Steven G. Kellman at The American Scholar:

The life and work of Stephen Crane derived gravity from brevity. Not one of his novels is much more than a hundred pages long, and they and his short stories strip language to its potent minimum. Crane’s short but prodigious life—he died, of tuberculosis, five months before his 29th birthday—observed the same concision. His hold on the public imagination has also lacked longevity. Crane’s most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is no longer required reading in American schools, and his other greatest hits—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), “The Open Boat” (1897), The Monster (1898), “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), and “The Blue Hotel” (1898)—have fallen out of the cultural conversation.

Novelist Paul Auster aims his new book about Crane at “those who know little or nothing about him,” which, apart from a small cadre of scholars, is the entire species lector americanus. Describing his subject as a “burning boy of rare preciousness who was blocked from entering the fullness of adulthood,” he invites the reader to share his own intense reactions to Crane’s writing and the twists and turns of the man’s abbreviated career.

more here.

Declan Ryan at Poetry Magazine:

“Many of his poems are at best rococo vases of an eighteenth century artificiality, insisted on in our strenuous age though thrones go toppling down.” Such was Harriet Monroe’s verdict on the British writer Walter de la Mare in a review she wrote for Poetry in 1919. Her appraisal echoed several persistent criticisms of de la Mare’s poems: the frequent use of inversion, the decorated lexicon, the never-fashionable attempt to paint a sort of Elfland, and the clinging to the primacy of childhood.

That said, from the time when de la Mare first came to widespread public attention, via his collections The Listeners (1912) and Peacock Pie (1913) and the hugely popular Georgian Poetry anthologies, of which he was a staple, he grew into a lauded—if always defiantly eccentric—figure. He was celebrated by some of the leading (and most skeptical) poets and critics of his era, such as Edward Thomas and Robert Frost.

more here.

Andrew Anthony in The Guardian:

In the wake of bestselling blockbusters such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, that backwater of history – prehistory – has been infused by a surge of popular interest. It’s also proved an area of fertile promise for those who find the established narratives of modernity either constricting or based on false premises or both.

The last point is particularly relevant for the egalitarian-minded. After the catastrophic failure of the Soviet experiment, there were few places left to turn in support of the belief that humanity is at heart cooperative rather than competitive. The notable exception was the pre-agricultural era, those tens of thousands of years in which humans were thought to live in a state of… well, what exactly?

Since the Enlightenment, there have been two conflicting visions of humanity stripped of its civilised trappings. On the one hand, there is Hobbes’s notion of us as predisposed to violence – waging war against each other in a “nasty, brutish and short” existence. On the other, Rousseau’s idyll of prelapsarian innocence, in which humanity led a life of Edenic bliss before being destroyed by the corruptions of society.

Both these understandings of humanity’s roots are manifestly wrong, contend the late anthropologist David Graeber and his co-author, the archaeologist David Wengrow in their new and richly provocative book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. As the title suggests, this is a boldly ambitious work that seems intent to attack received wisdoms and myths on almost every one of its nearly 700 absorbing pages.

More here.

Mandy Nguyen in Vox:

While it can sometimes seem like humanity is hell-bent on environmental destruction, it’s unlikely our actions will end all life on Earth. Some creatures are sure to endure in this age of mass extinction and climate crisis. Over time, they will adapt to a harsher world we’ve helped create, evolving to meet the moment as best they can.

Some of these transformations have gotten underway in our lifetimes. Climate change, some research suggests, is already “shape shifting” animals — shrinking certain migratory birds and speeding up the life cycles of amphibians, for example. No one knows exactly what changes to plants and animals will transpire in the years to come. Still, evolutionary biologists say it’s worth trying to imagine what creatures will evolve in the future.

“I do think it’s a really useful and important exercise,” Liz Alter, professor of evolutionary biology at California State University Monterey Bay, says on the latest episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about unanswered questions in science. In thinking about the animals of the future, Alter says, we must consider how we’re changing the environment now. “It’s a very sobering thing to think about the long future,” she says.

More here.

Girish Shambu at The Current:

The works of great artists have a way of reactivating fundamental questions about the nature and potential of an art form. In the case of filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, these questions revolve around a word that has been used routinely to describe her cinematic style: poetic. Right from the start, her films have quietly suggested that there is an underlying tension in the way we think about cinema and its possibilities. Is poetic style in cinema in opposition to narrative? Do poetry and realism occupy opposite poles?

Few filmmakers have been greeted at the beginnings of their careers with the kind of critical celebration that Ramsay was. Her short films Small Deaths (1995) and Gasman (1997) both won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival; Kill the Day (1996) was awarded the jury prize at the world’s largest festival devoted to short films, held in Clermont-Ferrand, France; and her debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), premiered at Cannes to rapturous reviews. Struck by the thoughtful assurance of her directorial style, critics remarked on how she seemed to have arrived with a distinctive cinematic vision fully formed. At that moment, she was not yet thirty.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCs0Lb6zcR0

Cynthia Haven in Church Life Journal:

Czesław Miłosz, one of the greatest poets and thinkers of the past hundred years, is not generally considered a Californian. But the Polish-Lithuanian Nobel laureate spent four decades in Berkeley—more time than any other single place he lived. His debut collection in America, a short Selected Poems in 1973, was published by a small New York house, Seabury Press. Introduced by Kenneth Rexroth, the collection of about fifty poems included many from Ocalenie, the book that had appeared in Warsaw in 1945.

