From Phys.Org:

Physicists have discovered a new way to coat soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way. The research, led by the UK’s University of Bath, is described today in Science Advances. Authors of the study believe their breakthrough modeling on ‘active matter’ could mark a turning point in the design of robots. With further development of the concept, it may be possible to determine the shape, movement and behavior of a soft solid not by its natural elasticity but by human-controlled activity on its surface.

The surface of an ordinary soft material always shrinks into a sphere. Think of the way water beads into droplets: the beading occurs because the surface of liquids and other soft material naturally contracts into the smallest surface area possible—i.e. a sphere. But active matter can be designed to work against this tendency. An example of this in action would be a rubber ball that’s wrapped in a layer of nano-robots, where the robots are programmed to work in unison to distort the ball into a new, pre-determined shape (say, a star).

It is hoped that active matter will lead to a new generation of machines whose function will come from the bottom up.

More here.

Dave Lindorff in Counterpunch:

Nobody is talking about the blame that must be shouldered by the German government for the crisis and humanitarian disaster in Ukraine.

Sure Russia is guilty of a huge war crime in invading Ukraine. Surely too, the US must be blamed for creating the situation which led Russia and its autocratic leader Vladimir Putin to decide it had to invade to prevent Ukraine from being pulled into the US orbit with the goal that it would ultimately become a base for US offensive weapons — even nuclear weapons — on Russia’s border — something the US would never allow to happen anywhere in its self-proclaimed “backyard” of Latin America and the Caribbean.

But Germany, the largest country in NATO after the US, is almost as guilty for this current war in Europe as is the United States. Germany was only reunified without any difficulty after 45 years of being split in two following World War II, because of a deal struck by the US with Russia in 1990 at which US Secretary of State James Baker stated that NATO would not be expanded “one inch ” eastward past the reunified German border. Now it is widely known that despite having a powerful economy, Germany remains something of a lackey of the US in its foreign policy.

More here.

Customs

The second farthest place that I have been
from anything that you will ever know is
in love. Like this, I mean. Like how when
condors fledge, they leap from icy cliffs then
fly. They ask: Destination? Purpose? I say, Yes,
I wish to have one. Let’s say “South.” Ushuaia,
the land of lagooned mountains, turquoise in
the snow. Let’s say I have a backup answer, but
we will never hear it because I’ll go and I’ll be
gone, like how you went, too—became a time
lapse of the clouds over El Chaltén: just some slow
recording on my phone. That was supposed to be
the time of my life. That was supposed to be when
we got closer. What even is the word explore? Flamingoes
in their craning lines, pink perforations in the sky and salt. Ñandu.
Receding glaciers. Perhaps we should just accept climate change
as a liberation of the water. We’re its savior, returning it to
its rightful salten home. And who was Magellan,
anyway? There are penguins with his name, but
only in colonial tongues, and I call them that. And
you sent me here to learn what a disaster the world is—
has always been because of men like me. See it
all, you said; and I signed on without considering
the finest print: sure to witness disaster. We’ll be
fighting over love and water in our lifetimes.
We’ll squander them like years, but
faster. And even when we have
none left, we’ll still believe
we have the answers.

by Benjamin Faro
from the Ecotheo Review

Marc Lange in Aeon:

In the original Star Trek, with the Starship Enterprise hurtling rapidly downward into the outer atmosphere of a star, Captain James T Kirk orders Lt Commander Montgomery Scott to restart the engines immediately and get the ship to safety. Scotty replies that he can’t do it. It’s not that he refuses to obey the Captain’s order or that he doesn’t happen to know how to restart the engines so quickly. It’s that he knows that doing so is impossible. ‘I can’t change the laws of physics,’ he explains.

We all understand Scotty’s point (although the Enterprise does somehow manage to escape). He cannot break the laws of nature. Nothing can. The natural laws limit what can happen. They are stronger than the laws of any country because it is impossible to violate them. If it is a law of nature that, for example, no object can be accelerated from rest to beyond the speed of light, then it is not merely that such accelerations never occur. They cannot occur.

