Frans de Waal in The New York Times:

One of the greatest physicists of the last century, Paul Dirac, had no use for emotions. “My life is mainly concerned with facts, not feelings,” he declared. He loved his emotion-free existence, or so it seemed, until he met a vivacious woman who was his exact opposite — impulsive and ardent. She became his wife and not only made him a happy man but also dramatically changed his personality. He became a feeling human being, which in turn affected his science. Yes, physics! If being logical and rational were all that mattered, we wouldn’t need actual physicists. The job could be done by computers. Later in life, Dirac became so convinced that knowledge needs to be combined with intuitions, crazy hunches and irrational perseverance that whenever he was asked about the secret to his success, he stressed that one needs to be guided above all by one’s emotions.

Dirac’s case is one of many examples offered by Leonard Mlodinow in his latest book, which treats the mental impact of the emotions. To get an eloquent reminder of this impact is timely, given the stream of recent books paying one-sided attention to rationality and knowledge. We celebrate logic and reasoning and disparage the emotions, which we find too close to our bodies — those flawed vessels of flesh and blood that carry us around and bother us with irresistible needs and urges. The “flesh is weak,” we say. Throughout history, great (male) thinkers have argued that while animals (and women) run after their emotions and impulses, the human mind is at its noblest when it transcends these. They proudly declared “man” the only rational being on the planet.

More here.

Dwight Garner at the NYT:

Zora Neale Hurston’s best-known sentence, judging by its appearance on coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets, is this one: “No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

As distillations of her sensibility go, that’s not terrible.

Hurston’s books, which include the classic novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937) and the memoir “Dust Tracks on a Road” (1942), are earthy, packed with rough pleasures, wide in their human sympathies and in close contact with the ebullience that can touch the margins of everyday existence.

What’s interesting about the “oyster knife” comment, read in context — it appeared in her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” — is how expressive it is of her political views, which were heterodox. Were she living now, she might have a Substack.

more here.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

W. B. Yeats – 1865-1939

Chad Orzel in Forbes:

A couple of months ago, when I gave a talk about my forthcoming book A Brief History of Timekeeping, for the Physics and Astronomy colloquium at Union, I titled it “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” This was done largely as a nod to the title of a Chicago song that I’m just old enough to remember (a reference that went over the heads of some younger faculty…), but also in full awareness of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.

If you’re not familiar with it, and are too lazy to click on the link, this is the joke “Law” that any time an article has a headline in the form of a question, the expected answer to the question is “No.” So I used that title specifically to set up an answer in the negative— that, in fact, nobody really knows what time it is.

That might seem like a strange thing to do, especially as I’ve written an entire book exploring several thousand years of the human obsession with timekeeping, and have been banging on about it on this blog for the last couple of months as well. As a matter of fundamental physics, though, it’s absolutely true— not because we’re not good at building clocks (this is, in fact, something we’re exceptionally good at), but because “What time is it?” is not, in fact, a well-formed question with a single definitive answer.

More here.

John Timmer in Ars Technica:

Right from omicron’s first description, researchers were concerned about its variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Looking over the list of mutations it carried, scientists could identify a number that would likely make the variant more infectious. Other mutations were even more worrying, as they would likely interfere with the immune system’s ability to recognize the virus, allowing it to pose a risk to those who had been vaccinated or suffered from previous infections.

Buried in the subtext of these worries was a clear implication: scientists could simply look at the sequence of amino acids in the spike protein of a coronavirus and get a sense of how well the immune system would respond to it.

That knowledge is based on years of studying how the immune system operates, combined with a lot of specific information regarding its interactions with SARS-CoV-2. What follows is a description of these interactions, along with their implications for viral evolution and present and future variants.

More here.

Paris Marx in The Wire:

Silicon Valley has no shortage of big ideas for transportation. In their vision of the future, we’ll hail driverless pods to go short distances  – we may even be whisked into a network of underground tunnels that will supposedly get us to our destinations more quickly – and for intercity travel, we’ll switch to pods in vacuum tubes that will shoot us to our destination at 760 miles (1,220 km) per hour.

However, these fantasies of wealthy tech CEOs are just that: fantasies. None of these technologies will come to fruition in the way they promise  –  if they ever become a reality at all. The truth is that the technologies we need to transform our transportation networks already exist, but Americans have been stuck with a dated, auto-dependent system for so long while being denied the technology of the present  –  let alone the future  –  by politicians who are in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby and addicted to a damaging “free market” ideology that they’ll believe any snake oil salesman — or wealthy entrepreneur  –  who comes along with a solution.

More here.

More here.

“They will keep coming back to the same swamp each winter until it’s clean-
and then leave their bones among the cedars.”   -Durward L. Allen

I Lie Down

I wait in the woods,
I stand still as a white cedar
and hold my hands out
like branches until branches
sprout from my ribcage.

