Haley Mlotek at The Paris Review:

I am against August. When I try to explain this position, some people instinctively want to argue. These people seem to love the beach beyond all reason, to have never suffered a yellowed pit stain on a favorite white T-shirt in their life, and to eagerly welcome all thirty-one days of August as though they are a reward for a year well-lived rather than a final trial before the beginning of another. These are people who vacation with peace of mind. To them, I say: Go away. To the people who agree with me, I say: Go on.

Many friends who share my malaise compare the experience of the month to the Sunday feeling of knowing work or routine is imminent after a break. I don’t agree exactly, but I recognize the comparison. In August summer ends, and so whether or not you are done with it you must accept that it is finished.

more here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He’s been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.

But what is “long-termism”? I’m unusually well-placed to answer that, because a few days ago a copy of What We Owe The Future showed up on my doorstep.

More here.

Takehiko Kambayashi in The Christian Science Monitor:

On a sweltering day in July, Yoshii Aya, still reeling from her bitter election defeat a few months prior, arrived in Kyoto with a stack of leftover business cards tailored for that bygone race. During a three-day political training camp for women trying to break into Japan’s male-dominated politics, she coyly passed them out as a “memento of my candidacy.” Had she won the April election, Ms. Yoshii would have become one of two women sitting on the 20-member city council in Miyoshi, Japan. Instead, she spent her summer reflecting on the loss, and learning campaign financing and social media strategy along with 15 other training camp participants. Ms. Yoshii says she felt empowered by connecting with like-minded women at the camp, which was organized by Tokyo’s Academy for Gender Parity.

The event comes less than a year before the 2023 local elections, and as Japan continues to exhibit one of the lowest rates of female legislature representation in the world. During last month’s upper house race, a record 35 women gained seats in Japan’s parliament, raising the overall ratio of women in the chamber to 25.8% from 23.1%. It’s the kind of incremental progress that has Japanese women’s patience wearing thin. Many point out that the United States now has its first female vice president, and New Zealand and Taiwan both have female heads of state.

Increasingly, women are channeling that frustration into cooperation, forming solidarity groups and campaigning for the advancement of fellow female politicians.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

A 6-year-old boy began hearing voices coming from the walls and the school intercom telling him to hurt himself and others. He saw ghosts, aliens in trees, and colored footprints. Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich, MD, a psychiatrist at Boston Children’s Hospital, put him on antipsychotic medications and the frightening hallucinations stopped. Another child, at age 4, had hallucinations with monsters, a big black wolf, spiders, and a man with blood on his face.

While children are known for their active imaginations, it’s extremely rare for them to have true psychotic symptoms. Through chromosomal array testing, both children were found to have copy number variants or CNVs, meaning deletions of duplications of chunks of their DNA.

More here.

Morning in the Burned House

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against
the bowl which was melted also.
No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,

their dishes piled beside the sink,
which is beside the woodstove
with its grate and sooty kettle,

every detail clear,
tin cup and rippled mirror.
The day is bright and songless,

the lake is blue, the forest watchful.
In the east a bank of cloud
rises up silently like dark bread.

I can see the swirls in the oilcloth,
I can see the flaws in the glass,
those flares where the sun hits them.

I can’t see my own arms and legs
or know if this is a trap or blessing,
finding myself back here, where everything

in this house has long been over,
kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl,
including my own body,

including the body I had then,
including the body I have now
as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy,

bare child’s feet on the scorched floorboards
(I can almost see)
in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts

and grubby yellow T-shirt
holding my cindery, non-existent,
radiant flesh. Incandescent.

by Margaret Atwood 
from Morning in the Burned House
Houghton Mifflin Co.,
published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart, Inc.

