John Keefe and Curt Merrill at CNN:

In June, an unprecedented heat wave in the Pacific Northwest killed hundreds of people and shattered records in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Canada logged a new national record high when a town in British Columbia soared to 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Historic heat waves are so clearly caused by human-driven emissions that researchers can now easily link them to climate change. Scientists at World Weather Attribution concluded this summer’s Northwest heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without it.

More here.

Alia Ahmed at The Hudson Review:

Rushdie’s opening essay, “Wonder Tales,” takes us back to first things: the ancient mythology, both Eastern and Western, that would provide a blueprint for the literature that followed, and the subsequent “wonder tales” that captured his childhood imagination. Treasured among his memories are trips to the university library of Aligarh, riding behind his grandfather on a bicycle (fictionalized as Dr. Aziz in Midnight’s Children, in those pages biking instead in Agra). Yet these were not moralizing gods. Zeus and the gang behaved as badly as their human subjects, as did their Hindu counterparts. But while the Western gods of Olympus and their stories are today relegated to the sidelines of daily life, no longer occupying center stage, the pantheon of Hindu deities are alive and well in India. When, in 2012, Jyoti Singh died of horrific wounds after being raped and thrown off a moving bus in New Delhi, sparking outrage worldwide, an Indian state minister said that she had crossed the Lakshman rekha line—the magical line in the epic poem Ramayana that the god Ram draws around his lover Sita to keep her safe while he is away.

more here.

Kyle Beachy at The Paris Review:

For a fairly simple activity, skateboarding’s internal code of competition is more nuanced and complex and fluid than any single contest could possibly model. Because the Illusion is a burner from Malibu, he speaks of this nuance in terms of the cosmos. This cosmic side has led to some ironies over the years, like a photo I keep pinned to my bulletin board of a Nike 6.0 hoodie that says “Jocks Suck” across the chest. It is usually pretty clear who to call the best skater at any given session, or among a group of friends. But what looks like victory among pack dogs and, I suppose, salespeople and law students and most other worlds premised on rankings, is among skaters almost wholly irrelevant.

Oh, children will think differently about this.

more here.

Andrew Anthony in The Guardian:

The Australian historian and Regius professor of history at Cambridge, Christopher Clark, is best known for his commanding study of the origins of the first world war, Sleepwalkers. The historian Thomas Laqueur admiringly observed that it was not only the best book on the subject, “but a brilliant and intellectually bracing model for the writing of history”.

In this new collection of essays, Prisoners of Time, Clark displays that brilliance and bracing intellect to exhilarating effect. He is not only a learned historian but an engaging historiographer, able to combine a far-reaching grasp of research with a critical understanding of how history is created. The long opening essay, entitled The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar, is a bravura exploration of the role of political power in history. It begins with the Book of Daniel and the king of the neo-Babylonian empire’s disturbing dream, which the imprisoned Daniel interprets as a prophecy, thus rendering the grateful king his worshipful servant.

The story is both a fable of power and, as Clark explains, the beginning of the understanding of history as a foreordained “sequence of hegemonies”. Until the modern era, that was the conventional means of delineating the march of time, a tendency that was only slightly amended by Hegel’s notion of historical progress. Even today, having emerged from what Henry Luce called the “American century”, there is much talk of China’s assumption of the mantle of world power. “The habit of imagining history as a succession of empires has been hard to shake.” And it’s a habit that in its era-defining clarity promotes a picture of the struggle for power that obscures its complex nature. As Clark notes: “Power is at once the most ubiquitous and most elusive theme of historical writing.”

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

The disembodied brain in a vat is an amusing trope of science fiction. Without a vat, the brain needs a body to generate the nutrients to maintain itself and to furnish information about its environment. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell and proprioception help us to navigate, and find food or reproductive partners. Science fiction assumes that, with those basic needs taken care of by the vat, the brain can devote its full energies to developing genius intelligence.

Not so, argues science writer Annie Murphy Paul. Her book The Extended Mind lays out arguments that the body — and the world more generally — is part of being smart. The human brain is a structure with serious limits: in memory, in attention, in handling abstract concepts. But it can extend its thinking apparatus beyond its skull-bound membranes. Given that the modern world is ever more centred on non-intuitive ideas and abstractions, we need all the help that mind extension can offer. Society fails to recognize this, is Paul’s claim.

More here.

Sacha Golob in Psyche:

A few years before he died in exile from Nazism, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil delivered a lecture in Vienna, ‘On Stupidity’ (1937). At its heart was the idea that stupidity was not mere ‘dumbness’, not a brute lack of processing power. Dumbness, for Musil, was ‘straightforward’, indeed almost ‘honourable’. Stupidity was something very different and much more dangerous: dangerous precisely because some of the smartest people, the least dumb, were often the most stupid.

