Ed Simon in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

INCLUDED AMONG THE great literary felines would be the ninth-century Pangur Bán, written about by an Irish monk of Reichenau Abbey who enthused that his pet was “the master of the work which he does every day”; the witch-queen Grimalkin in William Baldwin’s 1561 novel, Beware the Cat, where “birds and beasts” have “the power of reason”; Montaigne’s kitten of which he asked, “When I play with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?”; Dr. Johnson’s beloved Hodge, of whom Boswell wrote that the great lexicographer “used to go out and buy oysters [for him], lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature”; and of course T. S. Eliot’s splendiferous Mr. Mistoffelees.

By my estimation, however, no cat is quite as divine as Jeoffry, the subject of Christopher Smart’s brilliant, beautiful, and exceedingly odd 1763 masterpiece, Jubilate Agno, written while the English poet was convalescing in St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics. Smart notes that his only companion, Jeoffry, is the “servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. […] For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary. / For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life. / For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him. / For he is of the Tribe of Tiger.”

Decades before William Blake and a century before Walt Whitman, Smart had unshackled poetry from its formal constraints, though with little of the self-seriousness of the former and none of the self-absorption of the latter.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Researchers have used AlphaFold — the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) network — to predict the structures of more than 200 million proteins from some 1 million species, covering almost every known protein on the planet.

The data dump is freely available on a database set up by DeepMind, the London-based AI company, owned by Google, that developed AlphaFold, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL–EBI), an intergovernmental organization near Cambridge, UK.

More here.

John Mueller at The Cato Institute:

Some analysts now fear that the long decline of interstate war may be about to reverse. In an article for The Economist published shortly before the Russian invasion, the Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari declared the decline in international war to be “the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilization.” But he also worried that a war in Ukraine could bring about “a return to the law of the jungle.” In an essay published in May in Foreign Affairs, the political scientist Tanisha Fazal expressed concern that Putin’s war could result in “an increase in not only the incidence but also the brutality of war.”

But five months into the current phase of the war in Ukraine, it seems more likely that Putin’s venture will reinforce and revitalize the aversion to and disdain for international war. The key objective is not so much about winning as making sure that the country that started the war is far worse off than if it had not done so. That has already been substantially achieved.

More here.

What To Expect When Traveling with Your Arab Wife

When they ask you
How many days were you away?
Don’t say two weeks
They want to know the exact number
Tell them 11 days
When they ask you
Do you have any food
in your luggage?
Don’t say no
Tell them we have a sealed package
of dates in our suitcase
When they ask what you do
Don’t say I’m an architect
Give them your exact title

Are you listening?
How many days were we away?
 11 days
Do you remember when we got married?
  A long time ago
Tell them the exact date

When they search our bags
Don’t be upset when they pull out your underwear
They’ve done it to me before
–even the dirty ones
When they hold them up high
Don’t worry
They will drop them and then you can pick them up
–but only when they tell you to
When they open my lipsticks one by one
Don’t worry, they won’t break them
I can pack them after they unpack them
When they take us into that room
Don’t worry
They will let us leave eventually
When they take away our cellphones
Don’t worry
They will give them back
When they are rude
Don’t worry
they are like that to all of us

Read more »

Alexander and Conrad in BBC:

The doom-laden headlines of our times would seem to indicate there are two futures on offer.

In one, an Orwellian authoritarianism prevails. Fearful in the face of compounding crises – climate, plagues, poverty, hunger – people accept the bargain of the “Strong Man”: their leader’s protection in return for unquestioning allegiance as “subjects”. What follows is the abdication of personal power, choice, or responsibility.

In the other, everyone is a “consumer” and self-reliance becomes an extreme sport. The richest have their boltholes in New Zealand and a ticket for Mars in hand. The rest of us strive to be like them, fending for ourselves as robots take jobs and as the competition for ever-scarcer resources intensifies. The benefits of technology, whether artificial intelligence, bio-, neuro- or agrotechnology, accrue to the wealthiest – as does all the power in society. This is a future shaped by the whims of Silicon Valley billionaires. While it sells itself on personal freedoms, the experience for most is exclusion: a top-heavy world of haves and haves-nots.

Yet despite the bandwidth and airwaves devoted to these twin dystopias, there’s another trajectory: we call it the “citizen future”.

More here.

Max Kozlov in Nature:

Researchers have restored¹ circulation and cellular activity in the vital organs of pigs, such as the heart and brain, one hour after the animals died. The research challenges the idea that cardiac death — which occurs when blood circulation and oxygenation stops — is irreversible, and raises ethical questions about the definition of death. The work follows 2019 experiments² by the same scientists in which they revived the disembodied brains of pigs four hours after the animals died, calling into question the idea that brain death is final. The latest experiments are “stunning”, says Nita Farahany, a neuroethicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Although this study is preliminary, she says it suggests that some perceived limitations of the human body might be overcome in time.

