Peter Filkins at Salmagundi:

The role of poet-critics is a special one in any literature. Practitioners of the art, they also reveal its underpinnings, an activity that involves more than a mere thumbs-up-or-down review. Instead, by shaping whom and how we read, their influence can be considerable. Randall Jarrell famously dissected poets in regards to their best, or most often, worst tendencies. T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, took the high road, gazing calmly over the centuries while situating poets amid a cultural landscape over which he sought to reign. Usually, however, the stakes are not that high, for most often the role of the poet-critic is neither to delineate nor disseminate, but rather to illuminate. In such manner the main subject of the poet-critic, versus that of the literary critic or reviewer, is poetry itself. Reviewers tell us what a book of poems is “about”; the poet-critic reminds us of what poetry is and can be.

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Charles De Wolf at Commonweal:

Still, national images are always subject to fluctuation, and at least in the West, historical shifts in the perception of Japan have been particularly dramatic. A much darker view of the country—as a land of ferocious militarists caught up in a death cult—was already fading when I was a boy in the early postwar years. U.S. soldiers returning from Japan showed color slides of Kyoto temples and stately young women in kimonos. Soon Japan was being described as the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes, now firmly committed to democracy and staunchly allied with its former enemy, the United States. Growing interest in Japan and Japanese culture, particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, led to an exaggerated picture of the nation’s strength. Admiration was mixed with misplaced envy, with “Japan Incorporated” now perceived as a new kind of Imperial Japan, with black-suited businessmen replacing sword-wielding warriors. Teaching Japanese and linguistics in a liberal-arts college in upstate New York for two years in the late 1980s, I met students eager to live in Japan long enough to master the language, obtain MBAs from a prestigious American institution, and thereby make their fortunes. Then in the early 1990s, the economic bubble burst. The rising superpower was now suddenly being described with another cliché—the land of the setting sun.

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Sun To God

The children walked.
Then they began to run.
Why are we running, one asked?
No one knew. They ran faster.
They began laughing.
Why are we laughing?
Not one knew. They laughed more.
It was the eve of war but they didn’t know.
The children walked.
The children’s parents walked.
The parents’ parents walked.
Their shadows spilled ahead.
Their shadows lagged behind.
Then, they began to run.
No one was laughing

by Ladan Osman
from The Rumpus,

Pradeep Niroula in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

It just so happens Fuller’s popular legacy is bloated, like the geodesic domes he is most easily identified with today. Alec Nevala-Lee’s new biography, Inventor of the Future, fact-checks Fuller’s legend and then corrects the record. Nevala-Lee himself discovered Fuller through the pages of the counterculture bible, Whole Earth Catalog, and grew up admiring him. But, in writing Fuller’s biography, he resists the hypnotic whirlpool surrounding Fuller. Known to be an unreliable narrator of his own life, Fuller inflated numbers, misrepresented facts, and invented stories of epiphanies and revelations. The legends and myths solidified with their countless retellings — but, really, how dare anyone doubt a sage? He lied about high school grades he never obtained, college courses never taken, daring rescues never made, and those are just the easiest to fact-check. Whenever possible, Nevala-Lee corrects Fuller as he cites him, the embellished version followed by the correct, less glamorous version. At other times, the reader is left wondering if what’s written on the page really happened.

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Nick Lane at Literary Hub:

The idea that mutations cause cancer remains the dominant paradigm. A special issue of Nature from 2020 wrote: “Cancer is a disease of the genome, caused by a cell’s acquisition of somatic mutations in key cancer genes.” Yet over the last decade it has looked as if the juggernaut has rolled too far. It has certainly failed to deliver on its promise in terms of therapies. So why hasn’t the death rate from malignant cancer changed since 1971?

The oncogene paradigm is not actually wrong, but neither is it the whole truth. Oncogenes and tumor-suppressor genes certainly do mutate, and they certainly can drive cancer, but the context is far more important than the paradigm might imply. We are not immune to dogmas even today, and the idea that cancer is a disease of the genome is too close to dogma. Biology is not only about information. Just as human delinquency cannot be blamed on individuals only, but partly reflects the society in which we live, so the effects of oncogenes said to cause cancer are not set in stone, but take their meaning from the environment.

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Taylor Dotson in The New Atlantis:

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted impending famine and social collapse driven by overpopulation. He compared the threat to a ticking bomb — the “population bomb.” And the claim that only a few years remain to prevent climate doom has become a familiar refrain. The recent film Don’t Look Up, about a comet barreling toward Earth, is obviously meant as an allegory for climate catastrophe.