The translation of the Ocalenie poems in English brought the wartime Polish poet who had been facing an unknown future into the present, and into English, nearly thirty years later when he was a Berkeley professor. In that light, some of the translation choices are revealing: we can see the American poet gently burnishing the man he once was into the man he had become, and the subtle shifts give the translated poems a less elevated, more American idiom.

More here.

Katarina Zimmer in The Scientist:

Tickled by sunlight, life teems at the ocean surface. Yet the influence of any given microbe, plankton, or fish there extends far beyond this upper layer. In the form of dead organisms or poop, organic matter rains thousands of feet down onto the seafloor, nourishing ecosystems, influencing delicate ocean chemistry, and sequestering carbon in the deep sea.

But humanity’s taste for fish may have disrupted some of that cycling, according to new research published today (October 8) in Science Advances. A team of scientists in the US and Canada modeled the historic change in biomass of commercially targeted fish species and their influence on ocean biogeochemical processes. The researchers estimate that before industrial fishing developed around 1900, the fecal matter of these species accounted for around 10 percent of biological material sinking to the seafloor—enough to contribute considerably to carbon sequestration, nutrient fluxes, and ocean chemistry in the deep sea. By 1990, when industrial fish catch peaked, the biomass of exploited species—and their poop’s influence—had fallen by roughly half, with potential knock-on effects on the deep-sea food web.

More here.

Hugo Drochon in Persuasion:

It’s not surprising that the narrative we’ve heard a lot lately is that such theories exploded over the past 18 months. It’s common to see headlines asking why conspiracies are “thriving in the pandemic,” or declaring that we’re “Living in the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories.”

But this is not the whole story. True, we’re hearing a lot about Covid-19 and QAnon-related conspiracies. But just because they are more visible does not mean that belief in them has gone up.

I’ve been doing work with Joseph Uscinski of the University of Miami—the leading specialist studying conspiracies theories—and we’ve carried out a number of studies, assessing whether Covid-19 conspiracy theories have proliferated over the course of the pandemic and whether we’ve seen a general increase in belief in conspiracy theories in the last fifty years. Our paper is currently under review, but our findings may surprise you: Belief in conspiracy theories has, if anything, decreased over the pandemic.

More here.

Rachel Riederer at Harper’s Magazine:

On July 8, 1962, just after 11 pm, the sky over Hawaii turned, in a moment, from black to blazing. Streetlights went out, all at once; radios stopped working. For several minutes, a red orb, edged in purple, surrounding a luminous yellow core, made the night as bright as day. It then dimmed, slowly, receding into color-changing auroras. When these lights faded, they left behind a spectral glow that persisted for hours and could be seen throughout the Pacific.

The United States had just detonated a 1.4-megaton nuclear warhead in space. Launched from the Johnston Atoll, an isolated island that had gone from seabird refuge to seaplane landing base to weapons-testing site, the hydrogen bomb exploded two hundred and fifty miles above the earth’s surface.

more here.

Part of Eve’s Discussion

It was like the moment a bird decides not to eat
… from your hand,
and flies, the moment the rivers seem
… to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no
… storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they
… wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it
… occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin,
… like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were
… about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
… all the time.

by Marie Howe
from Poetry 180
Random House 2003

From NPR:

The dream of animal-to-human transplants — or xenotransplantation — goes back to the 17th century with stumbling attempts to use animal blood for transfusions. By the 20th century, surgeons were attempting transplants of organs from baboons into humans, notably Baby Fae, a dying infant, who lived 21 days with a baboon heart.

With no lasting success and much public uproar, scientists turned from primates to pigs, tinkering with their genes to bridge the species gap. Pigs have advantages over monkeys and apes. They are produced for food, so using them for organs raises fewer ethical concerns. Pigs have large litters, short gestation periods and organs comparable to humans. Pig heart valves also have been used successfully for decades in humans. The blood thinner heparin is derived from pig intestines. Pig skin grafts are used on burns and Chinese surgeons have used pig corneas to restore sight.

In the NYU case, researchers kept a deceased woman’s body going on a ventilator after her family agreed to the experiment. The woman had wished to donate her organs, but they weren’t suitable for traditional donation. The family felt “there was a possibility that some good could come from this gift,” Montgomery said. Montgomery himself received a transplant three years ago, a human heart from a donor with hepatitis C because he was willing to take any organ. “I was one of those people lying in an ICU waiting and not knowing whether an organ was going to come in time,” he said.

Several biotech companies are in the running to develop suitable pig organs for transplant to help ease the human organ shortage. More than 90,000 people in the U.S. are in line for a kidney transplant. Every day, 12 die while waiting.

More here.

From Medical Xpress:

Immunotherapy is a promising strategy to treat cancer by stimulating the body’s own immune system to destroy tumor cells, but it only works for a handful of cancers. MIT researchers have now discovered a new way to jump-start the immune system to attack tumors, which they hope could allow immunotherapy to be used against more types of cancer.

Their novel approach involves removing tumor cells from the body, treating them with chemotherapy drugs, and then placing them back in the tumor. When delivered along with drugs that activate T cells, these injured cancer cells appear to act as a distress signal that spurs the T cells into action.

“When you create cells that have DNA damage but are not killed, under certain conditions those live, injured cells can send a signal that awakens the immune system,” says Michael Yaffe, who is a David H. Koch Professor of Science, the director of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

In mouse studies, the researchers found that this treatment could completely eliminate tumors in nearly half of the mice.

More here.

Sven Birkerts in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Teaching writing, unlike most other kinds of teaching, is an intervention, closer to therapy than to any transmissible instruction. But with all the fussing about craft — anyone who teaches has a personal punch-list — we almost never hear about or get close to the real business, the meld. Maybe because each teacher is different and each interaction draws on a unique set of human variables.

Let me start at the beginning. Bennington MFA: the residency

Day one. The residency begins: greetings all around, the hors d’oeuvres and the better wine laid out in the big cafeteria space. Reminders have been posted and emailed that the first workshop starts tomorrow at one o’clock in the Barn. But really, the whole business has begun already. Because, of course, the student-teacher assignments have been made, and the first workshop packets have been sent to everyone, and it’s a good bet that everyone has read everything in order to suss out the field. Most students have surely Googled their instructor.

More here.

Alexander Hellemans in Quanta:

In an increasingly data-driven world, mathematical tools known as wavelets have become an indispensable way to analyze and understand information. Many researchers receive their data in the form of continuous signals, meaning an unbroken stream of information evolving over time, such as a geophysicist listening to sound waves bouncing off of rock layers underground, or a data scientist studying the electrical data streams obtained by scanning images. These data can take on many different shapes and patterns, making it hard to analyze them as a whole or to take them apart and study their pieces — but wavelets can help.

Wavelets are representations of short wavelike oscillations with different frequency ranges and shapes. Because they can take on many forms — nearly any frequency, wavelength and specific shape is possible — researchers can use them to identify and match specific wave patterns in almost any continuous signal. Because of their wide versatility, wavelets have revolutionized the study of complex wave phenomena in image processing, communication and scientific data streams.

More here.

Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Sheng, a professor of composition at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theater, and Dance, said he was sorry for showing a 1965 film version of Othello, starring Laurence Olivier in blackface, during an undergraduate class last month. In the first apology, sent to students shortly after the class ended, he called the film’s use of blackface “racially insensitive and outdated” and wrote that it was “wrong for me” to show it. He promised they would discuss the issue in the next class. As it turns out, he wouldn’t get that chance.

In an email sent several days later, Sheng again apologized, this time at more length, writing that he did not initially realize the “graveness of my action” and that he “failed to recognize that showing a heavy makeup of a black face in fact has a strong racist content.” But that didn’t stop calls for Sheng, a renowned composer and pianist who was selected as MacArthur fellow in 2001, to be removed from the class.

More here.

June

You stand in the scuffed Box Brownie square,
pretty and slim in your summer shorts,
your Heddy Lemarr hair, in front of a stage-left
parasol somewhere on the Côte d’Azure
between your two young daughters,
like the border guard between rival nations.
All of us squinting in the unfamiliar sun.

The past, they say, is another country,
one I barely remember as I search
our eyes to understand the real story.
I forget what was going on in front of us.
A man waving to his wife from the sea,
perhaps, a barefoot boy in a sombrero
selling sugared almonds on the beach,
children in a pedallo, laughing.

Years later, as you lay
trying to catch your shallow breath
in the summer heat –
the same month as your name,
the same month as your birth –
I sat beside your cot holding
your frail hand in mine
like a child in danger of getting lost –
wanting to tell you,
this is who I am, this has been the story.
That there are no drafts, no proofs
to be corrected, that we do not
get to write it again.

by Sue Hubbard
from: the punch magazine

Jackson Arn at Art in America:

Yet the fact remains that Harold Rosenberg is to the intellectuals of midcentury Manhattan what Andrew McCarthy is to the Brat Pack of 1980s Hollywood—the most minor of the major, the one people may have heard of but couldn’t tell you much about. He wrote for Partisan Review, Commentary, and the other august little magazines that flourished between the rise of the New Deal and the fraying of the New Left. At the time of his death, he’d been the New Yorker’s art critic for twelve years. He knew everyone, sat on all the panels, went to all the parties; he even had an archnemesis in the art critic Clement Greenberg. He proposed daring theories and coined arresting phrases, most of which have been banished to the dustier corners of the library. Still, one good biography is all it would take to get a comeback going.

Instead, he got Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life. Debra Bricker Balken has dug the man up, only to bury him in sentences like “Rosenberg’s sense of ostracism affected him emotionally.”

more here.