Charles T. Rubin at The New Atlantis:

As the story is often told, even before the era of manned lunar exploration ended, policymakers and the public were losing interest. It was enough to have fulfilled the promise of President John F. Kennedy, and to have “beat the Russians.” President Richard Nixon may have paid lip service to bigger and bolder goals when he announced the space shuttle program, but he was also clear about the shuttle’s less-than-inspiring purpose — to “revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.” Perhaps we should better appreciate the wonders of the commercial world, but to make something routine is precisely to suck the wonder out of it, to make it uninteresting. And indeed, that is pretty much what happened.

It may seem odd that things should have turned out this way. For while many are the wonders of our technological powers, surely few are more wonderful than our ability to reach outer space, and to survive there for extended periods. And getting into space is just the beginning of the wonders.

more here.

Vikram Murthi at The Current:

The Feelies never quite belonged to the “blank generation,” a term coined by punk rocker Richard Hell that describes the midseventies New York punk scene. They certainly played alongside the likes of Television, the Patti Smith Group, the Shirts, and other CBGB and Max’s Kansas City mainstays, but they never quite gelled with that crowd. Their sound was more angular and percussive than the shambolic style of their peers. They were the jangly alternative to the alternative culture, exemplifying a vibrant sonic quality that strongly influenced early R.E.M. and almost every other band that critics would eventually label “college rock.” Perhaps the twin rhythm guitar and percussion sections contributed to their outsider status. Or maybe they never quite belonged because Glenn Mercer and Bill Million, the founding members, hail from suburban New Jersey.

more here.

Richard Hughes Gibson in The Hedgehog Review:

In his 1987 book Die Schrift, the Czech-born Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser posed the question of whether writing had a future (Hat Schreiben Zukunft? reads Flusser’s subtitle). As he surveyed the media landscape of the late twentieth century, Flusser observed that some aspects of writing (“this ordering of written signs into rows”) could already be “mechanized and automated” thanks to word processing, and he foresaw that artificial intelligence would “surely become more intelligent in the future” allowing the mechanization of writing to proceed further.

In fact, Flusser anticipated that AI would soon exhibit the hallmark cognitive traits of the mental world inaugurated by writing. Of that mental world, Flusser writes, “Only one who writes lines can think logically, calculate, criticize, pursue knowledge, philosophize.” Above all, Flusser credits writing with giving humans “historical consciousness,” which he defines as the ability to see and describe the world in terms of goal-oriented processes—as opposed to the unchanging cycles that marked prehistorical societies. AIs, in Flusser’s view, will soon “possess a historical consciousness far superior to ours,” allowing them to “make better, faster, and more varied history than we ever did,” with the result that we’ll leave the business of history-writing to them. Writing may indeed have a future, Flusser believed, but that future won’t be an entirely, or even primarily, human one.

More here.

David Nirenberg in The Nation:

Unlike his much more famous colleague Albert Einstein, John von Neumann is not a household name these days, but his discoveries shape the possibilities of life for every creature on this planet. As a teenager, von Neumann provided mathematics with new foundations. He later helped teach the world how to build and detonate nuclear bombs. His invention of game theory furnished the conceptual tools with which superpowers today decide whether to wage war, economists model the behavior of markets, and biologists predict the evolution of viruses. The pioneering programmable computer that von Neumann and his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., completed in 1951 established “von Neumann architecture” as the standard for computer design well into the 21st century, making first IBM and then many other corporations fabulously wealthy.

More here.

Editorial in Nature:

For warming to be limited to 1.5 °C, emissions need to fall by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030. According to the latest UNFCCC report, published in October, they are set to increase by more than 10%. There is still no coordinated plan to turn these figures around. With some 45,000 people registered to attend COP27 — a record — many are questioning whether a planetary emergency can be tackled in this way.

One undoubted step forwards, however, came with the historic agreement to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund. For the first time, countries that have suffered devastation as a result of climate change will be helped with the associated costs, such as those of rebuilding homes and businesses destroyed by floods. This represents a totally new kind of fund, going beyond existing (if imperfectly implemented) mechanisms for funding the costs of mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change.

