A Game of Chess

In Washington Square Park, astonishing late October
turns a yellow leaf as airily as spring.
Everything slices up the light—the office towers,
the bough above a woman cutting a man’s hair

by the finished roses. Water blazes from the fountain
and bible quotes done in chalk are dust beneath
the feet of the fiddler playing bluegrass for a few coins.
It is so very hard to get close to anything.

Over where the public chess tables
stand in latticed shade, their concentration
makes the players seem all of a piece,
and the heart wants to sleep. But even here
a small upheaval . . .

A black man, serious and soft, and a white boy
maybe ten years old, pressed into his sharp collared shirt,
engage in the abstract and the real.

Here, I am given the space to see
the boy let go his queen
too soon, the look on his face.

The man takes the queen away
and the empty square is an immensity
the boy cannot move

then the man succeeds in taking us all in
when he puts her back contrariwise,
leans and smiles—Don’t you be doing that again.

And a boy grows in the light, and a man loses
because he loves. And all the season does
is throw down leaves and divvy up the sun
above the chessmen on their chequered field.

by Cally Conan-Davies
from the Hudson Review

Bad Patriot Poem

sun bears are the smallest bear species
the 2nd smallest bear species is
not the moon bear although they are
relatively small when compared
to other bears such as polar bears
if left alone most dog breeds would
die off and the ones remaining would
adapt through natural selection
to survive in the wild like wolves
the new variety of poodle will be
smaller but also have warmer legs
because humans will be gone
and their fur will not be shaved
for aesthetic reasons

this morning i woke up in iowa city
in seoul my brothers who i may
or may not have are getting ready
for bed no one here looks like
me everyone looks at me hi
hello i say i’m trying my best
to be american no one here thinks
i can be an american

by Sean Cho A.
from The Rumpus Magazine

Jake Mearns at the LARB:

THERE IS NO other novel quite like Michael Fessier’s 1935 genre-bending Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind. At first glance, the San Francisco–set tale is classic noir, narrated in the steely patter of Depression-era hard-boiled crime fiction. An average Joe, John Price, happens upon a murder in the street; he then becomes unwillingly entangled in the perpetrator’s subsequent killings; and finally, he must prove his innocence when the police try to railroad Price for the other’s crimes. But what elevates Fully Dressed into a class all its own is how Fessier incorporates fantastical characters and events that are alien to noir. The incongruity between the novel’s deadpan, tough-guy prose and its wildly surreal content makes Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind a haunting novel that’s impossible to put down.

more here.

Haruki Murakami at the New York Times:

What books would you recommend to somebody who wants to understand present-day Japan?

The same trend is found almost everywhere, I think, but in Japan, too, women writers — especially those of the younger generation — are quite active in publishing novels and are gaining a large, receptive readership. Personally, I like Mieko Kawakami’s novel “Natsu Monogatari” (“Summer Tales”). She has such sensitivity as a writer and is a deeply committed storyteller. This novel was translated and published in English in 2020 under the title “Breasts and Eggs.”

What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?

It’s an interesting question, but I’ve never really thought about it. Writing a lengthy novel is a job that takes time and patience over the long haul, and it’d be kind of disruptive if I had to give up reading the books I want to read while I’m writing.

more here.

Howard LaFranchi in The Christian Science Monitor:

Just how anti-American is Pakistan?

Judging by the outpouring of domestic political support that former Prime Minister Imran Khan received when he claimed the United States was in on the assassination attempt against him this month, quite a lot. Go back to 2018, when the Trump-like populist Mr. Khan swept into power by shrewdly tapping into a deep vein of anti-American sentiments over the war on terror, and the antagonism seems confirmed. Top it off with widespread support for Mr. Khan’s further claim that it was U.S.-engineered “regime change” that caused his ouster from power in April of this year. It would all seem to add up to a deep well of anti-Americanism.

But hold on.

The hugely popular Mr. Khan appeared to switch gears this week when he told foreign journalists that he is ready to work with the U.S. – and even more surprisingly, that he no longer blames the U.S. for his removal from power in a vote of no confidence.

