Dayna Tortorici at the NYRB:

Because Gornick is foremost a memoirist, any tour of her work must contend with her autobiography as she tells it, in fragments. There is no single book in which she narrates her life story straight through; “truth in memoir,” she writes in The Situation and the Story (2001), “is achieved not through a recital of actual events.” Instead, each of her books marshals different pieces of her life in service of a central insight, whether she’s writing memoir, criticism, reportage, or a biography of someone else. She is dedicated to nonfiction as a genre, but has a novelist’s instinct for selection. To recount her biography chronologically thus requires some reconstruction.

Gornick was born in 1935 in the Bronx, the second child of working-class immigrant Jews. Her father, she recalls in The Romance of American Communism, was a kind man who “stood upright on the floor of a dress factory on West 35th Street…with a steam iron in his hand for thirty years.” Her mother, a passionate woman with a rougher style of affection, kept house.

more here.

The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances

Mayaguez Puerto Rico 1856

I. The First Horse
Cholera swarmed unseen through the water, lurking in wells and fountains,
… squirming in garbage and excrement, infinitesimal worms drilling the intestines,
… till all the water and salt would pour from the body, till the body became a worm,
… shriveling and writhing, a slug in salt, till the skin burned blue as flame, the skin
… of the peasant and the skin of the slave gone blue, the skin in the slave barracks blue,
… the skin of ten thousand slaves blue. The Blue Death, face hidden in a bandanna,
… dug graves with the gravediggers, who fell into holes they shoveled for the dead.
… The doctors died too, seeing the signs in the mirror, the hand with the razor shaking.

II. The Second Horse
Doctor Betances stepped off the boat, back from Paris, the humidity of the plague
… glistening in his beard. He saw the stepmother who fed him sink into a mound
… of dirt, her body empty as the husk of a locust in drought.He toweled off his hands.
… In the quarantine tents there was laudanum by the bitter spoonful, the lemonade
… and broth; in the dim of the kerosene lamps there was the compress cool against
… the forehead, the elixir of the bark from the cinchona tree. For peasants and slaves
… moaning to their gods, the doctor prescribed chilled champagne to soothe the belly.
… For the commander of the Spanish garrison, there was silence bitter as the spoon.

III. The Third Horse
At every hacienda, at every plantation, as the bodies of slaves rolled one by one
… into ditches all hipbones and ribs, drained of water and salt, stripped of names,
… Doctor Betances commanded the torch for the barracks where the bodies would
… tangle together, stacked up as if they never left the ship that sailed from Africa,
… kept awake by the ravenous worms of the plague feasting upon them. Watching
… the blue flames blacken the wood, the doctor and the slaves saw another plague
… burning away, the plague of manacles scraping the skin from hands that cut
… the cane, the plague of the collar with four spikes for the runaways brought back. Read more »

Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker:

The immediate aftermath of the Presidential election of 2000 has taken on the air of legend. On Election Night, news organizations first called Florida for Vice-President Al Gore—then, about two hours later, withdrew the call and, about four hours after that, declared that George W. Bush, the governor of Texas, had won the state, giving him enough electoral votes to become President. Gore called Bush to concede, and left his hotel in a motorcade to announce the end of his campaign to his supporters. His aides, learning that the race in Florida was, in fact, too close to call, tried frantically to contact the Vice-President in his limousine. They reached him just in time, and he telephoned Bush to retract the concession. Bush indignantly told Gore that his “little brother”—the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush—had said that he had won. “Let me explain something,” Gore replied. “Your little brother is not the ultimate authority on this.”

