Bill and Melinda Gates at the website of their foundation:

A year ago, we sat down to write an unusual Goalkeepers Report. After years of steady progress on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was devastating families, health systems, and economies. We feared it was triggering an unprecedented reversal of progress across nearly every measure of health and prosperity that we track each year in this report.

Indeed, it has been an unprecedented year: Millions of people around the world have died from COVID-19. Millions more have felt the shocks of a global economy in crisis. And still the pandemic rages, with ever more contagious and severe variants spreading around the globe.

In so many ways, the pandemic has tested our optimism. But it hasn’t destroyed it.

More here.

Hua Hsu at The Nation:

Several months after Charlottesville, as part of an exhibition at the New Museum, Bordowitz debuted Some Styles of Masculinity, a trio of improvised monologues on these figures and how they’d shaped him, how they’d enabled him to go off script and to cultivate a performance of gender that accounted for his particular understanding of race, ethnicity, and nationality. The monologues are sincere and hopeful, weird and campy. Bordowitz, who was born in 1964, returns to his roots: He performs under his Hebrew name, Benyamin Zev, fulfilling his longtime fantasy of hosting a variety show. He regards his own body—the way he speaks, stands, listens—as he describes how he became who he is: through worshiping Lou Reed, studying Lenny Bruce routines, absorbing Jewish liberation theology, and engaging in the confrontational, in-the-streets action of late-’80s AIDS activism. But he acts less like a pedagogue or narrator than the host of an off-kilter, otherworldly take on The Carol Burnett Show or The Dick Van Dyke Show. He addresses the audience, casting about for reactions, but he also looks past the crowd—and past the reader—for an audience that has yet to assemble.

more here.

Jason Farago at the New York Times:

Six years in the making, “Surrealism Beyond Borders” has been organized by Stephanie D’Alessandro at the Met and Matthew Gale at Tate Modern in London, to which the show will travel next year. As in recent shows like “International Pop,” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, or “Postwar,” at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, this new show conceives of Surrealism as not quite a movement, but a broad, tentacular tendency. Its forms and its aims mutated as they migrated, and therefore simple narratives of this-one-influenced-that-one won’t cut it. This is something grander, messier, and much more compelling: an unstable cartography of images and ideas on the move, blowing across the globe like trade winds of the subconscious.

These movements were, like everything with Surrealism, not quite rational and linear. Surrealism was a free-flowing network of exchanges, translations, idealizations and misunderstandings — and on this matter, all too rarely in this age of smug cultural moralism, the curators actually treat us like adults.

more here.

From Phys.Org:

In a new USC study on the health effects of a low-calorie diet that mimics fasting in the body, researchers found regular five-day cycles of the diet in mice seemed to counteract the detrimental effects of their usual high-fat, high-calorie diet. The study, published today in Nature Metabolism, analyzed the diet, health and lifespan of three different groups of mice over two years. The findings point to the potential of using a fasting-mimicking diet as “medicine,” according to the researchers. A fasting-mimicking diet, or FMD, is a low-calorie diet that “tricks” the body into a fasting state.

One group of mice ate a high-calorie, high-fat diet (with 60% of their calories from fat) and became unhealthy and overweight. A second group of mice ate the same poor diet as the first one for approximately 4 weeks, followed by five days where they were fed an FMD and two days of a normal, healthy diet. Study authors say those brief diet interventions were sufficient for that second group to return to normal levels of cholesterol, blood pressure and weight. Notably, the mice who ate the fasting-mimicking diet for five days out of each month lived as long as a third group of mice that was consistently fed a healthy diet. In humans, obesity caused by a high-fat, high calorie diet is a major risk factor for metabolic syndrome, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

More here.

Hasan Altaf in The Paris Review:

After her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), Arundhati Roy did not publish another for twenty years, when The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was released in 2017. The intervening decades were nonetheless filled with writing: essays on dams, displacement, and democracy, which appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Outlook, Frontline, and the Guardian, and were collected in volumes that quickly came to outnumber the novels. Most of these essays were compiled in 2019 in My Seditious Heart, which, with footnotes, comes to nearly a thousand pages; less than a year later she published nine new essays in Azadi.

To see that two-decade period as a gap, or the nonfiction as separate from the fiction, would be to misunderstand Roy’s project; when finding herself described as “what is known in twenty-first-century vernacular as a ‘writer-activist,’ ” she confessed that term made her flinch (and feel “like a sofa-bed”). The essays exist between the novels not as a wall but as a bridge. Roy’s subject and obsession is, throughout, power: who has it (and why), how it is used (and abused), the ways in which those with little power turn on those with less—and, importantly, how to find beauty and joy amid these struggles. The God of Small Things is a novel focused on one family, while The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has a larger scale, but in the questions they ask and the themes they explore, both novels are as “political” as any of her essays. Her essays, in turn, are as powerfully and lovingly written as her fiction, with the same suspicion of purity, perfection, and simple stories.

