Lauren Michele Jackson in The New Yorker:

In August of 2019, a special issue of the Times Magazine appeared, wearing a portentous cover—a photograph, shot by the visual artist Dannielle Bowman, of a calm sea under gray skies, the line between earth and land cleanly bisecting the frame like the stroke of a minimalist painting. On the lower half of the page was a mighty paragraph, printed in bronze letters. It began:

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.

The name of this endeavor was introduced at the very bottom of the page, in print small enough to overlook: “The 1619 Project.” The titular year encapsulated a dramatic claim: that it was the arrival of what would become slavery in the colonies, and not the independence declared in 1776, that marked “the country’s true birth date,” as the issue’s editors wrote.

Seldom these days does a paper edition have such blockbuster draw. New Yorkers not in the habit of seeking out their Sunday Times ventured to bodegas to nab a hard copy. (Today you can find a copy on eBay for around a hundred dollars.) Commentators, such as the Vox correspondent Jamil Smith, lauded the Project—which consisted of eleven essays, nine poems, eight works of short fiction, and dozens of photographs, all documenting the long-fingered reach of American slavery—as an unprecedented journalistic feat. Impassioned critics emerged at both ends of the political spectrum.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Two Poems by Claude McKay

A Memory of June

When June comes dancing o’er the death of May,
With scarlet roses tinting her green breast,
And mating thrushes ushering in her day,
And Earth on tiptoe for her golden guest,

I always see the evening when we met–
The first of June baptized in tender rain–
And walked home through the wide streets, gleaming wet,
Arms locked, our warm flesh pulsing with love’s pain.

I always see the cheerful little room,
And in the corner, fresh and white, the bed,
Sweet scented with a delicate perfume,
Wherein for one night only we were wed;

Where in the starlit stillness we lay mute,
And heard the whispering showers all night long,
And your brown burning body was a lute
Whereon my passion played his fevered song.

When June comes dancing o’er the death of May,
With scarlet roses staining her fair feet,
My soul takes leave of me to sing all day
A love so fugitive and so complete.

Enslaved

Oh when I think of my long-suffering race,
For weary centuries despised, oppressed,
Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place
In the great life line of the Christian West;
And in the Black Land disinherited,
Robbed in the ancient country of its birth,
My heart grows sick with hate, becomes as lead,
For this my race that has no home on earth.
Then from the dark depths of my soul I cry
To the avenging angel to consume
The white man’s world of wonders utterly:
Let it be swallowed up in earth’s vast womb,
Or upward roll as sacrificial smoke
To liberate my people from its yoke!

Claude McKay

Russell Berman in The Atlantic:

The wails of protest began almost immediately after the lopsided votes concluded in the New York legislature earlier this month. Lawmakers in Albany had redrawn the state’s congressional map to create what instantly became perhaps the nation’s most brutal gerrymander. The “most brazen and outrageous attempt at rigging the election,” a party chair cried. “Egregious, unfair, and unconstitutional,” a senior member of Congress proclaimed. “It’s the voters who should be choosing their representatives, not the other way around,” declared another lawmaker who had been targeted for defeat in the reshuffling.

Voters are surely familiar with these complaints; Democrats have been making them—verbatim, in many cases—for years, accusing Republicans of using extreme partisan gerrymandering to tilt elections in their favor and entrench themselves in the majority. This time, however, Republicans were the victims of a supposed power grab, and they were the ones grousing about it.

The Democrats who control New York politics had drawn maps that could essentially wipe out half of the GOP’s eight congressional seats in the state before a single vote is cast. “It is wrong, and it is illegal,” Representative Elise Stefanik, the upstate New Yorker who serves as chair of the House Republican Conference, told me last week. She is supporting a lawsuit that Republicans nationally and in New York have filed against the Democratic-drawn map, alleging that it violates a prohibition in the state’s constitution against partisan gerrymandering.

More here.

Joel Christensen in The Conversation:

Each Valentine’s Day, when I see images of the chubby winged god Cupid taking aim with his bow and arrow at his unsuspecting victims, I take refuge in my training as a scholar of early Greek poetry and myth to muse on the strangeness of this image and the nature of love.

In Roman culture, Cupid was the child of the goddess Venus, popularly known today as the goddess of love, and Mars, the god of war. But for ancient audiences, as myths and texts show, she was really the patron deity of “sexual intercourse” and “procreation.” The name Cupid, which comes from the Latin verb cupere, means desire, love or lust. But in the odd combination of a baby’s body with lethal weapons, along with parents associated with both love and war, Cupid is a figure of contradictions – a symbol of conflict and desire.

This history isn’t often reflected in the modern-day Valentine celebrations.

More here.

Saima May Sidik in Nature:

Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study¹ shows. Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease.

What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.

