Fugitive Beauty

The term “fugitive beauty” came
to me in a letter. A friend’s wife
had used it in conversation. My friend
is a painter who studied in Paris.
I sought his opinion on poetry.

Fugitive beauty, evanescent, fleeting,
as if it implied a criminality
I did not understand.
Did all art start that way —
alone, furtive, so coiled
in its incubation that it feared
possible success or failure?

Fugitive, running away,
not standing with the norm, the herd,
not strong enough
to be judged?

Or did it mean beauty as Keats meant it?
“Truth is beauty, beauty truth” —
a raw truth, or a new dimension of beauty,
a new adjective
to describe eagles soaring.
no parameters,
like prisoners breaking out.

Out there by itself,
not great, not mediocre,
but flying in its own space
against all normalcy, blasting off
to its own truthfulness,
its own freedom.

by George De Gregorio
from Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Anthology, 2008

Helena de Bres in Point:

Analytic philosophers avoided the subject of meaning in life till relatively recently. The standard explanation is that they associated it with the meaning of life question they considered bankrupt. But it’s surely also because the subject conflicts with some of the core tendencies of the analytic tradition. “What gives point to life?” is a sweeping question that invites the synoptic approach associated with continental philosophy, not the divide-and-conquer method favored by Anglo-Americans. The question also wears its angst on its sleeve, making it an awkward fit with the dispassionate mode employed in the mainstream academy.

But over the past couple of decades we analytics have turned to the question, with the result that we now have a sharply laid-out set of takes on the matter. The standard way to approach the topic is via a distinction between subjective, objective and hybrid views of meaning. Roughly, subjectivism says your life is meaningful if you have the right kind of attitude to it, objectivism says you need to be engaged with objects of attitude-independent value and the hybrid view says you need both.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

In Alysson Muotri’s laboratory, hundreds of miniature human brains, the size of sesame seeds, float in Petri dishes, sparking with electrical activity.

These tiny structures, known as brain organoids, are grown from human stem cells and have become a familiar fixture in many labs that study the properties of the brain. Muotri, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has found some unusual ways to deploy his. He has connected organoids to walking robots, modified their genomes with Neanderthal genes, launched them into orbit aboard the International Space Station, and used them as models to develop more human-like artificial-intelligence systems. Like many scientists, Muotri has temporarily pivoted to studying COVID-19, using brain organoids to test how drugs perform against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. But one experiment has drawn more scrutiny than the others. In August 2019, Muotri’s group published a paper in Cell Stem Cell reporting the creation of human brain organoids that produced coordinated waves of activity, resembling those seen in premature babies¹. The waves continued for months before the team shut the experiment down.

This type of brain-wide, coordinated electrical activity is one of the properties of a conscious brain. The team’s finding led ethicists and scientists to raise a host of moral and philosophical questions about whether organoids should be allowed to reach this level of advanced development, whether ‘conscious’ organoids might be entitled to special treatment and rights not afforded to other clumps of cells and the possibility that consciousness could be created from scratch.

More here.

Geoff Anders in Palladium:

In November of 1660, at Gresham College in London, an invisible college of learned men held their first meeting after 20 years of informal collaboration. They chose their coat of arms: the royal crown’s three lions of England set against a white backdrop. Their motto: “Nullius in verba,” or “take no one’s word for it.” Three years later, they received a charter from King Charles II and became what was and remains the world’s preeminent scientific institution: the Royal Society.

Three and a half centuries later, in July of 2021, even respected publications began to grow weary of a different, now constant refrain: “Trust the science.” It was a mantra everyone was supposed to accept, repeated again and again, ad nauseum.

This new motto was the latest culmination of a series of transformations science has undergone since the founding of the Royal Society, reflecting the changing nature of science on one hand, and its expanding social role on the other.

More here.

K. Holt in Engadget:

Researchers who grew a brain cell culture in a lab claim that they taught the cells to play a version of Pong. Scientists from a biotech startup called Cortical Labs say it’s the first demonstrated example of a so-called “mini-brain” being taught to carry out goal-directed tasks. ”It is able to take in information from an external source, process it and then respond to it in real time,” Dr. Brett Kagan, lead author of a paper on the research that was published in Neuron, told the BBC.

The culture of 800,000 brain cells is known as DishBrain. The scientists placed mouse cells (derived from embryonic brains) and human cells taken from stem cells on top of an electrode array that was hooked up to Pong, as The Age notes. Electrical pulses sent to the neurons indicated the position of the ball in the game. The array then moved the paddle up and down based on signals from the neurons. DishBrain received a strong and consistent feedback signal (a form of stimulus) when the paddle hit the ball and a short, random pulse when it missed.

More here.

