Victor David Hanson in City Journal: (Autumn 2001)

From the very first moments of the World Trade Center horror, the valor and élan of New York’s firemen, together with that of the city’s police and emergency forces, have transfixed the whole nation—especially us in rural America who rarely see the real Gotham. Danger was nothing to them, courage and honor everything. They responded instantly to the explosion and fire, all drawn to, rather than repelled by, the inferno—and without regard to their own safety or the consequences of their possible incineration upon their loved ones at home. We now know their last radio cries: “Move away from the towers! Everyone move away from the towers!” Silence. . . .

As the ghastly rubble gets turned over, we find their remains in clusters—four incinerated here, ten buried there, 14 caught en masse in a stairwell, where they had guided the panicked down as they themselves ascended to their deaths: “All nonessential personnel move away from that building!” The antithesis, left unsaid, is obvious: “All necessary rescuers get into that building!”

So many of them disappeared—at least 388 firefighters—because in a heartbeat they chose to race into the flames and smoke rather than to hesitate and accept the obvious: that the towers were already death traps. In the tradition of all great American armies in battle, officers—47 lieutenants, 20 captains, and 21 chiefs—died alongside the rank and file, heroic death requiring no prerequisite of class or color. Indeed, the magnitude of the terrorist-inflicted disaster rivaled that of a fierce battle, where the enemy overruns and annihilates an entire military unit—paramedics, a fire marshal, even the fire department’s chaplain were engulfed. Remarkably, moments after the buildings collapsed, there were even more rescue workers on the scene than before. It is human to flee from a place of death; the firemen and the police were almost inhuman in mounting so quickly the rubble that buried their brethren.

More here.

Linn Washington Jr. in Counterpunch:

These Black heroes of 9/11 valiantly battled terrorism. But the sacrifices of these Black heroes will receive no recognition during the commemorations around America for the 20^th Anniversary of what is considered the most tragic terrorist attack ever conducted on America soil. These heroes, William Parker and his colleagues, confronted terrorists on 9/11 in defense of freedom and liberty – professed pillars of democracy in America. Although badly outnumbered, these Black heroes successfully battled the armed terrorists whose onslaught included threats to employ a weapon of massive destruction. While the anti-terrorism actions of Parker and his band of Black heroes did occur on 9/11 those actions did not occur on ‘that’ 9/11.

The so-called “Christiana Riot” on September 11, 1851, involved Parker and his band battling a group of slave catchers from Maryland who sought return of three Blacks who fled the enslavement of a Methodist minister in Baltimore. The continued failure of America to recognize the contributions of these Black heroes constitutes a tragedy larger than 9/11 itself. This failure to learn from the lessons these Black heroes taught is tied into many of the tribulations that now ravage America domestically and internationally.

Most Americans know nothing about these Black 9/11 heroes, some of whom went on to fight in America’s bloodiest war. Compounding this lack of awareness is the fact that the possibility of more Americans learning about these heroes is now under brutal attack across the country from conservative driven campaigns to kill instructional initiatives to expose institutional racism like Critical Race Theory and the New York Times’ award-winning 1619 Project. Their actions on September 11, 1851, made national news, far beyond the small village of Christiana located about 50-miles west of Philadelphia in what is now Lancaster County. The terrorism that Parker and his band battled in 1851 was the brand of deadly domestic terrorism that predates America’s “War on Terror.”

More here.

Study of Two Pears

….. I
Opsculum Paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

….. II
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.

….. III
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.

….. IV
In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.

….. V
The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges, and greens
Flowering over the skin.

….. VI
The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.

by Wallace Stevens
from News of the Universe
Sierra Club Books, 1995

Sarah Stoller in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

You don’t have to look far in 2021 to come across the celebratory rhetoric of women’s sexual empowerment. Were it not for ongoing reports of sexual harassment and abuse in the wake of the #MeToo movement, it might appear at a glance that we now live in a fully liberated era of sexuality for women, the culmination of decades of feminist progress. In addition to popular new guides to women’s sexual pleasure like OMGyes, recent years have seen the mainstreaming of porn by and for women by figures like Erika Lust; the popularization of sex therapy; the rise of posh, ticketed, women’s-only sex parties; the ongoing proliferation of sex toys for women; and the diversification of sexual pleasure for lesbian, bi, and trans women — all accompanied by an insistence that closing the so-called “orgasm gap” is now within reach.