More here.

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under
….. an arcade

I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.
A woman with a certain mission
which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.
A woman with the nerves of a panther
a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels
a woman feeling the fullness of her powers
at the precise moment when she must not use them
a woman sworn to lucidity
who sees through the mayhem, the smokey fires
of these underground streets
he dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind
on the wrong side of the mirror

by Ann Sexton
from No More Masks!
Anchor Books, 1973

Sarah Boxer at Bookforum:

Kusama’s Narcissus Garden and Bourgeois’s Ventouse both feature gleaming globes on flat surfaces. And both, I believe, come from a similar place—the land of daddy complexes and phallic fetishes. (I’m not the first to notice some parallels between Kusama and Bourgeois; in 2017 Sotheby’s S|2 gallery in London presented a joint show, as did Peter Blum Gallery in 2001.)

The biographical parallels are pretty stunning. Both girls’ fathers cheated on their mothers, and both girls were cast into their parents’ marital maelstroms. (Kusama’s mother demanded she spy on her wayward father; Bourgeois cared for her ailing mother in southern France while her father cavorted in Paris with her English tutor.) Both were smart, strong-willed, sensitive, and ambitious girls from prosperous families whose wealth came from their mothers’ side. Both were involved in their family’s work. (Kusama, born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, spent time in her family’s seed nursery, which is where she had her first hallucinations, of talking flowers. Bourgeois, born in Paris in 1911, worked in her family’s tapestry-restoration business, drawing in the missing feet of the figures on worn-out textiles.)

more here.

Emily Gould at The Paris Review:

“I loved it when my tits or my cock or my asshole would destroy my own ego with their needs,” writes Dodie Bellamy in The Letters of Mina Harker. It’s true that these body parts and many others assert themselves vehemently throughout the text, which is already a riot of warring impulses and contradictory or just chorusing voices. Most writing strives to unify impulses, to find harmony between the heart (or whatever) and the mind, the corporeal and the spiritual, the story and its narrator. Dodie begins this book by disassembling that expectation, mocking it as she discards it, bringing it up again and again only to find it eternally lacking. Formal contrivance can never compete for long with what’s real and right in front of us. This book interrupts itself often to critique itself, or tell the story of its own creation, or take a break from itself to eat a snack, jerk off, begin again.

I have to admit, the first time I attempted to read this book circa 2012, I didn’t “get it.” I came to it because I was obsessed with diaries and had loved Dodie’s then-latest book, which was a diary that she initially serialized as a blog of an affair with a shitty Buddhist teacher.

more here.

Daron Acemoglu in Project Syndicate:

With the price of Bitcoin reaching new highs, and El Salvador and Cuba deciding to accept it as legal tender, cryptocurrencies are here to stay. What implications will this have for money and politics?

Money depends on trust. It is accepted in exchange for goods and services only because people can confidently assume that others will accept it in the future. This is as true for the US dollar as it is for gold. To argue that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are merely a confidence game – or a speculative bubble, as many economists have emphasized – is to ignore their popularity.

And yet, cryptocurrencies lack the stable institutional foundations needed to bolster the public’s trust in them. Trust thus ebbs and flows, making them fragile and volatile, as Bitcoin’s wild gyrations have amply demonstrated.

Moreover, with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that rely on “proof-of-work” mechanisms, transactions must be continuously verified and logged in a decentralized ledger (in this instance based on blockchain).

More here.

Raghavendra Gadagkar in The Wire:

My inspiration for this essay comes from reading a paper entitled ‘Time-activity budget of urban-adapted free-ranging dogs’, by Arunita Banerjee and Anindita Bhadra, published in the journal acta ethologica on September 8. This study provides a rigorous quantitative answer to the question raised in the title of my essay, at least for stray dogs in India.

People often ask me why I like some papers more than others. One of my answers is that a paper should make me jealous that I did not write it. This feeling can only come if I could easily have conducted that study and written the paper, at least in principle. Arunita and Anindita’s paper has the potential of making every citizen of India jealous because any one of us could have done their study and could have done it anytime in the last 100 years, if not earlier.

But there is also another reason why this paper moved me so much. It brought back fond memories of my own research in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was studying the Indian paper wasp Ropalidia marginata as a hobby.

More here.

Samuel Miller McDonald in the Boston Review:

For half a century the debate around nuclear energy has produced more heat than light, inspiring impassioned discourse on all sides. But given the many urgent imperatives for rapidly transitioning our energy systems from high- to low-carbon—and from centralized and vulnerable to decentralized and resilient—in the very near future, an even-handed, impartial reckoning with nuclear power is perhaps more important than ever.

High-profile accidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island have helped to make both policymakers and the general public skittish about nuclear energy, despite the fact that the number of combined fatalities from nuclear energy is dwarfed by fatalities caused by fossil fuel-derived energy.

