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

I have been doing a great deal of publicity these past weeks for my new book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. I have been compelled to train my speaking voice, to craft short-and-sweet sound-bites, and even to worry about such externalities as my physical appearance when I am asked to make promotional videos or to appear on podcasts that transmit not only a trace of my voice, but an animate likeness of my very person, across the world wide web.

I have been saying “yes”, to virtually every podcast and radio invitation I’ve received. Sometimes I find myself doing some rather quick mental work, after clicking the Zoom link, to recall who exactly it is I’m talking to, and what is expected of me. Sometimes there’s a tell-tale hint —an Australian accent, say— that brings me back to the e-mail I received a week or so prior and that reminds me of the host’s general orientation and expectations. Sometimes I fly blind through the whole thing, still uncertain at the end whose show I’ve just graced with my presence.

More here.

John Bistline, Inês Azevedo, Chris Bataille and Steven Davis in the New York Times:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which was released last week and which we co-authored with many colleagues, offers hope for limiting global warming.

But there is no time to waste. And wasted time includes time spent debating issues that divert us from our most important priorities right now.

Unfortunately, debates about distant future decisions and future uncertainties are distracting advocates, policymakers, researchers and the public from their shared, near-term goals. At best, these disputes give observers — especially policymakers and their advisers, who are trying to make tough short-term decisions during a global energy security crisis — a misleading impression that experts disagree about effective steps to decarbonize energy systems. At worst, these disputes can stall progress by delaying policies and incentives that would accelerate clean energy deployment.

More here.

Bill Gates in his blog:

Over the years, I’ve read quite a few books about the brain, most of them written by academic neuroscientists who view it through the lens of sophisticated lab experiments. Recently, I picked up a brain book that’s much more theoretical. It’s called A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, by a tech entrepreneur named Jeff Hawkins.

I got to know Hawkins in the 1990s, when he was one of the pioneers of mobile computing and co-inventor of the PalmPilot. After his tech career, he decided to work with a singular focus on just one problem: making big improvements in machine learning. His platform for doing that is a Silicon Valley–based company called Numenta, which he founded in 2005.

More here.

Mankind is at least 90% slumber. The rest is history.
……………………………………………..—Roshi Bob

The Inferno -excerpt

—Canto 1

Midway upon the journey of our life
….. I found myself within a forest dark,
….. For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say
….. What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
….. Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter it is, death is little more;
….. But of the good to treat, which there I found,
….. Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
….. So full was I of slumber at the moment
….. In which I had abandoned the true way.

Dante Alighieri
from The Inferno
Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003
Translation: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Misha Glenny in The Guardian:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a long-term shift in the tectonic plates of history that even three months ago appeared extremely unlikely. We are only six weeks in but even now, it is clear this one event will have multiple consequences around the world for many years to come.

Books on current affairs and recent history always run the risk of being overtaken by events. The revolutions in eastern Europe upended many papers and books on policy, which were still confidently assuming that the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic or Yugoslavia would still be functioning states well into the millennium. (Even the CIA, as late as spring 1988, was predicting that no great upheaval in eastern Europe was likely in the coming years.) Such developments have consigned many a tome to the charity bookshops prematurely.

More here.

Lina Zeldovich in Nautilus:

In 2017, Karen Kostroff, a renowned oncology surgeon at Northwell Health in the New York Metropolitan area added a new talking point to her standard conversation with breast cancer patients facing tumor removal surgery. These conversations are never easy, because a cancer diagnosis is devastating news. But the new topic seemed to give her patients a sense of purpose, a feeling that their medical misfortune had the potential to do something good for other people. Kostroff was asking her patients if they would donate their tumors to science. Researchers were studying the malignant cells, hoping one day to disarm them and stop them from spreading. “You could see that there was a twinkle in their eye,” Kostroff says. “It gives them hope that even if the currently available treatments may not always cure them, this may help them or others in the future, maybe their children or relatives.”

