John Keay at Literary Review:

From St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, a lane once led through fields up to a small patch of grass. In the centre of this green, where formerly stood a stake, there is now a stone slab engraved: ‘in memory of those accused of witchcraft’. Convicted at trials held in the cathedral, the condemned were marched up the lane with hands bound, lashed to the stake and then ‘wyrried’ – that is strangled to death by the public executioner – and burned to ash. Other forms of execution were available; common criminals and traitors might also be wyrried but not reduced to ashes. Burning, however, was ‘cheust’ – ‘just’ – for witches. Yet the witches were otherwise quite undistinguished: ‘they wur cheust folk’ declares the slab’s main inscription in suitably Orcadian spelling. 

The memorial is new and was the idea of a local heritage group. In Storm’s Edge, an engrossing and near-faultless book about ‘life, death and magic’ in Orkney between the 16th and 18th centuries, Peter Marshall, professor of history at Warwick University and himself an Orcadian, endorses the slab’s sentiments.

more here.

Nik Popli in Time Magazine:

There’s no state that political pundits will be watching more closely this fall than Arizona. Voters in one of the nation’s biggest electoral battlegrounds are set to determine the outcome of a tossup Senate race, a pair of close congressional seats, and the winner of its 11 Electoral College votes—and now a recent court ruling has ensured abortion will be an animating issue at the ballot box. After the state Supreme Court decided on Tuesday to bring back a 160-year-old near total ban on the procedure, Arizona has effectively been thrust into the center of the national abortion debate that is expected to dominate the upcoming presidential election and once again test Republicans’ messaging strategy after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

“I don’t think it can be overstated the impact this week’s ruling will have on the November election,” says Barrett Marson, an Arizona-based Republican strategist who predicts the key battleground state now leans blue. “Everything that you thought was conventional wisdom about Arizona was thrown out the window overnight.” Democrats have already seized on the ruling to transform the 2024 race into another referendum on abortion rights, blaming former President Donald Trump for overturning the constitutional right to abortion and encouraging disaffected Democrats in the state to turn out in November.

More here.

McKenzie Prillaman in Nature:

It was hailed as a potentially transformative technique for measuring brain activity in animals: direct imaging of neuronal activity (DIANA), held the promise of mapping neuronal activity so fast that neurons could be tracked as they fired. But nearly two years on from the 2022 Science paper¹, no one outside the original research group and their collaborators have been able to reproduce the results. Now, two teams have published a record of their replication attempts — and failures. The studies, published on 27 March in Science Advances^2,3, suggest that the original results were due to experimental error or data cherry-picking, not neuronal activity after all.

…It’s clear that the signals DIANA detects are “not necessarily related to neural signal”, says Shella Keilholz, an MRI physicist and neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Although, she says, it’s possible that brain activity contributed to the detected signals. Neuroscientists will continue to explore the cause of the conflicting results. And that could have an upside, says Noam Shemesh, an MRI researcher at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon. The original paper and attempts to replicate or rebut it could lead researchers towards developing and finessing more-direct ways to measure neural activity, he says.

More here.

Squarings

xxxvii

In famous poems by the sage Han Shan,
Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean
A state of mind. Or different states of mind

At different times, for the poems seem
One-off, impulsive, the kind of thing that starts
I have sat here facing the Cold Mountain

For twenty-nine years, or There is no path
That goes all the way—enviable stuff,
Unfussy and believable.

Talking about it isn’t good enough,
But quoting from it at least demonstrates
The virtue of an art that knows its mind.

by Seamus Heaney
from Seeing Things
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY

Amy Herzog at Film Quarterly:

Glazer’s decision to only use hidden cameras, without any artificial lighting, creates formal limitations and challenges. But the images retain an intense tactility: patterns on fabrics, the pull of harshly parted and pinned hair, fuzz on a bee that circles a blossom, the softness of a dog’s muzzle, the glint of light reflected from an extracted human tooth. Close-ups punctuate longer observational takes, asserting the specificity of the surfaces that define this moment. The measured pacing of The Zone of Interest strikes me as distinct from the slow cinema tradition, where duration typically serves as a thematic focus. Instead, the length of the shots serves the function of extending the overarching tension. Glazer’s long takes are often paired with an uncomfortable intensity in the soundscape (perhaps the sonic analogue to an uncomfortable close-up), making these moments less an invitation to haptic reverie than an overwhelming of the senses. Suspense, tension, and a nauseating realization about what remains unseen dominate the affect, increased by the long takes that never fully reveal or resolve. The impact feels similar to the way the mind retains a vividly detailed image of a mundane moment preceding a traumatic event that itself can’t be fully recalled.

more here.

Lauren Michele Jackson and Maggie Nelson at The New Yorker:

We have a sense, I think, of the false border sequestering art from theory. And so to remark on Maggie Nelson’s facility in mating the two is to say the least about how she does so—which is with a hurtling gusto that nonetheless invites us to pause and think. For this, her books are beloved by audiences with varying attachments to the categories that are often, imperfectly, applied to what they are reading: “memoir,” “art criticism,” “poetry,” “queer theory,” “feminism.” This is one way of saying that describing Nelson’s writing can be harder than consuming it, as one of its defining features involves unfurling the shorthand that governs—literally and figuratively—so much of our lives, including the terms we use to identify ourselves.

