Iman Ghosh in Nautilus:

Our planet supports approximately 8.7 million species, of which over a quarter live in water. But humans can have a hard time comprehending numbers this big, so it can be difficult to really appreciate the breadth of this incredible diversity of life on Earth. To fully grasp this scale, we draw from research from “The biomass distribution on Earth,” by Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo to break down the total composition of the living world, in terms of its biomass, and where we fit into this picture.

Why Carbon?

A “carbon-based life form” might sound like something out of science fiction, but that’s what we and all other living things are. Carbon is used in complex molecules and compounds—making it an essential part of our biology. That’s why biomass, or the mass of organisms, is typically measured in terms of carbon makeup. In our visualization, one cube represents 1 million metric tons of carbon, and every thousand of these cubes is equal to 1 Gigaton (Gt C). Here’s how the numbers stack up in terms of biomass of life on Earth:

Plants make up the overwhelming majority of biomass on Earth. There are 320,000 species of plants, and their vital photosynthetic processes keep entire ecosystems from falling apart. Fungi is the third most abundant type of life—and although 148,000 species of fungi have been identified by scientists, it’s estimated there may be millions more.

More here.

Rosanna Warren at Salmagundi:

Robert Lowell is, for me, the inescapable elder poet, and Day by Day is the inescapable book. It is where you go if you want to see where American poetry last set into major balance an art fully aware of its traditions and an experimental openness to unliterary raw material. Leaving behind the ruck and rubble of Notebook and History, it steps beyond the Cyclopean masonry blocks of the unrhymed sonnets of The Dolphin and ventures into irregular but adamantine shapes of feeling and thought. The smashed sonnets may suggest the smashed life or lives the book loosely recounts: aging friends, dead friends, dead parents, are summoned; a marriage is chronicled in its dilapidations; mental breakdown sends the suffering speaker once again to a hospital. From these wreckages and from the wreck of stricter verse form, Lowell has saved the aphoristic essentials, and broken through to poetic renewal in the very recognition of failure. Sacrifice, truly executed, earns recompense, and these poems do.

more here.

Devika Girish at The Current:

A pair of kohl-lined eyes bores through the screen in the first few moments of Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960), as the blank visage of a clay idol of Goddess Durga—held in close-up behind the opening credits—acquires bold, painted features. In Hindu myth, Durga and her wrathful avatar, Kali, are both forms of Devi, the all-powerful Mother Goddess. When the camera pulls away from the idol to reveal a village celebration of Durga Puja, the melodic strings of the score giving way to the diegetic din of bells and fireworks, it’s as if the legend of the Mother Goddess has been reified: the world has come into boisterous being around her.

The scene is both an anomaly in Ray’s work, with its gothic shadings, and a kind of signature shot. Often in the Bengali auteur’s lyrical, literary films, a set of curious eyes leads us into a world, and into a nascent point of view. Think of our introduction to Apu in Pather Panchali (1955), Ray’s triumphant debut feature and the first entry in The Apu Trilogy: Apu’s sister, Durga, pries one of his eyes open through a hole in his blanket to wake him up for school.

more here.

“It’s here, it’s gone. That’s it.”
…………..—Yacob Stručnost

Letter to my Almost Former House

It’s true, I’m getting ready to leave you.
You’re big and cold and expensive, and like any old lover,

I’ve begun to badmouth you to friends.
Once you were the center of my expanded life,

full-skirted host to my largesse. Display case
for dead aunt breakfronts and thrift store taste.

A cool backyard of Japanese maple and pine,
four types of hydrangea, and family close by. Come in, come in—

I’d coo to neighbors, meter readers, college friends
out from the city. Sorry it’s a mess, though I’d swept

through your rooms like a hurricane. Twice I held
Thanksgiving here, that deadly sin of pride,

and thirty chairs etched scars on your floors.
Now the dining room sits empty. The staircase quiet.

