Stefan Collini in The Nation:

The idea of an “avant-garde” tends to inspire complex emotions, oscillating between excitement at its glamour and scorn at its pretensions. The term carries an association of being daring, experimental, unconventional; the main body of practice or opinion that it is in “advance” of is usually figured as a monolith of dull orthodoxy. But the label also easily attracts a lightly ironical coating, in which those so designated are held to be exhibiting an excess of self-consciousness or even self-congratulation, pluming themselves on innovations that others suspect are merely willful or modish. An avant-garde likes to present itself as insurgent and radical, yet the logic of the metaphor suggests that a new group will soon be coming along to replace it. Today’s avant-garde is always liable to congeal into tomorrow’s orthodoxy.

More here.

Jonathan Day in The Conversation:

As a medical entomologist who’s worked with mosquitoes for more than 40 years, I’m often asked why some people seem to be mosquito magnets while others are oblivious to these blood-feeding pests buzzing all around them.

Most mosquito species, along with a host of other arthropods – including ticks, fleas, bedbugs, blackflies, horseflies and biting midges – require the protein in blood to develop a batch of eggs. Only the female mosquito feeds on blood. Males feed on plant nectar, which they convert to energy for flight.

Blood-feeding is an incredibly important part of the mosquito’s reproductive cycle. Because of this, a tremendous amount of evolutionary pressure has been placed on female mosquitoes to identify potential sources of blood, quickly and efficiently get a full blood meal, and then stealthily depart the unlucky victim.

More here.

Shadi Hamid in First Things:

The Middle East was ahead of its time—and certainly ahead of the West—on at least one thing: existential debates over culture, identity, and religion. During the heady, sometimes frightening days of the Arab Spring, the region was struggling over some of the same questions Americans are contending with today. What does it mean to be a nation? What do citizens need to agree on in order to be or become a people? Must the “people” be united, or can they be divided?

The fall of stagnant Arab autocracies opened up a divide over religion, illiberalism, and the relationship between Islam and the state. Liberalism—with its emphasis on nonnegotiable freedoms, ­individual autonomy, and minority rights—faced an uphill battle. Liberalism requires liberals, and there simply weren’t enough of them.

In the Middle East, Muslims went further, because they could. In the absence of a preexisting liberal consensus, alternatives to liberalism—in the form of Islamism—weren’t merely considered; they were voted into power.

More here.

Daniel Spaulding at Art In America:

In criticism as in war, the law of proportionate response enjoys only occasional observance. Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History is the fruit of what its author, art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, calls the “nearly unfathomable duration” of his engagement with the most influential German painter since World War II. “Unfathomable” is an overstatement, but only just. Buchloh has been thinking about Richter for half a century. The result is a book that comes in at just over 650 pages divvied up between no fewer than 20 chapters, most of which began as independent essays published between the 1980s and the present.

Curiously, given that Richter is by all evidence Buchloh’s favorite artist (or at any rate, the one who sustains the biggest share of his attention), their relationship has been marked from the beginning by profound differences of approach.

more here.

Franklin Einspruch at The New Criterion:

If Guston was labeled an Abstract Expressionist for his nonobjective takes on Monet, Walker could fairly be described as an Abstract Romanticist for his nonobjective takes on John Constable, to whose paintings Walker was introduced as a child in Birmingham, England. In the catalogue, French describes his training at the Birmingham School of Art in the late 1950s as “rigorously traditional” and tells of the artist’s profound confusion upon discovering a Malevich canvas that impressed him by capturing all the emotion that he had experienced regarding Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride. Early on he realized that technique did not amount to feeling.

A typical Walker evinces broad knowledge of the mechanics of oil painting and the sort of juicy application that we associate with a lover of the medium. As befitting a Romanticist approach, it is composed intuitively, in defiance of strategy but not wisdom.

more here.

Bidisha Mamata in The Guardian:

The Royal Academy of Art has never hosted a solo exhibition by a woman in their main space. The National Gallery was founded in 1824 and held its first major solo exhibition by a female artist, Artemisia Gentileschi, in 2020. The first edition of EH Gombrich’s supposedly definitive The Story of Art featured no female artists in its first edition in 1950 – and one woman in its 16th edition. In 2015, the curator and art historian Katy Hessel “walked into an art fair and realised that, out of the thousands of artworks before me, not a single one was by a woman”.

And so she created this positive, beautifully written corrective, which should become a founding text in the history of art by women. Starting in 1500 and shooting through to artists born in the 1990s, The Story of Art Without Men brings centuries-old figures to life while giving form and gravitas to emergent voices and covering every substantial movement from dadaism to civil-rights-era antiracist art along the way.

More here.

Lina Zeldovich in Nautilus:

Matthew Weiss dreams of the day when his oncology practice will operate very differently. A surgeon at the Northwell Health System in New York who treats pancreatic cancer—one of the deadliest malignancies known—he doesn’t have a lot of choices when it comes to saving his patients. Some people with pancreatic tumors die within a few weeks and others fight longer, but only 11 percent of them are still alive five years later.¹ Current treatment options are limited. There are only two treatment paradigms, one based on a cocktail of two chemotherapy drugs and another one based on three, but doctors never know which one will work. “We may as well flip a coin when we decide which regimen to use,” says Weiss. “We have no way to predict who’s going to respond to what chemotherapy.”

Doctors can of course switch from one regimen to another if the initial performs poorly. But it takes a few months to determine whether tumors are shrinking or not, and patients don’t have that time. Moreover, the initial chemo may sicken some to the point that they are too weak to try the second approach. To make things worse, the incidences of pancreatic cancer, once considered rare, have increased in the past 20 years, now reaching over 60,000 cases annually in America alone.² “About 1 in 50 to 60 people get it, and most of them don’t survive it,” says David Tuveson, cancer biologist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and director of CSHL’s Cancer Center. “It used to be rare, but it’s not anymore. It is now the third most common cancer, behind lung and colon, and predictions show that it’s going to take the number two spot soon.”

More here.

. . . So Why Start Now

Do I look yellow? like jaundice yellow? I half-jokingly ask
My husband sitting in the driver’s seat during half-time
Of our daughter’s soccer game. We came to charge
Our phones and get warm.

Look at my eyes carefully, I urge him. He is distracted
By the Michigan–Michigan State game on his phone, but
Manages to toss me a glance. I look back into the visor’s tiny
Mirror convinced I look sick.

I’ve been trying to drink myself to death, but it’s not
Working, I confess. He bitches about Fat Pat, who carelessly
Texts and that’s the game! before it comes through on a two
Minute internet delay.

The tall pine trees that thickened the edge of Fury’s Ferry Road
Have been bull-dozed. It’s a fifty-million-dollar project
To widen the road where we live. Orange barrels stand guard
Over newly exposed backyard fences.

There were so many trees just a month ago. Oh, some still
Lie there, waiting their turn to become dust as we just continue
Learning new words— feller buncher, excavator mulcher,
Bull hog attachment.

The smaller trees seem to watch, waiting for someone to offer
An answer. Or to help. As though they expect one of us to notice
And make it stop. As though they expected us to keep our end
Of some ecological deal.

Well, we don’t— at least not for them. Or for us either. Nature
Realizes it’s on its own. And now that his game is over, I repeat
I’ve been trying to drink myself to death. My husband smiles:
You’ve never been a quitter before

by Candice Kelsey
from The Echotheo Review

Hal Foster at Artforum:

Initial detractors called Minimalism “cold” and “inhuman,” and subsequent opponents deemed it “masculinist” and “totalitarian.” I still see these responses as emotionally reactive or formally reductive or both, and, like several other critics, I have stressed the phenomenological dimension of Minimalism, its engagement with the body and the space of the viewer, in part to counter such readings. Nonetheless, they did represent the sentiments of many observers, and some of these accounts also point to the historical problem at issue here, even if, to my mind, they misconstrue it in doing so.¹¹ For what was taken as “inhuman” in Minimalist practice is better understood as “antihumanist,” a position that was largely shared by Conceptual artists. This antihumanism was active, for example, when, in another well-known conversation from 1966, Frank Stella and Donald Judd claimed to jettison European “rationalism,” and when Bochner insisted a year later that Conceptualists sought to bracket all considerations of style and metaphor.¹² Not only a local reaction against late Abstract Expressionism, this rejection, widespread among artists, writers, and philosophers of the time, targeted a humanism that had had no effective answer for fascism, the Holocaust, or the Bomb and that continued to fail in the face of American imperialism in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

more here.

Andrew Key at the LARB:

On my first viewing of Top Gun: Maverick, I was moved to tears. Many men who I’ve spoken to about the film have admitted to crying while they watched it. I cried, despite my awareness that I was being aggressively manipulated by a work of vainglorious, sentimental, and stupid propaganda for the US military. This is the only Cruise film which has moved me in this way. Between the aerial stunts, Top Gun: Maverick is a film about coming to terms with the death of the father: Cruise’s Maverick finds himself stuck in the complex situation of grieving for his peer, Iceman (Val Kilmer), who had become his surrogate father-protector, while simultaneously navigating his own role as a surrogate father-protector to Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of the man whose death he caused in the film’s prequel. Kilmer is only two years older than Cruise, but in Top Gun: Maverick he is coded as older and wiser, almost a mentor, due to his seniority in rank. Cruise/Maverick’s peers have aged around him, but he remains stuck in perpetual adolescence. This is a recent example of a long trend: Cruise’s filmography is filled with troubled relationships between absent or disappointing fathers and the sons who suffer. There is certainly scope for speculation about the influence the difficult relationship with his own father has had on the roles Cruise chooses and shapes.

more here.

David Albert in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

This is a meticulous and deliberate and beautiful book.

People used to say of Ernest Nagel’s now-neglected classic The Structure of Science that its greatness was in its many qualifications—because those qualifications were meant not to mislead, or to conceal, or to dissemble, or to preempt potential criticisms—but precisely, and on the contrary, to be honest and forthright and un-sensational and clear. To acknowledge that philosophy is hard. To show how philosophy is responsibly done. And that’s very much how I feel reading Jill North’s book.

This is (to begin with) a book about scientific realism—in the most familiar and straightforward and old-fashioned and flat-footed sense of that term. And it is not so much about the thesis of that kind of realism as it is about the practice of that kind of realism. It is (more particularly) an exquisitely detailed and sober and penetrating discussion of an ocean of difficult and interesting questions that come up in connection with the practice of reading our best and most fundamental physical theories as accounts of what the world might actually be like.

North does not propose anything as cut and dried as a “method” for that kind of reading here—and her book would be much less interesting than it is, and much less valuable than it is, if she had.

More here.

Robert C. Thornett in Quillette:

According to professor emeritus Andrew Hacker of Queens College of the City University of New York, less than five percent of Americans will ever use any higher math at all in their jobs, including not only calculus but algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. And less than one percent will ever use calculus on the job. Born in 1929 and holding a PhD from Princeton, Hacker taught college political science for decades and has also been a math professor. His book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions argues that not only college students but high school students should not be required to take algebra, geometry, trigonometry, or calculus at all. Hacker points out that not passing ninth grade algebra is the foremost academic indicator that a student will drop out of high school.

Before the objections tumble forth, I should emphasize that both Hacker and I like math and neither of us wants to remove all math requirements; we want to improve them.

More here.

Faisal Devji in the Boston Review:

The brutal attack on novelist Salman Rushdie at a public lecture in Chautauqua, New York, last month has prompted a flood of revealing responses from liberals in the West. In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik decried the enduring “terrorist” threat to “liberal civilization” in rhetoric that might well have been issued by the administration of George W. Bush. (Even law enforcement has declined to link the assault to terrorism.) Meanwhile, Graeme Wood, writing in the Atlantic, likens criticism of texts to complicity in assassination, while Bernard-Henri Lévy’s predictable diatribe against fanaticism calls for a “campaign” to “ensure” that Rushdie wins this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature—a cause New Yorker editor David Remnick has now joined, too. If it shocks us that the novelist was attacked after so long, it should also shock us that this commentary looks much the same as it did when his life was first threatened more than thirty years ago.

The defining feature of this genre of liberal exasperation is a dogmatic repudiation of history. In place of careful analysis of particular (and therefore changing) circumstances, it relies on stereotype and anecdote to depict a metaphysical conflict between religious fanaticism and liberal tolerance—one that is always and everywhere the same.

More here.

Darryl Pinckney in The New Yorker:

It was June, 1981. Elizabeth Hardwick was in Castine, the small town in Maine where she’d spent her summers for more than twenty years, since before her daughter, Harriet, was born. Even after Robert Lowell, her husband, left her, in 1970, she kept going. The flight from New York City to Bangor took only an hour; the rental car to Castine added another. “The drive is very nostalgia-creating,” she told me. When she arrived, she’d go grocery shopping, check in on the local couple who looked after the house for her, and be settled in by the time her old friend Mary McCarthy phoned. Mary and her husband had been coming to Castine almost as long as Elizabeth had. Mary lived on Main Street, but Elizabeth had remodelled a house on a bluff overlooking the water.

She wrote a great deal when she was in Maine, and she’d call me in New York to talk about her work. Those calls, her confidence, were an honor and a joy. She always came back to the city with something. In September, 1978, a year after Lowell died, she had returned with a blue box that contained the manuscript of her novel “Sleepless Nights.”

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Imagine you have 20 new compounds that have shown some effectiveness in treating a disease like tuberculosis (TB), which affects 10 million people worldwide and kills 1.5 million each year. For effective treatment, patients will need to take a combination of three or four drugs for months or even years because the TB bacteria behave differently in different environments in cells—and in some cases evolve to become drug-resistant. Twenty compounds in three- and four-drug combinations offer nearly 6,000 possible combinations. How do you decide which drugs to test together?

In a recent study, published in the September issue of Cell Reports Medicine, researchers from Tufts University used data from large studies that contained laboratory measurements of two-drug combinations of 12 anti-tuberculosis drugs. Using mathematical models, the team discovered a set of rules that drug pairs need to satisfy to be potentially good treatments as part of three- and four-drug cocktails.

More here.

Yellow

I’m wearing my yellow robe, drinking coffee out of a yellow mug that has a
rooster on it. When I take coffee into my mouth, I hold off from swallowing
and let my tongue believe it’s taking a luxurious bath. Traffic swooshes
down the street. People are busy being busy. For hours, I’ve been planning
a trip to the end of the driveway to pick up the newspaper. Ravens bicker
with each other out in the yard. The cats circle my chair, beg to be let out to
murder. Each day we inch our way toward death. One day, without knowing
it, we buy the clothes we’ll be buried in. We smile for a camera that snaps
the shot that’ll be used for our obituary. I’ll probably die in this robe, but
until then I’m going to eat some waffles that come in a box that’s also
yellow. Often, when children draw the sun, they’ll either use a yellow or
orange   crayon.   The   older,   more   advanced   children   will   use   both.   In
kindergarten, there was this kid who drew his suns in big, blood-red circles.
The teacher once asked him why he chose red for his suns, and he said,
“This is how I see it. This is how it is in my world.”

—Joshua Michael Stewart
from Love Something