The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
by Gary Snyder
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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:
Designing drugs is a bit like playing with Polly Pocket. The vintage toy is a plastic clam shell that contains a multi-bedroom house, a skating rink, a disco dance floor, and other fun scenarios. Kids snap tiny dolls into designated spots so they can spin them around or move them up and down on an elevator. To work, the fit between the doll and its spot has to be perfectly aligned.
Proteins and the drugs targeting them are like this. Each protein has an intricate and unique shape, with areas that grab other molecules to trigger physiological effects. Many of our most powerful drugs—from antibiotics to anti-cancer immunotherapies—are carefully engineered to snap onto proteins and alter their functions. Designing them takes months or years.
More here.
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Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings:
Every baby is born the same way (namely, as a baby).
And every mathematician is born the same way, too: as a baby as a Platonist.
It usually begins something like this: What exactly are triangles? In a cosmos where no plane is perfectly flat, no segment perfectly straight, and no corner perfectly sharp, are Euclidean triangles in any sense “real”?
Yes, says the Platonist. Tangible? No. Physical? No. But the Platonist has tasted enough of math to know, in her bones, that math is more than just human whim. Math must, in some independent sense, exist. The Platonist believes (in the grand tradition of Seinfeld) that mathematical objects are real, and they’re spectacular.
Other philosophies may come later. Structuralists evolve, like birds from dinosaurs. Formalists are trained, like soldiers in boot camp. Intuitionists emerge, like neo-reactionaries from economic recessions.
But every mathematician begins in the same sweet swaddle of Platonism.
More here.
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Boluwatife S. Olubusoye and James V Cizdziel in The Conversation:
Every few years, the tires on your car wear thin and need to be replaced. But where does that lost tire material go?
The answer, unfortunately, is often waterways, where the tiny microplastic particles from the tires’ synthetic rubber carry several chemicals that can transfer into fish, crabs and perhaps even the people who eat them.
We are analytical and environmental chemists who are studying ways to remove those microplastics – and the toxic chemicals they carry – before they reach waterways and the aquatic organisms that live there.
Millions of metric tons of plastic waste enter the world’s oceans every year. In recent times, tire wear particles have been found to account for about 45% of all microplastics in both terrestrial and aquatic systems.
Tires shed tiny microplastics as they move over roadways. Rain washes those tire wear particles into ditches, where they flow into streams, lakes, rivers and oceans.
More here.
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Carl Bildt at Project Syndicate:
Three urgent priorities are set to strain Europe’s public finances over the next few years. The first – and most obvious – is defense. The push to boost military spending is primarily a response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, compounded by US President Donald Trump’s relentless criticism of America’s NATO allies. Together, these pressures have made strengthening Europe’s defense posture a strategic necessity.
The second, and arguably more urgent, priority is to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia. If Ukraine’s defenses were to collapse, a revanchist Russia would likely go on a rampage. Ensuring that Ukraine can continue to defend itself will require European governments to go beyond their existing defense-spending commitments.
And lastly, there is the lengthy process of producing the European Union’s next multiyear budget, which will cover the period from 2028 to 2034.
More here.
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Adam Phillips at Salmagundi:
In a piece written by the critic Kenneth Gross, an ex-student of Harold Bloom, we read that “Bloom was always alive to Blake’s way of joining visionary, esoteric wildness and blunt sceptical, satirical rage. He treasured Blake’s cheerful independence, his dark sense of humour, his willingness to think through for himself all ideas and traditions, his hatred of the mind’s capacity to accept and forge limitations for itself and others, and his ambition of ‘opening up the reader’s own buried capacity for imaginative self-liberation.’”
This is as good an account as any of the spirit and preoccupations of Bloom’s work; it being the singular, original, idiosyncratic independence and radical non-compliance of Blake’s vision that Bloom celebrated, and aspired to. (Bloom said in an interview that when he read Northrop Frye’s book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, it was the best book he had ever read, and that after many readings he knew it by heart.) The Anxiety of Influence—at once a history of poetic tradition, and a story about the individual development of what Bloom called “strong poets”—was the book that first fully exemplified, or theorised, what Bloom, in Gross’s account, valued about Blake.
more here.