Like all historical events, the following thirty-five days can look, in retrospect, inevitable, even preordained. But they were a product of choice, improvisation, and happenstance. Gore demanded recounts in four Democratic-leaning counties, which began the painstaking process of studying their punch-card ballots and determining whether the tiny boxes known as chads had been fully detached. Bush responded by filing a lawsuit in federal court in Miami to stop the recounts. In one of the lesser-known events surrounding that case, James A. Baker III, Bush’s lead strategist at the time, called John C. Danforth, the former Republican senator from Missouri and an ordained minister, who was famous for his rectitude. Baker wanted Danforth to be Bush’s spokesman in the suit. Danforth was horrified. “Candidates don’t sue,” he told Baker. “You could ruin Governor Bush’s career. He’s only fifty-four years old, and the decision to file a court case like this would be a black mark that followed him forever. And it would destroy the reputation of everyone involved on the Bush side.”

More here.

Ben P. Stein in Phys.Org:

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new method of 3-D-printing gels and other soft materials. Published in a new paper, it has the potential to create complex structures with nanometer-scale precision. Because many gels are compatible with living cells, the new method could jump-start the production of soft tiny medical devices such as drug delivery systems or flexible electrodes that can be inserted into the human body.

A standard 3-D printer makes solid structures by creating sheets of material—typically plastic or rubber—and building them up layer by layer, like a lasagna, until the entire object is created. Using a 3-D printer to fabricate an object made of gel is a “bit more of a delicate cooking process,” said NIST researcher Andrei Kolmakov. In the standard method, the 3-D printer chamber is filled with a soup of long-chain polymers—long groups of molecules bonded together—dissolved in water. Then “spices” are added—special molecules that are sensitive to light. When light from the 3-D printer activates those special molecules, they stitch together the chains of polymers so that they form a fluffy weblike structure. This scaffolding, still surrounded by liquid water, is the gel. Typically, modern 3-D gel printers have used ultraviolet or visible laser light to initiate formation of the gel scaffolding. However, Kolmakov and his colleagues have focused their attention on a different 3-D-printing technique to fabricate gels, using beams of electrons or X-rays.

More here.

Markman Ellis in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

What does coffee do to you? Dinah Lenney’s Coffee is a free-form exploration of such surprisingly complicated questions: Why do we drink coffee? What gives it its power? Humans have been considering these and other coffee-related queries (like “Is it good for my health?” and “Is it good for my society?”) for centuries, ever since they first encountered the substance. Lenney is most interested in coffee’s direct effects on our lived experience, and what they mean.

The active property of coffee is called caffeine, as we all know. The word for the compound was coined in 1830, as a result of research by two different groups of scientists — one in Jena, Germany, led by a young chemist Ferdinand Runge, and the other in France, led by Pierre Jean Robiquet and Pierre Joseph Pelletier. Both groups successfully isolated the active substance of coffee in an organic “base” or vegetable salt. They showed that this salt caused the effects associated with coffee in humans. Caffeine, in other words, is the drug, and coffee is its vehicle. In 1861, Adolph Strecker defined the molecular structure of caffeine in the formula C₈H₁₀N₄O₂. Caffeine isn’t everything, though: coffee still tastes reasonably like coffee without caffeine, and coffee’s distinctive flavors, we now think, reside in a different set of chemical substances, including aromatic oils and volatile flavonoids, most of which are produced during the pyrolytic roasting process.

More here.

Jørgen Veisdal in Cantor’s Paradise:

It is the beginning of November, 1943. The Manhattan project is in its fourth year of operations, and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos Laboratory is eleven months into its mission of designing and building the first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer had in 1942 been headhunted to the project by its Director, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (1896–1970) on the strength of the recommendation of physicist Arthur Compton (1892–1962). He was 39 years old at the time, and came to the project already a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. There, starting in the mid 1930s he had worked on deuteron-induced nuclear reactions, the so-called Oppenheimer-Phillips process, whose experiments were conducted at the newly built UC Berkeley cyclotron.

