“A 22-year-old Iranian woman died after being arrested for allegedly violating strict hijab rules — sparking protests against the Islamic Republic’s morality police.” —NY Post

Moan of the Mirror (Ahe Ayeneh)

Digging in the pit,
her family knew it was her
by her long hair.

O earth –
is this the same innocent body?
Is a woman only this pile of dirt?

She used to comb
the treasure of her hair,
and braid beyond the mirror frame
the wind of her thoughts.

She used to greet in the morning, ‘Salam!’
And her smile would pick a flower
from the reflection.
Lifting her hand to her temple
she would brush the night aside
to reveal
the sun in the mirror.

Her mind would wake on the rising day,
a rain of stars shaken loose
from the sky of her eyes,
then that sweet smile
would open a door through her reflection
onto the sun-garden of her soul.

Thieves have blinded the mirror
by stealing those eyes
from the sill of morning.

Oh you – burnt youth –
the ash of spring!
Your image has flown away from the empty mirror.
Holding the memory of your long hair
the mirror moans in the hanging dust of morning.

Birds in the garden sing for no reason.
This is no occasion for bloom.

by H.E. Sayeh
from Poetry International

Translated from the Farsi by
Chad Sweeney and Mojdeh Marashi

Ron Slate at On the Seawall:

Jersey Breaks is largely about insisting on having things your own way and getting away with it. Such was the example set by grandfather Dave Pinsky, Prohibition bootlegger, then bar proprietor. Young Robert was a mediocre student, or rather, he was an avid  reader who spurned the orthodoxies of schooling. Music became his expressive refuge; he played the horn at school dances and later during ROTC drills at Rutgers where Paul Fussell became his first notable teacher. Before college, he read Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee, R. L. Stevenson, James Joyce, and Walter Scott. Then later, the first poetry – Ginsberg, Moore, Eliot, Yeats. He heard something similar in the work of Eliot and Ginsberg, though his instructors said otherwise.

More here.

Parmin Sedigh in Undark:

In August 2022, two research groups published papers in Nature and Cell that demonstrated scientists’ newfound ability to create synthetic mouse embryos in the laboratory until 8.5 days post-fertilization — no egg cells, sperm cells, or wombs needed. The outcry was immediate: If this can be done with mice, are humans next?

Scientists were quick to ease the public’s worries: It’s not yet possible to create synthetic human embryos. Yet their response was concerning. Why did we need to wait until such a scientific advance to occur before we could discuss its implications? How can we have important discussions about bioethical issues — issues at the intersection of ethics and biological research — that already impact society?

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

The generally acknowledged development champion of the modern world is South Korea. Joe Studwell, the author of How Asia Works, uses Korea as his paradigmatic success story, as does the economist Ha-Joon Chang (who grew up there). Chang and Studwell’s ideas have forced mainstream economists to take another look at industrial policy — in particular, at the idea that poor countries should promote manufactured exports in order to raise their productivity levels. Korea, which has fully made the transition from poverty to developed-country status over the last half century, has used this strategy to great effect. In general, in this series of posts, I’ve tried to look at developing countries through the lens of the Chang/Studwell model, which means I’ve been implicitly comparing them to South Korea all along.

But anyway, South Korea is not the only big development success story that we’ve seen in recent decades. Two others that are almost as impressive are Poland and Malaysia, which are now on the cusp of developed-country status.

More here.

Michael Schulman at The New Yorker:

So who is Janelle Monáe? Since she emerged on the music scene, she’s been less a pop star than a world-builder, refracting herself through sci-fi and Afrofuturist imagery. Her first EP, “Metropolis: The Chase Suite,” from 2007, drew on Fritz Lang’s German Expressionist classic and cast Monáe as her android alter ego, Cindi Mayweather. With her tuxedos and protruding pompadours, she was a glam retro-futurist androgyne, and her three studio albums—“The ArchAndroid” (2010), “The Electric Lady” (2013), and “Dirty Computer” (2018)—leaned into her funk-robot persona. “I’m a cyber-girl without a face, a heart, or a mind,” she sang on one track. Monáe used Mayweather and other spinoff characters as metaphors for her sense of otherness, as a queer Black woman from Kansas City, Kansas. (In 2018, she came out as pansexual, and last April revealed herself to be nonbinary; she uses she/her or they/them pronouns but says that her preferred pronoun is “freeassmuthafucka.”) Monaé’s forty-eight-minute visual album—or “emotion picture”—for “Dirty Computer” featured her as Jane 57821, a Sapphic android in a “Blade Runner”-esque dystopia, and in 2022 she expanded the “Dirty Computer” universe into a sci-fi story collection, “The Memory Librarian.”

more here.