Paul Franz in The Hedgehog Review:

Does anyone still need advice on how not to think like a liberal? Amid widespread doubts on both left and right about the legitimacy of liberal institutions and economic arrangements, it might appear that the new book by Raymond Geuss, an American-born Cambridge University professor of philosophy, has come to tell us how not to do what we have already ceased doing. Yet as Geuss observes, “Some form of liberalism”—with its characteristic emphasis on uncoerced consent and open discussion among notionally free individuals—“is…still the basic framework which structures political, economic, and social thought in the English-speaking world.” So deeply embedded are liberal ideas in our institutions and discourse, he writes, that even when the conditions that gave rise to them have altered, “it can be difficult for someone who does not have a slightly deviant social position or education to get an appropriate cognitive distance from them, and thus to see some of their deficiencies for what they are.” Not Thinking Like a Liberal tells how its author came to acquire such deviancy.

More here.

Tom Ridge and Asha M. George in The New Atlantis:

The Covid-19 pandemic has killed an estimated fifteen million people around the world, ravaged health systems, and destroyed economies. It has also exposed destabilizing divisions at home and abroad, and revealed domestic and global weaknesses in biodefense. The United States alone has seen a million lives lost to the virus and an estimated $16 trillion in economic costs, making it the deadliest pandemic in our history and the costliest catastrophe since the Great Depression. The turmoil and grief Americans have faced reflect their justified frustrations with the government’s ineffectiveness in handling the crisis.

This ineffectiveness also contributed to the extreme politicization of the crisis. Mask mandates were understandably frustrating and lockdowns maddening, and public health and political leaders were flummoxed when it came to basic communication. Our reliance on century-old responses spurred civil and political unrest as the public lost faith in leaders to protect them.

More here.

Jesse Singal in The Spectator:

These campaigns, I know from first- and second-hand experience, almost always involve sociopathic backchannel efforts to cut the victims off from their social and professional networks; anyone who is seen as ‘defending’ them (by questioning the charges or the punishment at all) risks getting subsequently un-personed themselves. So, many people denounce or ignore their friends, rather than sticking up for them.

More here.

Darryl Jones at Culturico:

Cities are, indeed, the opposite of natural ecosystems. Net sinks of energy and materials, they are hot, noisy, poisonous and dangerous. They are constantly changing, often for frivolous or even wasteful reasons. Very few non-human species can cope with such chaos and stay away. Some species, however, see opportunities where others find only disturbance and stress. Cities offer countless productive chances for those willing and able to adapt. Those that take up this challenge share several crucial characteristics, including: already being abundant in the neighbouring landscape (10), having a generalised diet (with granivores being at a great advantage given the ubiquity of feeders)(11), demonstrating innovative foraging capacity and often belonging to groups with proportionally larger brains (12). Clearly, the latter two features go hand in hand.

One additional characteristic, however, can be regarded as a prerequisite for making the first steps into a human-dominated environment: the ability to tolerate the presence of humans.

more here.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett at Literary Review:

She was daughter, sister, wife or mother to five kings and two queens. On her wedding day, her pale blue velvet train was ostensibly held by three princesses of the blood, but so heavily encrusted was it with golden embroidery that a man had to walk concealed beneath it to carry the weight. Such a start in life might seem to presage a pleasant existence of leisure and luxury, but the career of Henrietta Maria, a Bourbon princess by birth and a Stuart queen by marriage, was as full of trouble and strife as the most harrowing of hard-luck case histories.

When she was six months old, her father, King Henri IV of France, was murdered. When she was seven, her eldest brother, who believed himself to be God’s representative on earth, had her mother arrested and banished from court.

more here.

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

Intelligence – at least according to IQ test scores – is declining across the globe, which won’t surprise anyone who follows the news but doesn’t exactly bode well for the continuing survival on the species. What to do? One suggestion made by this book is that we all connect our brains to neural interfaces which will collect everyone’s thoughts in a massive “super-brain cloud”, the better to sweetly reason ourselves collectively out of disaster. What could possibly go wrong? This isn’t yet feasible anyway, but it is an example of the neuroscientist author’s determined optimism. Her central argument is important and correct: that we have become too used to thinking of intelligence as the private skill of individuals, vying against one another in a neoliberal world of relentless competition. What is needed, especially in an age of irredentist warmongering and climate disaster, is a greater emphasis on our ability to reason together, our “collective intelligence”.

This has been possible, of course, since we gruntingly taught one another how to make flint tools around the cave fire. What does neuroscience add to our understanding of it?

