Rebecca Brenner Graham in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Although existentialist philosophers rarely labeled themselves as such or agreed on a definition of what they were doing, existentialism is a coherent and sound philosophy. It begins with the claim that “existence precedes essence,” meaning that people enter the world (they exist) before they can be said to have a fixed definition (or essence). They are free to create their own essence, and with this freedom comes responsibility. The contrast between how strange it is to exist and the reality that we are here is called “absurdity.” From absurdity, nihilists would avow that life is meaningless, and thus do whatever they want. Existentialists, however, typically reject nihilism and embrace authenticity. For Martin Heidegger, authenticity was related to our “being toward death.” For Friedrich Nietzsche, the “eternal return of the same” counsels us to live as if our life will repeat itself eternally.

Some French existentialists, however, posited more nuanced ideas of authenticity that engaged with other people, systems of oppression, and the world. Skye C. Cleary’s How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment explores Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas of existential authenticity and applies them to life today.

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Adrian Cho in Science:

A decade ago, particle physicists thrilled the world. On 4 July 2012, 6000 researchers working with the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key to their abstruse explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass. The discovery fulfilled a 45-year-old prediction, completed a theory called the standard model, and thrust physicists into the spotlight.

Then came a long hangover. Before the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped LHC started to take data in 2010, physicists fretted that it might produce the Higgs and nothing else, leaving no clue to what lies beyond the standard model. So far, that nightmare scenario is coming true. “It’s a bit disappointing,” allows Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “I thought we would discover supersymmetry,” the leading extension of the standard model.

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Tilly Lawless in Prospect:

In my nine years of doing this work I have seen an increasing demonisation of the clients of sex workers, even while I’ve seen increasing support for sex workers themselves. Much of the discussion around sex-worker rights focuses on the workers, how often marginalised people enter the industry out of financial necessity, and how criminalising that only further marginalises them, by forcing them into more dangerous scenarios and punishing them for their need. All this is of course of pre-eminent importance. And I think that the rights of sex workers shouldn’t rely on the value or respectability of the work itself—it is simply a human rights and labour rights issue. Sex workers should be able to speak about exploitation and abuse in the industry without that being used against us to argue for the eradication of the industry itself—in the same way migrant workers are speaking about working conditions on Australian farms without it leading to a cry to shut down agriculture.

However, I think the blanket demonising of clients does a disservice to both those who pay for sex and those who sell it, for a few reasons.

More here.

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel in Science:

They span three continents, but a trio of researchers who’ve never met share a singular focus made vital by the still-raging pandemic: deciphering the causes of Long Covid and figuring out how to treat it.

Almost 2 years ago in Italy, pediatric infectious disease doctor Danilo Buonsenso, who works at Gemelli University Hospital, started to see children who, months after mild infections with SARS-CoV-2, were still short of breath and had crushing fatigue and other symptoms. He now suspects that, in some of them, the cells and tissues that control blood flow are damaged and the blood’s tendency to clot is amplified. Minute blood clots, leftover from the viral assault or fueled by its aftermath, might be gumming up the body’s circulation, to disastrous effect from the brain to joints. “In some patients we have specific areas where no blood flow comes in” or the flow is reduced, Buonsenso says. Is that driving their lingering symptoms? “I can’t say this is the truth, of course. But this makes sense.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, microbiologist Amy Proal can’t stop thinking about a second leading Long Covid theory: that the coronavirus keeps hurting people by stubbornly enduring in the body, even after acute infection passes. Studies have shown “the virus is capable of persistence in a wide range of body sites,” especially nerves and other tissues, says Proal, who works at the PolyBio Research Foundation, a nonprofit in Washington state. She recently caught COVID-19 for the third time.

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Louis Menand in The New Yorker:

On March 9, 1945, an armada of more than three hundred B-29s flew fifteen hundred miles across the Pacific to attack Tokyo from the air. The planes carried incendiary bombs to be dropped at low altitudes. Beginning shortly after midnight, sixteen hundred and sixty-five tons of bombs fell on the city.

Most of the buildings in Tokyo were constructed of wood, paper, and bamboo, and parts of the city were incinerated in a matter of hours. The planes targeted workers’ homes in the downtown area, with the goal of crippling Japan’s arms industry. It is estimated that a million people were left homeless and that as many as a hundred thousand were killed—more than had died in the notorious firebombing of Dresden, a month earlier, and more than would die in Nagasaki, five months later. Crewmen in the last planes in the formation said that they could smell burning flesh as they flew over Tokyo at five thousand feet. That night, Yoko Ono was in bed with a fever. While her mother and her little brother, Keisuke, spent the night in a bomb shelter under the garden of their house, she stayed in her room. She could see the city burning from her window. She had just turned twelve and had led a protected and privileged life. She was too innocent to be frightened.