Carolyne Larrington at Literary Review:

How does an Oxford academic follow up a prize-winning trade book, a newly researched biography of Geoffrey Chaucer? And, moreover, in lockdown, when archives and libraries are largely inaccessible? Marion Turner, the newly elected J R R Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at Oxford, has avoided ‘second-book syndrome’ with a breathtakingly simple idea: a biography of Chaucer’s most famous character, Dame Alison (or Alice), weaver, pilgrim, businesswoman and serial participant in the marriage market, better known as the Wife of Bath. Informative, clear-sighted, entertaining and as opinionated as its subject, Turner’s new book is a wonderful introduction to the lives of 14th-century women, The Canterbury Tales and the fascinating ways in which Alison has been read and misread since she first hoisted up her voluminous skirts to show her fine red stockings during the last decade of the 14th century.

more here.

Joseph Keegin in The Hedgehog Review:

Something was in the water in Austin. In the 1960s, a gang of classics scholars and philosophy professors had rolled into town like bandits, the University of Texas their saloon: William Arrowsmith, chair of the Classics Department, who scandalized the academic humanities with a Harper’s Magazine essay titled “The Shame of the Graduate Schools,” arguing that “the humanists have betrayed the humanities” and that “an alarmingly high proportion of what is published in classics—and in other fields—is simply rubbish or trivia”; John Silber, promoted to dean of the College of Arts and Sciences just ten years after graduating from Yale, who promptly replaced twenty-two department heads, much to the ire of the university’s board; and a third, an unassuming former radio broadcaster from the United Kingdom with a knack for classical languages and only a master’s degree to his name.

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Natalia Mesa in The Scientist:

Humans are still evolving new genes, according to a study published in Cell Reports on December 20. As our lineage evolved, at least 155 human genes sprung up from DNA regions previously thought of as “junk,” including two human-specific genes that emerged since humans branched off from chimpanzees around 4 to 6 million years ago, the researchers report. “I thought it was a great study,” says Alan Saghatelian, a biologist at the Salk Institute who was not involved in the work. He adds that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if there were many more of these genes hiding in plain sight. The genes described in the new study went undiscovered for so long because they’re teeny: They top out at about 300 nucleotides in length, while a typical human gene is 10 to 15,000 base pairs on average. Even though they possess start and stop codons that allow them to be read by cells’ transcriptional machinery just like traditional genes, these so-called microgenes—sometimes called short open reading frames (sORFs)—have long been assumed to be nonfunctional, Saghatelian explains.

But recent studies found that knocking out sORFs stunts cell growth, indicating they’re important after all. One 2020 study, for example, found hundreds of functional sORFs in human cells, both in the coding and noncoding regions of the genome. The number was intriguing to Nikolaos Vakirlis, a computational evolutionary biologist at Biomedical Sciences Research Center Alexander Fleming in Vari, Greece, and he and his colleagues felt compelled to investigate these genetic oddities further, launching what became the newly published research. “We find species-specific genes everywhere,” Vakirlis says. “So there has to be an evolutionary route for them to originate.”

More here.

Matthew K. Ritchie in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The anonymous setting of Mohsin Hamid’s 2022 novel The Last White Man brings with it a certain comfort. The British Pakistani author’s lack of specificity is purposeful: dropped into a nameless town in an unknown country, the reader has no cultural touchstones to grab onto, no societal baggage to carry. The blank slate leaves just one aspect to focus on, which Hamid homes in on with his first line: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” This succinct statement of fact — a rarity in the novel — establishes the binary law of the land: you’re either white or dark, no in-between.

The Last White Man arrives at a precarious time in the world’s racial landscape. The tenets and language of the “Great Replacement” theory — the conspiratorial worldview that whites are being systematically replaced in society by nonwhites — are flooding the mainstream at a frightening rate.

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Max Kozlov in Nature:

When clinical trial data for the antiviral drug Paxlovid emerged in late 2021, physicians hailed its astonishing efficacy — a reduction of nearly 90% in the risk of severe COVID-19. But more than a year later, COVID-19 remains a leading cause of death in many countries, and not only in low-income nations where the drug is in short supply. In the United States, for example, hundreds of people still die from COVID-19 each day.

Researchers say that the drug’s rollout has been hampered by worries about ‘rebound’ (the mysterious return of symptoms or detectable virus days after a person starts to feel better) and side effects — as well as by declining concern about the risk of COVID-19. Inadequate funding for distribution, the drug’s high price tag and the need for it be taken soon after infection have also slowed its uptake. As a result, physicians have prescribed the drug in only about 0.5% of new COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom, and in about 13% in the United States, according to a report by the health-analytics firm Airfinity, based in London, UK. Even doctors have reported serious difficulties in helping their family members to obtain Paxlovid.

More here.

