Victoria Princewill at Granta:

Byung-Chul Han tells us in The Disappearance of Rituals, that ‘symbolic perception, as recognition, is the perception of the permanent’. In a world that often seems to be determined by change, by transient experiences, names are an anomaly. They are stubborn things, pushing back against the relentless march of time. Ages change, job titles, citizenship, but names we carry with us. In defiance of a life in constant motion.  When we name newborns, we are trying to locate them in the world by carving out their distinction from others, as absolute immutable entities. Some part of that distinction will follow them through the trajectory of their life. Names endure, names remain.

Yet our names function, first, as words spoken back to us. Our existence is shaped in part by the recognition of others, making the experience of naming a collaborative project. In some West African families, like my own, one can be named for another relative, in recognition of their unique heritage.

more here.

David Searcy at The Paris Review:

I’d like to set up an experiment to chart the sadness—try to find out where it comes from, where it goes—to trace it, in that melody (whichever variation) as it threads across Manhattan from the Lower East Side straight across the river, more or less west, into the suburbs of New Jersey and whatever lies beyond. This would require, I’m guessing, maybe a hundred saxophonists stationed along the route on tops of buildings, water towers, farther out on people’s porches (with permission), empty parking lots, at intervals determined by the limits of their mutual audibility under variable conditions in the middle of the night, so each would strain a bit to pick it up and pass it on in step until they’re going all at once and all strung out along this fraying thread of melody for hours, with relievers in reserve. There’s bound to be some drifting in and out of phase, attenuation of the tempo, of the sadness for that matter, of the waveform, what I think of as the waveform of the whole thing as it comes across the river losing amplitude and sharpness, rounding, flattening, and diffusing into neighborhoods where maybe it just sort of washes over people staying up to hear it or, awakened, wondering what is that out there so faint and faintly echoed, faintly sad but not so sad that you can’t close your eyes again and drift right back to sleep.

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Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian:

Memoria is a beautiful and mysterious movie, slow cinema that decelerates your heartbeat. For some, the andante tempo, with its glacially long silent takes, will exasperate – and opinions may divide on the extraordinary sci-fi epiphany ending. Even now I’m not sure what I think about it. But what originality and daring, the biggest ideas invoked with compelling zen humility. Weerasekathul is an artist who demands that you return your thoughts to the unsolved and unspoken mysteries of existence: that we are born, live, die and all without ever knowing why, or often even wanting to know. But he approaches these phenomena as calmly as he might questions of agriculture or engineering.

more here.

My Women are Tabla & Qanoun

I could swear I was born in Cairo,
breastfed from the Nile –
look at my blood when I dance to sha3bi music,
how it turns to river.
After reading Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire,
I wore blue eyeshadow & pink jalabiya & khilkhal.
I married five men like Fifi Abdo
& killed them all in my sleep
then stepped into a cabaret, down the corner,
to dance for the women        my women,
you are tabla & qanoun
you are silver coins on my waist
you are black hair smelling of sunsilk shampoo
you are white tarboush & blue misbaha
on the hands of one khalto starting the dabkeh
& another praying to God. My women,
I count your 99 names under my breath
& dream of a city created in your image.

I know what you’ll tell me at midnight:
Cairo is not the same & they’ve closed up
the casinos. You’re right, a whole world,
it’s changing maybe for the worse maybe not
but yesterday, did we not dance
to Souad Hosny on the rooftop,
did you not see the young girls clap
for their newly wed friend?
Is Oum Kolthoum not bursting
from the camps & cab drivers —
have you heard Maryam Saleh’s song,
didn’t you just want to love to it?