But catastrophism fails to capture the complexities of problems that play out over a long time scale, like Covid and climate change. In a tornado or a flood, which are not only undeniably serious but also require immediate action to prevent destruction, people drop political disputes to do what is necessary to save lives. They bring their loved ones to higher ground. They stack sandbags. They gather in tornado shelters. They evacuate. Covid began as a flood in early 2020, but once a danger becomes long and grinding, catastrophism loses its purchase, and more measured public thinking is required.

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Meilan Solly in Smithsonian:

In popular culture, Tudor noblewoman Jane Boleyn is often portrayed as a petty, jealous schemer who played a pivotal role in the downfall of Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives. According to historians and fiction writers alike, Jane (also known as Viscountess or Lady Rochford) provided damning testimony that sent her husband, George, and his sister Anne to the executioner’s block on charges of adultery and incest in May 1536.

This betrayal—supposedly motivated by her distaste for George and jealousy over his close relationship with Anne—has tainted Jane’s reputation for centuries, with one Elizabethan writer labeling her a “wicked wife, accuser of her own husband, even to the seeking of his own blood,” who acted “more to be rid of him than of true ground against him.”

More here.

David Frum in The Atlantic:

You might think that the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago yesterday would provide a welcome opportunity for a Trump-weary Republican Party. This would be an entirely postpresidential scandal for Donald Trump. Unlike his two impeachments, this time any legal jeopardy is a purely personal Trump problem. Big donors and Fox News management have been trying for months to nudge the party away from Trump. Here was the perfect chance. Just say “No comment” and let justice take its course.

But that was not to be.

The former president has discovered a new test of power: using his own misconduct to compel party leaders to rally to him. One by one, they have executed the ritual of submission: Kevin McCarthy, Marco Rubio, even the  would-be Trump replacer Ron DeSantis. Maybe they’re inwardly hoping the FBI will do for them what they are too weak and frightened to do for themselves. But outwardly, they are all indignation and threats of retribution

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Dustin Illingworth at Poetry Magazine:

For artists, middle age is freighted with aesthetic drama. For poets, it’s also often a period of formal metamorphoses. Midlife crisis is a term too loaded with risible associations to be useful here. The transformation seems more a matter of taking inventory, the poet alighting on a doubt or an intuition and having a good look around. Evolutions during this period are frequent and substantial: the seriocomic alibi of Brazil in Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel (1965), the plastic pharmacopoeia of Frederick Seidel’s Sunrise (1979), Les Murray’s confessional word machines in Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), and Karen Solie’s eschewing of the hard-luck plains in The Caiplie Caves (2019). Each represents a significant departure written during the poet’s middle years. Here the provisional conclusions of the early work lie exhausted, and the delights and disappointments of a late style are as yet undisclosed. Such an interim invites its own risks and abdications. It is simultaneously a little death and a return to life.

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Najee Olya at the LARB:

Derbew’s book arrives at a pivotal moment in classical studies. The past years have seen debates on the whiteness of the discipline and calls to burn the field down. The very term “classics” has come under fire for its perceived elitism and opacity, with eminent departments (including Berkeley’s) abandoning the name. Some have criticized the field’s intense focus on ancient Greek and Latin at the expense of archaeology, the ancient Mediterranean outside Greece and Rome, and the interdisciplinarity that forms the foundation of research like Derbew’s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, attempts to broaden the boundaries of the discipline have drawn fire from some quarters. The recent reworking of Princeton’s undergraduate language requirements in classics, for example, has become grist for the culture warrior’s mill. Yet what Sarah Derbew has accomplished is a testament to the kind of innovative work one can do by combining traditional philological rigor with fresh and novel thinking.

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Siobhan Roberts in The New York Times:

Humans, frogs and many other widely studied animals start as a single cell that immediately divides again and again into separate cells. In crickets and most other insects, initially just the cell nucleus divides, forming many nuclei that travel throughout the shared cytoplasm and only later form cellular membranes of their own. In 2019, Stefano Di Talia, a quantitative developmental biologist at Duke University, studied the movement of the nuclei in the fruit fly and showed that they are carried along by pulsing flows in the cytoplasm — a bit like leaves traveling on the eddies of a slow-moving stream.

But some other mechanism was at work in the cricket embryo. The researchers spent hours watching and analyzing the microscopic dance of nuclei: glowing nubs dividing and moving in a puzzling pattern, not altogether orderly, not quite random, at varying directions and speeds, neighboring nuclei more in sync than those farther away. The performance belied a choreography beyond mere physics or chemistry.

“The geometries that the nuclei come to assume are the result of their ability to sense and respond to the density of other nuclei near to them,” Dr. Extavour said. Dr. Di Talia was not involved in the new study but found it moving. “It’s a beautiful study of a beautiful system of great biological relevance,” he said.

More here.