More here.

Brandon Keim in The New York Times:

It’s easy to look at a forest and think it’s inevitable: that the trees came into being through a stately procession of seasons and seeds and soil, and will replenish themselves so long as environmental conditions allow. Hidden from sight are the creatures whose labor makes the forest possible — the multitudes of microorganisms and invertebrates involved in maintaining that soil, and the animals responsible for delivering seeds too heavy to be wind-borne to the places where they will sprout. If one is interested in the future of a forest — which tree species will thrive and which will diminish, or whether those threatened by a fast-changing climate will successfully migrate to newly hospitable lands — one should look to these seed-dispersing animals.

“All the oaks that are trying to move up north are trying to track the habitable range,” said Ivy Yen, a biologist at the University of Maine who could be found late one recent afternoon at the Penobscot Experimental Forest in nearby Milford, arranging acorns on a tray for mice and voles to find.

More here.

Meal Ticket

We’ve made the turkey’s breast
so large it’s an obstacle to mating,
the birds artificially imbued,
lots of creatures these days
needing an assist with things
they used to do for themselves.
No other earthlings consume as we do,
the planet’s tender rotations
always tempting, commerce
done to a last turn. And the turkeys,
their so-called stupidity
a kind of innocence, stand in
crowded metal pens,
rain falling on those outside,
snoods and wattles trembling,
yellow bills turned up to sky
that once meant promise.
Instinct stirs, hope nesting
in a dark branch of cloud,
just enough to drown them.

by Sally Molini
from Rattle, Winter 2009
Whitson Publishing

Katherine Rundell in Delancey Place:

Donne was not sent to school. He was missing very little; the schools of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were grim, ice cold metaphorically and literally. Eton’s dormitory was full of rats; at many of the public schools at the time, the boys burned the furniture to keep warm, threw each other around in their blankets, broke each other’s ribs and occasionally heads. The Merchant Taylors’ school had in its rules the stipulation, ‘unto their urine the scholars shall go to the places appointed them in the lane or street with­out the court’, which, assuming the interdiction was neces­sary for a reason, suggests the school would have smelled strongly of youthful pee. Because smoking was believed to keep the plague at bay, at Eton they were flogged for the crime of not smoking. Discipline could be murderous. It became necessary to enforce startling legal limits: ‘when a schoolmaster, in correcting his scholar, happens to occa­sion his death, if in such correction he is so barbarous as to exceed all bounds of moderation, he is at least guilty of manslaughter; and if he makes use of an instrument improper for correction, as an iron bar or sword … he is guilty of murder.’

Instead, Donne was educated at home.

More here.

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

Is any product of bourgeois consumer ideology more noxious than the “bucket list”? At just the moment a person should be adjusting their orientation, in conformity with their true nature, to focus exclusively on the horizon of mortality, they are rudely solicited one last time, before it’s really too late, for a final blow-out tour of the amusement parks and spectacles that still held out some plausible hope of providing satisfaction back in ignorant youth, when life could still be imagined to be made up of such things. “Travel is a meat thing”, William Gibson wrote, to which we might add that the quest for new experiences in general is really only fitting for those whose meat is still fresh.

But our economic order cannot accept this. Capitalism obscures from view first the meaning of life, which properly understood is a preparation for death, and then it obscures the meaning of death, which properly understood is the all-surrounding horizon of a mortal life.

More here.

Carissa Wong in New Scientist:

An experimental vaccine has generated antibody responses against all 20 known strains of influenza A and B in animal tests, raising hopes for developing a universal flu vaccine.

Influenza viruses are constantly evolving, making them a moving target for vaccine developers. The annual flu vaccines available now are tailored to give immunity against specific strains predicted to circulate each year. However, researchers sometimes get the prediction wrong, meaning the vaccine is less effective than it could be in those years.

Some researchers think annual flu jabs could be replaced by a universal flu vaccine that is effective against all flu strains. Researchers have tried to achieve this by making vaccines containing protein fragments that are common to several influenza strains, but no universal vaccine has yet gained approval for wider use.

Now, Scott Hensley at the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues have created a vaccine based on mRNA molecules – the same approach that was pioneered by the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna covid-19 vaccines.

More here.

Christopher Leslie Brown interviewed at Asterisk Magazine:

Asterisk: Your book Moral Capital is about why the movement to abolish the slave trade in Britain happened in the late 1780s and not earlier. Would you mind briefly walking through the thrust of that argument?

Christopher: While it’s not easy to boil down the entire book, essentially, there’s a group of people who gather in the late 1780s and commit themselves to convincing British authorities to abolish Britain’s slave trade. The book explains how that group came together, who they were and why they chose that particular issue. The broad answer is that the circumstances of the American Revolution and its aftermath created an environment with new political, moral and cultural values that did not exist before. I don’t argue that the American Revolution caused the antislavery movement, but that it created the conditions that made the movement possible.

More here.

Richard Marshall at 3:16 AM:

3:16: What made you become a philosopher?

David Hume: When I turned my eye inward, I found nothing but doubt and ignorance. Truth is, Richard, all the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho’ such is my weakness that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Can I be sure, that, in leaving all established opinions, I am following truth? and by what criterion shall I distinguish her, even if fortune should at last guide me on her footsteps? After the most accurate and exact of my reasonings, I can give no reason why I should assent to it; and feel nothing but a strong propensity to consider objects strongly in that view under which they appear to me. The memory, senses, and understanding, are all of them founded on the imagination. No wonder a principle so inconstant and fallacious should lead us into errors, when implicitly followed (as it must be) in all its variations. The understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition either in philosophy or common life. We have no choice left, but betwixt a false reason and none at all. Should I endeavor to banish these sentiments, I feel I should be a loser in point of pleasure; and this is the origin of my philosophy.

More here.

Return to Sibiu

After a year of absence
I find my house strewn with feathers.

From the paintings, what first disappeared
was the sea.
Only a fish’s gasping mouth remained alive,
bubbling words.

Moon rays curled obediently
in my coffee cup
and an invisible bird measured invisible time
inside a clock where she’d built her nest.

“Georg,” she whispered.
“Philipp,” the echo sang back.
“Telemann,” I say aloud
while the record is spinning
and the violin strings
accompany your body
a world away.

Like an unseen orchestra:
                       Presto, say your fingers
                       Corsicana, answer my fingers
Allegrezza, say your eyes
                       Scherzo, answer my eyes
                       Gigue, say your patent-leather shoes
                       Polacca, answers my white dress
                       Menuet, answer our bodies, dancing in a ring
                                                on the perfect Street of the Bards . . .

by Lilliana Ursu
from Blackbird

Original Romanian: Here
Audio rendition: Here

Charles Arrowsmith in The Washington Post:

Peter Attia in peterattiamd.com:

I recently shared a graph on Instagram representing whom we spend time with across our lifetime, collected from 2009 to 2019 as part of the American Time Use Survey (Figure 1). For the most part, the numbers make intuitive sense. The amount of time we spend with our coworkers starts dropping in our mid-fifties as we begin to retire, and time with partners rises concurrently. Time spent with children spikes during the typical child-bearing years of our twenties and thirties and falls again as we reach the “empty nest” stage.

Figure 1: Who Americans spend their time with, by age.

These data demonstrate that most of us enjoy a diversity of social connections daily, and yet, throughout virtually all of our lifespan, we spend more time alone than with any given relationship. Especially eye-catching is the rapid increase in time spent alone after the age of forty, and beyond our early sixties, we spend, on average, more than seven waking hours alone.

Guaranteed loneliness?

The same article, published by Our World in Data, interestingly shows that the percentage of Americans living alone across all age groups has been increasing throughout history, as shown in Figure 2 (one exception being a recent decline in the age 75 group, though this is likely an artifact of increased life expectancy). In just the past half-century, the proportion of people living alone has almost doubled. In fact, more than 40% of people over the age of 89 live alone. So not only do we spend more time alone as we age, we also spend more time alone than our historical counterparts at all ages. These combined trends raise the question: are we growing lonely? 