The declaration that women’s sexuality is no longer secret or shameful has arrived in tandem with the promise that women can, and therefore should, know their desires, declare them proudly, and go about fulfilling them. In a landscape of apparently unbounded opportunities for self-realization and pleasure, it can now seem as though the not-yet-transcendentally-satisfied woman has only herself to blame. And why not?

More here.

Donna Lu in The Guardian:

The remains, belonging to a teenager nicknamed Bessé, were discovered in the Leang Panninge cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Initial excavations were undertaken in 2015.

The discovery, published in the journal Nature, is believed to be the first time ancient human DNA has been discovered in Wallacea, the vast chain of islands and atolls in the ocean between mainland Asia and Australia.

The DNA was extracted from the petrous part of Bessé’s temporal bone, which houses the inner ear.

Griffith University’s Prof Adam Brumm, who co-led the research, said the intact DNA was a rare find.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

In case you find this hard to follow: ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that looked promising against COVID in early studies. Later it started looking less promising, and investigators found that a major supporting study was fraudulent. But by this point it had gotten popular among conspiracy theorists as a suppressed coronavirus cure that They Don’t Want You To Know.

The media has tried to spread the word that the scientific consensus remains skeptical. In the process, they may have gone a little overboard and portrayed it as the world’s deadliest toxin that will definitely kill you and it will all somehow be Donald Trump’s fault. It turned into the latest culture war issue, and now there’s a whole discourse on (for example) how supposedly-sober fact-checkers keep calling it “a horse dewormer” (it is used to deworm horses, but it’s also FDA-approved for humans, but lots of the people using it are buying the horse version), and probably this is hypocritical in some way.

Enter the article above. A doctor named Jason McElyea apparently told local broadcaster KFOR that Oklahoma hospitals are “overwhelmed” with ivermectin poisoning cases, so much so that “gunshot victims” are “left waiting”. Some of the world’s biggest news outlets heard the story and ran with it. The tweet mentions the Rolling Stone version, but the same story, with the same doctor’s testimony, got picked up by The Guardian, the BBC, Yahoo News, etc.

More here.

Rekha Seshadri in Nature:

Close your eyes and imagine stalks of barley and corn waving gently against a butterscotch-coloured sky under the light of Phobos and Deimos — on the ruddy plains of a terraformed Mars! Although this science fiction fantasy has been re-imagined many times in cinema and print, the following recent studies bring this make-believe scenario infinitesimally closer to the realm of credibility. But more urgently, these studies begin to address potential solutions for alleviating pressures arising from agricultural burdens and climate change on our own planet.

Geddes, Paramasivan, Joffrin et al.¹ successfully engineered Medicago trunculata (barrelclover) and Hordeum vulgare (barley, a cereal crop) with a synthetic pathway for bacterial-derived rhizopine, which was exuded into the plant root milieu and functioned as a signal to recruit a rhizopine biosensor-carrying Rhizobium leguminosarum. Engineering crops, cereals in particular, to gain important nutrients such as N₂ without costly and environmentally detrimental fertilizer input is the ‘Holy Grail’ of agronomists, and the study by Geddes et al.¹ proves this goal is achievable. N₂ fixing bacteria or other growth-promoting bacteria could be specifically recruited and induced by engineering plant signalling and control. Also evidenced in this study, a lack of comprehensive functional knowledge of genes that participate in rhizopine metabolism proved an impediment, and considerable effort was expended in elucidating the native bacterial pathway, with partial success. Ultimately, success was achieved with an alternate rationally designed pathway (comprising genes from two different bacterial sources) that was transferred to the plant host with the desired effects.

More here.

