Allison Hussey at Pitchfork:

Loretta Lynn never called herself a feminist but, as women tend to do, she got it done anyway. Through her sharp, insightful songs, Lynn transformed country music into a place where people like her could speak plainly and for themselves. Across a music career that spanned more than six decades, she cut a new lane for women making their own way without apologizing for it.

Lynn’s most enduring songs are frank and ferocious, where she excoriates double standards and sexist assumptions with a smile. Many years before the Chicks were making conservatives clutch their pearls, Lynn was locking horns with country radio stations that refused to play “The Pill,” her 1975 ode to birth control that offered a woman’s view on reproductive freedom. When Lynn sang about scrapping in her rowdy 1968 hit “Fist City,” she sounded like she could absolutely beat your ass and wouldn’t even think twice about it. She wore a broad grin as she sang about cheaters, sluts, and the banalities of domesticity, demonstrating how women were in fact tough as nails.

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Adam Kirsch at The Nation:

By the 1950s, when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish fiction was beginning to win acclaim in English translation, the future of the Yiddish language looked bleak. Its homeland in Eastern Europe had been destroyed in the Holocaust, and the largest remaining Jewish populations were now being raised to speak different languages: English in the United States, Russian in the Soviet Union, and Hebrew in Israel. The readers Singer had addressed for decades in The Forward, New York’s leading Yiddish daily paper, represented a significant share of the world’s surviving Yiddish speakers. Few of them were younger than him, and their numbers were shrinking.

Singer and his Yiddish readers shared the uncanny experience of being the last bearers of a disappearing culture. For Jewish and non-Jewish readers who encountered him in translation, however, those common religious, political, and personal reference points were obscured. To that larger public, Singer appeared not as a participant in a broader Yiddish culture but as a synecdoche for Yiddish as such, perhaps even a medium with the power to resurrect it.

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Andrea Brady in Berfrois:

“Remember / you can have what you ask for, ask for / everything.” In these, probably the most famous lines from Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima echoes Frank O’Hara’s assertion in his “Ode to Joy” that “We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying.” Like her friend Frank, di Prima is writing about joy, “which will remake the world.”

Di Prima’s poetry channels her grandfather’s anarchist speeches of the 1930s, which emphasised love and solidarity as the weapons of working-class people against fascism. Domenico Mallozzi was an Italian immigrant, tailor and trade unionist, who would bring home “entire squalling families of would-be union organizers,” and Antoinette, di Prima’s grandmother, would entertain them “with her welcoming frugal abundance.”

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Daniel Kriegman in Quillette:

Altruistic behavior toward one’s offspring or other kin is not terribly puzzling since they are genetically related. More puzzling was the development of altruistic behavior toward unrelated others, which does appear to be antithetical to the basic, self-serving fitness interest that underlies evolutionary theory. However, Robert Trivers, in what quickly came to be considered a classic paper, developed the concept of “reciprocal altruism” which sought to explain the adaptive advantage of altruistic behavior toward unrelated others. He was even able to explain altruistic acts between members of different species which, of course, is an extreme example of a lack of genetic relatedness.

Trivers’s concept of reciprocal altruism is based on the notion that an altruistic act can at some point be returned.

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Sophia Goodfriend in the Boston Review:

These days automated systems have replaced secret agents. The protagonists of state-sanctioned surveillance are cybersecurity experts hacking into smart phones’ operating systems from a suburban office park, Microsoft engineers refining a biometric camera’s algorithm from their home office, and plain-clothes soldiers parsing through geolocation data for someone else to carry out a drone strike. Most of the people involved are not called agents or spies. They are product managers, engineers, data analysts, or “intelligence researchers.” Often their work feels so ordinary they might forget they are in the business of espionage. Sometimes they might not even realize it to begin with.

Two recent books—Brian Hochman’s The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States and Roberto González’s War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future—join a cascade of new titles on the genealogy, impact, and future of contemporary surveillance regimes.

