Peter H. Schuck in Quillette:

Sometimes our most precious cultural institutions fail to live up to their high educational and moral commitments and responsibilities. These failures especially damage the social fabric because they tend to harm many people who rely on them and tarnish the high ideals that the institutions claim to exemplify.

An incident in early October involving MIT, a jewel in world academia’s crown, presents an especially egregious instance of this institutional failing, aggravated by that university’s cowardice in the face of intimidation and threats by self-righteous students and their faculty allies. MIT had invited Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago geophysicist, to deliver the prestigious John Carlson Lecture on climate and the potential of life on other planets—a topic on which Abbot is a recognized expert. Unfortunately for Abbot and his intended audience, however, he had recently committed the campus equivalent of hara-kiri by taking seriously the norms of academic freedom which MIT and other schools claim to cherish.

More here.

The Poem of Chalk

On the way to lower Broadway
this morning I faced a tall man
speaking to a piece of chalk
held in his right hand. The left
was open, and it kept the beat,
for his speech had a rhythm,
was a chant or dance, perhaps
even a poem in French, for he
was from Senegal and spoke French
so slowly and precisely that I
could understand as though
hurled back fifty years to my
high school classroom. A slender man,
elegant in his manner, neatly dressed
in the remnants of two blue suits,
his tie fixed squarely, his white shirt
spotless though unironed. He knew
the whole history of chalk, not only
of this particular piece, but also
the chalk with which I wrote
my name the day they welcomed
me back to school after the death
of my father. He knew feldspar,
he knew calcium, oyster shells, he
knew what creatures had given
their spines to become the dust time
pressed into these perfect cones,
he knew the sadness of classrooms
in December when the light fails
early and the words on the blackboard
abandon their grammar and sense
and even their shapes so that
each letter points in every direction
at once and means nothing at all.
At first I thought his short beard
was frosted with chalk, as we stood
face to face, no more than a foot
apart. I saw the hairs were white,
for though youthful in his gestures
he was, like me, an aging man, though
far nobler in appearance with his high
carved cheekbones, his broad shoulders,
and clear dark eyes. He had the bearing
of a king of lower Broadway, someone
out of the mind of Shakespeare or
Garcia Lorca, someone for whom loss
had sweetened into charity. We stood
for that one long minute, the two
of us sharing the final poem of chalk
while the great city raged around
us, and then the poem ended, as all
poems do, and his left hand dropped
to his side abruptly and he handed
me the piece of chalk. I bowed,
knowing how large a gift this was
and wrote my thanks on the air
where it might be heard forever
below the sea shell’s stiffening cry.

by Philip Levine
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Mathew Lyons in New Humanist:

We don’t know his real name. In early inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but we don’t know how it was spoken. He has come to be known as Yahweh. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; by the third century BCE his name had been declared unutterable. We know him best as God.

God, as he is now understood by monotheistic religions, wasn’t always a singular deity. When Sargon II of Assyria conquered Israel in the eighth century BCE, he described seizing statues of “the gods in whom they trusted”. Who were these other gods – and what was Yahweh to them? Thanks to second-millennium BCE texts from the Syrian city-state Ugarit, we know that Yahweh was once a minor storm god of a wild, mountainous region south of the Negev desert. He was part of a large pantheon of Levantine gods headed by the patriarch El and his consort Athirat.

El, not Yahweh, was most likely the first god of the people of Israel. But early in the first millennium BCE, Yahweh displaced him. This Yahweh is the god whom Francesca Stavrakopoulou – professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the university of Exeter – anatomises. He is not the perfect, abstract, immaterial being of modern conception; his is a visceral presence with an all too corporeal reality and many of the flaws that flesh is heir to.

He is very much made in the image of man. In texts, he is described as having radiant and red-hued skin, a ruddy complexion being an ancient marker of divine power, virility and strength. His beard is long but carefully groomed, and his hair is curled, black and lustrous. The older, white-haired god with whom we are more familiar is the creation of the prophet Daniel, writing in the second century BCE. At first, Yahweh was not entirely man-like, however. “God, who brought [Israel] out of Egypt, has horns like a wild ox!” the prophet Balaam exclaims in the Book of Numbers, the fourth book of the Hebrew Bible. In some early temples he was represented by golden statues of a divine bull.

More here.

Melinday Moyer in Scientific American:

The body’s constellation of gut bacteria has been linked with various aging-associated illnesses, including cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Now a study has found that aging itself is associated with microbiome changes, and that these alterations are distinct from those connected to diseases or medication use. The findings raise the possibility that shifts in gut bacteria help drive the aging process—and that protecting these microbes could help people lead longer, healthier lives.

