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Lola Butcher at Undark:

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the organization now called March of Dimes, with the goal of wiping out polio, the viral disease that caused his paraplegia. Just 17 years later, clear evidence arrived that Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was effective — the first step in the near-total eradication of polio around the world. In the organization’s 1955 annual report, its top executive called the vaccine a “planned miracle.”

In “Planning Miracles: How to Prevent Future Pandemics,” science journalist Jon Cohen introduces readers to biologists, veterinarians, epidemiologists, and others who are trying for another miracle: to blunt pandemics, or even prevent them altogether.

Cohen, a longtime correspondent for Science magazine, traveled the globe to document the vast amount of work being done to identify emerging threats, along with the vaccines and other containment practices to stop their spread. The sheer volume of effort is a reason for hope. But polio had one highly visible attribute — a world leader partially paralyzed by the disease — that our viral diseases today do not have.

More here.

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Dwight Garner at the NY Times:

Jack Kerouac’s only child, Jan Kerouac, lived hard and died young. She was 44 when she succumbed to complications of liver failure in Albuquerque in 1996. She met her famous father, the author of “On the Road” and the avatar of the Beat generation, only twice.

She was born in 1952, shortly after her parents, Kerouac and his second wife, Joan Haverty, separated. At the time, her father was penniless and all but unknown. The publication of “On the Road” was still five years off. He didn’t feel ready to have a child. He attempted to deny paternity and never publicly acknowledged his daughter before his own death in 1969. Jan lugged a famous last name through her short life, and it was both a blessing and a curse. Father and daughter looked alike, and there was a continuity of soul between them. She inherited Jack’s imperative toward motion, and she too became a writer, publishing three semi-autobiographical novels: “Baby Driver” (1981), “Train Song” (1988) and the unfinished “Parrot Fever” (2005), published posthumously. Each has long been out of print.

That changes now with the reissue of “Baby Driver,” the most sharply realized of her books.

more here.

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J. Hoberman at the LRB:

Now 82, Crumb is America’s greatest cartoonist. Inimitable and inventive as Herriman and Gould were, neither had his range, nor his independence. Crumb, who developed a rounded, cuddly style reminiscent of Depression-era cartoons, is also a great draughtsman, with a capacity to render fastidiously detailed naturalistic drawings. Technique alone cannot account for his eminence, however. Crumb is both an observant satirist and a self-aware student of his own drives. His grasp of American vernacular and his sardonic humour suggest a comparison with Mark Twain as well as with Twain’s admirer, the proudly prejudiced social critic H.L. Mencken. Rambunctious and often offensive, Crumb draws freely on pre-existing racial and gender stereotypes, and always draws in the first person – typically representing himself as a scrawny, misanthropic loner, obsessed with sexually dominating (or being dominated by) Amazonian women. Unlike any previous comic-strip artist (but not unlike a stand-up comedian), Crumb is his own flawed persona. ‘The Many Faces of R. Crumb’, a two-page spread produced at the height of his powers in 1972, begins with a ridiculous image of the artist masturbating to one of his own comics and ejaculating out of his studio window, then goes on to depict him as a penitent saint, a fascist creep, a self-centred SOB, a sentimental slob, a rugged individualist and a guilt-ridden crybaby.

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Yascha Mounk in Persuation:

We are at that strange stage in the adoption curve of a revolutionary technology at which two seemingly contradictory things are true at the same time: It has become clear that artificial intelligence will transform the world. And the technology’s immediate impact is still sufficiently small that it just about remains possible to pretend that this won’t be the case.

Nowhere is that more clear than on college campuses.

The vast majority of assignments that were traditionally used to assess—and, more importantly, challenge—students can now easily be outsourced to ChatGPT. This is true for the essay, the most classic assignment students complete in humanities and social science courses. While the best students can still outperform AI models, a combination of technological progress and rampant grade inflation means that students who are content with an A- or perhaps a B+ can safely cheat their way to graduation, even at top universities.

More here.

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From Nature:

Since the 1800s, cancer surgeons have known that tumours can spread along the nerves. Today, the burgeoning field of cancer neuroscience is starting to reveal the true impact of the disease’s interaction with the nervous system. The phenomenon, known as perineural invasion, is common in certain types of cancer. “When treating patients with head and neck cancers, I see invasion into nerves in about half of cases,” says Moran Amit, professor of head and neck surgery at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “It’s an ominous feature. It puts patients in a higher risk category and requires us to escalate treatment.”