Although a classified endeavor, it was not uncommon for scientists and engineers on the project to communicate between themselves in letter-form about how things were proceeding. Indeed, communication across both institutions and scientific branches was imperative for ensuring a successful “Project Y”. Classified, of course, many such letters have since been made available to the public. When reading through Oppenheimer’s communications, one in particular stands out.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

I recall an illuminating moment a decade or so ago. Cathy Guisewite had just announced she would step back from creating new instalments of her long-running Cathy comic. The blogosphere, as it was called then, was all revved up, heatedly discussing the legacy of the perpetual dieter, hen-pecked by her mother, conflicted about her low-energy boyfriend Irving, never able to resist a box of chocolate, always discovering runs in her pantyhose, always frazzled. An acquaintance of mine, an up-and-coming journalist whom I knew in real life to have subtle opinions and an appreciation for the complexity of life, entered the online conversation. Cathy, she judged, was harmful to women’s self-image, and it is therefore good that she is —in the old sense of the word— to be cancelled.

Few people will know this about me, but I happen to like Cathy. I don’t think much about her, but to recall her to mind does make me happy for at least a moment. In fact I have to admit that I like all those comforting and mediocre representations traditionally and perplexingly known in the US as “the funnies”. What I wouldn’t give to read the Sunday comics in some hokey local American newspaper! Marmaduke, Ziggy, Garfield, Family Circus: none of them transformed into next-level memes on the internet, no Nietzsche Family Circus or Lasagna Cat, but just as they were meant to be by their hokey normie creators.

More here.

Jeremiah Moss at n+1:

ON MY DOORMAT, a large, greasy-golden rat is curled as if sleeping, tucked into the corner where my apartment door meets the wall of the hallway. Her dark, shining eyes are open. I can’t tell if she’s dead or dying, alive enough to dart into my apartment, so I close the door quick. I can’t get out of my apartment without stepping over the rat and I have no intention of doing that. She gives me the shivers. In twenty-five years, I have never seen a rat inside the building and this weird intrusion concerns me as an indication of entropic breakdown in the system gone too far. When the exterminator comes for his monthly visit, he will tell me that, since the pandemic began, the rats of New York have been leaving the subterranean zone to venture upwards into buildings, into hallways and apartments, searching for food. This, he will say, is unusual behavior for a rat.

more here.

Luc Sante at The Paris Review:

When I was a teenager I was, like most teenagers, preoccupied with the idea that somewhere on the horizon there was a Now. The present moment came to a peak out there; it achieved a continuous apotheosis of nowness, a wave endlessly breaking on an invisible shore. I wasn’t quite sure what specific form this climax took, but it had to involve some concatenation of records, poems, pictures, parties, and behavior. Out there all of those items would be somehow made manifest: the pictures walking along in the middle of the street, the right song broadcast in the air every minute, the parties behaving like the poems and vice versa. Since it was 1967 when I became a teenager, I suspected that the Now would stir together rock ’n’ roll bands and mod girls and cigarettes and bearded poets and sunglasses and Italian movie stars and pointy shoes and spies. But there had to be much more than that, things I could barely guess. The present would be occurring in New York and Paris and London and California while I lay in my narrow bed in New Jersey, which was a swamplike clot of the dead recent past.

more here.

David Frum in The Atlantic:

The smart play for Trump is to postpone the nomination to reduce the risk of Democratic mobilization, and to warn Republicans of the risks should he lose. Trump’s people do not usually execute the smart play. They are often the victims of the hyper-ideological media they consume, which deceive them about what actually is the smart play. This time, though, they may just be desperate enough to break long-standing pattern and try something different.

Will the conservative legal establishment play ball?

The judicial status quo enormously favors conservatives. Even should Democrats win big in November, it will take many years for them to catch up to the huge Republican lead in judicial appointments. By then, who knows, the GOP may have retaken the Senate, and of course it may well find a way to hold on in 2020. But a last-minute overreach by McConnell could seem so illegitimate to Democrats as to justify radical countermoves should they win in November: increasing the number of appellate judges and Supreme Court justices; conceivably even opening impeachment hearings against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

McConnell may want the win badly enough to dismiss those risks. But many conservative-leaning lawyers in the country may be more cautious. And their voices will get a hearing in a contentious nomination fight—not only by the national media, but by some of the less Trump-y Republican senators. This could be enough to slow down a process that has no time to spare. Mitch McConnell has gotten his way so often that it’s hard to imagine he might ever lose. But the political balance of power is shifting this fall, and for once, McConnell may be on the wrong side of a power dynamic.