Despite these statistics, time spent alone does not reflect a loss of meaningful social connection and does not predict loneliness.

More here.

Michael Pettis in American Compass:

“China will compete for some low-wage jobs with Americans,” lectured Nobel laureate Robert Solow from the White House podium, amidst the U.S. debate over China’s ascension to the World Trade Organization. “And their market will provide jobs for higher wage, more skilled people. And that’s a bargain for us.” More than 20 years later, economists and policymakers are still searching for that bargain. Belatedly, they are discovering that whether or not trade benefits the global economy or any particular nation depends, like most things in economics, on the specific underlying economic conditions.

When it comes to trade, the key conditions are the approaches that countries take in their quests for international competitiveness. Trade can directly boost production and indirectly boost demand, so that the global economy is generally better off. But trade can also make the global economy worse off by directly constraining demand and so indirectly constraining production. The outcome depends on whether a country’s higher export revenues are recycled into higher consumption and imports or into higher savings.

In the traditional view, international trade allows a country or region to specialize in producing things that it can produce relatively more efficiently than its trading partners, and so trade shifts production to the locale in which a given amount of labor and capital yields the greatest output. In a world of scarce inputs, this allows the global economy to maximize production. According to that model, by definition, anything that impedes or distorts free trade, whether a regulation or tariff or quota, reduces global production. Mainstream economists accept that the benefits of free trade may be badly distributed, even to the point at which free trade can leave some sectors worse off, but this, they insist, is a distribution problem that should be solved politically.

More here.

Martijn Konings in Sidecar:

The award of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Ben Bernanke last month unleashed a wave of indignation among those who view the former chair of the Federal Reserve as the epitome of unoriginal establishment thinking. Bernanke received the prize for work demonstrating that bank runs were possible and that they could impact real economic activity. Both of those things had been perfectly obvious since at least the 1930s. But the Keynesian models that the economics profession built during the post-war era were unable to account for such events, having no real explanation for the volatile dynamics of debt and finance.

This aporia became more obvious when the era of ‘fiscal dominance’ came to an end and financial instability made a comeback from the second half of the 1960s, challenging the Keynesian paradigm and lending credibility to rival strands of thought. Rational expectations theorists underscored the inherent futility of government attempts to interfere with the inner workings of the market, while Milton Friedman’s monetarism fostered the notion that Keynesian inflationism was responsible for the corruption of America’s monetary standard.

Bernanke and other New Keynesians didn’t buy the idea that the problems of the present could be solved by returning to a pure free market. Yet the shallowness of their take on the problem of capitalism’s instability was evident in the subsequent evolution of Bernanke’s work into a framework for inflation targeting and monetary fine-tuning that looked with suspicion on any attempts to manage stock markets or asset prices.

More here.

Daniela Gabor in Phenomenal World:

At COP26, US Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry sanguinely declared the need to “derisk the investment, and create the capacity to have bankable deals. That’s doable for water, it’s doable for electricity, it’s doable for transportation.” Derisking is financial speak for the public sector—be it through official development aid, multilateral resources or national fiscal resources—accepting to take some risks from private financiers in order to persuade them to invest, public efforts variously described as “mobilizing private finance”or “blended finance.”  In response, the UN Special Envoy for Climate and head of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) Mark Carney announced GFANZ’s intentions to work in partnership with governments and multilateral development institutions to mobilize its $130 trillion for green purposes.

At this year’s COP27 in Egypt, Carney was less triumphant. On the contrary, he defensively explained why the GFANZ financiers had dropped the partnership with UN Race to Zero, intended to police their green pledges and reduce pervasive greenwashing. No longer flanked by top financiers like BlackRock’s Larry Fink (who reportedly stayed away to avoid further incensing the US Republican party), and amid several reports denouncing the systematic failure of the GFANZ-Global North mobilization drive, Carney cut a lonely figure.

More here.