Richard Dawkins in Skeptical Inquirer:

Just another run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road Pinker volume. Which is another way of saying it’s bloody marvelous. What a consummate intellectual this man is! Every one of his books is a bracing river of fluent readability to delight the non-specialist. Yet each one simultaneously earns its place as a major professional contribution to its own field. Grasp the fact that the field is different for each book, and you have the measure of this scholar. Steven Pinker’s professional expertise encompasses linguistics, psychology, history, philosophy, evolutionary theory—the list goes on. There’s even a book on how to write good English—for, sure enough, he is a master of that too.

And now Rationality. In the final chapter of this book, Pinker raises the serious, even baffling, question of how it could ever have been necessary to mount an argument against slavery, against drawing and quartering, against breaking on the wheel, or against burning at the stake. Isn’t the case against slavery obvious? Nevertheless, it had to be made. One could ask the same question about the justification of rationality. How is it possible that rationality needs an advocate? Isn’t it obvious?

More here.

Ankur Paliwal in The Guardian:

The village was located in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, on the edge of the dense Hasdeo Arand forest. One of India’s few pristine and contiguous tracts of forest, Hasdeo Arand sprawls across more than 1,500 sq km. The land is home to rare plants such as epiphytic orchids and smilax, endangered animals such as sloth bears and elephants, and sal trees so tall they seem to brush against the sky.

The forest also contains an estimated 5bn tonnes of coal. This coal is located close to the surface, which makes it easy to mine. The federal government has divided the region into 23 “coal blocks”, six of which it has approved for mining. The Adani Group has bagged the contracts to mine four of those six, including the one that encompasses Kete and adjoining villages. The construction of these mines will destroy at least 1,898 hectares of forest land. The specific coal block under Kete has about 450m tonnes of coal, worth about $5bn.

More here.

Diaspora

If the meaning of the prayer was not passed down to you,
find it through holier means than translation.
Cling to the rhythm instead.

If you were not taught the rhythm, memorize the clang
of knife against yam against wooden cutting board.
Keep it ringing, ringing in your ears.

If not the ring,
then the Bombay jazz club
and its green lanterns swaying in the long, long night

If you were not given the religion, then at least
Boompa’s rosary beads,
with their memories
indented in thick amber,
the gold Zarathustra hanging from a neck
and tattooed on a sunburnt back.

If the traditions were never taught to you,
then cling to tea time always served at 2pm.
Display the cups and remember
elders do not take their tea with sugar,
like you do.

You have only a fraction of their blood.
You thicken your water with milk.

If home did not fit in the carry on compartment,
then the sprigs of lemongrass from the garden will do.
The tea bags brought from India will do.
The reusable garland will do.

The passport’s golden lions
show a compass of 3 directions.
The fourth will do, too.
With its back facing you,
and its open jaws the homeland.

If the orthodox genealogy did not show up to the altar
of any of the son’s weddings, identity will celebrate
the melting pot mothers. Inheritance
blooms a grateful garland
around the brownish baby’s plump smile.

Her laughter, an anthem.
Her heartbeat, a golden rhythm.

by Azura Tyabji
from Split This Rock

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McKenzie Prillaman in Nature:

The hotel ballroom was packed to near capacity with scientists when Susan Yanovski arrived. Despite being 10 minutes early, she had to manoeuvre her way to one of the few empty seats near the back. The audience at the ObesityWeek conference in San Diego, California, in November 2022, was waiting to hear the results of a hotly anticipated drug trial. The presenters — researchers affiliated with pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, based in Bagsværd, Denmark — did not disappoint. They described the details of an investigation of a promising anti-obesity medication in teenagers, a group that is notoriously resistant to such treatment. The results astonished researchers: a weekly injection for almost 16 months, along with some lifestyle changes, reduced body weight by at least 20% in more than one-third of the participants¹. Previous studies^2,3 had shown that the drug, semaglutide, was just as impressive in adults.

The presentation concluded like no other at the conference, says Yanovski, co-director of the Office of Obesity Research at the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. Sustained applause echoed through the room “like you were at a Broadway show”, she says.

More here.

Arthur C. Brooks in The Atlantic:

Communities can be amazingly resilient after traumas. Londoners banded together during the German Blitz bombings of World War II, and rebuilt the city afterward. When I visited the Thai island of Phuket six months after the 2004 tsunami killed thousands in the region and displaced even more, I found a miraculous recovery in progress, and in many places, little remaining evidence of the tragedy. It was inspirational.

Going from surviving to thriving is crucial for healing and growth after a disaster, and scholars have shown that it can be a common experience. Often, the worst conditions bring out the best in people as they work together for their own recovery and that of their neighbors. COVID-19 appears to be resistant to this phenomenon, unfortunately. The most salient social feature of the pandemic was how it forced people into isolation; for those fortunate enough not to lose a loved one, the major trauma it created was loneliness. Instead of coming together, emerging evidence suggests that we are in the midst of a long-term crisis of habitual loneliness, in which relationships were severed and never reestablished. Many people—perhaps including you—are still wandering alone, without the company of friends and loved ones to help rebuild their life.

