Joel Whitney in Jacobin:

Diego Rivera painted Pan American Unity for the 1940 San Francisco World’s Fair in an airplane hangar, accompanied by an armed guard. Shortly before he commenced work on the mural, his wife — the artist Frida Kahlo — and Leon Trotsky began an affair. Though Rivera remained an admirer of the hero of the October Revolution, he expelled Trotsky from his home in Mexico. The security budget required to protect the former military leader had already been putting a strain on the household’s finances. This was the last straw.

Pan American Unity features no image of Trotsky. Stalin appears on the painting’s fourth panel as one set of a triad of ghouls cloaked in a gray ether, alongside Hitler and Mussolini. They are surrounded by portraits of actors, chief among them Charlie Chaplin, who assumes a number of his satirical personas. A single arm, tattooed with a swastika and holding a dagger tightly, emerges out of the cloud, but it is held at bay by another, much larger, arm draped in an American flag and flanked by bombers and paratroopers. This is Rivera’s ode to anti-fascist Hollywood.

More here.

Siddhartha Mukherjee in Literary Hub:

Modern genetics was launched by the practice of agriculture: the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel discovered genes by cross-pollinating peas with a paintbrush in his monastery garden in Brno. The Russian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was inspired by crop selection. Even the English naturalist Charles Darwin had noted the extreme changes in animal forms created by selective breeding. Cell biology, too, was instigated by an unassuming, practical technology. Highbrow science was born from lowbrow tinkering.

In the case of cell biology, it was simply the art of seeing: the world measured, observed, and dissected by the eye. In the early seventeenth century, a Dutch father and son team of opticians, Hans and Zacharias Janssen, placed two magnifying lenses on the top and bottom of a tube and found that they could magnify an unseen world.

More here.

Jesse Russell in The Hedgehog Review:

In his classic book from 1990, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, the Marxist-turned-Catholic-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre discusses three basic modern and postmodern approaches to philosophical inquiry: encyclopedia, genealogy, and tradition. The genealogical method, pioneered by Friedrich Nietzsche and elaborated by Michel Foucault, presents a historical narrative in which ideas develop and grow over time. According to this thinking, being and truth are conditioned by history (historicized) and thus develop in tandem with the twists and turns of science, technology, economics, language, and culture.

A method initiated by critical theorists writing primarily for other intellectuals and academics, the genealogical approach has found surprising success in an unlikely genre: coffee table books.

More here.

The Water Wheel

… The afternoon arrived
mournful and dusty

… The water was composing
its countrified poem
in the buckets
of the lazy water wheel.

… The mule was dreaming—
old and sad mule!
in time to the darkness
that was talking in the water.

… The afternoon arrived
mournful and dusty.

… I don’t know which noble
and religious poet
joined the anguish
of the endless wheel

… to the cheerful music
of the dreaming water,
and bandaged your eyes—
old and sad mule . . .

… But it must have been a noble
and religious poet,
a heart made mature
by darkness and art.

by Antonio Machado
from Times Alone
Wesleyan University Press, 1989

Teresa Xie in Vox:

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I found myself at a career crossroads. The pandemic hit a few months earlier and like most students across the country, I was kicked off campus and sent back home. As I spent the remainder of the school year sitting idly in my childhood bedroom, I had no choice but to wrestle with the ever-looming question: What do I really want to do with my life?

Media and culture had always been passions of mine, but I never saw them as viable paths to pursue. But the dreariness of the pandemic shook me, and I decided to pivot from business to journalism with no portfolio, no connections, and no experience during what seemed like the most inopportune time to make a career switch. The only resource I had at my disposal was the internet — and turns out, I didn’t need much more. Over the next few weeks, I scoured the depths of Twitter — reading profiles of journalists my age and seasoned writers with dream gigs. I figured the best way to learn more about the industry was to actually talk to people who were in it. I cold Twitter-DM’d anyone I thought was remotely interesting and asked to hop on the phone with them. To my surprise, not one person refused — and through these conversations I learned about programs to apply to, editors to pitch to, and other writers I should try to talk to.

More here.

David Sedaris in The New Yorker:

Tours have always been good for getting me out of my bubble, this one even more so. Driving across the Midwest, I saw one Trump 2024 sign after another—this while the election was an entire three years away. “You know you’re in a place that’s inhospitable to liberals when you see fireworks stores,” Adam said in rural Indiana as we passed one powder keg after another.

“Fireworks are guns for children,” I observed.

“They’re the gateway drug,” Adam agreed.

