Sadie Stein at The Paris Review:

One Monday evening some five years ago, I walked into my first Spiritualist service. In those days, the New York Spiritualist Church held services roughly once a month in a broad-minded white-marble Methodist structure designed to hold some thousand parishioners. But the Spiritualists only filled the first few rows. It was dim, churchy-smelling, and vast.

I’d thought about what to wear. It was, after all, a church; it was also seven in the evening in late November. In the end, I changed out of my jeans and wore a high-necked Laura Ashley dress and a tweed jacket and my least ironic glasses. My hair was severely curtailed into a topknot. I suppose, as in many such moments, I was trying to control the one thing I could. As it turned out, I could have worn anything. There were people in jeans, there were people in gowns, there was a Guardian Angel beret—or maybe it was just a red hat.

more here.

Gabriel Popkin in The New York Times:

Justine Karst, a mycologist at the University of Alberta, feared things had gone too far when her son got home from eighth grade and told her he had learned that trees could talk to each other through underground networks. Her colleague, Jason Hoeksema of the University of Mississippi, had a similar feeling when watching an episode of “Ted Lasso” in which one soccer coach told another that trees in a forest cooperated rather than competed for resources.

Few recent scientific discoveries have captured the public’s imagination quite like the wood-wide web — a wispy network of fungal filaments hypothesized to shuttle nutrients and information through the soil and to help forests thrive. The idea sprouted in the late 1990s from studies showing that sugars and nutrients can flow underground between trees. In a few forests, researchers have traced fungi from the roots of one tree to those of others, suggesting that mycelial threads could be providing conduits between trees. These findings have challenged the conventional view of forests as a mere population of trees: Trees and fungi are, in fact, coequal players on the ecological stage, scientists say. Without both, forests as we know them wouldn’t exist.

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John-Baptiste Oduor in The Nation:

The philosopher Stanley Cavell, who was the author of some 19 books, passed away in 2018. Fifteen years earlier, he had turned his attention to his death in Little Did I Know, a memoir occasioned by the discovery of his own declining health. There, as in much of his work, he was comfortable writing in the retrospective mode, reflecting again and again on his most famous collection of essays, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), and the arguments, ideas, and distinctive style he developed there. The latter would be described by his critics as self-indulgent and by his defenders as profound. The reality was somewhere between these judgments, although often closer to the former than the latter.

Like his mother, Fannie Goldstein, Cavell began and then abandoned a career in music. Although she gave up music to work occasionally in her husband Irving’s pawnshop in Atlanta, Cavell would leave the arts for philosophy and at 16 would change his name to an anglicized version of Kavelieruskii, the name his father had exchanged for Goldstein on arriving in America from Poland.

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Luana Maroja at Common Sense:

As an evolutionary biologist, I am quite used to attempts to censor research and suppress knowledge. But for most of my career, that kind of behavior came from the right. In the old days, most students and administrators were actually on our side; we were aligned against creationists. Now, the threat comes mainly from the left.

The risk of cancellation at Williams College, where I have taught for 12 years, and at top colleges and universities throughout this country, is not theoretical. My fellow scientists and I are living it. What is at stake is not simply our reputations, but our ability to pursue truth and scientific knowledge.

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

It isn’t just pundits and commentators who are annoyed with the state of macro; economists in other fields often join in the criticism. For example, here’s Dan Hamermesh in 2011:

The economics profession is not in disrepute. Macroeconomics is in disrepute. The micro stuff that people like myself and most of us do has contributed tremendously and continues to contribute. Our thoughts have had enormous influence. It just happens that macroeconomics, firstly, has been done terribly and, secondly, in terms of academic macroeconomics, these guys are absolutely useless, most of them. Ask your brother-in-law. I’m sure he thinks, as do 90% of us, that most of what the macro guys do in academia is just worthless rubbish.

This is much harsher than I would put it, but it hints at some of the vicious internal battles being waged in the ivory tower. And even top macroeconomists are often quite upset at their field — see Paul Romer’s (extremely nerdy) 2015 broadside, “Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth”.

More here.

