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Snow Falls From Then to Now

Pluvius couldn’t make up his mind between
snow and rain – so he sent small snow, small rain
together. A small quiet joined them, so dog
and I walked with all three, a little wet, a little white,
a little inward. Last night, when I rose to comfort
him from some disturbing doggie dream I could
see whirls of whiteness dancing in the steeetlight
and heard myself think, “Silent snow,
secret snow.”
Early waking let me watch the fall continue through
a blue-gray dawn sky. Morning walk – short, dangerous,
ice beneath the white coverlet. Greystoke didn’t
like it either so was quick, though I had to push
my walker across the tundra to pick up his leavings.

So, this is an ordinary poem about ordinary, But I’ll add a
small quiet blesses us all.

by Nils Peterson
from Task: To be Where I am

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Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

Schiff estimates Updike typed some 25,000 letters and postcards over the course of his life. He neglected to keep carbons and used whatever paper was handy. (“I am pleased to see we share a lack of official stationeries,” he wrote to Alice Munro in 2006, reveling in the reverse snobbery.) He didn’t think much of these missives, or so he said. He told his editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, that “my letters are too dull to be dredged up.”

Surely, he knew better. Some 700 of them have been resurfaced by the indefatigable Schiff, who teaches at the University of Cincinnati and is the founding editor of The John Updike Review. Despite Updike’s distance-creating geniality, what an enormous and beneficent bounty these letters are for anyone who cares about this country’s literature during the last half century.

These letters trace Updike’s life (1932-2009) and, because they are so approachable, are not a bad introduction to his work for a young person who has not read him.

More here.

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Steve Nadis in Quanta:

In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the University of California, Berkeley, George Dantzig — a first-year graduate student — copied two problems off the blackboard, thinking they were a homework assignment. He found the homework “harder to do than usual,” he would later recount, and apologized to the professor for taking some extra days to complete it. A few weeks later, his professor told him that he had solved two famous open problems in statistics. Dantzig’s work would provide the basis for his doctoral dissertation and, decades later, inspiration for the film Good Will Hunting.

Dantzig received his doctorate in 1946, just after World War II, and he soon became a mathematical adviser to the newly formed U.S. Air Force. As with all modern wars, World War II’s outcome depended on the prudent allocation of limited resources. But unlike previous wars, this conflict was truly global in scale, and it was won in large part through sheer industrial might. The U.S. could simply produce more tanks, aircraft carriers and bombers than its enemies. Knowing this, the military was intensely interested in optimization problems — that is, how to strategically allocate limited resources in situations that could involve hundreds or thousands of variables.

The Air Force tasked Dantzig with figuring out new ways to solve optimization problems such as these. In response, he invented the simplex method, an algorithm that drew on some of the mathematical techniques he had developed while solving his blackboard problems almost a decade before.

More here.

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Jacqueline Detwiler-George at Popular Mechanics:

Trace evidence analysis is the most versatile of the crime scene disciplines, requiring a specialist to be ready for whatever comes through the door. Officially, a trace analyst handles anything that doesn’t fit into the other standard crime lab departments, which tend to include body fluids (also known as serology), fingerprints, and ballistics. In reality, it can include analyzing an absurd variety of materials. It could be flame accelerant, explosives, cosmetics, carpet fibers, tree bark, hairs, shoe prints, clothing, dirt, glass fragments, tape, glue, and, yes, glitter.

Part of the reason Jones chose trace was his love for microscopes—today, he owns five. He was the microscope expert at the Ventura lab and remains a member of the Microscopical Society of Southern California, for which he often makes art out of “arranged microstuff” that looks cool at great magnification.

More here.

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Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

What made Clark’s appearance in the guise of an art critic an event was not just his already existing eminence as an art historian. Nor was it the fact that Clark is one of the rare art historians who has forged a style for his writing, by which I mean that he is always himself, and always recognizably himself, in his prose. Rather, it was that he was contravening the conventional division of labor within art writing: Old art is the subject of history, new art is the subject of criticism. What was thrilling about Clark’s new enterprise was that he was writing about artists such as Bosch and Velázquez not as a historian but as a critic—and yet was doing so with a historian’s erudition and authority rather than with the more approachable fluency with which a belletristic critic such as Jed Perl or Peter Schjeldahl might do so. He was, in a sense, disproving (or at least providing an exception to) Marcel Duchamp’s cynical remark that “after a work has lived almost the life of a man…comes a period when that work of art, if it is still looked at by onlookers, is put in a museum. A new generation decides that it is all right. And those two ways of judging a work of art”—before and after it is consecrated by the museum—“certainly don’t have anything in common.” Clark, by contrast, was treating the art of the past as what it is or should be, something alive and challenging in the present, and not just as what it also is, an artifact.

more here.

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Mythili Rao in The Guardian:

Lying in her Birmingham hospital bed in the weeks after she’d been shot in the head by a Taliban assassin, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai used to imagine the conversation she would have with Taliban leadership. “If they would just sit down with me … I could reason with them and convince them to end their reign of misogyny and violence,” she writes in her new memoir.

Malala kept a notebook by her bed, filled with rhetorical strategies and talking points – the names of journalists who might be able to broker a meeting with the Taliban, the Qur’an verses she could cite to show that girls do have a right to education in Islam, the things she could say to establish her own credentials as a God-fearing Muslim. Of course, that conversation never happened. Much later, after the fall of Afghanistan in 2021, it made her wince to recall her naive belief that the Taliban would ever listen to her.

