Matthew Mutter in The Hedgehog Review:

For years, I played basketball with a humanities skeptic. He was an endowment manager at the Ivy League university from which he had graduated with a degree in economics. He knew I was a professor of literature, and one day he asked what I taught—and did I by any chance teach Moby-Dick? I nodded, and he said, “You don’t believe the hype, do you?” His proudest moment in college had come when, required to read the novel for a first-year class, he developed a firm belief that Moby-Dick’s reputation was explainable chiefly by its obscurity. The emperor had no clothes: The novel was taught because it was revered, and revered because it was taught. Baffled readers took their incomprehension as a sign of its elusive greatness. Teachers followed blind tradition and enjoyed the aura of solemn stupefaction.

“Now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority”: So Virginia Woolf’s Londoners felt when they spotted a car, its windows curtained, transporting royalty. The intimations of majesty are pleasant, but there is a deeper pleasure in unmasking authority. The memory of pulling back the curtain still pleased my basketball partner fifteen years later.

More here.

David Schurman Wallace at Poetry Magazine:

A reader who opens a volume of Šalamun to any page is likely to find a startling line: “Bees rustle like a fifth column”; “I am a volcano that needs no sandals.” His images cascade in bewildering but thrilling torrents: “Wreaths shut in butter, shut in a glassy / casket in the hydra’s snout under the tree-tooth, / left shadow, microbes, blown up by / Job, flushed tender shivering gelatinous / Law morphing into socage.” Tonally, he can shift abruptly from the silly (“the soul of earth jacks off the skeleton key”) to the breathtaking (“My heart / beats like the heart of a hare who will die of fear”). He is a poet of wild and strange delights; to love Šalamun, readers must want to be invited into uncharted territory.

Rather than refer to him as a “poet’s poet,” that rickety epithet, better to think of him as dashingly “peripheral”: an artist on an arrow-flight toward the world’s bullseye, a pilgrim on a mission to transform speech, regardless of birth tongue.

more here.

Jonathan Meades at Literary Review:

Owen Hatherley blithely claims that this massive tour de force is ‘a guide to the place … you’re visiting, or a place you want to visit’. Pull the other one, squire. The notion of Owen Hatherley, Tripadvisor, is sheerly preposterous, though it may appeal to a tremulous publisher figuring out how to market this behemoth. He is really a polemicist, ready to take issue with anyone, including himself. His insistent invitations to look are heavy with allusions, catholic comparisons and quiet asides. The result of his tireless labour is an oblique, partial, lopsided survey of Britain throughout the long modernist century; and no matter what a platoon of celluloid collars and triple-breasted waistcoats may have wished for, modernism did triumph, in many guises. Its variety goes unnoticed by its antagonists, who have no ability to discern the kinship of much modernist architecture to its medieval and Victorian precursors. What they do have, in abundance, is torpid prejudice. This approximate gazetteer will not convince the obstinate to change their minds. But that really is not its point. It is a gorgeous treat for the already converted and, maybe, for those impaled on the spikes of equivocation. Hatherley’s only historical blunder is to describe Art Nouveau as ‘a mechanized sub-species of the Arts and Crafts’. The latter was pretty much exclusively English; the former was its flashy contemporary in places such as Belgium, Catalonia and Nancy. They hardly infected each other.

more here.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds

by Jack Gilbert
from The Great Fire: Poems, 1982-1992
Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, 1994

Lukas Wesemann in Nature:

Infectious diseases such as malaria remain a leading cause of death in many regions. This is partly because people there don’t have access to medical diagnostic tools that can detect these diseases (along with a range of non-infectious diseases) at an early stage, when there is more scope for treatment. It’s a challenge scientists have risen to, with a goal to democratize health care for economically disadvantaged people the world over. My colleagues and I have developed a new method for the investigation of biological cells which is small enough to fit into a smartphone lens. While we have so far only tested it in the lab, we hope in the future this nanotechnology could enable disease detection in real-world medical settings using just a mobile device. We hope our work can eventually help save millions of lives.

