These are immigrant times
And the lines are long,
The signs for jobs few,
The songs sadder, the air meaner.
Everyone is hungry.
Everyone is willing.
Jobs are not jobs but lives lived
Hard at the work of being human.
These are immigrant times,
And the lines are long again.
by Alberto Rios
from Not Go Away is My Name
Copper Canyon Press
Felipe De La Hoz in The Baffler:
If anyone is tried for sedition after this whole wretched ordeal, it should be Donald Trump and the repellent congressional creatures who cravenly believed they could direct the QAnon crowd and keep them in their control. The fact of their failure, their monumental miscalculation, does not absolve them of their culpability. We’re already seeing figures like the pusillanimous Missouri Senator Josh Hawley denounce the diehard supporters they’ve spent years whipping into a frenzy, no doubt breathing a sigh of relief that they have a convenient scapegoat to absorb the heat of their misdeeds.
We all feel like we’re standing on the edge of a precipice, but in egging on the trampling of civil liberties, we’re in danger of joining the modern conservative movement in signaling that our convictions are negotiable, or a convenient smoke screen obscuring a primary objective of primacy and oppression, already a pervasive fantasy in their fevered imaginations. Not that we should hit the breaks in a display of good faith to people who will never in an eon give us the benefit of the doubt, but rather out of our own compass, because our tenets aren’t fungible.
If anything, it’s during moments of crisis that it’s particularly important to remember what anchors us, and it certainly isn’t a belief in expansive law enforcement powers and a harsh and retributive penal system. Besides the fact that we would bear the brunt of this arrangement, these convictions are the only thing we have in the end. We might relish in bringing down the hammer on these easy targets, leaving our values by the wayside, but to give in is to risk that when this storm blows past, we’ll find ourselves unmoored, adrift, and unprepared for the squalls to come.
More here.
Sofia Moutinho in Science:
The naked mole-rat may not be the most attractive rodent on the block, but it’s still a social butterfly. These hairless, mostly blind and deaf animals live in colonies of up to 300 individuals, which communicate with high-pitched squeaks. Now, researchers have discovered that, like humans and many birds, mole-rat communities have their own dialect, which is kept alive by their queen. “The study is exciting because it provides the first evidence for vocal learning in a rodent,” says evolutionary biologist Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna, who was not part of the work. More research, he says, may help scientists better understand how complex vocalizations evolved in social animals, including humans.
Naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are renowned for a vast list of weird features: They rarely get cancer, for instance, they live longer than any other rodent, and they have a high pain tolerance. Researchers became interested in them in the 1970s because they are also a rare example of mammals living—like bees and ants—in colonies of workers ruled by a single breeding matriarch or “queen.” Scientists knew naked mole-rats used chirps to communicate, but until now, they had no idea how complex their vocalization was.
More here.
Ronald W. Dworkin in National Affairs:
We all yearn for happiness, and yet so many Americans are unhappy. Polls document a rising tide of unhappiness — especially now, as the pandemic has upended life, with 23% of Americans claiming to be unhappy. This represents the highest figure on record since 1972. Yet even in 2019, with the economy humming, levels of unhappiness had been rising for some time.
The medical literature confirms the unhappiness trend in a different way. Up to half of today’s Americans regularly numb themselves with mood-modifying substances ranging from the legal, such as anti-depressants, to the illegal, such as heroin. In the case of anti-depressants, people justify their prescriptions by “medicalizing” their unhappiness, calling it a neurotransmitter problem. Whether they are right to do so has framed the unhappiness debate for the last 20 years.
But that debate is ending, and a new one has begun. The focus of the “medicalization of unhappiness” debate was whether unhappiness should be considered a scientific problem. That issue has given way to the “politicization of unhappiness.” Whatever unhappiness Americans feel in their private lives has spilled over into the public realm, with ramifications far beyond whether people who take drugs to feel happy should be doing so.
More here.