Nelson was raised in Northern California and moved to New York after college. While there, in the nineties, she became immersed, academically and recreationally, in the rad ideation in literature, theory, and art of the times, and was guided by her daring predecessors: the poet and novelist Eileen Myles, the artist and writer Wayne Koestenbaum, and the critic and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

more here.

Craig Lambert in Harvard Magazine:

In 1968, Stephen Bergman ’66, M.D. ’73, was driving through the desert in Morocco on a dead-straight road. At one point, he noticed the sun going down directly in front of him while the moon was rising behind. “I had never seen anything like that on Earth,” he recalls.

The sunset/moonrise moment seemed an epiphany, “a sign,” he says, that the symmetries and mysteries of the world, which art echoes, were, for him, life at its richest. Somehow it seemed to validate his innate wish to be a writer, although at that time, Bergman’s actual writing “was too precious to show anyone,” he says. Still, “an adventure had shown itself to me. I loved feeling free of all these damn schools I had spent my life in.”

Even so, Bergman scarcely imagined himself becoming one of the world’s most widely read authors. A decade hence, his first novel, The House of God, on his internship at a Boston hospital, appeared under the pen name “Samuel Shem.” Over time it built a vast global readership that continues even today, with more than 2 million copies sold and translations available in all the world’s major languages.

More here.

Dan Gardner in PastPresentFuture:

Daniel Kahneman died last week at the age of 90. His legacy is immense. He was, as he put it, the “grandfather” of behavioural economics — think economics but with a realistic model of what a human is — a role which won him a Nobel Prize. But Kahneman’s legacy is bigger than that. Kahneman and Tversky changed how we think about how people think, and if you change that, you change everything. You can see their influence all across the social sciences and much of the humanities.

But this is not a remembrance of Daniel Kahneman, whose endorsement of two of my books will forever be a professional highlight. There are many, lovely reflections on Kahneman as a man and scholar. I recommend Daniel Engber’s appreciation of Kahneman’s willingness to say those three simple words, “I was wrong.”

This post is about complexity.

More here.

William H. Janeway at Project Syndicate:

The detective in a typical British crime procedural would say that Mordecai Kurz “has got form.” An emeritus professor at Stanford University, Kurz received his doctorate in economics from Yale University more than 60 years ago. In 1970, he co-authored a book with Kenneth J. Arrow, a soon-to-be Nobel laureate in economics and among the greatest cross-over mathematician-social scientists ever.

Kurz would go on to establish a distinctive platform for criticizing John Muth and Robert Lucas’s rational expectations hypothesis, demonstrating with rigor that any number of models could be mapped to the historical statistical record to reveal a spectrum of alternative “rational beliefs.” And now, in his book The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age, he brings the same rigor to bear on the question of what shapes income growth and the distribution of wealth in an economy driven by privately owned technological innovations.

Kurz’s theory of “technological market power” distinguishes legally sanctioned monopolies based on innovation from illegal conspiracies that restrain trade.

More here.

NOTE: The previous video (Chap. 5) about transformers is here.

Exit Strategy

Tell me there is a way to believe it all,
an exit strategy with groggy murmurs
of nothing but rest and a quiet universe.

All I can think of is my child, asleep
in bed, dealing with whatever birthright
his dreams afford his fears, waiting to wake.

Sometimes I feel like Kepler, poised to inherit
pages of wrinkled data, but grumbling,
What a holy-fucking mess Tycho left behind.

Under the surface of the crowd’s rumble
is a song. We could have danced, you know,
to the how-not-why of these perfect heartbeats.

It’s true. You’ve not been asked to understand.
You’ve been asked to listen, and work it out.

by George Murray
from The Rush Here
Nightwood Editions, 2007

From Time Magazine:

An estimated 30% of people who received the COVID-19 vaccine also reported nasty side effects. Making matters worse, like a nightmarish self-fulfilling prophecy, the very words used by clinicians might well have caused some of this harm. Of course, doctors and nurses do not deliberately set out to hurt patients—far from it. They want to ensure that patients are fully informed. However, as our research shows, their words might unintentionally ramp up the effects of a psychological phenomenon that operates under the radar. This phenomenon is called the “nocebo effect.”

Characterized as the “evil-twin” of the placebo effect, nocebo effects are harms that arise from negative expectations. While placebo effects are those beneficial outcomes that arise when we expect to feel better and, as a result, do, nocebo effects are what happen when we expect to feel worse.

More here.

Alejandra Manjarrez in The Scientist:

Hematopoietic stem cells give rise to all blood cells in the body. Most of the time they are not dividing. Rather, they serve as a reserve for the times when the body needs rapid blood formation. “One of the reasons why we have this kind of cellular Swiss bank account [is to protect] the cellular integrity,” said Britta Will, a stem cell biologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Each cell division may harm the cells’ DNA and other macromolecules, so the very demanding task of daily blood cell production is instead accomplished by more committed descendants, namely progenitor blood cells that can differentiate into specific cell types.

