Teju Cole at Bookforum:

Edward Said loved music, and I loved his love of music as well as the musicality that characterized everything he did. Because of his writings on late style, I think of him in connection with Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 15, op. 132. This was Beethoven’s thirteenth quartet, but the fifteenth in order of publication. It’s the kind of work that tempts one to agree with the strange notion that there is such a thing as pure music, music better than any possible performance. This is a romantic idea, and it’s probably not true, since music exists in the hearing, not on the page. But listening to Beethoven’s Op. 132, you can see why people think so. Within the written tradition of Western classical music, as in all genres of music, there is music that exhausts superlatives. Late Beethoven emerges coherently out of mature Beethoven, and mature Beethoven is an extension and fulfillment of early Beethoven. These are major shifts and distinct modes of evolution, but they are not radical breaks.

more here.

John Banville at The Nation:

Any account of childhood written by an adult might quickly become a work of adult art, presenting the child’s world, its highlights and its shadows, with a sensibility foreign to the experiences of being young. With his intensely concentrated gaze and voluptuous yet exact prose style, however, Wollheim offers us a work of vivid immediacy. Reading it, one experiences the kind of embarrassment that the critic Christopher Ricks identified in Keats’s poetry: Brought this close up to what it feels like to be a child, or for that matter an adult, Wollheim helps us see with awful clarity what an emotional and moral predicament it is to be alive.

Afitting epigraph to Germs could be Philip Larkin’s stark yet somehow comic line “Life is first boredom, then fear.”

more here.

Robin Blades in Scientific American:

Electric vehicles have the potential to substantially reduce carbon emissions, but car companies are running out of materials to make batteries. One crucial component, nickel, is projected to cause supply shortages as early as the end of this year. Scientists recently discovered four new materials that could potentially help—and what may be even more intriguing is how they found these materials: the researchers relied on artificial intelligence to pick out useful chemicals from a list of more than 300 options. And they are not the only humans turning to A.I. for scientific inspiration.

Creating hypotheses has long been a purely human domain. Now, though, scientists are beginning to ask machine learning to produce original insights. They are designing neural networks (a type of machine-learning setup with a structure inspired by the human brain) that suggest new hypotheses based on patterns the networks find in data instead of relying on human assumptions. Many fields may soon turn to the muse of machine learning in an attempt to speed up the scientific process and reduce human biases.

In the case of new battery materials, scientists pursuing such tasks have typically relied on database search tools, modeling and their own intuition about chemicals to pick out useful compounds. Instead a team at the University of Liverpool in England used machine learning to streamline the creative process. The researchers developed a neural network that ranked chemical combinations by how likely they were to result in a useful new material. Then the scientists used these rankings to guide their experiments in the laboratory. They identified four promising candidates for battery materials without having to test everything on their list, saving them months of trial and error.

More here.

From Spiked:

Heralding the start of the COP26 climate talks yesterday, UK prime minister Boris Johnson warned that the world is ‘one minute to midnight’ in its fight against climate change. The world leaders gathered in Glasgow say they are saving the planet from an existential threat. But does the fate of humanity really hang in the balance? And could climate alarmism do more harm than good?

Bjorn Lomborg is a climate economist and a self-described sceptical environmentalist. His latest book is False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. He joined Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to talk about where the world is going wrong on climate change. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: At COP26, there will be lots of discussion, lots of statements and lots of dashed hopes and ambitions. What do you make of global gatherings of this kind? Do they do any good in terms of tackling climate change or making the world a better place?

Bjorn Lomborg: They probably make the world a slightly better place. But the giveaway is in the number 26 – this is the 26th time that we have tried this. We have been trying since 1992, when we signed the Rio Convention. The entire rich world failed to follow through on it. Then we had the Kyoto Protocol and again most parties failed to live up to their promises. Then we had the Paris Agreement and now we have Glasgow. The Glasgow conference is supposed to go even further than Paris did.

More here.

A Dispatch From Seattle or, Nervous in the Hot Zone

Yes, we’re scared but we also make
zombie apocalypse jokes

By texts. I don’t know when I’ll see
my friends in person again.

We don’t want to panic and overreact
but we don’t want

To underreact. Some of my friends
are still hosting parties.

Some of them are still planning
to take their previously

Scheduled trips overseas. Some are
the polite looters

Who are buying all the toilet paper
in Seattle.

“Good for you,” I text to one of them.
“You’ll be

The most hygienic and well-stocked
shitter in the city.”

Some of my fellow Native Americans
are performing

The highly sacred Indigenous shrug,
as in, “Dude,

They’re not giving us smallpox
blankets.”