More here.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

Timothy Noah in The New Republic:

Tycoons are susceptible to the misconception that if you know how to make billions you know how to spend them. Sam Bankman-Fried, the “unkempt millennial” (The Wall Street Journal) and founder of the cryptocurrency firm FTX, demonstrated that he knew how to make a fortune that peaked at $26.5 billion. Then he demonstrated that he also knew how to lose it, under circumstances that are now under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department. But what caught my eye was Bankman-Fried’s aspiration to use his billions to save the world through a modish variety of philanthropy especially popular right now among millennial and Gen Z cybernerds called effective altruism.

Effective altruism, or E.A., is a movement created 10 years ago by William MacAskill, a 35-year-old associate professor of philosophy at Oxford. E.A. tries to distinguish itself from routine philanthropy by applying utilitarian reasoning with academic rigor and a youthful sense of urgency.

More here.

J. Hoberman at Artforum:

A ROMANIAN FILMMAKER who regularly deflates Romanian myths of national greatness, Radu Jude recently graced the New York Film Festival with a compact, farcical essay on the material basis of historical memory, or, to use Trotsky’s term, “the dustbin of history.”

The Potemkinists takes the form of a conversation between a would-be public artist and a prospective state patron. Those familiar with Jude’s tricksy, appalling account of a staged historical pageant, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), will recall considerable screen time devoted to a similar debate. Indeed, Alexandru Dabija, the affably sly ministry official in I Do Not Care, appears here in the guise of a garrulous sculptor selling a proposal to rehabilitate a glorious moment from Romania’s past. His possible benefactor is a generally unimpressed cultural bureaucrat (Cristina Drăghici, who delivered an inspired rant as a shopper in Jude’s 2021 Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn).

more here.

Rachel Cooke at The New Statesman:

The creation of Steven Knight of Peaky Blinders fame, it shares with that series a fondness for mythologising and aphoristic dialogue. Set in the Egyptian desert in 1941 as the British army struggles to defend besieged Tobruk from the Germans, its tone is midway between the war comics my brother used to read as a boy (he favoured Battle) and a Duran Duran video – and I mean this as a compliment.

If it’s both silly and cynical, it’s also affectionate, sending up the war in much the same spirit as, say, Noël Coward once did (his “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” is on the soundtrack, along with a ton of heavy rock and a bit of George Formby). Most of the time, it’s self-consciously edgy: foul language, bad behaviour, bodies piled like bags of pasta. But at other moments, it’s almost old-fashioned. All these men in khaki, smoking their pipes! If Kenneth More or Richard Attenborough suddenly appeared, you’d hardly be surprised. (Instead, we get Dominic West, as a character called Lt Col Wrangel Clarke, in full make-up, for reasons as yet unexplained.)

more here.

John O’Rourke in BU Today:

It is hard to imagine anyone who has done more to champion poetry than Robert Pinsky. The author of 10 collections of poems—including the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996—Pinsky has edited anthologies, written more than a half-dozen prose books about poetry, and translated Dante’s Inferno and the poems of Czesław Miłosz. As director of BU’s Creative Writing Program, he has helped launch the careers of many of the country’s most accomplished young contemporary poets.

But Pinsky, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and College of Arts & Sciences professor of English and of creative writing, exerted perhaps the greatest influence as US poet laureate. During his three terms (1997-2000), he launched the Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans of all ages and walks of life to share the poems that matter most to them. More than 18,000 answered the initial open call for submissions, resulting in dozens of videos of people reading beloved poems. Those films are available for viewing in a recently completed digital database, housed at Boston University. Pinsky became a de facto ambassador for poetry, appearing on shows as varied as The PBS NewsHour, The Stephen Colbert Show, and The Simpsons.

More here.

Reya Farber in The Conversation:

Trans people’s right to exist has been challenged throughout time and across the world in multiple ways. Worldwide, trans people face disparities across many areas, including access to health care, legal support and economic security. Governments, global organizations and the legacies of colonialism also enact high levels of violence and stigma against them.