How to investigate a biological cell

Being able to investigate biological cells through optical microscopes is a fundamental part of medical diagnostics. This is because specific changes in cells that can be observed under a microscope are often indicative of diseases. In the case of malaria, for example, the gold-standard method of detection involves using microscope images to identify specific changes in a patient’s red blood cells. But biological cells are good at hiding. Many of their internal features are practically transparent and almost invisible to conventional microscopes. To make these features visible, we need to apply tricks. One way is to introduce some sort of chemical staining, which adds contrast to the transparent features of cells.

More here.

David Marchese in The New York Times:

In 2013, the French economist Thomas Piketty, in his best seller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” a book eagerly received in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, put forth the notion that returns on capital historically outstrip economic growth (his famous r>g formula). The upshot? The rich get richer, while the rest of us stay stuck in the mud. Now, nearly a decade later, Piketty is set to publish “A Brief History of Equality,” in which he argues that we’re on a trajectory of greater, not less, equality and lays out his prescriptions for remedying our current corrosive wealth disparities. (In short: Tax the rich.) If the line from one book to the other looks slightly askew given the state of the world, then, Piketty suggests, you’re looking from the wrong vantage point. “I am relatively optimistic,” says Piketty, who is 50, “about the fact that there is a long-run movement toward more equality, which goes beyond the little details of what happens within a specific decade.”

In the time since “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” was published, there has been a huge proliferation in the number of American billionaires. Something like 130 new ones were added between 2020 and 2021 alone. That happened in the context of growing public discussion — and anger — about economic inequality. So what the hell happened? What enabled the ultrawealthy to flourish in the face of such widespread antipathy? Let me put this very clearly: I understand that each year and each decade is tremendously important, but it’s also important not to forget about the general evolution. We have become much more equal societies in terms of political equality, economic equality, social equality, as compared with 100 years ago, 200 years ago. This movement, which began with the French and U.S. revolutions, I think it is going to continue.

Of course there are structural factors that make it difficult: the system of political finance, the structure of media finance, the basic democratic institutions are less democratic than they should be. This makes things complicated. But it’s always been complicated. The Supreme Court for decades made it impossible to create a progressive income tax. They were fine with the racial segregation, but having a progressive income tax was unconstitutional. In the end, it took 20 years to change the Constitution, but then it happened and contributed to reduced inequality.¹

More here.

Alexander Larman in The Critic:

If Sir Kingsley Amis was still alive today, on the occasion of his centenary — an event that would owe a quite remarkable amount to medical science, and might, given the context of this particular weekend, even be seen as a second Resurrection narrative — he might be amused by the way that he has been treated by posterity. I’ve written about the decline in Kingers’ fortunes, justified or not, for the May issue of The Critic, but one area that I was only able to touch on in the most passing of fashions was one that many Amis aficionados prefer not to dwell on. Yes — oh dear yes — Kingsley Amis wrote poetry. Many may have wished that it were not so.

This does one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant writers a disservice. One of the oft-repeated ironies of his epochal friendship with Philip Larkin is that, for a fair amount of their early lives, each man saw himself in the opposite sphere to the one in which he ended up excelling: Larkin wished to be a novelist, Amis a poet.

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Morgan Meis in Slant Books:

Well Rick B. from the United States, it seems that you did not like the Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s newest film The Worst Person in The World very much. Your Amazon review is quite short, and pretty rough. You gave it one star. The title of your review is “tedious, annoying people talking too much.”  And then you followed that up with two words and an exclamation mark: “It sucks!”

I did like the film and so I found your annoyance annoying, which brings up the immediate question as to why I spend so much time reading Amazon reviews of things, films in particular, but also books, and I will also confess that when I read an Amazon review I find especially baffling I will often click on the name of the person leaving the review and look at other things they have reviewed.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

When the mathematicians Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai first posed their “expectation threshold” conjecture in 2006, they didn’t believe it themselves. Their claim — a broad assertion about mathematical objects called random graphs — seemed too strong, too all-encompassing, too bold to possibly be true. It felt more like wishful thinking than a reflection of mathematical truth. Even so, no one could prove it false, and it quickly became one of the most important open problems in the field.

Now, more than 15 years later, a pair of young mathematicians at Stanford University have done what Kahn and Kalai thought borderline impossible: In a surprisingly short preprint posted online just a few weeks ago, Jinyoung Park and Huy Tuan Pham have provided a complete proof of the conjecture.

“It’s strikingly simple and ingenious,” said Kalai. “It’s stunning. It’s wonderful.”

More here.

Jeff Bleich and Dr. Bradley J. Strawser at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next technological revolution, a breakthrough that poses both great risks and great rewards for human rights. Our ability to mitigate AI’s risks will depend not on its technical features, but on how and why those features are used. A hammer can build a house or break a skull — the impact of any tool depends on who wields it, their intentions behind its use, and what constraints, if any, have been built around the tool’s use.

Having studied leading AI technologies, we are optimistic about their capacity to enhance the core values of human rights — including the right to life, equality, freedom of movement, and a sustainable environment. But realizing that potential requires being clear-eyed about the threat AI technologies pose, then addressing those threats.

AI is already embedded in many aspects of our lives, from mail systems that anticipate our words to Alexa/Siri assistants learning our needs to bank systems recognizing out-of-pattern purchases to playlists shuffling to match our personal tastes. Some find these things convenient; some find them annoying. Few consider them an immediate threat to our lives and freedoms.

Yet, as AI advances, its presence in the world will come into sharper relief.

More here.

Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon:

Creativity is an essential element of the human condition. Yet unlike other elements of our humanity, there’s a perception that creativity seems to leave us as we age. Children, wrapped up in their imaginary play worlds and projects, are notoriously unhindered in their creativity. But adults are far less adept at conjuring the fantastical and bizarre imagination that their childhood selves had easy access to. Many adults long for those playful youthful days, when conjuring up a grand scene, on paper or on the playground, was as natural as breathing.

To write his new book on creativity, author Matt Richtel turned to a diverse group of individuals who exemplify the essence of the word — director Judd Apatow, entrepreneur Mike Lee, musician Rhiannon Giddens, Nobel prize laureate Dr. James Allison. He listened to their stories about what sparks them and how they’ve attained their achievements. And the good news is, you and I don’t have to be like any of them.

More here.

I Went Into the Maverick Bar

I went into the Maverick bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
………………………….. backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earing in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
…………………………..by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
…………………………..where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”
And with the next song,
…………………………..a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances
…………………………..in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
…………………………..and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness—
…………………………..America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders—
…………………………..under the tough old stars—
In the shadow of bluffs
…………………………..I came back to myself
To the real work, to
…………………………..”What is to be done.”

by Gary Snyder
from No Nature- New and Selected Poems
Pantheon Books, 1992

Heather Clark in The New York Times:

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was once the most famous poet in America. Her collections sold tens of thousands of copies, and her readings filled theaters from New York to Texas. She was the female voice of the Jazz Age, the New Woman incarnate whose passionate and iconoclastic verse earned her a devoted following. Her 1920 poem “First Fig” became an anthem for a generation tired of Victorian mores:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, and at the height of her fame she seemed unstoppable. But not long after World War I, modernist poets began rejecting rigid rhyme, meter and expressions of emotion. Millay’s wildly popular love sonnets suddenly seemed quaint when set beside the oblique and somber lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The modernists won the day, and the discrete, imagistic verse of Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore eventually crowded out the more decadent, romantic lyrics of Millay and Sara Teasdale. The poet Maxine Kumin remembered her Harvard professors dismissing Millay as “just a sentimental woman” in the mid-1940s.

Now, 72 years after her death, Yale University Press has published Millay’s diaries nearly in full. Their editor, Daniel Mark Epstein, hopes this landmark publication will revive interest in Millay’s daring, transgressive verse. And indeed, Millay’s best work — with its coy rhymes, bravado and playful sexual politics — deserves a contemporary reassessment. It’s something of a miracle that Millay was published at all. She grew up in poverty in Newburyport, Mass., and Camden, Maine.

More here.