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A Reporter from New York Asks Edith Mae Chapman,
Age Nine, What Her daddy Tells her about the Strike

We ain’t to go in the company store, mooning
over peppermint sticks, shaming ourselves like a dog
begging under the table. They cut off our account
but we ain’t no-account. We ain’t to go to school
so’s the company teacher can tell us we are.
The ain’t going to meeting and bow our heads
for the company preacher, who claims it is the meek
will inherit the coal fields, instead of telling
how the mountains will crumble and rocks
rain down like fire upon the heads
of the operators, like it says in the Bible.
We ain’t to talk to no dirtscum scabs
and we ain’t to talk to God. My daddy
is very upset with the Lord.

by Diane Gilliam
from Kettle Bottom
Perguia Press, 2004

Editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine:

For more than two decades, colonoscopy has been recommended as one of several available options for colorectal cancer screening, and it has been the predominant form of screening for colorectal cancer used in the United States. However, the best evidence to support its use has been limited to data from cohort studies, which have estimated that this type of screening has been associated with a 40 to 69% decrease in the incidence of colorectal cancer and a 29 to 88% decrease in the risk of death from this disease.¹ Unlike randomized, controlled trials, which have provided support for fecal occult blood testing and sigmoidoscopy,² cohort studies probably overestimate the real-world effectiveness of colonoscopy because of the inability to adjust for important factors such as incomplete adherence to testing and the tendency of healthier persons to seek preventive care.

This evidence gap is addressed by the landmark Nordic-European Initiative on Colorectal Cancer (NordICC) trial, the results of which are now reported in the Journal by Bretthauer et al.³ This pragmatic trial involved nearly 85,000 men and women who were randomly assigned either to receive an invitation to undergo screening colonoscopy or to receive usual care (i.e., no screening). In the intention-to-screen analysis, colonoscopy was found to reduce the risk of colorectal cancer over a period of 10 years by 18% (risk ratio, 0.82; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.70 to 0.93). However, the reduction in the risk of death from colorectal cancer was not significant (risk ratio, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.64 to 1.16).

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Tim Caro in Nature:

The breathtaking palette of colours seen in nature is the fuel that drives many of us to become biologists, and is the reason why some researchers try to understand the biological basis of animal and plant coloration¹. Normally, the drivers of such evolutionary processes can be bracketed into categories that result in colour for protection, signalling or physiological reasons². Writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Falk et al.³ propose an evolutionary driver with a new twist.

Variation in coloration occurs between species but also within them — leopards (Panthera pardus), for example, can have a black or mottled tawny coat, and the flowers of Iris lutescens can be purple or yellow. These colour differences are variations in form called polymorphisms. For some scientists, it is sufficient to know that such colour polymorphisms exist, but for others, the underlying genetics of such variation must be understood. Formally, a polymorphism is “the occurrence together in the same habitat of two or more distinct forms of a species in such proportions that the rarest of them cannot be maintained by recurrent mutation”⁴. In other words, for the rare forms to be present, a new mutation doesn’t have to occur each time.

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Martha Henriques at the BBC:

The issue is that Newton’s laws work about twice as well as we might expect them to. They describe the world we move through every day – the world of people, the hands that move around a clock and even the apocryphal fall of certain apples – but they also account perfectly well for a world in which people walk backwards, clocks tick back afternoon to morning, and fruit soars up from the ground to its tree-branch.

“The interesting feature of Newton’s laws, which wasn’t appreciated till much later, is that they don’t distinguish between the past and the future,” says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, who discusses the nature of time in his latest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. “But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don’t have any photographs of the future.”

The problem is not confined to the centuries-old theories of Newton. Virtually all of the cornerstone theories of physics since then have worked just as well going forward in time as they do backwards, says physicist Carlo Rovelli of the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, France, and the author of books including The Order of Time.

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Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar at the Yale School of the Environment:

Spring came early this year in the high mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, a remote border region of Pakistan. Record temperatures in March and April hastened melting of the Shisper Glacier, creating a lake that swelled and, on May 7, burst through an ice dam. A torrent of water and debris flooded the valley below, damaging fields and houses, wrecking two power plants, and washing away parts of the main highway and a bridge connecting Pakistan and China.

Pakistan’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, tweeted videos of the destruction and highlighted the vulnerability of a region with the largest number of glaciers outside the Earth’s poles. Why were these glaciers losing mass so quickly? Rehman put it succinctly. “High global temperatures,” she said.

Just over a decade ago, relatively little was known about glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, the vast ice mountains that run across Central and South Asia, from Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar in the east. But a step-up in research in the past 10 years — spurred in part by an embarrassing error in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, which predicted that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 — has led to enormous strides in understanding.

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Jacob Soll in Politico:

One of the most enduring ideas in economics is that free markets bring peace between countries. It comes from the notion that commerce drives humans to follow their mutual material interests rather than make destructive war due to passions.

This was the animating force behind the U.S. granting China its “most-favored-nation” trade status in 2000, which allows for free trade and economic cooperation. Republicans and Democrats alike assured the public that the deal would bring “constructive engagement” and expose communist China to America’s “ideals” of democracy. Where are we today? Beijing has moved closer to authoritarianism, economic competition is fiercer than ever, and American and Chinese diplomatic relations are near a crisis point, with both countries brandishing threats of war. Free trade has brought some peace, but it has not brought lasting friendship between the world’s two superpowers.