At the same time, 95% of global health-related organizations do not recognize or mention the needs of gender-diverse people in their work, resulting in the “near-universal exclusion” of trans people from health practices and policies. There is also a lack of holistic trans-inclusive research around the world. For instance, searching for the word “transgender” on the website for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the global health metrics giant of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that collaborates with the World Health Organization to improve global health data, currently returns zero results.

More here.

Madeleine Cuff in New Scientist:

It has been more than two decades since the issue of “loss and damage” was first raised at a UN climate summit.

Since then, talk has come cheap. Finding a way to force high-income countries to produce some cash to help vulnerable countries manage the impacts of climate change has proved much, much more difficult.

But at this year’s COP27 summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, everything is different. For the first time, loss and damage is at the heart of the conference agenda.

“This is an issue whose time has now come,” the UN’s climate chief, Simon Stiell, told the media at the summit on 10 November.

More here.

Benjamin Waller-Wells in The New Yorker:

Tim Michels, a wealthy sixty-year-old businessman, was the Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin. During the primary, when asked whether the 2020 Presidential election had been stolen, Michels said, “Maybe.” A few months later, he said that, if he became governor, Republicans would “never lose an election in Wisconsin again.” Given the context, it was hard to know whether that was normal political braggadocio or a statement of intent. Donald Trump came to Wisconsin to campaign for Michels, who made election integrity, as he put it, a big part of his pitch. He proposed to eliminate the nonpartisan agency that oversees the state’s elections and replace it with a new entity whose composition and mission was left a little hazy.

Part of what made this year’s midterms so nerve-racking was the possibility that the election-denial movement might succeed in warping the mechanisms of American democracy; in Wisconsin and elsewhere, democracy itself was said to be on the ballot. Polls leading up to Election Night showed Michels neck and neck with the incumbent Democratic governor, Tony Evers. But when the votes started to come in last Tuesday, the election seemed to be going Evers’s way. Michels addressed his supporters just after midnight, and gave a frank concession speech. “It wasn’t our night,” he said. “I thank everybody for your support. God bless.” With that, Michels left the stage, and his candidacy dissolved. It would be another eleven hours before the Associated Press determined that Evers had, in fact, won the race.

More here.

Tanya Lewis in Scientific American:

There’s an age-old adage in biology: structure determines function. In order to understand the function of the myriad proteins that perform vital jobs in a healthy body—or malfunction in a diseased one—scientists have to first determine these proteins’ molecular structure. But this is no easy feat: protein molecules consist of long, twisty chains of up to thousands of amino acids, chemical compounds that can interact with one another in many ways to take on an enormous number of possible three-dimensional shapes. Figuring out a single protein’s structure, or solving the “protein-folding problem,” can take years of finicky experiments.

But earlier this year an artificial intelligence program called AlphaFold, developed by the Google-owned company DeepMind, predicted the 3-D structures of almost every known protein—about 200 million in all. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior staff research scientist John Jumper were jointly awarded this year’s $3-million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for the achievement, which opens the door for applications that range from expanding our understanding of basic molecular biology to accelerating drug development.

More here.

Relax

Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the dryer.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she’s a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours. Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair, and your memory. If your daughter
doesn’t plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used-appliance store for a pickup—drug money.
The Buddha tells a story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs halfway down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles in a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh, taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

by Ellen Bass
from Like a Beggar
Copper Canyon Press, 2014

Alan McIntyre at the Scottish Review:

Since 1994 midterms have mattered, not just as protest votes, but as elections that have frequently determined congressional control. In the last eight midterms, control of the House has changed hands either four or five times (depending on the final 2022 result), while it’s only been twice in the Senate. Midterms have become a true political thermostat, and the result has often been divided government for the last two years of a Presidential term. Consequently, the typical second half of a Presidency is now legislative gridlock, occasional cross-party compromise, stacks of Executive Orders, and a sharp uptick in Presidential overseas trips to get away from the unpleasantness in DC.

With Biden’s approval rating stuck in the low 40s, the table was set last week for a Democratic rout. Instead, it looks like the Republican House majority will be at most one or two seats, while Democrats have retained the Senate. So why did 2022 buck the midterm orthodoxy?

More here.