“It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, it doesn’t matter if you smoked, or you didn’t,” says study co-author Ziyad Al-Aly at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the chief of research and development for the Veterans Affairs (VA) St. Louis Health Care System. “The risk was there.”

Al-Aly and his colleagues based their research on an extensive health-record database curated by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.

More here.

Philip Oltermann in the Irish Times:

Some time in the tense winter of 1983, when Nato forces rehearsed a nuclear endgame to the Cold War so realistic that Soviet counter-intelligence briefly suspected it to be a cover for a real attack, a Stasi officer read out a stream-of-consciousness poem to a fellow intelligence operatives inside a heavily fortified compound in East Berlin.

“Match reports state visits plague of locusts”, the poem starts breathlessly, with flagrant disregard for punctuation. “Computer production readers letters TV listings”. Then a chill runs down the spine: “Lightning triggered the firing of three American rockets from their missile silos.” A line break to indicate a sigh of relief. They are only “meteorological rockets”, which won’t sow death and destruction but merely harvest information about wind and the weather.

Written by a second lieutenant in the Stasi’s central information service, these experimental lyrics still lie in a cache of poems at the Stasi Records Archive in Berlin, subsumed into the German federal archives last year. The folders full of typewritten verse – some written in jaunty rhyming couplets, others in tense vers libre – bear testimony to one of the most bizarre experiments of the socialist German Democratic Republic, when one of the most fearsome secret police forces in European history tried to weaponise the vaguest of literary disciplines, the “art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing”, as Edmund Burke once wrote.

More here.

Claus Leggewie at the LARB:

De Francesco’s book is a fascinating historical examination of the charlatan figure that remains valid. Drawing on a variety of historical sources, de Francesco traces this path through early modern Europe, dwelling on alchemists, worm doctors, magnetizers, prestidigitators, and mountebanks. Individuals making an appearance include long-forgotten gold-makers like Leopold Thurneißer and Marco Bragadino, purported revenants like the Count of St. Germain, self-styled healers like Doctor Eisenbarth and James Graham, magicians like Jacob Philadelphia, and occultists like the Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. De Francesco, who sometimes comes across like a phenomenological sociologist in the tradition of Walter Benjamin or Siegfried Kracauer rather than an art historian, manages to distill the traits and behaviors of all these historical figures to an archetype.

more here.

Keith Miller at Literary Review:

Gary Shteyngart has quietly become one of the most talented comic writers working in English today. More or less uniquely, apart maybe from bits of Zadie Smith, he’s even funny on the subject of identity. He’s also good on both Tom Wolfe’s ‘right – BAM! – now’ and J G Ballard’s ‘next five minutes’, having trained his lens on the brutal carnival of post-Soviet Russia in Absurdistan, the impact of tech on the mating habits of youngish Americans in Super Sad True Love Story and the fallout of the financial crisis of 2008 in Lake Success. If all that were not enough, he’s an unusually acute observer of a certain strain of male sexual anguish that some of his predecessors might have treated with an indulgence bordering on mysticism, but which most of his contemporaries now seem to view as little more than an abstract social problem or a handy plot device.

more here.

A Brief History of Hostility

In the beginning
there was the war.

The war said let there be war
and there was war.

The war said let there be peace
and there was war.

The people said music and rain
evaporating against fire in the brush
was a kind of music
and so was the beast.

The beast that roared
or bleated when brought down
was silent when skinned
but loud after the skin
was pulled taut over wood
and the people said music
and the thump thump
thump said drum.
Someone said
war drum. The drum said war
is coming to meet you in the field.
The field said war
tastes like copper,
said give us some more, said look
at the wild flowers our war plants
in a grove and grows
just for us.

Read more »

Amy Maxmen in Nature:

The head is stately, calm, and wise,

And bears a princely part;

And down below in secret lies

The warm, impulsive heart.

— John Godfrey Saxe, 1898

For centuries, writers have mused on the heart as the core of humanity’s passion, its morals, its valour. The head, by contrast, was the seat of cold, hard rationality. In 1898, US poet John Godfrey Saxe wrote of such differences, but concluded his verses arguing that the heart and head are interdependent. “Each is best when both unite,” he wrote. “What were the heat without the light?” At that time, however, Saxe could not have known that the head and the heart share a deep biological connection.

In the past 15 years, scientists have uncovered a developmental link between the two. In 2010, for example, researchers revealed that the same small pool of cells that divides and differentiates to form the heart in mouse embryos also gives way to muscles in their throats and lower heads¹. Key components of the two are cut from the same cloth.

Even more surprising is that the embryonic head–heart connection pre-dates the evolutionary origin of vertebrates, and perhaps even of the head itself. Researchers stumbled on the link while studying sea squirts, blobby, sedentary marine creatures, found affixed to the sea floor, that have two openings — one for sucking water in and the other for squirting it out — hence the name.