Morning will come & we will stitch
rhinestones onto bras. You will hang
your purple underwear to dry & wink at me
like a secret right before the women,
our women, tickle you to curl your small finger
to migrating clouds, to move with them
like birds in flight.

by Nur Turkmani
from Muzzle Magazine, Spring 2021

Amber Dance in Nature:

The Borg have landed — or, at least, researchers have discovered their counterparts here on Earth. Scientists analysing samples from muddy sites in the western United States have found novel DNA structures that seem to scavenge and ‘assimilate’ genes from microorganisms in their environment, much like the fictional Star Trek ‘Borg’ aliens who assimilate the knowledge and technology of other species. These extra-long DNA strands, which the scientists named in honour of the aliens, join a diverse collection of genetic structures — circular plasmids, for example — known as extrachromosomal elements (ECEs). Most microbes have one or two chromosomes that encode their primary genetic blueprint. But they can host, and often share between them, many distinct ECEs. These carry non-essential but useful genes, such as those for antibiotic resistance.

Borgs are a previously unknown, unique and “absolutely fascinating” type of ECE, says Jill Banfield, a geomicrobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She and her colleagues describe their discovery of the structures in a preprint posted to the server bioRxiv¹. The work is yet to be peer-reviewed.

Unlike anything seen before

Borgs are DNA structures “not like any that’s been seen before”, says Brett Baker, a microbiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Other scientists agree that the find is exciting, but have questioned whether Borgs really are unique, noting similarities between them and other large ECEs. In recent years “people have become used to surprises in the field of ECEs”, says Huang Li, a microbiologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “However, the discovery of Borgs, which undoubtedly enriches the concept of ECEs, has fascinated many in the field.”

More here.

Oliver Muday in The Atlantic:

One morning a few weeks ago, I sent my friend a Proust text. It was a photo of a page from Swann’s Way, and it took several attempts for me to capture the near-page-length sentence in its entirety. Next to me, my 2-year-old daughter slowly guided a spoonful of oatmeal into her mouth, noticing my struggle. “Daddy, what are you doing?” she asked. The answer: being insufferable. My friend’s response shortly thereafter confirmed this: “It’s too early for me to follow this sentence.”

Proust’s work has many qualities that might recommend it for pandemic reading: the author’s concern with the protean nature of time, the transportive exploration of memory and the past, or simply the pleasure of immersing oneself in the richly detailed life of another. His novel cycle, In Search of Lost Time, also presents the attractive challenge of surmounting a massive text—multiple volumes, stretching between 3,000 and 4,000 pages, depending on the edition—and the subsequent entry into a rare and rather pretentious club of readers. All of it appealed; I wanted in. What I found was a novel so preoccupied with the minutiae of experience that I had no choice but to reappraise my own.

Before accepting that I was no different from everyone else sublimating their ambition into a “quar project,” my reading habits had changed naturally with the phases of the pandemic. Early in March, as New York City prepared for a shutdown, I felt a sense of adventure in ordering a stockpile of books along with black beans and toilet paper. My first batch included Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, works often cited for their distinctive styles of comedy (self-lacerating and wry, respectively). One night, the two novels happened to be stacked on top of each other beside my bed; I found myself haunted by the cryptic dispatch of their titles.

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Anjali Vaidya in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Once upon a time, I decided to start answering the question “Where are you from?” with “The middle of the Pacific Ocean.” I never followed through, though I still think it’s a good answer. I have spent so much of my life bouncing back and forth between the United States and India that, for me, the concept of home is more like a stationary probability distribution — a phrase that I filched from a statistics paper once, and which is likely to make less sense to most people than “the middle of the Pacific Ocean.” After all, the latter at least counts as a place.

All of which is to say that the central themes of Kazim Ali’s Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water resonated so strongly with me that I cannot pretend to be objective about how much I loved the book. I was captured by its compelling themes of global desi homelessness and what it means to love places that are not our own — what it means when none of the places we love are our own, but we belong to them anyway.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

The summer wasn’t meant to be like this. By April, Greene County, in southwestern Missouri, seemed to be past the worst of the pandemic. Intensive-care units that once overflowed had emptied. Vaccinations were rising. Health-care workers who had been fighting the coronavirus for months felt relieved—perhaps even hopeful. Then, in late May, cases started ticking up again. By July, the surge was so pronounced that “it took the wind out of everyone,” Erik Frederick, the chief administrative officer of Mercy Hospital Springfield, told me. “How did we end up back here again?”