More here.

Kylie Cheung in Salon:

Nearly three years ago, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the U.S. Senate that then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her decades ago. In many ways, her testimony, which became a watershed moment for survivors and women in politics, was able to happen because of the Black woman who had come before her: Anita Hill. A new podcast called “Because of Anita” revisits how in 1991, Hill testified that then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her while she worked for him. Not only did her testimony introduce the concept of workplace sexual harassment into the lexicon, but it had galvanized generations of women, and shined a light on the unique experiences of Black women who seek safety and justice.

“There was an understanding [in 1991] — white women stood for gender, and Black men stood for race,” Cindi Leive, who co-hosts of the podcast along with New York Times cultural critic Dr. Salamishah Tillet, told Salon. “As a Black woman, she was in no woman’s land.  . . . And it was really important for us to foreground that in this podcast.” At the time, it was precisely this limited conception of identity and its intersections that labeled Hill as a “race traitor,” a Black woman playing the part of a white woman for challenging Thomas, who was seen as representing all Black people as a Black man.

That’s why 30 years later, Anita Hill’s story feels more relevant than ever. To examine its impact and gain new insights, the four-part podcast features a conversation between Hill and Dr. Ford, as well as numerous interviews. Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in particular recalls attending the hearing and discusses intersectionality, a term she coined, in relation to Hill’s story and our understanding of it today. Other guests include: journalist Jane Mayer; Kerry Washington, who portrays Hill in “Confirmation”; Carol Moseley Braun, the first Black woman U.S. Senator; Me Too founder Tarana Burke; and a wide range of other expert voices.

More here.

Throwing Away Several Pages of Poetry

They were decent little nuggets
almost. Interesting lumps of ideas,
I think. Stupid, incoherent, nearly
lovable phrases. A few beginnings
and I tossed them away. Threw them
into the invisible heap of rejected things
like a drunk landlord, so sure of himself,
singing Puccini as he goes up the basement
steps after dropping the rent checks
into the coalbin.

Well, now I go back into the basement
to search for them. I’ve come to
wonder what shadow of things
I was trying to find words for; what
form of love was too trivial or sad
to acknowledge. Naked, I nose
into the coalbin, the fine fur
of coal dust slowly settling over me.
I dig through the hunks of black,
concealed fire, and then I think
suddenly — why am I here? why
couldn’t I just forget, just let go,
or why didn’t I save everything,
every word, every crazily valued
bent coin experience? Because,
I hear myself say, there is no
peace, dammit, no real peace.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997

Anil Seth in Nautilus:

I have a childhood memory of looking in the bathroom mirror, and for the first time realizing that my experience at that precise moment—the experience of being me—would at some point come to an end, and that “I” would die. I must have been about 8 or 9 years old, and like all early memories this one too is unreliable. But perhaps it was at this moment that I also realized that if my consciousness could end, then it must depend in some way on the stuff I was made of—on the physical materiality of my body and my brain. It seems to me that I’ve been grappling with this mystery, in one way or another, ever since.

Consciousness won’t be solved in the same way that the human genome was decoded, or the reality of climate change established. Nor will its mysteries suddenly yield to a single Eureka-like insight—a pleasant but usually inaccurate myth about scientific progress. A science of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. I say wetware to underline brains are not just computers made of meat. They are chemical machines as much as they are electrical networks. Every brain that has ever existed has been part of a living body, embedded in and interacting with its environment—an environment which in many cases contains other embodied brains. Explaining the properties of consciousness in terms of biophysical mechanisms requires understanding brains—and conscious minds—as embodied and embedded systems.

This way of thinking leads us to a new conception of what it is to be a self—that aspect of consciousness which for each of us is probably the most meaningful. An influential tradition, dating back at least as far as Descartes, held that non-human animals lacked conscious selfhood because they did not have rational minds to guide their behavior. They were “beast machines”: flesh automatons without the ability to reflect on their own existence.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py1Iw7jET3o

David McDermott Hughes in the Boston Review:

Renewable energy seems set to repeat many of the mistakes of fossil fuels. Though wind and solar power will not degrade the conditions for life on planet earth, the geography and corporate structure of these industries concentrate benefits and exclude communities in the style of Big Oil. The neighbors tend to notice—and to complain. So-called “renewable energy rebels” want a slice of revenues, or wind farms that are smaller or farther away. These “not-in-my-backyard” protests are delaying and blocking projects from Spain to Germany to the United States. To the extent that these movements succeed, they undercut the planet-saving ideal these technologies promised to all of us.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those laws. To hold such a position in a principled way, it’s important to have a clear understanding of “emergence” and when it happens. Anil Seth is a leading researcher in the neuroscience of consciousness, who has also done foundational work (often in collaboration with Lionel Barnett) on what emergence means. We talk about information theory, entropy, and what they have to do with how things emerge.

More here.