Thomas Lewton in Wired:
In 1987, A giant star exploded right next to our own Milky Way galaxy. It was the brightest and closest supernova since the invention of the telescope some four centuries earlier, and just about every observatory turned to take a look. Perhaps most excitingly, specialized observatories buried deep underground captured shy subatomic particles called neutrinos streaming out of the blast.
These particles were first proposed as the driving force behind supernovas in 1966, which made their detection a source of comfort to theorists who had been trying to understand the inner workings of the explosions. Yet over the decades, astrophysicists had constantly bumped into what appeared to be a fatal flaw in their neutrino-powered models.
Neutrinos are famously aloof particles, and questions remained over exactly how neutrinos transfer their energy to the star’s ordinary matter under the extreme conditions of a collapsing star. Whenever theorists tried to model these intricate particle motions and interactions in computer simulations, the supernova’s shock wave would stall and fall back on itself. The failures “entrenched the idea that our leading theory for how supernovas explode maybe doesn’t work,” said Sean Couch, a computational astrophysicist at Michigan State University.
More here.
Bernard Freamon in Aeon:
The six city-states on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf, each formerly a sleepy, pristine fishing village, are now all glitzy and futuristic wonderlands. In each of these city-states one finds large tracts of ultramodern architecture, gleaming skyscrapers, world-class air-conditioned retail markets and malls, buzzing highways, giant, busy and efficient airports and seaports, luxury tourist attractions, game parks, children’s playgrounds, museums, gorgeous beachfront hotels and vast, opulent villas housing fabulously affluent denizens. The six city-states – Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Manama in Bahrain, Dammam in Saudi Arabia, Doha in Qatar, and Kuwait City in Kuwait – grew into these luminous metropolises beginning in the 1970s, fuelled by the discovery of oil and gas, an oligarchic accumulation of wealth, and unconditional grants of political independence from the United Kingdom, the former colonial master of the region. Thereafter, the family-run polities that took control of these city-states began to attract huge amounts of financial capital from all over the world. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE, has been described as ‘the richest city in the world’, with wealth rivalling that seen in Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Like those cities, Abu Dhabi is swimming in over-the-top affluence. According to a 2007 report in Fortune magazine, Abu Dhabi’s 420,000 citizens, who ‘sit on one-tenth of the planet’s oil and have almost $1 trillion invested abroad, are worth about $17 million apiece’.
More here.
There’s just one sure harmony: follow the Way.
But how will you know the Way?
It has no quality or form.
It hides in implication.
It expresses nature to its smallest point.
It inhabits all motion.
The Way is a fountain of sense and memory.
The Way is the source of everything known,
without exception.
There’s only one way to understand the source:
accept it.
from the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu
Katherine Wright in Physics:
Today, poetry and science are often considered to be mutually exclusive career paths. But that wasn’t always the case. The mathematician Ada Lovelace and the physicist James Clerk Maxwell were both accomplished poets who wrote rhymes about rainbows and verse about scientific societies. Conversely, the poet John Keats was a licensed surgeon. Combining the two practices fell out of favor in the 1800s, when science moved from a hobby of the elite to a legitimate profession. But translating research into lyrics, haiku, and other poetic forms is resurging among scientists as they look for alternative ways to inspire others with their findings.
“Poetry is a great tool for interrogating and questioning the world,” says Sam Illingworth, a poet and a geoscientist who currently works as a lecturer in science communication at the University of Western Australia. Through workshops and a new science-poetry journal, called Consilience, Illingworth is helping scientists to translate their latest results into poems that can attract appreciation from those outside of their immediate scientific sphere. “There are so many amazing science stories out there that people don’t know about because they are hidden in the jargon of scientific papers,” he says. “Poetry is a really powerful way to change that and to enable communication to take place.”
One scientist who has started using poetry as a communication tool is Stephany Mazon, who studies problems related to gas condensation in the atmosphere at the University of Helsinki in Finland. In May, Mazon joined one of Illingworth’s workshops, which took place via Zoom as part of the European Geophysical Union’s annual meeting. In the workshop, she, along with 300 other scientists, were split into groups of three. Each group was then tasked with writing a haiku, a 17-syllable-long poem that traditionally focuses on nature. Mazon was inspired to join the workshop, as she wanted to try her hand at this unconventional method of science communication. “We can’t all be Twitter stars,” she jokes. Her group only had a few minutes to come up with their haiku, which spotlighted water, a fluid that serendipitously featured in all of the group members’ research projects. “It was a lot of fun, and surprisingly easy to write the poem,” Mazon says.
More here.
Silvia Foti in The New York Times:
When I was growing up in Chicago during the Cold War, my parents taught me to revere my Lithuanian heritage. We sang Lithuanian songs and recited Lithuanian poems; after Lithuanian school on Saturdays, I would eat Lithuanian-style potato pancakes. My grandfather, Jonas Noreika, was a particularly important part of my family story: He was the mastermind of a 1945-1946 revolt against the Soviet Union, and was executed. A picture of him in his military uniform hung in our living room. Today, he is a hero not just in my family. He has streets, plaques and a school named after him. He was awarded the Cross of the Vytis, Lithuania’s highest posthumous honor.
On her deathbed in 2000, my mother asked me to take over writing a book about her father. I eagerly agreed. But as I sifted through the material, I came across a document with his signature from 1941 and everything changed. The story of my grandfather was much darker than I had known. I learned that the man I had believed was a savior who did all he could to rescue Jews during World War II had, in reality, ordered all Jews in his region of Lithuania to be rounded up and sent to a ghetto where they were beaten, starved, tortured, raped and then murdered. More than 95 percent of Lithuania’s Jews died during World War II, many of them killed with the eager collaboration of their neighbors.
More here.
Ron Hanson and Carolee Schneemann at White Fungus:
In communicating with Carolee Schneemann in the last months of her life there was a sense that the artist was in a race against time. Schneemann — now regarded as one of the most important artists of the 20th century — knew that death was approaching and there was still so much to clear up, to articulate and to preserve. In the last years before her passing in 2019, Schneemann had finally overcome decades of rejection and neglect of her work to receive the art world’s recognition and adulation in its fullness. There were major retrospectives at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and MoMA Ps1 in New York. In 2017, Schneemann received the Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale. And yet it wasn’t always easy for the artist to enjoy this newfound respect. The path had been hard.
more here.
Agnes Callard at The Point:
When your anger won’t play well with the anger of others—when it turns down invitations to surface, and persists despite the absence of company—you frequently find yourself on the receiving end of attempts at anger management. Sometimes these conversations can be settled by the introduction of new information or the correction of a misperception, but when those strategies fail, they often devolve into a pure emotional tug-of-war in which you hear that your anger is unproductive; that it’s time to move on; that we are ultimately on the same team. Or, alternatively—for this, too, is “anger management,” though it isn’t usually called that—you hear that if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention; that unless you’re with us, you’re against us.
more here.
Cal Flyn in Prospect:
What is it like to be a bat? It might seem a silly question, but as I start my new series in which I imagine my way into various animals’ heads, it is a perfect starting point. Why? Because it is a silly question that has taken up an enormous amount of earnest intellectual energy ever since the American philosopher Thomas Nagel first posed it in a celebrated 1974 paper.
Bats, he wrote, are sufficiently similar to us—as fellow mammals, and therefore close relations—to allow us to imagine that they might have a form of consciousness resembling our own. But they are different enough to make understanding that consciousness impossible.
It was not enough, Nagel argued, to imagine what it would be like to fly around at dawn and dusk, or spend the day hanging upside down. That would only tell us what it would be like to behave as a bat does. “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” he says, but he seems to regard the requisite imaginative leap impossible.
Maybe.
More here.
Sophie McBain in New Spectator:
In the mid-Sixties the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created the first artificial intelligence chatbot, named Eliza, after Eliza Doolittle. Eliza was programmed to respond to users in the manner of a Rogerian therapist – reflecting their responses back to them or asking general, open-ended questions. “Tell me more,” Eliza might say. Weizenbaum was alarmed by how rapidly users grew attached to Eliza. “Extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” he wrote. It disturbed him that humans were so easily manipulated.
From another perspective, the idea that people seem comfortable offloading their troubles not on to a sympathetic human, but a sympathetic-sounding computer program, might present an opportunity. Even before the pandemic, there were not enough mental health professionals to meet demand. In the UK, there are 7.6 psychiatrists per 100,000 people; in some low-income countries, the average is 0.1 per 100,000. “The hope is that chatbots could fill a gap, where there aren’t enough humans,” Adam Miner, an instructor at the department of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, told me. “But as we know from any human conversation, language is complicated.”
Alongside two colleagues from Stanford, Miner was involved in a recent study that invited college students to talk about their emotions via an online chat with either a person or a “chatbot” (in reality, the chatbot was operated by a person rather than AI).
More here.
Alicia Ault in Smithsonian:
As long as vaccines have existed, humans have been suspicious of both the shots and those who administer them. The first inoculation deployed in America, against smallpox in the 1720s, was decried as antithetical to God’s will. An outraged citizen tossed a bomb through the window of a house where pro-vaccination Boston minister Cotton Mather lived to dissuade him from his mission. It did not stop Mather’s campaign.
After British physician Edward Jenner developed a more effective smallpox vaccine in the late 1700s—using a related cowpox virus as the inoculant—fear of the unknown continued despite its success in preventing transmission. An 1802 cartoon, entitled The Cow Pock—or—the Wonderful Effects of the New Innoculation, depicts a startled crowd of vaccinees who have seemingly morphed into a cow-human chimera, with the front ends of cattle leaping out of their mouths, eyes, ears and behinds. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says the outlandish fiction of the cartoon continues to reverberate with false claims that vaccines cause autism, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, or that the messenger RNA-based Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna lead to infertility. “People are just frightened whenever you inject them with a biological, so their imaginations run wild,” Offit recently told attendees of “Racing for Vaccines,” a webinar organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “The birth of the first anti-vaccine movement was with the first vaccine,” says Offit. People don’t want to be compelled to take a vaccine, so “they create these images, many of which obviously are based on false notions.”
More here.
Mitch Leslie in Science:
For 7 years as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Robert Tjian helped steer hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists probing provocative ideas that might transform biology and biomedicine. So the biochemist was intrigued a couple of years ago when his graduate student David McSwiggen uncovered data likely to fuel excitement about a process called phase separation, already one of the hottest concepts in cell biology.
Phase separation advocates hold that proteins and other molecules self-organize into denser structures inside cells, like oil drops forming in water. That spontaneous sorting, proponents assert, serves as a previously unrecognized mechanism for arranging the cell’s contents and mustering the molecules necessary to trigger key cellular events. McSwiggen had found hints that phase separation helps herpesviruses replicate inside infected cells, adding to claims that the process plays a role in functions as diverse as switching on genes, anchoring the cytoskeleton, and repairing damaged DNA. “It’s pretty clear this process is at play throughout the cell,” says biophysicist Clifford Brangwynne of Princeton University.
More here.
Michael Lind in Tablet:
To observers of the American class system in the 21st century, the common conflation of social class with income is a source of amusement as well as frustration. Depending on how you slice and dice the population, you can come up with as many income classes as you like—four classes with 25%, or the 99% against the 1%, or the 99.99% against the 0.01%. In the United States, as in most advanced societies, class tends to be a compound of income, wealth, education, ethnicity, religion, and race, in various proportions. There has never been a society in which the ruling class consisted merely of a basket of random rich people.
Progressives who equate class with money naturally fall into the mistake of thinking you can reduce class differences by sending lower-income people cash—in the form of a universal basic income, for example. Meanwhile, populists on the right tend to imagine that the United States was much more egalitarian, within the white majority itself, than it really was, whether in the 1950s or the 1850s.
Both sides miss the real story of the evolution of the American class system in the last half century toward the consolidation of a national ruling class—a development which is unprecedented in U.S. history.
More here.