Animal Planet

“I am the master of this universe, my fun and frolic are the only things that matter, besides which there is no other truth
or mystery, inside this creation,”— Whenever the modern man thinks like this, he turns into a beetle. A stout, strong
black beetle of the Amazon basin. He roams the branches of the rubber trees with a snobbish swagger. He sits in a
coffee house of Rio de Janeiro, wearing spectacles and a grave expression on his face, indulging in intellectual
discourse about musk and Michel Foucault. In fact that coffee house is nothing but a tall branch of a huge rubber tree,
under which flows the river Amazon. And in the water of that river swims a ‘water-monkey’ fish. The fish has two very
long beards on its chin. Amid the dense rainforest, suddenly the water-monkey fish jumps from the water up to a height
of six feet in the air, neatly gobbles up the beetle in its mouth, and disappears under the waters of the river Amazon.

by Ranajit Das
from: A Summer Nightmare and Other Poems
translation: 2011, Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee
Rupa and Co, New Delhi, 2011

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

One of the last flashes of creativity I saw before I deactivated my Twitter account (more on that below, and on its significance for this Substack project), was a question launched by another user (whom I can’t locate now, without Twitter, but to whom I say “thanks”). “Are there,” this user asked, “more eyes or legs in the world?”

To be honest I’ve been thinking about little else for the past few weeks since I encountered this “prompt” (as American undergraduates now say, I’ve learned, of what I still call “paper topics”). Nor is this only the burrowing and obsessing of a curiosity that does not know when to quit. As I am about to show you, I think this question has profound implications for our understanding of certain fundamental matters at the heart of our ongoing debates about scientific realism. In particular, while I’m still on the fence about eyes, I don’t think legs, strictly speaking, exist, and I think the non-existence of legs offers an instructive illustration of the limits of the “manifest image” of the world. Moreover, I think this difference has vast consequences for our understanding of certain prejudices that run throughout the history of philosophy. For example, it becomes clear why René Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” sounds like a serious and laudable stab at explaining the nature of our existence, while Thomas Hobbes’s retort, “Why not: ‘I walk, therefore I am’?” sounds like facetious trouble-making.

In a Hobbesian spirit, then, let us make some trouble.

More here.

Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist:

Moving to daylight saving time permanently could prevent 36,550 deer deaths, 33 human deaths and $1.19 billion in costs annually in the US.

Calum Cunningham at the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues have analysed data from 23 US states that included details on more than a million collisions between deer and vehicles from 1994 to 2021. There are an estimated 2.1 million of these accidents in the US every year, killing about 440 people and causing upwards of $10 billion in damage.

The team found that the shift from daylight saving time to standard time in November, when the clocks go back an hour, leading to sunrise and sunset being experienced at an earlier time, led to a sudden increase in the amount of driving during darkness. Peak traffic volume also shifted from before sunset in October to during sunset in November. The records showed that collisions between deer and cars in the US rise by 16 per cent in the week following the autumn clock change.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

People have a complicated relationship to mathematics. We all use it in our everyday lives, from calculating a tip at a restaurant to estimating the probability of some future event. But many people find the subject intimidating, if not off-putting. John Allen Paulos has long been working to make mathematics more approachable and encourage people to become more numerate. We talk about how people think about math, what kinds of math they should know, and the role of stories and narrative to make math come alive.

More here.

Tom Cochrane in Aeon:

So can we find final value in the world? I believe that we can, so long as we are attuned to aesthetic value. Aesthetic value is a catch-all term that encompasses the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the dramatic, the comic, the cute, the kitsch, the uncanny, and many other related concepts. It is a well-worn cliché that the practical person scorns aesthetic value. But there’s reason to think that it is the only way in which we can draw final positive value from the entire world. Thus, to the extent that we care whether or not we live in a good world, we must be aesthetically sensitive.

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Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

BEING A TRUTH-TELLING journalist has always been a liability in Pakistan. If one manages to evade the bullying of this or that political party, there is the omniscient Pakistani military and its long shadow. The powerful in Pakistan believe that truth is something that can be molded; they expect journalists to do the molding to their liking. It follows, therefore, that independent investigative journalism is a dangerous, sometimes fatal, pursuit.

Arshad Sharif was a renegade journalist, and in the past several months he had been playing with fire while walking a tightrope. Since April of this year, when a no-confidence motion in Parliament led to the removal of then-prime minister Imran Khan, he had been digging to expose the truths behind this regime change. At issue was the allegation that Khan, a right-of-center populist leader, had been removed because of disagreements with General Qamar Javed Bajwa, the head of Pakistan’s bloated military. Sharif was chasing this story.

In the last video that he posted on YouTube, he remained committed to exposing how collusion between the Pakistani military and the opposition political parties had led to the no-confidence motion in Parliament. Khan’s government, the legitimately elected one, had thus been wrongly removed from power. This summer, the new government slapped Sharif with sedition charges, allegedly for criticizing state institutions and “abetting mutiny” within the military.

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Sarah Blackwood in The Paris Review:

“Undine Spragg—how can you?” her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid “bell-boy” had just brought in.

It strikes me as odd that the opening of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country, rarely appears on those “best first lines in literature” lists that go around every so often. The sentence has everything that makes the novel, and Wharton’s work in general, so great: vigor, voice, irony, detail. Through it, Wharton sketches a tense and dissonant world in which the colloquial and the bejeweled come into uncomfortable relation with each other. Dramatic and dynamic, this world nevertheless feels intensely claustrophobic. From the first five words of the novel, the reader is tied to a repetitive present tense that feels inescapable—no future, no past, just a boxed-in present (“how can you?” rather than the usual “how could you?”).

Each time we read the novel, it seems, the continuous present of the deliciously named Undine Spragg happens to us all over again. The Custom of the Country, many recent commentators have noted, feels uncannily up to the minute. Its heroine, the beautiful, social-climbing, rapacious, and empty-souled Undine Spragg, reminds us of a tabloid fixture or a reality television star; her currency as a figure who exemplifies the ideas about white womanhood in every era has remained constant. If the morality of divorce—the main “problem” in this 1913 “problem novel”—is perhaps no longer the most pressing social phenomenon to imaginatively explore, Undine’s grasping, financially speculative approach to personal identity and relationships still is.

More here.

The Fiddler

In a little Hungarian cafe
Men and women are drinking
Yellow wine in tall goblets.

Through the milky haze of the smoke,
The fiddler, under-sized, blond,
Leans to his violin
As to the breast of a woman.
Red hair kindles to fire
On the black of his coat-sleeve,
Where his white thin hand
Trembles and dives,
Like a sliver of moonlight,
When wind has broken the water.

by Lola Ridge
from Poetry.com

The Death of the Wounded Child

… In the night once more . . . It is the fever-
hammer in the bandaged temples
of the boy. “Mother! The yellow bird!
The butterflies are black and purple!”

… “Sleep, my son.” The mother by the bed
squeezes the tiny hand. “My burning flower,
my bloodflower, who freezes you? Tell me!”
There is an odor of lavender in the stark bedroom;

… outside the swollen moon is turning white
the cupola and the steeple of the darkened city.
An invisible aeroplane hums.

… “Are you asleep, sweet flower of my blood?”
The pane on the balcony window shivers.
“Oh cold, cold, cold, cold, cold.”

by Antonio Machado
from Times Alone
Wesleyan University Press, 1983

Original Spanish at: Read More

Read more »

Patrick Barkham at The Guardian:

The greatest living writer on the English countryside will celebrate his 100th birthday this week at his Suffolk farmhouse, surrounded by the friends he calls his “dear ones”. Ronald Blythe is best known for Akenfield, his moving and intimate portrait of a Suffolk village through the lives of its residents, which became an instant classic when published in 1969. But Blythe, who has spent all his 10 decades living within 50 miles of where he was born, has also devoted millions more words – in history, fiction, and luminous essays and columns – to describe with poetry and precision not simply rural folk but the very essence of existence.

His writing is honoured in a new volume, Next to Nature, a highlights package of nearly a quarter-century of weekly columns for the Church Times, written between 1993 and 2017. Fellow writers agree that Blythe’s work has improved with age.

more here.