Animals

At night a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore
In the slow swell between the rock and the cliff,
Sharp flippers lifted, or great-eyed heads, as they roll in the sea,
Bigger than draft horses, and barking like dogs
Their all-night song. It makes me wonder a little
That life near kin to human, intelligent, hot-blooded, idle and
… singing, can float at ease
In the ice-cold midwinter water. Then, yellow dawn
Colors the south, I think about the rapid and furious lives
… in the sun:
They have little to do with ours; they have nothing to do with
… oxygen and salted water; they would look monstrous
If we could see them : the beautiful passionate bodies of living
… flame, batlike flapping and screaming,
Tortured with burning lust and acute awareness, that ride the
… storm-tides
Of the great fire-globe. They are animals as we are. There are
… many other chemistries of animal life
Besides the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and amino-acids.

by Robinson Jeffers
from News of the Universe—
… Poems of Twofold Consciousness chosen by Robert Bly
Sierra Club Books, 1995

Samuel Moyn at Lit Hub:

It would take Tolstoy some time to sound the alarm that humanitarianism could entrench war. On the way to doing so, he had one of his most famous characters embrace the inverse proposition: brutality can make it rare.

“One thing I would do if I had the power,” Prince Andrei, the debonair and reflective leading man of War and Peace, declares, “I would not take prisoners.” It comes to the hero as an epiphany: if in battle an enemy soldier were captured, or if he laid down his arms and surrendered, it should not save him from death. No one today thinks it is permissible to kill enemies in war summarily when they are captured or surrender. In fact, to do so is today a gross war crime. How could Andrei take a position that would have made even the worst counselors of inhumanity in recent American wars—George W. Bush’s lawyers, who exempted the country precisely from rules about how to treat captives—blanch?

more here.

Yiyun Li at The Paris Review:

Books that I feel drawn to and reread, War and Peace among them, are full of uncommon sense and common nonsense. (Uncommon nonsense makes exhilarating literature, too, in Lewis Carroll’s case, but uncommon nonsense does better to stay uncommon: in less skillful hands, it becomes caprice or parody.)

One imagines that Tolstoy did not seek to write about uncommon sense. He simply presented the world, and the world, looked at closely, is often extraordinary. A line I never tire of in War and Peace: “The transparent sounds of hooves rang out on the planks of the bridge.”

Colors are regularly described as “muted” or “loud,” but sounds that are transparent make a reader pause. The ringing hooves take me back to my early childhood in Beijing, where cars were scarce, and flatbed horse trailers passed in the street, carrying coal, lumber, produce, and sometimes people huddled together.

more here.

Stan Carey in Sentence first:

It’s a truism that language is integral to identity. So when our relationship with it changes, complications quickly accrue: Do we become someone different in another tongue? Is that all down to culture and context, or is there something inherent in a language that affects who we feel ourselves to be? And what happens when we start our lives speaking one language but then switch to another?

These are among the questions explored, with heart and rigour, in Julie Sedivy’s new book, Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self (available October 2021 from Harvard University Press, who sent me a copy). Sedivy was born in the former Czechoslovakia and spoke only Czech until the age of two. At that point her family left the country, then the continent, and her linguistic environment was transformed.

More here.

Max G. Levy in Quanta:

Imagine two friends hiking in the woods. They grow hungry and decide to split an apple, but half an apple feels meager. Then one of them remembers one of the strangest ideas she’s ever encountered. It’s a mathematical theorem involving infinity that makes it possible, at least in principle, to turn one apple into two.

That argument is called the Banach-Tarski paradox, after the mathematicians Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski, who devised it in 1924. It proves that according to the fundamental rules of mathematics, it’s possible to split a solid three-dimensional ball into pieces that recombine to form two identical copies of the original. Two apples out of one.

“Right away, one sees that it’s completely counterintuitive,” said Dima Sinapova of the University of Illinois, Chicago.

More here.

Eric Schmidt in Project Syndicate:

The world is only starting to grapple with how profound the artificial-intelligence revolution will be. AI technologies will create waves of progress in critical infrastructure, commerce, transportation, health, education, financial markets, food production, and environmental sustainability. Successful adoption of AI will drive economies, reshape societies, and determine which countries set the rules for the coming century.

This AI opportunity coincides with a moment of strategic vulnerability. US President Joe Biden has said that America is in a “long-term strategic competition with China.” He is right. But it is not only the United States that is vulnerable; the entire democratic world is, too, because the AI revolution underpins the current contest of values between democracy and authoritarianism. We must prove that democracies can succeed in an era of technological revolution.

More here.

You can also watch Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

Alice Albinia in The Guardian:

Throughout history, the idea of islands where women rule has been part mythological wish fulfilment, part male fantasy – and part cultural-geographical reality. In 2017 I moved to Orkney, an archipelago still dominated, as all of Britain once was, by its monumental neolithic architecture. Early one spring morning I visited the chambered cairn of Maeshowe, which is older than Stonehenge and much more complex in construction. Originally a circle of standing stones, around 2800BC it was encased in huge slabs of rock, making a domed chamber aligned to the setting winter solstice sun. Five thousand years later, on any clear evening a few weeks either side of solstice, as the sun goes down behind the hill of a nearby island, it hits the top of a standing stone, and is channelled into Maeshowe in a burst of golden light. It is a sacred moment in Britain’s year: when nature and culture collide, exploding out of winter’s darkness in a dramatic symbol of warmth and hope.

We were there to experiment with neolithic acoustics. Kristin Linklater, an Orcadian voice coach, crawled down Maeshowe’s entrance passage first, followed by me and my baby daughter, an archaeologist or two, musicians and students. Inside the central chamber, we stood up and began to sing. Kristin and I had already discussed our fascination with Maeshowe’s shape, which, with its green turf covering, looks like a giant grassy breast or pregnant womb. Together, we had enjoyed deploring the fact that the female symbolism of this monument receives little if any mention in academic literature, let alone tourist guidebooks. Yet it is just as likely that structures such as Maeshowe were designed to honour the female body as a safehouse of human potency in the world, as they were to serve a male elite priesthood.

More here.

Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic:

“It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length.”

So begins the tale of Hester Prynne, as recounted in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. As readers of this classic American text know, the story begins after Hester gives birth to a child out of wedlock and refuses to name the father. As a result, she is sentenced to be mocked by a jeering crowd, undergoing “an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.” After that, she must wear a scarlet A—for adulterer—pinned to her dress for the rest of her life. On the outskirts of Boston, she lives in exile. No one will socialize with her—not even those who have quietly committed similar sins, among them the father of her child, the saintly village preacher. The scarlet letter has “the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.”

We read that story with a certain self-satisfaction: Such an old-fashioned tale! Even Hawthorne sneered at the Puritans, with their “sad-colored garments and grey steeple-crowned hats,” their strict conformism, their narrow minds and their hypocrisy. And today we are not just hip and modern; we live in a land governed by the rule of law; we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.

More here.

William Hasselberger at The New Atlantis:

To be even remotely plausible, a computer model of the human mind must warp — and restrict — our commonsense definitions of intelligence, knowledge, understanding, and action. Larson discusses the renowned computer scientist Stuart Russell, who defines intelligence as simply the efficient pursuit of objectives, based on inputs from the environment. An “intelligent agent,” says Russell, is just a physical “process” whereby a “stream of perceptual inputs is turned into a stream of actions” to achieve a predefined “objective.” As Larson wryly notes, this definition “covers everything from Einstein ‘achieving’ his ‘objective’ when he reimagined physics as relativity, to a daisy turning its face toward the sun.” It places intelligent human activity on the same spectrum as Venus fly traps and shrimp; the difference is merely a matter of complexity.

Among other things, this ignores the reflective aspect of human intelligence — how we discover, imagine, question, and commit to our objectives in the first place, the judgments we make about which objectives really matter in life, and which are trivialities, distractions, irrational cravings.

more here.

Gary Dorrien at Commonweal:

“We never said the welfare state is a substitute for socialism.” This staple of Harrington’s lecture tours had a flipside, his retort to old-school socialists: “Any idiot can nationalize a bank.” He said both things frequently after Mitterrand retreated. Harrington relied on his core message: bureaucratic collectivism is an unavoidable reality. The question is whether it can be wrested into a democratic and ethically decent form. Freedom will survive the ascendance of globalized markets and corporations only if it achieves economic democracy. Harrington had long argued that the market should operate within a plan, but in the mid-1980s his actual position shifted to the opposite. He conceived planning within a market framework on the model of Swedish and German social democracy—solidarity wages, full employment, co-determination, and collective worker funds. To many critics that smacked of selling out socialism. He replied: “To think that ‘socialization’ is a panacea is to ignore the socialist history of the twentieth century, including the experience of France under Mitterrand. I am for worker- and community-controlled ownership and for an immediate and practical program for full employment which approximates as much of that ideal as possible. No more. No less.”

more here.