Diana Lind in the Washington Post:

There are plenty of healthy activities available at home, of course, from playing with your children to pursuing a hobby. But there are also consequences to our homebody lifestyle. Time in the house is more likely to be time spent alone and sedentary, triggering two of Americans’ biggest mental and physical health problems — social isolation and lack of exercise.

Screens surely explain some of our turn inward, but not all of it. For example, men are spending a record 100 minutes per day on household activities, including a 50 percent increase in time spent cooking since 2003. And if our phones, tablets, and video games are as insidious as they’re often portrayed, then part of the solution needs to be finding real-life environments and activities that can compete for attention with apps and streaming services at home.

More here.

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Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

I have always had a soft spot for bats, and yet, after more than 500 reviews, this is the first bat book I cover here. Having now read this richly illustrated general introduction to their biology, I am even more engrossed with their many unique adaptations.

The Lives of Bats is part of Princeton University Press’s series The Lives of the Natural World that has grown to 14 volumes since I reviewed its entry on viruses. Technically speaking, it is designed and produced by UniPress Books, which I have described elsewhere as the spiritual successor of Ivy Press and which is similarly known for producing good-looking books. As with the other volumes, this one is chock-a-block with full-colour photos, to the point that you would be hard-pressed to find a single page of plain text.

More here.

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Corey Robin at his own website:

This post is for other people, Jews and non-Jews, who read my work, people who are less settled in their position on Israel and Palestine, people who identify as Zionist or with parts of the Zionist project, who have supported, or continue to support, the military actions of the Israeli government in Gaza (even if they vehemently oppose Netanyahu), people who call for a return of the hostages and a ceasefire and say no more, people who fear that anti-Israel protests on college campuses are a sign of rising antisemitism in the US, people who believe, or hope, that Israel as a Jewish state is a cause worth defending.

This post is for you.

It’s for you because, given the way algorithms go and online communities sort themselves out, you may not have seen some developments in the last few days, among people who hold or once held views similar to yours. I’m posting these statements here just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing.

More here.

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Carly Tagen-Dye in People Magazine:

Roy, who is the author of novels like Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, had a “complex” relationship with Mary, after running away at age 18. The author says she left her mother “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her,” per the memoir’s synopsis. Mary, a women’s rights activist, was best known for winning a 1986 Supreme Court lawsuit that granted Christian women in India equal inheritance rights.

When Mary died in 2022, Roy was “more than a little ashamed” by her response to the news, and turned to the page to process her feelings. Mother Mary Comes to Me tells the story of Roy’s childhood in Kerala, India, where she was raised, as well as her path toward becoming the acclaimed author she is today. The memoir is “a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother,” per the book’s synopsis.

More here.

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David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times:

Everywhere they look, they find particles of pollution, like infinite spores in an endless contagion field. Scientists call that field the “exposome”: the sum of all external exposures encountered by each of us over a lifetime, which portion and shape our fate alongside genes and behavior. Humans are permeable creatures, and we navigate the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of civilization partly by absorbing it.

There is plastic in salty sea foam freshly sprayed by crashing waves, in dreamy Japanese mountaintop clouds and in the breath of dolphins. When scientists test Antarctic snow, or the ice upon Mount Everest, plastics are there. When, in 2019, an explorer reached the ocean’s greatest depths in the otherworldly Mariana Trench, he found that plastics had beaten him there, too, miles past the reach of natural light.

More here.

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Almost August

Almost August.  The year
has turned.  You can feel the light
sucking at the sand beneath your feet
as it slides away into autumn.

You think back to childhood
when the days of summer seemed
endless, and time long enough.

But, when the school bell rang,
you woke with a jolt
into the mortality of arithmetic.

After supper, it was too dark
to go out again for very long,
then just too dark to go out,
then just too dark.

So you began to learn to live
with Night, admire her,
love her a little even.