Mona Ali in Phenomenal World:

The centerpiece of shock and awe of the West’s economic response to Russia’s invasion and bombardment of Ukraine was the freezing of Russia’s central bank assets. In the March 7 edition of his Global Money Dispatch newsletter, the Credit Suisse investment strategist Zoltan Pozsar writes that the G7 seizure of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves marks a regime change in the global monetary system. Pozsar pronounces this new regime Bretton Woods III. He anticipates that Asian sovereigns, fearing that their dollar- and euro-denominated foreign reserves are at risk of expropriation in the event of future foreign policy disputes, will park their surplus funds outside of the reach of Western financial authorities. For Pozsar, this heralds the rise of “commodity-backed currencies in the East” and spells the denouement of dollar hegemony.

In a follow-up piece published on March 31, Pozsar speculates that recent developments will drive China to replace the West as the buyer of last resort of Russian oil. As a result, oil tankers will have to be rerouted from the quicker East-West route via the Suez to a longer passage (one requiring ship transfers) from Russia to China. Geopolitics will shape the reorganization of real infrastructure networks, slowing down supply chains and increasing the cost of credit. Pozsar predicts that this rearrangement of global commodity and money flows presage a new world economic order, one in which China will replace the US as the monetary hegemon. The petrodollar, he envisages, will be replaced by the petro-yuan.

Pozsar’s analysis—as well as Adam Tooze’s response to it—appreciates the asymmetry in the world economy: between advanced economies that dominate global finance, and developing countries that produce the majority (about sixty percent) of world GDP. Asia may be the center of gravity of world manufacturing, but European and North American firms still command the bulk of the profits embedded in global supply chains.

More here.

Gunnar O Babcock in Aeon:

If you split yourself down the middle to become two people, would you survive the process? And, if you did, would your other half be your child, your clone or your sibling? Would this create two instances of the same you, existing simultaneously in two places at the same time; or would it create two entirely new people, causing you to suddenly cease to exist? While such thought experiments raise baffling questions about personal identity, there is a more fundamental problem I want to consider: would splitting in two be an instance of reproduction or an entirely different kind of process?

When we think about how organisms reproduce, we don’t tend to think of splitting bodies. We think of sex. We tend to think of animals such as panda bears, leopards, ravens or any other large multicellular organisms having sex, becoming pregnant (or laying fertilised eggs), and giving birth. It isn’t surprising that this is how we think new organisms come into existence. Sexual reproduction is, after all, the form of reproduction that nature has selected for creatures like us. But sex is not the way most reproduction takes places.

Most forms of life on this planet create other living beings through asexual processes – and there are many ways this can happen (as we’ll see). Some of the most common forms are similar to the thought experiment above: a body splits in two. Nearly all prokaryotic microbes, such as bacteria, reproduce through various forms of this process, such as binary fission (when a body separates into two new bodies). However, it’s not always clear what kinds of relation result from fission, as in the thought experiment above.

More here.

Gary Younge in The Nation:

When I first moved to the US from London, I asked an American journalist what kind of reception I might expect as a Black Briton. “Well, when they hear an English accent, Americans usually add about 20 points to your IQ,” he said. “But when they see a Black face, they usually don’t.” Recalling that the authors of the book The Bell Curve had claimed that Black people have an IQ 15 points lower than whites, I figured that, at the very least, I would still come out at least five points ahead.

There were moments during my 12 years as the US correspondent for The Guardian when I needed all the help I could get. It could be a particular challenge when reporting from Republican events. Englishness, the American journalist had made clear, carried cultural cachet; Blackness did not. The two arriving in the same body could mess with some people’s heads. When I introduced myself as a British journalist, I was occasionally subjected to an interrogation of my credentials. “Were you born there?” they’d ask. “I don’t hear an accent.” (I sound like Ricky Gervais, with nary a hint of a transatlantic twang.)

But my point here is not partisan. Republicans could be, as it happens, ruder than most. But despite Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen, acclaimed author Zadie Smith, and actors Idris Elba, David Oyelowo, and Thandie Newton—to name but a few—the general American image of Britain (particularly outside the big cities) remains ossified in a time before the large-scale migration of Black people to Britain following the Second World War. (My parents came from Barbados in the early 1960s.) When I wrote an article for The Washington Post about being Black and British in the US, it ran alongside a picture of a Black man in a bowler hat carrying an umbrella in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.

More here.