From Literary Hub:

Tumbuktu, Tehran, London, Freetown, Honolulu, New Orleans. These are but a few of the compass points visited in The Window Seat, Aminatta Forna’s debut collection of essays, which Grove/Atlantic publishes in May next year. As a reporter and traveler, Forna has been studying flight and movement for her entire life. She has also lived in its wake. Just as Barack Obama, Sr. departed Kenya for America for an education, Forna’s own father left Sierra Leone to study medicine abroad.

Raised between countries, with a front row seat to ruptures of history, Forna muses here on what it means to live in a world shaped by travel of choice and necessity. How to appreciate the wonders of flight while also acknowledging the terror which prompts less metaphorical flight. As the child of a doctor, who one day wanted to be a veterinarian, Forna also returns such questions to the biosphere. What does the way we treat animals and landscapes say of our capacity to share any space? How will we ever appreciate the gulf that stands between us and every other species, for whom migration is often crucial to survival?

Recently, Forna spoke over email with novelist and friend Maaza Mengiste, whose latest book, The Shadow King, was a finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize.

More here.

Daniel Garisto in Scientific American:

For the first time, a quantum computer made from photons—particles of light—has outperformed even the fastest classical supercomputers.

Physicists led by Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Shanghai performed a technique called Gaussian boson sampling with their quantum computer, named Jiŭzhāng. The result, reported in the journal Science, was 76 detected photons—far above and beyond the previous record of five detected photons and the capabilities of classical supercomputers.

Unlike a traditional computer built from silicon processors, Jiŭzhāng is an elaborate tabletop setup of lasers, mirrors, prisms and photon detectors. It is not a universal computer that could one day send e-mails or store files, but it does demonstrate the potential of quantum computing.

Last year, Google captured headlines when its quantum computer Sycamore took roughly three minutes to do what would take a supercomputer three days (or 10,000 years, depending on your estimation method). In their paper, the USTC team estimates that it would take the Sunway TaihuLight, the third most powerful supercomputer in the world, a staggering 2.5 billion years to perform the same calculation as Jiŭzhāng.

More here.  And more in Science News here.

Ryan P. Hanley in the National Review:

Adam Smith is today known as the founding father of economics. But by profession he was a university professor, holding a chair in moral philosophy. It was in this capacity that in 1759 he published the first of his two books. Neither can be fully appreciated without the other — and both deserve our careful attention now, perhaps more than ever.

Smith’s first book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. An instant hit, it early on caught the attention of such prominent admirers as Edmund Burke, David Hume, and John Adams. The aim of the book is at once descriptive and prescriptive. It is descriptive insofar as it provides an account of the moral institutions that enable a free society to function. And it is prescriptive insofar as it seeks to cultivate the qualities of character that allow free individuals to lead flourishing lives and free societies to prosper and persist. 

The Theory of Moral Sentiments covers a great deal of ground, tackling topics ranging from justice and judgment to conscience and love. But its most original and important contributions arguably come on three specific fronts: its theory of sympathy, its concept of the impartial spectator, and its vision of virtue.

More here.

Black Sun: Amorphous Flocks of Starlings Swell Above the Danish Marshlands from Colossal on Vimeo.

Things That Happen in an Eclipse

I’m lying on my back on a blanket in the front yard, and I have my glasses and my dog.

My next-door neighbor is out front, too, on his porch, talking to some other neighbors who have walked over, but I can’t hear what they’re saying.

He is an old man. I sit up and call over to him, ask him if he has seen it yet.

No way. I’m not going out in that heat, he says, holding his white paper glasses.

I smile and say okay and lie down again.

I can feel earrings on my neck and the mulch of the flowerbed on the back of my head. The flowerbed needs weeding.

My dog pants, and I pet her.

I watch. Sometimes I check the time: maximum eclipse at 2:41 p.m. Just partial, but still.

There is the occasional passing car. I wonder if they mind that they’re missing it.

Beyond my glasses are the shaded sky and the carpenter bees that put holes in my porch.

