Shoalfish

I swim with others.
Some are dolphins, some are sharks.
Which is which depends on the temperature of the water
or the weather. Something: it’s not clear.
From whale song to hammerhead thrash,
they change their tune at the drop of a mask
over the side, pulled deep by invisible cable
to pressurised obscurity.
Before I know it the warm, blue shallows shelve
into coldness. Gloom wraps me in panic.
I pray. My prayer says:
“Even turtles nip if they think you’re edible.”
Overwhelming, but it’s either that
or swim alone.

by Robin Knight
from Rattle #71, Spring 2021; Tribute
to Neurodiversity

Kieran Setiya in the Boston Review:

The month is May 1916. In southern Galicia, now Ukraine, on the Eastern Front of World War I, a twenty-seven-year-old Austrian volunteers for duty in an observation post exposed to enemy gunfire. He keeps a notebook of his hopes and fears, written in a simple cipher from his childhood—the letter “z” stands for “a,” “y” for “b,” and so on—with philosophical remarks, uncoded, on the facing pages. The latter concern the nature of logic and are peppered with logical symbols. From April 15: “Every simple proposition can be brought into the form ɸx.”

In June Russia launches the “Brusilov Offensive,” one of the most lethal military campaigns of the war. The young man’s notebook goes empty for a month. Then, on July 4, he begins to write, in the uncoded pages, remarks that are not logical, but spiritual. “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” he asks. “That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. . . . I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will; I am completely powerless.”

From this point on, distinctions blur. The cipher seeks connections; the philosophy leaps from logic to life’s meaning and back. “Yes,” he writes on August 2, “my work has broadened out from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world.” In the end, there is no code. Nothing is hidden—though “What cannot be said, cannot be said!”

More here.

Ian Neubauer in Al Jazeera:

In wealthier countries, rodenticides like bromadiolone that prevent blood from clotting are used to combat plagues of rats and mice. But they also poison non-target species, soil, water and sometimes the farmers who apply them, and can be prohibitively expensive.

But a team of researchers from the National University of Laos and Australia’s Monash University have discovered a much simpler, cheaper and environmentally friendly solution that utilises existing indigenous rodent hunting tools and know-how: an economic game that pools together the efforts of villagers, and rewards those who kill or capture the most rats.

More here.

Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager and Evgeniya Pyatovskaya in The Conversation:

We are international critical cultural scholars with extensive experience in various geopolitical contexts – the U.S., European Union and post-Soviet countries. We believe that those who think that sanctions will turn Russia and Russians around and end the war know very little about the country, its history and its people.

Russians are used to turmoil and instability. They endured cruel social experiments during the 20th century, and the early 21st, performed upon them by their own political leadership. Except for the rare example of Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian leadership during that period was never democratic.

More here.

BELLATRIX – Sébastien Guérive from Thomas Blanchard on Vimeo.

Cristella Guerra on NPR:

Birth professionals from around the country gathered in Montgomery, Ala., to heal, to learn and to honor the lives and sacrifices of three women: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey, the Mothers of Gynecology. These towering mothers built of scrap metal were the cornerstone of a two-day conference in late February centered on Black maternal health inside Old Ship A.M.E Zion Church.

“There’s so much that people don’t know about,” says Dr. Veronica Maria Pimentel, an obstetrician gynecologist based in Hartford, Ct., who began a petition two years ago asking those in her field to recognize the contributions of Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey. “The history is told from the point of view of those in power and those who were in power were men and those who were in power were also white,” she says. “And we’re talking about women, we’re talking specifically about Black women, and we’re talking about enslaved Black women. So it is important for us to go back and look at this history because the history informs what we’re doing today when we talk about inequalities in health care.”

More here.

Michael Eisenstein in Nature:

When scientists first came across p53 in 1979, it was an intriguing but not Earth-shattering discovery. Six groups independently discovered a cellular protein with a molecular weight of roughly 53 kilodaltons — hence the name. It seemed that p53 was interacting with a tumour-inducing virus called simian virus 40, and researchers soon showed that healthy cells forced to express this newly cloned gene encoding p53 quickly became cancerous¹.

But the truth was more complicated. As more researchers began to study p53, it became apparent that the tumour-causing versions of the gene were actually mutated. The unmutated, or wild-type, version of the gene, which was cloned from humans and mice in the 1980s, exerted the exact opposite effect: the gene acted as a potent inhibitor of tumorigenesis². Scientists had even got its size wrong; p53’s true molecular weight is closer to 44 kilodaltons. In the three decades since researchers came to this realization, p53’s biological significance has become ever more apparent. The protein coordinates a wide range of essential cellular functions, and its evolutionary history dates back to some of the earliest multicellular life on Earth.

More here.

Winter Rye

On an evening of broccoli
And Billy Collins,
My mind drifts back to May,

When the pale-green Bermuda
Replaced the winter rye, and my father
Dutifully attended to his guests.

He poured the white wine and laughed
At little jokes, so nervous in their delivery,
And consoled her group of friends.

