Josephine Rowe at Lit Hub:

The Bone House, published in 2005, is either a decade’s work or a lifetime’s, depending on how you look at it. It is the distillation of an expansive mind that seeks to delve and delve. Her tone is never didactic—rather, discursive, exploratory, delighted, unjaded, alive. To read more than a few pages at a stretch is to travel a long way from where you set out. Sometimes to travel so far as to lose the view of the mountain, only to be brought back via an unfamiliar face of it.

For a little more than a week, I read—I traveled through—very slowly. The book was there for mornings, the days drawing their shape and tone from as few as half a dozen pages. Or it was a place to come for refuge, panhandling at four am, unable to sleep, tilting the book towards the cheap lamp to ask, what lasts?

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at The New York Times:

Gödel could go for long walks with his fellow institute scholar Einstein, who sponsored Gödel’s citizenship application and called him the greatest logician since Aristotle, but he was wracked by physical ailments and nervous conditions. A doctor told him he had a bleeding ulcer, which he strangely refused to believe, even though he was also a self-medicating hypochondriac. He subscribed to all sorts of conspiracy theories, insisting that “nothing happens without a reason,” and that the reason was almost always a hidden one. The unlimited freedom he had at the institute proved to be double-edged, Budiansky observes. In one sense, it saved Gödel’s life; but it also allowed his consciousness to wander into the darkest places, without the checks on his expansive anxieties that interactions with the ordinary world might have otherwise provided.

more here.

Josie Delap in More Intelligent Life:

What would you rather have: an orgasm or a pastrami sandwich? The woman at the table next to Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in Katz’s Delicatessen in “When Harry Met Sally” chose poorly. She plumped for the turkey sandwich that seemed to have inspired Sally’s simulated raptures. She should have picked what he was having: the pastrami.

Pastrami on rye is the platonic ideal of the New York deli sandwich. The version Harry demolished as Sally educated him in the ways of womankind was oddly modest. He was able to get his chops around it with little effort and no mess. A perfect pastrami sandwich should be large enough to inspire a certain apprehension. It is testimony to the Jewish fear that someone, somewhere might at some point go hungry.

Jews did not invent pastrami. In Ottoman Turkey, basturma or pastirma was a kind of pressed, spiced meat – beef, goat or mutton – not unlike jerky. It may have been produced by horse riders stashing the beef in their saddlebags and pressing it with their thighs as they rode. The recipe travelled along the spice route to Romania, where goose became the meat of choice.

The late 19th century and early 20th century saw a surge of Jewish immigrants to New York from across eastern Europe, including Romania. An earlier rush of German migrants to the east coast had brought a delectable range of smoked and cured meats and sausages. When Romanian Jews introduced the pastrami, they soon abandoned the traditional goose in favour of beef, which was cheaper and more readily available.

More here.

Louis Proyect in Counterpunch:

Just over five years ago, Inky the octopus became a folk hero because of his escape from a New Zealand aquarium. After squeezing through a narrow chink in his tank, he crawled across the floor and found an opening to a 164-foot-long drainpipe that led to the ocean. As much as I enjoyed the film based on Stephen King’s “The Shawshank Redemption”, which climaxes in Tim Robbin’s daring prison break, I only wish that a gifted animation team like the one that made “How to Train Your Dragon” could tell Inky’s story.

At the time, I made a mental note to myself to learn about octopuses. From the time that I read about Inky, interest in the creatures has increased dramatically with this year’s Oscar for documentary going to “My Octopus Teacher.” Nearly everybody who spends time looking at octopus YouTube videos, or going further and reading books about them, will be struck by both their intelligence and inscrutability.

…Furthermore, if intelligence is related to the amount of neurons in a creature’s brains, some attention must be paid to how they are located in an octopus’s body. Most are not in its head but in its arms. Each tentacle has millions of them that it uses to help in finding food but without the direct visual cues that go along with the eye-to-brain pathway. For an octopus, there are the usual experiments that measure a lab specimen’s IQ such as rats finding the shortest path to food in a maze or challenging a chimpanzee to place a round peg in a round hole, etc. Godfrey-Smith argues that it is much better to see an octopus’s intelligence in terms of its ability to reproduce itself in the ocean. One example is how this one carries around coconut shells that can come in handy fending off a shark’s bite.

More here. (Note: Do watch the incredible video!)

Manan Kapoor in Srcoll.in:

In Delhi, Shahid also became aware of the city’s Mughal and colonial history, and was impressed by its architecture. In the early ’60s, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz had visited New Delhi and had been charmed by its architecture. He wrote numerous poems about the city and about all that he had witnessed here. He found Delhi’s “aesthetic equivalent” in “novels, not in architecture”, and to him, wandering the city was “like passing through the pages of Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, or Alexandre Dumas”.

Paz’s gaze, wherever he went, was directed inwards. For him, all the experiences, including the splendour of the Mughal architecture that attracted him, were revelatory and enlightening in one way or the other. In his book In Light of India, he called Delhi’s architecture “an assemblage of images more than buildings”. It was quite the same for Shahid who, after nineteen years, had returned to the city of his birth.