The gaudy bills pile up and the flooding
holds us under. Soon someone else will sit out back

on jasmine evenings, share a cigarette and two fingers
of good whiskey while the kids fall asleep, compare

your century-old body to a big bucket of cream.

by Theresa Burns
from Plume Magazine

Sam Thorne at Frieze:

Paul Auster, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf – many novelists who have written about fictional artists have also produced criticism. Indeed, one of the great novels of the 20th century, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, began life as a work of criticism, a series of essays arguing against the author Sainte-Beuve. This voluminously chatty work is, over the course of its 1.5 million words, peppered with the names of more than 100 real-life artists – from Giotto and Corot, to Bellini and Léon Bakst. By my rough estimate, Vermeer and Whistler are the most frequently referred to, though much dinner party gossip is given over to Édouard Manet’s 1863 painting Olympia (‘Nowadays nobody is in the least surprised by it. It looks just like an Ingres!’ exclaims a duchess). Amidst the masters mingle Proust’s contemporaries – little-known or forgotten academicians, as well as critics and collectors – above whom towers just one fictional artist: Elstir, a famed painter whose seascapes, according to the narrator Marcel, ‘break up that medley of impressions which we call vision’. Many have tried to identify the source of Carquethuit Harbour, which is said to be Elstir’s greatest painting: Manet’s Le Port de Bordeaux (1871) is often mentioned, along with Vuillard and Hokusai, while Michel Butor has pointed out that ‘Elstir’ is a Gallicized anagram of ‘Whistler’.

more here.

Maddie Crum at the LARB:

LUCILLE CLIFTON’S Generations, her only work of nonfiction amid a vast body of poetry, was published in 1976, before memoir ballooned into a commodified genre, including ghostwritten celebrity tell-alls.

As the form took shape in America, it borrowed from existing literary genres. In Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson highlight several, including the confessional, a poetic style in which personal experiences and traumas, often taboo, are revealed to challenge existing power structures, and the bildungsroman, the rags-to-riches arc of social assimilation and public achievement.

In 1845, Frederick Douglass published his account of slavery, using the first-person “I” to reposition himself as the narrator of his own oppression; a decade later, in 1855, P. T. Barnum published a memoir in the vein of today’s self-help narratives, The Life and Adventures of P. J. Barnum: Clerk, Merchant, Editor, and Showman with His Rules for Business and Making a Fortune, using the first-person “I” to profess his authority.

more here.

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

Just minutes after St. Nicholas was born, on December 6, he stood up on his own two feet in the basin where the midwives washed him, and completed the task himself. Then the babe grabbed a knife from the table and severed his own umbilical cord. Through the rest of his infancy he refused to nurse more than twice a week, and only ever on Wednesdays and Fridays. As Nicholas grew older he developed a sharp hatred of sin, and wept whenever he witnessed it. Having inherited a great wealth from his parents, he decided to fight sin through what you might today call “effective altruism”. When he overheard his neighbor announcing a plan to sell his two daughters into prostitution in order to lighten his debts, Nicholas contrived to throw a sack of gold coins through the neighbor’s window in the middle of the night (the sled and reindeer, we may imagine, are later accretions upon the legend). After a life of such good works, when he died in 313 AD, oil poured from his head, and water from his feet, and continued to pour for some centuries after that from the site of his burial, when such things as this still occurred.

More here.

Emily Cataneo in Undark:

Consciousness is such a slippery and ephemeral concept that it doesn’t even have its own word in many Romance languages, but nevertheless it’s a hot topic these days. “Feeling & Knowing” is the result of Damasio’s editor’s request to weigh in on the subject by writing a very short, very focused book. Over 200 pages, Damasio ponders profound questions: How did we get here? How did we develop minds with mental maps, a constant stream of images, and memories — mechanisms that exist symbiotically with the feelings and sensations in our bodies that we then, crucially, relate back to ourselves and associate with a sense of personhood?

Damasio argues that the answers are not simple (not so simple as an algorithm, anyway) but it’s also not as complex as some theorists and scientists believe.

More here.