More here.

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Sam Dembling at n+1:

Michael Hurley, the godfather of freak folk, died in April. Now we have his last, posthumous album, which was released in September and offers a final occasion to look back at his contributions, always arriving slightly aslant, to folk music history. An outsider artist but no museum-room oddity, Hurley was an authentic American avant-gardist, like Emily Dickinson or Ornette Coleman. When I saw him at the Brooklyn Folk Festival last November he walked onstage to a hero’s welcome. The show was in a great dark church and those of us who didn’t arrive in time to fill the pews found space on the floor, sitting at his feet. Skeletal, serious, with a handkerchief around his neck and a pipefitter hat shading his eyes, Hurley sang out in a tremulous voice. A few times in the set he paused for a moment—Had he forgotten the words? I wondered—but only to summon some invisible inner current. He was funny, he was grim. On one song, Snock, as many called him, resembled a children’s entertainer, doing an a cappella impersonation of an owl with utter frankness. On another, “The End of the Road,” a wry confrontation with final things, he seemed to be chilly elegizing himself: “They’re chasing’ the fox and they’re runnin’ him ragged and he knows he gone wrong somewhere.” He was old, but the music was electric and his fans seemed to be younger than ever.

more here.

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The Forest is Burning in the Palm of My Hand

My son comes running across acres of grass.
He is twenty-seven years old.
He is eleven years old. He is
four years old.

He turns his hand up to show me
the distant inner glow, smoke
drifting from him.

He wants to see so I lift
my hand to the old paths
where fire often danced;
plateaus of desolation inside my fist.

My son comes running
across acres of grass.
He is four
years old. He
is eleven years old.
He is twenty-seven
years old.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal books, 1997

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Dana Milbank in The Washington Post:

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Dean W. Ball at Hyperdimensional:

Imagine that you are a cook, and you just made a cake in your kitchen. You’ve made a delicious cake, and you’d like to start a business making 1,000 of them a day. So you replicate your kitchen 1,000 times over—you buy 1,000 residential ovens, 1,000 standard mixing bowls, 1,000 bags of flour. And you hire 1,000 humans to follow your recipe, each making their own cake in the various kitchens you’ve built.

Of course no one would do this. And yet this is not that far off from how we today “scale science,” and in some ways we are even less efficient.

What you should do instead, obviously, is build a factory with the ability to make 1,000 cakes at the same time. This was, at one point, a new type of institution that entailed distinct organizational structures (the modern corporation, for example), new relationships of workers to firm owners, novel patterns of work, and much else. The factory enabled and necessitated new technology: in our example, industrial ovens, wholesale purchase of ingredients, and the like, in quantities that would be alien in a residential kitchen. Similarly, it required new occupations that do not map cleanly to their pre-industrial analogs (consider the “chef” or “baker,” for example, versus the “batter-vat cleaner”).

Standing in a pre-industrial residential kitchen, it would be difficult to imagine a factory, partially because there are numerous complementary innovations a factory requires (for example, the ability to manufacture and power industrial-scale cooking equipment), and partially because imagination is hard.

More here.

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Tessa Koumoundouros at Science Alert:

With their bladed paws, wielded by a rippling mass of pure muscle, sharp eyes, agile reflexes, and crushing fanged jaws, lions are certainly not a predator most animals have any interest in messing with. Especially seeing as they also have the smarts to hunt in packs.

“Lions are the biggest group-hunting land predator on the planet, and thus ought to be the scariest,” conservation biologist Michael Clinchy from Western University in Canada said in 2023.

But in over 10,000 recordings of wildlife on the African savannah, 95 percent of the species observed responded with far more terror to the sound of an entirely different beast. This animal isn’t even technically an apex predator. It’s us: humans.

More here.

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Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by Numbers:

I often hear about “skyrocketing” demand for electricity in countries like the United States (here’s just one example).

There is no doubt that electricity demand will rise (or, in many countries, already has started rising). This is often a good thing as it represents a shift from fuels to electricity, which is another huge part of the energy transition.

There is a lot of hand-wringing about whether countries will be capable of meeting this extra demand. But that made me curious about how unprecedented this growth really is. How do current and future growth rates compare to the past? Is it really the case that electricity demand will “skyrocket”, or are we really just talking about a fairly quick increase?

Let’s run through some numbers for the US to get some perspective.

More here.

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Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. What you make of your suffering is the abacus on which it all adds up. It is there that your capacities to love and to give contract or expand, there that you feel most alone, there that you touch most directly the thread of human experience that binds us. Suffering is the common record of our unreturned messages to hope, and because we are the hoping species, it is inseparable from what makes us human. More than a cerebral operation, it is an experience of the total organism, entwining synapse and sinew, engaging the entire orchestra of hormones and neurotransmitters and enzymes that plays the symphony of aliveness. This is why AIs — those disembodied cerebrators — will never know suffering and, not knowing the transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art, will never be able to write a truly great poem. (About suffering they will always be wrong, the new masters.)

Nick Cave — who has known more grief than most, having lost his young son and lost his own father at a young age, but has remained an unrelenting guardian of joy — takes up the question of that transmutation on the pages of his altogether magnificent book Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library).

more here.

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Philip Elliott in Time Magazine:

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