More here.

Lina Zeldovich in Nautilus:

Manish Vira, a urologist at Northwell Health in New York performs prostate biopsy procedures three to five times a week. He inserts 12 needles into specific locations on the prostate gland, identified by MRI images that reveal malignant or suspicious lesions. The samples then go to a pathologist who determines whether cancer is present and how aggressive it is. “It’s a standard protocol,” explains Vira, who is also a chief oncologist at Northwell.

For the past few years, however, that standard protocol had a few extra steps. Now, the biopsy “wash”—a collection of molecules washed off the sample—goes to the research lab of Lloyd Trotman, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who studies what makes these tumors aggressive or aids their metastases. Trotman’s team looks at the tumors’ genomic signatures—their genetic make-up, which can make them more aggressive. They look at the tumors’ microenvironments—the molecules that cancer surrounds itself with. And while researching these factors, they also dig into something that’s rarely looked at in cancer biology: the nervous system and its role in helping tumors spread.

More here.

Swoon

The ear that hears the cardinal
hears in red;

the eye that spots the salmon
sees in wet.

My senses always fall in love:
they spin, swoon;

they lose themselves in one
another’s arms.

Your senses live alone
like bachelors,

like bitter, slanted rhymes whose
marriage is a sham.

They greet the world the way accountants
greet their books.

I tire of such mastery. And yet, my senses
often fail

to let me do the simplest things,
like walk outside.

Invariably, the sun invades
my ears

and terrifies my feet—the angular
assault of Heaven’s

heavy-metal chords.
I cannot hear

to see, cannot see to move.
And so I cling,

As on a listing ship at night,
to the stair-rail.

by David James “DJ” Savarese
from Split This Rock

Stephanie Bastek in The American Scholar:

In pursuit of the natural laws of the universe, human beings have accomplished remarkable things. We’ve outlined the principles of gravity and thermodynamics. We’ve built enormous machines to dig into the deepest parts of the Earth, to understand what happens at the shortest quantum distances, and equally large machines to take pictures of the most distant parts of the cosmos. Still, there remain a number of foundational gaps in our knowledge—gaps that have allowed some wild ideas to take root. Some scientists hypothesize that, with every decision we make, our universe forks into multiverses, that consciousness arises from the quantum movements of microtubules, that the universe itself is conscious, or that there is this cat in a box and not in a box at the same time. These ideas, and related big questions about the nature of the universe, are the subject of particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book, Existential Physics. In it, she argues that many of these far-out theories, put forward without evidence, are on par with religious belief. Physics, she contends, does not yet provide the answers to all of our questions—and it’s doubtful that it ever will.

More here.

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

Inside a soundproofed crate sits one of the world’s worst neural networks. After being presented with an image of the number 6, it pauses for a moment before identifying the digit: zero. Peter McMahon, the physicist-engineer at Cornell University who led the development of the network, defends it with a sheepish smile, pointing out that the handwritten number looks sloppy. Logan Wright, a postdoc visiting McMahon’s lab from NTT Research, assures me that the device usually gets the answer right, but acknowledges that mistakes are common. “It’s just this bad,” he said.

Despite the underwhelming performance, this neural network is a groundbreaker. The researchers tip the crate over, revealing not a computer chip but a microphone angled toward a titanium plate that’s bolted to a speaker. Other neural networks operate in the digital world of 0s and 1s, but this device runs on sound.

More here.

Ryan Kemp in The Hedgehog Review:

We’ve got the Internet all wrong. Its raison d’être is not, as Mark Zuckerberg claims for his own corporation, to “strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” To the contrary, the Internet is a pernicious disease. It is—as Justin E.H. Smith argues in his new book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is—thoroughly “anti-human.”

The problem is straightforward: The Internet as we know and use it in our daily lives (the realm of Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.) significantly limits our capacity for freedom in all the various and complex senses of the term. We might think about the proliferation of action-constraining algorithms and ubiquitous surveillance. Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, admits that these things undermine our well-being, but he focuses instead on the so-called crisis of attention: the idea that the Internet is ferociously adept at cultivating distraction.

More here.