There are many things that never actually happen but could have happened in that their occurrence would violate no law of nature. For instance, to borrow an example from the philosopher Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953), perhaps in the entire history of the Universe there never was nor ever will be a gold cube larger than one mile on each side. Such a large gold cube is not impossible. It just turns out never to exist.

More here.

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj in War on the Rocks:

In his 1919 work Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes warns that “the menace of inflationism … is not merely a product of war, of which peace begins the cure. It is a continuing phenomenon of which the end is not yet in sight.” Keynes was commenting on the negotiations that would lead to the Versailles Treaty. Against a backdrop of hunger and despair, the victors of World War I condemned Germany to further sanctions. The treaty’s proponents believed that to prevent a future war, the German economy, a “vast fabric built upon iron, coal, and transport,” needed to be “destroyed.” But Keynes understood that with Germany in a state of perpetual crisis, the European economy would never recover. Tearing up Germany’s fabric would keep Europe on the path to another great war.

Western governments have responded to President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine with an unprecedented sanctions program. President Joe Biden has vowed to sap Russia’s “economic strength and weaken its military for years to come.” Erik Sand and Suzanne Freeman echo Keynes’ warning in this publication, arguing that “there is likely no way to effectively pressure Russia without some increase in the risk of escalation.” Putin may respond to increased economic pressure militarily, but so far he is weighing economic countermeasures. Reports that Russia will ban the export of key commodities for the remainder of the year have rocked global markets given the likely inflationary shock.

More here.

Ron Ivey in American Affairs Journal:

SG—environmental, social, and governance—investing has become one of the fastest growing areas of finance in recent years and increasingly influences capital allocation decisions for investors and firms. But what exactly is ESG, and does its actual impact on a broad group of economic “stakeholders” match its advertising? As ESG funds have grown their assets under management in recent years, ESG invest­ment criteria have, if anything, only become more contested.

Indeed, Bloomberg Businessweek recently revealed that the largest for‑profit accreditation company of corporate environmental and social responsibility, MSCI, does not actually measure a corporation’s impact on society or the environment, but rather assesses how companies are reducing regulatory and brand risks for their shareholders.¹ New York University finance professor Aswath Damodaran recently lamented that the ESG ecosystem is merely a “gravy train” for consultants, ESG fund managers, and investment marketers, leading to little social benefit for stakeholders outside of the self-serving circle of the ESG industry.² Former Facebook executive, SPAC promoter, and Social Capital found­er Chamath Palihapitiya has made an even bolder statement that ESG funds and evaluation agencies like MSCI are fraudulent products.³ He argues that these groups use the veneer of social and environmental responsibility to reduce regulatory oversight for multinational behemoths while allowing them to apply for negative interest rate loans from central banks. From Palihapitiya’s perspective as a venture investor, these “green washed” and “social washed” funds attract investment away from actual businesses that are addressing social and ecological challenges more fundamentally in their business models.

More here.

Ian Black at The Guardian:

In modern times – at least since the mid-19th century – the Old City of Jerusalem has been conventionally described by foreigners as consisting of four distinct quarters: Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian. Matthew Teller, in his highly perceptive and readable book, tells a very different story.

Teller, a freelance journalist and documentary-maker, combines millennia of Jerusalem’s history with insightful interviews with its residents, weaponising that unusual approach to present a subtle portrait of the current reality at the heart of the world’s most intractable and divisive conflict. The Old City is still enclosed by 16th-century walls built by the Ottomans and only started to expand beyond them in the 1860s when Britain, then the rising global superpower, began to take an interest, reinforced by its Protestant Christian identity.

more here.