The hospital is now busier than at any previous point during the pandemic. In just five weeks, it took in as many COVID-19 patients as it did over five months last year. Ten minutes away, another big hospital, Cox Medical Center South, has been inundated just as quickly. “We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day,” Terrence Coulter, the critical-care medical director at CoxHealth, told me.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

In October 2018, David Asperó was on holiday in Italy, gazing out a car window as his girlfriend drove them to their bed-and-breakfast, when it came to him: the missing step of what’s now a landmark new proof about the sizes of infinity. “It was this flash experience,” he said.

Asperó, a mathematician at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, contacted the collaborator with whom he’d long pursued the proof, Ralf Schindler of the University of Münster in Germany, and described his insight. “It was completely incomprehensible to me,” Schindler said. But eventually, the duo turned the phantasm into solid logic.

Their proof, which appeared in May in the Annals of Mathematics, unites two rival axioms that have been posited as competing foundations for infinite mathematics. Asperó and Schindler showed that one of these axioms implies the other, raising the likelihood that both axioms — and all they intimate about infinity — are true.

“It’s a fantastic result,” said Menachem Magidor, a leading mathematical logician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “To be honest, I was trying to get it myself.”

Most importantly, the result strengthens the case against the continuum hypothesis, a hugely influential 1878 conjecture about the strata of infinities.

More here.

Andru Okun in The Baffler:

Concerns were raised about the 2020 hurricane season even before it officially began, as above-average air and water temperatures in the Gulf signaled an elevated chance of supercharged storms. When Hurricane Laura struck the southwest coast of Louisiana late last August, it carried with it 150 mile-per-hour winds and a storm surge of roughly ten feet. It was the strongest hurricane to hit Louisiana since 1856, causing around $17.5 billion in damages and killing thirty-three. Six weeks later, the same area was hit by yet another powerful hurricane that dumped fifteen inches of rain onto the storm-ravaged city of Lake Charles. Recently, climate researchers looked at over ninety peer-reviewed scientific articles on tropical cyclones and concluded that anthropogenic global warming was—to no one’s surprise—making storms more powerful. Meanwhile, Louisiana continues to heat up, with cities throughout the state experiencing up to an extra month of extreme heat when compared to fifty years ago.

As I began writing this, the New Orleans area was under an excessive heat warning, with a possibility of “feels like” temperatures nearing 110 degrees. I posted up in front of an air-conditioner—a window unit, set to 82 degrees. I’d describe it as “comfortable,” but what does that even mean? Much of Eric Dean Wilson’s new far-reaching study of air-conditioning—After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and The Terrible Cost of Comfort—deals directly with this question. While it may not be a surprise to learn that Euro-American standards of comfort have been largely dictated by rich and sweaty white men, how exactly this standard was set makes for a fascinating narrative of technological innovation and environmental destruction.

…While air-conditioning became normalized in industry and education by the 1920s, Wilson notes that “the idea of air-conditioning for public and private comfort remained absurd”—even for the wealthy. Early model air-conditioners tended to be clumsy and dangerous, using toxic natural refrigerants like ammonia that could corrode copper piping and leak, thereby infusing a space with the smell of urine and potentially killing anyone who remained inside. For comfort cooling to achieve mainstream acceptance, safer, more efficient systems needed to be created.

Enter chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the synthetic refrigerant better known as Freon—which facilitated the widespread adoption of mechanical cooling and massively fucked up the planet in the process.

More here.

Katha Pollitt in Dissent:

People who want to deplatform a speaker or deep-six a book love to point out that the First Amendment only applies to government. But socially and culturally, the notion that people have a right to say what they think and read what they want is much broader than that. That is why common dismissals—you can still get the book online, the speaker has plenty of other ways to express herself, books go out of print all the time—sound flip.