The Ono family was wealthy. They had some thirty servants, and they lived in the Azabu district, near the Imperial Palace, away from the bombing. The fires did not reach them. But Ono’s mother, worried that there would be more attacks (there were), decided to evacuate to a farming village well outside the city. In the countryside, the family found itself in a situation faced by many Japanese: they were desperate for food. The children traded their possessions to get something to eat, and sometimes they went hungry. Ono later said that she and Keisuke would lie on their backs looking at the sky through an opening in the roof of the house where they lived. She would ask him what kind of dinner he wanted, and then tell him to imagine it in his mind. This seemed to make him happier. She later called it “maybe my first piece of art.”

More here.

Paterson: Early Winter, ‘78

—for Ed Smith

I will see you once again
on the long silver train
people call “night”.

The sizzling green neon
of Van Houten Ave. pizzeria
will smooth the wrinkles
from your corduroy coat

& it’ll be what we expected
of that time & of that place
&, so, to let it all slide into
the crisp russet Meadowlands.

Sun will rise again on the good friends
we once had, now dreaming on the sly
as we cash in the empties from our karma
& become an animation of two guys
walking through the paradise
that New Jersey once was.

by Joel Lewis
from The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow
No. 3, 2010

Malcolm Harris at The Nation:

Stewart Brand is not a scientist. He’s not an artist, an engineer, or a programmer. Nor is he much of a writer or editor, though as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, that’s what he’s best known for. Brand, 83, is a huckster—one of the great hucksters in a time and place full of them. Over the course of his long life, Brand’s salesmanship has been so outstanding that scholars of the American 20th century have secured his place as a historical figure, picking out the blond son of Stanford from among his peers and seating him with inventors, activists, and politicians at the table of men to be remembered. But remembered for what, exactly?

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand is the first full biographical consideration of a man who has already provided useful fodder for writers seeking to characterize the various social and intellectual movements that came out of California in the final third of the 20th century.

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Chloe Wyma at Artforum:

PAINTED IN THE 1950S on the walls of her sons’ bedroom and later collected in a children’s book called The Milk of Dreams, Leonora Carrington’s wicked fairy tales inspired the title and tenor of the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale. Filled with disobedient children, deviant friendships, orphaned monsters, evil crones, sentient meat, hungry furniture, misplaced heads, scatological warfare, and pharmacological magic, Carrington’s stories struck curator Cecilia Alemani for their construction of what she describes as “a world free of hierarchies, where everyone can become something else.” Alemani endeavored to create something like this world in her beautiful and perturbing exhibition, and to a great degree she has succeeded.

In the rotunda entrance to the Arsenale, Golden Lion winner Simone Leigh’s sightless Brick House, 2019, part female figure, part architectural envelope, is encircled by the gorgonizing black-and-white collagraphs of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón.

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Leslie McFarlane in Crime Reads:

This example of calmness in the face of disaster didn’t really help. It was all very well for Dave Fearless to meet catastrophe with aplomb. He could count on Bob Vilett and Captain Broadbeam to haul him to the surface, while Pat Stoodles lent encouragement by bellowing “Heave-ho, bejabers!” I couldn’t count on anyone—except, perhaps, Edward Stratemeyer.

It turned out that I could count on Edward Stratemeyer. Before the week was out a long envelope brought another outline, accompanied by a letter explaining his “other plans.” He had observed, Stratemeyer wrote, that detective stories had become very popular in the world of adult fiction. He instanced the works of S.S. Van Dine, which were selling in prodigious numbers as I was well aware. S.S. Van Dine was neither an ocean liner nor a living man but the pseudonym of Willard Hungtington Wright, a literary craftsman who wrote sophisticated stories for Mencken’s Smart Set.

It had recently occurred to him, Stratemeyer continued, that the growing boys of America might welcome similar fare.

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Matthew M. Kavanagh in Nature:

The COVID-19 pandemic was foreseen. Experts everywhere had long predicted a global viral outbreak and called for action to prevent it. World leaders, on the whole, did little. Now, with COVID-19 still raging, Bill Gates has produced a manifesto on what must be done to prevent the next pandemic. Written in accessible prose that even a busy world leader could not fail to grasp, the global-health philanthropist offers some life-saving ideas that are ambitious and achievable — if political leaders act.

“Learn from COVID” is the opening gambit. One of the book’s most important insights is how often the world’s wealthiest countries got things wrong that less well-resourced countries and communities got right. Vietnam ran outbreak simulations — something that most of Europe never did. Gates shares the example of a Vietnamese simulation that sent patient-actors into emergency rooms in the northeast of the country to test whether fictionalized cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome would be detected and correctly diagnosed. This exercise revealed gaps in sharing information about potential outbreaks, and the authorities fixed them.

More here.

Joshua Sooter at Public Books:

A student once asked—after a classroom discussion of how 19th-century westward expansion connected to the ongoing injustices of American military bases in the Pacific—what she was supposed to do with this knowledge. Her question was as genuine as it was perceptive. It also felt like I had, again, failed.

As a historian and an educator of college students, my experience teaching about US imperialism is one of disappointment. I have largely failed to engender in my students a deep engagement with America’s imperial past and present. I believe in the importance of education and history. Yet, what the past years have shown me is that the classroom alone is insufficient in teaching the social and psychological realities of US imperialism.

