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.

More here.

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.

more here.

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.

more here.

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.

Artichoke

… —from: Elemental Odes

The artichoke
of delicate heart
erect
in its battle-dress, builds
its minimal cupola
keeps
stark
in its scallop of
scales.
Around it
demoniac vegetables
bristle their thicknesses,
devise tendrils and belfries,
the bulb’s agitations;
while under the subsoil
the carrot
sleeps sound in its
rusty mustaches.
Runner and filaments
bleach in the vineyards,
whereupon rise the vines.
The sedulous cabbage
arranges
its petticoats;
oregano
sweetens a world;
and the artichoke
dulcetly there in the gardenplot,
armed for a skirmish,
goes proud
in its pomegranate
burnishes.

Pablo Neruda
from Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970
translation: Ben Bellitt
Grove Press, 1974

From The Atlantic:

Leibovich: The Republican Party is in a strange place. The 2022-midterm losses stunned the GOP and created calls for a 2024 challenger to Donald Trump. But can the party move past the man who dominated it for six years? Now we’re actually going on seven years, almost eight years, right? It just keeps going and going. So, hi, Elaina—tell us everything.

Plott: Yeah. As I sit here, I am reflecting on the most recent midterm elections, and I would say that, for me, the biggest takeaway and what I’d love to hear your thoughts on is: When we were counting down to see if somebody like Kari Lake in Arizona, also someone like Blake Masters in Arizona, would end up pulling it out for the Republicans, what that would say about the party. Masters and Lake, of course, were huge proponents of the stolen-election theory. But it didn’t work in the end. And I think the kind of immediate takeaway, at least that I was seeing among centrist-minded people but also people on the right who are vaguely anti-Trump, was that this was a lesson that the party is very ready to move on from Donald Trump.

More here.

Mujib Mashal in The New York Times:

The four designated stages inside the crowded stadium complex in the heart of the busy capital weren’t enough. So the poetry lovers also took to the footpaths and the spaces in between, turning them into impromptu open-mic platforms for India’s embattled language of love.

…That more than 300,000 people came to celebrate Urdu poetry during the three-day festival this month in New Delhi was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India. For centuries, Urdu was a prominent language of culture and poetry in India, at times promoted by Mughal rulers. Its literature and journalism — often advanced by writers who rebelled against religious dogma — played important roles in the country’s independence struggle against British colonial rule and in the spread of socialist fervor across the subcontinent later in the 20th century.

In more recent decades, the language has faced dual threats from communal politics and the quest for economic prosperity. Urdu is now stigmatized as foreign, the language of India’s archrival, Pakistan. Families increasingly prefer to enroll children in schools that teach English and other Indian languages better suited for the job market.

More here.

With so many tellers a tale never remains faithful to what it was.
It becomes a game... —Roshi Bob

Telephone

A mockingbird
perched on the hood
of a payphone
half-buried in a hedge
of wild rose
and heard it ring

The clapper ball
trilled between
brass gongs
for two seconds
then wind
and then again

With head cocked
the bird took note
absorbed the ringing
deep in its throat
and frothed
an ebullient song

The leitmotif
the bright alarm
recurred in a run
from hawk
to meadowlark
from May to early June

The ringing spread
from syrinx to syrinx
from Kiowa
to Comanche to Clark
till someone

finally picked it up
and heard a voice
on the other end
say Konza
or Consez or Kansa
which the French trappers
heard as Kaw

which is only the sound
of a word for wind
then only the sound of wind.

by Devin Johnston
from Poetry Magazine, 2014

Justin E. H. Smith in Berfrois:

On the evening of December 2, 2020, around 10pm, I swallowed the last of what must have been multiple lifetimes’ worth of mouthsful of red wine. Unlike the partisans of AA, I am confident in saying that I will never again in my life consume alcohol. There are things I just don’t do anymore. I am no less morally certain, for example, that I will never go sky-diving. The version of me that believed a good life is constituted from such “fun” diversions as this died a long time ago. Far from having a “bucket list”, I now understand that the proper conduct of the second half of life is to approach something like what the Tibetan Buddhists call tukdam, to do less and less, but only to sit and meditate, and to breathe once every century or so, so that by the time you actually die there will be scarcely any change to register. I can picture a future not so far from now when, to the question, “Is he alive or dead?”, the only fitting response will be: “Who can say?” You might be able to jolt me into some new movement, like a fly removed from its long sleep in a jar of talc that flicks its wing in reluctant palingenesis (the phenomenon of being “born again”, which by the law of nomen est omen has long tricked me into thinking that Sarah Palin must be destined for a comeback); then again you might not. So, yeah, sky-diving’s out, along with drinking. The version of me that drank died two years ago. We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of his death.

More here.

Sam Russell in The Independent:

A grammatical problem which has perplexed scholars since the 5th century BC has been solved by a Cambridge University student and could “revolutionise the study of Sanskrit”, a professor has said.

Indian PhD student Rishi Rajpopat, 27, decoded a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around two-and-a-half-thousand years ago.

Sanskrit is only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than one billion, Cambridge University said.

But it is the sacred language of Hinduism and the medium through which much of India’s greatest science, philosophy, poetry and other secular literature have been communicated for centuries.

More here.

Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian:

Wherever I turned, in every conversation, there was a total rejection not just of the Russian dictator, not merely of the Russian Federation as a state, but of everything and almost everyone Russian. Polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows that some 80% of Ukrainians had a positive attitude to Russia in 2013; by May 2022, the figure was just 2%. A university lecturer told me that his students now write “russia” with a small initial letter. “I don’t correct them.”

This may be unsurprising in Ukraine, a country suffering from a Russian war that is now primarily directed against the civilian population. But the same thing is happening across much of the territory of the former Russian (and subsequently Soviet) empire – which, since the early 2000s, Moscow has tried to reimagine as the russkiy mir, or Russian world.

More here.

Paul Pettitt in Sapiens:

The recent study’s analysis of zinc from the tooth enamel of a Neanderthal who lived and died around 150,000 years ago in the Spanish Pyrenees gives new insights into the diet of ancient humans. Zinc isotopes were analyzed from 43 teeth of 12 animal species living in a grassland around the Los Moros I Cave in Catalonia, Spain. These included carnivores such as wolf, hyena, and dhole (also known as mountain wolf); omnivorous cave bears; and herbivores including ibex, red deer, horse, and rabbit. The results brought to life a food web of the Pleistocene steppe, a system of interlocking food chains from plants up to the top carnivores. The zinc in the Neanderthal’s tooth had by far the lowest zinc value in the food web, revealing they were a top-level carnivore.

More here.

Stephen Witt in The New Yorker:

In the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California, between the orchards and the ocean, sits an inconspicuous warehouse, its windows tinted brown and its exterior painted a dull gray. The facility has almost no signage, and its name doesn’t appear on Google Maps. A small label on the door reads “Google AI Quantum.” Inside, the computer is being reinvented from scratch.

In September, Hartmut Neven, the founder of the lab, gave me a tour. Neven, originally from Germany, is a bald fifty-seven-year-old who belongs to the modern cast of hybridized executive-mystics. He talked of our quantum future with a blend of scientific precision and psychedelic glee. He wore a leather jacket, a loose-fitting linen shirt festooned with buttons, a pair of jeans with zippered pockets on the legs, and Velcro sneakers that looked like moon boots. “As my team knows, I never miss a single Burning Man,” he told me.

In the middle of the warehouse floor, an apparatus the size and shape of a ballroom chandelier dangled from metal scaffolding. Bundles of cable snaked down from the top through a series of gold-plated disks to a processor below. The processor, named Sycamore, is a small, rectangular tile, studded with several dozen ports. Sycamore harnesses some of the weirdest properties of physics in order to perform mathematical operations that contravene all human intuition. Once it is connected, the entire unit is placed inside a cylindrical freezer and cooled for more than a day. The processor relies on superconductivity, meaning that, at ultracold temperatures, its resistance to electricity all but disappears. When the temperature surrounding the processor is colder than the deepest void of outer space, the computations can begin.

More here.