More here.

Sarah DeWeerdt in Nature:

Over the course of two decades spent developing treatments for the genetic lung disease cystic fibrosis, biologist Fredrick Van Goor has had hundreds of conversations with patients. But he remembers one in particular. The discussion was about the genetics of cystic fibrosis, a disease that develops when a person inherits two faulty copies of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene. This gene encodes the CFTR protein, which resides in the cell membrane and transports chloride and bicarbonate ions out of the cell. More than 2,000 variants of CFTR have been identified, and more than 350 of them are known to produce enough disruption in the protein’s function to trigger the debilitating and life-shortening condition. The focus of the conversation was the inevitable inequities of personalized medicine, which can be highly effective for people who meet certain criteria, but will leave others behind — as was the case for this patient. “He described it as being on a sinking ship, when all of the other lifeboats have left,” Van Goor recalls. “That image has stuck with me.”

Van Goor, the head of cystic fibrosis research at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, California, had a major role in building the biggest lifeboat for cystic fibrosis yet: the blockbuster combination drug Trikafta. The drug achieved sales of US$420 million in the first 10 weeks after its launch in late 2019, far exceeding expectations. “I think it has made a big difference,” says Martina Gentzsch, a molecular biologist studying CFTR at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The success in the clinic really justifies that this is an absolutely outstanding treatment.” Trikafta is indicated for people with cystic fibrosis who carry at least one copy of a mutation known as F508del. This is the most common cystic fibrosis mutation, present in more than 80% of the over 90,000 people with cystic fibrosis worldwide.

More here.

The History of Everything II

a lament for the lost phrase, a lay for the never-said
a song for the thoughts that timid knocked but
were not asked in, who wander lonely looking for drink,
dance, welcome, setting up camp on the edge of a dream,
fleeing just before you open your eyes

“Out of the four elements, all things are formed.”
In the kitchen, the dishwasher sings a sloshy song.
Over the airwaves, the Modern Jazz Quartet brings
an obbligato of silver fire. I said “Air,” so must look for earth
and find her in the garden jamming with Forsythia.

waking to the sun rising thinking how
long Light took to get here from the first
let there be thinking how far it has to go
before “Time that takes survey
of all the world, Must have a stop”

Day in gray pajamas yawns, stretches behind
the far hills then dresses in bright clothes
to walk about the backyard with his friends.
He reaches through the window to touch
my forehead with a father’s blessing.

Forest Floor Seen as a Prayer Rug

Rot of leaf, twig, branch. Bits, pieces
of fallen trees, armies of mushrooms
beneath cap helmets. The droppings
of small animals upon the grainy moss.
What place better to ask blessing?

Thinking of Angels

Sometimes we see a sliver of light like the reflection
off a shiny surface but there is no shiny surface, sometimes
between you and the sea, a transparent opaqueness.
They haven’t fallen – they’ve drifted down, drawn
by the gravity of what? flesh? love? hunger? ending?

by Nils Peterson
from All the Marvelous Stuff
Caesura Editions, 2019

Olivia Durif in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“Prisons are created internally / and are found everywhere.” My conversations with Spoon Jackson keep returning to this point, a line from one of his poems. Prisons are both real and imaginary. All people experience some kind of prison, some to a greater degree than others. Those degrees are not coincidental. Jackson, a 63-year-old Black man, has been serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for 42 years and has lived in a series of prisons. He discovered poetry one day, about 30 years ago, sitting in his cell, looking over the bay at San Quentin. At least that’s how he tells it.

