Eida Edemariam in The Guardian:

One afternoon not long after the Obamas had moved into the White House, Michelle organised a playdate for her youngest daughter, Sasha. The children were at their new school and she was worried about how they were settling in. So, in a move recognisable to parents everywhere, she hovered unseen nearby, listening intently, “quietly overcome with emotion any time a new peal of laughter erupted from Sasha’s room”. When it was over she did, again, what any parent of a small child might do, and went out to meet the new friend’s mother. She wanted to chat about how the playdate had gone and maybe make a new friend for herself – at which point all relatability abruptly ended: a rustling surrounded her as her Secret Service detail, who hadn’t planned for this, talked urgently into their wrist microphones. The mother’s car was swiftly encircled by a Counter Assault Team. Hey there, Obama said. The woman, “eyeballing the guards clad in helmets and black battle dress … very, very slowly opened the car door and got out”.

It’s a funny anecdote. But like every story in The Light We Carry, and in Obama’s previous book, her memoir Becoming, it is told in the service of a serious point, which in this case is that making sustaining friendships requires effort and intention.

More here.

Perri Blumberg in The New York Times:

John P. Porcari is a bit of a reality TV show junkie. When he wants to work out, Dr. Porcari, a retired professor of sports and exercise science from the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, goes downstairs and watches “Alaska: The Last Frontier” or “Naked and Afraid” while bouncing on a mini trampoline. Just before speaking with The Times, he had completed four sets of 50 bounces while watching Discovery Channel’s “Gold Rush.” “I have a ski trip in January to get ready for,” he said.

The global market for trampolines is anticipated to rise to $4.1 billion by 2027, up from an estimated $2.9 billion in 2020. Despite its exploding popularity — fueled in part by the pandemic, when demand for mini trampolines skyrocketed amid gym closures — the trampoline still seems more like a kid’s toy than a legitimate workout tool. But a growing body of recent research suggests trampolining (also known as rebounding) is an impressively effective, efficient mode of exercise.

In one small 2016 study Dr. Porcari conducted for the American Council on Exercise, 24 college students jumped on mini trampolines for six months. During each 19-minute workout, men burned an average of 12.4 calories per minute, while women burned 9.4 calories per minute, similar to running six miles per hour on flat ground. Yet the participants rated their effort on the trampoline as lower than one would expect for that level of exertion. In short, Dr. Porcari said, they were having too much fun to notice.

More here.

George Dardess at Slant Books:

Meis employed his dis- or un-layering style first in The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality.There Meis used Peter Paul Rubens’s 1620 painting, “The Drunken Silenus,” to expose the thinness of the membrane that separates mortality from immortality. Meis probes that membrane again in this second book, The Fate of the Animals. Here, he chooses Franz Marc’s 1913 painting, “The Fate of the Animals,” as a source for revealing or at least giving us a glimpse of the coming-into and going-out-of existence of all beings, including our own transient selves.

Does Meis’s project strike you as a crazily ambitious, crazily quirky? Two short books (both fewer than 200 pages), each focused on only one painting, one by an acknowledged master (Rubens), one by a painter I admit I had never heard of (Marc).  The painters themselves unconnected by genre, historical setting, or personal or professional interests. Yet both painters’ works are treated as if equally endowed by their capacity to change our lives.

More here.

Charlie Wood and Merrill Sherman in Quanta:

High school physics teachers describe them as featureless balls with one unit each of positive electric charge — the perfect foils for the negatively charged electrons that buzz around them. College students learn that the ball is actually a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks. But decades of research have revealed a deeper truth, one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words or images.

“This is the most complicated thing that you could possibly imagine,” said Mike Williams, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.”

The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form. And its forms differ drastically depending on how researchers set up their experiment. Connecting the particle’s many faces has been the work of generations.

More here.

Chris Hedges in Consortium News:

I met Jerry when I was a pariah. I had repeatedly and publicly denounced the invasion of Iraq and, for my outspokenness, had been pushed out of The New York Times. I was receiving frequent death threats. My neighbors treated me as though I had leprosy. I had imploded my journalism career.

Seeing how isolated I was, Jerry suggested we have lunch each week. His friendship and affirmation, at a precarious moment in my life, meant I had someone I admired assure me that it would be all right.

He had the impetuosity and passion of youth, reaching into his pocket to pull out his latest poem or essay and reading long sections of it, ignoring his food. But, most of all, he knew where he stood, and where I should stand.

“There is no love without justice,” he would say. “They are identical.”

More here.

Nazish Brohi in Guernica:

After they find dry ground for refuge, tie up surviving livestock, scan the ground for snakes and scorpions, queue, break queue and grab for food, plead for water, scream for tents, weep for loss, curse officials, lament fate — after all that, people whose lives have been upended by floods want to talk. I tell them I can’t do much. I am a researcher documenting and analyzing disaster impacts for various organizations, and it can be months before anyone even reads my reports. But sometimes, it’s enough for them to find someone who will listen.

Their stories are preserved in my scribbles from Pakistan’s 2010 superfloods, amber-toned by the resin of old grievances. And there are other, newer ones from this year’s record-breaking “Monster Monsoon” floods, not yet tinged by time and age; instead, they hold the clarity and acidity of vinegar. A few of the stories make it to my reports as case studies or three-line illustrations of my analyses. The rest lie in my soundproof vault of secondary grief.

More here.

Freya Johnston in Prospect Magazine:

Andrea Wulf’s substantial yet pacey new book concerns itself with a dazzling generation of German philosophers, scientists and poets who between the late 18th and early 19th centuries gathered in the provincial town of Jena and produced some of the most memorable works of European romanticism.

Perhaps the most wonderful account of this group’s intellectual and emotional life published in English is Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1995 historical novel The Blue Flower. For that book’s epigraph, Fitzgerald chose a comment made by Friedrich von Hardenberg, the man later known as Novalis: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” This fragmentary thought is both allusive and cryptic. We might take it to mean that novels pick up where history leaves off; that fiction comes into being in order to chart the private, intimate, domestic aspects of life rather than the large-scale, public sweep of grand events that governs a conventional historical narrative. Novels implicitly challenge the priorities of history, inviting us to look within and to reconceive the world. Novalis, himself a wildly experimental writer of fiction and a poetic thinker of terrific originality and insight, argued strenuously for the need to romanticise and revolutionise our surroundings according to what we find inside ourselves: philosophy, he said, originates in feeling.

Fitzgerald’s response as a novelist to that call—to recognise the primacy of individual sensations—was to write in such an unobtrusively informed and tactful way as to convince us that she personally knew the characters about whom she was writing. Conveying her sense of the past through beautifully assured, delicately economical glimpses of the Hardenbergs and their circle at home in the 1790s, her style is as clipped and fragmentary as that of her philosophical subject, intimating via imaginary reconstructions a world of familiarity with private love, pain and grief.

More here.

Eurydice

I am not afraid as I descend,
. . . step by step, leaving behind the salt wind
. . . . . .blowing up the corrugated river,

the damp city streets, the sodium glare
. . . of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
. . . . . .for my eyes still reflect the half-remembered moon.

Already your face recedes beneath the station clock,
. . . a damp smudge among the shadows
. . . . . .mirrored in the train’s wet glass.

Will you forget me? Steel tracks lead you out
. . . past cranes and crematoria,
. . . . . .boat yards and bike sheds, ruby shards

of Roman glass and wolf-bone mummified in mud,
. . . the rows of curtained windows like eyelids heavy
. . . . . .with sleep, to the city’s green edge.

Now I stop my ears with wax, hold fast
. . . the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear.
. . . . . .Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair.

You turned to look . . .
. . . Seconds fly past like birds.
. . . . . .My hands grow cold. I am ice and cloud.

This path unravels.
. . . Deep in hidden rooms filled with dust
. . . . . .and sour-night breath the lost city is sleeping.

Above, the hurt sky is weeping,
. . . soaked nightingales have ceased to sing.
. . . . . .Dusk has come too early. I am drowning in blue.

I dream of a green garden
. . . where the sun feathers my face
. . . . . .like your once eager kiss.