Then there were the actual guns—one I saw, for instance, in Dayton, Ohio, as I waited in line to get a cup of coffee. Ahead of me stood a group of three, none of whom had apparently ever been to a Starbucks before. All were bearded and maskless. Theirs were the faces you’d see on a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster in the Old West, but colorized. “What’s the closest you got to a milkshake?” the tallest of them asked the employee behind the counter. “Is the ice in a Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino shaved or in chunks?” A month earlier, at a coffee shop in Springfield, Missouri, I saw a sign for an Almond Joy Latte. For all our talk about health and, worse still, “wellness,” the burning question in most of America is “How can we make this more fattening?”

More here.

Nichola Raihani in The Guardian:

What springs to mind when you hear the word cooperation? It increasingly feels like bland corporate jargon, evoking images of firm handshakes and cheerful teamwork. Typing it into Google Images produces a reel of people doing increasingly bizarre things with their hands. But cooperation is much more than a workplace platitude: it is sewn into the fabric of our lives, from the most mundane of activities, such as the morning commute, to magnificent achievements such as sending rockets into space. Cooperation is our species’ superpower, the reason that humans managed not just to survive but to thrive in almost every habitat on Earth.

We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. And, to some extent, this perspective is justified. Cooperative individuals are more likely to care for others, to display empathy for those in distress and to act to alleviate their suffering. It’s why people are willing to donate their money, their time and even their blood to help those in need.

More here.

Emily Zarevich in JSTOR Daily:

According to poetry scholar John Timberman Newcomb, Millay is “among the most widely-known and read of all American literary figures,” representative of the subversive Modernist literary movement following World War I (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career was also gaining steam around the same time). Millay’s life, a glamorous succession of popular publications and love affairs, has been the subject of much speculation by biographers and journalists, and she secured her place in history by winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. But what many don’t know is that Millay’s first great “success” was actually a colossal failure. Imagine that your literary debut cheated you out of $500. That’s exactly what happened to Millay.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The founders of statistical mechanics in the 19th century faced an uphill battle to convince their fellow physicists that the laws of thermodynamics could be derived from the random motions of microscopic atoms. This insight turns out to be even more important than they realized: the emergence of patterns characterizing our macroscopic world relies crucially on the increase of entropy over time. Barry Loewer has (in collaboration with David Albert) been developing a theory of the Mentaculus — the probability map of the world — that connects microscopic physics to time, causation, and other familiar features of our experience.

More here.

Chris Blattman in the Boston Review:

Nothing destroys progress like conflict. Fighting massacres soldiers, ravages civilians, starves cities, plunders stores, disrupts trade, demolishes industry, and bankrupts governments. It undermines economic growth in indirect ways too. Most people and business won’t do the basic activities that lead to development when they expect bombings, ethnic cleansing, or arbitrary justice; they won’t specialize in tasks, trade, invest their wealth, or develop new ideas. These costs of war incentivize rivals to steer clear from prolonged and intense violence.

Of course, it seldom feels like peace is our natural state. “The story of the human race is war,” said Winston Churchill, “except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world.” Certainly it often seems so, especially today as a major conflict rages in Ukraine and the number of civil wars in the world climbs to levels not seen since the 1990s.

But that sentiment is misleading and comes from ignoring the quieter moments of compromise.

More here.

Autumn Notes – Montana

I know a thousand shades of green –
Here I learn a thousand browns

Wind feels out the shape of my face
like a blind man making a new friend

Wind blows brown dust up along
a dry road, turns and blows it back.

However high the sky
its shadow in the pond’s as deep

The leaves on the dry trees
rattle like the ghosts of gourds

Far off throaty rusty sound
Birds, yes, but no longer birdsong

Gray-brown road between
gray-green hills

Wind rocking thoughtfully
on the porch swing

Winter now. While I put on my
heavy coat, the trees strip bare.

5 o’clock where does the mountain
snow end and clouds begin?

by Nils Peterson
and here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HICqQwQZPyo&ab_channel=InOurTime

Jesse Russell at The Hedgehog Review:

Relationships between ancient humans and birds had a deeply religious element. Birkhead locates the “ground zero” of an early human civilization built around animal worship in ancient Egypt. Within the catacombs at Tuna el-Gebel in Egypt, there are four million mummified birds contained in jars and coffins. In addition to mummifying ibises, ancient Egyptians preserved a variety of creatures in cemeteries throughout the Nile Valley. Birds, however, are among the most prominent animals. Clearly, the lovingly embalmed birds were considered sacred; and ancient Egypt was a civilization in which humans and birds lived in harmony.

But such religious understandings of birds could cut both ways—not just care and preservation, but also blood sacrifice. Ancient Egyptians believed that the gods demanded appeasement in order to regulate, among other things, the fertility of the Nile river. Figures such as Ramses II (1187-1157BC) would offer sacrifices of up to 20,000 birds per year. Animal gods populated the Late Period of Egyptian history (672-332BC). The ancient Egyptians ate birds and used them for sport.

more here.

