Liz Berry at The Guardian:

A novel-in-verse written in dense Dorset vernacular, Orlam is a curious and enchanting thing. Like a dark poetic almanac, it charts, month by month, a year in which its heroine, nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles, leaves behind the innocence of her childhood.

Orlam takes the reader by the hand, with each poem laid out opposite its “standard” translation and an abundance of footnotes to illuminate a hoard of folklore. This doubling slows down the reader who cares to be slowed, allowing them to puzzle out the dialect words and the way they change the poems.

Ira’s world is a magical realist outpost of the West Country where PJ Harvey grew up. Conjured through tightly rhyming poems, often taking the form of songs or incantations, the village of Underwhelem appears: “Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow. / All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow.”

more here.

Evelyn Juers at The Sydney Review of Books:

Natural history is deeply rooted in, and benefits from, connections between the personal and the scientific. There is a blog called ‘Cassin’s Sparrow – Why Blog About Cassin’s Sparrow?’ which explains that there is plenty of information on birds but less on ‘the story of how we know’ about them, ‘the historic, cultural, political, and scientific processes behind their discovery…[and] this blog tries to fill that gap’, as well as ascertaining ‘what Cassin’s Sparrow can teach us about life on Earth’ and ‘why it matters to know these things’. The author is John Schnase, an American biologist and computer scientist who calls Cassin’s Sparrow his ‘sherpa bird’. ‘Its plaintive song and spectacular skylarks have been a constant source of solace and joy in my life’. Similarly, Alec Chisholm’s observations, vivid descriptions, and emotional attachments to birds and locations are part of a larger ornithological and cultural history.

Chisholm’s favourites included the extremely elusive, also called ‘cryptic’, ground-dwelling Rufous Scrub-birds, that he first saw in Queensland’s Lamington National Park and described as ‘quiet in plumage’ with ‘resonant voices’.

more here.

Dwight Garner in The New York Times:

Gabriel García Márquez would not sleep in a house if someone had died in it. Colette was passionate about dowsing. James Merrill had his Ouija board. Ted Hughes taught Sylvia Plath to read horoscopes. Robert Graves believed in ghosts. If Edmund Wilson had a dream about you, he’d call you to mull it over.

Most of us sense, at times, that there are parts of the electromagnetic spectrum not accessible with the tools at hand. Moments manifest as auguries, as kismet, as a sense that God has glanced at us or, conversely, that we have been silently brushed by demons.

Coincidence can provide shivers of this sort. G.K. Chesterton called coincidences “spiritual puns.” Don DeLillo, in “Libra,” wrote, “A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million.”

Intuitions collect intensely around disasters. Inevitably there is the man who slept late and missed the crashed jet, the woman who saw the tsunami coming in a dream or the teen who had an urge to hit the floor before the first rounds left the semiautomatic rifle. Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, spooked a generation by writing, shortly before Sept. 11, a song that included the lyrics “Tall buildings shake / Voices escape singing sad, sad songs.”

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Sam Knight in The New Yorker:

The Queen is the only royal who actually matters or does anything. That’s not fair, of course, but the monarchy is unfairness personified and glorified, long to reign over us. Naturally, the rest of the Royal Family—the heirs; the spares; Princess Michael of Kent, whose father was in the S.S. and whom Diana nicknamed the Führer; Princess Anne, Charles’s younger sister, who’s known to feed the chickens in a ballgown and Wellington boots after a night at the palace—are all busy. They have numberless engagements and causes, which fill their identical, repeating years, but they exist only as heralds for the magical authority of the Crown, which resides in the Queen and nobody else. “They are high-born scaffolding,” as Tina Brown, a former editor of The New Yorker, writes in “The Palace Papers,” her latest chronicle of the unhappy House of Windsor. The Queen decides. She elevates. She exiles. The rest of them sweat: about their annual allowance; their ridiculously discounted rents on apartments in Kensington Palace; the granting of a weekend cottage on the grounds of Sandringham; their access to the balcony of Buckingham Palace for big photo ops; their entry to the Knights of the Garter, a reward for not fucking things up too badly; their Instagram followers; today’s ghastliness in the MailOnline.

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The Kookaburras

In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, kingfishers, pressed against the edge of
their cage, they asked me to open the door.
Years later I wake in the night and remember how I said to them,
no, and walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.

by Mary Oliver
from New and Selected Poems
Beacon Press, 1992

Stuart Ritchie in his Substack newsletter, Science Fictions:

Let’s start with something everyone agrees on: the world’s fertility rate has declined. Whether you’re in a low-, middle-, or high-income country, with few exceptions the “total fertility rate”—the number of children per woman—dropped pretty precipitously across the latter part of the 20th Century.

The vast majority of this decline has absolutely nothing to do with testosterone. The main reason for it is economic development: people tend to have fewer children as they and their countries become richer – and that’s incredibly good news. Other things that lower the fertility rate are also related to progress and prosperity: education (particularly of women), urbanisation, the availability of contraception, and so on.

But there also might be negative trends in fecundity – meaning a person’s biological ability to have kids, as opposed to simply whether they have kids or not (the latter being what people call “fertility”). It would be more worrying if fecundity was dropping, because that would take the choice of whether to have kids out of many people’s hands.

More here.

Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

Researchers have worked with hunters for decades as part of regular wildlife surveillance to manage deer populations and track the spread of infectious diseases, such as chronic wasting disease and bovine tuberculosis. But these days, the scientists are also looking for the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans.

In between estimating a deer’s age by checking teeth and taking antler measurements, researchers wearing masks and gloves wipe mud and grass from around the animal’s nostrils before inserting a swab to test for viral RNA. They then collect blood to check for antibodies against the virus. Their work has uncovered widespread infection in white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in North America, with hundreds of infected animals in 24 US states and several Canadian provinces.

Scientists want to understand how the virus gets into deer, what happens as it spreads among them, and what risk these infections might pose for other wildlife and for humans. Close to 30 million deer live in the United States — one for every 10 people — and a few million live in Canada.

More here.

Jeff Maurer in Persuasion:

I have no special love for the SAT. Aside from the fact that my test came back with a big, red, “NO HARVARD FOR YOU, DUMMY” stamped on it, it always seemed a bit arbitrary. After all: Why should my eligibility for college depend on knowing words like “nefarious” and “egregious”? That seems…there must be a better word for this…crappy. We know that SAT scores correlate with household income, and evidence suggests that studying helps a bit, and though I’m not ready to join those who view the SAT as history’s most biased test that doesn’t involve phrenology, I agree that the test has flaws.

But you don’t have to love the SAT to feel that the absolute last thing we should do if we care about fairness is to increase the relative importance of the college application essay. College essays make Tinder profiles look like sworn court testimony from Lincoln himself. Every alleged problem with the SAT—that it’s arbitrary, that it privileges kids with resources, that it can be gamed—is magnified by a factor of ten in the essay. And, as colleges move away from requiring the SAT, we should consider whether it’s wise to give more weight to an application component that makes about as much sense as having a swimsuit round for federal judgeships.

More here.

Farah Abdessamad at berfrois:

Like German author Judith Schalansky, I like paying attention to maps. They are time-stamps, relics and quantifiable measure, and, generally, works of art. Unlike Schalansky though, who wrote an entire Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands (2010) about fifty islands she has “not visited and never will”, I gravitate towards rock more than sand – a cinematic universe of desaturated hues, greyscale, dimmed light and eroded matter to match the incongruity of life itself.

Things that are collapsing attract me more than a fantasised mythology of immortal coral, sea and tacky sunscreen. They reflect a necessity for nature and humans to peacefully coexist, testifying that even extravagant dreams of megastructures are bound to dissolve with time. Stones are humbling. When I stand in front of ruins, I mourn shattered hubris – with a tinge of schadenfreude sometimes. “Paradise may be beautiful, but it’s not interesting”, Schalansky wrote. It’s an elusive statement that lacks originality, but it’s one with which I agree to some extent, ruminating about what paradise truly means and entails.

more here.

Stephanie DeGooyer at Lapham’s Quarterly:

In 1816 an American lawyer named J.F. Dumoulin wrote Thomas Jefferson a letter to thank him for his hospitality during a recent visit to the former president’s Monticello plantation. As a token of gratitude, Dumoulin enclosed a treatise he had written about naturalization and expatriation. The essay denounced Britain for holding fast to the feudal doctrine of perpetual allegiance, which denied individuals the right to change their nationality. In his reply Jefferson praised Dumoulin, whose opinions on emigration closely matched his own. Why would any man, he wrote, “feel any obligation to die by disease or famine in one country, rather than go to another where he can live?” Every person has just as much “right to live on the outside of an artificial geographical line as he has to live within it.”

With hindsight, historical ideas often appear commonsensical or even passé. Twenty-first-century students look back on the suffrage movement as merely the imperfect beginning of progressive agitation for women’s rights.

more here.

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

Lockdown was, among other things, a sudden collective experiment in volume control. Sound waves from the regular rush-hour thrum of cities usually penetrate more than a kilometre below the Earth’s surface. When Covid-19 forced humans inside, seismologists noticed the muzak of their subterranean instruments was quieted. The ancient rock of our planet came closer to the silence that it had known for nearly all of the first 4bn years of its existence. And the relative stillness was felt on the surface, too. People noticed voices from beyond the human world a little more readily, and those voices felt less need to shout to be heard. Scientists in San Francisco discovered that the city’s sparrows reverted to softer and lower pitched songs of a kind not heard since the invention of the freeway.

Biology professor David George Haskell’s often wonderful book is all about listening to those kinds of lost frequencies. It is a sort of rigorous scientific update on that 1960s imperative to “tune in and turn on”: a reminder that the narrow aural spectrum on which most of us operate, and the ways in which human life is led, blocks out the planet’s great, orchestral richness. Haskell’s previous acclaimed book, The Forest Unseen, was a thrillingly curious investigation of the life of one square metre of ancient Tennessee woodland. This new volume gives you the experience of closing your eyes in such a space and having your senses flooded with the background cacophony.

More here.

Jocelyn Kaiser in Science:

Vaccines to prevent certain types of cancer already exist. They target viruses: hepatitis B virus, which can trigger liver cancer, and human papillomavirus, which causes cervical and some other cancers. But most cancers are not caused by viruses. The Lynch vaccine trial will be one of the first clinical tests of a vaccine to prevent nonviral cancers.

The idea is to deliver into the body bits of proteins, or antigens, from cancer cells to stimulate the immune system to attack any incipient tumors. The concept isn’t new, and it has faced skepticism. A decade ago, a Nature editorial dismissed a prominent breast cancer advocacy group’s goal of developing a preventive vaccine by 2020 as “misguided,” in part because of the genetic complexity of tumors. The editorial called the goal an “objective that science cannot yet deliver.” But now, a few teams—including one funded by the same advocacy group, the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC)—are poised to test preventive vaccines, in some cases in healthy people at high genetic risk for breast and other cancers. Their efforts have been propelled by new insights into the genetic changes in early cancers, along with the recognition that because even nascent tumors can suppress the immune system, the vaccines should work best in healthy people who have never had cancer.

More here.

Playing the Chances

Let me, in fancy, enter the womb again
take that precipitant plunge into life
one particular sperm, one particular egg
one chance, one blind collision—

Let me be that minute explosion
of life creating itself,
let me know womb and water and warmth
and dark and swimming and growing
and infant born.

Let me become—cell by cell, division by
division, moving moving becoming more
inexorable growing destined for the
mountain shaking birthing day.

From one spasmodic incident
from minute speck of egg and sperm
with urgency to grow
and here am I

still becoming me—growing
still becoming me dying
passing life on through me

O let me in fancy enter the womb again
and for an instant taste life emergent
coming through playing the chances.

by Betty Lockwood
from The Matriarch’s Song
publisher Peter E. Randall
Portsmouth, NH, 2001

Maxim D. Shrayer in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

On the night of April 22, the Composer doesn’t sleep …

Insolent insomnia, he will say to his wife the following morning at breakfast. Kornfleks and kofe with kreem. The neck and jowls of an athlete, the aquiline nose, and the lips of an old camel. A few years ago he could still play a strong game of lawn tennis. Now strictly indoor games. And a jacket with black and white squares. The Composer will let the jacket drop, and then will jot down the word “Petrarch” on an index card of the sort the French call Fiches Bristol.

As soon as Véra has fallen asleep in her bedroom, the Composer starts the preparations.

More here.

Jackson Ryan at CNET:

Though theorized in the 1930s and first detected in the 1950s, neutrinos maintain a mysterious aura, and are often dubbed “ghost particles” — they’re not haunting or dangerous, but they just zip through the Earth without us even noticing them. Oh, “and it’s a cool name,” according to astrophysicist Clancy James at Curtin University in Western Australia.

In recent years, ghost particles have been making headlines for all sorts of reasons and not just because they have a cool name. That Antarctic collision was traced to a black hole that shredded a star, for instance, and other neutrinos seem to come via the sun. In early 2022, physicists were able to directly pin down the approximate mass of a neutrino — a discovery that could help uncover new physics or break the rules of the Standard Model.

More here.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins in The Nation:

The term “neoliberalism” is often used to condemn an array of economic policies associated with such ideas as deregulation, trickle-down economics, austerity, free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. As a political movement, neoliberalism is seen as experiencing its breakthrough 40 years ago with the election into office of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. And since the 2007–08 financial crisis, an explosion of academic work and political activism has been devoted to explaining how neoliberalism is fundamentally to blame for the massive growth in inequality.

Yet Gary Gerstle—in his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era—argues that this understanding of neoliberalism struggles to explain why it has exerted such a profound influence on both the left and the right. Gerstle—a professor of American history at the University of Cambridge—thinks neoliberalism should be understood as a worldview that promises liberation by reconciling economic “deregulation with personal freedoms, open borders with cosmopolitanism, and globalization with the promise of increased prosperity for all.”

Such a vision. as Gerstle relates, was able to attract such strange bedfellows as Steve Jobs and Barry Goldwater, Ralph Nader and Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.

More here.

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