Allie Volpe in Vox:

To find mirth in the world is to be human.

No culture is unfamiliar with humor, according to Joseph Polimeni, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba. For someone who analyzes humor, Polimeni tells me he’s still surprised by its complexity: How words and phrases and jokes have different meanings to everyone, but we all have the instinct to laugh. Just as humans have an innate ability to understand language, Polimeni says, so, too, do they have a reflex for comprehending everyday comedy. Sure, there are people who are better suited at making others laugh, but “almost everybody,” Polimeni tells me, can appreciate a quip.

As much as humor is universal, how it works is, to most people, a mystery. We seek out laughs in nearly every form of media, from film and TV to memes and TikToks. At the box office, popular comedies rake in big bucks. Funny people are idolized in pop culture.

More here.

Richard Eldridge in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Psychically, Geuss argues, liberalism offers “the fantasy of being an entirely sovereign individual” as “a reaction to massive anxiety about real loss of agency in the world.” It offers the false security of “living in a bubble of nostalgia” for the international economic hegemony that the United States began to lose from the mid-1960s onwards, first as other economies recovered from the devastations of World War II and then with increasing globalization, job flight, Trumpism, and Brexit. In this situation, liberalism “responds in a particularly satisfactory way to deep human needs and to the vested interests of powerful economic and social groups.”

How, then, did Geuss manage to escape it? Born in 1946 and raised outside Philadelphia as the son of a devout Catholic steelworker, young Raymond was sent at the age of 13 as a scholarship student to Devon Preparatory School, a boarding school run by Hungarian priests (émigrés from the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution), members of Order of the Pious. Unusually, and unlike the schools of the Jesuits, the school was non-Thomist, antiliberal, and nonauthoritarian. Students were instructed to think for themselves, all the while understanding that the resources available for thought were the fruits of complex religious, linguistic, and social traditions within which they lived, and that they were themselves more than likely to be sinful in one way or another. Above all, “illusions of purity, absolute autonomy, and self-dependence” were taken to be “ungrounded […] sinful […] expressions of human pride.” Religious beliefs were not matters of taste, opinion, decision, or otherwise things at one’s individual command.

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Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta:

Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during the recall of memories.

“It started to raise the question of whether a memory representation is actually different from a perceptual representation at all,” said Sam Ling, an associate professor of neuroscience and director of the Visual Neuroscience Lab at Boston University. Could our memory of a beautiful forest glade, for example, be just a re-creation of the neural activity that previously enabled us to see it?

“The argument has swung from being this debate over whether there’s even any involvement of sensory cortices to saying ‘Oh, wait a minute, is there any difference?’” said Christopher Baker, an investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health who runs the learning and plasticity unit. “The pendulum has swung from one side to the other, but it’s swung too far.”

Even if there is a very strong neurological similarity between memories and experiences, we know that they can’t be exactly the same.

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Alexander Raikin in The New Atlantis:

This is the promise of medical assistance in dying: that vulnerable people who want to die for the wrong reasons will be encouraged to live, as they always have been — while people who want to die for the right reasons will have their autonomous decision upheld. If even a single vulnerable person were pushed into assisted death, it would be a scandal to the system. That is why safeguards were put into place.

And yet stories describing just this — a system that does encourage the vulnerable to seek medical death — are coming fast and hard lately. A number of recent news articles have reported on Canadians who, driven by poverty and a lack of access to adequate health care, housing, and social services, have turned to the country’s euthanasia system.

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Kit Duckworth at Artforum:

IN THE WINTER OF 1972, around the time Manhattan gallerygoers were immersing themselves in Memory—a sprawling installation comprising over a thousand tiled photographs and several hours of tape-recorded text amassed by the American poet Bernadette Mayer—the French writer of memory Annie Ernaux and her then-husband, Philippe, bought a Bell and Howell Super 8 camera. Mayer, who died this year and who in life seemed ahead of the future, once imagined “a computer or device that could record everything you think or see, even for a single day”—a thought Ernaux would echo across space and time: “Someday, would we be able to see, imprinted on a person’s brain, everything they had done, said, seen and heard?” And even so, would that suffice? Though Mayer shot a roll of film each day for one month, all the while jotting down and revising her exhaustive impressions, it was the gaps in Memory, like the ghostly zones of a photonegative, that stood out: “emotions, thoughts, sex, the relationship between poetry and light, storytelling, walking, and voyaging to name a few.” To name a few! To name everything—everything, that is, worth saving: the so-called empty hours haloing mundane life.

more here.

Charles Foster at Literary Review:

God does not approve of street lighting, observed Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That wasn’t an oblique aphorism: it was simple biblical exposition. The God of Genesis is famously keen on maintaining boundaries between domains. There is supposed to be light (‘Let there be light’) and darkness (‘He separated the light from the darkness’ and called ‘the light “day”, and the darkness “night”’). Now, over much of the globe, night has been cancelled. The night sky in Hong Kong is 1,200 times brighter than the unilluminated sky. Millions will never see the constellations so central to the stories humans have told about the cosmos.