And so finally she was, as they say,
Put to rest, and it was quietly sound, enough so
That I found myself watching him carefully

Watching him smile at each and every guest,
Such dignity amid the Chardonnay,
Such grace among the last of the winter rye.

by Richard Fenwick
from Anon Seven Poetry Magazine, Edinburgh Scotland

Ellen Pierson-Hagger at The New Statesman:

Across three albums between 2014 and 2019, Harding, who lived for a time in Cardiff, but is now based in a small town back in New Zealand, has released a collection of songs that could most easily be considered contemporary folk. She sings and plays guitar, there are drums and keys, the arrangements are typically sparse, and the songs are melody-focused. More interesting is her vocal elasticity – the way her tone shifts on the 2017 track “Party” from a creaky, pleading squeal to a delicate whisper – and her brilliant and peculiar lyrics: “Looks like a date is set/Show the ferret to the egg/I’m not getting led along,” she sang on “The Barrel”, which, with more than 39 million Spotify streams, is her biggest hit.

There are real oddities in Harding’s music, as there are in her stage presence. But more immediately striking is the warmth and veracity of her sound and lyrics. 

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

I said last week that Putin has “taken the world hostage” by threatening to use nuclear weapons in order to defend the territorial sovereignty of Russia, and I certainly count my own mind and faculty of attention among the captives. Some of you might be tired of this subject by now, which now enters its fourth week as my exclusive focus in this space. I expect I’ll get back to regular programming soon, as, God willing, the font size of the New York Times’ front-page headlines begins at long last to shrink back to something closer to normal. You might be particularly tired of hearing from me on the subject, as plainly what you are seeing here is not expert analysis, such as you might expect from, say, Timothy Snyder or Anne Applebaum, but rather the essayistic laying bare of unstable convictions, fleeting worries, and divinations from long-ago memories of formative experiences in Russia.

So I begin today with a two-part warning. First, please don’t take what I have to say as if it were coming from a self-styled expert. Read me, but don’t “listen to me”. Second, don’t listen to the experts either. For the most part, they are only resorting to old-fashioned Kremlinology, which is itself a variety of divination, as for example when they try to read secret meanings from the expression on Defense Minister Shoïgu’s face when Putin says Russia will make use of any defensive measures necessary, “… в том числе и ядерные / including atomic weapons”. The heart is a dark forest, and the face is seldom a true window of it, and if that’s all we’ve got, we might as well just admit our ignorance.

More here.

David Robertson in Stat News:

Herd immunity was always our greatest asset for protecting vulnerable people, but public health failed to use it wisely.

In March 2020, not long after Covid-19 was declared a global public health emergency, prominent experts predicted that the pandemic would eventually end via herd immunity. Infectious disease epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who advised President Biden, opined in the Washington Post that even without a vaccine, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, would eventually “burn itself out as the spread of infection comes to confer a form of herd immunity.” The best strategy, he reasoned, was to “gradually build up immunity” by letting “those at low risk for serious disease continue to work” while higher-risk people sheltered and scientists developed treatments and, hopefully, vaccines.

Experts in the United Kingdom also spoke early on of herd immunity acquired through infection as a protective force that would ultimately end the epidemic.

More here.

Benjamin Cooper in The Common Reader:

War is a not a word that communicates much. It wants to, but quickly the gruff sound deteriorates into an abstraction and nothing more. War. War. Like love, truth, or beauty, we say the word but cannot see it. The gut does not believe. To title a book War as Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished historian, has done, is to attempt to assert control over the very term itself. As a result, even before the prose begins, War: How Conflict Shaped Us promises to be a revelation: here, war will be understood at last. Such authoritativeness is a noble pursuit, and MacMillan joins others in recent years such as Sebastian Junger and Jeremy Black in a frantic effort to articulate a unified field theory of war before it is too late.¹ “We face the prospect of the end of humanity itself,” MacMillan concludes, if we fail to demystify war in our current moment. (289) That is the project, and given the book’s critical and popular praise from notable figures such as war journalist Dexter Filkins, former National Security Director H.R. McMaster, and former Secretary of State George Schultz, readers might feel it has done its work. I am not so sure, which is not a criticism of MacMillan’s book so much as it is a lament about the relentless inscrutability of war both as an object of academic study and as a lived experience that resists expression.

More here.

Angel Adams Parham in The Hedgehog Review:

They were in lines extending as far as the eye could see, stretching across the horizon and toward the Promised Land. Dutifully, though with growing impatience and anxiety, they were waiting their turn to enter the fabled American Dreamland, where all who worked hard would be assured well-paid jobs and comfortable homes where well-adjusted children would flourish, and smile their winning smiles.

Or such is the foundation of what sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls the “deep story” in her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a journey into the heart of white working-class America. Doing much of her research in a rural Louisiana parish, where refineries and petrochemical plants provide plenty of jobs but befoul the air and water of this once-beautiful bayou country, Hochschild sought to understand the anger, frustration, and fear of its residents, particularly during the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. She describes the “deep story” as “the story feelings tell.”¹ Such stories emphasize emotions over facts, helping us to make sense of the world and our place in it. But they do much more than simply furnish our imaginations. They shape our politics.

More here.

The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
in waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly to top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.

by  Archibald MacLeish