Peter Richardson at the LARB:

HALF A CENTURY AFTER the publication of Post Office (1971), how should we understand Charles Bukowski’s literary achievement? His publisher predicted that Bukowski would never reach a mainstream audience. And yet his books, including his poetry, have sold millions of copies in more than a dozen languages. Writing for The New Yorker in 2005, Adam Kirsch claims that Bukowski’s liminal status and seedy persona were part of his appeal: “He is one of those writers whom each new reader discovers with a transgressive thrill.” Describing his verse as “pulp poetry,” Kirsch also notes the author’s penchant for autobiography. “Bukowski’s poems are best appreciated not as individual verbal artifacts but as ongoing installments in the tale of his true adventures, like a comic book or a movie serial,” he observes. “They are strongly narrative, drawing from an endless supply of anecdotes that typically involve a bar, a skid-row hotel, a horse race, a girlfriend, or any permutation thereof.” That combination made a strong impression on readers. “The effect is as though some legendary tough guy, a cross between Philip Marlowe and Paul Bunyan, were to take the barstool next to you, buy a round, and start telling his life story.”

more here.

The Review’s Review from The Paris Review:

“Living in America during the Reagan years had the same disorientation as a texture dream,” writes David Wojnarowicz in Close to the Knives, “that sense you get at times lying with your face against the sheets with your eye open, millimeters away from the microscopic weave of the linen, and suddenly your body freezes up and your eye is locked into the universe of textures and threads and weaves, and for an extended moment you can’t shake yourself from the hallucination.” The political subterfuge of the Reagan years is the subject, too, of Maxe Crandall’s recent poem-novel, The Nancy Reagan Collection. Published by Futurepoem in 2020, it’s a mercurial archive of the Reagans’ silence on AIDS and the era’s innumerable other devastating failures, among them Iran-Contra and the expansion of the war on drugs. In high-camp imagined encounters with Nancy Reagan, Crandall deftly traces the era’s iconography of concealment—Nancy in her immutable trademark red, her high-necked collar, her tartan blazer, her little nautical blouse, her gloves—as he lists the names of friends and public figures dead from AIDS and its complications. Grief and rage churn at the center of these encounters, each of them shaped by speculative archival work and a biting queer sensibility. It’s a beautifully inventive experiment in historiography and a reminder of the enduring political aesthetics of obfuscation and silence: the particular politeness that meets with mass death. And like everything Futurepoem puts out, as an object it’s gorgeous—bright red, impossible to miss. —Oriana Ullman 

More here.

William Deresiewicz in UnHerd:

One summer afternoon when I was 23 — this was in 1987 — I was twiddling the dial on the radio in the apartment I was subletting on 114th St. when I stumbled on a station that was unlike anything that I had ever heard before. They were in the middle of a story about the Appalachian Trail, profiling some of the people who were hiking its two thousand miles that year. The reporting was calm, patient, intelligent, allowing the subject to find its own shape, unfolding slowly, minute after minute, like the trail itself.

What is this, I thought? What portal had I fallen through? I’d been raised on 1010 WINS, “all news all the time,” blaring the same rotation of headlines, weather, traffic, and trivia, in 40-second increments, for hours at a stretch. The piece that I had happened on that day went on, improbably, for over 20 minutes.

The program I was listening to was called All Things Considered, on a network with the unfamiliar name of NPR, short for National Public Radio. I was immediately hooked. In no time flat, I’d put it on whenever I was home. Morning Edition as soon as I opened my eyes, All Things Considered when I got back in the afternoon, Fresh Air during dinner. I fell in love with Robert Siegel’s wit, Renée Montagne’s voice, Scott Simon’s charm. These people got me. They shared my interests, my outlook, my sensibilities. For the first time, I felt myself reflected in the public sphere. “NPR,” I put it to a friend a few years later, “is my home in America.”

More here.

The Freezer Section of the Walmart in the Third Ward

With freezer door open and bags of crinkle cut fries
in my hands, deciphering ingredients my mother
would shun if she read them, I keep losing focus
for the child one aisle over, crying, because her mother
tore from her hands a box of Jolly Rancher Pop Tarts.
(I know this because she screams–Jolly Rancher Pop Tarts.)
I recall brand names of products I never needed—Star Wars
Episode III Anakin figurine with detachable hands
and waist; Nerf Foam Flight Football whose little holes
would whistle when thrown from oily fingers;
the toy I received instead, my favorite, black barbie doll,
whose name I never learned, with a sparkling swimsuit,
appearing on contact with water. My grandmother
gifted her to me, my favorite doll, professional scuba diver
like my mother wished to be. Years later, embarrassed,
I donated her to charity for fear of childishness, for fear
of never finding another with whom to interlock fingers,
drive with windows down, smelling fresh air off fields
in towns with names that we don’t know. Tonight,
outside of Walmart, my car windows rolled down, all I smell
is smoke from the cigarette of the man on the stop light’s curb.
He argues directions with a man not there. Across the street,
behind chained fences, a game of pickup basketball.
Their hoops have no nets, the concrete is cracked,
and players insult, or encourage, one another, with 5’ 1”, air ball, 
adopted, until we all return to reality together, hearing
the gunshot echo off the trees and small houses around us,
and I notice the stop light has been blinking red for minutes.