In the new study, published in Cell Reports on September 28, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles sampled bacteria from the small intestines of 251 people between the ages of 18 and 80 who were undergoing upper endoscopies, when a doctor sticks a small probe down the throat and past the stomach. Usually, researchers study gut bacteria through stool samples. But those microbes, coming from the very end of the bowel, can be quite different from bacteria in the small intestine, closer to the stomach. That’s where most digestion and nutrient absorption occurs. “All the magic happens in the small intestine,” says study co-author Mark Pimentel, a gastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai.

After analyzing the samples, the researchers found that aging was linked with changes in bacterial populations. Older people had more bacteria from the families Enterococcaceae, Lactobacillaceae, Enterobacteriaceae and genus Bacteroides, “and those are all groups of bacteria that can cause disease in humans,” says Heidi J. Zapata, an infectious disease specialist and immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. E. coli bacteria, which belong to the Enterococcaceae family, for instance, can cause diarrhea and urinary tract infections. Overall bacteria diversity also declined as people got older, going down as people headed towards age 80. Low diversity has been linked to health problems too, Pimentel says. Studies have found a relationship between low bacterial diversity and Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome and colorectal cancer, among other conditions.

More here.

An excerpt from Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse in Scroll.in:

To this day nobody knows exactly what transpired in Selamon on that April night, in the year 1621, except that a lamp fell to the floor in the building where Martijn Sonck, a Dutch official, was billeted.

Selamon is a village in the Banda archipelago, a tiny cluster of islands at the far southeastern end of the Indian Ocean. The settlement is located at the northern end of Lonthor, which is also sometimes referred to as Great Banda (Banda Besar) because it is the largest island in the cluster. “Great” is a somewhat extravagant epithet for an island that is only two and a half miles in length and half a mile in width – but then, that isn’t an insignificant size in an archipelago so minute that on most maps it is marked only by a sprinkling of dots.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

People are most likely to die of extreme cold in Sub-Saharan Africa, and most likely to die of extreme heat in Greenland, Norway, and various very high mountains. You’re reading that right – the cold deaths are centered in the warmest areas, and vice versa.

This has got to all be wrong, right? 10% of Africans freezing to death, a substantial number of Greenlanders dying of the heat? The paper doesn’t have any answers. It just presents its mathematical model and runs away. So what’s going on?

More here.

Yascha Mounk in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: I’ve just read a draft of your next book. Though there have been many defenses of liberalism in the last few years, there haven’t been any so far which I felt made the thoughtful but also full-throated defense of liberalism that we need. But in my opinion, your book succeeds.

What is this tradition called liberalism?

Francis Fukuyama: It’s a really old doctrine. And I think there are several reasons that it’s been around for such a long time: A pragmatic, political reason; a moral reason; and then there’s a very powerful economic one.

The practical one, I think, is one that we’ve lost sight of, which is that liberalism is really a doctrine meant to deal with diversity. When people really don’t agree on some fundamental issues, how do you get them to live peacefully with one another? That’s related to liberalism’s origin: It came out of the wars of religion in Europe following the Protestant Reformation, when Protestants and Catholics spent 150 years killing each other. And the founders of liberalism basically said, “Look, if we’re going to base a society on some religious doctrine of some particular sect, we’re never going to live in peace, because nobody agrees on those. And so let’s detune politics and agree that we all need to live together and push religion into the private sphere. So you can worship whatever you want, but you’re not going to impose it on anyone else.”

More here.