Most cancer patients don’t die from their so-called primary tumor—the spot where it first develops. Once detected, surgeons cut it out or administer therapies to kill it—such as chemotherapy, radiation, or immunotherapy. But cancer cells have an uncanny ability to travel. They slip through blood vessels’ walls and catch a ride in the bloodstream to new places. Breast cancer’s favorite destinations are the liver, lungs, bones, and brain, Kostroff says. Once there, they begin multiplying and become nearly impossible to extinguish.

More here.

Adam Tooze over at Chartbook:

War and history are intertwined. Entire conceptions of history are defined by what status one accords to war in one’s theory of change. War is certainly not the only way to punctuate history, but it is clearly one of the pacemakers. Battles and campaigns are not the only events that define winners and losers, but they do matter. In its heyday war was the great engine of history.

One of humanity’s recurring hopes has been that through history we might escape war. Since World War II Western Europe in particular has been invested in the idea of consigning war to the past. That is a hope that is based not just on a humanitarian impulse, but also on the sense that the basic questions of international politics were resolved and that for the settlement of whatever remained, the modern instruments of war – most notably nuclear weapons – were likely counterproductive. The era of military history was thus consigned to an earlier developmental phase.

If it was once sensible to think of war as the extension of policy by other means, historical development had closed that chapter. Both the main questions of policy and the repertoire of sensible policy tools have changed. With the passing of that epoch, war belonged to the past. Skepticism about war was not, first and foremost, a matter of moral values, it was a matter of realism, of understanding what actually made the modern world tick.

More here.

Alex Kane in Jewish Currents:

IN LATE 2019, Jason Isaac, an energy policy staffer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, began hearing of a new threat to fossil fuel companies. Pressure from climate activists had led some banks, pension funds, and universities to announce that they were divesting from oil, gas, and coal. As a result, executives of companies in Texas told Isaac that they were struggling to access capital as some investors backed away from their sector out of what Isaac—whose think tank program advocates for the continued use of fossil fuels and receives some of its funding from energy companies—called a desire to “appease a woke ideological political base.”

But Isaac had an idea. In late 2016, as a Republican member of the Texas state legislature, he co-authored legislation that banned the state from doing business with companies or individual contractors who withheld their investments or services from the State of Israel. The legislation, later signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, is meant to combat the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, which calls for boycotts of Israeli products, divestment from corporations that do business in Israel, and sanctions on the state.

Isaac realized he could apply a similar logic to those who might seek to hobble the energy industry.

More here.

Daniel J Herman in Aeon:

In her recent book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020) – currently, Amazon’s top seller in the political history category – the historian Heather Cox Richardson expands and modifies Brown’s observation, arguing that Goldwater’s ‘Movement Conservatism’ – meaning vehement opposition to civil rights bills, communism, labour unions and social spending – solidified a neo-Confederate alliance between West and South that permanently transformed the Republican Party.

In Richardson’s telling, the Reagan/Goldwater cowboy persona evolved out of literary myths manufactured in the late 19th century specifically to counter Reconstruction era racial reforms, myths that 20th-century reactionaries used in their battle against civil rights. The anti-civil rights, anti-government alliance between South and West that began in the late 19th century, she argues, continued with early 20th-century opposition to anti-lynching bills before spawning Movement Conservatism in the 1960s.

What I’d like to offer here is a counter-history. To the degree that progressives formed successful constituencies in the 20th century – in economic, gender, racial and even foreign policy matters – the West was key.

More here.

Over at Phenomenal World, Lily Hu interviews Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on climate crisis, reparations, and the use of history:

LILY HU: …My first question is: do you see your lack of focus on questions that have been deemed important in philosophy as a case of refusing that “distraction” referenced by Morrison? How do you see your work on reparations as a philosopher, walking the line between contributing to an existing philosophical discourse on reparations but also setting it on a fresh course?

OLÚFẸ́MI TÁÍWÒ:  I’m less concerned about which questions to focus on, even though in principle I’m willing to make a point about the priority of different kinds of questions. For example, I engage with discussions in the philosophical literature about the so-called non-identity problem, which calls into question whether it makes sense to make reparations to the present-day victims of great historic injustices, who, it is argued, owe their existence to those unjust institutions. The non-identity problem asks: if so many populations would not themselves exist had it not been for these processes of great injustice, can we really say they’ve been made “worse-off” by them? It’s a jarring question, but it has been taken as a substantial hurdle in philosophical debate about reparations and climate justice. I also think there’s a distributional factor around whose questions we take up.

