Substitute Heart

A single human life migrates through many lifetimes,
according to the books she read to me.

The word migrant is cousin to nomad which is what her ancestors were.

When she turned refugee, she was told not to confuse herself with migrant.

There is no uniform legal definition of migrant. Blurring the terms generates
…… confusion, aid workers explained.

We are often asked who we are and where we come from. We tell the story we’ve
…… memorized by heart, we know when to insert facts and what emotions
…… are better left in our bodies.

Practice compassion, the teacher says when we ask him to make decisions for us.

Good thoughts generate good thoughts without asking for an exchange.

Just the thought of wanting to help others is worth thinking on, he says.

by Tsering Wangmo Duompa
from Poetry (April 2022)

Bocar Ba, Jacob Kaplan, Dean Knox, Mayya Komisarchik, Rachel Mariman Jonathan Mummolo, Roman Rivera, and Michelle Torres write in a new paper available at the Princeton website:

Policies to make police forces more representative of communities have centered on race. But race may crudely proxy views and lived experiences, undermining classic theories of representative bureaucracy. To conduct a multi-dimensional analysis, we merge personnel records, voter files and census data to examine roughly 220,000 officers from 97 of the 100 largest local U.S. agencies—over one third of local law enforcement agents nationwide. We show officers skew more White, Republican, politically active, male, and high-income than their jurisdictions; they also surround themselves with similarly unrepresentative neighbors. In a quasi-experimental analysis in Chicago, we find Democratic and minority officers initiate fewer stops, arrests, and uses of force than Republican and White counterparts facing common circumstances. The Black-White behavioral gap is often far larger than the Democratic-Republican gap, a pattern not observed among Hispanic officers. Our results complicate conventional understandings of descriptive representation, highlighting the importance of multi-dimensional perspectives of diversity.

More here.

Claudio Campagnari and Martijn Mulders in Science:

Over the past 60 years, the standard model (SM) has established itself as the most successful theory of matter and fundamental interactions—to date. The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson only added to the streak of triumphs for the theory (1, 2). However, the SM is known to be incomplete and has noticeable shortcomings, such as its inability to account for dark matter in the universe or to include gravity in a consistent fashion. Physicists have looked for phenomena that directly challenge the SM in the hope of finding hints on what a more complete theory may look like. Although no “new” particle has yet been found, a few fissures have recently been exposed in the SM by precise measurements that are at odds with the model’s predictions (3, 4). On page 170 of this issue, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) Collaboration (5) adds further intrigue with its measurement of the W boson mass.

The W boson, whose existence and detailed properties were first predicted in the 1960s and confirmed at CERN in 1983, is a key building block of the SM. It is a particle that is associated with the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive nuclear β decay, and that plays a similar role as that of the photon in the electromagnetic interaction.

More here.

Lucy Song in the Boston Review:

One of the most revealing features of the reckoning prompted by the recent horrific attacks on Asians in the United States is the diversity of responses offered by Asian Americans themselves. Undermining the racialized presumption that “Asian Americans” form a homogeneous group, these conflicting views reveal the sociopolitical stratification of some 22 million people all too typically portrayed as a politically disengaged monolith. On one side are those who regard anti-Asian violence as idiosyncratic compared to systemic anti-Black oppression and worry about reinforcing the carceral state. Others feel gaslighted, contending that anti-Asian violence and discrimination have not received the public attention they deserve. Why, they ask, are these concerns dismissed, even by other Asian Americans?

These kinds of divisions are at the heart of Jay Caspian Kang’s timely book, The Loneliest Americans, which sifts through the fine structure of Asian American life and finds a marked heterogeneity inflected by class, family history, and ethnic background.

More here.

Amber Husain at The Believer:

Does banishing convention from the schemas with which we formulate our manners and moods allow us, as DeWitt’s fictions seem to suggest, to transcend systemic bullshit? In recounting to Lorentzen the frustrations of her literary career, DeWitt compared the irrationality of editors to that of Plato’s Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Gorgias, “sophists who sulk whenever Socrates frustrates their conventional arguments.” If conventions are by their nature arbitrary, and reason is by nature orderly, one might be forgiven for thinking it follows that convention is an enemy of reason. And if reason constitutes our sole path to veracity, one might be forgiven for thinking it follows that convention is an enemy of truth. Occasionally I do wonder if my lust for the convention of financial security invalidates and renders irrational my equally convention-based claims that my work is “all very exciting.” If I have followed the convention of rising through the ranks of employment, a convenience in exchange for which my mind must descend into bullshit, does this render me unavoidably irrational? Does it make me an enemy of truth?

more here.

Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

Much of “Wet Leg” addresses the banality of adulthood, and particularly the discombobulating stretch between youth and middle age—from twenty-five to forty, say. (Teasdale is twenty-nine and Chambers is twenty-eight.) In the video for “Too Late Now,” Teasdale and Chambers stumble around in striped bathrobes with cucumber slices over their eyes. A montage gathers some of the more aesthetically unpleasant elements of modern life: cranes, a cigarette butt, Botox, trash spilling from an overstuffed dumpster, graffiti wishing passersby a shit day, fluorescent lights, a pigeon. “I’m not sure if this is the kinda life that I saw myself living,” Teasdale admits. A synthesizer rings out like church bells. Though she never sounds especially devastated, “Too Late Now” is Teasdale’s most tender and revealing vocal performance, and one of the best and most dynamic songs on “Wet Leg.” As children, we’re often desperate to grow up, yet it turns out that adulthood can be ugly and depressing.

more here.

Michelle Cottle in The New York Times:

Top showboaters this time around included Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham — a master of the self-righteous hissy fit. These folks really went the extra mile to turn the proceedings into a circus. So much performative outrage. So little interest in reality.

Surprising no one, Mr. Cruz was the most embarrassing of the lot. In a convoluted effort to paint Judge Jackson as a radical wokester (the asinine details of which are but an online search away for those interested), the senator whipped out a copy of the picture book “Antiracist Baby” and started tossing off bizarre, misleading questions such as, “Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist?” (The book doesn’t teach that.)

Perhaps Mr. Cruz was feeling nostalgic for his freshman year in the chamber, when he gave a dramatic reading on the Senate floor of another kiddie book — Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” — as part of a marathon speech protesting the Affordable Care Act. That speech is often mischaracterized as a filibuster. But a vote on the legislation had already been scheduled, meaning that nothing Mr. Cruz said, read or yodeled made a lick of difference. He was simply delivering an empty, blustery performance with an eye toward convincing his party’s voters of his fighting chops.

More here.

From Nature:

From its resting place outside Chicago, Illinois, a long-defunct experiment is threatening to throw the field of elementary particles off balance. Physicists have toiled for ten years to squeeze a crucial new measurement out of the experiment’s old data, and the results are now in. The team has found that the W boson — a fundamental particle that carries the weak nuclear force — is significantly heavier than theory predicts.

Although the difference between the theoretical prediction and experimental value is only 0.09%, it is significantly larger than the result’s error margins, which are less than 0.01%. The finding also disagrees with some other measurements of the mass. The collaboration that ran the latest experiment, called CDF at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), reported the findings in Science¹ on 7 April. The measurement “is extremely exciting and a truly monumental result in our field”, says Florencia Canelli, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. If it is confirmed by other experiments, it could be the first major breach in the standard model of particle physics, a theory that has been spectacularly successful since it was introduced in the 1970s.

More here.

The past is not dependent upon us for existence, but exists in its own right.
— Henry Steel Commager

The Past

All along certainly it’s been there, waiting for us, waiting to receive
……….. us, not to waver,
flickering shakily across the mind-screen, always in another shadow,
……….. always potentially illusion,
but out ahead, where it should be, redeemable, retrievable, accessible
……….. not by imagination’s nets
but by the virtue of its being, simply being, waiting patiently for us like
……….. any other unattended,
and other anticipated or not even anticipated—as much as any
……….. other fact rolling in . . .
All the project needs is patience, cunning, similar to that with which we
……….. outwit trembling death . . .
Not “history” but scent, sound, sight, the sensual fact, the beings and
……….. the doings, the heroes,
unmediated now, the holy and the horrid, to be worked across not like
………..a wistful map, but land.

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
Harper-Collins, 1994

Ana Quiring in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Upon the death of Joan Didion at age 87 at the close of 2021, her admirers shared a common adoration for one facet of her genius. “Her sentences — dear Lord, her sentences!” wrote The New York Times’s Frank Bruni in a tribute published on Christmas Eve. Twitter accolades from poets, journalists, and fans echoed this praise, to such repetitive vehemence that LARB’s own Phillip Maciak tweeted, “Joan Didion is one of the greatest writers of sentences to ever live on planet Earth. Sentences are different now because of the way she wrote. SENTENCES!”

This repeated accolade makes sense for such an eminent and prolific American writer, one whose legacy was secured long before her death. Brian Dillon anticipated Didion eulogies by writing a chapter about her “prose like a shiny carapace” in his 2020 book about the art of the sentence. All this praise is also, of course, a spectacular neg — a backhanded compliment that lauds her craft without engaging her ideas. We avert our eyes from the content of Didion’s writing, or at least make it secondary to style.

More here.

More here.

Anna Blaustein in Scientific American:

On February 24 Ukraine’s electric grid operator disconnected the country’s power system from the larger Russian-operated network to which it had always been linked. The long-planned disconnection was meant to be a 72-hour trial proving that Ukraine could operate on its own. The test was a requirement for eventually linking with the European grid, which Ukraine had been working toward since 2017. But four hours after the exercise started, Russia invaded.

Ukraine’s connection to Europe—which was not supposed to occur until 2023—became urgent, and engineers aimed to safely achieve it in just a matter of weeks. On March 16 they reached the key milestone of synchronizing the two systems. It was “a year’s work in two weeks,” according to a statement by Kadri Simson, the European Union commissioner for energy.