Her nights were long,
but you began to know
time was not long enough.

by Nils Peterson

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Frances Wilson at the New Statesman:

There once was an ugly duckling, so despised by the other birds that he fled the farm to explore the wider world. But because of his very great ugliness he was taunted there too, until one day he caught his image reflected in a pond and he had turned into a beautiful swan. The Ugly Duckling, first published in 1843, was one of Hans Christian Andersen’s many autobiographical fairy tales: “It matters nothing if one is born in a duck-yard,” he wrote, “if one has lain in a swan’s egg.”

Andersen’s subject, from the start, was the outsider destined for greatness. “At school,” he recalled in The Fairy Tale of My Life, the third of his three memoirs, “I told the boys curious stories in which I was always the chief person, but was sometimes ridiculed for that.” His stories were miniature epics (The Princess and the Pea is 300 words long) and his characters, like the author himself, solitary figures of spiritual greatness for whom the world is a place of inexplicable cruelty. Other versions of Anderson’s life can be found in his first published fairy tale, The Tinderbox, in which a clever soldier discovers the magic formula for wealth and success; The Steadfast Tin Soldier, in which a one-legged, love-sick toy falls from a window, is swallowed by a fish, and then thrown into a stove where he melts into a heart-shaped lump; and The Little Match Girl, where a frozen, homeless child, on her last night on Earth, gazes through a window at a happy bourgeois family.

more here.

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Gerald Early in The Common Reader:

Her book design itself seems an exercise in branding.  Only the word “Melania” on the cover. Nothing else, indicating not just fame but a sort of stardom, a woman known by only one name like singers Madonna and Beyoncé or, more fitting here, models Iman and Twiggy. Or a First Lady like Jackie, who may have been the only post-World War II president’s wife who could have published an autobiography with the same design and gotten away with it. One-third of this short book is made up of photographs of Melania, appropriate, I suppose, for a book about a model, but perhaps also a way for her to hide in plain sight, so to speak, to avoid having to talk about things she does not wish to talk about.

More here.

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Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Manyika at Noema:

Claims that computing underlies physical reality are hard to prove or disprove, but a clear-cut case for computation in nature came to light far earlier than Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis. John von Neumann, an accomplished mathematical physicist and another founding figure of computer science, discovered a profound link between computing and biology as far back as 1951.

Von Neumann realized that for a complex organism to reproduce, it would need to contain instructions for building itself, along with a machine for reading and executing that instruction “tape.” The tape must also be copyable and include the instructions for building the machine that reads it. As it happens, the technical requirements for that “universal constructor” correspond precisely to the technical requirements for a UTM [a Universal Turing Machine]. Remarkably, von Neumann’s insight anticipated the discovery of DNA’s Turing-tape-like structure and function in 1953.

Von Neumann had shown that life is inherently computational.

More here.

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Paul Krugman at his own Substack:

In fact, the basic logic of enshittification — in which businesses start out being very good to their customers, then switch to ruthless exploitation — applies to any business characterized by network effects. It may go under different names like “penetration pricing,” but the logic is the same.

Doctorow’s final stage — “Then, they die” — may also be wishful thinking.

So let me talk a bit about the economics of enshittification, as I see it, then follow up by talking about how enshittification can mess with our heads in several ways. The title of this post is, of course, facetious. I don’t have a general theory to offer, just some hopefully clarifying ideas.

More here.

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Michael Schulson in Undark Magazine:

Some 280,000 people live in the five northernmost counties of Idaho. One of the key public officials responsible for their health is Thomas Fletcher, a retired radiologist who lives on a 160-acre farm near Sandpoint. Fletcher grew up in Texas and moved to Idaho in 2016, looking for a place where he could live a rural life alongside likeminded conservatives. In 2022, he joined the seven-member board of health of the Panhandle Health District, the regional public health authority, and he was appointed chairman last summer.

PHD handles everything from cancer screenings to restaurant hygiene inspections, and the business of the board is often mundane, almost invisible. Then, this February, Fletcher issued a short announcement online. Parents, he wrote, should be informed of the potential harms of common childhood vaccines. It was time for the board to discuss how best to communicate those risks, rather than “withholding information contra the CDC narrative.” Fletcher invited everyone who believes in “full disclosure and transparency when providing informed consent on childhood vaccines” to attend the next monthly meeting of the board, on a Thursday afternoon.

