David Sedaris in The New Yorker:

Tours have always been good for getting me out of my bubble, this one even more so. Driving across the Midwest, I saw one Trump 2024 sign after another—this while the election was an entire three years away. “You know you’re in a place that’s inhospitable to liberals when you see fireworks stores,” Adam said in rural Indiana as we passed one powder keg after another.

“Fireworks are guns for children,” I observed.

“They’re the gateway drug,” Adam agreed.

Then there were the actual guns—one I saw, for instance, in Dayton, Ohio, as I waited in line to get a cup of coffee. Ahead of me stood a group of three, none of whom had apparently ever been to a Starbucks before. All were bearded and maskless. Theirs were the faces you’d see on a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster in the Old West, but colorized. “What’s the closest you got to a milkshake?” the tallest of them asked the employee behind the counter. “Is the ice in a Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino shaved or in chunks?” A month earlier, at a coffee shop in Springfield, Missouri, I saw a sign for an Almond Joy Latte. For all our talk about health and, worse still, “wellness,” the burning question in most of America is “How can we make this more fattening?”

More here.

Nichola Raihani in The Guardian:

What springs to mind when you hear the word cooperation? It increasingly feels like bland corporate jargon, evoking images of firm handshakes and cheerful teamwork. Typing it into Google Images produces a reel of people doing increasingly bizarre things with their hands. But cooperation is much more than a workplace platitude: it is sewn into the fabric of our lives, from the most mundane of activities, such as the morning commute, to magnificent achievements such as sending rockets into space. Cooperation is our species’ superpower, the reason that humans managed not just to survive but to thrive in almost every habitat on Earth.

We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. And, to some extent, this perspective is justified. Cooperative individuals are more likely to care for others, to display empathy for those in distress and to act to alleviate their suffering. It’s why people are willing to donate their money, their time and even their blood to help those in need.

More here.

Emily Zarevich in JSTOR Daily:

According to poetry scholar John Timberman Newcomb, Millay is “among the most widely-known and read of all American literary figures,” representative of the subversive Modernist literary movement following World War I (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career was also gaining steam around the same time). Millay’s life, a glamorous succession of popular publications and love affairs, has been the subject of much speculation by biographers and journalists, and she secured her place in history by winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. But what many don’t know is that Millay’s first great “success” was actually a colossal failure. Imagine that your literary debut cheated you out of $500. That’s exactly what happened to Millay.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The founders of statistical mechanics in the 19th century faced an uphill battle to convince their fellow physicists that the laws of thermodynamics could be derived from the random motions of microscopic atoms. This insight turns out to be even more important than they realized: the emergence of patterns characterizing our macroscopic world relies crucially on the increase of entropy over time. Barry Loewer has (in collaboration with David Albert) been developing a theory of the Mentaculus — the probability map of the world — that connects microscopic physics to time, causation, and other familiar features of our experience.

More here.

Chris Blattman in the Boston Review:

Nothing destroys progress like conflict. Fighting massacres soldiers, ravages civilians, starves cities, plunders stores, disrupts trade, demolishes industry, and bankrupts governments. It undermines economic growth in indirect ways too. Most people and business won’t do the basic activities that lead to development when they expect bombings, ethnic cleansing, or arbitrary justice; they won’t specialize in tasks, trade, invest their wealth, or develop new ideas. These costs of war incentivize rivals to steer clear from prolonged and intense violence.

Of course, it seldom feels like peace is our natural state. “The story of the human race is war,” said Winston Churchill, “except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world.” Certainly it often seems so, especially today as a major conflict rages in Ukraine and the number of civil wars in the world climbs to levels not seen since the 1990s.

But that sentiment is misleading and comes from ignoring the quieter moments of compromise.

More here.

Autumn Notes – Montana

I know a thousand shades of green –
Here I learn a thousand browns

Wind feels out the shape of my face
like a blind man making a new friend

Wind blows brown dust up along
a dry road, turns and blows it back.

However high the sky
its shadow in the pond’s as deep

The leaves on the dry trees
rattle like the ghosts of gourds

Far off throaty rusty sound
Birds, yes, but no longer birdsong

Gray-brown road between
gray-green hills

Wind rocking thoughtfully
on the porch swing

Winter now. While I put on my
heavy coat, the trees strip bare.

5 o’clock where does the mountain
snow end and clouds begin?

by Nils Peterson
and here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HICqQwQZPyo&ab_channel=InOurTime

Jesse Russell at The Hedgehog Review:

Relationships between ancient humans and birds had a deeply religious element. Birkhead locates the “ground zero” of an early human civilization built around animal worship in ancient Egypt. Within the catacombs at Tuna el-Gebel in Egypt, there are four million mummified birds contained in jars and coffins. In addition to mummifying ibises, ancient Egyptians preserved a variety of creatures in cemeteries throughout the Nile Valley. Birds, however, are among the most prominent animals. Clearly, the lovingly embalmed birds were considered sacred; and ancient Egypt was a civilization in which humans and birds lived in harmony.