More here.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction:

In the past years, media coverage of climate change has noticeably shifted. Many outlets have begun referring to it as “climate crisis” or “climate emergency”, a mostly symbolic move, in my eyes, because those who trust that their readers will tolerate this nomenclature are those whose readers don’t need to be reminded of the graveness of the situation. Even more marked has been the move to no longer mention climate change skeptics and, moreover, to proudly declare the intention to no longer acknowledge even the existence of the skeptics’ claims.

As a scientist who has worked in science communication for more than a decade, I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, I perfectly understand the futility of repeating the same facts to people who are unwilling or unable to comprehend them – it’s the reason I don’t respond when someone emails me their home-brewed theory of everything. On the other hand, it’s what most science communication comes down to: patiently rephrasing the same thing over and over again. That science writers – who dedicate their life to communicating research – refuse to explain that very research, strikes me as an odd development.

This makes me suspect something else is going on. Declaring the science settled relieves news contributors of the burden of actually having to understand said science. It’s temptingly convenient and cheap, both literally and figuratively. Think about the last dozen or so news reports on climate change you’ve read. Earliest cherry blossom bloom in Japan, ice still melting in Antarctica, Greta Thunberg doesn’t want to travel to Glasgow in November. Did one of those actually explain how scientists know that climate change is man-made? I suspect not. Are you sure you understand it? Would you be comfortable explaining it to a climate change skeptic?

More here.

Greg Jackson in Harper’s Magazine:

To those who still harbor doubts about the justness of this war, who continue to question the scientific consensus on global warming and the ravages it promises, I ask only that you entertain, if there is a chance you are right, that there is also a chance you are wrong. Let us even say, for argument’s sake, that the virtual certainty of scientists were reduced to 50 percent confidence and the forecasted effects of climate violence were reduced in severity by 50 percent as well. That would still justify the most massive mobilization of human energy and resources the world has ever seen, because the likely outcome would still be far worse than any threat we have faced in the past.

Of course, there are some who accept the seriousness of the threat but console themselves with the possibility that we might overcome it without serious disruption to our lives. The cost of solar power has fallen by more than 80 percent in the past decade and shows no sign of stopping. Wind power has followed suit. According to reports by the International Renewable Energy Agency and others, wind and solar are now the cheapest forms of energy in most cases, and there are already many places where building new wind and solar capacity is cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants. Synergistic technologies, such as batteries and electric cars, have improved dramatically over the same period, and there has been progress on more intractable problems such as the decarbonization of air travel and the production of cement, glass, and steel.

But for all the good news, we would be foolish to think technology alone will save us.

More here.

Ela Bittencourt at Hyperallergic:

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa once said that his films were about “the decay and disintegration of the former Russian Empire.” With 29 titles under his belt, ranging from fiction to observational and archival documentaries, Loznitsa demonstrates a keen interest in form, particularly in using fictional devices within documentary. He also opposes the recent tendency in Eastern Europe to frame histories with war and authoritarianism in heroic or rosy terms.

Sergei Eisenstein said that cinema is enchantment, and so is political theater. Loznitsa’s newest film, the documentary State Funeral (2019), analyzes how that theater is staged. It compiles footage from across the Soviet Union during the time of Stalin’s death and grandiose burial. When his death of heart failure on March 5, 1953 is announced, the word “heart” repeats in a hypnotic refrain. I was reminded of Dziga Vertov’s kaleidoscopic A Sixth Part of the World (1926) and its ambition to proclaim the young Soviet Union’s might. Loznitsa is instead ambivalent; ordinary citizens often appear stunned and muted rather than enraptured.

more here.

Margaret Wertheim at Cabinet Magazine:

In the 1980s, zoologists were thus astonished to discover that Salticidae, or jumping spiders, a family of the arachnids that contains more than five hundred genera and over five thousand separate species, had vision systems on par with cats, mammals famous for their acute eyesight. With around six hundred thousand neurons in its brain (roughly half that of a fly or a honeybee), a jumping spider can recognize images on a television screen and is the only invertebrate known to be capable of such a sophisticated feat of visual processing. “How does this speck of dust of a brain achieve such a complicated task?” asks Simon Pollard, curator of invertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand. “We need to look deep into these unblinking eyes.”

more here.

From The Guardian:

There were 38 minutes left when eight very disparate Israeli opposition parties announced, just before midnight on Wednesday, that they could form a government to eject Benjamin Netanyahu from the prime ministership he has held for 12 bitter years. This last-minute outcome underscores two things. First, it says the eight-party grouping, which ranges from the leftwing Meretz to the small and ultra-nationalist Yamina of the prospective prime minister Naftali Bennett, and which will be supported by the Arab Islamist Ra’am party, is an exceptionally fragile coalition even by modern Israeli standards. Second, it shows that, in spite of Israel’s successful Covid campaign and the heightened national feeling arising from its recent conflict with Hamas, a very wide range of political groups from very different traditions nevertheless believe they have an overriding shared interest in ousting the country’s longest-serving and still ruthless leader.

