The Love for my Culture

Maybe it’s the Spanish running through my veins
That’s the only way I know how to explain it
Maybe it’s the r’s rrrolling off my tongue
See,
When I speak in Spanish
It takes the air from my lungs
The love for my culture reaches the sky
The love for my culture will never die
And while you get up and have your milk and cereal
Siempre desayuno con platano de mangu
Not no cheerios
I always mix it up
Con salsa y merengue
Constantly side ways glanced at
Like, she speak no ingles
Yo si puedo hablar, ingles y espanol
Hasta puedo entender dos y tres
Languages!
Confronted with problems like immigration
Forced to have my parties down in the basement
Confined to the more popular story that my family
Criss, crossed, and slid past borders
Trying to find a new place to live
Guilty of chasing paper
without papers
but when that visa is blinking green
It’s saying
“Go, go m’jita! Fight for your dreams!”
Read more »

Phillip Lopate in The Paris Review:

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been an uneasy time of rupture and anxiety, filled with historic challenges and opportunities. In that close to twenty-five-year span, the United States witnessed the ominous opening shot of September 11, followed by the seemingly unending Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the effort to control HIV/AIDS, the 2008 recession, the election of the first African American president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the contentious reign of Donald Trump, the stepped-up restriction of immigrants, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, and the coronavirus pandemic, just to name a few major events. Intriguingly, the essay has blossomed during this time, in what many would deem an exceptionally good period for literary nonfiction—if not a golden one, then at least a silver: I think we can agree that there has been a remarkable outpouring of new and older voices responding to this perplexing moment in a form uniquely amenable to the processing of uncertainty.

When the century began, essays were considered box office poison; editors would sometimes disguise collections of the stuff by packaging them as theme-driven memoirs. All that has changed: a generation of younger readers has embraced the essay form and made their favorite authors into best sellers.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

CO2 concentrations now sit at 412 ppm, Earth’s temperature is a full 1.3 °C (2.3 °F) above pre-industrial levels, and still, no meaningful, sustained initiatives to reduce our global carbon emissions have been taken. In fact, they’re presently at an all-time high. The longer we delay meaningful climate action, the more severe the consequences will get not just for all of humanity today, but for generations and even millennia to come. Although our climate future intimately depends on how global emissions unfold in the coming years and decades, the latest IPCC report provides unprecedented clarity on a number of important issues. Here are the top six takeaways we should all accept and understand.

More here.

John Keefe and Curt Merrill at CNN:

In June, an unprecedented heat wave in the Pacific Northwest killed hundreds of people and shattered records in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Canada logged a new national record high when a town in British Columbia soared to 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Historic heat waves are so clearly caused by human-driven emissions that researchers can now easily link them to climate change. Scientists at World Weather Attribution concluded this summer’s Northwest heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without it.

More here.

Alia Ahmed at The Hudson Review:

Rushdie’s opening essay, “Wonder Tales,” takes us back to first things: the ancient mythology, both Eastern and Western, that would provide a blueprint for the literature that followed, and the subsequent “wonder tales” that captured his childhood imagination. Treasured among his memories are trips to the university library of Aligarh, riding behind his grandfather on a bicycle (fictionalized as Dr. Aziz in Midnight’s Children, in those pages biking instead in Agra). Yet these were not moralizing gods. Zeus and the gang behaved as badly as their human subjects, as did their Hindu counterparts. But while the Western gods of Olympus and their stories are today relegated to the sidelines of daily life, no longer occupying center stage, the pantheon of Hindu deities are alive and well in India. When, in 2012, Jyoti Singh died of horrific wounds after being raped and thrown off a moving bus in New Delhi, sparking outrage worldwide, an Indian state minister said that she had crossed the Lakshman rekha line—the magical line in the epic poem Ramayana that the god Ram draws around his lover Sita to keep her safe while he is away.

more here.

Kyle Beachy at The Paris Review:

For a fairly simple activity, skateboarding’s internal code of competition is more nuanced and complex and fluid than any single contest could possibly model. Because the Illusion is a burner from Malibu, he speaks of this nuance in terms of the cosmos. This cosmic side has led to some ironies over the years, like a photo I keep pinned to my bulletin board of a Nike 6.0 hoodie that says “Jocks Suck” across the chest. It is usually pretty clear who to call the best skater at any given session, or among a group of friends. But what looks like victory among pack dogs and, I suppose, salespeople and law students and most other worlds premised on rankings, is among skaters almost wholly irrelevant.