But such religious understandings of birds could cut both ways—not just care and preservation, but also blood sacrifice. Ancient Egyptians believed that the gods demanded appeasement in order to regulate, among other things, the fertility of the Nile river. Figures such as Ramses II (1187-1157BC) would offer sacrifices of up to 20,000 birds per year. Animal gods populated the Late Period of Egyptian history (672-332BC). The ancient Egyptians ate birds and used them for sport.

more here.

Nilo Tabrizy at The Paris Review:

Protests enter their second week. I’m waiting on the street for the taxi to arrive when I see an old religious man coming towards me. At first, I’m afraid he wants to mention I’m not wearing a hijab. All of a sudden, he brings his phone in front of me and shows me Mahsa Amini’s photo, saying, “Can you believe it, ma’am? They killed someone’s daughter. I myself have a daughter. I swear to God, I haven’t slept for a week.”

They say this is the women’s revolution. Maryam, who is on the street every day and has been attacked by so much tear gas that her eyes are swollen, says, No matter what, let’s see each other at Café Haft. We hear that Abbas is missing. Two days later, we find out that he has been arrested. They have arrested Roghiyeh’s and Maryam’s friends too. I have no way of communicating with the world outside of Iran. The internet is down and no VPN is working.

more here.

Hannah Thomasy in The New York Times:

Ned and Sunny stretch out together on the warm sand. He rests his head on her back, and every so often he might give her an affectionate nudge with his nose. The pair is quiet and, like many long-term couples, they seem perfectly content just to be in each other’s presence.

The couple are monogamous, which is quite rare in the animal kingdom. But Sunny and Ned are a bit scalier that your typical lifelong mates — they are shingleback lizards that live at Melbourne Museum in Australia. In the wild, shinglebacks regularly form long-term bonds, returning to the same partner during mating season year after year. One lizard couple in a long-term study had been pairing up for 27 years and were still going strong when the study ended. In this way, the reptiles are more like some of the animal kingdom’s most famous long-term couplers, such as albatrosses, prairie voles and owl monkeys, and they confound expectations many people have about the personalities of lizards. “There’s more socially going on with reptiles than we give them credit for,” said Sean Doody, a conservation biologist at the University of South Florida.

More here.

Jess Cotton in Jacobin:

Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last Thursday, was not on the other end of the telephone when the committee rang to deliver the news. Last year, she received a prank text telling her she had won the illustrious award, which might be one reason why her first response when the committee did get through to her was incredulous: “Are you sure?”

Unlike Philip Roth who sat on tenterhooks waiting for a call that never came, Ernaux, at eighty-two, was never too fussed about prizes. Certainly she didn’t wait in expectation of them. When she didn’t win the Man Booker International in 2019, she went to see the Dorothea Tanning show at the Tate Modern instead, had lunch with the view of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and drank in a pub frequented by Amy Winehouse. She preferred her own company to the heavy, uncharming world of prize culture. On receipt of the Nobel, Ernaux, however, recognized the responsibility that came with it: to continue fighting “everything that is a form of injustice against women.”

More here.

Benj Edwards in Ars Technica:

Matrix multiplication, which involves multiplying two rectangular arrays of numbers, is often found at the heart of speech recognition, image recognition, smartphone image processing, compression, and generating computer graphics. Graphics processing units (GPUs) are particularly good at performing matrix multiplication due to their massively parallel nature. They can dice a big matrix math problem into many pieces and attack parts of it simultaneously with a special algorithm.

In 1969, a German mathematician named Volker Strassen discovered the previous-best algorithm for multiplying 4×4 matrices, which reduces the number of steps necessary to perform a matrix calculation. For example, multiplying two 4×4 matrices together using a traditional schoolroom method would take 64 multiplications, while Strassen’s algorithm can perform the same feat in 49 multiplications.

Using a neural network called AlphaTensor, DeepMind discovered a way to reduce that count to 47 multiplications, and its researchers published a paper about the achievement in Nature last week.

More here.

Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian in the Boston Review:

David Barsamian: The situation in Ukraine is dire. If Putin is trapped in a corner, he may make a desperate move to use nuclear weapons, or one of the six Ukrainian nuclear reactors could be bombed (deliberately or by accident). The fate of the planet is in the hands of Putin, Zelensky, Biden. Frankly, I’m very worried. What can people do in this scenario?

Noam Chomsky: Same as always. It’s a dangerous scenario. We can work to try to influence what’s within our range of influence. The United States happens to be diverging right now, pretty sharply, from most of the world with regard to this crucial issue, and we can work to try to change that policy. That’s hard but not impossible. Most of the world overwhelmingly wants to move directly to negotiations to try to end the horrors in Ukraine before they get even worse. It’s true of the Global South, India, Indonesia, China, Africa, overwhelmingly. In Germany, according to a poll at the end of August, over three-quarters of the population want to move to negotiations right away. So that’s one point of view.

The United States and Britain are standing out. Their position is that the war must continue in order to severely weaken Russia, and that means no negotiations, of course.

More here.

Robert Bryce in Quillette:

Last year, according to data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, in both the US, and the world as a whole, the growth in hydrocarbons—oil, natural gas, and coal—far exceeded the growth of wind and solar by huge margins.

Renewable energy’s inability to displace hydrocarbons isn’t due to a lack of money. According to Statista, between 2004 and 2019, spending on renewables in the US was some $577 billion. Meanwhile, over that same time frame, the rest of the world spent another $1.5 trillion on renewables. But the BP numbers show that despite all that spending, wind and solar are not making a significant dent in our insatiable thirst for oil, gas, and coal. The reasons for that are many, including the gargantuan scale of global energy use, and the limits on the availability of neodymium, steel, aluminum, copper, and myriad other commodities that will be needed by the gigaton to make any large-scale move away from hydrocarbons.

More here.

Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times:

For nearly 150 years, a cloud has hung over the reputation of Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of “The Canterbury Tales,” long seen as the founder of the English literary canon.

A court document discovered in 1873 suggested that around 1380, Chaucer had been charged with raping Cecily Chaumpaigne, the daughter of a London baker. In the document, Chaumpaigne released Chaucer from “all manner of actions related to my raptus”— a word commonly translated as rape or abduction. In recent decades, the suggestion that Chaucer had been accused of rape helped inspire a rich vein of feminist criticism looking at sex, power and consent in stories like “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” which contain depictions of sexual assault (or what to modern readers appears like it). But this week, two scholars stunned the world of Chaucer studies with previously unknown documents that they say show that the “raptus” document was not in fact related to an accusation of rape against Chaucer at all.

More here.

Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Guardian:

In the spring of 2017, I was overwhelmed by the most profound wave of depression that I have ever experienced. I use the word “wave” deliberately: when it finally burst on me, having crept up slowly for months, I felt as if I were drowning in a tide of sadness I could not swim past or through. Superficially, my life seemed perfectly in control – but inside, I felt drenched in grief. There were days when getting out of bed, or even retrieving the newspaper outside the door, seemed unfathomably difficult. Simple moments of pleasure – my child’s funny drawing of a weeping shark (“Do the tears go up like bubbles, or just mingle into the saltwater?”) – seemed locked away in boxes, with all their keys thrown into the depths of the ocean.

Why? I could not tell. Part of it, perhaps, was coming to terms with my father’s death a year before. In the wake of his passing, I had thrown myself manically back to work, neglecting to give myself time and space to grieve. Some of it was confronting the inevitability of ageing. I was at the edge of the last years of my 40s, staring into what seemed like an abyss. My knees hurt and creaked when I ran. An abdominal hernia appeared out of nowhere. The poems I could recite from memory? I would now have to search my brain for words that had gone missing (“I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – / The Stillness in the Room / Was like” … um … like what?). I was becoming fragmented. It wasn’t my skin that had begun to sag, but my brain. I heard a fly buzz.

Things got worse. I dealt with it by ignoring it, until it had crested fully. I was like the proverbial frog in the pot that doesn’t sense the incremental rise in temperature until the water starts boiling. I started antidepressants (which helped, but only moderately) and began to see a psychiatrist (which helped much more). But the sudden wave of the disorder, and its recalcitrance, mystified me. I was lost. All I could feel was the “dank joylessness” the writer William Styron describes in Darkness Visible.

More here.

I Have Walked Along Many Roads

… I have walked along many roads,
and opened paths through brush,
I have sailed over a hundred seas
and tied up on a hundred shores.

… Everywhere  I’ve gone I’ve seen
excursions of sadness,
angry and melancholy
drunkards with black shadows,

… and academics in offstage clothes
who watch, say nothing, and think
they know, because they do not drink wine
in ordinary bars.

… Evil men who walk around
polluting the earth . . .

… And everywhere I’ve been I’ve seen
men who dance and play,
when they can, and work
the few inches of ground they have.

… If they turn up somewhere,
they never ask where they are.
When they take trips, they ride
on the back of old mules.

… They don’t know how to hurry,
not even on holidays.
They drink wine, if there is some,
if not, cool water.

… These men are the good ones,
who love, work, walk and dream.
And on a day no different than the rest
they lie down beneath the earth.

by Antonio Machado
from Times Alone
Wesleyan University Press, 1983
translated by Robert Bly