Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

Fish don’t realize they’re swimming in water.

We don’t realize what alternatives to democracy will emerge because we’re submerged in the current system.

Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.—Winston Churchill

When you look at ideas to improve democracy, you find things like alternative ways to vote for your leaders or delegating your vote altogether. These are nice ideas, and can change the party in government like they recently did in Australia. But they’re superficial. The Internet is a bulldozer. It will uproot democracy and grow something new from scratch. To understand what will blossom in its place, we need to reprogram our brain first1. We’re too used to the current system to realize there are alternatives.

More here.

In the summer of 1976, the first generation of computer legends—top engineers, scientists, and software pioneers—got together to reflect on the first 25 years of their discipline at the Los Alamos National Laboratories. Here are more recently restored videos from the conference.

Stephanie Pain in Smithsonian:

There’s only one word for it: indescribable. “It’s one of those awesome experiences you can’t put into words,” says fish ecologist Simon Thorrold. Thorrold is trying to explain how it feels to dive into the ocean and attach a tag to a whale shark — the most stupendous fish in the sea. “Every single time I do it, I get this huge adrenaline rush,” he says. “That’s partly about the science and the mad race to get the tags fixed. But part of it is just being human and amazed by nature and huge animals.”

Whale sharks are one of a select group of large marine animals that scientists like Thorrold, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, have signed up as ocean-going research assistants. Fitted with electronic tags incorporating a suite of sensors, tracking devices and occasionally tiny cameras, they gather information where human researchers can’t. They have revealed remarkable journeys across entire oceans, and they have shown that diving deep is pretty much ubiquitous among large marine predators of all kinds.

Many regularly plunge hundreds and sometimes thousands of meters — to depths where the water can be dangerously cold and short of oxygen, there’s little or no light except for the flickers and flashes of bioluminescent organisms, and the pressure is immense, putting some animals at risk of fatal decompression sickness.

More here.

Song of the Fox

Dear man with the accurate mafia
eyes and dog sidekicks, I’m tired of you,
the chase is no longer fun,
the dispute for this territory
of fences and hidden caverns
will never be won, let’s
leave each other alone.

I saw you as another god
I could play with in this
maze of leaves and lovely blood,
performing hieroglyphs for you
with my teeth and agile feet
and dead hens harmless and jolly
as corpses in a detective story
but you were serious,
you wore gloves and plodded,
you saw me as vermin,
a crook in a fur visor;
the fate you aim at me
is not light literature.

O, you misunderstand,
a game is not a law,
this dance is not a whim,
this kill is not a rival.

I crackle through your pastures,
I make no profit / like the sun
I burn and burn, this tongue
licks through your body also

by Margaret Atwood
from Margaret Atwood Selected Poems
Oxford University Press, 1976

Bina Gogineni at Salmagundi:

Rather than repel or frighten him as it might a conventional English gentleman travel-writer, this “atmosphere of entire strangeness” calls to Fermor, pulling him into the fray. Not only does he foray into the local market before even reaching his hotel, but soon afterward he investigates all things Créole—the language, the population, and the dress. Within a mere two days—and despite the fact that Guadeloupe ends up his least inspiring destination—he has so thoroughly immersed himself in the very things whose strangeness had captured his attention that he can bandy Créole patois terms with ease and has decoded the amorous messages indicated by the number of spikes into which the older women tie their silk Madras turbans. What is striking is the thoroughness of his inquiry and his capacity to explain the exotic without eviscerating its alluring quality of otherness.

more here.

Daniel Engber in The Atlantic:

In the spring, just before the launch of Fatherly, a Clemson University student’s viral essay introduced the world to the phrase and image of the dad bod: “a nice balance between a beer gut and working out,” as she put it. Soon dad bod was the subject of hundreds of newspaper stories, including five in The Washington Post alone. But as the phrase’s popularity increased, so did debates about its meaning. Was the dad bod hard or soft? Was it imposing or forgiving? Was it just a state of mind, or was it—as Men’s Health suggested—a dangerous reality? (“Face it: The dad bod is just a precursor to dead bod,” the magazine’s editor proclaimed.)

Everybody knew that dads used to earn a living; that they used to love their children from afar; and that when the need arose, they used to be the ones who doled out punishment. But what were dads supposed to do today? “In former times, the definition of a man was you went to work every day, you worked with your muscles, you brought home a paycheck, and that was about it,” the clinical psychologist Thomas J. Harbin would explain to Fatherly a few years later. “What it is to be a man now is in flux, and I think that’s unsettling to a lot of men.” Indeed, modern dads were left to flounder in a half-developed masculinity: Their roles were changing, but their roles hadn’t fully changed.

More here.

Adrian Searle at The Guardian:

Among the most enigmatic works of his turbulent life, they now occupy a single room at Madrid’s Prado museum, whose collection they entered in 1881. Why Goya painted them, and even if they were all originally painted by the artist himself; how much he revised and changed them, and how much they were further altered by early restorers – all that remains a matter of debate. There is also conjecture about his house (which got its name not from Goya, but from the previous occupant), which was demolished in 1909.

A few steps away from the Black Paintings takes us 200 years into the future, to a room of similar proportions, temporarily converted into a small cinema by the French artist Philippe Parreno, where he is showing La Quinto del Sordo, a film first seen at a Goya exhibition in Switzerland last year. Now it is paired with the paintings that provide its subject. Typically of this complex artist, there is more to it. Several times a day, the lights go down and a cellist takes a seat beside the screen, reading a statement by Spanish composer Juan Manuel Artero before beginning to play.

more here (thanks Brooks).

Sean Illing in Vox:

Cornel West is one of the most unique philosophical voices in America. He has written a ton of books and taught for over 40 years at schools like Princeton, Harvard, and now at the Union Theological Seminary.

West is what I’d call a public-facing philosopher, which is to say he’s not a cloistered academic. He’s constantly engaging the public and his thought is always in dialogue with poetry and music and literature. (If you’ve ever seen one of his lectures, you know what I mean.)

That civic-mindedness is a product of his roots in a school of thought called pragmatism. America doesn’t have an especially deep tradition of philosophy, but if we’re known for any one tradition, it’s pragmatism.

More here.

Robert F. Service in Science:

It’s the ultimate chicken-and-egg conundrum. Life doesn’t work without tiny molecular machines called ribosomes, whose job is to translate genes into proteins. But ribosomes themselves are made of proteins. So how did the first life arise?

Researchers may have taken the first step toward solving this mystery. They’ve shown that RNA molecules can grow short proteins called peptides all by themselves—no ribosome required. What’s more, this chemistry works under conditions likely present on early Earth.

“It’s an important advance,” says Claudia Bonfio, an origin of life chemist at the University of Strasbourg who was not involved in the work. The study, she says, provides scientists a new way of thinking about how peptides were built.

More here.

Oscar Holland at CNN:

The horrifying photograph of children fleeing a deadly napalm attack has become a defining image not only of the Vietnam War but the 20th century. Dark smoke billowing behind them, the young subjects’ faces are painted with a mixture of terror, pain and confusion. Soldiers from the South Vietnamese army’s 25th Division follow helplessly behind.

Taken outside the village of Trang Bang on June 8, 1972, the picture captured the trauma and indiscriminate violence of a conflict that claimed, by some estimates, a million or more civilian lives. Though officially titled “The Terror of War,” the photo is better known by the nickname given to the badly burned, naked 9-year-old at its center: “Napalm Girl”.

The girl, since identified as Phan Thi Kim Phuc, ultimately survived her injuries. This was thanks, in part, to Associated Press photographer Nick Ut, who assisted the children after taking his now-iconic image. Fifty years on from that fateful day, the pair are still in regular contact — and using their story to spread a message of peace.

More here.

[More details here.]

From Nature:

Benjamin Izar is trying to work out what happens when immune cells encounter cancer cells. He starts with large molecular profiling studies, such as whole-exome sequencing and RNA-seq. “They give dozens of putative targets or mechanisms that may play a role in disease or drug response, but it is impossible to functionally validate each of them individually,” he laments.

To help, Izar, a physician-scientist at Columbia University’s Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center in New York, turned to CRISPR screens. CRISPR allows researchers to precisely alter cells’ DNA sequences, and modify gene function. With high-throughput screens, the effects of thousands of perturbations can be assessed in a single experiment. These tools aid research and drug discovery efforts by helping scientists identify the genetic variations, in both coding and non-coding regions, that contribute to disease.

However, until now, typical read-outs of CRISPR screens under different conditions, such as drug treatment or viral infection, have been quite simple cell growth and survival assays. These read-outs reveal genes that, when disturbed, either sensitize or confer a selective advantage to the challenged cells — but with no indication of how they do so. Newly developed techniques provide single-cell, multi-omic readouts of CRISPR-modified cells. “Any large-scale profiling or screening effort may benefit from such methods as they help drill down to what might be functionally relevant,” says Izar. With these ‘high-content’ CRISPR screens, researchers can start to evaluate the myriad nominated mechanisms and targets.

More here.

From MSKCC:

Sascha Roth remembers the phone call came on a hectic Friday evening. She was racing around her home in Washington, D.C., to pack for New York, where she was scheduled to undergo weeks of radiation therapy for rectal cancer. But the phone call from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) medical oncologist Andrea Cercek changed everything, leaving Sascha “stunned and ecstatic — I was so happy.” Dr. Cercek told Sascha, then 38, that her latest tests showed no evidence of cancer, after Sascha had undergone six months of treatment as the first patient in a clinical trial involving immunotherapy at MSK.

Immunotherapy harnesses the body’s own immune system as an ally against cancer. The MSK clinical trial was investigating — for the first time ever — if immunotherapy alone could beat rectal cancer that had not spread to other tissues, in a subset of patients whose tumor contain a specific genetic mutation. “Dr. Cercek told me a team of doctors examined my tests,” recalls Sascha. “And since they couldn’t find any signs of cancer, Dr. Cercek said there was no reason to make me endure radiation therapy.”

These same remarkable results would be repeated for all 14 people — and counting — in the MSK clinical trial for rectal cancer with a particular mutation. While it’s a small trial so far, the results are so impressive they were published in The New England Journal of Medicine and featured at the nation’s largest gathering of clinical oncologists in June 2022. In every case, the rectal cancer disappeared after immunotherapy — without the need for the standard treatments of radiation, surgery, or chemotherapy — and the cancer has not returned in any of the patients, who have been cancer-free for up to two years. “It’s incredibly rewarding,” says Dr. Cercek, “to get these happy tears and happy emails from the patients in this study who finish treatment and realize, ‘Oh my God, I get to keep all my normal body functions that I feared I might lose to radiation or surgery.’ ”

More here.

Le Vent Sauvage

The Clouds they come to greet me.
I kiss their furrowed brows.

Though they cannot hold me,
I respect their somber songs.

I live in the moon shade,
and travel by day’s breath.

I dance on the grass reeds,
and play with rivers wild.

For I am owned by no one,
and am the sky’s own child.

by Celine Beaulieu
from The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow
Red Wheelbarrow Poets, 2010

Marcia B. Siegel at The Hudson Review:

Bronislava Nijinska looked a lot like her brother, the famous dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. This proved an advantage to her own career, and a disadvantage. They’d grown up together, studied at the Imperial Ballet school in St. Petersburg, and begun their performing careers in the Maryinsky Theater. Both were trained in the virtuosic skills of the time. Acclaimed as a prodigy from the first, Vaslav left the home company soon after graduation to join Serge Diaghilev, founder of what became the legendary Ballets Russes. Vaslav’s story—his relationship with Diaghilev, his meteoric stardom in the early ballets of Michel Fokine, his budding choreographic career fostered by the possessive Diaghilev, his expulsion from the company following his marriage to Romola de Pulzsky, and his long mental deterioration—has been told many times. It’s only a sideline in Lynn Garafola’s new book La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern.

more here.

George Prochnik at Literary Review:

Wispy, thick, swirled and streaking, the dark lines burst outward, racing or splintering. The strongest impression one is left with while paging through this exquisitely produced volume of Kafka’s complete drawings is of minimally delineated figures in states of maximally dramatised unrest.

In two of the early single-page sketches, the human subjects – one on foot, the other riding a horse – are reduced so entirely to curling and back-slanting flourishes that they resemble lines drawn to indicate wind or the displacement of air surrounding figures in motion rather than figures themselves. Even when Kafka’s subjects are depicted on chairs or penned within enclosures in positions ordinarily associated with stationary conditions, their poses are so dynamically strained as to inject the immobilised state with high kinetic tension. Here, movement and the repressed urge thereto appear as traces of a primal survival instinct. ‘Mount your attacker’s horse and ride it yourself,’ Kafka wrote in one frantic diary entry. ‘The only possibility. But what strength and skill that requires! And how late it is already!’

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

Living as I do, mostly by choice, in a post-Babel cacophony of languages, I find I often discern meanings that are not really there. This is particularly easy to do in the contact zones of the former Angevin Empire, where more than a millennium’s worth of cross-hybridity between English and French has brought it about that this empire’s ruins are populated principally by faux amis, so that one must not so much learn new words, as reconceive words one already knows. Thus deception becomes disappointment, to assist is not to help but only to be present, to report is to postpone, to defend is to prohibit (sometimes), to verbalise is to fine, to sense is to smell, to mount is to get in, to descend is to get out, a location is a rental, ice-cream has a perfume instead of a flavor, and so on.

The gentle shift one has to make to reconcile all these false friends occurs not only at the lexical level, but also in morphology and phonology, and once it takes place one starts to discern the likenesses of outre-Manche cousins that previously remained hidden: thus Guillaume is the cousin of William, and gardien of warden, and guichet of wicket, and guerre of war.

More here.

Gary Marcus in his Substack newsletter:

Every now and then engineers make an advance, and scientists and lay people begin to ponder the question of whether that advance might yield important insight into the human mind. Descartes wondered whether the mind might work on hydraulic principles; throughout the second half of the 20th century, many wondered whether the digital computer would offer a natural metaphor for the mind.

The latest hypothesis to attract notice, both within the scientific community, and in the world at large, is the notion that a technology that is popular today, known as large language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-3, might offer important insight into the mechanics of the human mind.  Enthusiasm for such models has grown rapidly; OpenAI’s Chief Science Officer Ilya Sutskever recently suggested that such systems could conceivably be “slightly conscious”. Others have begun to compare GPT with the human mind.

That GPT-3, an instance of a kind of technology known as a “neural network”, and powered by a technique known as deep learning, appears clever is beyond question – but aside from their possible merits as engineering tools, one can ask another question: are large language models a good model of human language?

More here.