Nick Paumgarten at The New Yorker:

Todd Rundgren, the record producer, sound engineer, songwriter, and recording artist, has had such a strange career in the music business that it somehow does not seem strange that, at seventy-four, he has been performing in a David Bowie tribute band. This on the heels of a few Beatles-tribute tours. A giant covering giants.

“I’ve already determined that I’m not doing any more Beatles,” he said the other day. “I’m Beatled out. At this point, I’m kind of tributed out.”

He was in a bar in Chelsea, on a day off from the Bowie tour (twelve gigs in thirteen nights), sipping what he called a Ukrainian Mule. Known in his youth as Runt, he’s sturdier now, with long two-tone hair and a vibe that manages to be both beatific and bearish. He arranges his own travel, to avoid the tour bus and the covid risk. He doesn’t own a cell phone. “I actually have my wife’s spare in case I need an Uber,” he said. They live on the island of Kauai; his wife owns a tiki bar.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsezr0qiFIc&ab_channel=rundgrenfan

Penelope Rowlands at The American Scholar:

After Bunny’s arrangement with Paul was established, she went on to flower artistically. Partly schooled by John Fowler, of the London interior design firm of Colefax & Fowler, she cast a spell on all seven of her residences—including ones in Nantucket, Washington, D.C., and New York City. In this phase, too, she championed and collaborated with a long line of gay visual artists. These relationships took the form of “violent crushes”; each of them, for her, was a kind of romance. And one, the gifted French jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger—”the black cat,” she called him—is rumored to have been her lover in the early 1950s. He escorted her to Paris, where she attended the haute couture collections for the first time. Once “perilously close to dowdy,” Griswold writes, Bunny was transformed. She became a style icon, seemingly overnight, thanks to her new, romance-tinged friendships with two famed fashion designers, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy. The latter brought Bunny into Paris’s haut monde. She purchased an apartment on the Avenue Foch and basked in the attention of a chic new crowd she called her “French family.” The courtly Givenchy steered Bunny toward one of her most celebrated projects—her impeccable restoration of the 1678 Potager de Roi, Louis XIV’s kitchen garden at Versailles, which had long fallen into desuetude.

more here.

Untitled

1.
My family arrived here in a Marxist tradition

My mother immediately filled the house with Santa knick-knacks
Weighed the pros and cons of the plastic Christmas tree
as if the problem were hers

During the day she distinguished between long and short vowels
as if the sounds that came out of her mouth
could wash the olive oil from her skin

My mother let bleach run through her syntax
On the other side of punctuation her syllables became whiter
than a winter in Norrland

My mother built us a future consisting of quantity of life
In the suburban basement she lined up canned goods
as if preparing for a war

In the evenings she searched for recipes and peeled potatoes
As if it were her history inscribed
in the Jansson’s temptation casserole

To think that I sucked at those breasts
To think that she put her barbarism in my mouth

2.
My mother said: You are a dreamer born to turn straight eyes aslant
My mother said: If you could regard the circumstances as extenuating
you would let me off easier

My mother said: Never underestimate the trouble people will take
to formulate truths possible for them to bear
My mother said: You were not fit to live even from the start

3.
My mother said: From the division of cells
from a genetic material
from your father’s head
But not from me

My father said: From the clash of civilizations
from a fundamental antagonism
from my tired head
But not from her

by Athena Farrokhzad
from Versopolis
translation: Jennifer Hayashida

Daniel Clery in Science:

On 11 July, in a live broadcast from the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled the first image from what he called a “miraculous” new space telescope. Along with millions of people around the world, he marveled at a crush of thousands of galaxies, some seen as they were 13 billion years ago. “It’s hard to even fathom,” Biden said.

Not many telescopes get introduced by the president, but JWST, the gold-plated wunderkind of astronomy built by NASA with the help of the European and Canadian space agencies, deserves that honor. It is the most complex science mission ever put into space and at $10 billion the most expensive. And it did not come easy. Its construction on Earth took 20 years and faced multiple setbacks. New perils came during the telescope’s monthlong, 1.5-million-kilometer journey into space, as its giant sunshield unfurled and its golden mirror blossomed. Engineers ticked off a total of 344 critical steps—any one of which could have doomed the mission had they gone wrong.

More here.

Michael Hattem in Lapham’s Quarterly:

In 1788, as the young republic was trying to establish itself under the new Constitution, Noah Webster wrote, “Americans, unshackle your minds, and act like independent beings…you have an empire to raise…and a national character to establish.” “To effect these great objects,” he continued, “it is necessary to frame a liberal plan of policy and build it on a broad system of education.” After the War of Independence ended, Webster published several best-selling readers and grammatical texts “calculated particularly for American schools.” These books incorporated many now-familiar stories from the United States’ colonial and revolutionary past, chosen for their “noble, just, and independent sentiments of liberty and patriotism” with the hope that education might “transfuse them into the breasts of the rising generation.” From the very beginnings of the United States, education, history, and patriotism have been fundamentally intertwined.