As individuals age, this cellular bank is not as readily available as in youth; the capacity of blood stem cells to self-renew declines. This reduced ability to replenish diverse blood cell types may result in impaired immune surveillance and contribute to the development of aging-associated cancers or other degenerative diseases. In a study published in Cell Stem Cell, Will and her colleagues showed that young mouse hematopoietic stem cells tightly regulate iron homeostasis to keep intracellular iron levels low, a capacity which may be lost during aging.¹ Furthermore, when researchers subjected them to additional iron restriction by using iron chelators, these cells activated a molecular response that is linked to their regenerative capacity. A treatment for intermittently removing excess iron in mice over the course of 13 months prevented the age-associated decline in these cells’ function.

More here.

Jonathan Chatwin in the Asian Review of Books:

Eric Arthur Blair once wrote that he was born into the “lower-upper-middle class”, having cachet but no capital. His father had been a sub-deputy opium agent in India, where Blair was born in 1903; his French mother was the daughter of a Burmese teak merchant. He attended Wellington, briefly, and then Eton—but with fees taken care of as a King’s Scholar. He was, he wrote later, relatively happy at Eton, but he recalls his prep school, St Cyprian’s, with something close to loathing in his essay “Such, Such Were The Joys”—a place where he was constantly reminded of his “lower-upper-middle class” status: one boy, having queried Blair as to his father’s income, told him with “amused contempt” that his father earned over two hundred times as much money.

Once he had finished school, Blair—dubbed by Martin Amis an “auto-contrarian”—decided not to progress to Oxford or Cambridge, but instead to turn towards Empire—where plenty of men with indistinct class backgrounds managed to refashion themselves.

More here.

Jonathan Haidt in After Babel:

Odgers recently stated the skeptics’ case in an essay in Nature titled The Great Rewiring: Is Social Media Really Behind an Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness? The essay offered a critique of my recent book, The Anxious Generation. Odgers’ primary criticism is that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.”  She also warns that my ringing of a false alarm “might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people,” which, she suggests, are social ills such as racism, economic hardship, and the lingering impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its disparate impact on children in low SES families.

In this response essay, I’ll present the two main problems I see with the skeptics’ approach, as exemplified in Odgers’ review:

1. 1. Odgers is wrong to say that I have no evidence of causation
   2. Odgers’ alternative explanation does not fit the available facts.

More here.

Darrin M. McMahon in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Equity has become a familiar term on American college campuses in recent years, as well as a flashpoint in the nation’s culture wars. Centers for teaching and learning embrace it, as do institutes and education schools promoting “inclusive excellence” and “equity in higher education.” Meanwhile, diversity, equity, and inclusion offices have multiplied to such an extent that they have generated a reaction: Conservative politicians now seek to close them, and many on the right treat “equity” as a trigger word, progressive code for a litany of menacing ideas, including quotas and critical race theory, which emanate, they charge, from America’s “woke” colleges.

But what does “equity” really mean, and when and why did it emerge as a contemporary key word?

More here.

Martha Bayles at The Hedgehog Review:

If the Poetics, Aristotle’s treatise on the subject of tragedy, is rarely studied today, it is largely because the French Neoclassicists of the seventeenth century turned Aristotle’s descriptions of Greek tragedy into prescriptions. Finessed by Corneille and Racine, ignored by Molière, challenged by the Romantics, and rejected by the Modernists, the Poetics was all but forgotten by 1953. But each in his own way, Beckett and Clarke heeded the deeper insights it contains.

The most important of these insights is that plot is the key to character. Aristotle did not reach this conclusion because he thought character unimportant. Rather, it was because, as he argued in the Ethics, the only way for one human being to discern the true character of another is to observe the other’s actions over a long period, preferably a lifetime. In the theater, where such lengthy observation is not possible, tragedy forces the issue by taking “a man like ourselves,” who despite his good intentions stands “between the two extremes” of “eminently good and just” and “vice and depravity,” and subjecting him to at least one wrenching, agonizing “reversal of fortune.”

more here.

Deborah Levy at Literary Review:

Earth was dying. We had five years left to live. Ziggy Stardust, the bisexual alien rock star, was sent from another planet to grey, binary 1970s Britain to give us a message of hope. I’m not sure about the hope part of the message, but he really turned us on. 

Apparently, Ziggy was a fictional character. We knew that, but we didn’t want to know it. It’s not like we were in the mood for critical thinking as we set about freeing our secret freakish selves. Bowie understood the power and point of enigma, right to the end of his life. Narrative needs to be porous so that we can fill it with our own yearnings, desires, imaginations. It’s still hard to accept that Ziggy didn’t fall from the stars in full makeup to blow our minds. Yes, other people helped create him. One of them was Suzi Ronson (born Fussey), a young, sparky hairstylist from Bromley, who has now written an entertaining book about the part she played in crafting the Ziggy persona.

more here.