Zachary Fine in The Oxonian Review:

Part of the pleasure of reading Parul Sehgal’s book reviews when she served as a critic for The New York Times was the impression that her prose had slipped past the censors. Some of her sentences had the crispness of newspaper copy but others were much more blurred and atmospheric. You could watch her trialing an idea, circling it with adjectives, letting it rise with the sound of the words.

Here I sit, having just completed a novel that lines up these pieties and threatens to dispatch them with calm and ruthless efficiency . . . it is most thoroughly and exuberantly about the hunched, clammy, lightly paranoid, entirely demented feeling of being ‘very online’—the relentlessness of performance required, the abdication of all inwardness, subtlety and good sense.

This in The New York Times? And not an anomaly but every week, give or take, for four years. Her pieces were elliptical, slightly wry, unafraid to double back on themselves. One could sense that she was thrilling to the limits of the form and not simply meeting a deadline. ‘Book reviewing’, she said, ‘can get a bad rap as glorified book reports, when it really is this amazing instrument, this vocabulary of pleasure.’

More here.

Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta:

As wildly diverse as life on Earth is — whether it’s a jaguar hunting down a deer in the Amazon, an orchid vine spiraling around a tree in Congo, primitive cells growing in boiling hot springs in Canada, or a stockbroker sipping coffee on Wall Street — at the genetic level, it all plays by the same rules. Four chemical letters, or nucleotide bases, spell out 64 three-letter “words” called codons, each of which stands for one of 20 amino acids. When amino acids are strung together in keeping with these encoded instructions, they form the proteins characteristic of each species. With only a few obscure exceptions, all genomes encode information identically.

Yet, in a new study published last month in eLife, a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University showed that it’s possible to tweak one of these time-honored rules and create a more expansive, entirely new genetic code built around longer codon words.

More here.

Krithika Varagur in The New Republic:

It’s remarkable: For more than a year, it’s been impossible to describe any world leader as a version of the sitting U.S. president. Run this thought experiment yourself: Who might be the “Joe Biden of South America”? Or “Central Europe’s Biden”? You draw a blank. What a contrast from the four years in which the world contained Hungary’s Trump, Brazil’s Trump, India’s Trump, Turkey’s Trump, the Philippines’ Trump, and so many more. The parallels between these leaders and Trump were chilling, but they were also a boon for the geopolitical commentariat: the sundry experts, analysts, specialists, and columnists who used them to give an intelligible shape to troubling developments in places far from the United States. The stakes were uncontestably high, and the conditions for analogy, the Swiss Army knife of such professions, had never been so ripe.

The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World by Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, is one of several new books that attempt to explain today’s authoritarians as a single phenomenon by slotting their rise and their “playbooks”—a favorite term of these analyses—into a unifying framework.

More here.

Rafaela von Bredow and Johann Grolle in Der Speigel:

DER SPIEGEL: Professor Deutsch, you believe that mankind, after billions and billions of years of absolute monotony in the universe, will now reshape it to their liking, that a new cosmological era is coming. Are you serious?

Deutsch: I am not the first to propose this idea. The Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani wrote in the 19th century that he had no hesitation in declaring man to be a new power in the universe, equivalent to the power of gravitation.

DER SPIEGEL: And fly to distant planets? Tap energy from black holes? Conquer entire galaxies?

Deutsch: I am not saying that we will necessarily do all this. I am only saying that, in principle, there is nothing to stop us. Only the laws of physics could prevent us. And we do not know a law of physics that forbids us, for example, from traveling to distant stars.

More here.

Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic:

​Growing up, Erin Nelson used to make fun of their dad for spending so much time looking out the window at what the neighbors were up to. “Now I’m that person,” Nelson, a 31-year-old who bought their first house a year ago in Portland, Oregon, told me. “I’m always peeking out the window … That’s like my new TV.” Nelson, who uses they/them pronouns, has realized that as a homeowner, their life is bound up with the people next door in a way it never has been before.

Buying a first house is, for those who can afford it, among the largest financial decisions someone makes in their life, and lately, the process has only gotten more stressful: During the pandemic, home prices have shot up, and shopping for a house has become intimidatingly competitive in many places. But even some winners of the competition have buyer’s remorse. In a recent survey from the real-estate site Zillow, roughly one-third of respondents reported regretting how much work or maintenance their home required, and roughly one-fifth concluded that they had paid too much.

Perhaps forgotten amid the bidding wars and the rush to lock in a mortgage as interest rates rise is the fact that this transaction has a way of changing people as well. In addition to buying an assemblage of wood, glass, and other materials and committing to a host of unfamiliar chores, homeowners are also buying a psychological grab bag of new stressors, time sucks, comforts, perks, and trivial fixations—such as the neighbors’ comings and goings. Homeownership can change your mental time horizon, your conception of your community, and your stakes in a physical place.

More here.

Maria Rubin in The NY Review of Books:

IT IS DAUNTING to write a biography of Tolstoy. Hundreds or even thousands of books have already put each detail of his life and work under a microscope, and the archives contain no more hidden treasures. Yet, new interpretations of Tolstoy’s life continue to pour in, with more expected in the run-up to the writer’s 200th birthday in 2028. One of the most immediately obvious advantages of Andrei Zorin’s Leo Tolstoy is its brevity. And I don’t mean this as a backhanded compliment. While other biographies tend to compete with the author’s greatest novels in length, this medium-format book of roughly 200 pages will be welcomed by those who want to learn more about the legendary Russian writer without a major time commitment.

Zorin’s book achieves the ultimate expectation set by the biography genre — he creates a consistent representation of Tolstoy’s integral personality. To begin with, he does not revisit the familiar dichotomy of Tolstoy the artist versus Tolstoy the thinker. According to this narrative, the writer turned to excessive moralizing after completing War and Peace and Anna Karenina, gradually suffocating his artistic genius. In the colorful words of Tatyana Tolstaya, the writer’s distant descendent and a popular author in her own right, once he turned to preaching the “quill fell out of his hand.” Tolstoy himself was very much aware of this inner conflict and in later life “resolved” it by condemning much of European art and literature, his own fiction included. Whereas many scholars have been all too eager to assimilate this binary paradigm, Zorin writes his biography against that trend. He presents Tolstoy as a sum total of all of his various activities — fiction, nonfiction, correspondence, oral teachings, religious writings, direct action, and even family squabbles — seamlessly integrated into the text of his life. While Tolstoy’s path seems full of unexpected shifts from one extreme to the other (from a dissolute lifestyle to near-chastity, from hunting to vegetarianism, from fiction to preaching, from luxury to asceticism), Zorin’s book shows that every juncture was just another manifestation of the inner logic of his existence. In this light, the spiritual crisis of 1878, when Tolstoy appeared to have rejected nearly all of his former values, was nothing sudden: this “conversion” became a culmination of a lifelong quest for the meaning of life and death, deep self-reflection and religious skepticism.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svk9VWnSfgA&ab_channel=Moconomy

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven in Aeon:

With the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said would become one of the most influential scholars of our era. The book transformed the study of the history of the modern world, as it offered insights into how racist discourses created and maintained European empires. As much for his political activities, Said and his work attracted a number of Right-wing critics, most notably perhaps Bernard Lewis. Less well known in the West is Samir Amin, the Egyptian economist who coined the term ‘Eurocentrism’. The term comes from Amin’s book Eurocentrism (1988), which criticised Said’s view of empire from the Left and offered an alternative view, one based not on culture or discourse, but on a materialist understanding of capitalism and imperialism.

Said spent most of his career in the Global North, in New York City, while Amin spent his mostly in Africa, attempting to build African academic and political institutions to challenge the dependencies created through imperialism. When I met Amin for an interview back in 2016, he was 85 and still vigorously involved in building alternative institutions and challenging Eurocentric social theory. Although he died in 2018, his legacy remains acutely relevant.

More here.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary in Late Light:

On April 30, 2018, the temperature reached 122.4⁰ Fahrenheit (50.2⁰ Celsius) in Nawabshah, Pakistan, a city of 1.1 million people a mere 127 miles from Karachi, the capital city with approximately 15 million residents. Although Pakistan is a large and varied country geographically speaking, it is the fifth most populous country in the world, with just under 230 million residents. This was not only the hottest April day ever in Nawabshah; it was the hottest April day ever in recorded human history.

Many climate scientists who work on “dangerous heat”—in some ways the most straightforward social impact of global warming—talk about “wet-bulb” temperatures, a combination of heat and humidity measures. And for good reason. Wet-bulb thresholds are much lower (around 32-35⁰C) and are already being crossed all over the world. But even a “dry-bulb” threshold (around 35⁰C) without the compounding issues is “dangerous.” For a few days, maybe even a few hours, 50.2⁰C is deadly.

There is so much to think through with an example like this: from the obvious—climate change, rising temperatures, and its systemic causes—to the less-so: even with mitigation, these are millions of people who can and will move. But what I wish to focus on for the moment are the temporal aspects such blunt empirical realities pose. Horizons seem to fade, a fog descends, the past is churning geologically in the present while if there is a “future,” it is already here.

More here.

Lee Harris in Phenomenal World:

After weeks of rising domestic pressure, a spiraling economic crisis, and the swift loss of crucial military support, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan was removed from office last weekend following a vote of no confidence. The political turmoil is the latest in a worrisome series of events in the country—the price of food has risen sharply in recent months, along with gas and other essentials. And Pakistan’s rupee plummeted against the dollar, raising concern that higher bills for basic imports may deplete its dollar reserves.

Khan’s erratic style went from being seen as an asset—bucking pressures from Western lenders—to a liability, ​​as the government reversed course on key policies and contributed to heightened economic instability. In a speech following his election, Khan’s successor, interim Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, said the former cricket player and socialite had run a government that was “corrupt, incompetent and laid-back.”

His dismissal comes as the war in Ukraine and rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve pose immense challenges for heavily dollar-indebted developing countries. A late January poll found that two-thirds of Pakistanis considered double-digit inflation to be the biggest problem facing the country. But tens of thousands protested across the streets of major cities on Sunday night, showing their support of Khan and echoing his unsubstantiated claim that the ouster was a result of US meddling.

More here.

Matthew Reisz at The Guardian:

Robin Dunbar sets out to offer nothing less than “an overarching theory for why and how humans are religious”. Unlike most writers on such themes, he is largely uninterested in the truth or otherwise of religious claims and has little to say about the damage caused by religions, although he does touch on their “militant violence” and the predatory promiscuity we find among the charismatic leaders of small cults. But he is intrigued by the “seeming universality” of religions and their constant tendency to fragment. His stimulating and hugely ambitious book, therefore, uses a variety of different approaches to throw light on three really big questions: “the functions that religion has served”, “the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms that make this possible” and “the timing of the origins of religion”.

At the emotional heart of religion, as Dunbar sees it, is something he calls “the mystical stance”, which includes “a susceptibility to enter trance-like states”, “belief in a transcendental (or spirit) world” and “a belief that we can call on hidden power(s) to help us”.

more here.

Dan Turello at the LARB:

Instead of following the well-worn path of thinking about Abraham as the father of a nation, we are presented with a traveling herder about whom we know nothing other than that he had a beautiful wife. Calasso points out that among “the many causes of bafflement scholars come up against in the Bible one of the most glaring is the fact that there are three occasions in Genesis when a man tries to pass off his wife as his sister.” Recalling these episodes alongside the accounts of fathers willing to send out their daughters to be raped by mobs casts these men in rather unflattering light. But more importantly, it raises the question of how the books of the Bible were assembled, how and why stories were included or deleted. The “main author of the Bible,” writes Calasso, “could be thought of as the unknown Final Redactor, who thus becomes responsible for all the innumerable occasions of perplexity that the Bible is bound to provoke in anyone.” This seems to be the interpretative crux. The Bible continues to inspire our cultural and religious imaginary. The question is not whether to read it — it is how we read it.

more here.

He Thanks His Woodpile

The wood of the madrone burns with a flame at once
lavender and mossy green, a color you sometimes see in a sari.

Oak burns with a peppery smell.

For a really hot fire, use bark.
You can crack your stove with bark.

All winter long I make wood stews:

Poem to stove to woodpile to stove to
typewriter.    Woodpile.    Stove.

and can’t stop peeking at it!
can’t stop opening up the door!
can’t stop giggling at it

“Shack Simple”

crazy as Han Shan as
Wittgenstein in his German hut, as
all the others ever were and are

………………. Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers

who walked away from it, finally,
kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of
man-hooked Man

………………. ( which is not, at last, estrangement )

by Lew Welch
from Ring of Bone
Grey Fox Press, 1960

Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker:

Lake Mary Jane is shallow—twelve feet deep at most—but she’s well connected. She makes her home in central Florida, in an area that was once given over to wetlands. To the north, she is linked to a marsh, and to the west a canal ties her to Lake Hart. To the south, through more canals, Mary Jane feeds into a chain of lakes that run into Lake Kissimmee, which feeds into Lake Okeechobee. Were Lake Okeechobee not encircled by dikes, the water that flows through Mary Jane would keep pouring south until it glided across the Everglades and out to sea.

Mary Jane has an irregular shape that, on a map, looks a bit like a woman’s head in profile. Where the back of the woman’s head would be, there’s a park fitted out with a playground and picnic tables. Where the face would be, there are scattered houses, with long docks that teeter over the water. People who live along Mary Jane like to go boating and swimming and watch the wildlife. Toward the park side of the lake sits an islet, known as Bird Island, that’s favored by nesting egrets and wood storks. Like most of the rest of central Florida, Mary Jane is under pressure from development. Orange County, which encompasses the lake, the city of Orlando, and much of Disney World, is one of the fastest-growing counties in Florida, and Florida is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. A development planned for a site just north of Mary Jane would convert nineteen hundred acres of wetlands, pine flatlands, and cypress forest into homes, lawns, and office buildings.

In an effort to protect herself, Mary Jane is suing.

More here.

Lawrence Weschler in Orion Magazine:

As a student at St. Paul’s Academy in London, Oliver Sacks founded a tremendously successful literary society. It quickly eclipsed the staid Milton Society, “which had been founded at St. Paul’s, years earlier, by Milton himself,” he says. “We were a ravenous Jewish overgrowth,” he goes on, “and one day the headmaster called me in and said, ‘Sacks, you’re dissolved, you don’t exist,’ as simple as that—a phrase that has persisted within me, hauntingly, through the years.” Talking about St. Paul’s, which “used to be in Hammersmith, in a magnificent Gothic monstrosity,” to which Oliver would bike or bus (“the 28, the bus of my childhood, whose fare has in the meantime jumped from one penny to forty pence”), puts him in mind of the Natural History Museum in nearby South Kensington, which he would often skirt on the way to and from school—and he proposes we head over for a visit.

On the drive, he explains how, though his romance with motorcycles began in adolescence, he really only got his first one on his twenty-first birthday. During his last six months in England, stationed for a residency in Birmingham, he would gun his black Norton down the Birmingham–London highway. Eventually, as virtually his last act in England—he starts to laugh at the memory—he “stepped o=” his bike, at eighty miles an hour, slid a hundred yards on the slippery road, and survived, protected by his leather swaddling. (The bike was destroyed.)

Then, the minute he got to America, he got another, “an off-road scrambler.”

Arriving at the Natural History Museum, a huge and imposing stone secular cathedral built in high confident Victorian Gothic, Oliver relates, as we approach the ramp, “Beneath the visible museum, there was a vast underground one, crammed with anatomical samples. The New Spirit Building, it was called; I was a frequent visitor. The place used to be so unpopular, it was a delight. There were no concessions to popular presentation,” he says, punning.

More here.

Michaela Haas in Reasons to be Cheerful:

Ralph Gerber* has tried nearly everything a wealthy alcoholic can try during two decades of excessive drinking: half a dozen stints in rehab, Alcoholics Anonymous, even a shaman-led quest through the Arizona desert. Each time, the treatments got him sober, yet the 48-year-old real estate broker in Los Angeles kept relapsing. His divorce, problems at his firm, the Covid lockdowns — there was always a trigger that sent him back to the gin.

In the spring of 2021, he decided to try a path that is not entirely legal. He flew to Denver, Colorado, to take a dose of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic component in magic mushrooms. “It was a journey into my innermost core,” is how Gerber describes the six-hour experience. “I felt flooded with love and was able to get in touch with long-suppressed feelings.” Six months later, he made the trip again for a second session. “I have been sober ever since,” he says proudly, half confident he’s reached the end of his addiction, half fearful the effects might eventually wear off.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

For more than a decade, molecular biologist Martin Beck and his colleagues have been trying to piece together one of the world’s hardest jigsaw puzzles: a detailed model of the largest molecular machine in human cells.

This behemoth, called the nuclear pore complex, controls the flow of molecules in and out of the nucleus of the cell, where the genome sits. Hundreds of these complexes exist in every cell. Each is made up of more than 1,000 proteins that together form rings around a hole through the nuclear membrane.

These 1,000 puzzle pieces are drawn from more than 30 protein building blocks that interlace in myriad ways. Making the puzzle even harder, the experimentally determined 3D shapes of these building blocks are a potpourri of structures gathered from many species, so don’t always mesh together well.

More here.