In the work, published on 3 August in Nature¹, researchers connected pigs that had been dead for one hour to a system called OrganEx that pumped a blood substitute throughout the animals’ bodies. The solution — containing the animals’ blood and 13 compounds such as anticoagulants — slowed the decomposition of the bodies and quickly restored some organ function, such as heart contraction and activity in the liver and kidney. Although OrganEx helped to preserve the integrity of some brain tissue, researchers did not observe any coordinated brain activity that would indicate the animals had regained any consciousness or sentience.

More here.

Tom Pepinsky in his own blog:

Does language shape thought? Do the languages we speak affect how we live our lives? These are some of the oldest questions in the cognitive and social sciences, and most everybody reading these words probably has thought about them. These also speak to core questions in the philosophy of mind and language, on the role of language in intermediating between our brains and the world around us.

An emerging literature in the social sciences has given these questions renewed prominence by arguing that language systematically affects people’s values, beliefs, and behaviors. And in a forthcoming article in Language (preprint here [PDF]), I subject this prominent new literature to conceptual and empirical scrutiny. What follows is an expanded summary of my argument, accompanied by a discussion of why it matters, based loosely on this Twitter thread.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The idea of an “interest rate” might seem mundane and practical, in comparison to our usual topics around here, but there is a profound philosophical idea lurking in the background: if you lend me money now against the promise of me paying you back more in the future, I am relating the different values that a certain sum has to me at different moments in time. Traditionally, the interest rates set by the government have been a major tool for influencing the economy, but in recent decades they have increasingly fallen near zero. John Quiggin relates this change to the shift from manufacturing to an information economy, and we talk about what that means for the public interest in having information be reliable and widely available. And yes, there is a bit about crypto.

More here.

L. Benjamin Rolsky in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

INTELLECTUAL HISTORIES OF recent American public life typically foreground disintegration in order to capture the mood of a country on the brink. These moments are not only about the United States’s ongoing culture wars or its “hyper-politics” but also evidence of how the nation explains social and political change to itself with a turn of phrase or analytical framework.

For historian Gary Gerstle, such moments of rupture and conceptual birth are fundamental to understanding what he calls “the neoliberal order” in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. He is less interested in partisan explanations and more concerned with developing an academic category for measuring political shifts over multiple election cycles, arguing that there have been two phases of the American polity: the New Deal order and the neoliberal order. Party affiliation dating back to the 1920s becomes relative once compared to more capacious neoliberal assumptions shared by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in the name of economic freedom.

More here.

Zeynab Warsame at The Believer:

The craft of knitting is such a prominent literary act that a subgenre of literature—called “knit-lit”—has formed. Within this subgenre, there are several motifs, including what is colloquially referred to as “the sweater curse”: the idea that when someone knits a garment for their love interest, the act will seal the demise of their relationship. Knitting a garment by hand is a deeply intimate act, which perhaps explains why authors are attracted to its symbolic potential. Knitting also has an unassuming quality. The act evokes peace and domestic tranquility, and it is often employed to convey these sentiments. A knitter can become a vehicle for change, too, propelling a story forward through their handicraft. A character may weave intricate narrative webs, sometimes suggesting warmth or safety, and other times disguising the places where heartbreak, deceit, and evil may lie. If you look for them, you’ll find them—somebody in the corner, knitting a hat or a scarf, quite possibly something containing the depths of their affections or, just as probable, the names of the people they wish dead.

more here.

John Gray at The New Statesman:

Wait for tea to cool before drinking it, avoid all alcohol, crowds, reading, writing letters, wear warm clothes in the evening, eat rhubarb from time to time, have a napkin at breakfast, remember notebook.” These memoranda, as recorded in Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin, capture the regime Friedrich Nietzsche followed in that city, in the last of his many lodgings during his wanderings across Europe. He loved long walks, but any interruption of routine was as toxic for him as bad food, so he avoided fashionable cafés and promenades. Even a bookshop was off-limits for fear of bumping into an acquaintance who might want to talk about Hegel. He needed, above all, a quiet life.

Nietzsche had cultivated the habits of an invalid for many years. Migraines, myopia, insomnia and nervous exhaustion pursued him from his twenties.

more here.