More here.

Dodai Stewart in The New York Times:

On a Wednesday morning in January, Kamala Harris became the first Black woman — and the first woman of color — sworn into the office of Vice President of the United States.

During the inauguration ceremony, Amanda Gorman, a Black writer and, at 22, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, recited “The Hill We Climb.” The New York Times critic Dwight Garner wrote that Ms. Gorman “offered a fortifying tablespoon of American plain-spokenness. She offered lucidity and euphony.”

It was Black history in the making, televised to millions — and a hint at what was to come in the new year. 2021 was always destined to be viewed through the lens of the year that came before, and 2020 was a milestone in Black history. Following the death of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer, the summer of 2020 churned with turmoil. Americans took to the streets in what was estimated to be the largest movement in U.S. history. There were demonstrations, confrontations, protests and declarations; over and over, we heard the phrase “Black lives matter.”

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

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

My friend Agnes Callard stirred up some mischief a while back by writing at least somewhat sympathetically of the deeds of plagiarists, including her own past self in elementary school. “Academia,” she observed, “has confused a convention with a moral rule, and this confusion is not unmotivated.”

In order to count as plagiarism, I take it, a piece of written work must be falsely presented as if written by its presenter, when in fact it was written by someone else. So defined, I suppose I am in most circumstances “opposed to plagiarism,” roughly in the same degree and with the same intensity as Agnes. Though much like her as well, rather than simply taking a stand on the issue —as if that’s what an intellectual were supposed to do—, I am much more interested in figuring out the historical and technological circumstances in which this gesture came to be something like the literary and academic equivalent of murder, the absolute unspeakable act that can only eventuate in total exclusion from the ecumene, this even at a time when information-processing technologies are, like it or not, largely obviating the need for a well-rounded, generally competent person to develop the skill of long-form textual composition at all.

More here.

Mordechai Rorvig in Quanta:

Our species owes a lot to opposable thumbs. But if evolution had given us extra thumbs, things probably wouldn’t have improved much. One thumb per hand is enough.

Not so for neural networks, the leading artificial intelligence systems for performing humanlike tasks. As they’ve gotten bigger, they have come to grasp more. This has been a surprise to onlookers. Fundamental mathematical results had suggested that networks should only need to be so big, but modern neural networks are commonly scaled up far beyond that predicted requirement — a situation known as overparameterization.

In a paper presented in December at NeurIPS, a leading conference, Sébastien Bubeck of Microsoft Research and Mark Sellke of Stanford University provided a new explanation for the mystery behind scaling’s success.

More here.

Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:

Every medium of communication has its own attentional norms. Like all tacit rules that govern behavior, they get violated, but the violators typically act deliberately. For instance, the people who talk aloud in the movie theater typically aren’t ignorant of the norms; they transgress them for the lulz. Human beings are extremely skilled at recognizing and internalizing the norms of any given medium or environment.

Such norms are not set in stone but rather can alter over time. The strict decorum demanded of classical music audiences was codified in the early twentieth century, largely through the influence of Gustav Mahler. By contrast, Haydn and Mozart had to put up with noisy audiences, and indeed rarely began a symphonic piece quietly because if they had done so no one would have known that the music had started. Similarly, it was common in the Middle Ages for churchgoers to chat  through most of Mass and even play cards, listening with one ear to the bells that would alert them when their attention was required. (Even the more overtly pious would often pray the rosary as the priest said the Mass, again relying on the bells as a notification system.) Still, despite changes that inevitably occur over the long term, at any given moment in time most people know what the attentional norms are for any social endeavor they participate in.

It has been interesting to watch over the last two pandemic years as the norms associated with videoconferencing have coalesced.

More here.

Ranulph Fiennes in Literary Hub:

The Royal Geographical Society encouraged the Royal Navy to support British expeditions of Antarctica in the early 1900s. Heading from New Zealand, the expedition ship Discovery anchored off the coastline of the unknown land under the leadership of Captain Robert Falcon Scott. He chose the Anglo-Irish ex-Merchant Navy Third Officer, Ernest Shackleton, to lead the first hazardous sledge journey inland over slippery surfaces at temperatures as low as minus 62 degrees Fahrenheit. They aimed to make history by breaking the furthest South record towards the bottom of planet Earth.

Both men succeeded separately, over the next ten years in hellish conditions, to open the way to the South Pole. Scott became famous through the courageous manner of his death and Shackleton through his remarkable 18-month survival story, which ended when his ship, the Endurance, sank. He died in January 1922, 100 years ago, on another Antarctic voyage.

When cocooned in the darkness for months on end, many on Antarctic expeditions have lost their minds.

More here.