Wafik El-Deiry in The Cancer Letter:

Some, including me, may be suffering from Chronic Password Fatigue Syndrome (CPFS would be the acronym). Scientific publishing, peer review and paywalls are a very problematic area that contributes to disparities around the world, among other disparities in research and clinical oncology that I have previously pointed out. Irreproducibility of scientific results has gotten lots of attention, although real solutions have yet to address the problem. As one thinks about how we got here, it helps to have lived through the evolution and to have a foot in both medicine and science. Actually, more than a foot. What follows is opinion but maybe it will help connect some dots.

In the mid- to late-1990s, HIPAA privacy rules came on the scene, due to efforts by Hillary Clinton and others. Having completed medical school in Miami, medicine and oncology training at Johns Hopkins, and having started a faculty position at University of Pennsylvania before HIPAA, I can assure anyone reading this that there was no major deluge of privacy violations.

There were some anecdotes where some nosy people looked at health records of celebrities, and there was some concern by the early- to mid-1990’s that genetic information may be used against people who would be discriminated against by employers or insurance companies. But there has been a law against genetic discrimination, and it’s a good law, separate from HIPAA. Hillary meant well, but no one anticipated the downside of HIPAA.

More here.

Apoorva Tadepalli in The Nation:

On April 3, 1911, Edna St. Vincent Millay took her first lover. She was 19 years old, and she engaged herself to this man with a ring that “came to me in a fortune-cake” and was “the symbol of all earthly happiness.” Millay had just graduated from high school and had taken charge of running the household while her mother worked as a traveling nurse. She fixed her younger sisters dinner, washed and mended all their clothes, and entertained their guests. Her lover had no name and no body; he was a figment she’d conjured up to help her get through the stress and loneliness of being a teenage caretaker. This first lover, her “shadow,” is not often recounted among the many others she later had, but Millay had various ways of making these exhausting days of her early adulthood endlessly charming and alive. In one note to her lover, she describes the chafing dish she served her siblings’ dinner on, which she called James, and jokes, “Why don’t you come over some evening and have something on ‘James’—doesn’t that sound dreadful—‘have something on James’!”

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Robin Fields in Undark:

In the U.S., public health agencies generally don’t test sewage for polio. Instead, they wait for people to show up sick in doctor’s offices or hospitals — a reactive strategy that can give this stealthy virus more time to circulate silently through the community before it is detected.

In New York, the first sign of trouble surfaced when a young man in Rockland County sought medical treatment for weakness and paralysis in June. By the time tests confirmed he had polio, nearly a month had passed.

Because the majority of polio infections cause no symptoms, by the time there’s a case of paralysis, 100 to 1,000 infections may have occurred, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases.

“You’re already chasing your tail if you’re going to wait for a case to show up,” she said.

More here.

Francis Fukuyama in Persuasion:

Many people have recognized the centrality of polarization and offered solutions for how to get out of it. Among these are: institutional changes, especially to our electoral laws, that would restructure the incentives under which politicians operate; the growth of a third, centrist party that grabs the middle ground from the extreme wings of the existing two; and grassroots movements to build moderation and understanding from the bottom up. All of these will be important components of depolarization, but none of them will be sufficient by themselves or take place soon enough to solve the problem.

The path out of polarization needs to be a political one, given the nature of our democratic system: that is, a realigning election in which one party decisively wins control of both houses of Congress and the presidency and holds on to power through two or three electoral cycles. These realignments are rare, but in conjunction with the other pathways suggested may be in reach in the coming years if one of the two parties plays its cards right.

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Emergence

I call out for Water Woman, my mother
I call out for Earth Woman, my mother
I emerge from below the earth’s surface
I emerge from within sacred darkness
that cradles my mother Earth Woman’s heart
I emerge at the House-Made-of-Thought
I emerge at the House-Made-of-Language
I am home
I am home

by Manny Loley
from The Poetry Foundations
translated by the author from the Navajo

Notes:
Audio version performed by the author
Read the Navajo-language version by the author, “Hasísná.”

Nat Watkins in The New Atlantis:

I have worked in restaurants, lived on sustenance homesteads, volunteered for aquaponics and permaculture farms, and harvested at food forests from Hawaii to Texas. I invariably come home with a crate of spare cuttings and leftovers that no one else wants. My pockets are often full of uneaten complimentary bread.

This is possible because I live in a country where 30 to 40 percent of food produced is never eaten, where the average family throws out $1,500 worth of food every year, and where a typical restaurant discards about a half-pound of food per meal.

This is an astonishing historical anomaly. In almost any other time and place in human history, someone would look at the very same waste and say, “Looks delicious!” Some of the world’s most common dishes — like chilis, soups, and casseroles — were once common ways of using leftovers. A culture of scarcity created delicious food, often literally out of cultures growing on food: yeasts, molds, and bacteria. We would have no cheese, bread, and beer without them. By contrast, our culture of abundance is also a culture of waste, partly because we have forgotten the ways we used to cook.

More here.