Soon, soon I will climb
. . . from this blackened earth
. . . . . .into the diffident light.

by Sue Hubbard
from Artlyst Magazine

Matteo Wong in The Atlantic:

Judging by the titles of bills they propose, members of Congress occupy a space between used-car salesperson and poet. Over the past two years, lawmakers in the 117th Congress have introduced the DAYLIGHT Act (Daylight All Year Leads to Ideal Gains in Happiness and Temperament), the ZOMBIE Act (Zeroing Out Money for Buying Influence after Elections), the CROOK Act (Countering Russian and Other Overseas Kleptocracy), and the GIVE MILK Act (Giving Increased Variety to Ensure Milk Into the Lives of Kids). Some acronym names are so long that I can summarize the bill’s message in fewer letters: the CONFUCIUS Act (anti-China), the SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP Act (pro-U.K.), the CONSCIENCE Act (anti-vax).

These reverse-engineered acronyms, or “backronyms,” are inescapable on Capitol Hill. Two of the biggest laws of the past few years were the CARES Act, for pandemic relief, and the CHIPS for America Act, for semiconductor manufacturing. Since early 2021, members of Congress have introduced two separate AMIGOS Acts, two PROTECT Florida Acts, and four SHIELD Acts. These naming devices can seem silly and contrived, especially when compared with the general soberness of Washington policy making. Yet congressional backronyms have been on the rise for years: I wrote a computer program to check legislation titles for acronyms that spell out complete words, and found that roughly 10 percent of bills and resolutions introduced over the past two years have had backronym names—up from about one in 20 a decade ago and less than 1 percent in the late 1990s. The proportion has risen with every Congress since at least 2001.

If that trend holds, the next Congress, elected this week, will be the most backronym heavy yet. So how did the acronym come to infiltrate American politics?

More here.

Katy Guest at The Guardian:

As he unveiled Tesla’s new humanoid robot, Optimus, this September, Elon Musk spoke with characteristic flamboyance about the device’s potential. “This means a future of abundance,” he declared. “A future where there is no poverty … It really is a fundamental transformation of civilisation as we know it.” Perhaps deliberately, he was echoing the tone of his company’s namesake, Nikola Tesla, who in the 1890s was making similarly bold claims about his own work-in-progress. With his new system of wireless telegraphy, Tesla insisted, battleships would be controlled remotely, meaning that pretty soon “war would be abolished” and there would be a “revolution in the politics of the whole world”.

How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon argues that this triumphalist view of the future, so much the norm among Tesla’s contemporaries, led directly to the advances that enabled the moon landings, the technological present we now inhabit and the way we still think about the future today.

more here.

Thomas J. Sugrue at Public Books:

Vergara’s newest book, Detroit Is No Dry Bones, powerfully documents the transformation of Detroit over the last several decades, offering an unflinching portrayal of a city gutted by decades of anti-urban public policies, intense racial segregation, and heartlessly mobile capital. Vergara’s approach is a reminder of the power of looking at small things—a fence, a broken window, a graffiti-strewn brick wall, a lawn ornament—to illustrate what might otherwise be impersonal processes and grand social forces. But Vergara’s keen eye also sees what cannot simply be reduced to urban decay. A raggedy lot becomes a lush garden, a blank wall becomes a canvas for an unknown artist, a pile of tires and a piece of wood become an impromptu bench at a bus stop. Vergara’s Detroit is not simply an acropolis, it is a place of rebirth and reinvention.

more here.

Magali Nuzant in lensculture:

The images are printed on khadi, the cloth produced by traditional spinning wheels—the charkha, a device that is deeply rooted in Indian history. During the struggle for independence, Mahatma Gandhi used the spinning wheel as a symbol of self-reliance, urging Indians to spin their own cloth as a means of gaining economic freedom from the exploitation of British colonizers. If the spinning wheel has come to be a symbol of self-reliance, then in the work of Malik, the act of embroidery embodies resistance and the strength and care that can be found in community. Behind the work lies the reality of the struggle for women’s rights and the issue of gendered violence in India.