More here.

Peggy Ellsberg at the LARB:

Brann’s new book sweeps across the vast range of things that hold her interest. It thus invites us to enjoy the life of the mind and to live from our highest selves. A thoughtful encounter with this book will make you, I swear, a better person. The book includes chapters on Thing-Love, the Aztecs, Athens, Jane Austen, Plato, Wisdom, the Idea of the Good. The first half provides an on-ramp to the chapter titled “On Being Interested,” which falls in the dead center of the book. This central chapter serves as more than a cog in the wheel: it is an ars poetica. Addressing issues of attention, focus, and interest itself, as well as how and where to deploy these functions throughout our lives, “Being Interested” offers a solution for any seeker intrigued by the notion that happiness is not an accident but a vocation. Brann characterizes the pursuit of happiness as “ontological optimism […] to be maintained in the face of reality’s recalcitrance.” In her 2010 book Homage to Americans: Mile-High Meditations, Close Readings, and Time-Spanning Speculations, Brann recounts her experience of waiting for a delayed flight at the Denver Airport. Rather than whining about the tedium and soul-sucking banality of the event, she turns her exquisite attention to the actual experience of “waiting.” Possessed of a consistent ability to enjoy, Brann seems literally incapable of boredom.

more here.

Julian Lucas at The New Yorker:

Few have won bigger than Wiley, whose good fortune has taken him from an enfant terrible of the early two-thousands, when he became known for transfiguring hip-hop style into the idiom of the Old Masters, to one of the most influential figures in global Black culture. He was already collected by Alicia Keys and the Smithsonian when his official portrait of Obama, unveiled in 2018, sparked a nationwide pilgrimage. Now, following the success of Black Rock Senegal, a lavish arts residency he’s established in Dakar—soon to be joined by a second location, in Nigeria—Wiley is shifting the art world’s center of gravity toward Africa with a determination that combines the institution-founding fervor of Booker T. Washington and the stagecraft of Willy Wonka. No longer just painting power, he’s building it.

In Brussels, Wiley was searching for models to confect into the image of royalty for a site-specific show proposed by the city’s Oldmasters Museum. The challenge was familiar.

more here.

John Griswold in The Common Reader:

IFC Films has released a new documentary on Kurt Vonnegut, co-directed by Robert Weide, who in the process of filming Vonnegut over decades created a close relationship with the writer. The film traces this connection, even as it shows Weide’s failure to make his original conception of the documentary—for 40 years.

Weide has won three Emmys, including for his work on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and has made previous documentaries on comedians he loves, such as Lenny Bruce, the Marx Brothers, WC Fields, and Woody Allen. Those subjects contain darker impulses, and this new film plays off the seeming dichotomy between the comedic and the angry/traumatized/depressed, but it does not go very deep in this.

Vonnegut, following Arthur Koestler, thought the human neocortex an evolutionary mistake that led to suffering and extinction, but he insisted we have the free will to be more moral. When his hope for better behavior fails he makes jokes, and when those fail due to grim evidence, he can say only, “So it goes,” as he does a hundred times in Slaughterhouse-Five.

More here.

John Gallagher in Psyche:

One of the first things I learnt to say in Dutch was ‘we beat them to death with sticks’. Not exactly standard fare for the first week of language classes, but then again this wasn’t an ordinary language class. As a historian working with 16th- and 17th-century documents, I was taking a specialised class to learn to read the Dutch of the period – so, instead of learning how to talk about hobbies or ask directions to the train station, we jumped straight into texts from the so-called Golden Age of the Netherlands.

As someone who had learnt a few languages before, this was a whole new experience for me. I was used to the kind of language learning that might be familiar from school: an orderly progression through the basics of grammar, the steady building-up of vocabulary, some basic dialogues on tape or practised with a classmate. But, with Dutch, I had to change my methods and find new learning aids that worked for this project.

More here.

Adam Tooze in Chartbook:

After a year of political turmoil and financial embarrassment, Britain ends 2022 shaken. There is a new spate of talk about national decline. Once again the UK is falling behind. The outlook is uncertain. It is symptomatic that Perry Anderson chose already in 2020, to author yet another gigantic essay for the New Left Review on the UK.

I generally avoid writing about the UK. My feeling about the country are too conflicted. But the discussion going on right now makes it irresistible. It seems as though half a century or more of debate are once again up for grabs.

Though the British elite had a first attack of nerves around 1900 as imperialist rivals emerged on the scene, the decline debate as we know it today originated in the 1950s, within the frame of US hegemony, at a moment when imperial humiliation in Suez coincided, as Jim Tomlinson has shown with the publication of new comparative productivity figures by the OECD.

More here.