This is not surprising. Mr Netanyahu may have dominated Israeli politics for a generation. But his militant divisiveness at home and abroad, and his stridently anti-Palestinian policies, have taken the country into a political blind alley. The defeat of Donald Trump has left Mr Netanyahu without his strongest international backer. He is also currently on trial for corruption, facing bribery and fraud charges arising out of three different cases of trading political favours for cash. Each of the last four general elections has ended in stalemate or something very close, most recently in March 2021. If the country was not to waste another few months under yet another unsuccessful Netanyahu regime, there had to be some sort of break. The March election has provided that opportunity – just.

More here.

From Scientific American:

It has been said that “the eyes are the window to the soul,” but new research suggests that they may be a window to the brain as well.

Our pupils respond to more than just the light. They indicate arousal, interest or mental exhaustion. Pupil dilation is even used by the FBI to detect deception. Now work conducted in our laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that baseline pupil size is closely related to individual differences in intelligence. The larger the pupils, the higher the intelligence, as measured by tests of reasoning, attention and memory. In fact, across three studies, we found that the difference in baseline pupil size between people who scored the highest on the cognitive tests and those who scored the lowest was large enough to be detected by the unaided eye.

We first uncovered this surprising relationship while studying differences in the amount of mental effort people used to complete memory tasks. We used pupil dilations as an indicator of effort, a technique psychologist Daniel Kahneman popularized in the 1960s and 1970s. When we discovered a relationship between baseline pupil size and intelligence, we weren’t sure if it was real or what it meant.

More here.

Self-Portrait as Pop Culture Reference

I was born in 1993, the year Regie Cabico became the first
Asian American to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam.

I want these facts to mean something to each other,
the way a room is just a room until love or its inverse

tells me what to do with the person standing in it.
Once, I stood on a street corner & a white woman, stunned

by the horizon I passed through to be here, put her hands
on my face to relearn history. I was named after a movie star

who died by drowning, A Streetcar Named Desire gone now
to water, & split an ocean every year to see my mother again.

The first man I loved named me after a dead American
& crushed childhood into a flock of hands.

The women I loved taught me that water cures anything
that ails, given enough thirst. I speak thirst,

sharpen the tongue that slithered through continents
& taught my ancestors to pray its name. I pray its name

& so undertake the undertaker, it preys my Mandarin name
so I watch Chinese dramas with bright-eyed bodies

Read more »

Sharon Steel in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

WHEN WRITERS BEGIN to learn our craft, we’re told to write for ourselves. As one becomes further embedded in the creative process, it can be difficult to work with this pure impulse in mind. Write for ourselves, yes, but if the work never finds readers, what does that say about us? Do stories that exist in a one-sided conversation with their authors have as much value as stories that take on a life of their own?

Jhumpa Lahiri’s creative approach begins and ends with her own desires. She’s spoken of this many times over the years, from her love of filling notebooks no one else will read to her insatiable need to understand herself through language. Many other writers say similar things, but Lahiri is the rare writer who actually means them. Having an audience, a platform, and thousands of admiring readers are consequences, not goals, of her practice.

More here.

Veronique Greenwood in Quanta:

The hydra is a simple creature. Less than half an inch long, its tubular body has a foot at one end and a mouth at the other. The foot clings to a surface underwater — a plant or a rock, perhaps — and the mouth, ringed with tentacles, ensnares passing water fleas. It does not have a brain, or even much of a nervous system.

And yet, new research shows, it sleeps. Studies by a team in South Korea and Japan showed that the hydra periodically drops into a rest state that meets the essential criteria for sleep.

On the face of it, that might seem improbable. For more than a century, researchers who study sleep have looked for its purpose and structure in the brain. They have explored sleep’s connections to memory and learning. They have numbered the neural circuits that push us down into oblivious slumber and pull us back out of it. They have recorded the telltale changes in brain waves that mark our passage through different stages of sleep and tried to understand what drives them. Mountains of research and people’s daily experience attest to human sleep’s connection to the brain.

But a counterpoint to this brain-centric view of sleep has emerged.

More here.

Jeffrey Sachs in Project Syndicate:

Israel’s attempt to justify its latest brutal assault on Gaza rings hollow to anybody familiar with events in Israel, where the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, backed by anti-Arab racists, has systematically, cruelly, and persistently violated the basic human rights of the Arab population. Human Rights Watch, a global NGO with many Jewish leaders, has recently condemned Israel for crimes against humanity.

Israel’s behavior puts US President Joe Biden’s administration, which professes a foreign policy based on human rights, under the spotlight. If that commitment is genuine, the administration should support an independent UN investigation of Israeli human rights violations against the Arab population and suspend military aid to Israel until the inquiry is completed and the human rights of the Palestinians are secured.

The antecedents of Israel’s recent airstrikes and artillery attacks on Gaza were Israeli threats to expel Palestinians from their home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem and Israeli-provoked violence at the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Right-wing Israelis marched through East Jerusalem chanting “death to Arabs.”

More here.