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Alex Abramovich at the LRB:
‘There are ten thousand freedoms,’ the late Joshua Clover once said, ‘but rock freedom is definitely set – in the first instance – in a car, when it’s late outside. It can be ecstatic, it can be boring, it can be adjectiveless freedom, but you have reached escape velocity, faster miles an hour, you have no particular place to go, and you have the radio on.’
Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ recently turned seventy. Recorded on 21 May 1955 in a studio on the South Side of Chicago, it tells the story of a man chasing his girlfriend down the highway. He’s in a Ford V8, she’s driving a Cadillac. She’s cheating, the car’s overheating, he’s trying to catch her before she gets away for good. ‘Maybellene’ isn’t Chuck Berry’s best song but it was his first single. Without it there’d be no Bob Dylan. No rock and roll as we know it. It’s a miracle.
There’s a story about the song, too. The demo tape that Chuck Berry gave Leonard Chess included a slow blues, ‘Wee Wee Hours’, and a faster number that Berry called ‘Ida Mae’.
more here.
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Katie Kavanagh in Nature:
The brain activates front-line immune cells in response to the mere sight of a sick person, mimicking the body’s response to an actual infection, a study shows1. The results required the use of brain scans and blood tests, as well as less conventional technology: gaming kit. Study volunteers donned virtual reality (VR) headsets to view human avatars with rashes, coughs or other symptoms of illness — avoiding the need to expose volunteers to pathogens. The results illustrate the power of the brain “to predict what is going on [and] to select the proper response”, says study co-author Andrea Serino, a neuroscientist at the University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland.
The immune system reacts promptly to infections, but it can’t always move fast enough to prevent serious illness. That means it would be useful for the body to realize that an infection is possible and mount a pre-emptive response. To study humans’ ability to anticipate a pathogen attack, Serino and his colleagues outfitted healthy volunteers with Google’s Oculus Rift headsets and showed them avatars that approached closer and closer, although the avatars never ‘touched’ the participants. Some avatars showed signs of having an infectious illness; others were controls that looked healthy.
More here.
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trees dangle upside down from a sky
which is no longer sky
but mineral gem earth insulating us
from the various problems of birds
singing below singing below
a reminder of the past kept
in the folds of distance
as I walk through blue & discarded clouds
I examine tree canopy’s swish
a froth situating my ankles
these shocks of green
everywhere everywhere flesh
of leaves & stalks pertinent
to my arms & legs & face
an almost-substitute for people
(remembering when people
touched each other’s bodies)
branches are capillaries & how like skin
to be this dry & forgotten
like when you were here last
& I rubbed rose oil
into the difficult geometry
of your scars
by Carolyn Wilsey
from Pank Magazine
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Susan Choi in The Yale Review:
What i always say is that I wasn’t a very good checker. I don’t mean I made mistakes—mistakes being, in fact-checking, failing to catch someone else’s mistakes. I mean that the things I checked weren’t serious or difficult, that generally, the bar was pretty low. This was at Tina Brown’s New Yorker in the mid-1990s, a time when the magazine was trying to raise its own heart rate. The idea was to make headlines, not just cultural history. But when we had a piece whose publication might result in a lawsuit or an international incident, or a person’s vindication or ruination, or a significant and unanticipated paradigm shift on a matter of collectively agreed-upon importance, such as the Holocaust or Shakespeare, I wasn’t the first checker anyone thought of. My boss—a brilliant, kind, and fair man I still count as a friend—tended to pitch me softballs, an expression I’ve never understood because I didn’t check sports articles either, being equally ignorant about every sport. I tended to check culture pieces: reconsiderations of, say, Maria Callas, for which there was no “peg”—an occasion in the real world that dictated when it should publish—beyond the opera-loving author’s strong feeling that Callas was owed some attention. This was the sort of piece that might long remain in unscheduled limbo, allowing me to bone up on Callas, about whom I knew nothing.