In the Monastery Garden

—for Hopi Chief Dan Evehema 1893-1999

Thousands of miles from your mesa, I walk this garden.
Earth Mother
Indigo up to my knees will make dye.
August makes black dye sunflowers bow their heads.
Sky Father.
I brush tulsi, “holy basil” used in Ayurveda, perfuming the air.
Sun.
You knew these squash, corn and beans well.
You knew the prophecies and tried to reveal them to us.
Masaw, guardian spirit, here in the burdock’s plumes
that sends purple wisps into the hot wind
bringing change to us, but not to you.
Tonight, I will return here under the Moon.
Kachinas, invisible but felt, have something yet to teach me.
After harvest, before winter, we will dye new kasaya to wear
So many gods.
So many ways to pray.

by Lianna Wright
from Poets Online Archive

Alex Marshall in The New York Times:

With so many lives affected by cancer — in the United States alone, about 40 percent will receive a cancer diagnosis during their lives — it might be understandable if the disease were a common and compelling subject for museum shows. Despite the statistics, major exhibitions on cancer have been few and far between. But on Wednesday, “Cancer Revolution: Science, Innovation and Hope” opened at the Science Museum in London. The show, running through January 2023, is one of the first big institutional efforts to tell the full story of the disease and its treatment. The exhibition includes objects linked to early surgeries — which were conducted without anaesthetic — as well as displays showing how artificial intelligence and virtual reality are now helping doctors detect and treat the disease.

More here.

David Shiffman in Delancey Place:

The ripple effects that come from the removal or diminished size of a predator’s population:
“Sometimes the ecological effects resulting from changes in predator populations ripple through the food chain. This ripple effect is called a trophic cascade. The classic example of a trophic cascade comes from the Pacific Northwest. When orca whales began to consume more and more sea otters in the kelp forests of the North Pacific, it wasn’t surprising that sea otter populations declined. But the plot thickened! One of sea otters’ favorite foods is the sea urchin, which they consume by adorably crushing them with rocks on their bellies. The population declines of sea otters then resulted in sea urchin preda­tion release. The increasing sea urchin population ate more and more of their preferred food, seaweeds called kelp, resulting in kelp declines. All of this was caused by a change at the top of the food web. Even though area whales and otters don’t eat kelp, changes in how orcas interact with otters significantly affected kelp. And that was bad for everything that lived in the kelp forest.

“The most famous example of a trophic cascade in a terrestrial ecosys­tem occurred in Yellowstone National Park as a result of wolf declines. Fewer wolves meant an increase in the wolf prey population, including giant herbivores like elk. More elk meant more grazing, and perhaps most impactfully, grazing in areas where elk were previously afraid to graze, such as riverbanks that restricted their ability to run away from a predator. This led to major disruptions in a unique Yellowstone ecosys­tem called an aspen forest. The Yellowstone case study also remains one of the best examples of predator restoration: when wolves were even­tually restored, they ate more elk, bringing the population back under control and pushing elk back to their normal feeding grounds. As a result, the aspen forest is growing back.”

More here.

Eleanor Johnson in Public Books:

Scene: Scandinavia, late summer, a cloudless night. The Dark Ages. Seemingly from nowhere, a quasihuman monster, descended from Cain, hears the sounds of warriors reveling in their Great Hall and decides to silence them. Creeping out of the unstructured darkness of his usual stomping grounds, this monster sneaks into the Great Hall and slaughters the warriors in their sleep. The monster develops a taste for blood, so these murders become habitual. For years.

When the monster is at last maimed and slain by a hero, his semihuman mother creeps out of the fetid pond they live in to take revenge for her only child’s death. She rips men apart in the night, seething like death itself. The same hero follows this grim hag into her pond (he’s a strong swimmer) and cuts her down with a talismanic sword. Some time later, a third monster surges forth, this time a poisonous dragon. The hero kills the dragon, too, but not before the dragon lethally poisons him.

All that is left is horrified lamentation at the certainty that worse things are coming. Despite the hero’s efforts and sacrifices, no one is safe. The women ululate, and the rituals of burial for the hero bring no comfort.

This is the story of Beowulf. And, to the best of my knowledge, it is the earliest horror narrative in English literature.

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

Wading into current gender debates is not for the faint of heart, but that has not discouraged Dutch-born primatologist Frans de Waal from treading where others might not wish to go. In Different, he draws on his decades-long experience observing our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, to see what we can learn from them about us. As much as many people would like it to be otherwise, our ape heritage influences us strongly, also where sex and gender are concerned. Unbeholden to ideology, this nuanced book is a breath of fresh air that is sure to simultaneously delight and upset people on both sides of various gender-related discussions.

Before delving in, it is worth highlighting a few disclaimers. In his comparisons between primates and humans, De Waal omits human behaviour without proper animal parallels. These comparisons are always made in the understanding that today’s primates are not our ancestors, but models of our shared ancestor, and that “they offer a comparison, not a model for us to emulate” (p. 8). He also does not discuss the role of hormones or neurobiology for the simple reason these are outside his wheelhouse.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

The Forer Effect is a trick used by astrologers, psychics, and social psychologists. Given a list of statements like these:

1. 1. 1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
      2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
      3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
      4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
      5. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
      6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
      7. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
      8. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
      9. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.
      10. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
      11. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
      12. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
      13. Security is one of your major goals in life.

…most people will agree that the statements accurately describe them. In fact, most people will feel like they’re unusually accurate descriptions, which is how astrologers get you.

What statements show a Forer effect? Wikipedia just says they should be vague and somewhat positive. Can we do better?

More here.