Song of Myself —excerpt

Have you reckcon’d  a thousand acres much? Have You
……. reckon’d earth as much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the
……. origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are
……. millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor
……. look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the
……. spectres in books,
Backward I see my own days where I sweated through
……. fog with linguists and contenders,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things
……. from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them through your self.
……
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

by Walt Whitman
from Walt Whitman-Poetry and Prose
Viking Press, 1982

David Kordahl at The New Atlantis:

Why was the direction of cosmology altered so decisively when two radio engineers observed the cosmic microwave background? It wasn’t because of just one thing. The “hot big bang” scenario predicted the cosmic microwave background, since matter and light were presumed to be in thermal equilibrium at the beginning. As the universe expanded and cooled, the matter was thought to clump together gravitationally, becoming stars and galaxies, while the light was thought to zip around diffusely, becoming the cosmic microwave background. But the hot big bang also solved other problems. Steady-state theorists posited that hydrogen was being created ex nihilo, while heavier elements could be forged by nuclear fusion in the stars. But their numbers didn’t work out. Steady-state theorists found that helium was more abundant in stars than stellar fusion alone would predict. But in a hot big bang, hydrogen could also be fused into helium at the very beginning.

more here.

Bill Morris at The Millions:

Though never a household name, Bruce Duffy drew rapturous critical praise for his 1987 debut novel, The World as I Found It, a fictional biography of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Duffy was unfazed when the dense and challenging book failed to catch on with readers. “You know,” he said at the time, “you don’t always have a choice of what you’re going to write. You’re not like a cow that can give ice cream with one udder and milk with another. So I said, ‘Screw it!’ I don’t care what anybody thinks.”

Duffy, who died from complications of brain cancer on Feb. 10 at 70, produced just two more novels—an autobiographical tale about a 12-year-old boy who flees his home in the Maryland suburbs after his mother’s death, and a reimagining of the life of the scabrous French poet Arthur Rimbaud. All the while Duffy worked day jobs as a security guard, corporate consultant and speechwriter. Though The World as I Found It was reissued as a classic by NYRB in 2010, Duffy couldn’t find a literary agent willing to shop his fourth novel. Once again he said “Screw it!” and started writing a new book. He was working on it at the time of his death.

more here.

Jordi Graupera in The New Yorker:

This past spring, the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein taught his final two classes at the New School for Social Research, in New York, where he had been a professor since 1989. One was a course on American pragmatism, the tradition to which his own work belongs. The other was a seminar on Hannah Arendt, who, late in her life, was Bernstein’s friend. Years ago, when I got my Ph.D., I was Bernstein’s student. I still am, in a way. And so I asked him if I could audit the class on Arendt and write about it. He said that he didn’t like passive auditors—I would have to participate fully. That requirement struck me as a good description of what Bernstein had done all his life.

He was already in his seventies when I first met him, in 2008, but he still appeared more energetic than most of his students. You’d hear him coming down the hall, engaged in animated conversation, and then he’d stroll confidently and generously into the classroom, a small man in a black turtleneck, his sleeves rolled up, his wavy white hair swept gently back. He had a distinctively raspy voice that was somehow always half ironic and yet deeply sincere, and which sounded more streetwise than the other professors. Even a foreigner like me, from Barcelona, could hear the Brooklyn in it.

More here.

Katherine Irving in The Scientist:

In 1909, a chicken breeder approached Rockefeller Institute pathologist Peyton Rous with one of her hens. The chicken had a large, malignant tumor growing from the connective tissue in its breast, and Rous, who had long been fascinated by tumor biology and transmissibility, decided to investigate. He took biopsies and ground up the samples, then passed them through filters to remove any cells. Finally, he injected the mixture into healthy chickens of the same breed and watched as these chickens developed tumors of their own. This was to become the first major result that solid tumors can be infectious and spread through what some researchers at the time called “filterable agents,” now better known as viruses, which weren’t described in detail until the discovery of the electron microscope decades later.

These findings would eventually change the course of cancer research, but when Rous first reported his discoveries in 1910 and 1911, the scientific community was underwhelmed, according to Scripps Research cancer biologist Peter Vogt. “Rous made this big discovery, and at the time it was incredibly ahead of the field,” says Vogt, who coauthored a perspective piece on the virus, later named Rous sarcoma virus, or RSV (not to be confused with respiratory syncytial virus, also abbreviated to RSV). “People either didn’t believe him or belittled his work.”

More here.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy in The Hedgehog Review:

I’m not Michel Foucault, but here’s a history of sexuality, greatly abridged: First came the slut shamers. The traditionalist, patriarchal religious haranguers. Things weren’t great for men in the before times, but they were particularly unpleasant for women. Then came the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, which involved chucking all the rules. This had some good effects (ambitious women at last permitted to leave their houses and become doctors, lawyers, bosses) and some less good ones (moviemakers permitted to assault underage girls). In the 1990s and early 2000s, following however many backlashes against backlashes, the sexual revolution re-emerged as sex positivity.

In theory, sex positivity is friendlier to women than sexual liberation (more negotiated nonmonogamy, fewer bunny girls). It involves applying an open-minded but gender-neutral approach to sex and relationships. This is not the same as overtly catering to men but amounts to the same thing.

More here.