Sayari Debnath in Scroll.in:

Many readers around the world are still just discovering Abdulrazak Gurnah. After his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 – which almost no one saw coming – the 72-year-old Zanzibar-born author is finally in the limelight that was perhaps due to him for a few decades now.

Born in 1948, Gurnah spent his childhood in the islands of Zanzibar before escaping to England in the 1960s. This was shortly after the island gained independence from British colonial rule in December 1963 and went through a revolution. However, the post-revolution regime ushered in the oppression and persecution of citizens of Arab origin.

At the height of the civil unrest, massacres became a common occurrence on the island. Gurnah belonged to a persecuted minority ethnic group and, after finishing school, was forced to leave his family and flee the country.

More here.

Kit Fan in The Guardian:

What happens when words spoken on Capitol Hill make us shiver? Amanda Gorman’s luminous poem The Hill We Climb was addressed to Joe Biden and “the world”. Inaugural poems are a fiendishly difficult genre, attempted only six times since JF Kennedy’s ceremony. However, such “occasional” poems play an important cultural role, especially in our time when no public rhetoric and few common values can be taken for granted, as the poet addresses and repairs the damaged foundations of the state itself.

A soaring sense of history and solidarity pervades Gorman’s debut collection. Part elegy, part documentary record, and part witness statement, Call Us What We Carry is first and foremost “a letter to the world”, a phrase she borrows from Emily Dickinson. Like Dickinson’s, Gorman’s poetry puts immense pressure on our present moment, committing itself to an archaeology of our past and conservation of our future. It urges us to revisit the chequered history of intersectional injustices and re-evaluate our fragile species, systems and planet, engulfed by the pandemic, personal grief and public grievances.

“What happened to us”, Gorman writes, “Happened through us.” One of the most haunting things about her book is its retreat from the first-person singular. “I” exists sparingly, peripherally. By contrast, the all-inclusive trio “we”, “us” and “our” occur more than 1,500 times in her shape-shifting poems, a rare feat in the age of overwhelming selfhood. Gorman’s affirmative choric we echoes Martin Luther King’s memorial dream and John Lennon’s utopian lyricism, but her music also draws on the new dimension opened up by trailblazing poets such as Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Carson and Tracy K Smith. She challenges Walt Whitman’s “I am large. I contain multitudes.” In her book, it is we who contain multitudes, and a shared vision, grief and responsibility, as she affirms that “This book is awake. / This book is a wake. / For what is a record but a reckoning?”

More here.

Jenna Daroczy in CSIROscope:

Our science delivers a lot of exciting breakthroughs to make life better today. But we’re also busy working behind-the-scenes on science that takes a bit longer to develop. Science that will significantly change what the future looks like. We call these areas of cutting-edge research our Future Science Platforms (FSPs). This is because they will be the foundations of tomorrow’s breakthroughs. We kicked off five new FSPs during 2021. We call these areas of cutting-edge research our Future Science Platforms (FSPs). This is because they will be the foundations of tomorrow’s breakthroughs. We kicked off five new FSPs during 2021.

…Dr Alan Richardson is the Chief Research Scientist in our Microbiomes for One System Health program. This team will develop our capabilities across agriculture, land-use and human health. “Microorganisms hold huge potential because they are integral in the makeup of all plants and animals. And they are the key drivers of biological and environmental processes,” Alan said. “Our approach will reflect the interconnectivity of microbiomes across systems. It will identify new opportunities to manage the environment, transform food production, waste management, and plant, animal and human health.”

More here.

Teaching Poetry In A Men’s High Security Prison

I was searched at every edge. I wanted everyone, including me, to be innocent. One inmate squeezed my hand like a letter he’d been hoping for. In the workshop, he read his poem. I applauded. He hugged me. He smelt of stale soap. Leaning in, his stubble sandpapered my softer jaw. He tells me what he did.

He was drunk the night he blacked out, opened his eyes in the kitchen, his wife who wanted divorce, on the floor, dead. I see his wedding ring. I wish I knew her name so I could plant it here.