Wind chimes and cicadas, the sense of a shift.

Nothing is happening, nothing that I can see, without the glasses. Only in the glasses, it is happening.

I watch. Once, I hit my glasses accidentally, and for a second there is the sun, and I wonder if I will go blind but decide not to worry about it.

Now I know that I think of people in eclipses. Maybe this is what eclipses do. Maybe because you are under a thing you have never seen before, you think of things you have seen and known.

The sun becomes the moon and the moon becomes nothing, like thoughts passing over one another, on their way somewhere else.

by Susan Harlan
from The Brooklyn Quarterly

From The Paris Review:

Shahzia Sikander’s first New York solo exhibition in more than a decade showcases an astonishing range of work: paintings, mosaics, animations, and her inaugural foray into freestanding sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies, a stunning monument to desire that depicts both a Greco-Roman goddess and an Indian devata. Sikander is an artist whose talents and ambitions threaten to outstrip the materials available to her; the works featured here confront the climate crisis, religion, migration, war, memory, and much more. But despite the daunting abundance of ideas and mediums, careful attention reveals that the show itself is a sort of mosaic, the pieces all slotting into place to form a portrait of the artist over the past few years of her practice. The works on paper inform the animations; the animations inform the individual mosaics (in part, Sikander credits her experiments with the latter form to “the dynamism of the pixel that emerged in my mind as a parallel to the unit of a mosaic”).

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Ageing affects the body in myriad ways — among them, adding, removing or altering chemical groups such as methyls on DNA. These ‘epigenetic’ changes accumulate as a person ages, and some researchers have proposed tracking the changes as a way of calibrating a molecular clock to measure biological age, an assessment that takes into account biological wear-and-tear and can differ from chronological age. That has raised the possibility that epigenetic changes contribute to the effects of ageing. “We set out with a question: if epigenetic changes are a driver of ageing, can you reset the epigenome?” says David Sinclair, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the Nature study. “Can you reverse the clock?”

There were suggestions that the approach could work: in 2016, Belmonte and his colleagues reported² the effects of expressing four genes in mice genetically engineered to age more rapidly than normal. It was already known that triggering these genes could cause cells to lose their developmental identity — the features that make, for example, a skin cell look and behave like a skin cell — and revert to a stem-cell like state. But rather than turn the genes on and leave them that way, Belmonte’s team turned them on for only a few days, then switched them off again, in the hope of reverting cells to a ‘younger’ state without erasing their identity.

The result was mice that aged more slowly, and had a pattern of epigenetic marks indicative of younger animals.

More here.

Eric Been at JSTOR Daily:

Southern contained multitudes: He was a first-rate screenwriter, novelist, essayist, cultural tastemaker, critic, craftsman of the weird short-story, and a devotee of letter-writing (a mode he once called “the purest form of writing there is… because it’s writing to an audience of one”). One of Southern’s touchstones was the notion of the grotesque—he wanted to examine what disturbed people, pushing a macabre-showing mirror back in his audience’s face, and to muck through the modern American “freak show” at large.

Born in the cotton-farming town of Alvarado, Texas, in 1924, Southern went on to become a U.S. Army demolitions expert in World War II. After earning an English degree at Northwestern University, he subsequently studied philosophy in Paris at the Sorbonne, via the G.I. Bill. In France, after finishing up at school in the early fifties, Southern stayed in the Latin Quarter for a stint—enticed by existentialism, the city’s jazz scene, and the literary crowd he fell into.

more here.

Jae Kim at the LARB:

When asked in an interview with Words Without Borders to give an example of an untranslatable word in Korean, Choi answers that duplicatives, “adverbs or adjectives that are repeated to form a pair,” poses a challenge. “Such doubling is the norm in Korean, and it accentuates the sounds, which can also have the phonetic or mimetic effects of onomatopoeia.” Her solution is often to use a similar tactic in English, such as “swarmsswarms” or “waddlewaddling.” In “Orphan Kim Seong-rye,” she uses the doubling technique twice: “Oblong oblong” and “circled and circled.” While the latter sounds natural in English, the former is more difficult to digest. It demands the reader’s attention, and the reader lingers over the phrase — oblong oblong, oblong oblong… — until all that remains is the sound.

more here.

Tess McNulty in The Point:

Flip through Don DeLillo’s massive corpus, and you may notice that the word “silence” crops up, again and again, at crucial moments. It’s the first word he spoke to the public when, in 1982, he gave his first, reluctant interview. Why, asked the critic Tom LeClair, did DeLillo shun the public eye? “Silence, exile, cunning, and so on,” the author responded, quoting Stephen Dedalus, tongue in cheek. It’s a word that then wended through his work, uttered by his secretive, mysterious men—“Silence,” says Underworld’s Nick Shay, “is the condition you accept as a judgment on your crimes.” It’s a word that, finally, became the target of his most serious critic, James Wood. Far from quiet, Wood complained in a 2000 essay, DeLillo’s books simply could not shut up. Underworld in particular—his vast 1997 Cold War epic—seemed gripped by the delusion that it “might never have to end.” “There are many enemies, seen and unseen, in Underworld,” wrote Wood, “but silence is not one of them.”

White Noise was DeLillo’s breakout book, his first—in 1985—to inspire loud chatter. “Postmodernism, Postmodernism!” the critics all cried, as the author ran his twelve-year-long victory lap, publishing Libra, Mao II and then Underworld to resounding applause. These, the 1980s and 1990s, were the decades of DeLillo’s canonization.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

On May 19, Ashwin Sah posted the best result ever on one of the most important questions in combinatorics. It was a moment that might have called for a celebratory drink, only Sah wasn’t old enough to order one.

The proof joined a long list of mathematical results that Sah, who turned 21 in November, published while an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (he posted this new proof just after graduating). It’s a rare display of precocity even in a field that celebrates youthful genius.

“He has done enough work as an undergraduate to get a faculty position,” said David Conlon of the California Institute of Technology.

The May proof focused on an important feature of combinatorics called Ramsey numbers, which quantify how big a graph (a collection of dots, or vertices, connected by edges) can get before it necessarily contains a certain kind of substructure.

More here.

The San Francisco Symphony performs the world premiere of Throughline, a new SF Symphony commission composed by Nico Muhly with performances by Esa-Pekka Salonen, all eight Collaborative Partners, and the San Francisco Symphony. Watch the full program here.

Simon Torracinta in the Boston Review:

In 1893 financial panic triggered a four-year depression in the United States, then the most severe in the nation’s history. Bank runs, shuttered factories, and plummeting wheat prices put millions out of work. In Chicago alone, as many as 180,000 workers were jobless by the end of the year.

An attempt by the Pullman Palace Car Company in the city’s South Side to impose a 30 percent wage cut on its workforce in the spring of 1894 led to a walkout by the newly formed American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs (not yet famous as the socialist firebrand who would later win 6 percent of the vote in the 1912 presidential election). It quickly escalated into full-scale boycott of luxury Pullman cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad workers across the country—the infamous Pullman strike, which took place between May and July. With the railways paralyzed, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago, and pitched battles—at times lethal—erupted in working-class neighborhoods. “This is no longer a strike,” the Chicago Tribune thundered: “This is a revolution.” That same spring, hundreds of desperate, unemployed workers, calling themselves the Army of the Commonwealth of Christ, marched from Ohio to the White House, demanding the federal government offer relief in the form of an ambitious public works program to be funded by the unprecedented issuance of fiat money. Another 700 workers from the northwest forcefully commandeered a train to make the trip to D.C., fending off marshals until federal troops intercepted them in Montana.

This was the atmosphere surrounding the campus of the University of Chicago, then only a few years old, which had just hired a young Norwegian-American economist named Thorstein Veblen two years earlier.

More here.

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness.