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Lucy Knight and Angelique Chrisafis in The Guardian:

The French thinker Bruno Latour, known for his influential research on the philosophy of science has died aged 75.

Latour was considered one of France’s most influential and iconoclastic living philosophers, whose work on how humanity perceives the climate emergency won praise and attention around the world.

He won the Holberg prize, known as the Nobel of the humanities, in 2013, hailed for a spirit that was “creative, imaginative, playful, humorous and – unpredictable”.

Emmanuel Macron tweeted that as a thinker on ecology, modernity or religion, Latour was a humanist spirit who was recognised around the world before being recognised in France. The French president said Latour’s thoughts and writing would continue to inspire new connections to the world.

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Quitting Time

The hosed-down chamfered concrete pleases him.
He’ll wait a while before he kills the light
on the cleaned up yard, its pails and farrowing crate,
And the cast-iron pump immobile as a herm
Upstanding elsewhere, in another time.
More and more this last look at the wet
Shine of the place is what means most to him —
And to repeat the phrase “My head is light,”
Because it often is as he reaches back
And switches off, a home-based man at home
In the end with little. Except this same
Night after nightness, redding up the work,
The song of the tubular steel gate in the dark
As he pulls it and starts his uphill trek.

by Seamus Heaney
from District and Circle
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

Helena de Bres in LARB:

HAVE YOU NOTICED lately that everything is shit? Things were very shitty the year before last, they became even shittier last year, and now everything is just indescribably shit. As a species, we’ve been stuck with this aspect of the human condition for around 300,000 years. But the question of how to respond to it intellectually and emotionally arises with fresh urgency in each new generation. And in the face of each fresh piece of shit. Traditionally, one role of philosophy has been to aid us in this task. Friar Lawrence advises Romeo, banished from his city and the arms of his girl, to sip “Adversity’s sweet milke, Philosophie.” However, over the past couple of centuries, with the transformation of philosophy into an academic discipline, its connection with self-help has largely been severed. The aim of Kieran Setiya’s new book Life Is Hard is to recapture philosophy’s ancient mission of “helping us find our way” in the face of life’s afflictions.

One storied philosophical response to our situation is to claim that, when you really think about it, Nothing Is Shit. The 17th-century poster child for this view was Gottfried Leibniz, who argued that everything that’s apparently terrible and senseless is in fact a necessary, even beautiful part of God’s benevolent scheme. Today we’re more likely to find the suggestion on Instagram, in a sunset-saturated image exhorting us to exude “GOOD VIBES ONLY” or “MANIFEST JOY.” I don’t know about you, but the bare reading of these phrases makes me bust out bad vibes like octopus ink, and Setiya is a kindred spirit here. It’s pretty clear that the universe contains significant pointless suffering, and we do ourselves no favors in denying the fact. “What we need in our affliction,” Setiya writes, isn’t self-deception or distraction but “acknowledgment.” Engage that core and lean in.

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Robin Wright in The New Yorker:

The girls and women of Iran are just bitchin’ brave, flipping the bird at its Supreme Leader in a challenge to one of the most significant revolutions in modern history. Day after dangerous day, on open streets and in gated schools, in a flood of tweets and brazen videos, they have ridiculed a theocracy that deems itself the government of God. The average age of the protesters who have been arrested is just fifteen, the Revolutionary Guard’s deputy commander claimed last week. In the process, they have captured the world’s imagination; sympathy rallies have been held from London to Los Angeles, Sydney to Seoul, and Tokyo to Tunis.

Iran’s protests may well be the first time in history that women have been both the spark and engine for an attempted counter-revolution. “The role played by Iranian women right now seems very unprecedented,” Daniel Edelstein, a political scientist at Stanford and an expert on revolutions, told me. One of the few possible parallels was the role of Parisian female poissonières, or market workers, who stormed Versailles to prevent the king from turning against the National Assembly and crushing the nascent French Revolution, he said. In that case, however, “the women were seeking to prevent counter-revolution, not contributing to it.” During the Russian Revolution, bread riots led by women in Petrograd played a pivotal role in the tsarist empire’s collapse, Anne O’Donnell, a Russia historian at New York University, told me. But Iran’s protests have been unique because, she said, “this is not just an upheaval involving women, it is an upheaval about women and women’s freedom, and that makes it very special.”

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