Musil’s lecture bequeaths us an important set of questions. What exactly is stupidity? How does it relate to morality: can you be morally good and stupid, for example? How does it relate to vice: is stupidity a kind of prejudice, perhaps? And why is it so domain-specific: why are people often stupid in one area and insightful in another? Musil’s own answer, which centred around pretentiousness, is too focused on the dilettantism of interwar Vienna to serve us now. But his questions, and his intuition about stupidity’s danger, are as relevant as ever.

More here.

Philip Ball in Physics World:

Like many science writers, I have often adopted the conceit that quantum mechanics and general relativity are our two principal (if incompatible) theories of the physical world. With his superb new book Einstein’s Fridge: the Science of Fire, Ice and the Universe, documentary filmmaker Paul Sen has made me doubt that this is the right way to express it. Those two theories might be better positioned as the terms of engagement with the universe: relativity describing the backdrop of space–time, and quantum theory giving a fine-grained account of the stuff within it. But to explain what we actually see happening amid all the teeming particles, we are better served by the subject of Sen’s book: thermodynamics, in all its guises.

Einstein’s Fridge offers an accessible and crystal-clear portrait of this discipline’s breadth, largely told through its history. Beginning as an attempt to understand and improve the machinery of the Industrial Revolution, thermodynamics soon provided the most profound of what physicists today call no-go theorems – statements about what is physically impossible – in the form of the first two laws of thermodynamics. First, energy is conserved in the universe; second, in all that comes to pass, some energy is unavoidably dissipated into a form that cannot be used to do work. From those ingredients, 19th-century scientists realized that we can make deductions about the beginning of the universe (it must have had an unlikely, low-entropy configuration) and its end (in a “heat death” of useless energetic uniformity).

Thermodynamics tells us everything from the prosaic (why ice cream melts), to the global (what powers the engine of the world’s climate system) and even the cosmic (why the Big Bang has left a pervasive microwave background hum).

More here.

Emily Conover in Science News:

At every moment, subatomic particles stream in unfathomable numbers through your body. Each second, about 100 billion neutrinos from the sun pass through your thumbnail, and you’re bathed in a rain of muons, birthed in Earth’s atmosphere. Even humble bananas emit positrons, the electron’s antimatter counterpart. A whole universe of particles exists, and we are mostly oblivious, largely because these particles are invisible.

When I first learned, as a teenager, that this untold world of particles existed, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And when I thought about it, I could barely breathe. I was, to steal a metaphor from writer David Foster Wallace, a fish who has only just noticed she’s swimming in water. The revelation that we’re stewing in a particle soup is why I went on to study physics, and eventually, to write about it.

To truly fathom matter at its most fundamental level, people must be able to visualize this hidden world. That’s where particle detectors come in. They spot traces of the universe’s most minuscule constituents, making these intangible concepts real. What’s more, particle detectors reveal beauty: Particles leave behind graceful spirals of bubbles, flashes of light and crisp lines of sparks.

More here.

Robert S. Levine in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Once a specialized school of thought developed in law schools, critical race theory (CRT) has become a favorite wedge issue for the Republican Party. During the final months of his presidency, Trump warned that CRT was infiltrating American schools and ordered a halt to what he claimed was CRT-inspired diversity training in federal agencies. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, regularly refers to CRT as a Marxist plot to undermine the nation, and Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the conservative Discovery Institute, terms it “a grave threat to the American way of life.”

In a recent Washington Post piece, Christine Emba attempts to explain why conservatives find CRT so threatening: they become anxious when they believe white people are under attack, and their anxiety is exacerbated by the fact that they view CRT as standing in “for anything that reexamines the United States’ racial history.” In Idaho, one state legislator, in the service of promoting anti-CRT legislation, cited To Kill a Mockingbird to call for banning Critical Race Theory from public schools because the book supposedly makes white people look bad.

Frederick Douglass could just as easily be banned from school systems in states adopting anti-CRT legislation, for this is a man who from the beginning of his career in the late 1830s to his death in 1895 viscerally and intellectually understood the centrality of slavery and race to American history and culture.

More here.

From The Cancer Letter:

These are a few of the authors your colleagues are reading in 2021.

A diverse panel of clinicians, basic scientists, early-career faculty, and regulators submitted their book recommendations to The Cancer Letter for the second year in a row. Non-fiction and fiction are equally represented, ranging from opera to Obama, Proust to fly fishing. This year’s reading list genres have expanded to include a poetry anthology, a children’s book, a podcast—and  Wafik El-Deiry’s in-depth review of seven books, which appears here.