But, hey, it’s the Trumps. Their
wicked incompetence

Read more »

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

There’s a painting entitled Celestina’s House (2000-1). I count at least twenty-two figures in the painting. That’s a rough count. A few of these figures are sitting around a table, presumably eating a meal, though the only food on the table is a lobster and crab, maybe still alive. In front of the table, several figures nap awkwardly on pillows while, nearby, a tiny old woman sits on the floor, reaching up like a baby. Elsewhere, two women work, disconsolate, at a sewing machine, another woman falls down backward through the air, and a young fellow sits on a ladder with his back to us, as if he’s being punished. There is so much going on it is impossible to understand exactly what is going on. It is a scene, perhaps, showing us what would happen if the entire contents of many nights’ dreaming were smashed onto one canvas. The style is more or less realist, but not fastidiously so. We seem to be firmly in the realm of fantasy, memory, fable, and dream.

The artist is Paula Rego. Rego is originally from Portugal (b. 1935) but has lived much of her life in England. Her work has been celebrated in England and to some degree in her native Portugal, but is not as well known elsewhere. She exhibited with the so-called London Group in the 1960s, a group that included David Hockney, Barbara Hepworth, and Frank Auerbach. Recently, The Tate has mounted an exhibit billed as “the UK’s largest and most comprehensive retrospective of Paula Rego’s work to date.” Critical response to the show has been rapturous and widespread. At eighty-six years of age, Rego seems finally to be getting the recognition she deserves.

More here.

António Guterres at COP26 World Leaders Summit:

Dear Prime Minister Boris Johnson, I want to thank you and COP President Alok Sharma for your hospitality, leadership, and tireless efforts in the preparation of this COP.

Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

The six years since the Paris Climate Agreement have been the six hottest years on record.

Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink.

We face a stark choice:  Either we stop it — or it stops us.

It’s time to say: enough.

Enough of brutalizing biodiversity.

Enough of killing ourselves with carbon.

Enough of treating nature like a toilet.

Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper.

We are digging our own graves.

More here.

James K. Galbraith in Project Syndicate:

Brood with me on the latest delay of the full release of the records pertaining to the murder of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. That was 58 years ago. More time has passed since October 26, 1992, when Congress mandated the full and immediate release of almost all the JFK assassination records, than had elapsed between the killing and the passage of that law.

The late Senator John Glenn of Ohio – an astronaut-hero of the Kennedy era – wrote the 1992 law. It stipulates that “all Government records concerning the assassination … should carry a presumption of immediate disclosure, and all records should be eventually disclosed.” The law states that “only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.”

Congress was precise in specifying where such a need might exist. Protecting the identity of an intelligence agent who “currently requires protection” was one case. Likewise, any intelligence source or method “currently utilized” deserved protection. In some cases, privacy concerns might be paramount. Finally, there was language exempting any other matter relating to “defense, intelligence operations, or the conduct of foreign relations, the disclosure of which would demonstrably impair the national security of the United States.”

More here.

Philip Ball at Marginalia Review:

Just how experimentally constrained scientific theories are is a matter that has long been debated (and still is) by philosophers of science. And it’s surely no coincidence that they, like historians, are another scholarly group regularly dismissed and belittled by some practicing scientists as being irrelevant to the daily business of science. But in any event, many scientists seem determined to regard science and the knowledge it produces in Platonic terms: as rising rapidly above the histories, personalities, and social milieu that generate it.

Sure, they might say, Darwinism was misused in its early days, when it was still poorly understood, to support racism, eugenics and a host of other prejudices of the times. But now we really know what it means! And this notwithstanding the fact that still today leading scientists will argue about whether natural selection makes eugenics meaningfully possible in principle (while new biomedical technologies resurrect its spectre), or whether there are genetic distinctions that give rise to different characteristics between racial groups. The idea that all dubious sociopolitical considerations have long since been sifted out of such scientific theories is ludicrous and ahistorical special pleading.

more here.

Dodie Bellamy at Artforum:

GIDDY FROM SIPPING FLUTES of the de Young Museum’s prosecco, my friend Karen and I quickly realized that from the VIP section, the view of Judy Chicago’s smoke sculpture, Forever de Young, was going to suck. Since we were standing to the side of the huge pyramid-shaped scaffolding that was holding the canisters of colored pigments that would be “released” into the air, we knew we would not be able to see the whole picture. We scanned for a better vantage point but were cordoned off, and the rest of the crowd formed a dense mass that looked impossible to insert ourselves into. So we hunkered down with museum patrons and low-level journalists, and waited, as the de Young instructed us, for Chicago to “pull the trigger at just the right moment” and set the extravaganza in motion.

Until I got here, I wasn’t sure the event was going to happen. Last March, Chicago’s Living Smoke performance in Palm Desert was cancelled because of environmental concerns.

more here.

Interview with David Remnick in The Paris Review:

Fifty years ago, at a harp recital in Gloucester­shire, a retired British military officer with a clipped aristo accent came across a brown-skinned teenager. “I say, old chap, do you speak English?” the officer said. As a story in Yale’s New Journal recounted, the young man—Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah—replied, “Why don’t you ask my grandmother?”

“Who, may I ask, is your grandmother?” the retired officer said.

“Lady Cripps.”

Lady Cripps was Isobel Cripps, the widow of Sir Stafford Cripps, a Christian socialist and Labour politician who had been chancellor of the exchequer and the Crown’s ambassador to the Soviet Union; he was known for his stalwart desire to relinquish Britain’s imperial possessions, from Calcutta to Accra. In 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, Stafford and Isobel’s daughter Peggy married Joe Appiah, kinsman of Ashanti kings and a leader of the Ghanaian independence movement. (The marriage would help inspire the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.) A year later, the Appiahs’ first child and only son was born.

When Anthony was growing up in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti region of Ghana, the Appiah household was a locus of political and literary conversation. Among the visitors were the historian and activist C. L. R. James, the Pan-Africanist George Padmore, and the novelist Richard Wright. Joe Appiah instilled in his son a sense of global citizenship and family honor. As Anthony once wrote, “I found myself remembering my father’s parting words, years ago, when I was a student leaving home for Cambridge—I would not see him again for six months or more. I kissed him in farewell, and, as I stood waiting by the bed for his final benediction, he peered at me over his newspaper, his glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, and pronounced: ‘Do not disgrace the family name.’ Then he returned to his reading.”

More here.

Mark Fischetti in Scientific American:

Vaccine booster shots for COVID have recently been approved and are being rolled out widely. Wariness about boosters is still evident, however, along with debate over whether vaccinations should be required. All this seems new to us in 2021, but a similar situation played out in the U.S. and globally way back in 1872, when smallpox was raging. Scientific American published an article about the science, fears and debate over “revaccination”—boosters—and the discussion then is eerily parallel to the COVID discourse right now.

The article is reprinted below; it is a fascinating and pretty quick read. The alarming disease was spreading, people were afraid of contagion, the sick were being quarantined, and notably, there was great worry about a variant that could make smallpox much more deadly. Data from Prussia, where law required revaccination every seven years, showed that death by smallpox was rare, compared with higher rates in other parts of the world, so the editors expressed support for revaccination. Scientists were trying to determine how long to wait after initial inoculation before boosters were given. The editors also said that if there were a law requiring vaccination and revaccination, that action could end the scourge, yet they wondered whether such a law could be enforced.

More here.

Different Names for Lamotrigine

—after Sam Sax

Bitter thing—swallowed
…….. with bread, cake,
a curtain of water closing my throat,
……..anything to keep from tasting
the slight in my magician’s hand.
……..Magic is any science
you do not understand. So, too,
……..is God. Faith is
the way I trust the bitter taste will
……..turn me sweet; prayer
is how I start every day with it
……..on my tongue
before any lover, before opening
……..the window to let
the morning sun make shadows
……..where there were none
before. My body is a haunted house
……..cracking under
its own weight. Love is anything that
……..banishes the ghosts.

by Jaz Sufi
from Pank Magazine, poetry 13.1, 2018

Gerald Early in The Common Reader:

As Lisa Morton notes in Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances, there is not a shred of scientific evidence that proves the existence of spirits or any ability on our part or theirs, if they did exist, that we can communicate with them. (298) Despite this, there is hardly a culture or people on earth that has not or does not believe in a spiritual life of some sort after death and that does not have some sort of ritual conducted by a “specialist” to communicate with the dead. Human beings are convinced, and have been throughout history, that there is an afterlife, that death is not the end but simply a gateway to more life, and that this afterlife has some profound effect upon those still living this life. What this pervasive belief shows is:

• First, that we cannot imagine non-existence or fervently do not want to; for us, life only begets more life, good or gruesome, material or trans-material.

• Second, that there is an essential loneliness about human existence that makes us want to be surrounded by ghosts, spirits, gods, and the like who mean us either good or harm; to be alone frightens us more than evil spirits do.