More here.
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Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:
It took months of effort to understand what the AI was doing(opens a new tab). It turned out that the machine had used a counterintuitive trick to achieve its goals. It added an additional three-kilometer-long ring between the main interferometer and the detector to circulate the light before it exited the interferometer’s arms. Adhikari’s team realized that the AI was probably using some esoteric theoretical principles that Russian physicists had identified decades ago to reduce quantum mechanical noise. No one had ever pursued those ideas experimentally. “It takes a lot to think this far outside of the accepted solution,” Adhikari said. “We really needed the AI.”
If the AI’s insights had been available when LIGO was being built, “we would have had something like 10 or 15% better LIGO sensitivity all along,” he said. In a world of sub-proton precision, 10 to 15% is enormous.
More here.
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John Simpson in The Guardian:
In 1976 when we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, came back to the office from a grand US embassy party one evening and remarked: “The cleverest and most entertaining people at these things are always CIA. Makes it all the harder to understand why they get everything wrong.” An exaggeration, of course, but one with a degree of truth to it. Why has an organisation with huge amounts of money at its disposal, a record of recruiting the brightest and the best, and the widest of remits, failed to notch up a better record? It’s true that we may not know about many of the CIA’s successes. But we know about a lot of its failures, and some of them have marked US history ineradicably.
In The Mission, Tim Weiner, whose reporting on the CIA in the New York Times was always essential reading, and whose subsequent books on the US intelligence community have a place on the shelves of anyone interested in international affairs, provides a variety of answers to this essential question.
More here.
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Julia Friedman at The Hedgehog Review:
Published by Hunters Point Press last year, the writings collected in Is Art History? cover seven decades of Alpers’s prolific professional life. Arranged chronologically, from a long scholarly article first published in 1960 to a book review that came out in 2023, the compilation offers a long-distance view of a storied career. The book is clearly a labor of love. It is hefty, at 420 pages of text plus color plates, complete with a red cloth cover with embossed gold lettering and a silky gray ribbon bookmark. The margins are extra wide (a rarity today). In addition to the color plates compiled at the end of the volume, there are black-and-white illustrations in the margins, for quick reference. This is one of many nods to the classic art history texts of yore. The foreword is by Barney Kulok, a young photographer who collaborated with Alpers, and the introduction is by her former student, now professor of art history at Stanford University, Richard Meyer. The absence of contributions by her colleagues, friends, or coauthors (who included the likes of John Berger, Michael Podro, Richard Wollheim, and Michael Baxandall), is a sad reminder that, as Alpers remarks: “Everyone I would have written for is dead.”
more here.
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Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker:
You could say all of this in another way: Theo Huxtable was a nicely realized character but also a lofty ideal. What he meant was too much for any real person to carry around. Malcolm-Jamal Warner seemed miraculously able to pull it off. He’d been famous and highly visible at an alarmingly young age, but, unlike many other former child stars, he never seemed to feel much rancor about the experience, or resentment about lugging pure-minded Theo around with him for the rest of his life.
When he played roles in shows like “Suits,” “The Resident,” and “Malcolm and Eddie,” you couldn’t help but think about Theo. But that wasn’t a bad thing: it only meant that the archetype that the earlier character had prodded into being was now commonplace in all kinds of representations of reality—that Theo had done the impossibly difficult cultural work of affixing a face upon a new, then suddenly ubiquitous, kind of person.
Warner helped this process along by always comporting himself with an ambassadorial cheer. He knew what he meant. One of “The Cosby Show” ’s unspoken assertions—now much more controversial than in the eighties, when the show premièred—was that polished personal presentation was part of a Black man’s arsenal of tools to survive an unpredictable world.
more here.
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