I stand still like this and wait
until the deer come to strip
my lower limbs clean down
to my furrowed bark.

I lie down here by the copper-
colored water until it blooms
white and thickens, then greys
and turns to ice.

I lie down in this silent clearing
and slow my heart to barely beating
until vines grow around my damp
and greening body.

The deer cross and recross animal
paths to return under bluer skies
and in this way, grasses will grow
and insect my clothing.

They come and go and I lay my
body down, dumbstruck.

by Liane Tyrrel
from the Echotheo review

H W Brands in The Guardian:

Barbara Walter does not expect to see a civil war in the US of the order of the conflict that tore the nation apart in the 1860s, but that’s chiefly because civil wars are fought differently these days. And it’s about the only comfort a concerned reader can take from this sobering account of how civil wars start and are conducted in our time. Walter is a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego, and a consultant to various government and international agencies. She has studied civil wars and insurgencies for three decades, and iIn this book she draws on her own work and that of other researchers to produce a typology of the descent into organised domestic violence.

The key concept is that of “anocracy”, a transition stage of government between autocracy and democracy. The transition can be made in either direction, and it is during the transition that most civil wars erupt. Autocracies possess sufficient powers of repression to keep potential insurgents in check; democracies allow dissidents means to effect change without resorting to violence. But when autocracies weaken, repression can fail, and when democracies ossify, the release valves get stuck.

More here.

From IFL Science:

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is almost always a delayed response to infection with the Epstein-Barr virus, a study of 10 million former military personnel in the US indicates. The findings could provide clues on how to treat the disease – which is hallmarked by the immune system attacking the myelin sheath that protects the brain and spinal nerves – and raise the urgency of preventing the common virus in the first place. More broadly, it serves as a reminder that even when people appear asymptomatic or recover quickly from viral infections, there can be serious consequences down the track.

The Epstein-Barr virus is part of the herpes family of double-stranded DNA viruses. Its high transmissibility through kissing, spitting, or sharing food means the overwhelming majority of the population has been infected by their late 20s. Its most common effect is infectious mononucleosis, better known as glandular fever, which can leave people feeling exhausted for weeks and, in rarer cases damage the liver or spleen.

More here.

Jack Miles at the LARB:

As an undergraduate, Francesca Stavrakopoulou observed to her theology professor that “lots of biblical texts suggest that God is masculine, with a male body,” and was told, to her evident frustration, that these texts were metaphorical, or poetic. “We shouldn’t get too distracted by references to his body,” her professor asserted, because to do so would be “to engage too simplistically with the biblical texts.” Anything but distracted by biblical references to God’s body, Stavrakopoulou is aesthetically entranced by them and programmatically attentive to their iconographic and literary contexts, from ancient Southwest Asia in the fourth millennium BCE to Christian and Jewish Europe as late as the 16th century. Her work, true to its subtitle, is anatomically organized into five parts plus an epilogue: I, “Feet and Legs”; II, “Genitals”; III, “Torso”; IV, “Arms and Hands”; V, “Head.” Each of these five major parts comprises three or four chapters, and each chapter has its own fresh emphasis and coherence. “Head,” for example, has separate chapters for ears, nose, and mouth.

more here.

Anne M. Wagner at nonsite:

To think about the semantics of Smith’s work is above all to consider the labor that went into it, in the process informing how it was made. In this regard Smith’s story is well known. He famously welded steel, but also bent, pierced and cut it, lifted and placed it, often singlehandedly; in other words, he worked steel and iron directly, rather than turning to assistants to do the heavy lifting his art required.1 Yet despite Smith’s commitment to the bodily labor of making, the materials and procedures he used were then, and still remain, those of the military-industrial complex as famously defined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.2 The artist, then aged 55, was only four years from his death. He learned to weld in the 1930s while employed by the auto industry, working for Studebaker, and a decade later made use of those same skills on a Schenectady (NY) assembly line, where he was as crucial as every other human cog in the effort to manufacture tanks for use in World War II.

more here.

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

Novak Djokovic, the world’s top-ranking tennis player, has just been granted a medical exemption to take part in the Australian Open. Djokovic, who has won the event nine times (one more victory would give him a record-breaking 21 major titles), refused to show proof of vaccination, which is required to enter Australia. “I will not reveal my status whether I have been vaccinated or not,” he told Blic, a Serbian daily, calling it “a private matter and an inappropriate inquiry.”

The family of Dale Weeks, who died last month at the age of 78, would disagree. Weeks was a patient at a small hospital in rural Iowa, being treated for sepsis. The hospital sought to transfer him to a larger hospital where he could have surgery, but a surge in COVID-19 patients, almost all of them unvaccinated, meant that there were no spare beds. It took 15 days for Weeks to obtain a transfer, and by then, it was too late.