Mark Ford: I think his best poems all reveal that the pressures of his autobiography in terms of the effect on him of his fairly disastrous early childhood is something which features in poem after poem of the ones which we still read today. MacNeice wrote enormous amounts, given the fact he died in his mid fifties. His Collected Poems is some six hundred pages, and there were all the radio plays, enormous amounts of criticism as well. He was a reviewer. He really lived the literary life. But in his most powerful moments he does seem to always be returning to the bleakness of his childhood and the kind of divisions which had inculcated in him.

Listen to the podcast at the LRB here.

Rachel Kushner at Artforum:

A certain scene between Marguerite Duras and Susan Sontag, told to me by someone who was friends with both and seated between them while Susan was visiting Paris, goes like this: Duras had just made a new film, and, in keeping with her character, she spoke at Susan in a monologic séance, going on and on about herself, her new film, and critical reactions to her new film. After speaking for most of the occasion they were together, Duras suddenly quieted and seemed to notice Sontag qua Sontag, and not just any old audience to her tirade. “Susan! My goodness. I have only talked and talked, and I haven’t let you speak a word! Please, tell me everything.” At this, Susan—or can we even say “poor Susan”—beamed like a child who was finally getting the attention she’d sought. Duras continued, “I want every detail! What did you think of my new film?”

I never tire of Duras, just as Duras never tired of Duras, and this year brought us two new beautiful English translations of raw and refined Durasianisms, Me & Other Writing (Dorothy Project) and Duras/Godard Dialogues (The Film Desk of Metrograph Cinema).

more here.

Roxanne Khamsi in Nature:

Just before Thanksgiving in November 2005, paediatrician Ruchi Gupta gathered some parents of children with food allergies in an office building. She aimed to collect data on their knowledge and beliefs about allergies, but the conversation quickly turned emotional. One parent described how her family wouldn’t be joining the big Thanksgiving gathering because of her son’s allergy. “She started crying and she was very emotional about it, and said they were just going to do Thanksgiving on their own,” recalls Gupta, director of the Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research at Northwestern and Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. “The whole focus group became pretty intense and tissue boxes came out.” The meeting was planned to last an hour, but people stayed well into a third. Other parents opened up about their distress. “They started talking about their experiences in every realm of life: people who didn’t believe them, even in their own families. A lot of times the grandparents would say, ‘Oh, you’re just over-protective. We didn’t have this in my day’.”

Gupta decided that this was no coincidence; people with food allergies, and their families, needed more mental-health support. She conducted six more focus groups over the next six months, before publishing a paper detailing some of the anxiety felt by parents of children with food allergies¹. It described how parents experience “emotions of fear, guilt, and even paranoia”. In the years since, she has continued to research the effects of food allergies on families, and last year published an analysis of available mental-health resources².

More here.

Arthur C. Brooks in The Atlantic:

On a scale of 0 to 10, I’d say my happiness ranks at about a 6. I’d guess my wife’s is at least a 9. I try not to envy her natural Spanish alegría, but sometimes it’s hard. Still, I’m glad to know I’m a 6, because, as a famous management maxim puts it, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” This is generally used in reference to business operations, but as a social scientist, I can assure you that it works for life operations as well. If you want to improve an aspect of your life, you need to be able to assess progress toward your goal—and that means measuring it. The goal of this column is to help you manage and improve your happiness. No surprise, then, that I make frequent reference to studies and surveys that measure happiness. A number of people have asked me whether quantitative happiness measures are really accurate and reliable—and it’s a reasonable question.

…The most dangerous use of happiness self-tests is social comparison. Researchers have long found that social comparison is a killer of joy, but you hardly need a study to tell you that—just spend a few hours browsing Instagram and see how bad you feel about yourself. This is because you are comparing your happiness with your perception of others’ happiness, as depicted in information of dubious accuracy. Nothing good comes of this. Shakespeare sums up the happiness-comparison problem in his Sonnet 29. The bard, after cursing what he calls his “outcast state,” compares himself to “one more rich in hope, / Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, / Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.” The product of this envy? “With what I most enjoy contented least.” In sum: If you compare your happiness to others’—and covet theirs—you will lose the happiness you do have.

More here.