The cancellation began when humans discovered fire and used it to extend their days. This was a gentle type of hubris, different in kind as well as scale from the hubris of the Chinese engineers who are said to be about to put artificial moons into space, their orbits synchronised with the night hours of each commissioning city, pumping out light eight times stronger than the light of the real moon.

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From The New York Times:

In voting on Monday to issue a sweeping final report, the Jan. 6 committee has honored its duty and the Constitution. When the full report is released this week, there will be much to review and process for our country, our government and American history. But given the facts that have been revealed, these hearings had to end with criminal referrals against Donald Trump and his minions.

The House committee articulated a powerful legal case encompassing the many schemes of Mr. Trump, John Eastman and others, including the audacious promotion of false electoral slates. The committee also recommended prosecution of Mr. Trump on charges of inciting insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists — a charge unseen since the Civil War. The referrals make clear to prosecutors and to Americans just how dangerous the attempted coup was, and how vulnerable our system was (and is) to such assaults.

The committee demonstrated its seriousness of purpose by refusing to put forth a laundry list of defendants. The committee members have all along thought as legislators and public educators, but also have put themselves in the minds of prosecutors. That led them to rightly focus on a short list of prospective defendants against whom the evidence is most damning, providing critical context to the prosecutors. Focusing on the very best cases avoids diluting the effect of the referrals with more tenuous theories against a large number of actors, and emphasizes the cases the prosecutors can actually win.

More here.

Jennifer Zieba in The Scientist:

Nerve cells, or neurons, are the basic functional units of the nervous system. Multiple interconnected neurons form a neural circuit and use electrical and chemical signals to quickly transmit information throughout an organism. The nervous system is broadly divided into two sections: the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The CNS consists of the brain and spinal cord whereas the PNS includes neurons that branch off from the CNS and connect to the rest of the body. In general, neurons in the PNS receive and carry signals in the body while neurons in the CNS analyze information.

…Typically, neurons share information by producing electrical events called action potentials, also known as nerve impulses, which involve rapid changes in voltage across their membrane. When a neuron’s dendrite or cell body receives enough inputs from other neurons via chemical or electrical synapses and a particular threshold for that neuron is exceeded, the neuron is triggered to send an action potential across its axon.

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The Story of Keys

If you would give me
the key to your house
I would think of it
as a one-dimensional
mountain range.
I would hold it up
to the sky
and study how clouds
drink in its valleys.
Think of it
as a tiny file
that cuts through
vertical shadows.
The door of your house
would be a rectangle of light

that shuts behind me
trapping the moon
by the coattails.
I would no longer need
the twisted path
that brought me to you.
It would disappear
along with the forest
that popped up
on springs and hinges.
And the stagehands
and the roadies of my dreams
could put away their props —
cups, pools, musical perfumes
darker than your hair.

Entering for the first time
would be as if I never left.
And I would tell you
the story of keys.
They were made long before
the invention of doors.
Although no one knew their function,
wise men suspected their importance.
Carefully, they would place them
into the cracks of tree bark and twist.

Anything can be a key: a piece of wire
a safety pin, laughter.

by Richard Garcia
from Touching the Fire
Anchor Books, 1998

Sarah M. Brownsberger in The Hedgehog Review:

We wondered: Were we condensing phrases to terms because we were typing with our thumbs? Had we come to expect listeners and readers to autocomplete and fill in syntax? Had work jargon saturated private life because Americans worked such long hours? Had a generation told by daycare providers that they were good toy-picker-uppers grown up to make a norm of behaviorist verbing? Had the passive constructions by which one avoids assigning blame (or credit) in the workplace made naming who did what seem rude?

Or did sounding technical have a political flavor? Did it announce, “I believe that science is real,” as some lawn signs in our new neighborhood did, along with other tenets of what apparently was a new, progressive Nicene Creed?

Or were people just preening, using pseudoterms to sound savvy?

What did talking like this do?

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Chris D Thomas, Jack Hatfield, and Katie Noble in The Conversation:

Fortunately, a whole raft of new technologies is being developed that make a system-wide revolution in food production feasible. According to recent research by one of us (Chris), this transformation could meet increased global food demands by a growing human population on less than 20% of the world’s existing farmland. Or in other words, these technologies could release at least 80% of existing farmland from agriculture in about a century.

Around four-fifths of the land used for human food production is allocated to meat and dairy, including both range lands and crops specifically grown to feed livestock. Add up the whole of India, South Africa, France and Spain and you have the amount of land devoted to crops that are then fed to livestock.

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

So, unfortunately, it’s time for another one of these. By which I mean both a “[Country], you were doing so well!” post, and a “Why [country] is having an economic crisis” post. I thought Ghana was going to be one of my development success stories, and then before I got around to writing about, its economy went into a crisis. The basic story here is that Ghana just defaulted on most of its external debt, and is experiencing very high inflation, and is going to have to be bailed out by the IMF. That’s going to result in financial and economic chaos in the country, a year or two of depressed economic activity, and hardship for the Ghanaian people.

I’m sure Ghana will eventually bounce back. And as I’ll explain, when we look at the particulars of how this crisis has played out, we see that the government is being smarter than many. But overall this is pretty disappointing. So first I’ll talk a bit about why it’s so disappointing, and then move on to the crisis itself.

More here.

Alex Clark in The Guardian:

A century ago, a man with a double life published one of the most celebrated, anthologised and dissected poems in English literature. TS Eliot spent six days a week at the offices of Lloyds bank and crammed the business of poetry and literary criticism into the evenings and Sundays. This allowed him to write The Waste Land, a densely allusive work that drew on Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Jacobean tragedy, tarot and the Upanishads to create a dazzling portrait of both the ruins of postwar Europe and the inner alienation of modernity. But it was not, as Matthew Hollis’s captivatingly exhaustive “biography of a poem” demonstrates, a work conceived or executed in isolation; and chief among Eliot’s enablers were his wife, Vivien, and his fellow poet and indefatigable literary fixer, Ezra Pound, who looms almost as large in the book as does Eliot himself.

One of the numerous illuminating anecdotes of their entwined lives sees TS Eliot deliver a parcel to James Joyce in Paris at their first ever meeting. Entrusted with the gift by Pound but forbidden from knowing its contents, Eliot, alongside his fellow traveller Wyndham Lewis, ceremoniously presented the package as the trio assembled at a Left Bank hotel and waited as Joyce struggled with its strings until, for want of a knife, a pair of nail scissors was found. Within, a clearly second-hand pair of brown shoes, prompted by Pound’s anxiety that Joyce, whom he liked and admired, was short of funds and in need of sturdy footwear. “‘Oh!’ said Joyce faintly, and sat down.” That night the Château Latour flowed, and subsequently a humiliated Joyce settled every bill.

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Ed Caesar at The New Yorker:

Pick the best moment of the match. It seems impossible. The Lionel Messi flick pass that oiled the move that led to Argentina’s beautiful second goal? Sumptuous. Try another. Kylian Mbappé’s volleyed finish from the edge of the penalty area, to take the contest to 2–2, and extra time? Dazzling. One more, or perhaps two? The rampant French attack in the final minutes of injury time, with the match tied at 3–3, that preceded a one-footed save by Argentina’s goalkeeper, Emiliano Martínez? The lightning Argentina counterattack that immediately followed it, and then the missed header to win the match? I think I held my breath for a minute.

This was the best World Cup final I have ever seen, that perhaps anyone has ever seen—a match stuffed full of so many remarkable incidents, so much tension, such dramatic momentum swings, such joy. It was soccer played con brio.

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Brian Phillips at The Ringer:

OK, I’m going to do my best here. But I need you to know exactly what you are getting, as Joan Didion once wrote, and what you are getting is a man who cannot feel his face. My hands are still shaking. There are tears in my eyes. I’m writing this less than 10 minutes after the end of the greatest World Cup final ever, which Lionel Messi’s Argentina won on penalties over Kylian Mbappé’s France, and I do not believe it is recency bias that makes me think that this match was the single most thrilling sporting event I have ever witnessed. Every game is a story. And when you consider the stakes, the performances, the history in the balance, the refusal of either side to lose, the moments of astonishing play, the sudden reversals and wild swings of momentum, the knife’s-edge uncertainty of the outcome, and the epochal significance of a result that brought the career of the world’s best player to an almost magically perfect climax, it is hard to imagine a story more overwhelming or more satisfying than this one.

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Eve Herold in Leap:

Rochelle “Shelley” Buffenstein has one of the world’s largest, if not the largest, lab-dwelling colonies of the naked mole rat. (No one has done a worldwide tabulation, but she has 4,500 of them.) Buffenstein has spent decades studying the little subterranean-dwelling rodents. Over the years, she and her colleagues have uncovered one surprising discovery after another, which has led them to re-orient the whole field of anti-aging research.

Naked mole rats defy everything we thought we knew about aging. These strange little rodents from arid regions of Africa, such as Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, live up to ten times longer than their size would suggest. And unlike virtually every other animal, they don’t lose physical or cognitive abilities with age, and even retain their fertility up until the end of life. They appear to have active defenses against the ravages of time, suggesting that aging may not be inevitable. Could these unusual creatures teach humans how to extend life and ameliorate aging?

More here.