Oh, children will think differently about this.

more here.

Andrew Anthony in The Guardian:

The Australian historian and Regius professor of history at Cambridge, Christopher Clark, is best known for his commanding study of the origins of the first world war, Sleepwalkers. The historian Thomas Laqueur admiringly observed that it was not only the best book on the subject, “but a brilliant and intellectually bracing model for the writing of history”.

In this new collection of essays, Prisoners of Time, Clark displays that brilliance and bracing intellect to exhilarating effect. He is not only a learned historian but an engaging historiographer, able to combine a far-reaching grasp of research with a critical understanding of how history is created. The long opening essay, entitled The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar, is a bravura exploration of the role of political power in history. It begins with the Book of Daniel and the king of the neo-Babylonian empire’s disturbing dream, which the imprisoned Daniel interprets as a prophecy, thus rendering the grateful king his worshipful servant.

The story is both a fable of power and, as Clark explains, the beginning of the understanding of history as a foreordained “sequence of hegemonies”. Until the modern era, that was the conventional means of delineating the march of time, a tendency that was only slightly amended by Hegel’s notion of historical progress. Even today, having emerged from what Henry Luce called the “American century”, there is much talk of China’s assumption of the mantle of world power. “The habit of imagining history as a succession of empires has been hard to shake.” And it’s a habit that in its era-defining clarity promotes a picture of the struggle for power that obscures its complex nature. As Clark notes: “Power is at once the most ubiquitous and most elusive theme of historical writing.”

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

The disembodied brain in a vat is an amusing trope of science fiction. Without a vat, the brain needs a body to generate the nutrients to maintain itself and to furnish information about its environment. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell and proprioception help us to navigate, and find food or reproductive partners. Science fiction assumes that, with those basic needs taken care of by the vat, the brain can devote its full energies to developing genius intelligence.

Not so, argues science writer Annie Murphy Paul. Her book The Extended Mind lays out arguments that the body — and the world more generally — is part of being smart. The human brain is a structure with serious limits: in memory, in attention, in handling abstract concepts. But it can extend its thinking apparatus beyond its skull-bound membranes. Given that the modern world is ever more centred on non-intuitive ideas and abstractions, we need all the help that mind extension can offer. Society fails to recognize this, is Paul’s claim.

More here.

Sacha Golob in Psyche:

A few years before he died in exile from Nazism, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil delivered a lecture in Vienna, ‘On Stupidity’ (1937). At its heart was the idea that stupidity was not mere ‘dumbness’, not a brute lack of processing power. Dumbness, for Musil, was ‘straightforward’, indeed almost ‘honourable’. Stupidity was something very different and much more dangerous: dangerous precisely because some of the smartest people, the least dumb, were often the most stupid.

Musil’s lecture bequeaths us an important set of questions. What exactly is stupidity? How does it relate to morality: can you be morally good and stupid, for example? How does it relate to vice: is stupidity a kind of prejudice, perhaps? And why is it so domain-specific: why are people often stupid in one area and insightful in another? Musil’s own answer, which centred around pretentiousness, is too focused on the dilettantism of interwar Vienna to serve us now. But his questions, and his intuition about stupidity’s danger, are as relevant as ever.

More here.

Philip Ball in Physics World:

Like many science writers, I have often adopted the conceit that quantum mechanics and general relativity are our two principal (if incompatible) theories of the physical world. With his superb new book Einstein’s Fridge: the Science of Fire, Ice and the Universe, documentary filmmaker Paul Sen has made me doubt that this is the right way to express it. Those two theories might be better positioned as the terms of engagement with the universe: relativity describing the backdrop of space–time, and quantum theory giving a fine-grained account of the stuff within it. But to explain what we actually see happening amid all the teeming particles, we are better served by the subject of Sen’s book: thermodynamics, in all its guises.

Einstein’s Fridge offers an accessible and crystal-clear portrait of this discipline’s breadth, largely told through its history. Beginning as an attempt to understand and improve the machinery of the Industrial Revolution, thermodynamics soon provided the most profound of what physicists today call no-go theorems – statements about what is physically impossible – in the form of the first two laws of thermodynamics. First, energy is conserved in the universe; second, in all that comes to pass, some energy is unavoidably dissipated into a form that cannot be used to do work. From those ingredients, 19th-century scientists realized that we can make deductions about the beginning of the universe (it must have had an unlikely, low-entropy configuration) and its end (in a “heat death” of useless energetic uniformity).

