. While for some people, telling left from right is as easy as telling up from down, a significant minority – around one in six people, according to a recent study – struggle with the distinction. Even for those who believe they have no issues, distractions such as ambient noise, or having to answer unrelated questions, can get in the way of making the right choice.

More here.

Viviane Callier in Quanta Magazine:

Animals that produce many offspring tend to have short lives, while less prolific species tend to live longer. Cockroaches lay hundreds of eggs while living less than a year. Mice have dozens of babies during their year or two of life. Humpback whales produce only one calf every two or three years and live for decades. The rule of thumb seems to reflect evolutionary strategies that channel nutritional resources either into reproducing quickly or into growing more robust for a long-term advantage.

But ant queens can have it all. In some ant species, queens live more than 30 years while laying the thousands upon thousands of eggs that become all the workers in the nest. In contrast, worker ants, which are females that don’t reproduce, live only months. Yet if circumstances demand it, the workers of some species can step up to become pseudo-queens for the good of the nest — and to reap a significant extension in their life span.

What governs this gigantic range in ant life span is poorly understood, but two recent studies have revealed important details about what makes the life spans of ants so flexible. In Science, researchers at New York University showed that some ant queens produce a protein that suppresses the aging effect of insulin so that they can consume all the additional food needed for their egg-laying without shortening their lives. And in a preprint recently posted on the biorxiv.org server, researchers in Germany described a parasite that greatly lengthens the lives of its ant hosts by secreting a rich cocktail of antioxidants and other compounds. Both studies add to the evidence that the observed life spans of organisms have little to do with limitations imposed by their genes.

More here.

Stephen Akey at The Hedgehog Review:

A carefully administered and properly controlled dosage of a hallucinogen, their studies attest, can accomplish in a single, not-to-be-repeated session what years of psychotherapy and regimens of antidepressant medications often fail to achieve.

I believe it. Nowhere, however, in the outpouring of recent literature on the subject, have I encountered any significant discussion of what most struck me in my limited experience of psychotropic drugs. The visions I encountered and the perceptions I took away were every bit as intense, rapturous, frightening, and transformative as sober physicians and wild-eyed advocates claim them to be. They were also—and this doesn’t get talked about much—astonishingly banal. If “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was one frame of reference for me, another was the poster art of late sixties California acid rock. I had been given a privileged glimpse into the collective unconscious and it looked like a dayglo poster for the Jefferson Airplane at Fillmore West circa 1967.

more here.

Ian Bogost at The Atlantic:

A boyfriend just going through the motions. A spouse worn into the rut of habit. A jetlagged traveler’s message of exhaustion-fraught longing. A suppressed kiss, unwelcome or badly timed. These were some of the interpretations that reverberated in my brain after I viewed a weird digital-art trifle by the Emoji Mashup Bot, a popular but defunct Twitter account that combined the parts of two emoji into new, surprising, and astonishingly resonant compositions. The bot had taken the hand and eyes from the 🥱 yawning emoji and mashed them together with the mouth from the 😘 kissing-heart emoji. That’s it. Compare that simple method with supposedly more sophisticated machine-learning-based generative tools that have become popular in the past year or so. When I asked Midjourney, an AI-based art generator, to create a new emoji based on those same two, it produced compositions that were certainly emojiform but possessed none of the style or significance of the simple mashup: a series of yellow, heart-shaped bodies with tongues sticking out.

more here.

Alice Robb in The New Statesman (free registration required):

Forty years ago the literary theorist Peter Brooks made a name for himself by championing a then-unfashionable argument: we understand ourselves through stories. Narrative, he wrote in his landmark 1984 book Reading for the Plot, is “the principal ordering force” by which we make meaning out of our lives.

Brooks did not anticipate how fully the rest of the world – from politicians and doctors to psychologists, marketers and social media users – would come to agree. In his new book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, which he frames as a kind of mea culpa, the now 84-year-old comparative literature professor writes that he “never envisaged nor hoped for the kind of narrative takeover of reality we appear to be witnessing in the early twenty-first century”. Today, he complains, he cannot even look at a box of biscuits or browse deodorant online without encountering tales of ambitious young entrepreneurs and idealistic families seeking preservative-free personal care products.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

New year, new variant. Just as scientists were getting to grips with the alphabet soup of SARS-CoV-2 variants circulating globally — your BQ.1.1, CH.1.1 and BF.7 — one lineage seems to be rising to the top, thanks to a peculiar new mutation.