When I ask students to define what an empire is, they typically picture Rome or the British Empire, not the United States. Imperialism, expansion, and colonialism have been integral to every period of America’s existence, including the present. Much of my work as a historian and an educator focuses on conveying and exploring this fact. Every year, however, I witness students struggling to internalize it.

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Kent Russell at Harper’s Magazine:

But my interest, I clarified, while probably morbid, is not merely personal. It stems from a keenly felt, soul-sucking disillusionment. By accident of birth I am a modern, which means I will never know a charmed world. A world of consecrated hosts and faerie-haunted forests, where the line between individual agency and impersonal force is blurred at best. Gone is the idea of a porous human self, vulnerable to immaterial forces beyond his control. Significance has retreated from the outer world into our respective skulls, where, over time, it has stiffened, bloated, and finally decomposed into nothing, into dust.

This decay of faith—in institutions, in other people—is practically audible to me. I exist within a purely immanent culture in which the value of human life has been reduced to the parameters of the marketplace, where little is sacred and even less is profane. And I cannot take this shit much longer, I said.

more here.

Hilary Davies at Literary Review:

Who are we? Where do we come from? Who or what were the people, the land, the gods who made us? These questions have perplexed and haunted us ever since human beings evolved.

One of the heartlands of our understanding of Upper Palaeolithic man is the southwest of France – more precisely, the courses of the Vézère, Dordogne, Lot and Aveyron and their tributaries. There are several reasons for the density of ancient sites in this region: the plentiful supply of water, which attracted both humans and game animals between thirty thousand and ten thousand years ago; the high plains through which these rivers run, which at that time formed steppe, providing grassland for the untold numbers of reindeer and other migratory animals that moved across them seasonally; and the limestone bedrock through which over millennia the waters have carved enormous and complex underground cave systems. I

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Hannah Fish in The Christian Science Monitor:

On Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, rests an extraordinary monument that has puzzled and inspired people for millennia: the circular set of rocks known as Stonehenge. The iconic scene, so precisely designed and constructed, provokes a litany of questions: What motivated the Neolithic people to create such a thing? Where did the huge, 20-ton stones come from? How was it built?

Archaeologist and journalist Mike Pitts, who has studied the ruins for decades and co-directed excavations at the site, offers readers an in-depth assessment in “How To Build Stonehenge.” While he doesn’t try to answer the first question of why – writing that “imagination is the only limit” to finding a motive – he does break down the second question into several components: how the stones were obtained, how they were moved to the site, how the structure was erected, and how its construction has changed over time. Overall, the book feels geared toward readers who relish granular technicalities of geological analysis. Yet for those who are more interested in the human aspects of Stonehenge’s construction, Pitts’ review of how megaliths have been handled over time still proves noteworthy.

For example, studies have identified the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales, as the place where the smaller ring of rocks known as bluestones were quarried. The bluestones, which weigh an average of 2 tons apiece, were somehow transported to Salisbury Plain, which lies 140 miles from the Preseli Hills. (By comparison, the larger slabs, known as sarsens, weigh 20 tons and are thought to have come from Marlborough Downs, about 20 miles north of Stonehenge.) To begin to understand how the bluestones could have been moved such a distance, Pitts turns to another corner of the globe: the Indian Ocean.

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Sean Collins in Vox:

Juneteenth — a portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth” — became a federal holiday just last year, but Black Americans, particularly Black Texans, have been celebrating it for generations. The first Juneteenth festivities took place in the late 19th century in Texas’s Emancipation Park, and combined political organizing with partying in a manner still seen in today’s get-out-the-vote drives and barbecues and red drinks. Originally, as with today, it was a day to remember enslaved ancestors, to rejoice for those who found liberation from forced labor, and to spend time with friends and loved ones.

Juneteenth observes the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865. On that day, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, a storied Union Army officer, read General Order No. 3 aloud with 2,000 federal troops at his back, forcing Texas enslavers who had refused to free their slaves, as required by law, to finally do so, more than two years late. In granting that freedom, the United States had a major opportunity, too: to ask forgiveness for the ways it had violated its core ideals by enslaving Black Americans, and to seek redemption for that self-mutilation. Instead, the nation’s leaders let the moment pass.

More here.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

In February’s stillness, under fresh snow,
two bright red cardinals leaping
inside a honeysuckle bush.
All day I’ve thought that would make
for a good image in a poem.
Washing the dishes, I thought of cardinals.
Folding the laundry, cardinals.
Bright red cardinals while I drank hot cocoa.
But the poem would want something else.
Something unfortunate to balance it,
to make it honest. A recognition of death
maybe. Or hunger. Poems are hungry things.
It can’t just be dessert, says the adult in me.
It can’t just be joy. But the schools are closed
and despite the cold, the children are sledding.
The sound of boots tamping snow are the hinges
of many doors being opened. The small flames
of cardinals and their good talk in the honeysuckle.

by Keith Leonard
from The Ecotheo Review