Since then, he has won four PEN America Prison Writing Awards for his poetry. In 1988, Jackson played Pozzo in a historic production of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin. In 2010, he co-authored By Heart, a joint memoir he wrote with his poetry teacher, Judith Tannenbaum. Jackson’s poetry and life have inspired more than one full-length documentary. I had known of him and his poetry since 2016, when I spent a New York spring doing editorial work for Die Jim Crow, now the first nonprofit record label for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians.

More here.

Diane Peters in Undark:

There are as many as 9 million feral swine across the U.S., their populations having expanded from about 17 states to 38 over the last three decades. Canada doesn’t have comparable data, but Ryan Brook, a University of Saskatchewan biologist who researches wild pigs, predicts that they will occupy 386,000 square miles across the country by the end of 2020, and they’re currently expanding at about 35,000 square miles a year.

“I’ve heard it referred to as a feral swine bomb,” says Dale Nolte, manager of the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program at the United States Department of Agriculture. “They multiply so rapidly. To go from a thousand to two thousand, it’s not a big deal. But if you’ve got a million, it doesn’t take long to get to 4 [million], then 8 million.”

More here.

James Gleick in the New York Review of Books:

“Which category have they put you in?”

This sinister question—at least, it was meant to sound sinister—headlined the advertising copy for The 480, a 1964 novel by Eugene Burdick. His previous best sellers, The Ugly American and Fail-Safe, had caused sensations in political circles, and the new one promised to do the same. Its jacket featured the image of a punched card. The title referred to 480 categories of voter, defined by region, religion, age, and other demographic characteristics, such as “Midwestern, rural, Protestant, lower income, female.” Many readers recoiled from the notion of being sorted into one of these boxes. The New York Times’s reviewer called The 480 a “shock novel” and found it implausible.

What was so shocking? What was implausible? The idea that a company might use computer technology and behavioral science to gather and crunch data on American citizens, with the nefarious goal of influencing a presidential election.

In the 1950s and 1960s this seemed like science fiction. Actually, The 480 was a thinly disguised roman à clef, based on a real-life company called Simulmatics, which had secretly worked for the 1960 campaign of John F. Kennedy. Burdick had been a political operative himself and knew the Simulmatics founders well. The company’s confidential reports and memoranda went straight into his prose. And the 480 categories—listed in an appendix to the novel—were the real Simulmatics voter types, the creation of what one of its founders called “a kind of Manhattan Project gamble in politics.”

Simulmatics was founded in 1959 and lasted eleven years. Jill Lepore mentioned its involvement in the Kennedy campaign in These Truths (2018), her monumental history of the United States; she was already on the trail of the story she tells in her new book, If Then.

More here.

Jackson Arn in The Point:

For good reason, The Great Gatsby is one of the most admired and talked-about books of the twentieth century. And that reason is, of course, that it’s really short—47,094 words, to be exact. I read it for the first time in a few hours at a swim meet (the aptness of the setting wasn’t clear to me until Chapter 8) and probably would have finished sooner had it not been for the snatches of Eminem coming from somebody’s boombox. You can count the book’s speaking roles on your fingers, and any high school sophomore can skim it the night before the big exam. Assign that to millions of teenagers for sixty-odd years, and a Great American Novel is born.

I don’t mean to belittle what Fitzgerald achieved in his most famous work: the grandeur of his themes, or the calm thrust of his narrator’s voice, or the fine shading of his descriptions (the bit about the juice machine button pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb has mocked my feeble attempts at lyricism for years). But not all beautifully written books sell half a million copies a year, and it’s no coincidence that Gatsby—rather than The Adventures of Augie March, Invisible Man or Gravity’s Rainbow, to name three American novels of equal splendor but considerably more bulk—is the rare classic that everyone remembers the gist of. There is much less of it to forget.

So much less, in fact, that readers may find themselves remembering things Fitzgerald never wrote.

More here.