Nilo Tabrizy at The Paris Review:

Protests enter their second week. I’m waiting on the street for the taxi to arrive when I see an old religious man coming towards me. At first, I’m afraid he wants to mention I’m not wearing a hijab. All of a sudden, he brings his phone in front of me and shows me Mahsa Amini’s photo, saying, “Can you believe it, ma’am? They killed someone’s daughter. I myself have a daughter. I swear to God, I haven’t slept for a week.”

They say this is the women’s revolution. Maryam, who is on the street every day and has been attacked by so much tear gas that her eyes are swollen, says, No matter what, let’s see each other at Café Haft. We hear that Abbas is missing. Two days later, we find out that he has been arrested. They have arrested Roghiyeh’s and Maryam’s friends too. I have no way of communicating with the world outside of Iran. The internet is down and no VPN is working.

more here.

Hannah Thomasy in The New York Times:

Ned and Sunny stretch out together on the warm sand. He rests his head on her back, and every so often he might give her an affectionate nudge with his nose. The pair is quiet and, like many long-term couples, they seem perfectly content just to be in each other’s presence.

The couple are monogamous, which is quite rare in the animal kingdom. But Sunny and Ned are a bit scalier that your typical lifelong mates — they are shingleback lizards that live at Melbourne Museum in Australia. In the wild, shinglebacks regularly form long-term bonds, returning to the same partner during mating season year after year. One lizard couple in a long-term study had been pairing up for 27 years and were still going strong when the study ended. In this way, the reptiles are more like some of the animal kingdom’s most famous long-term couplers, such as albatrosses, prairie voles and owl monkeys, and they confound expectations many people have about the personalities of lizards. “There’s more socially going on with reptiles than we give them credit for,” said Sean Doody, a conservation biologist at the University of South Florida.

More here.

Jess Cotton in Jacobin:

Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last Thursday, was not on the other end of the telephone when the committee rang to deliver the news. Last year, she received a prank text telling her she had won the illustrious award, which might be one reason why her first response when the committee did get through to her was incredulous: “Are you sure?”

Unlike Philip Roth who sat on tenterhooks waiting for a call that never came, Ernaux, at eighty-two, was never too fussed about prizes. Certainly she didn’t wait in expectation of them. When she didn’t win the Man Booker International in 2019, she went to see the Dorothea Tanning show at the Tate Modern instead, had lunch with the view of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and drank in a pub frequented by Amy Winehouse. She preferred her own company to the heavy, uncharming world of prize culture. On receipt of the Nobel, Ernaux, however, recognized the responsibility that came with it: to continue fighting “everything that is a form of injustice against women.”

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Benj Edwards in Ars Technica:

Matrix multiplication, which involves multiplying two rectangular arrays of numbers, is often found at the heart of speech recognition, image recognition, smartphone image processing, compression, and generating computer graphics. Graphics processing units (GPUs) are particularly good at performing matrix multiplication due to their massively parallel nature. They can dice a big matrix math problem into many pieces and attack parts of it simultaneously with a special algorithm.

In 1969, a German mathematician named Volker Strassen discovered the previous-best algorithm for multiplying 4×4 matrices, which reduces the number of steps necessary to perform a matrix calculation. For example, multiplying two 4×4 matrices together using a traditional schoolroom method would take 64 multiplications, while Strassen’s algorithm can perform the same feat in 49 multiplications.

Using a neural network called AlphaTensor, DeepMind discovered a way to reduce that count to 47 multiplications, and its researchers published a paper about the achievement in Nature last week.

More here.

Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian in the Boston Review:

David Barsamian: The situation in Ukraine is dire. If Putin is trapped in a corner, he may make a desperate move to use nuclear weapons, or one of the six Ukrainian nuclear reactors could be bombed (deliberately or by accident). The fate of the planet is in the hands of Putin, Zelensky, Biden. Frankly, I’m very worried. What can people do in this scenario?

Noam Chomsky: Same as always. It’s a dangerous scenario. We can work to try to influence what’s within our range of influence. The United States happens to be diverging right now, pretty sharply, from most of the world with regard to this crucial issue, and we can work to try to change that policy. That’s hard but not impossible. Most of the world overwhelmingly wants to move directly to negotiations to try to end the horrors in Ukraine before they get even worse. It’s true of the Global South, India, Indonesia, China, Africa, overwhelmingly. In Germany, according to a poll at the end of August, over three-quarters of the population want to move to negotiations right away. So that’s one point of view.

The United States and Britain are standing out. Their position is that the war must continue in order to severely weaken Russia, and that means no negotiations, of course.

More here.