In a 2020 study, Amit and colleagues showed how a tumour can modify nearby nerves and change their behaviour¹. To further explore the impact of perineural invasion on treatment, they have now examined nerves in tumour samples taken from skin cancer patients participating in an immunotherapy trial.

More here.

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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

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Robert Pinsky in the New York Times:

“The Poems of Seamus Heaney” amplifies a reader’s understanding of the poet’s accomplishment by putting the meticulous grandeur of each book into the context of uncollected and unpublished poems, many of them excellent and all of them illuminating. With a lucid, chronological format for the Contents page, the volume’s editors invite readers to sample the honorable outtakes and preliminaries, the range-finding preparatory studies, that underlie for instance the haunted vision of “North” (1975) or the magisterial yet intimate scope of “Station Island” (1984).

Early on, the quite young Heaney had already mastered his distinctive combination of observant, nearly prosaic reporting with the chewable consonant clusters and ecstatic syntax of Gerard Manley Hopkins — as in “Digging,” the famous, beloved poem that opens his debut volume, “Death of a Naturalist” (1966), published when Heaney was not yet 30.

More here.

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Raymond Zhong, Jason Gulley and Bora Erden in the New York Times:

The ice of the Himalayas is wasting away. Glacier-draped slopes are going bare. The ground atop the mountain range, which sprawls across five Asian countries, is slumping and sliding as the ice beneath it — ice that held the land together — disappears. Meltwater is puddling in the valleys below, forming deep lakes.

As humans warm the planet, so much ice has been erased from around Mount Everest that the elevation at base camp in Nepal, which sits on a melting glacier, has dropped more than 220 feet since the 1980s.

But this loss is not unfolding gradually.

Often it begins slowly, imperceptibly — and then it happens all at once, with catastrophic consequences for the people below. That was how it went on a warm August day last year.

More here.

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Blake Scholl at Big Think:

These programs share a common origin: a Cold War-era desire in the West to demonstrate technological superiority over the Soviet Union. Apollo was, of course, championed at the highest levels of the U.S. government and consumed 4% of the federal budget at its peak. Concorde was a joint venture between the French and British governments, established via treaty in 1962.

Both programs ultimately delivered tech demos — and both threw off technologies that might otherwise have taken longer to invent — but neither paved a path toward an enduring future of space exploration or supersonic travel. Both pursued glory without regard to cost or practicality.

Glory is a dangerous goal, and when it is pursued without regard to pragmatic utility, much damage is done.

More here.

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Tara Isabella Burton at the Hedgehog Review:

It started with the memes. People in the online know were all reading the tweets of Bronze Age Pervert. Quoting from neo-Nietzschean joke-manifesto Bronze Age Mindset was a sign, on what was still in 2016 called the alt-right, that you not only valued strength and masculine vigor and the annihilation of all liberal and feminizing impulses from the sclerosis of the liberal-bureaucratic-democratic establishment but also that you could speak the cant of the scene. It was the first Trump administration, and half the alt-right was high on the promise of meme magic—the tantalizing notion that a group of posters on 4chan had, implausibly, harnessed the latent energies of the universe and the powers of Internet vibes to meme Donald Trump into office. Neopagan vitalism was as sexy, in the recesses of the Internet characterized by avatars of cartoon frogs, as the mirror-image figure of the “resistance witch” on the anti-Trump left.

But memes, as they tend to do, shape reality in their image. Somewhere between Trump’s shock victory in 2016 and the inevitability of his return, vitalism became not merely a pithy means of online identity-formation but a renascent political and, indeed, spiritual project.

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Estelle Tang in The Guardian:

The very first sentence of Arabelle Sicardi’s book, The House of Beauty, reads: “When I tell you that beauty is a monster, I need you to know it is my favorite kind.” Sicardi, who splits their time between New York City and Los Angeles, has a love/hate relationship with the beauty industry. A writer and consultant working in beauty and tech, their projects include a beauty newsletter, a creative collective called Perfumed Pages and a non-profit arts project called the Museum of Nails Foundation. In their new book, they examine the impact of the $450bn beauty industry – the pretty and the very ugly.

