J R Patterson in New Humanist:
Springtime on the West African coast. Nights, pleasantly warm and close, give way to searing daylight. By ten o’clock, the sun presses down upon the earth like a thumb, grinding everything beneath it into the dust that rises from the roads and thickens the air. It is a heat that hurts. People hide in the shade of mango trees or within the dark caverns of roadside shops; movement encourages a torrent of sweat.
Into this climate came Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, during which the observant abstain from all food and drink between sunrise and sunset. Those who must move – the men busting their guts making bricks, the women hauling buckets of water to vegetable patches along the river Gambia – take no water to slake their thirst, no food to ease their rumbling bellies.
I do not write to make fun of fasting, which is undertaken in some variation by much of the world’s population. But as the month-long deprivation descended on The Gambia, I wondered whether there was something beyond religious zeal that compels millions to deprive themselves of food in what could already be considered conditions of want. Could fasting create a societal relationship to food that extended beyond not having enough of it?
I profess no religion, and stem from a heritage that perceives religious (or even non-spiritual) fasting as eccentric behaviour. Early on, I looked up fasting online. “See list of ineffective cancer treatments,” the internet told me. It seems that this is good advice for some. There are groups – “breatharians” and “sungazers” among them – for whom fasting is a kind of panacea, a way to eradicate so-called toxins from the body. The fasting I saw in The Gambia was far from this idiocy, but the dedication required to temporarily forgo the needs of the body was similar.
In the west, gluttony barely registers as a problem.
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The word ‘economy’ evolved from the Greek root οἶκος. ‘Oikos’ had three interrelated senses in ancient Greece: the family, the family’s land, and the family’s home. These three, taken interchangeably, constituted the first or fundamental political unit in the ancient Greek world, especially in the minds of Greece’s hereditary aristocrats, for whom family mattered more than all other affiliations. The family, then and after, was viewed as the state in miniature, with its rules of order and its exemplars (of moral strength or moral incontinence).
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City streets seemed eerily empty in the early years of photography. During minutes-long exposures, carriage traffic and even ambling pedestrians blurred into nonexistence. The only subjects that remained were those that stood still: buildings, trees, the road itself. In one famous image, a bootblack and his customer appear to be the lone survivors on a Parisian boulevard. When shorter exposure times were finally possible in the late 1850s, a British photographer marveled: “Views in distant and picturesque cities will not seem plague-stricken, by the deserted aspect of their streets and squares, but will appear alive with the busy throng of their motley populations.”
Surgeons in New York have successfully attached a kidney grown in a genetically altered pig to a human patient and found that the organ worked normally, a scientific breakthrough that one day may yield a vast new supply of organs for severely ill patients.
Perhaps the most invigorated intellectual movements to gain steam during the Trump era occupied not the progressive left but the reactionary right. The conservative visions of Reagan, Goldwater, or Buckley have now receded into the pages of history, voicing only a whimper of protest. What stands in the wake of these older modes of conservatism is not yet fully determined, but various modes of populism, authoritarianism, nationalism, cable news antagonisms, and conspiracy-driven paranoia now contend for whatever will come next.
The Quick and the Dead, which is not set in Florida but in the West, is one of the weirdest, funniest, darkest novels you’ll ever read. It lost the 2001 Pulitzer Prize to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, thus fulfilling the promise of Luke 4:24. Williams’s new novel, Harrow, is Quick’s spiritual successor, perhaps even sequel, taking up that novel’s concerns and amplifying them by the full twenty years it took her to write it. Harrow reminds me very much of Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but, with apologies to the boys, it’s better than both of their novels put together. Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction, even as it refuses the basic premise (human survival is important) and the sentimental rays of hope (another world is possible!) that are the hallmarks of the genre. This novel doesn’t care who you vote for or if you recycle. It’s not bullish on green tech jobs or sustainable meat. It would leave Steven “Things Are Getting Better” Pinker and Matthew “One Billion Americans” Yglesias writhing in shame if guys like them were capable of reading novels or feeling shame. Harrow is a crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of uncompromised originality and vision. For all of its fragmentation and deliberate strategies of estrangement, Harrow feels coherent and complete, like a single long-form thought or a religious epiphany. It’s also funny as hell.
In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Lee Iacocca, the celebrated executive who had run both Chrysler and Ford, visited the Los Angeles laboratory of Patrick Soon-Shiong, a surgeon at U.C.L.A. Iacocca’s first wife had died of Type 1 diabetes a few years earlier; he was searching for a cure. Soon-Shiong, who was in his thirties, specialized in pancreas transplant, a risky treatment reserved for severe diabetics. Soon-Shiong was a skilled surgeon who had trained under organ-transplant pioneers, but he’d grown unhappy with the procedure: pancreas transplants carried a high risk of organ rejection, and he didn’t feel that the outcomes were worth the danger. He wanted to shut down U.C.L.A.’s pancreas-transplant program and embark on a new line of research. Instead of replacing the entire pancreas, Soon-Shiong would replace only the insulin-producing islet cells inside it.
Fatalism creeps across our movements like rust. In conversations with scientists and activists, I hear the same words, over and again: “We’re screwed.” Government plans are too little, too late. They are unlikely to prevent the Earth’s systems from flipping into new states hostile to 
Because of all the very different ways in which percentages could be used, I think it may make sense to propose an alternate system of units to measure one class of probabilities, namely the probabilities of avoiding some highly undesirable outcome, such as death, accident or illness. The units I propose are that of “
are in the probability of successfully avoiding the negative outcome, thus
success = one nine of safety
success = two nines of safety
success = three nines of safety
Psychology, as a scientific discipline in its own right, appears towards the end of the nineteenth century at roughly the moment when it is no longer possible in respectable institutions to speak of the soul. To put this another way, the science of the soul, which is all the word “psychology” means, begins only when those concerned with it declare the soul off-limits within the scope of their science. This might seem paradoxical, but in fact it is a common pattern: “biology” comes into its own, too, only when it ceases for the most part to look for that special je-ne-sais-quoi we call “life” that would somehow place living beings at a different ontological rank on some imagined “scale of being” from helium or silica, and just gets down to the business of accounting for how a certain class of carbon-based compounds do their thing. Philosophy for its part would still be able to talk about the soul in some limited contexts, but typically only as an occasion for investigating other conceptual problems or as shorthand for the gedankenexperimental fiction of a fully disembodied conscious being. Still, “Does the soul exist?” remains even today a legitimate topic of inquiry in a typical Intro to Philosophy course, though I suspect many instructors rush at the beginning of this segment to reassure their students that they personally know full well that it does not.
Springsteen From when I was a young man, I lived with a man who suffered a loss of status and I saw it every single day. It was all tied to lack of work, and I just watched the low self-esteem. That was a part of my daily life living with my father. It taught me one thing: work is essential. That’s why if we can’t get people working in this country, we’re going to have an awful hard time.