More here.

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Tom Bissel in Harper’s Magazine:

I listen to a lot of conservative talk radio. Confident masculine voices telling me the enemy is everywhere and victory is near — I often find it affirming: there’s a reason I don’t think that way. Last spring, many right-wing commentators made much of a Bloomberg poll that asked Americans, “Are you more sympathetic to Netanyahu or Obama?” Republicans picked the Israeli prime minister over their own president, 67 to 16 percent. There was a lot of affected shock that things had come to this. Rush Limbaugh said of Netanyahu that he wished “we had this kind of forceful moral, ethical clarity leading our own country”; Mark Levin described him as “the leader of the free world.” For a few days there I yelled quite a bit in my car.

More here.

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Anshi Zachary Smith at Aeon Magazine:

When I was first exposed to Zen, I was in my early teens and semi-feral. I went to school, of course, but on the weekends, I did everything I could to get away and get outside. The town of Mill Valley lies at the foot of the beautiful Mount Tamalpais, and many weekends were spent hiking and camping there with friends. Sometimes we went further afield, hitchhiking to camp on the beaches of Mendocino, 140 miles away. In summer, I took longer trips: climbing mountains, swimming in ice-cold nameless lakes, sleeping in alpine meadows.

A life of monastic seclusion and discipline didn’t appeal to me. And I couldn’t help noticing that the adults I knew who talked about Zen had lives that seemed at odds with their spiritual interests: they had spouses, houses, children, jobs, hobbies, extramarital affairs and addictions, among other things, all of which they would have to abandon if they were to follow the Way. None of them seemed to be willing to take the plunge. Zen didn’t appear compatible with modern life.

more here.

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Edward Short at Literary Review:

In an essay entitled ‘American Literature and Language’ (1953), T S Eliot wrote that, in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain ‘reveals himself to be one of those writers, of whom there are not a great many in any literature, who have discovered a new way of writing, valid not only for themselves but for others. I should place him, in this respect, even with Dryden and Swift, as one of those rare writers who have brought their language up to date, and in so doing, “purified the dialect of the tribe”.’ One can only imagine the amusement such an encomium would have aroused in Twain, whose plain speaking tended to scandalise the wealthy Protestant tribe with whom he chose to consort. Nevertheless, he certainly had a profound influence on such writers as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, as well as Eliot himself, whose own new way of writing owed a great deal to the creator of Huckleberry Finn.

Had Twain not had the boldness to renew the language, to make it capture the newness of his experience in an America in which newness was fairly exploding, it is questionable whether his successors would have followed suit with quite the confidence they did.

more here.

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Jacob Dreyer in American Affairs:

Late last October, we were in the basement of an obscure academic building in Berlin’s southwestern suburb of Dahlem, a group of twenty or thirty people assembled to hear Wang Hui talk about nationalism; my friends at the Berggruen Institute Europe had organized a residency in Venice and Berlin for him, to engage with European thought before the Trump victory that everybody saw coming. A few decades ago, Wang was at odds with the Chinese intellectual consensus; he was part of a group called the “New Left,” less a formal grouping of friends than a label for those dissenting from the end-of-history approach. Called the New Left for their advocacy of the state, this group was also conservative, in the William F. Buckley Jr. sense of standing “athwart history yelling Stop” at a time when the changes were being driven by neoliberal American capitalists and their Chinese friends (in the leftist argot, “compradors,” like those Chinese merchants who helped imperialists sell opium in the nineteenth century).

Wang always rejected the New Left label and has never been anti-American as such; he was getting profiled in the New York Times and visiting friends in the West at the time. Today, he regularly bounces between Beijing, Princeton, Heidelberg, and other havens of the Western intelligentsia. Much as some Americans might say that they oppose the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but like the Chinese people, Wang never hated Americans, he just didn’t want China to accept globalist capitalism. He is now watching the unraveling of that regime with the same curiosity and schadenfreude as the rest of us.

Back in the 2000s, when it seemed that China’s leadership had embraced the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” dissent against that consensus naturally seemed leftist, if only because China was moving away from the state and toward the market.

More here.

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