Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

My cat died in Germany once. In Cologne. I remember the city being very ugly and the famous cathedral being so black, completely covered in soot. I’m not against ugly cities and truth be told I rather enjoy them. Cities should be ugly. Of course, that’s an absurd thing to say. There’s nothing more lovely than a lovely city. I was reminded of this recently when I traveled from Berlin to Paris. Berlin is so ugly and Paris is so beautiful. Whatever doubts I might have had that Berlin is just really ugly, my father squashed them for me on a brief visit to the city while I was staying there. We were walking through the city, making our way from the Motel One he was staying at on Alexanderplatz to the little Airbnb where I was living in Prenzlauerberg with my old and assiduous friend Stevie and I was watching my father move ever so slowly through the not-so-interesting streets that connect the two neighborhoods and as we stopped at the second or third cafe for him to catch his breath and take a rest I realized that he is genuinely elderly now. It’s an indistinct threshold, being old. But he has become old. That is what happens, of course. There is no shame in it. Will Germany kill my father, just as it killed my cat, I wondered to myself. It was hot in Berlin that week. We should have taken the U-Bahn or even a cab. But I wanted to walk with my aging father through the streets of Berlin. I was feeling tenderly toward him, even though I, and simultaneously Berlin itself, were both trying to kill him.

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Michael Le Page in New Scientist:

Low rainfall and record-breaking heat across much of China are having widespread impacts on people, industry and farming. River and reservoir levels have fallen, factories have shut because of electricity shortages and huge areas of crops have been damaged. The situation could have worldwide repercussions, causing further disruption to supply chains and exacerbating the global food crisis.

People in large parts of China have been experiencing two months of extreme heat. Hundreds of places have reported temperatures of more than 40°C (104°F), and many records have been broken. Subway stations have set up rest areas where people can recover from the heat.

On 18 August, the temperature in Chongqing in Sichuan province reached 45°C (113°F), the highest ever recorded in China outside the desert-dominated region of Xinjiang.

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Martijn Konings in the Boston Review:

Rumors of the death of neoliberalism are indeed greatly exaggerated. At a moment when economic authorities are calling for higher unemployment to combat supply-side inflation, it is essential to recall how U.S. political economy has been remade to serve the interests of asset owners at the expense of wage-earners. Only by reckoning with this asset economy head on can we envision a future that breaks free of it.

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Jon Cohen in Science:

Tucker Carlson, a political commentator on Fox News, has long assailed Anthony Fauci for his role in the U.S. government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic during both former President Donald Trump’s and President Joe Biden’s administrations. But on 22 August, when Fauci announced he would be retiring from his jobs as director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical adviser to the president at the end of year, the Tucker Carlson Tonight host laid into him like never before. Carlson asserted Fauci had committed “very serious crimes” and said he “apparently engineered the single most devastating event in modern American history.” Carlson, infamous for assailing people’s looks, also called Fauci a “an even tinier version of the Dalai Lama” and a “Stalinist midget.”

Carlson seems to relish criticisms of his comments, which inevitably draw more attention to him and his show. But at the risk of playing into his hand, Science fact-checked his criticisms of Fauci. The analysis shows Carlson took facts out of context and cited long-debunked studies or reports to attack Fauci. He also repeatedly blamed Fauci and other scientists for changing their minds based on new evidence—the bedrock of scientific progress. In Carlson’s calculus, such reversals equal lying.

Here are annotated fragments from a full transcript of the show posted on Fox News’s website. “Imagine the pandemonium at SoulCycle studios across the Northeast this morning when Tony Fauci announced his retirement. Ugly doesn’t begin to describe it. Picture the chaos, if you can, in the organic chaga aisle at Whole Foods in Brooklyn. Try to envision the panic and hysteria that must have broken out at espresso bars in Edgartown and Aspen and Santa Monica and Bethesda …”

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Arran Lomas in Literary Hub:

Up until the mid-thirteenth century, you would be fortunate if you were to be tried by a jury of your peers in the king’s court. Throughout the early Middle Ages, this particular court preferred trial by ordeal. The idea was that God favored the innocent, so the defendant would be put through an ordeal in which God would either help him prove his innocence or clarify his guilt. Commonly used methods were trial by cold water, in which the accused would have his hands and feet bound and be thrown into a body of water; if he floated, he was innocent, but if he sank, he was assumed guilty.

There was ordeal by hot iron or stone, in which the defendant was made to hold a lump of hot iron or plunge his hand into a pot of boiling water to fetch a stone. If his hand completely healed within three days, then, naturally, God had intervened, demonstrating his innocence. If scars still showed, he could expect a swift execution.

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Dan Sheehan at Lit Hub:

Located on the bank of the Miljacka river in the city’s old Turkish quarter, the beautiful pseudo-Moorish structure, known to locals as Vijećnica (City Hall), was a beloved symbol of the multiethnic, multicultural capital of Bosnia before the entire building, along with two million of the books it housed, went up in flames.

By August 25th, Sarajevo was suffering through the early days of a devastating four year siege (the longest in the history of modern warfare) by Bosnian Serb forces, one which would ultimately claim the lives of over ten thousand of its inhabitants. Every day, from the hills around the city and the windows of captured apartment blocks within it, shells and sniper fire rained down the trapped Sarajevan people—a people who had, only 8 years previous, joyously hosted the 1984 Winter Olympic Games.

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Gideon Lasco in Sapiens:

In fact, all of the world’s chili peppers—including the labuyo peppers that we typically use in the Philippines—likely came from the first domesticated chili plants (Capsicum annuum) in what is now Mexico. They were imported as part of the Columbian exchange, which saw the two-way transfer of ideas, animals, plants, diseases, and people between the Eastern Hemisphere and the Americas following Christopher Colombus’ first transatlantic voyage in the late 15th century.

Unthinkable as it may sound today, the cuisines we have come to associate with spiciness—Indian, Thai, Korean, and Chinese, among others—had no chili peppers at all before their introduction in the 16th century onward. Prior to that, those cuisines relied on other spices or aromatics to add heat to dishes, such as ginger, likely native to southern China, or black pepper, native to India.

How did chili peppers become part of the human diet beginning in the Americas an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 years ago? And why were they eventually embraced by the rest of the world?

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Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

It is Viktor Orbán’s worst nightmare: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” It is the opening line to Mohsin Hamid’s new novel The Last White Man, a line that deliberately echoes the opening to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Ever since he first bedazzled with his 2000 novel Moth Smoke, Hamid has shown himself willing and capable of tackling big, divisive subjects: the war on terror, immigration, identity, corruption, poverty. With his latest novel, he attempts to engage with another biggie: “whiteness”.

Whiteness is a condition that pleads to be given novelistic treatment and to be rendered through a Kafkaesque lens. It has become a kind of metaphor, a myth even, through which we project all manner of anxieties and fears about the world and our place in it. And this is true of all sides in the race debate. For racists, whiteness is an expression both of pride and of loss. An embodiment of a sense of superiority and specialness but also a rendering of a world that seems to be slipping away.

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Cassandra Willyard in Nature:

Researchers are baffled by long COVID: hundreds of studies have tried to unpick its mechanism, without much success. Now some scientists, and an increasing number of people with the condition, have been lining up behind the as-yet-unproven hypothesis that tiny, persistent clots might be constricting blood flow to vital organs, resulting in the bizarre constellation of symptoms that people experience.

Proponents of the idea (#teamclots, as they sometimes refer to themselves on Twitter) include Etheresia Pretorius, a physiologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and Douglas Kell, a systems biologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, who led the first team to visualize micro-clots in the blood of people with long COVID. They say that the evidence implicating micro-clots is undeniable, and they want trials of the kinds of anticoagulant treatment that Hawthorne is considering. Pretorius penned the Guardian article that caught Hawthorne’s attention. But many haematologists and COVID-19 researchers worry that enthusiasm for the clot hypothesis has outpaced the data. They want to see larger studies and stronger causal evidence. And they are concerned about people seeking out unproven, potentially risky treatments.

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Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times:

The main argument against prosecuting Donald Trump — or investigating him with an eye toward criminal prosecution — is that it will worsen an already volatile fracture in American society between Republicans and Democrats. If, before an indictment, we could contain the forces of political chaos and social dissolution, the argument goes, in the aftermath of such a move we would be at their mercy. American democracy might not survive the stress.

All of this might sound persuasive to a certain risk-averse cast of mind. But it rests on two assumptions that can’t support the weight that’s been put on them. The first is the idea that American politics has, with Trump’s departure from the White House, returned to a kind of normalcy. In this view, a prosecution would be an extreme and irrevocable blow to social peace. But the absence of open conflict is not the same as peace. Voters may have put a relic of the 1990s into the Oval Office, but the status quo of American politics is far from where it was before Trump.

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Under the Bo Tree

I bring you, Gautama, my empty hand,
which would have been full of figs
from a house that has never known death—
had there been one.
But there isn’t
so my palm is empty.

So I bring you, Gautama, my empty palm,
full of the days of my father’s house—
childhood books, summers staining the clothes green,
anxious to get out into that greater world
(convinced I would do better).
And then, later, the Fridays at Oaxaca Kitchen—
good beer, superb fajitas, the young
passing by, friends hilarious, everyone getting drunk,
my days full of useless work at a job,
the exhaustion found at my dusks,
the sweet ease of my sleep, my love of my bed,
blessed unconsciousness.

I bring you, Gautama, my open palm—
drop a blessing in it
so that I can touch the head of a bull
and ease its rage,
pat the head of a drunken monkey and say,
“I was where you are, my friend,”
or collect raindrops, my hand a bowl,
as we sit under the Bo tree,
just sitting, saying to the dissolving drops,
“You are my mind.”

An open palm to grab the days ahead,
take hold of what’s next,
open to sleep and a long work day
and the cycle of that worker’s life.

I bring you, Gautama, two hands, one heart,
one overused and, perhaps, useless mind—
human being, and human being only—

awaiting what’s next in a human being,
ready for more of what a human being is.

by Mark Fitzpatrick
from Rattle #76, Summer 2022

Emily Cataneo in Undark:

For many years, psychologists and other scientists believed that deep down, all of humankind experienced the same set of evolutionarily hard-wired emotions. Under this schema, anger, for example, was a concrete, immutable experience that happens deep inside all human beings, the same for a White American sipping coffee in Manhattan as for native Siberian herding reindeer. When Batja Mesquita, a key figure in the development of the field of cultural psychology, started researching emotion more than 30 years ago, she was confident that this model was correct. But Mesquita, who is today a distinguished professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, has come to view emotions through a completely different lens. In her new book, “Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions,” Mesquita makes a provocative argument that when it comes to emotions, we are not all the same. “Are other people angry, happy, and scared, just like you?” she queries. “And are your feelings just like theirs? I do not think so.”

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Ingrid Wickelgren in Quanta:

This time a year ago, Steve Horvath was looking for pangolin DNA. The ancient scaly anteater would be a first for his collection, which was then about 200 mammals strong. “I didn’t have any of that order, which is why I desperately wanted them,” he recalled.

Since the summer of 2017, Horvath, who until recently was an anti-aging researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has spent as much as 10 hours a day penning emails to zoos, museums, aquariums and laboratories. He has attended talks on bats and Tasmanian devils to meet their keepers. He has reached out to the far corners of the world, begging for the DNA of flying foxes, vervet monkeys, minipigs and bowhead whales.

With that vast menagerie of samples, he has built computational clocks that can calculate the age of creatures as diverse as shrews, koalas, zebras, pigs and “every whale you can name,” he said, just by looking at their DNA. But those were merely steps toward the completion of Horvath’s ambitious moonshot of a project: a universal clock that could measure the biological age of any mammal.

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Meghan O’Gieblyn at n+1:

MARGUERITE YOUNG SPENT EIGHTEEN YEARS of her life writing Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, the amount of time it requires to raise a child. She began the novel in 1945, in the shadow of Hiroshima, and proceeded for the next two decades to work on it each day, putting in a reliable eight hours. She wrote in Iowa City, where she taught creative writing and often unnerved her students by pausing to invite Henry James or Emily Dickinson into the classroom. She wrote in New York, from a cramped Greenwich Village apartment filled with dolls, carved angels, and an antique carousel horse. She wrote at Yaddo, where she spent summer evenings drinking with Truman Capote and Carson McCullers and running wild through the moonlit rose garden. FDR gave way to Harry, to Ike, to JFK. She was working on Miss MacIntosh at the time of Jackie Robinson’s first game, and throughout the spring of the McCarthy hearings, and the winter the Beatles first arrived in the US. None of these events appear in the novel, which is not interested in cultural or political landmarks, or, for that matter, linear time.

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