Weeks became another of the many indirect victims of COVID-19 – people who never had the virus, but died because others who did were taking up scarce health-care resources, especially beds in intensive care units.

More here.

Katie Surma in Undark:

The British lawyer is flush with energy, despite being at the tail end of a week-long visit with clients on the island nation of Mauritius. His casual black jacket, navy blue scarf, and black boots give him the appearance of a relaxed college professor. But his furrowed face and sharp gaze are those of a man who sees the world with a certain type of intensity.

He greets his colleague, an arts executive, with an elbow bump and they hurry to grab a taxi. Sands, a dark-haired, 61-year-old with a salt and pepper beard, high forehead, and gray-green eyes, has come to speak about his latest book, “The Ratline,” and to give two lectures on what he hopes will become the first international crime since 1945: ecocide.

His lectures are part of a global campaign, led by Stop Ecocide International, to make acts of mass environmental destruction a crime within the purview of the International Criminal Court, which has a mandate to investigate and prosecute individuals who otherwise would evade accountability after committing the most serious crimes of concern to humanity at large.

More here.

Kenneth Roth in Foreign Policy:

The conventional wisdom these days is that autocracy is ascendant and democracy is on the decline. But the superficial appeal of the rise-of-autocracy thesis belies a more complex reality—and a bleaker future for autocrats. As people see that unaccountable rulers prioritize their own interests over the public’s, the popular demand for rights-respecting democracy remains strong.

In country after country—Myanmar, Sudan, Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, Poland, Uganda, even Kazakhstan before protests seemed to have been hijacked by a governmental power struggle—large numbers of people have recently taken to the streets, even at the risk of being arrested or shot. There are few rallies for autocratic rule.

In some countries that retain at least a semblance of democratic elections despite the leader’s autocratic tendencies, opposition political parties have begun to paper over their policy differences to build alliances in pursuit of their common interest in ousting the ruler.

More here.

Two Poems

I.

With Black William

Half Lab and half Golden Retriever, at the percolation ponds
He is learning he likes the water and stands in it
up to his chest, snaps three times at the midges, then
erupts up the bank in a great larruping horsey gallop
surrounded for a moment by a fine thin silvery screen
of water curved like the battle shields of the Assyrians.

II.

sunlight sifts through the gray morning clouds and slides
across the water   when it reaches the shore it scampers up
the trees to meet itself coming down   this happens
despite the inwardness of the man looking out the window,
despite the black of the universe surrounding all.

by Nils Peterson

Benjamin Kunkel in BookForum:

DWINDLING ENLISTMENT AMONG STUDENTS and deteriorating market share among consumers; confusion as to immediate method and cloudiness as to ultimate mission. . . . Professors of literature have good reason to feel insecure about the status of literature and literary scholarship. And, like many an insecure person, the discipline of literary studies has grown increasingly interested in and respectful of popular taste as its own popularity has declined. Between the Great Recession and 2019, the number of undergrads majoring in English shrank by more than a quarter, and it’s difficult to imagine the pandemic has reversed the trend. Meanwhile, over approximately the same dozen years, professors in English and other literature departments have more and more bent their attention away from the real or alleged masterpieces that formed the staple of literature courses ever since the consolidation of English as a field of study in the 1930s, and toward more popular or ordinary fare. Sometimes the new objects of study are popular books in that they belong to previously overlooked or scorned genres of “popular fiction,” such as crime novels, sci-fi, or horror: this is popularity from the standpoint of consumption. And sometimes they are popular books in the different sense that they are written, in huge quantities, by authors with few if any readers, whatever the genre of their work: this is popularity from the standpoint of production.

More here.

Sara Morrison in Vox:

A few days after the Capitol insurrection last January, the FBI got two tips identifying an Ohio man named Walter Messer as a participant, and both cited his social media posts about being there. To verify those tips, the FBI turned to three companies that held a large amount of damning evidence against Messer, simply as a result of his normal use of their services: AT&T, Facebook, and Google. AT&T gave the FBI Messer’s telephone number and a list of cell sites he used, including one that covered the US Capitol building at the time of the insurrection, per the criminal complaint against Messer. Facebook told the FBI that the phone number provided by AT&T was linked to Messer’s Facebook account, where he posted several selfies from inside the Capitol during the riot.

Google gave the FBI precise location data showing Messer’s journey from Ohio to DC and back again between January 5 and 7, as well as his location on the afternoon of January 6 as he wandered around and ultimately inside the Capitol building. The complaint also lists videos of the riot posted on Messer’s YouTube channel, Messer’s YouTube searches, internet searches, and emails from his Gmail account — all used to help build a case against him.

More here.