Education in the United States underwent its first great expansion in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. The revolutionary generation had few models of public education. Until then, education had been limited almost entirely to elite white males, who were instructed in Latin and Greek (required for admission to college) at young ages in grammar schools.

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Ed Simon in Psyche:

If you were an animal in need of legal representation in early 16th-century Burgundy – a horse that had trampled its owner, a sow that had attacked the farmer’s son, a goat caught in flagrante delicto with the neighbour boy – then the best lawyer in the realm was Barthélemy de Chasseneuz. Though he’d later author the first major text on French customary law, become an eloquent defender of the rights of religious minorities, and be elected parliamentary representative for Dijon, Chasseneuz is most remembered for winning an acquittal on behalf of a group of rats put on trial for eating through the province’s barley crop in 1522. Edward Payson Evans, an American linguist whose book The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906) remains the standard work on the subject, explains that Chasseneuz was ‘forced to employ all sorts of legal shifts and chicane, dilatory pleas and other technical objections,’ including the argument that the rats couldn’t be forced to take the stand because their lives were at risk from the feral cats in the town of Autun, ‘hoping thereby to find some loophole in the meshes of the law through which the accused might escape’ like, well, rats. They were found not guilty.

Dismissing animal trials as just another backwards practice of a primitive time is to our intellectual detriment, not only because it imposes a pernicious presentism on the past, but also because it’s worth considering whether or not the broader implications of such a ritual don’t have something to tell us about different ways of understanding nonhuman consciousness, and the rights that our fellow creatures deserve.

More here.

Michael Schulson in Undark:

If DNA is the code of life, then outfits like GeneArt are printshops — they synthesize custom strands of DNA and ship them to scientists, who can use the DNA to make a yeast cell glow in the dark, or to create a plastic-eating bacterium, or to build a virus from scratch. Today there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of companies selling genes, offering DNA at increasingly low prices. (If DNA resembles a long piece of text, rates today are often lower than 10 cents per letter; at this rate, the genetic material necessary to begin constructing an influenza virus would cost less than $1,500.) And new benchtop technologies — essentially, portable gene printers — promise to make synthetic DNA even more widely available.

But, since at least the 2000s, the field has been shadowed by fears that someone will use these services to cause harm — in particular, to manufacture a deadly virus and use it to commit an act of bioterrorism.

Meanwhile, the United States imposes few security regulations on synthetic DNA providers. It’s perfectly legal to make a batch of genes from Ebola or smallpox and ship it to a U.S. address, no questions asked — although actually creating the virus from that genetic material may be illegal under laws governing the possession of certain pathogens.

More here.

Noura Erakat in the Boston Review:

Vivien Sansour is excited about wheat. More than 10,000 years ago, she explains, visionaries in the fertile crescent domesticated it and began to transform it into the croissants, pitas, and baguettes that feed the world today. Sansour studies seeds as a way to “design new things the way that [her] ancestors did.” In 2014 she founded the Heirloom Seed Library and then spent the next four years searching for heirloom varieties for preservation and propagation. Many of these seeds, all indigenous to Palestine, are threatened because of colonial regulation of Palestinian lands and lives. Israel has forced other species onto Palestinian farmers for the sake of efficiency and scale, though it maintains one of the largest heirloom seed libraries at the Arava Institute. While the institute maintains an experimental orchard, the seeds themselves are off-limits to farmers. Sansour insists that while the settler sovereign “took our seeds away from us, they don’t have the story and the system of knowledge associated with the seed.”

More here.

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — I had always been a bah humbug sort of person about Christmas.

It seemed like a season of stress, as my parents scrambled to find the money to buy presents for five kids and have a big feast. I didn’t like the materialism or the mawkishness. Why should there be one week of the year when we were all supposed to be Hallmark happy? “You’re weird,” my mother told me.

Then I took a course on Charles Dickens at Columbia University with the estimable Prof. James Eli Adams, and I began to fathom the magic. As Dickens said in his sketch, “A Christmas Tree,” published in his journal “Household Words” in 1850, “Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me.” His biographer Peter Ackroyd wrote that “Dickens can be said to have almost single-handedly created the modern idea of Christmas.” Christmas morally radicalized Dickens. The disparity between the circumstances and fates of different people offended Dickens in the Christmas season. For him, it was a time to think about what we owe one another, how we live with one another; a time to have a proper sense of outrage about inequality and injustice, and to think about the past, present and future and how much they have to do with each other; a time to consider the good values we’ve thrown away and the bad values — selfishness, egotism, social snobbery, condescension and the worship of money — that infiltrate the heart. Dickens became an outsider looking in when his middle-class life got disrupted by cold, grinding reality: His father went to debtors’ prison and, at 12, Dickens had to leave school to work in a bootblacking factory in London.