the first creation story i every heard

goes like this: in the beginning, there was no light.
everything that existed was a deep sleep.
a mother stirs in the long night she rears, and names it absence.
from absence, she makes two sons, one son makes man, another
makes war. man makes a sword, makes la ballista, makes gunpowder,
and kills the sons, kills the mother. it is from their blood you are given
genesis, mission, decimation, and the colonial church. after a few hundred years
you are given an american flag, no generators, a tin roof, and paper towels
…. for a flood.
*
the word hurricane is taino- from hurakán, phonetic descendent of Juracan:
god of the storm, second self-willed son, who brought his chaos to the west.
summers of rage, i remember. calabash tree through kitchen window, no
…. running water.
a drowned shore, dead fish fetid and bleaching under an exiled sun. remember,
…. how luis
died stepping on a live wire? i read somewhere that electricity is just lightning
…. pretending 
to be permanent, maybe it is the same for the storm. maybe it is the same for
…. the flood.
remember, remember, the cries and himnos in the dark of those forty nights?
*
“you are native before you are american,” is one of the few things i can recall
…. my father telling me.
i thought this meant being tapped into a primordial grief. my displaced rage, my
…. native guard.
inside me, an acreage and an armada of ships, of men waged from absence. what
…. i wage
is far worse. after all, it was i who inherited the sleeplessness, the torrent, the flag,
…. the gun
tossed into the sea. it was i who fashioned this great loneliness, who threw my
…. arms around
each wandering son i loved and whispered “ven a casa.” come home to a place
…. that cannot
exist again. cariño, natiao, tell me where will you run from the powers that come
to thrash and skin and bleed you?
*
i open for a lover against the seawall of a river named mantazas. spanish for massacre.
a few close centuries ago, hundreds of shipwrecked men lined themselves along
…. this shore
and presented their necks. we grow along these estuaries of blood.
i salvage what i can at the edge of a mouth, at the ellipse
of a body, water racking the skin of my many griefs. i became what birthed me,
with a storm in the passage of my throat.

the story will end how it begins: a long night, a woman labored
with the first emptiness. she writhes, opening her mouth, expelling light.

by Lauren Licona
from Muzzle Magazine (reading here)
Spring 2021

Steven G. Kellman at The American Scholar:

The life and work of Stephen Crane derived gravity from brevity. Not one of his novels is much more than a hundred pages long, and they and his short stories strip language to its potent minimum. Crane’s short but prodigious life—he died, of tuberculosis, five months before his 29th birthday—observed the same concision. His hold on the public imagination has also lacked longevity. Crane’s most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is no longer required reading in American schools, and his other greatest hits—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), “The Open Boat” (1897), The Monster (1898), “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), and “The Blue Hotel” (1898)—have fallen out of the cultural conversation.

Novelist Paul Auster aims his new book about Crane at “those who know little or nothing about him,” which, apart from a small cadre of scholars, is the entire species lector americanus. Describing his subject as a “burning boy of rare preciousness who was blocked from entering the fullness of adulthood,” he invites the reader to share his own intense reactions to Crane’s writing and the twists and turns of the man’s abbreviated career.

more here.

Declan Ryan at Poetry Magazine:

“Many of his poems are at best rococo vases of an eighteenth century artificiality, insisted on in our strenuous age though thrones go toppling down.” Such was Harriet Monroe’s verdict on the British writer Walter de la Mare in a review she wrote for Poetry in 1919. Her appraisal echoed several persistent criticisms of de la Mare’s poems: the frequent use of inversion, the decorated lexicon, the never-fashionable attempt to paint a sort of Elfland, and the clinging to the primacy of childhood.

That said, from the time when de la Mare first came to widespread public attention, via his collections The Listeners (1912) and Peacock Pie (1913) and the hugely popular Georgian Poetry anthologies, of which he was a staple, he grew into a lauded—if always defiantly eccentric—figure. He was celebrated by some of the leading (and most skeptical) poets and critics of his era, such as Edward Thomas and Robert Frost.

more here.

Andrew Anthony in The Guardian:

In the wake of bestselling blockbusters such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, that backwater of history – prehistory – has been infused by a surge of popular interest. It’s also proved an area of fertile promise for those who find the established narratives of modernity either constricting or based on false premises or both.

The last point is particularly relevant for the egalitarian-minded. After the catastrophic failure of the Soviet experiment, there were few places left to turn in support of the belief that humanity is at heart cooperative rather than competitive. The notable exception was the pre-agricultural era, those tens of thousands of years in which humans were thought to live in a state of… well, what exactly?

Since the Enlightenment, there have been two conflicting visions of humanity stripped of its civilised trappings. On the one hand, there is Hobbes’s notion of us as predisposed to violence – waging war against each other in a “nasty, brutish and short” existence. On the other, Rousseau’s idyll of prelapsarian innocence, in which humanity led a life of Edenic bliss before being destroyed by the corruptions of society.

Both these understandings of humanity’s roots are manifestly wrong, contend the late anthropologist David Graeber and his co-author, the archaeologist David Wengrow in their new and richly provocative book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. As the title suggests, this is a boldly ambitious work that seems intent to attack received wisdoms and myths on almost every one of its nearly 700 absorbing pages.

More here.

Mandy Nguyen in Vox:

While it can sometimes seem like humanity is hell-bent on environmental destruction, it’s unlikely our actions will end all life on Earth. Some creatures are sure to endure in this age of mass extinction and climate crisis. Over time, they will adapt to a harsher world we’ve helped create, evolving to meet the moment as best they can.

Some of these transformations have gotten underway in our lifetimes. Climate change, some research suggests, is already “shape shifting” animals — shrinking certain migratory birds and speeding up the life cycles of amphibians, for example. No one knows exactly what changes to plants and animals will transpire in the years to come. Still, evolutionary biologists say it’s worth trying to imagine what creatures will evolve in the future.

“I do think it’s a really useful and important exercise,” Liz Alter, professor of evolutionary biology at California State University Monterey Bay, says on the latest episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about unanswered questions in science. In thinking about the animals of the future, Alter says, we must consider how we’re changing the environment now. “It’s a very sobering thing to think about the long future,” she says.

More here.

Girish Shambu at The Current:

The works of great artists have a way of reactivating fundamental questions about the nature and potential of an art form. In the case of filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, these questions revolve around a word that has been used routinely to describe her cinematic style: poetic. Right from the start, her films have quietly suggested that there is an underlying tension in the way we think about cinema and its possibilities. Is poetic style in cinema in opposition to narrative? Do poetry and realism occupy opposite poles?

Few filmmakers have been greeted at the beginnings of their careers with the kind of critical celebration that Ramsay was. Her short films Small Deaths (1995) and Gasman (1997) both won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival; Kill the Day (1996) was awarded the jury prize at the world’s largest festival devoted to short films, held in Clermont-Ferrand, France; and her debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), premiered at Cannes to rapturous reviews. Struck by the thoughtful assurance of her directorial style, critics remarked on how she seemed to have arrived with a distinctive cinematic vision fully formed. At that moment, she was not yet thirty.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCs0Lb6zcR0

Cynthia Haven in Church Life Journal:

Czesław Miłosz, one of the greatest poets and thinkers of the past hundred years, is not generally considered a Californian. But the Polish-Lithuanian Nobel laureate spent four decades in Berkeley—more time than any other single place he lived. His debut collection in America, a short Selected Poems in 1973, was published by a small New York house, Seabury Press. Introduced by Kenneth Rexroth, the collection of about fifty poems included many from Ocalenie, the book that had appeared in Warsaw in 1945.

The translation of the Ocalenie poems in English brought the wartime Polish poet who had been facing an unknown future into the present, and into English, nearly thirty years later when he was a Berkeley professor. In that light, some of the translation choices are revealing: we can see the American poet gently burnishing the man he once was into the man he had become, and the subtle shifts give the translated poems a less elevated, more American idiom.

More here.

Katarina Zimmer in The Scientist:

Tickled by sunlight, life teems at the ocean surface. Yet the influence of any given microbe, plankton, or fish there extends far beyond this upper layer. In the form of dead organisms or poop, organic matter rains thousands of feet down onto the seafloor, nourishing ecosystems, influencing delicate ocean chemistry, and sequestering carbon in the deep sea.

But humanity’s taste for fish may have disrupted some of that cycling, according to new research published today (October 8) in Science Advances. A team of scientists in the US and Canada modeled the historic change in biomass of commercially targeted fish species and their influence on ocean biogeochemical processes. The researchers estimate that before industrial fishing developed around 1900, the fecal matter of these species accounted for around 10 percent of biological material sinking to the seafloor—enough to contribute considerably to carbon sequestration, nutrient fluxes, and ocean chemistry in the deep sea. By 1990, when industrial fish catch peaked, the biomass of exploited species—and their poop’s influence—had fallen by roughly half, with potential knock-on effects on the deep-sea food web.

More here.

Hugo Drochon in Persuasion:

It’s not surprising that the narrative we’ve heard a lot lately is that such theories exploded over the past 18 months. It’s common to see headlines asking why conspiracies are “thriving in the pandemic,” or declaring that we’re “Living in the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories.”

But this is not the whole story. True, we’re hearing a lot about Covid-19 and QAnon-related conspiracies. But just because they are more visible does not mean that belief in them has gone up.

I’ve been doing work with Joseph Uscinski of the University of Miami—the leading specialist studying conspiracies theories—and we’ve carried out a number of studies, assessing whether Covid-19 conspiracy theories have proliferated over the course of the pandemic and whether we’ve seen a general increase in belief in conspiracy theories in the last fifty years. Our paper is currently under review, but our findings may surprise you: Belief in conspiracy theories has, if anything, decreased over the pandemic.

More here.