Clemens Fuest and Axel Ockenfels in Project Syndicate:

The energy crisis incited by Russia’s war in Ukraine has triggered intense debates in many countries about whether the windfall profits that energy companies are now making should be taxed. While this question concerns all companies that produce coal, gas, or oil, the focus currently is on electricity producers. Since a high gas price is driving up electricity prices across the board, suppliers with power plants that use other fuels or renewables can reap extremely high profits. And the immense burden of rising electricity prices on consumers has ratcheted up political pressure to tax “unjustified” profits.

Of course, windfall taxes face fundamental objections relating to tax symmetry and trust in applicable taxation rules. But, given the extent of recent energy-price increases, politicians want to skim energy companies’ profits nonetheless, just as they also want to protect other companies from unjustified losses associated with the crisis.

That is understandable. But if policymakers insist on taking this path, they will need to be mindful of the considerable implementation problems they will encounter along the way. Unless managed properly, any windfall profits tax that is imposed could make today’s energy shortages even worse.

More here.

Alex Kitnick at Artforum:

WOLFGANG TILLMANS HAS CREATED an image of contemporary Europe that a lot of people carry around in their heads. Not the Colosseum or the Arc de Triomphe or even the Eiffel Tower, but easyJet, English, Berghain. These keywords are both the technologies and the coordinates of Tillmans’s practice, the atmosphere and infrastructure that support his work, though they are not necessarily visible in his pictures. And yet he has created images—indeed, icons—that are somehow correlates for them, that use these things as scaffolding. I know this is a big claim to make about an artist, given that the profession today no longer has much to do with the way things look. The task of imaging has largely been left to the stylist, the executive, and the influencer. But by leveraging photography’s many lives (as art, as document, as fashion editorial, as reportage, and as publicity), Tillmans has been able to thread the needle through an increasingly vast network of image production, and its sites of display, in order to create a new kind of image—a moving image not simply in the affective sense, but in the circulatory one, too. His images get around, change shape. They are promiscuous. We can call them images in motion.

more here.

Ava Kofman at n+1:

ONE MAN ALONE can do very little. This was a precept held by Bruno Latour, among the most inventive and influential philosophers of postwar Europe. Latour did for science something similar to what Tolstoy, one of his heroes, did for history—namely, reveal that its landmark theories and discoveries, like epochal wars and revolutions, far from being the work of a few great men, were actually the product of careful coordination between an abundance of human and non-human actors. “A crowd may move a mountain; a single man cannot,” Latour wrote in The Pasteurization of France (1984), his unconventional study of Louis Pasteur. “If, therefore, we say of a man that he has moved a mountain, it is because he has been credited with (or has appropriated) the work of the crowd that he claimed to command but that he also followed.”

It was not lost on Latour, a generous, inveterate collaborator, that his own success could be partially explained by his ability to put his philosophy into practice.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYfwkTgEpmE&ab_channel=ARTE.tvDocumentary

Jocelyn Timperley in BBC:

“You know you’re a nerd when you store DNA in your fridge.”

At her home in Paris, Dina Zielinski, a senior scientist in human genomics at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, holds up a tiny vial to her laptop camera for me to see on our video call. It’s hard to make out, but she tells me that I should be able to see a mostly clear, light film on the bottom of the vial – this is the DNA. But this DNA is special. It does not store the code from a human genome, nor does it come from any animal or virus. Instead, it stores a digital representation of a museum. “That will last easily tens of years, maybe hundreds,” says Zielinski.

Research into how we could store digital data inside strands of DNA has exploded over the past decade, in the wake of efforts to sequence the human genome, synthesise DNA and develop gene therapies.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Tom Brennen)

From The Scientist:

The world may be at greater risk of infectious diseases that originate in wildlife because people are increasingly encroaching on natural habitats in the tropics to graze livestock and hunt wild animals. Devastating pandemics such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19, all of which likely originated in wildlife, are reminders of how environmental destruction and infectious disease are intertwined. Tropical deforestation and overhunting are also at the root of global warming and mass species extinction.

All of these phenomena suggest that what we choose to eat has a fundamental impact on our health and that of the planet. We recently conducted a review of the scientific literature to explore how wildlife-origin diseases, global warming, and mass species extinction are linked to the global food system. Our second objective was to explore reparative actions that governments, NGOs, and each one of us can undertake. From the perspective of individual consumers, the global population needs to shift to diets low in livestock-sourced foods to stem human encroachment on tropical areas of wilderness. Second, there is a need to curb wildmeat demand in tropical cities.

More here.

Border

I’m going to move ahead.
Behind me my whole family is calling,
My child is pulling my sari-end,
My husband stands blocking the door,
But I will go.
There’s nothing ahead but a river.
I will cross.
I know how to swim,
but they won’t let me swim, won’t let me cross.

There’s nothing on the other side of the river
but a vast expanse of fields,
But I’ll touch this emptiness once
and run against the wind, whose whooshing sound
makes me want to dance.
I’ll dance someday
and then return.

I’ve not played keep-away for years
as I did in childhood.
I’ll raise a great commotion playing keep-away someday
and then return.

For years I haven’t cried with my head
in the lap of solitude.
I’ll cry to my heart’s content someday
and then return.

There’s nothing ahead but a river,
and I know how to swim.
Why shouldn’t I go?

I’ll go.

by Taslima Nasrin
from Poetry Nook

Jennifer Wilson in The Nation:

In 2015, The New York Times Book Review posed the question “Whatever happened to the Novel of Ideas?” to the writers Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser. On the question of “whether philosophical novels have gone the way of the dodo bird,” Mishra answered in the affirmative and—not a writer who shies away from generalizations—charged that the culprit was the MFA program. “America’s postwar creative-writing industry,” Mishra claimed, has “hindered literature from its customary reckoning with the acute problems of the modern epoch” and “boosted instead a cult of private experience.”

Yet in his new novel, Run and Hide, Mishra sounds a bit down on the idea of, well, ideas. He begins his story on a college campus, a place that, theoretically, should be teeming with the stuff (in fact, he asserted in the Book Review, the campus novel had become the new novel of ideas). Yet in the picture he sketches of the university, it largely functions as a means to an end: that of ruthless upward mobility.

More here.

Rahul Rao in Nature:

Humans have for the first time proved that they can change the path of a massive rock hurtling through space. NASA has announced that the spacecraft it slammed into an asteroid on 26 September succeeded in altering the space rock’s orbit around another asteroid — with better-than-expected results.

Agency officials had estimated that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft would ‘nudge’ the asteroid Dimorphos closer to its partner, Didymos, and cut the time it takes to orbit around that rock by 10–15 minutes. At a press conference on 11 October, researchers confirmed that DART in fact cut the orbital time by around 32 minutes.

Neither asteroid was a threat to Earth, but the agency tested the manoeuvre to prove that humanity could, in principle, deflect a worrisome space rock heading for the planet.

More here.

Alex Tabarrok in Marginal Revolution:

A new paper, The Injustice of Under-Policing, makes a point that I have been emphasizing for many years, namely, relative to other developed countries the United States is under-policed and over-imprisoned.

…the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”

First, as is well known, the US  has a very high rate of imprisonment compared to other countries but less well  known is that the US has a relatively low rate of police per capita.

More here.

Javier Marías at The Believer:

As I write this I suddenly realize that All Souls’ Day, November 1, might have been a more timely date for the publication of this article, but alas, that is one of the (very few) inconveniences of not being a religious man. Life is life, however, and certain truths do not always dawn on us in a timely fashion; they come when they come. And in the end, there is so much more to be pondered in November, the month that Herman Melville always associated with melancholy, as he so succinctly expressed it at the beginning of Moby-Dick, through the voice of Ishmael, his narrator who said that “whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul… I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can,” since the sea was his “substitute for pistol and ball.”

In my case, a few days ago I decided it was high time I clean up my old address book, with its dog-eared oilcloth cover and its haphazard, chaotic content—last names starting with “C” that had long since overflowed into the “E” section because the “C” and “D” pages were entirely filled up with other names, just like “M,” “R,” and so many other sections.

more here.

Samanth Subramanian in The New Yorker:

Filmmaking thrives in plenty of other cities in India, but “Bollywood” has become shorthand for Indian cinema as a whole, and for the thousand or so movies that the country releases annually. For nearly a century, Bollywood has also worn the warm, self-satisfied gloss of being a passion that unifies a country of divisions. Not only are its audiences as mixed as India itself, filmmakers will say, but Bollywood is a place where caste and religion don’t matter. The most piously presented proof of this is the fact that, in a Hindu-majority country, a Muslim man named Shah Rukh Khan has been the supreme box-office star for decades.

Even if Bollywood possesses this liberal fibre, the rightward swing in Indian politics has gnawed away at it. In Mumbai, people divide recent history into pre-“Tandav” and post-“Tandav” periods, reading the show’s fate—its bitter legal battles, its suspended second season—as a lesson in what can and cannot be said in Modi’s India. Their nervousness manifests in absurdities—in, for example, how Amazon Prime now discourages characters who share their names with Hindu deities—but also in decisions to put audacious film and TV projects into cold storage. Other filmmakers embrace genres that match the B.J.P.’s tastes: dubious historical epics that glorify bygone Hindu kings; action films about the Indian Army; political dramas and bio-pics, dutifully skewed. These productions all draw from the B.J.P.’s roster of stock villains: medieval Muslim rulers, Pakistan, Islamist terrorists, leftists, opposition parties like the Indian National Congress. Through Bollywood, India tells itself stories about itself. Many of those stories are now starkly different, in lockstep with the right wing’s bigotry.

More here.