• Third, that science has far less influence on our thinking than we might claim, that science has its limits in our understanding and shaping of the real and the unreal, that we believe we live in a world that requires propitiation as much as it does governance and stewardship, a world that remains as much supernatural as it is natural.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, Hinternet:

If my father occasionally enjoyed falsifying his ancestry for a bit of role-playing fun on the French Riviera (I don’t believe it ever went very far, though he may once have gained admission with this ruse to a party at the vacation home of Sally Jessy Raphael), I have tended to adopt the opposite evolutionary strategy as I move through rather different social circles than those I may once have been expected to end up in. When an animal is threatened, it can puff itself up to appear even more threatening than its adversary, as a cat does; or it can lie prostrate like an opossum, even generating from within its living body the stench of death itself. While I have never been so desperate as to slip into thanatosis, I have often gone out of my way to imply, in rarefied social settings, that my own origins “stink”, that I come from the pure stock of Dustbowl migrants, from a sort of topsy-turvy farce of aristocracy in which you convince others that you are somebody precisely by establishing that you are descended from absolutely nobody.

This is both a useful strategy for social advancement —“What a wonder”, you can easily get people to think, as they might when confronted by a talking dog (like the one G. W. Leibniz went to investigate in a German peasant village that could say thé, café, and chocolat, thus not only being gifted with human speech, but somehow turning out Francophone), when you have established that you are an American who speaks French without ever having gone to boarding school in Switzerland or otherwise been thrust into a privileged bicultural setting in early childhood—; and, as Seneca reminds us, coming from nowhere —nowhere but the gods— is also the only genealogy worthy of a philosopher.

More here.

Wendy Orent in Undark:

Many writers and researchers suggested that the presence of a high-containment laboratory in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, could point to a laboratory origin for the pandemic: a bioweapons experiment; or gain-of-function research, in which genetic manipulation adds some new feature to an existing germ; or simply the laboratory escape of a lethal bat virus. Since many lab escapes have happened in the past, some argue, a lab leak is a plausible explanation for this devastating explosion of disease. While a team convened by the World Health Organization declared in March that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” and suggested wildlife farms that supplied the market could be the culprit, a new group of scientists is now set to revisit the issue.

Still, there remains, as of this writing, no physical evidence linking the pandemic’s origins with a laboratory escape. And furthermore, from a logical and evolutionary viewpoint, there is something fundamentally wrong with all lab-leak arguments.

More here.

Harriet Ryan in the Los Angeles Times:

When journalist Sam Quinones went looking for a buyer for the book that became “Dreamland” a decade ago, there was little interest. Only one publisher was interested in the story of an Ohio everytown savaged first by painkiller-pushing Purdue Pharma and then by Mexican black-tar heroin cartels.

“Nobody really knew what an opioid was,” recalled Quinones, who at the time was a Los Angeles Times staff writer.

The 2015 book became a commercial and critical hit, winning a National Book Critics Circle award. Others followed with works about the opioid epidemic, including Beth Macy’s “Dopesick,” now a Hulu series, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Empire of Pain,” about Purdue’s owners, the Sackler family. The company eventually crumbled into bankruptcy under the weight of thousands of lawsuits.

More here.

Philippa Snow in The White Review:

Here was a woman who had modelled her life so closely on Marilyn Monroe’s that doing so eventually helped drive her to her death – the blonde waves and the fake breasts; the pill addictions and the airheaded pronouncements about men and sex and diamonds; the years spent tumbling down the rabbit-hole in search of somebody with cash willing to play at being Daddy; the PLAYBOY cover and centrefold, and the unwise sexual exhibitionism, and the occasional moments of bleak honesty that nodded at some formative abuse – and yet still she achieved twice the thing that Monroe never did: for four days, from 7 September 2006 to 10 September 2006, Anna Nicole Smith was a mother to two children. As it had for Monroe, who confessed in her last year that she had wanted children ‘more than anything’, motherhood held as much significance for Smith as big-time fame did, her desire to be the world’s hottest chick only commensurate with her certainty that she should procreate. ‘I’m either going to be a very good, very famous movie star and model,’ Smith told ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY at the height of her success, in 1994, ‘or I’m going to have a bunch of kids. I would miss having a career, but I’ve done my acting, and I’ve done my modelling. I’ve done everything I wanted to do.’ She did not become a great actor, even if for a short time she was one of the biggest models on earth. She did not make it to 40, even though she outlived Monroe by 3 sad, medicated years, dying at the Hard Rock Hotel in Florida at just 39 years old, in 2007.

One thing she did make was herself. Vickie Lynn Hogan, born 28 November 1967, was a flat-chested brunette. At five, she announced her intention to become a supermodel; shortly after, she revised her statement and suggested that, in fact, the thing she really wanted to be was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. (Not an impersonator, note, or an entirely different starlet who took Monroe as her inspiration: the same woman, occupying the same body, not to mention the same obviously troubled mental space.)

More here.