More here.

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian:

As its title somewhat suggests, the artist Celia Paul’s second book takes the form of a series of letters to Gwen John, whose life, she believes, was “stamped with a similar pattern” to her own, and a postcard of whose painting The Convalescent she keeps in her studio (just one look at it, she says, and her breathing becomes easier). But this description is also – happily, I think – misleading. As anyone who has ever written a love letter will know, such notes inevitably say more about correspondent than recipient. If love is, as Paul suggests, the highest form of attention, it’s also a mirror: a means, marvellous and occasionally highly dangerous, of seeing ourselves anew.

I don’t mean at all to suggest that Paul is in love with John. But these are intimate letters, their author seemingly having taken to heart Colette’s writing advice (look at what gives you pleasure, but look longest at what gives you pain), and it’s this that enables me to forgive, if not quite to overlook, the rather fey idea of a one-sided conversation with a woman who died in 1939.

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

“Private Notebooks: 1914-1916” is a strange and intriguing record — illuminating when it comes to Wittgenstein’s preoccupations, his sexual anguish, his continuous struggles with his “work” in philosophy, along with his intermittent comments about his “job” in the military. (Like other writings by Wittgenstein that have been published posthumously, “Private Notebooks” is a bilingual edition, with German and English printed on facing pages.) Perloff also points out that unlike so many other war diaries, Wittgenstein’s includes very little about the larger stakes of the war itself. One exception is an entry that reads like a startlingly cheerful declaration that his own side was doomed: “The English — the best race in the world — cannot lose! We, however, can lose & will lose, if not this year, then the next!”

Nor did Wittgenstein share the average war memoirist’s sentimentality for his fellow soldiers. In fact, he seemed to despise them, only to clarify that what he felt wasn’t quite hatred but “disgust.”

more here.

Tony McKenna in Counterpunch:

It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

– James Baldwin

There are certain modern myths which gain credence and currency because they are rendered in a ‘scientific’ tone and language.  One such myth is that of the photographic memory.   As the name suggests, this refers to a person who can recall a past scene with all the accuracy of a photographic image.  Such memories neither fade nor fail and their crystalline clarity means they can be examined at will in the same way one might upload a digital image that has lost none of is clarity or lustre even if viewed many years after.

The idea of the human mind as operating akin to a machine, as a recording device with a given amount of storage space, is a belief which only comes into its own in the 19^th century, at the time of the industrial revolution when those ‘dark satanic mills’ were springing up in and around the great cities; such a doctrine takes shape in a society where technological production has been ratcheted up to its zenith, its product effectively measured and quantified according to the relentless rhythms of the conveyer belt, and where human labour itself has been inexorably fused with the pistons and levers of the factory monolith.

More here.

Sarah Kuta in Smithsonian:

A work of art has the power to transport its viewer to another time and place. Now, the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain, is taking that idea one step further with a new exhibition that incorporates smell to enhance the experience of a 17th-century painting. Per a statement from the museum, “The Essence of a Painting: An Olfactory Exhibition” focuses exclusively on The Sense of Smell, a work created by Belgian artists Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens between 1617 and 1618. The show, on view through July 3, invites visitors to not only look at the oil painting but also smell ten scents inspired by it.

For the show, Alejandro Vergara, the museum’s chief curator of Flemish and Northern European paintings, partnered with Gregorio Sola, a senior perfumer at Barcelona-based fashion and fragrance company Puig and an academic at the Academia del Perfume in Madrid. Sola developed new fragrances based on elements of the painting, which depicts Venus and Cupid surrounded by exotic flowers, birds, animals, and objects related to perfume (such as distillation vessels and scented gloves). The scent “Fig Tree,” for example, brings the refreshing, vegetal scent of the fruit tree in the painting to life, while “Allegory”—which combines rose, jasmine and carnation—embodies the bouquet of flowers Venus is smelling.

More here.

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)