…As Mitch Glazer, who co-wrote “Scrooged,” the hilarious 1988 movie with Bill Murray, put it: “Dickens hits us with the setup: regret, loss, mistakes, missed love, wasted life, and then the punchline: ‘It’s not too late!’ In every version from his novella to Mr. Magoo to ours, I always get emotional when Scrooge is reborn.” Dickens has taught me that it’s not too late to focus on the sweet memories, like the time my mom somehow bought me a doll’s kitchen I longed for that my parents couldn’t afford, or the way she would be aghast if we didn’t wear red and green.

The magic is there, if you look. So on this Christmas, as Tiny Tim said, God bless us, every one!

More here.

Michael Schulman in The New Yorker:

To revisit “The Dick Cavett Show,” which ran late night on ABC from 1969 to 1975 (and in various other incarnations before and after), is to enter a time capsule—not just because of Cavett’s guests, who included aging Hollywood doyennes (Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn), rock legends in their chaotic prime (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix), and squabbling intellectuals (Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer), but because Cavett’s free-flowing yet informed interviewing style is all but absent from contemporary television. Late-night shows are now tightly scripted affairs, where celebrities can plug a new movie, tell a rehearsed anecdote, and maybe get roped into a lip-synch battle. But Cavett gently prodded his subjects into revealing themselves. Though he was pegged as the “intellectual” late-night host, he resisted the label. He was a creature of show business: spontaneous, witty, and interested in everything.

Cavett’s interviews with the likes of George Harrison, Orson Welles, Lily Tomlin, and Richard Pryor have racked up millions of views on YouTube, providing a unique window into a raw, freewheeling, contentious time. A Nebraska native who went to Yale and got his start writing for the late-night hosts Jack Paar and Johnny Carson (before becoming Carson’s competition), Cavett presided over an era split between culture and counterculture, squares and hippies. He wasn’t quite either, but he was somehow at home with both. Two of his most frequent guests, each of whom became a close friend, were Groucho Marx and Muhammad Ali—who represented either pole. On December 27th, American Masters will air a documentary about the former, “Groucho & Cavett,” the filmmaker Robert S. Bader’s follow-up to “Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes.”

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6xgiBLEhms&ab_channel=AmericanArtForumwithRichardLove

Geneva Abdul at The Guardian:

Fleur Jaeggy would like to see herself as something of a mystic.

It’s something she aspires to, she admitted in an interview last year. The word mystic derives from the Greek mustē, an “initiated person”. When re-reading Sweet Days of Discipline, arguably the Swiss Italian author’s most famous work, it’s evident that she is such a person. Jaeggy is in on a secret, reaching at something beyond our understanding.

The novel from 1989, both slim and surreal, is centred around friendship at a boarding school. Set in postwar Switzerland, it follows the curious dynamics of the narrator who desires her schoolgirl companion Frédérique.

more here.

George Saunders in The New Yorker:

At twenty-six, at the embarrassing end of a series of attempts at channelling Kerouac, I was beyond broke, back in my home town, living in my aunt and uncle’s basement. Having courted and won a girl I had courted but never come close to winning in high school, I was now losing her via my pathetically dwindling prospects. One night she said, “I’m not saying I’m great or anything, but still I think I deserve better than this.”

That fall, my uncle called in a favor and soon I was on a roofing crew, one of three grunts riding from job to job in the freezing open back of a truck. My fellow-grunts, Leon and John, were the only black guys on the crew, and hence I was known as the Great White Hope. Once everyone had seen me work, I became the Great White Dope. Our job was to move the hot tar from a vat on the ground to the place on the roof where the real roofing was done. Leon had a thick Mississippi accent and no top teeth. He stayed on the ground, pulleying the smoking buckets up to us, muttering obscenities at passing grannies and schoolgirls. John was forty-two, gentle-voiced, and dignified, with a salt-and-pepper beard and his own roofing tools, which he brought to work every day, even though he was never allowed to do anything but lug tar. John had roofed all his adult life, and claimed to have virtuosoed his way into this job by appearing on the job site one day and outshingling the best white shingler.

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Miriam Naddaf in Nature:

Stimulating neurons that are linked to alertness helps rats with cochlear implants learn to quickly recognize tunes, researchers have found. The results suggest that activity in a brain region called the locus coeruleus (LC) improves hearing perception in deaf rodents. Researchers say the insights are important for understanding how the brain processes sound, but caution that the approach is a long way from helping people. “It’s like we gave them a cup of coffee,” says Robert Froemke, an otolaryngologist at New York University School of Medicine and a co-author of the study, published in Nature on 21 December¹. Cochlear implants use electrodes in the inner-ear region called the cochlea, which is damaged in people who have severe or total hearing loss. The device converts acoustic sounds into electrical signals that stimulate the auditory nerve, and the brain learns to process these signals to make sense of the auditory world.

More here.