“‘Nā́rī’ is a word that I’ve used all my life,” explains Malik. “There are multiple definitions that appear in Hindi: woman, wife, female, an object that is regarded as feminine, but it also means sacrifice. When I first read that, I started to read more about women in the time that the word was coined and all that women had to sacrifice throughout history, all the rituals that were part of the culture, that were built around this word.”

More here.

Liza Batkin in The New Yorker:

In 1978, when Antonin Scalia was still a law professor at the University of Chicago, the American Enterprise Institute invited him to a panel called “An Imperial Judiciary: Fact or Myth?” On his side of the table was Laurence Silberman, who had been Richard Nixon’s Deputy Attorney General; across from them sat the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union and a Harvard Law professor. Within the previous several years, the Supreme Court had established the right to abortion and had upheld a lower court ruling that required schools to bus students from other districts as a remedy for segregation. The panel’s speakers were debating whether the judiciary had taken on an outsized role in public life and the political process.

“I am not particularly concerned about whether the courts put the crown on their own head in Napoleonic fashion or whether somebody else conferred it upon them,” Scalia said to the panel. “We can blame everybody: the Congress, the executive, and the courts. I do not care whom we blame, I just do not want the crown there.” The philosophy that he went on to develop as a professor and Justice took aim at broad, ambiguous, and flexible decrees that he thought let judges rule imperiously.

More here.

A Little Flower

A little flower doesn’t know how beautiful she is
She has no such a concept
A little flower doesn’t even know her own name
Not to mention the meaning
On the side of the road
A little flower never feels lonely
She blooms as if she doesn’t know she will wither
She withers as if she doesn’t know what is wither
She just quietly blooms, blooms
Like a ring that is just the right size
Worn on the knuckle of God

by Ting Li
from Rattle #77, Fall 2022
Translated from the Chinese by the author

Tom McLeish at Marginalia:

There are distinct signs that the poet John Keats’ Grecian Urn has found its voice again. This is a surprise. The final Delphic utterance of the decorated vessel in his poem Ode to a Grecian Urn runs: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Though well-known as verse, it has long been relegated to romantic wishful thinking.

The dominant, highly dualistic discussion of beauty and truth over the last century, and of aesthetics more generally, has long stifled the wistful notion that beautiful ideas are more likely to be true than ugly ones. Furthermore, multiple voices in late modern philosophy adopt the equally dualistic assurance that the objective (truth) and subjective (beauty) simply don’t mix, that they support no connection, enjoy no conversation. Yet a recently-published and extensive survey of over 20,000 scientists in the US, India, Italy and the UK, The Role of Aesthetics in Science, by Brandon Vaidyanathan and Christopher Jacobi, found that only 34% of scientists disagreed with the statement declaring “mathematical beauty is a good indicator of scientific truth.” A very large majority also found that the objects of their scientific investigations were aesthetically beautiful.

Here, I want to explore the reasons for the apparent failure to suffocate the Urn’s continuing voice in our own time. Anticipating that this will require some philosophy as well as the testimony of science itself, the continually conflictual conversations between beauty and truth will require listening to the arts, as well as the sciences. Surprisingly perhaps, the road to resolution leads through theology.

More here.

Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:

Artificial intelligence can learn and remember how to do multiple tasks by mimicking the way sleep helps us cement what we learned during waking hours.

“There is a huge trend now to bring ideas from neuroscience and biology to improve existing machine learning – and sleep is one of them” says Maxim Bazhenov at the University of California, San Diego.

Many AIs can only master one set of well-defined tasks –  they can’t acquire additional knowledge later on without losing everything they had previously learned. “The issue pops up if you want to develop systems which are capable of so-called lifelong learning,” says Pavel Sanda at the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic. Lifelong learning is how humans accumulate  knowledge to adapt to and solve future challenges.

Bazhenov, Sanda and their colleagues trained a spiking neural network – a connected grid of artificial neurons resembling the human brain’s structure – to learn two different tasks without overwriting connections learned from the first task. They accomplished this by interspersing focused training periods with sleep-like periods.

More here.