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.

Richard Hughes Gibson at The Hedgehog Review:

What is a paragraph? Consult a writing guide, and you will receive an answer like this: “A paragraph is a group of sentences that develops one central idea.” However solid such a definition appears on the page, it quickly melts in the heat of live instruction, as any writing teacher will tell you. Faced with the task of assembling their own paragraphs, students find nearly every word in the formula problematic. How many sentences belong in the “group?” Somewhere along the way, many were taught that five or six will do. But then out there in the world, they have seen (or heard rumors of) bulkier and slimmer specimens, some spilling over pages, some consisting of a single sentence. And how does one go about “developing” a central idea? Is there a magic number of subpoints or citations? Most problematic of all is the notion of the main “idea” itself. What qualifies? Facts? Propositions? Your ideas? Someone else’s?

more here.

Phillip Maciak at n+1:

AT THE BEGINNING OF The Velvet Underground, the first documentary film by Todd Haynes, a title card appears: “A documentary film by Todd Haynes.” I laughed out loud when I saw it, though not out of derision. I had been waiting for Todd Haynes to make a documentary for a while. Or, more accurately, I had been waiting for Todd Haynes to make something that he’d finally call a documentary. Since his emergence in the late 1980s with the generation of filmmakers B. Ruby Rich called the “New Queer Cinema,” Haynes has hopped from genre to genre, pastiche to pastiche, hard art house to Oscar-bait, though never quite to nonfiction film. But he’s been playing with documentary the whole time, calling upon its beats and conventions, flirting with biography and ethnography while always ultimately disavowing the idea of a “true story.”

more here.

Poem Resisting Arrest

This poem is guilty. It assumed it retained
the right to ask its question after the page

came up flush against its face. The purpose
this poem serves is obvious, even to this poem,

and that cannot stop the pen or the fist
choking it. How the page tastes at times–unsalted

powerlessness in this poem’s mouth, a blend
of that and what it has inhaled of the news. It spits

blood–inking. It is its own doing and undoing.
This poem is trying to hold itself together. It has

the right to remain either bruised or silent,
but it is a poem, so it hears you’d be safer

if you stopped acting like a poem, ceased resisting.
Where is the daylight (this poem asks and is

thus crushed) between existence and resistance,
between the now-bloodied page and the poem?

Another poem will record the arrest of this poem,
decide what to excerpt. That poem will fail–

it won’t find the right metaphor for the pain
of having to lift epigraphs from the closing

words of poems that were accused of resisting.
That poem is numb. This poem is becoming

numb, already losing feeling in its cuffed phrasing.
No one will remember the nothing of which

this poem was accused–just that it was another
poem that bled. This poem never expected to be

this poem, yet it must be–for you who will not
acknowledge the question. This poem knew

it was dangerous to ask why?

by Kyle Dargon
from “Anagnorisis,”
TriQuarterly / Northwestern UP, 2018

Sophie Bushwick in Scientific American:

Hospital patients are at risk of a number of life-threatening complications, especially sepsis—a condition that can kill within hours and contributes to one out of three in-hospital deaths in the U.S. Overworked doctors and nurses often have little time to spend with each patient, and this problem can go unnoticed until it is too late. Academics and electronic-health-record companies have developed automated systems that send reminders to check patients for sepsis, but the sheer number of alerts can cause health care providers to ignore or turn off these notices. Researchers have been trying to use machine learning to fine-tune such programs and reduce the number of alerts they generate. Now one algorithm has proved its mettle in real hospitals, helping doctors and nurses treat sepsis cases nearly two hours earlier on average—and cutting the condition’s hospital mortality rate by 18 percent.

Sepsis, which happens when the body’s response to an infection spirals out of control, can lead to organ failure, limb loss and death. Roughly 1.7 million adults in the U.S. develop sepsis each year, and about 270,000 of them die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although most cases originate outside the hospital, the condition is a major cause of patient mortality in this setting. Catching the problem as quickly as possible is crucial to preventing the worst outcomes.

More here.

Steven Petrow in The New York Times:

Mohsin Hamid in The Guardian:

In 2017, I published my fourth novel, Exit West, and bought a small notebook to jot down ideas for the next one. I thought it would be about technology. I came across an article by Simon DeDeo, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, discussing an experiment he and his colleague John Miller had conducted in that same year. They simulated cooperation and competition by machines over many generations, building these machines as computer models and setting them playing a game together. An interesting pattern emerged. Rather than constant trading for mutual benefit among equals, or never-ending fights to the death among foes, instead a particular type of machine became dominant, one that recognised and favoured copies of itself, and enormous prosperity ensued, built on ever-growing levels of cooperation. But eventually the minute differences that naturally occurred (or were, in the experiment, designed to occur) in the copying process, as they do in organisms when genes are passed on, became intolerable, and war among the machines resulted in near-complete devastation and a new beginning, after which the cycle repeated, over and over.

More here.

Suresh V. Kuchipudi in The Conversation:

The omicron variant did indeed become dominant early in 2022, and several sublineages, or subvariants, of omicron have since emerged: BA.1, BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5, among others. With the continued appearance of such highly transmissible variants, it is evident that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is effectively using classic techniques that viruses use to escape the immune system. These escape strategies range from changing the shape of key proteins recognized by your immune system’s protective antibodies to camouflaging its genetic material to fool human cells into considering it a part of themselves instead of an invader to attack.

I am a virologist who studies emerging viruses and viruses that jumped from animals to humans, such as SARS-CoV-2. My research group has been tracking the transmission and evolution of SARS-CoV-2, evaluating changes in how well the omicron subvariants evade the immune system and the severity of disease they cause after infection.

More here.

Jonathan Baskin in Liberties:

On the fourth page of Pure Colour, the fourth and most recent novel by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, it is proposed that there are three kinds of beings on the face of the earth. They are each a different kind of “critic,” tasked with helping God to improve upon His “first draft” of the universe. There are birds who “consider the world as if from a distance” and are interested in beauty above all. There are fish who “critique from the middle” and are consumed by the “condition of the many.” And there are bears who “do not have a pragmatic way of thinking” and are “deeply consumed with their own.” The three main characters in the novel track with the three types: Mira, the art critic and main character, is a bird; Mira’s father, whose death takes up the middle part of the novel, is a bear; and Mira’s romantic interest and colleague at a school for art critics, Annie, is a fish.

The bird, the bear, and the fish are the basis for an inquiry into different value systems and the ways of perceiving the world that follow from them.

More here.