Thermodynamics tells us everything from the prosaic (why ice cream melts), to the global (what powers the engine of the world’s climate system) and even the cosmic (why the Big Bang has left a pervasive microwave background hum).

More here.

Emily Conover in Science News:

At every moment, subatomic particles stream in unfathomable numbers through your body. Each second, about 100 billion neutrinos from the sun pass through your thumbnail, and you’re bathed in a rain of muons, birthed in Earth’s atmosphere. Even humble bananas emit positrons, the electron’s antimatter counterpart. A whole universe of particles exists, and we are mostly oblivious, largely because these particles are invisible.

When I first learned, as a teenager, that this untold world of particles existed, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And when I thought about it, I could barely breathe. I was, to steal a metaphor from writer David Foster Wallace, a fish who has only just noticed she’s swimming in water. The revelation that we’re stewing in a particle soup is why I went on to study physics, and eventually, to write about it.

To truly fathom matter at its most fundamental level, people must be able to visualize this hidden world. That’s where particle detectors come in. They spot traces of the universe’s most minuscule constituents, making these intangible concepts real. What’s more, particle detectors reveal beauty: Particles leave behind graceful spirals of bubbles, flashes of light and crisp lines of sparks.

More here.

Robert S. Levine in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Once a specialized school of thought developed in law schools, critical race theory (CRT) has become a favorite wedge issue for the Republican Party. During the final months of his presidency, Trump warned that CRT was infiltrating American schools and ordered a halt to what he claimed was CRT-inspired diversity training in federal agencies. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, regularly refers to CRT as a Marxist plot to undermine the nation, and Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the conservative Discovery Institute, terms it “a grave threat to the American way of life.”

In a recent Washington Post piece, Christine Emba attempts to explain why conservatives find CRT so threatening: they become anxious when they believe white people are under attack, and their anxiety is exacerbated by the fact that they view CRT as standing in “for anything that reexamines the United States’ racial history.” In Idaho, one state legislator, in the service of promoting anti-CRT legislation, cited To Kill a Mockingbird to call for banning Critical Race Theory from public schools because the book supposedly makes white people look bad.

Frederick Douglass could just as easily be banned from school systems in states adopting anti-CRT legislation, for this is a man who from the beginning of his career in the late 1830s to his death in 1895 viscerally and intellectually understood the centrality of slavery and race to American history and culture.

More here.

From The Cancer Letter:

These are a few of the authors your colleagues are reading in 2021.

A diverse panel of clinicians, basic scientists, early-career faculty, and regulators submitted their book recommendations to The Cancer Letter for the second year in a row. Non-fiction and fiction are equally represented, ranging from opera to Obama, Proust to fly fishing. This year’s reading list genres have expanded to include a poetry anthology, a children’s book, a podcast—and  Wafik El-Deiry’s in-depth review of seven books, which appears here.

Last year’s book recommendations told a story of a year filled with activism, grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, and using fiction as an escape, perhaps in place of a much-needed vacation (The Cancer Letter, Aug. 6, 2020). The list seemed to want to answer the question: “What the hell is going on?” This year’s list demonstrates an evolution of thought: stories of personal and professional growth, the challenge of becoming a better leader, and deeper explorations of systemic racism in the U.S. All that, plus a passion for a good book—and fly fishing. If the question last year was “What the hell is going on,” this year’s question appears to be, “How can we be better?

More here.

Copernicus

You are always in the middle of the poem
even at the end.
More and more you are tied by ropes,
foliage, and as you move
the bindings grow around your knees, your feet.
Again and again you pass
your own footprints on the grass, on floors,
once more you have tracked mud into the house.
Have tracked a house into the mud. Outside the poem
are sirens, fires, ocean hitting
pier. Say to yourself: does not cohere
but is subsumed
and must not, must not. Outside the poem
a little vein clicks in the forehead of a financier,
a cue called, an oboe,
truncheons, pigeons, rain
mineralizes a colonnade.
A chorale stands up, taller than a building,
false in sense, numerically true.
You despise these techniques.
You have not got to the truth yet.
A truck downshifts on the freeway,
a shift whistle blows,
someone else’s emergency makes the poem hold.
At night, like notes pushed under doors,
sounds come in—
flypaper in an open window,
your mother rubbing lotion on her hands.
All this is with you, is you,
runs after you into the dark
like those men after Copernicus,
like a planet chased by telescopes into space.

by Timmy Straw
from Academy of American Poets, 8/5/21
Copyright © 2021