Deplatforming a speaker who has been chosen through the accepted university channels, or attacking Powell’s Books for selling Andy Ngô’s Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, means you lose the high ground. Now you look just like your enemies. And what have you won, really? Powell’s doesn’t put Ngô’s books on the shelves, but it sells it online. Charles Murray gets to look like the victim of a mob at Middlebury. Josh Hawley, like Woody Allen, takes his book to another publisher.

When you ban a book or shut down a speaker, what you’re really saying is that you need to protect people from ideas you disagree with.

More here.

Rebecca Sykes in BBC News:

In any normal summer, Spain’s famous Playa de la Castilla – a perfect 20km (12 mile) long stretch of sand backed by the Doñana nature reserve and close to the resort of Matalascañas, Huelva – would have been covered by the footprints of visiting tourists. But in June 2020 with international flights banned due to Covid-19, the beach was uncharacteristically quiet. Two biologists – María Dolores Cobo and Ana Mateos – who were strolling along the peaceful beach, nonetheless found many footprints. These, however, were made by a very different kind of visitor.

As savage storms and then powerful spring tides earlier in the year had lashed Spain’s south-west coast, huge waves scoured away the sand at the base of 20m (65ft) dunes, revealing an enormous area of rock covering some 6,000 sq m (1.5 acres). Its surface was pocked with indentations which the pair of biologists recognised as footprints: a jumble of hooves, claws and paws preserved in the rock. But when the two women looked closer, among the criss-crossing animal tracks were other prints that looked startlingly human. What’s more, their position at the bottom of the cliff layers meant they had to have been left in the distant past.

More 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 to Here
Nightwood Editions, 2007

Simon Torracinta in Boston Review:

This spring the United States embarked on a grand experiment. The American Rescue Plan, signed into law on March 11, appropriated $1.9 trillion in public spending—on top of $2.2 trillion for the CARES Act a year prior—to accelerate recovery from the dramatic economic shock of the pandemic. Combined, these measures amount to a fiscal stimulus of unprecedented scale.

Economists in the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve are bullish that this intervention will enable a rapid return to the boom times—or at least what passed for them—that preceded March 2020. They believe that running the economy “hot,” without much slack in unemployment, will extend the fruits of recovery to historically marginalized populations in the labor market and stimulate greater productive investment. Meanwhile, prominent skeptics like Larry Summers, himself a former Treasury secretary, have sounded the alarm about what they see as the significant risks and early signs of inflation, as existing capacity strains to meet the torrent of renewed demand. Implicitly, these admonitions conjure up the specter of the wage-price spirals of the 1970s.

Given the economic landscape since 2008—ultra-low interest rates, reduced worker power, low labor force participation rates—the prospects of this scenario seem rather dim. But the truth is that we don’t really know what will happen. The scale of the experiment and the sheer number of moving parts conspire to make forecasters even more uncertain than usual. Every new piece of economic data is scrutinized for augurs of the future, and entire news cycles turn on the finer points of microchip and lumber supply chains or used car sales.

Although uncertainty presents a persistent headache for central bankers and investors, it has a longstanding place in economic theory.

More here.

Molly Crabapple in the New York Review of Books:

The first thing you see when you walk into “Extraordinary Realities,” Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander’s major retrospective at the Morgan Library, is an Indian Devata dancer, gently resting her knee on the shoulder of Aphrodite. Cast in bronze, nearly life-sized, Promiscuous Intimacies (2020) is Sikander’s first sculpture, and her two women only have eyes for each other. Aphrodite toys with the Devata’s necklace. The Devata curves around Aphrodite like a snake.

The two sex bombs, archetypal respectively for East and West, expose the inanity of the categories. These avatars might be citizens of a single world—one where Alexander’s armies marched through the monsoon-soaked Punjab, where the inhabitants of the Indian city of Nysa claimed Dionysus as their founder, and where a statue of Lakshmi is hidden beneath the lava of Pompeii. Their separation only made sense according to the logic of newer empires. Here in the Morgan Library, they are wrapped together in love. Supremely self-confident and disdainful of all borders, the pair are the perfect guardians for a show in which Sikander blows open the form of miniature painting.

More here.