Last year’s book recommendations told a story of a year filled with activism, grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, and using fiction as an escape, perhaps in place of a much-needed vacation (The Cancer Letter, Aug. 6, 2020). The list seemed to want to answer the question: “What the hell is going on?” This year’s list demonstrates an evolution of thought: stories of personal and professional growth, the challenge of becoming a better leader, and deeper explorations of systemic racism in the U.S. All that, plus a passion for a good book—and fly fishing. If the question last year was “What the hell is going on,” this year’s question appears to be, “How can we be better?

More here.

Copernicus

You are always in the middle of the poem
even at the end.
More and more you are tied by ropes,
foliage, and as you move
the bindings grow around your knees, your feet.
Again and again you pass
your own footprints on the grass, on floors,
once more you have tracked mud into the house.
Have tracked a house into the mud. Outside the poem
are sirens, fires, ocean hitting
pier. Say to yourself: does not cohere
but is subsumed
and must not, must not. Outside the poem
a little vein clicks in the forehead of a financier,
a cue called, an oboe,
truncheons, pigeons, rain
mineralizes a colonnade.
A chorale stands up, taller than a building,
false in sense, numerically true.
You despise these techniques.
You have not got to the truth yet.
A truck downshifts on the freeway,
a shift whistle blows,
someone else’s emergency makes the poem hold.
At night, like notes pushed under doors,
sounds come in—
flypaper in an open window,
your mother rubbing lotion on her hands.
All this is with you, is you,
runs after you into the dark
like those men after Copernicus,
like a planet chased by telescopes into space.

by Timmy Straw
from Academy of American Poets, 8/5/21
Copyright © 2021

Shaan Sachdev over at the LA Review of Books:

A FEW YEARS AGO, I trekked, biked, and rode trains and buses through Weimar, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Todtnauberg, Basel, and, finally, Sils Maria. I was in Germany and Switzerland, with a servile sort of eros, to gape and touch and stroll through the universities and apartments at which some of our grandest modern philosophers had once lived: Goethe, Hegel, Husserl, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Arendt. Locals and students expressed little surprise when they learned I was poking around the Hegel Haus or peeking inside classrooms at Freiburg where Edmund Husserl taught phenomenology. The manager of a prim restaurant inside Todtnauberg’s nicest hotel excitedly interrupted my dinner of white fish and potatoes to show me the photographs on his office walls of his father together with Martin Heidegger; then he poured me a few glasses of Spätburgunder on the house.

Curiously, the only name of the lot that elicited more confusion than ratification — also the only woman and the only one to have persistently rebuffed the ascription of “philosopher” — was Hannah Arendt. There was less consensus about her legacy and allure. “Why her?” asked a young woman at the University of Freiburg who had spiritedly agreed to sneak me into Kollegiengebäude I, which hosted the philology, theology, and philosophy departments. “Was she one of the greats?”

More here.

In a podcast over at the Financial Times:

Adam Tooze, economic historian and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, joins the FT’s Brendan Greeley and Brown University’s Mark Blyth to discuss how our politics got us to where we are today, why our ideas about how the economy works may not be fit for purpose, and the key role that China played during the Great Recession and continues to play today. They also discuss the central importance of global capital flows for understanding our world and why global liquidity may be much more fragile than we like to think.

Branko Milanovic over at his substack:

“When China Rules the World” (no question mark or conditional tense) by Martin Jacques is a large, somewhat repetitive, volume of 700 pages that tries to answer a number of questions that many people in the world are asking themselves: Will China’s growth continue? Will China become a multi-party democracy? And what might Pax Sinica look like?

On the first question, Jacques entertains no doubt: China will successfully move (actually, it is already moving; the edition of the book that I read was published In 2012) to high value-added and high tech production and growth will, for the foreseeable future, remain high.

On the second question, Jacques is more circumspect:  China might become a multi-party democracy but it is likely, if Communist Party manages to control the process, to look like a cross between Singapore, a de facto single-party state, and Japan where factional struggles within Liberal Party often matter more than inter-party politics.

He is scathing of the view, often heard in the West, that higher education levels and higher incomes will, quasi-automatically, lead to demands for democracy. (Although he allows that in twenty years “and likely more” Chinese Communist Party will no longer be ruling.) Jacques believes that China, because of Confucian tradition of “virtuous” government that puts the emphasis on quality of governance and not on the way the rulers are selected, is different. Perhaps he is right…or perhaps not : nobody can tell. Here Jacques’ book also illustrates the hazards of prediction.

More here.