More here.

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The Mad Farmer in the City

“. . .a field woman is a portion of the field;
she has somehow lost her own margin . . .”
…………………………—Thomas Hardy

As my first blow against it, I would not stay.
As my second, I learned to live without it.
As my third, I went back one day and saw
that my departure had left a little hole
where some of its strength was flowing out,
and I heard the earthing singing beneath the street.
Singing quietly myself, I followed the song
among the traffic. Everywhere I went, singing,
following the song, the stones cracked,
and I heard it stronger. I heard it strongest
in the presence of women. There was one I met
who had the music of the ground in here, and she
was its dancer. “O Exile,” I sang, “for want of you
there is a tree that has borne no leaves
and a planting season that will not turn warm.”
Looking at her, I felt he tightening of roots
under the pavement, and I turned and went
with her a little way, dancing beside her.
And I saw a black woman still inhabiting
as in a dream the space of the open fields
where she had bent to plant and gather. She stood
rooted in the music I heard, pliant and proud
as a stalk of wheat with the grain heavy. No man
with the city thrusting angles in his brain
is equal to her. To reach her he must tear it down.
Wherever lovely women are the city is undone,
its geometry broken in pieces and lifted,
its streets and corners fading like mist at sunrise
above groves and meadows and planted fields.

by Wendell Berry
from Farming- A Handbook
Harvest Books, 1967

Christina Newland in The Baffler:

LIKE SO MANY YOUNG WOMEN of the immediate postwar years, my grandmother moved to Manhattan to seek a future. Born in rural West Virginia, the daughter of immigrant farmers, she snagged a job at a New York department store which as of today has been shuttered for half a century: Best & Company. It was there on Fifth Avenue, on a lunch break, that she saw Greta Garbo. She never forgot it. She described it like this: “She was very tall, in a big hat pulled down over her eye. She saw people staring, but she never stopped, and she never smiled.”

Garbo, once the preeminent goddess of the silver screen to which all other stars referred, is more likely to register to younger audiences today as a signifier of the vague, dusty glamour of a bygone age. But even when my grandmother glimpsed her in the late 1940s, Garbo had already withdrawn from the public eye. Having told the world with breathy certainty that she wanted to be alone, she disappeared from film after the Second World War. There was always something special about this icon of remote ennui on the screen; a movie star who had an eloquence of mien beyond most any other. Garbo radiated mystery because she was genuinely mysterious: self-possessed and private in a way that bordered on the compulsive. It only added to her mystique.

More here.

David Shenk in Delancey Place:

“‘It’s not that I’m so smart,’ Albert Einstein once said. ‘It’s just that I stay with problems longer.’

“Einstein’s simple statement is a clarion call for all who seek greatness, for themselves or their children. In the end, persistence is the difference between mediocrity and enormous success.

“The big question is, can it be taught? Can persistence be nur­tured by parents and mentors?

“Boston College’s Ellen Winner insists not. Persistence, she ar­gues, ‘must have an inborn, biological component.’ But the evi­dence indicates otherwise. The brain circuits that modulate a person’s level of persistence are plastic — they can be altered. ‘The key is intermittent reinforcement,’ says Robert Clonjnger, a Washington University biologist. ‘A person who grows up get­ting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.’

More here.

Will Rees in Aeon:

A few months before he died, Franz Kafka wrote one of his finest and saddest tales. In ‘The Burrow’, a solitary, mole-like creature has dedicated its life to building an elaborate underground home in order to protect itself from outsiders. ‘I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful,’ the protagonist notes at the outset. Quickly, however, the creature’s confidence begins to wane: how can it know if its defences are working? How can it be certain?

Kafka’s protagonist wants nothing less than complete security, so nothing can be left out of its calculations. In the small world of its burrow, every detail is significant, a possible ‘sign’ of a looming attack. Eventually, the creature begins to hear a noise it believes to be that of an invader. The noise is equally loud wherever it happens to be standing. It would appear, then, to originate within the creature’s own body: the sound, perhaps, of its own heart beating, its own frantic breathing; life happening and ebbing away, while the creature is worrying about something else.

‘The Burrow’ seems to serve as a retrospective commentary upon Kafka’s own life. By the time he was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of 34, Kafka had already spent two decades worrying about disease.

More here.

Fiona Harvey in The Guardian:

The world can still hope to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown but only through a “now or never” dash to a low-carbon economy and society, scientists have said in what is in effect a final warning for governments on the climate.

Greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, and can be nearly halved this decade, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to give the world a chance of limiting future heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The final cost of doing so will be minimal, amounting to just a few percent of global GDP by mid-century, though it will require a massive effort by governments, businesses and individuals.

But the chances were narrow and the world was failing to make the changes needed, the body of the world’s leading climate scientists warned. Temperatures will soar to more than 3C, with catastrophic consequences, unless policies and actions are urgently strengthened.

More here.