by William Littlejohn-Oram
from Muzzle Magazine, Winter 2021

Ian McEwan in The Guardian:

Here we are, in our ringside seats at a bloody circus, watching on TV and Twitter, trapped between infinite pity and rational self-interest. The tension between two opposing forces is unbearable. Pulling from one side, our horror at a senseless invasion, our wonder at the Ukrainian resistance, the unarmed villagers mobbing a Russian tank or feeding a captured Russian conscript sobbing as he is allowed to phone his mother, and our sorrow at the sight of terrified children in the bunkers huddling against their parents while their towns are destroyed; and from the other, waiting outside Kyiv, the 40-mile column, which we know could be destroyed in an afternoon by satellite-guided cruise missiles and stealth jet fighters invisible to radar.

The unlockable buckle restraining the west is fear of nuclear war, and Vladimir Putin, elevated into a deranged and unpredictable adversary, has played us well. So we are strapped in place by a bluff we dare not call, expert watchers with the mouse clicks and screen swipes, and in our communal anguish, incapable of much beyond sanctions and arms donations, alms and fulminations.

More here.

Ben Turner in Scientific American:

New research, published Feb. 17 in the journal Physiological Entomology, suggests that the palm-sized Joro spider, which swarmed North Georgia by the millions last September, has a special resilience to the cold.

This has led scientists to suggest that the 3-inch (7.6 centimeters) bright-yellow-striped spiders — whose hatchlings disperse by fashioning web parachutes to fly as far as 100 miles (161 kilometers) — could soon dominate the Eastern Seaboard.

“People should try to learn to live with them,” lead author Andy Davis, a research scientist at the University of Georgia, said in a statement. “If they‘re literally in your way, I can see taking a web down and moving them to the side, but they‘re just going to be back next year.”

More here.

Cole Smith in The Guardian:

From 2012 to 2017, I worked as a US air force nuclear missile operator. I was 22 when I started. Each time I descended into the missile silo, I had to be ready to launch, at a moment’s notice, a nuclear weapon that could wipe a city the size of New York off the face of the earth.

On the massive blast door of the launch control center, someone had painted a mural of a Domino’s pizza logo with the macabre caption, “World-wide delivery in 30 minutes or less or your next one is free.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, I’ve heard more discussions of nuclear war than I did in the entire nine years that I wore an air force uniform. I’m glad that people are finally discussing the existential dangers of nuclear weapons. There have been more near-misses than the world knows.

More here.

Oliver Milman in WIRED:

WHAT, THOUGH, IF we don’t act quickly enough? If the fall of insects’ tiny empires causes whole ecosystems to unravel, toppling previously solid certainties about the way our world functions, what then? It’s easy to foresee how diminishing supplies of certain foods and crashing wildlife populations will heap cascading suffering on the poor and vulnerable, given the lopsided nature of societies, and perhaps even stoke embers of resentment and nationalism as foundational resources become scarcer. It’s also reasonable to anticipate that we will reflexively grasp for a technological fix to the mess we’ve created.

Expectation is already being ladled upon projects, still in their infancy, to create genetically modified pollinators resistant to disease and chemicals or to fashion machines topped with tiny cannons that fire pollen at plants and therefore address some of the causes of the climate collapse. Other scientists have turned their ingenuity to replicating the form and function of winged insects—​researchers at Harvard University have devised diminutive robots that can swim before exploding out of the water into flight,

More here.