The next week, the poetry showcase is almost cancelled which causes the inmates to riot. The inmates won. I arrived at the prison for the last time. Flowers placed on all the tables. An inmate read, held himself like his mother’s favorite plant pot. After his poem, everyone applauded, even the guards. The tattooed fists of all those muscular men reached for flowers.

Thrown at men’s feet,
Anaconda red tulips,
Jewels of blood.

by Raymond Antrobus
from Split This Rock Magazine

Rachel Monroe at The Believer:

One year earlier, in the first throes of my renewed interest in the Manson Family, I had taken the Helter Skelter bus tour operated by Dearly Departed, an outfit specializing in Los Angeles death and murder sites. It sells out nearly every weekend, which is surprising given that there’s actually not much to see anymore. Scott Michaels, Dearly Departed’s founder and main guide, set the tone with a custom soundtrack of hits from 1969 (“In the Year 2525,” “Hair”), cozy oldies made newly spooky by our proximity to death. He also included extensive multimedia add-ons, such as cleavage-heavy clips from Sharon Tate’s early films and Jay Sebring’s cameo on the old bang-pow Batman TV show. Going on the tour is a little like taking a road trip through the parking lots and strip malls of central Los Angeles, accompanied by a group of strangers wearing various skull accessories. Many of the sites aren’t visible or no longer exist. The former Tate-Polanski house on Cielo Drive has been demolished; the site of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca’s murders in Los Feliz is mostly hidden by a hedge.

more here.

Seamus Perry at Literary Review:

Davidson is evidently a great wanderer and his book, largely an account of his nocturnal wanderings and the thoughts inspired by them, is itself an engagingly wandering affair. It is a work of great charm, moving from text to text and painting to painting in a disarmingly associative way: the connective tissue of the work is a network of phrases such as ‘My mind circles back…’, ‘I think of other lights which shine in more than one dimension…’, ‘I am reminded of an odd fragment of narrative…’ and ‘My thoughts moved to a far comparison…’. We begin and end accompanying the author through the crepuscular autumnal fog beside the Thames in Oxford, and in between we follow him through the sighing willows of Ghent, the frozen mid-afternoon darkness of Stockholm, the scruffy urban romance of central London, the smart neoclassical streets of Edinburgh’s New Town, the autumnal fields of Norfolk and the snows of Princeton. And as we make our way, Davidson tells us what emerges from his extraordinarily well-stocked mind.

more here.

Maureen Tkacik in The American Prospect:

Boeing’s self-hijacking plane took its first 189 lives on October 29, 2018, just over two months after it had been delivered to the Jakarta Airport terminal of Indonesia’s reigning discount carrier Lion Air. Fishermen described the fuselage plunging nose-first, directly perpendicular to the Java Sea, at speeds many times that of Komarov’s four-and-a-half mile descent from the half-baked Soyuz 1, with its malfunctioning parachutes. A 48-year-old diver dispatched to plumb the deep sea floor for body parts and the elusive cockpit voice recorder became the 190th fatality. As with the Soyuz, in which the famous cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was said to have detailed 200 outstanding manufacturing defects in a memo to superiors, the 737 MAX had been the subject of numerous ignored whistleblower reports, tormented confessions, and abrupt career changes; the general manager of the plane’s final assembly line outside Seattle had resigned in despair the week Lion Air took delivery.

But three years later, nothing has surfaced to suggest that any senior official at Boeing took so much as a passing glance at the corpse stew its greed chucked into the Java Sea, much less any semblance of responsibility.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

We all know you can’t derive “ought” from “is.” But it’s equally clear that “is” — how the world actual works — is going to matter for “ought” — our moral choices in the world. And an important part of “is” is who we are as human beings. As products of a messy evolutionary history, we all have moral intuitions. What parts of the brain light up when we’re being consequentialist, or when we’re following rules? What is the relationship, if any, between those intuitions and a good moral philosophy? Joshua Greene is both a philosopher and a psychologist who studies what our intuitions are, and uses that to help illuminate what morality should be. He gives one of the best defenses of utilitarianism I’ve heard.

More here.