Kenneth Roth in The Guardian:

During the three decades that I headed Human Rights Watch, I recognized that we would never attract donors who wanted to exempt their favorite country from the objective application of international human rights principles. That is the price of respecting principles.

Yet American universities have not articulated a similar rule, and it is unclear whether they follow one. That lack of clarity leaves the impression that major donors might use their contributions to block criticism of certain topics, in violation of academic freedom. Or even that university administrators might anticipate possible donor objections to a faculty member’s views before anyone has to say anything.

That seems to be what happened to me at Harvard’s Kennedy School. If any academic institution can afford to abide by principle, to refuse to compromise academic freedom under real or presumed donor pressure, it is Harvard, the world’s richest university. Yet the Kennedy School’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, vetoed a human rights fellowship that had been offered to me because of my criticism of Israel. As best we can tell, donor reaction was his concern.

More here.

Lauren Collee at The Baffler:

ILLUSION AND REALITY: A lecture and demonstration on magic and the expansion of consciousness by DOUG HENNING: First Magician of the Age of Enlightenment. So read the posters that began appearing around Chicago advertising an event to be held at Northwestern University by the student meditation society. It was the late seventies, and Doug Henning, an internationally acclaimed, Winnipeg-born magician with his own Broadway show and regular television special, had not appeared in public for months. News of the event quickly traveled among the Chicago magic community, who showed up en masse to see their MIA superstar in a rare live appearance.

They left the event feeling somewhat puzzled. After a half-hour set by Jay Marshall (an American magician and ventriloquist known for an act involving a glove-puppet rabbit called Lefty), Henning—a squirrelly looking man with a Peter Pan demeanor, a handlebar mustache, and a twinkle in his eye—emerged on the stage wearing a white three-piece suit.

more here.

Lisa Robertson at The Paris Review:

Chateaubriand says that the pleasures of youth revisited in memory are ruins seen by torchlight. I don’t know whether I’m the ruin or the torch.

Montaigne was dead at fifty-nine—kidneys; Baudelaire at forty-six—syphilis, probably. Rousseau died at sixty-six of causes unconnected to his lifelong urethral malformation, described so exhaustively and enticingly by Starobinski; Lord Byron died of fever at the age of thirty-six in the Greek War of Independence in 1824, the year of Baudelaire’s birth. After a final visit to his mistress, Madame Récamier, he by then blind and she paralytic, Chateaubriand died at the age of seventy-nine, in 1848, the year of the third revolution and its failure and of Baudelaire’s grand political disillusionment. The attribution of causation to human behavior is generally a work of fantasy. Birds will speak the last human words, Chateaubriand says. Each one of us is the last witness of something—some custom, habit, way of speaking, economy, some lapsed mode of life. He says only style survives.

more here.

Prayer

I invite you back
…………….. dear wildness        dear

…………………………………….. unfathomable formless
…………………….. universe of expansion

you alaap and scat
……………………. of tongue and throat

come seed me

……………….. my ground I’ve prepared
……………………………… ready for divinity

make day of my night
revolution in my field

come burn

……………. fallow grass

…………………………. and mustard alike

and I will string your each flame

……………………………………………. about my neck

until you flare into me

…………………. and I like you burn

……………………………………………. beyond recognition

by Rajiv Mohabir
from Split This Rock

Peter Conrad in The Guardian:

Norman Mailer – when not boozily brawling, dosing himself with hallucinogenic drugs and serially fornicating – was a man with a sacred mission. He regarded himself as a prophet, bringing bad news to a society that had settled into consumerist complacency during the 1950s. Americans believe that they live in God’s own country; Mailer alerted them to “the possible existence of Satan”, who might be residing next door and quietly assembling a private arsenal for use on Judgment Day. Although Mailer looked up at the sky with “religious awe”, what he saw there was a mushroom-shaped cloud that he called “the last deity”. Humanity, he declared, was reeling towards self-destruction. Now that his centenary has arrived (he was born 31 January 1923), I dare anyone – and that includes Richard Bradford, the author of this sensationalised canter through his life – to say that he was wrong.

True, Mailer was an obnoxious loudmouth. In episodes that Bradford documents with slavering relish, he conducted literary disputes by butting his colleagues: “Once again words fail you,” drawled the coolly disdainful Gore Vidal after one such attack.

Domestically, Mailer was a wife-beater and almost a murderer: taunted as a “faggot” by the second of his six spouses, he stabbed her with a penknife at a drunken party, just missing her heart. After an early infatuation with President Kennedy, whose fatal ride through Dallas in an open car he applauded as a moment of existentialist bravado, his politics lurched towards fascism. He commended Hitler for providing Germans with an outlet for their “energies”, although – as a man who bragged about his own bulbous, fizzily fertile “cojones” and the indefatigable piston of his penis – he pitied the Führer for possessing only one testicle and having to rely on masturbation.

More here.