Meet Eva Frank: The First Jewish Female Messiah

Shira Telushkin at JSTOR:

Eva Frank was born in 1756, in modern-day Ukraine, to Jacob and Hannah Frank, along with their existing children. Jacob had been raised in a family staunchly committed to the radical teachings of Shabtai Tzvi, the Jewish messianic claimant who died in 1676 after ultimately converting to Islam, and whose widely embraced prophecies and antinomian preaching—which specifically called for overturning Jewish law—nearly upended European Jewry. Around 1751, five years before Eva’s birth, Jacob proclaimed that he was Shabtai Tzvi’s successor on Earth. Building on Jewish mystical teachings and Shabtai Tzvi’s legacy, he fashioned himself as the Messiah on earth who had come to teach a new way of religious life that would bring the Messianic era. He quickly attracted thousands of followers, known as “Frankists”, and reportedly took the antinomian embrace of holy subversion even further than Shabtai Tzvi, hosting intricate rituals that overthrew the taboos of incest, menstruation, and adultery, often with the aid of sacred objects, including Torah scrolls. Though there is ongoing debate about the extent of such rituals in practice, as opposed to simply wild rumors, scholars Cristina Ciucu and Regan Kramer argue in their article published in Clio. Women, Gender, History that such ideology was markedly more extreme in Frankist practice than that of prior leaders and took a specific focus on the display of feminine sensuality.

more here.

Barneys Fantasia

Adrienne Raphel at The Paris Review:

SONY DSC

Department-store windows are a spectacle. When you look in the window, you don’t see into the storefront itself: you see a fashion-fantasia aquarium depicting a scene, like a diorama in a natural-history museum. Barneys’s longtime creative director, Simon Doonan, who joined the company as a window dresser in 1986, made the store’s windows iconically rebellious, a punk bizarrerie. Doonan put industrial tape on a nude statue of Madonna, spammed a rigorously minimalist Bottega Veneta mannequin display with dozens of Mr. Potato Head dolls, and dreamed up Dominatrix Margaret Thatcher.

Doonan’s flair marked him as the heir apparent to one of the pioneering show-window dressers of the early 1900s: L. Frank Baum. Emerald City, the glittering jewel of Baum’s Oz, is nothing if not a grand department store, one with shopwindows that are simply too dazzling for Dorothy’s unjaded sight to bear.

more here.

Birdsong, Quantum Computing, Omicron’s Mutations, and More

Laura Helmuth in Scientific American:

Science is all about expanding the realm of human perception. Sometimes that means making the invisible visible, like when Galileo turned a telescope toward Jupiter, discovered moons around another planet and changed our literal worldview. We now know that flowers, as beautiful as they are to us, are communicating with birds and bees using ultraviolet patterns we can’t see and that elephants can feel vibrations travel through the ground from miles away.

People have been observing birds singing and calling since there were people. Birds vocalize to attract mates, defend territory, find one another, and more. Many birds’ songs sound musical to us, with distinct notes that are repeated in pleasing patterns at a steady speed—melody, rhythm and tempo, basically. But as Adam Fishbein and other bird researchers have discovered recently, what sounds so entrancing to us isn’t that meaningful to them. Birds don’t seem to listen to the melody so much as to fine details within each note that humans can’t detect.

More here.

Thursday Poem

Alberto Caeiro  —IX

I’m a keeper of sheep.

The sheep are my thoughts
And each thought a sensation.
I think with my eyes and my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.

To think a flower is to see and smell it,
And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning.

That is why on a hot day
When I enjoy it so much I feel sad,
And I lie down in the grass
And close my warm eyes,
Then I feel my whole body lying down in reality,
I know the truth, and I am happy.

by Fernando Pessoa
from
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe
Penguin Classics, 1998
translation: Richard Zenith

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Songs for Invertebrates: Auto-Tune, Rhythm, and the Innateness of Music

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

My gym in the heart of the 19th arrondissement is inhabited by a goodly mix of young Tunisian beefcakes admiring themselves and one another in the full-wall mirrors; older barrel-shaped strongmen, often with moustaches and faded anchor tattoos on their forearms, as if straight off the carnival circuit circa 1910, where you might see them wearing skimpy leopard-spotted togas and lifting those ball-shaped barbells from the cartoons; and a scattering of scrawny ageing bourgeois who are quite plainly there on the stern recommendation of their doctors.

I fear I belong to this latter category. I gained an embarrassing amount of weight during the first lockdown, and overcompensated by losing it all, and much more, with a strict diet I started in early 2021 (zero flour, zero sugar, etc.). Without an accompanying exercise regime, my muscles atrophied, and by the end of that year I found myself dreading even the task of opening doors. My shoulders were so weak that the mere weight of my arms hanging from them caused tremendous pain. Get back to the gym! the physical therapist said, and so I did.

More here.

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast: Frans de Waal on Culture and Gender in Primates

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Humans are related to all other species here on Earth, but some are closer relatives than others. Primates, a group that includes apes, monkeys, lemurs, and others besides ourselves, are our closest relatives, and they exhibit a wide variety of behaviors that we can easily recognize. Frans de Waal is a leading primatologist and ethologist who has long studied cognition and collective behaviors in chimps, bonobos, and other species. His work has established the presence of politics, morality, and empathy in primates. His new book is Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

More here.

How Substack Might Replace The New York Times

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

The New York Times is obsessed with Substack. A few months ago, it published Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack. Recently, they published Substack’s Growth Spurt Brings Growing Pains.

They’re right to be obsessed. Substack might replace them.

Today I’ll explain why that might happen. And since the lessons are applicable to all creator economy companies, we will also get a glimpse of the future of video, audio, streaming, and other creator economy verticals.

To do all of that, we need to start with yet another competitor to Substack and The New York Times: Medium.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

An Introduction to Some Poems

Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don’t understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.

Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.

We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won’t believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.

The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,

Or profit, or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.

by William Stafford
from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems
Graywolf Press, 1998

Authoritarian Regimes’ AI Innovation Advantage

Daniel Oberhaus in Harvard Magazine:

FOR THE PAST DECADE, China has led the world in advanced-facial recognition systems. Chinese companies dominate the rankings of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Face Recognition Vendor Test, considered the accepted standard for judging the accuracy of these systems, and Chinese research papers on the subject are cited almost twice as often as American ones. Many experts recognize the importance of facial-recognition and other artificial-intelligence applications for promoting future economic growth through productivity gains, which makes understanding how China came to dominate this field a competitive concern. And after years of research, Harvard assistant professor of economics David Yang believes he’s discovered an explanation for the Chinese companies’ advantage.

More here.

Hepatitis B and the liver cancer endgame

Kristina Campbell in Nature:

When someone’s liver is infected with hepatitis B, damage increases over time, as long as the virus is active. The liver tissue thickens and forms scars (fibrosis), advancing to severe scarring called cirrhosis. In approximately one-third of people with hepatitis B infection, this then progresses to hepatocellular carcinoma, as the viral DNA inserts itself into liver cells, changing their function and allowing tumours to grow.

Researchers and medical professionals cannot yet predict with certainty which people with hepatitis B infection will develop liver cancer. They know it happens more frequently in men, in people infected with certain genetic variants of the virus, in heavy consumers of alcohol, and in those who have been exposed to chemicals called aflatoxins, which can contaminate foods, including peanuts. People with various metabolic disorders are also at higher risk, and studies have identified human genes associated with this viral-led progression to cancer1. However, these risk factors fail to identify everyone who will get hepatocellular carcinoma. People with hepatitis B infection and liver damage should ideally be monitored regularly for evidence of tumours, because survival rates increase if the cancer is caught early.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith’s Philosophical History Of The Internet

Trevor Quirk at Bookforum:

Yet this book could not be summarized as a jeremiad against cyberspace, because it, like most of Smith’s essays and scholarship, rarifies its subject through its author’s talent for synthesizing seemingly disparate ideas and endeavors. In building an alternative model of the internet, Smith transports his reader between discussions of Proust and 1940s hunting gadgetry; the signaling of sperm whales and the metaphysics of methyl jasmonate; Melanesian ritual masks and the Kuiper Belt; Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and Grand Theft Auto; the nascent industry of “teledildonics” and the rueful poetics of railways; Kant’s epistemology and the pablum of Mark Zuckerberg. In a book that meditates upon networks, webs, and connections, Smith’s astounding range becomes something of a method for revealing the interconnectedness of everything between stars and modems.

Accessing such a mystic vision first requires a deeper accounting of the shittiness of online experience. Smith is a historian of science, and so he appreciates how human understanding of nature is often constrained by era-defining technology.

more here.

‘Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph’ by Lucasta Miller

A.E. Stallings at The American Scholar:

There is something irresistible about John Keats’s poignantly brief life and his outsize greatness as an artist. That such a wealth of material about him exists—his own astonishing letters as well as reminiscences and diaries of his friends—means that there has never been a shortage of biographies. Vignettes began appearing soon after Keats’s death in 1821, with the first full biography, by Richard Monckton Milnes (a Victorian politician, failed suitor of Florence Nightingale, and avid collector of erotica), appearing in 1848. More recent lives of the poet include works by Amy Lowell (1924), Robert Gittings (1968), Andrew Motion (1997), and Nicholas Roe (2012), to name a few. Now the English literary journalist and biographer Lucasta Miller has added to the pile. She wrote her book, pegged to the 200th anniversary of Keats’s death, under pandemic lockdown in Hampstead, an area of London where the poet himself lived, a place still haunted by Keatsian associations.

more here.

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Arundhati Roy on Religious Nationalism, Dissent, and the Battle Between Myth and History

Arundhati Roy’s Sissy Farenthold Lecture at the University of Texas, in Literary Hub:

Before I begin, I would like to say a few words about the war in Ukraine. I unequivocally condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and applaud the Ukrainian peoples’ courageous resistance. I applaud the courage shown by Russian dissenters at enormous cost to themselves.

I say this while being acutely and painfully aware of the hypocrisy of the United States and Europe, which together have waged similar wars on other countries in the world. Together they have led the nuclear race and have stockpiled enough weapons to destroy our planet many times over. What an irony it is that the very fact that they possess these weapons, now forces them to helplessly watch as a country they consider to be an ally is decimated—a country whose people and territory, whose very existence, imperial powers have jeopardized with their war games and ceaseless quest for domination.

And now, I turn to India. I dedicate this talk to the increasing numbers of prisoners of conscience in India.

More here.

How hypersonic missiles work and the unique threats they pose

Iain Boyd in The Conversation:

I am an aerospace engineer who studies space and defense systems, including hypersonic systems. These new systems pose an important challenge due to their maneuverability all along their trajectory. Because their flight paths can change as they travel, these missiles must be tracked throughout their flight.

A second important challenge stems from the fact that they operate in a different region of the atmosphere from other existing threats. The new hypersonic weapons fly much higher than slower subsonic missiles but much lower than intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. and its allies do not have good tracking coverage for this in-between region, nor does Russia or China.

More here.

Kenneth Roth to Step Down at Human Rights Watch

From the HRW website:

“Ken’s fearless passion for justice, his courage and compassion towards the victims of human rights violations and atrocity crimes was not just professional responsibility but a personal conviction to him,” said Fatou Bensouda, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. “He has indeed been a great inspiration to me and my colleagues.”

Today, amid the horrific abuse taking place in Ukraine, an infrastructure is in place to hold perpetrators accountable.

Roth also created special teams to address the needs of certain marginalized people, including women, children, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, refugees, people with disabilities, and older people. He also oversaw the development of specialized programs on poverty and inequality, climate change, technology, and corporate social responsibility. In addition, he initiated a program to address human rights in the United States.

More here.  And more from the NY Times here.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria

Robert Rubsam at Commonweal:

We see a pile of cloth in a barely lit room. We look, and we look some more, and might make out an ever-so-slight movement under the cloth, as if the object were breathing. Then wham: a walloping sound bursts the silence, the covers fall back, and Tilda Swinton rises into frame.

I have seen Memoria four times now, but every time I see it again I forget this basic order of events. Such is the beguiling magic of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film: I find myself so absorbed by the nearly dark frame, illuminated by the little streetlight showing through the curtains, that the noise hits me like a blow every time, and I shake in my seat, momentarily as disoriented as our protagonist. That feeling will persist for the rest of the film.

more here.