The XBB.1.5 subvariant now makes up around 28% of US COVID-19 cases, according to projections from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, and its prevalence is on the rise globally. In the Northeastern United States, it seems to have rapidly out-competed the menagerie of other immunity-dodging variants that were expected to circulate alongside one another this winter.

“It’s almost certainly going to dominate in the world. I cannot find a single competitor now. Everything else is incomparable,” says Yunlong Cao, an immunologist at Peking University in Beijing whose team is studying the properties of XBB.1.5 in the laboratory.

More here.

John Crace in The Guardian:

I was the Spare. A nullity. A piece of the furniture to be moved around. Pa did his best. I suppose. He wasn’t really cut out for parenthood. More interested in his teddy. And Shakespeare and Nelson Mandela. To be or not to be. Not to be. Willy and I begged him not to marry Camilla. Be with her, if you must. Just don’t marry her. Camilla just nodded and phoned the press. Playing the long game. I was just a commodity.

In 1998 I went to Eton. I was outmatched. The teachers said I was thick. That was because they just asked the wrong questions. Willy ignored me. I begged him to help me. He just said I was too needy and should see a shrink. I said that I didn’t understand my lessons. That they felt like people were speaking in foreign languages. That’s your French class, Harold. I started smoking dope. Anything to numb the pain of reading this book.

More here.

Herman Pontzer in Scientific American:

It was my daughter Clara’s seventh birthday party, a scene at once familiar and bizarre. The celebration was an American take on a classic script: a shared meal of pizza and picnic food, a few close COVID-compliant friends and family, a beaming kid blowing out candles on a heavily iced cake. With roughly 380,000 boys and girls around the world turning seven each day, it was a ritual no doubt repeated by many, the world’s most prolific primate singing “Happy Birthday” in an unbroken global chorus.

Such a wholesome setting seems an unlikely place for rampant rule breaking. But as an evolutionary anthropologist, I can’t help but notice the blatant disregard our species shows for the natural order. Nearly every aspect of our modern lives marks a cheerfully outrageous departure from the laws that govern every other species on the planet, and this birthday party was no exception. Aside from the fresh veggies left wilting in the sun, none of the food was recognizable as a product of nature. The cake was a heat-treated amalgam of pulverized grass seed, chicken eggs, cow milk and extracted beet sugar. The raw materials for the snacks and drinks would take a forensic chemist years to reconstruct. It was a calorie bonanza that animals foraging in the wild could only dream about, and we were giving it away to people who didn’t even share our genes.

More here.

Lost Things, Found Hopes

For Nietzsche, hope was the beginning of loss.

But we can be even more radical:
the beginning of anything is the beginning of loss.

We all lose, but some lose more slowly
than others.

‘How’s it going?’ we ask mercilessly.

‘Slowly’, we answer, without really knowing.

Losing slowly is what we call winning.

But I, who do not love losing, love to lose myself in the forest.

Especially in forests
of music and breath,
skin and bark.

by Harkaitz Cano
from: Malgu da gaua / Flexible is the night
publisher: Etxepare Institutua, San Sebastián, 2014

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

I was nineteen, maybe twenty, when I realized I was empty-headed. I was in a college English class, and we were in a sunny seminar room, discussing “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” or possibly “The Waves.” I raised my hand to say something and suddenly realized that I had no idea what I planned to say. For a moment, I panicked. Then the teacher called on me, I opened my mouth, and words emerged. Where had they come from? Evidently, I’d had a thought—that was why I’d raised my hand. But I hadn’t known what the thought would be until I spoke it. How weird was that?

Later, describing the moment to a friend, I recalled how, when I was a kid, my mother had often asked my father, “What are you thinking?” He’d shrug and say, “Nothing”—a response that irritated her to no end. (“How can he be thinking about nothing?” she’d ask me.) I’ve always been on Team Dad; I spend a lot of time thoughtless, just living life. At the same time, whenever I speak, ideas condense out of the mental cloud. It was happening even then, as I talked with my friend: I was articulating thoughts that had been unspecified yet present in my mind. My head isn’t entirely word-free; like many people, I occasionally talk to myself in an inner monologue. (Remember the milk! Ten more reps!) On the whole, though, silence reigns. Blankness, too: I see hardly any visual images, rarely picturing things, people, or places. Thinking happens as a kind of pressure behind my eyes, but I need to talk out loud in order to complete most of my thoughts.

More here.

Clayton Fox in Tablet: