April White in Slate:

Flora Bigelow Dodge had not traveled to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in January 1903 for the same reason so many women of her acquaintance had. She did not do anything for the same reason other women did—at least not if you believed the newspapers. A fixture in the society pages, Flora was the “most daring, most original, cleverest woman in New York.” She was a wonderful musician, a graceful dancer, an expert horsewoman, and a captivating storyteller, an author of plays and short stories. She was “both courageous and imaginative.” She was witty, ambitious, generous, and beautiful, a woman of “unusual individuality” with a retinue of admirers.

She was also unhappy.

After 16 years of marriage to Charlie Dodge, son of the Dodge family, well-known for its lumber and mining fortune, 34-year-old Flora wanted a divorce—one which would be denied to her in her home state of New York unless she could furnish proof of adultery. And so she traveled west to join the “divorce colony,” as newspapermen called the sorority of dissatisfied wives who moved to South Dakota at the turn of the twentieth century to take advantage of the laxest divorce laws in the country.

More here.

Jeanne Erdmann in Nature:

Zion Levy remembers the excitement that he and his daughter felt while poring over body scans in 2019, watching small black dots, representing melanoma metastases, shrink away and eventually vanish. They weren’t Levy’s scans. He didn’t even know who the scans came from, but he did share a connection with them.

About five years earlier, Levy had been diagnosed with melanoma, but he was in remission thanks to a powerful immunotherapy called nivolumab. Because he had responded well to the drug, doctors at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer, Israel, asked whether he would consider donating his stool — and the microbes inside — to possibly help others who had failed to respond or whose cancers had become resistant to treatment. He agreed to rigorous tests, blood draws and detailed questions about what he ate most (pizza). Levy made his donation, packed it into a cooler, and then called a taxi hired by the hospital. As with any transplant, travel time mattered. Doctors wanted the sample to arrive in less than 90 minutes.

Once there, Levy’s faeces were tested for pathogens, diluted, homogenized, centrifuged and sifted down to a refined microbial broth that could be freeze-dried and packed into capsules. Levy’s enthusiasm for the project convinced Ben Boursi, an oncologist at the Sheba Medical Center, who was leading the study, to share the anonymized scans of a recipient of his donated microbes. Today, that person has gone more than three years without evidence of cancer and has become a donor in a similar melanoma-treatment trial. It’s a legacy that Levy feels good about. “I am very proud that I can save lives. I would like to do it again,” he says.

More here.

Arctic Wolf

—for three fine people

I
I told her I did not
Have a copy of All Things Must Pass
She found out I loved pretzels
When she came over my house
To visit,
She brought the boxed set of three albums
New, from the Record Exchange
A plastic coffer
Full of long pretzel sticks

II
After all these years
She held nothing against me
Shipped me a copy of a Pulitzer Prize winning
Short story collection
I read Interpreter of Maladies
Crafted a short story myself
After the stylistic aroma I gleaned
From Jhumpa Lahiri

III
She looked after my interest
Made suggestions where they seemed to fit
Burned me First Light CDs
Sent a Colin Hay video link
The frontman of Men at Work
Now a seasoned singer-songwriter

IV

I do not know
What I hold against love
I could not give any of the three
My heart, not for too long
Or in the way that was needed, or proper
Maybe it is true
I am an Arctic Wolf
Seven of them, in a dream
A scene in blue light, heaven, I gathered
They nipped at me playfully
I was blissful
A creature, happiest when alone
Like each one of them
I had found my pack

by Marc Steven Mannheimer

Matthew Shipe in The Common Reader:

Published by Thunder Bay Press, The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics: 1963-1970 offers an attractive, if strangely incomplete, collection of the lyrics that John, Paul, George, and (very rarely) Ringo produced during their 1960s heyday. The brevity of the Beatles’ career—seven short years from “Please Please Me” to “The Long and Winding Road”—remains the most mystifying element of the band, of how so much music poured out of the band in a remarkably brief amount of time. The Beatles Illustrated does not offer any answers or provide any new insight on the Fab Four’s magic—the commentary is limited to Steve Turner’s one-page introduction—but instead captures the bulk of the Beatles’ lyrics alongside some great photos of the band and illustrations that nicely compliment the songs.

More here.

Beth Gardiner in Scientific American:

With its recent decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which reined in the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to address climate change, the Supreme Court wrote into precedent an idea that has been gaining traction for years in conservative legal circles. The concept, known as the “major questions” doctrine, holds that regulatory agencies may not take actions with wide-ranging economic impact unless Congress has specifically authorized them to do so.

The case concerned the powers granted by the Clean Air Act, the landmark 1970 law that— in the absence of legislation specifically dealing with climate change—has been the best tool available for checking greenhouse gas emissions. And while the Court now constrains the federal government’s power to tackle big issues, the Clean Air Act was designed to address just such “major questions”—including, explicitly in its text, questions yet to be understood when it was enacted.

More here.

Lynzy Billing in Undark:

Anita’s case was far from unique. According to hospital records, the women’s ward in Herat saw 900 such cases that April. In 2021, the facility recorded 12,678 cases, up from 10,800 cases in 2020.

These mysterious ailments — often entailing loss of consciousness, convulsions, paralysis — have plagued girls and women in Afghanistan for more than a decade. Government officials, local media, and, often, the women themselves have described these events as poisonings, usually attributed to attacks by the Taliban or other militant groups. Doctors who review the cases have come to a different diagnosis: conversion disorder, part of a class of conditions called somatoform disorder.

Patients with somatoform disorder experience bodily symptoms with no apparent physical cause. Conversion disorder is a specific form in which a patient’s physical symptoms mimic a neurological disorder. The symptoms often follow a period of significant emotional or physical distress, and they are outside of the individual’s conscious control.

More here.

Daniel Callcut in Psyche:

Suppose that I am polyamorous and that my mother disapproves. She tolerates my love life but thinks it’s wrong that I have not one partner but two. What her half-accepting, half-critical attitude reveals is a duality at the heart of toleration, an ambivalence that is beautifully captured by the British philosopher Bernard Williams (1929-2003). Toleration, for Williams, is a central ingredient in thinking through ‘what coexistence under conditions of fundamental disagreement requires’ (to use a helpful phrase from the philosopher Teresa Bejan).

To tolerate, as Williams stresses, is to be conflicted. Toleration involves putting up with something that you would rather not be the case. This doesn’t have to involve moral disapproval: perhaps you just can’t stand your colleague’s taste in music. But toleration is likely to be especially hard when what you experience is moral disapproval. After all, if you think that something is wrong, why not try to stop it happening?

Consider what is called for when one group of people in society (perhaps members of a religion) are asked to tolerate behaviour (perhaps polyamory) they consider sinful.

More here.

F this and F that

One of the fringe benefits
……………………. of turning sixteen:
…………. a boy can tell the whole world
to get fucked and fly
…………………….down the street,
…………. as if his car were on fire
and the only way to put the fire out
…………………….is driving
…………. as fast as he can.
O fuck for when he opens the letter
…………………….that says exactly
…………. what he’s afraid it would.
Go fuck yourself
…………………….for when his father tries
…………. to persuade him
nothing will be different
…………………….now that his mother’s moving out.
…………. Motherfucker for the walls
that get in the boy’s way
…………………….in the hospital
…………. where his grandpop’s dying.
Fuck. The teeth biting into
…………………….the lower lip
…………. then the ck—just as good
as spitting into someone’s face.
…………………….Nothing else will do,
…………. Just when the boy’s sure
he’ll never be able to say what he feels,
…………………….this one syllable rises
…………. out of the great silence
all words inhabit
…………………….till they’re spoken.
…………. Fucking A! It’s the
kiss of a basketball
…………………….off the backboard.
…………. A key fitting
into the door he thought
…………………….locked forever.
…………. Light in a girl’s just-washed hair.
Fucking A. Once again
…………………….words
…………. had not failed him.

by Christopher Bursk
from The First Inhabitant of Arcadia
The University of Arkansas Press, 2006

Parul Sehgal in The New Yorker:

t was on a train journey, from Richmond to Waterloo, that Virginia Woolf encountered the weeping woman. A pinched little thing, with her silent tears, she had no way of knowing that she was about to be enlisted into an argument about the fate of fiction. Woolf summoned her in the 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” writing that “all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite”—a character who awakens the imagination. Unless the English novel recalled that fact, Woolf thought, the form would be finished. Plot and originality count for crumbs if a writer cannot bring the unhappy lady to life. And here Woolf, almost helplessly, began to spin a story herself—the cottage that the old lady kept, decorated with sea urchins, her way of picking her meals off a saucer—alighting on details of odd, dark density to convey something of this woman’s essence.

Those details: the sea urchins, that saucer, that slant of personality. To conjure them, Woolf said, a writer draws from her temperament, her time, her country. An English novelist would portray the woman as an eccentric, warty and beribboned. A Russian would turn her into an untethered soul wandering the street, “asking of life some tremendous question.”

More here.

Melinda Moyer in The New York Times:

Anders Åslund, Robert D. Atkinson, Scott K.H. Bessent, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, Josef Braml, Patrick M. Cronin, Mansoor Dailami, John M. Deutch, Mohamed A. El-Erian, Gabriel J. Felbermayr, Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Harold James, Michael C. Kimmage, Gary N. Kleiman, James A. Lewis, Jennifer Lind, Robert A. Manning, Ewald Nowotny, Thomas Oatley, William A. Reinsch, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Daniel Sneider, Atman Trivedi, Edwin M. Truman, Daniel Twining, Nicolas Véron, and Marina v N. Whitman offer views in The International Economy:

Thomas Oatley:

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s response have fractured global order. Western governments will not be able to piece the system back together. The invasion, as well as the broader foreign policy that produced it, indicate that Putin’s Russia is unwilling to continue as a subordinate member of a Western-led international order.

Debate over the West’s supposed responsibility for triggering the invasion has focused narrowly on the developing relationship between Ukraine and NATO and the extent to which this threatens Russian security. This focus has led analysts to neglect the broader question of how Putin views Russia’s place in the contemporary world order, as well as the extent to which the invasion constitutes an attempt to change this system.

Yet these broader concerns appear to play an important role in the regime’s calculations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has commented that Russia’s invasion
is “rooted in the U.S. and West’s desire to rule the world,” and reflects a determination by Russia to create “a multipolar, just, democratic world order.”

Regardless of the outcome in Ukraine, therefore, Russia’s dissatisfaction with its subordinate status in the Liberal Order (does one peer tell another that it stands on the “wrong side of history”?) and determination to restructure it will persist. Consequently, Russia will not reintegrate into this order.

More here.

Thomas Blanchet, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman of the Department of Economics at University of California, Berkeley have created a tool to track income and wealth inequality in near real time.

Realtime Inequality provides the first timely statistics on how economic growth is distributed across groups. When new growth numbers come out each quarter, we show how each income and wealth group benefits. Controlling for price inflation, average national income per adult in the United States increased at an annualized rate of 0.5% in the first quarter of 2022, and average income for the bottom 50% grew by 5.1%. National income is similar to GDP and a better indicator of income earned by US residents. Visit the Methodology page for complete methodological details.

More here.

Karmela Padavic-Callaghani in Aeon (Illustration by Richard Wilkinson):

Many science students may imagine a ball rolling down a hill or a car skidding because of friction as prototypical examples of the systems physicists care about. But much of modern physics consists of searching for objects and phenomena that are virtually invisible: the tiny electrons of quantum physics and the particles hidden within strange metals of materials science along with their highly energetic counterparts that only exist briefly within giant particle colliders.

In their quest to grasp these hidden building blocks of reality scientists have looked to mathematical theories and formalism. Ideally, an unexpected experimental observation leads a physicist to a new mathematical theory, and then mathematical work on said theory leads them to new experiments and new observations. Some part of this process inevitably happens in the physicist’s mind, where symbols and numbers help make invisible theoretical ideas visible in the tangible, measurable physical world.

Sometimes, however, as in the case of imaginary numbers – that is, numbers with negative square values – mathematics manages to stay ahead of experiments for a long time. Though imaginary numbers have been integral to quantum theory since its very beginnings in the 1920s, scientists have only recently been able to find their physical signatures in experiments and empirically prove their necessity.

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Matti Friedman in The Atlantic:

The American Colony, where I’m writing these lines on a table in the courtyard, is one physical incarnation of the thesis of The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. Mead, a distinguished professor of foreign affairs, columnist, and author, would like to take us on a tour not of Israel but of the manifestations of Israel in the American mind—an even weirder place than the actual country where I live and report.

The American fascination with Israel and with Jews, Mead believes, is not driven primarily by Israel or real Jews. Instead, “Israel” is a political instrument or a way of thinking about unrelated problems, just as those American settlers of the 1800s believed the Jews might serve as tools in a Christian end-times drama. The “idea that the Jews would return to the lands of the Bible and build a state there,” Mead writes, “touches on some of the most powerful themes and cherished hopes of American religion and culture.” And today, too, America’s furious debates about Israel policy have other homespun sources, and are more about conflicts over “American identity, the direction of world politics, and the place that the United States should aspire to occupy in world history than about anything that real-world Israelis and Palestinians may happen to be doing at any particular time.”

In that vein, Mead leads us with an even tone and expert hand through centuries of history, and through disparate topics including Puritan theology, the politics at the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the personality of Billy Graham. Eleanor Roosevelt’s support for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, we learn, was primarily a way of supporting a new “liberal order” after World War II. Growing Republican Party backing for Israel beginning in the 1970s was thanks not to any Jewish lobby but to the party’s understanding that this was an issue that could unite a fractious coalition of “pious evangelicals, honky-tonking southern good ol’ boys, blue-collar Midwestern Catholics, and elite neoconservative policy intellectuals”—just as today, hostility toward Israel is a way to mobilize a progressive movement that wants to somehow embrace both Dearborn and the Dyke March. For millions of American Christians in the late 1800s, a Jewish return to Zion was less about helping Jews than about proving the truth of biblical prophecy in a country where many seemed to be losing their religion.

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John Plotz at Public Books:

The epigraph to In the Castle of My Skin (“Something startles where I thought I was safe”) comes from Walt Whitman. Lamming takes heart from Whitman’s embrace of the sometimes paradoxical multiplicity that comes with giving one another room, with hearing and assimilating others’ viewpoints: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” There is even a subtle lesson in the names of Lamming’s first and last novels. As phrases, both In the Castle of My Skin and Natives of My Person allude to the complex interior state of the speaker. Both configure that interior as a populous place, shot through with other voices, other lives.

Natives of My Person, a torqued retelling of the post-Columbus era of European exploration and land grabs, concludes with a poignant scene between the wives of characters who have staked their lives on a mad venture westward.

more here.

Dana Smith in The New York Times: