Under the Bo Tree

I bring you, Gautama, my empty hand,
which would have been full of figs
from a house that has never known death—
had there been one.
But there isn’t
so my palm is empty.

So I bring you, Gautama, my empty palm,
full of the days of my father’s house—
childhood books, summers staining the clothes green,
anxious to get out into that greater world
(convinced I would do better).
And then, later, the Fridays at Oaxaca Kitchen—
good beer, superb fajitas, the young
passing by, friends hilarious, everyone getting drunk,
my days full of useless work at a job,
the exhaustion found at my dusks,
the sweet ease of my sleep, my love of my bed,
blessed unconsciousness.

I bring you, Gautama, my open palm—
drop a blessing in it
so that I can touch the head of a bull
and ease its rage,
pat the head of a drunken monkey and say,
“I was where you are, my friend,”
or collect raindrops, my hand a bowl,
as we sit under the Bo tree,
just sitting, saying to the dissolving drops,
“You are my mind.”

An open palm to grab the days ahead,
take hold of what’s next,
open to sleep and a long work day
and the cycle of that worker’s life.

I bring you, Gautama, two hands, one heart,
one overused and, perhaps, useless mind—
human being, and human being only—

awaiting what’s next in a human being,
ready for more of what a human being is.

by Mark Fitzpatrick
from Rattle #76, Summer 2022

Emily Cataneo in Undark:

For many years, psychologists and other scientists believed that deep down, all of humankind experienced the same set of evolutionarily hard-wired emotions. Under this schema, anger, for example, was a concrete, immutable experience that happens deep inside all human beings, the same for a White American sipping coffee in Manhattan as for native Siberian herding reindeer. When Batja Mesquita, a key figure in the development of the field of cultural psychology, started researching emotion more than 30 years ago, she was confident that this model was correct. But Mesquita, who is today a distinguished professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, has come to view emotions through a completely different lens. In her new book, “Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions,” Mesquita makes a provocative argument that when it comes to emotions, we are not all the same. “Are other people angry, happy, and scared, just like you?” she queries. “And are your feelings just like theirs? I do not think so.”

More here.

Ingrid Wickelgren in Quanta:

This time a year ago, Steve Horvath was looking for pangolin DNA. The ancient scaly anteater would be a first for his collection, which was then about 200 mammals strong. “I didn’t have any of that order, which is why I desperately wanted them,” he recalled.

Since the summer of 2017, Horvath, who until recently was an anti-aging researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has spent as much as 10 hours a day penning emails to zoos, museums, aquariums and laboratories. He has attended talks on bats and Tasmanian devils to meet their keepers. He has reached out to the far corners of the world, begging for the DNA of flying foxes, vervet monkeys, minipigs and bowhead whales.

With that vast menagerie of samples, he has built computational clocks that can calculate the age of creatures as diverse as shrews, koalas, zebras, pigs and “every whale you can name,” he said, just by looking at their DNA. But those were merely steps toward the completion of Horvath’s ambitious moonshot of a project: a universal clock that could measure the biological age of any mammal.

More here.

Meghan O’Gieblyn at n+1:

MARGUERITE YOUNG SPENT EIGHTEEN YEARS of her life writing Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, the amount of time it requires to raise a child. She began the novel in 1945, in the shadow of Hiroshima, and proceeded for the next two decades to work on it each day, putting in a reliable eight hours. She wrote in Iowa City, where she taught creative writing and often unnerved her students by pausing to invite Henry James or Emily Dickinson into the classroom. She wrote in New York, from a cramped Greenwich Village apartment filled with dolls, carved angels, and an antique carousel horse. She wrote at Yaddo, where she spent summer evenings drinking with Truman Capote and Carson McCullers and running wild through the moonlit rose garden. FDR gave way to Harry, to Ike, to JFK. She was working on Miss MacIntosh at the time of Jackie Robinson’s first game, and throughout the spring of the McCarthy hearings, and the winter the Beatles first arrived in the US. None of these events appear in the novel, which is not interested in cultural or political landmarks, or, for that matter, linear time.

more here.

Haley Mlotek at The Paris Review:

I am against August. When I try to explain this position, some people instinctively want to argue. These people seem to love the beach beyond all reason, to have never suffered a yellowed pit stain on a favorite white T-shirt in their life, and to eagerly welcome all thirty-one days of August as though they are a reward for a year well-lived rather than a final trial before the beginning of another. These are people who vacation with peace of mind. To them, I say: Go away. To the people who agree with me, I say: Go on.

Many friends who share my malaise compare the experience of the month to the Sunday feeling of knowing work or routine is imminent after a break. I don’t agree exactly, but I recognize the comparison. In August summer ends, and so whether or not you are done with it you must accept that it is finished.

more here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He’s been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.

But what is “long-termism”? I’m unusually well-placed to answer that, because a few days ago a copy of What We Owe The Future showed up on my doorstep.

More here.

Takehiko Kambayashi in The Christian Science Monitor:

On a sweltering day in July, Yoshii Aya, still reeling from her bitter election defeat a few months prior, arrived in Kyoto with a stack of leftover business cards tailored for that bygone race. During a three-day political training camp for women trying to break into Japan’s male-dominated politics, she coyly passed them out as a “memento of my candidacy.” Had she won the April election, Ms. Yoshii would have become one of two women sitting on the 20-member city council in Miyoshi, Japan. Instead, she spent her summer reflecting on the loss, and learning campaign financing and social media strategy along with 15 other training camp participants. Ms. Yoshii says she felt empowered by connecting with like-minded women at the camp, which was organized by Tokyo’s Academy for Gender Parity.

The event comes less than a year before the 2023 local elections, and as Japan continues to exhibit one of the lowest rates of female legislature representation in the world. During last month’s upper house race, a record 35 women gained seats in Japan’s parliament, raising the overall ratio of women in the chamber to 25.8% from 23.1%. It’s the kind of incremental progress that has Japanese women’s patience wearing thin. Many point out that the United States now has its first female vice president, and New Zealand and Taiwan both have female heads of state.

Increasingly, women are channeling that frustration into cooperation, forming solidarity groups and campaigning for the advancement of fellow female politicians.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

A 6-year-old boy began hearing voices coming from the walls and the school intercom telling him to hurt himself and others. He saw ghosts, aliens in trees, and colored footprints. Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich, MD, a psychiatrist at Boston Children’s Hospital, put him on antipsychotic medications and the frightening hallucinations stopped. Another child, at age 4, had hallucinations with monsters, a big black wolf, spiders, and a man with blood on his face.

While children are known for their active imaginations, it’s extremely rare for them to have true psychotic symptoms. Through chromosomal array testing, both children were found to have copy number variants or CNVs, meaning deletions of duplications of chunks of their DNA.

More here.

Morning in the Burned House

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against
the bowl which was melted also.
No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,

their dishes piled beside the sink,
which is beside the woodstove
with its grate and sooty kettle,

every detail clear,
tin cup and rippled mirror.
The day is bright and songless,

the lake is blue, the forest watchful.
In the east a bank of cloud
rises up silently like dark bread.

I can see the swirls in the oilcloth,
I can see the flaws in the glass,
those flares where the sun hits them.

I can’t see my own arms and legs
or know if this is a trap or blessing,
finding myself back here, where everything

in this house has long been over,
kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl,
including my own body,

including the body I had then,
including the body I have now
as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy,

bare child’s feet on the scorched floorboards
(I can almost see)
in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts

and grubby yellow T-shirt
holding my cindery, non-existent,
radiant flesh. Incandescent.

by Margaret Atwood 
from Morning in the Burned House
Houghton Mifflin Co.,
published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart, Inc.

Paul Franz in The Hedgehog Review:

Does anyone still need advice on how not to think like a liberal? Amid widespread doubts on both left and right about the legitimacy of liberal institutions and economic arrangements, it might appear that the new book by Raymond Geuss, an American-born Cambridge University professor of philosophy, has come to tell us how not to do what we have already ceased doing. Yet as Geuss observes, “Some form of liberalism”—with its characteristic emphasis on uncoerced consent and open discussion among notionally free individuals—“is…still the basic framework which structures political, economic, and social thought in the English-speaking world.” So deeply embedded are liberal ideas in our institutions and discourse, he writes, that even when the conditions that gave rise to them have altered, “it can be difficult for someone who does not have a slightly deviant social position or education to get an appropriate cognitive distance from them, and thus to see some of their deficiencies for what they are.” Not Thinking Like a Liberal tells how its author came to acquire such deviancy.

More here.

Tom Ridge and Asha M. George in The New Atlantis:

The Covid-19 pandemic has killed an estimated fifteen million people around the world, ravaged health systems, and destroyed economies. It has also exposed destabilizing divisions at home and abroad, and revealed domestic and global weaknesses in biodefense. The United States alone has seen a million lives lost to the virus and an estimated $16 trillion in economic costs, making it the deadliest pandemic in our history and the costliest catastrophe since the Great Depression. The turmoil and grief Americans have faced reflect their justified frustrations with the government’s ineffectiveness in handling the crisis.

This ineffectiveness also contributed to the extreme politicization of the crisis. Mask mandates were understandably frustrating and lockdowns maddening, and public health and political leaders were flummoxed when it came to basic communication. Our reliance on century-old responses spurred civil and political unrest as the public lost faith in leaders to protect them.

More here.

Jesse Singal in The Spectator:

These campaigns, I know from first- and second-hand experience, almost always involve sociopathic backchannel efforts to cut the victims off from their social and professional networks; anyone who is seen as ‘defending’ them (by questioning the charges or the punishment at all) risks getting subsequently un-personed themselves. So, many people denounce or ignore their friends, rather than sticking up for them.

More here.

Darryl Jones at Culturico:

Cities are, indeed, the opposite of natural ecosystems. Net sinks of energy and materials, they are hot, noisy, poisonous and dangerous. They are constantly changing, often for frivolous or even wasteful reasons. Very few non-human species can cope with such chaos and stay away. Some species, however, see opportunities where others find only disturbance and stress. Cities offer countless productive chances for those willing and able to adapt. Those that take up this challenge share several crucial characteristics, including: already being abundant in the neighbouring landscape (10), having a generalised diet (with granivores being at a great advantage given the ubiquity of feeders)(11), demonstrating innovative foraging capacity and often belonging to groups with proportionally larger brains (12). Clearly, the latter two features go hand in hand.

One additional characteristic, however, can be regarded as a prerequisite for making the first steps into a human-dominated environment: the ability to tolerate the presence of humans.

more here.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett at Literary Review:

She was daughter, sister, wife or mother to five kings and two queens. On her wedding day, her pale blue velvet train was ostensibly held by three princesses of the blood, but so heavily encrusted was it with golden embroidery that a man had to walk concealed beneath it to carry the weight. Such a start in life might seem to presage a pleasant existence of leisure and luxury, but the career of Henrietta Maria, a Bourbon princess by birth and a Stuart queen by marriage, was as full of trouble and strife as the most harrowing of hard-luck case histories.

When she was six months old, her father, King Henri IV of France, was murdered. When she was seven, her eldest brother, who believed himself to be God’s representative on earth, had her mother arrested and banished from court.

more here.

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

Intelligence – at least according to IQ test scores – is declining across the globe, which won’t surprise anyone who follows the news but doesn’t exactly bode well for the continuing survival on the species. What to do? One suggestion made by this book is that we all connect our brains to neural interfaces which will collect everyone’s thoughts in a massive “super-brain cloud”, the better to sweetly reason ourselves collectively out of disaster. What could possibly go wrong? This isn’t yet feasible anyway, but it is an example of the neuroscientist author’s determined optimism. Her central argument is important and correct: that we have become too used to thinking of intelligence as the private skill of individuals, vying against one another in a neoliberal world of relentless competition. What is needed, especially in an age of irredentist warmongering and climate disaster, is a greater emphasis on our ability to reason together, our “collective intelligence”.

This has been possible, of course, since we gruntingly taught one another how to make flint tools around the cave fire. What does neuroscience add to our understanding of it?

More here.

Lina Zeldovich in Nautilus:

Manish Vira, a urologist at Northwell Health in New York performs prostate biopsy procedures three to five times a week. He inserts 12 needles into specific locations on the prostate gland, identified by MRI images that reveal malignant or suspicious lesions. The samples then go to a pathologist who determines whether cancer is present and how aggressive it is. “It’s a standard protocol,” explains Vira, who is also a chief oncologist at Northwell.

For the past few years, however, that standard protocol had a few extra steps. Now, the biopsy “wash”—a collection of molecules washed off the sample—goes to the research lab of Lloyd Trotman, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who studies what makes these tumors aggressive or aids their metastases. Trotman’s team looks at the tumors’ genomic signatures—their genetic make-up, which can make them more aggressive. They look at the tumors’ microenvironments—the molecules that cancer surrounds itself with. And while researching these factors, they also dig into something that’s rarely looked at in cancer biology: the nervous system and its role in helping tumors spread.

More here.