Sicardi has written about beauty as “a terrorizing force” for their whole career, including a stint as a beauty editor at BuzzFeed, which proved a spiky learning experience. “I wrote a story critical of an advertising campaign and then got flak for it,” they recall. “I decided to leave because I didn’t want to deal with the politics and the insincerity of being told I can do something, but then having my work deleted. That type of situation still happens very regularly to writers for publications to this day,” they said.

More here.

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Jeffrey Kluger in Time Magazine:

It’s been a long time since Alice Charton got a good look at a human face. There are plenty of people moving through her world, of course—her husband, her friends, her doctors, her neighbors—but judging just by what she can see, she’d have to take it as an article of faith that any one person was there at all. It was five years ago that the 87-year-old retired schoolteacher, living in a suburb of Paris, first noticed her eyesight failing, with a point in the middle of her field of vision going hazy, muddy, and dim. Soon that point grew into a spot, and the spot into a blotch—until it became impossible for her to recognize people, read a book, or navigate unfamiliar places on the streets.

The cause of the problem was age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a disease that afflicts some 200 million people worldwide and involves a breakdown of the cells in the retina, particularly in the area known as the macula, which is responsible for central vision. AMD does not typically cause blindness, but vision can be severely impaired. As for a cure for AMD? Nonexistent.

More here.

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Mark Iosifescu at n+1:

For my money, though, the book is most interesting for those aforementioned moments of tonal whiplash, scenes wherein big shifts of register or reference point are undertaken with remarkably little in the way of narrative scaffolding. Shadow Ticket, in addition to being extremely fun and almost indecently readable, is also replete with edges left conspicuously unsanded, a combination that might go some way toward frustrating or at least reframing the prevailing misconception of Pynchon as a willfully difficult, high-maximalist, paranoid outsider-recluse. It’s a reputation that has obscured a clear view of the author’s work in one form or another for the entirety of a long career, alternately burnishing the image of an enigmatic hipster sage or offering up a strawman for the excesses and overreaches of the showoff tradition he supposedly epitomizes. It’s made the name “Thomas Pynchon” into a byword for inaccessible genius, the Trystero horn into an enduring stall-wall Sharpie tag, and Gravity’s Rainbow into a punchline on The O.C., but, meanwhile, the, you know, actual books? Those have drifted considerably from these mythic calcifications, gradually resolving into a scope and style more characterized by shaggy plotting, political generosity, and out-and-out sweetness than anything resembling the lit-bro hazing rituals that some contemporary readers have been conditioned to expect.

more here.

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Yoga Relationship

—To Thine own Self
Write the Bloody Truth—

I will help you grow and you will help
me grow. I won’t need you to behave
in a certain way to make my ego feel
comfortable. And  you will not make me
behave in a way to satisfy your ego. I
won’t make you be anyone you’re not.
And I will love you for who
you are. I will tell you the truth.
I will tell it to you lovingly.
I will tell it to you so you can hear me.
I will tell it to you even though it will hurt
you. I will tell it to you even though you
probably won’t like it. I will tell it to you
because I love you that much. So when
you are being an asshole I will tell you.
In exchange for this I expect you to do the
same for me.

by Nancy Slonim Aronie
from Writing from the Heart
Hyperion, NY 1998

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Naomi Alderman in The Guardian:

What we can see from the last two information crises is that they involve enormous leaps forward in knowledge and understanding, but also a period of intense instability. Following the invention of writing, the world was filled with new, beautiful ideas and new moralities. And there were also new ways to misunderstand each other: the possibility of misreading someone entered the world, as did the possibility of warfare motivated by different interpretations of texts. After the invention of the printing press came the Enlightenment, an explosion of new scientific knowledge and discovery. But before that period, Europe had plunged into the Reformation, which led to the destruction of statues and other artworks and many institutions that had been working at least adequately until then. And, to get to the heart of the matter, the Reformation in Europe meant a lot of people got burned at the stake, or killed in other terrible ways.

More here.

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Dan Fox and Richard Hodson in Nature:

Artificial intelligence is booming. Technology companies are pouring trillions of dollars into research and infrastructure, and millions of people now interact with AI in one form or another. But what is it all for?

To find out, Nature spoke to six people at the forefront of AI development — people who are driving the technology’s development and adoption, and those who are preparing society to adapt to its rapid rise.

In this video series, they describe their greatest ambitions for the technology, their expectations of where and how it will be adopted in the coming years, and their concerns for the future.

More here.

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