Dwight Garner in The New York Times:

By the time Edward St. Aubyn completed the last of his Patrick Melrose novels in 2012, it was clear that a new animal had approached the watering hole of fiction in England. This animal was of a species thought to have largely gone extinct: the anatomist of the remote upper classes. The subject of these novels put St. Aubyn in an invidious position. His arrival was resisted. To a certain kind of reader, the notion of consuming five novels about extreme privilege — heavy manners, long bones — seemed about as enjoyable as expressing a dog’s anal glands. But St. Aubyn could write: He could really write. He blended woe with wit; his ironies were fierce and finely tuned. The details were precise because St. Aubyn actually had the British upper-class background that, as Clive James noted, the snobbier Evelyn Waugh longed for. St. Aubyn’s new book, “Double Blind,” is an entertainment on scientific themes: brain-mapping, biochemistry, botany, immunotherapy, schizophrenia and the ethics of placebos (hence the book’s title), among other topics.

…Here he is on neuroscience and my day job: “What part of the brain lights up when the reader first encounters Mr. Darcy and his odious pride? Can literary criticism afford to ignore what is happening to the reader’s amygdala when Elizabeth Bennet rejects his first proposal? It is a truth universally acknowledged that any topic in search of a reputation for seriousness must be in want of neuroimaging.”

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From Phys.Org:

Art Garfunkel once described his legendary musical chemistry with Paul Simon, “We meet somewhere in the air through the vocal cords … .” But a new study of duetting songbirds from Ecuador, the plain-tail wren (Pheugopedius euophrys), has offered another tune explaining the mysterious connection between successful performing duos. It’s a link of their minds, and it happens, in fact, as each singer mutes the brain of the other as they coordinate their duets. In a study published May 31 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers studying brain activity of singing male and female plain-tailed wrens has discovered that the species synchronizes their frenetically paced duets, surprisingly, by inhibiting the song-making regions of their partner’s brain as they exchange phrases.

Researchers say that the auditory feedback exchanged between wrens during their opera-like duets momentarily inhibits motor circuits used for singing in the listening partner, which helps link the pair’s brains and coordinate turn-taking for a seemingly telepathic performance. The study also offers fresh insight into how humans and other cooperative animals use sensory cues to act in concert with one another. “You could say that timing is everything,” said Eric Fortune, co-author of the study and neurobiologist at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Department of Biological Sciences. “What these wrens have shown us is that for any good collaboration, partners need to become ‘one’ through sensory linkages. The take-home message is that when we are cooperating well… we become a single entity with our partners.”

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Question

Body my house
my home my hound
what will I do
when you have fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

by May Swenson
from A Book of Luminous Things
Houghton Mifflin, 1996

Kieran Setiya in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Philosophy has a vexed relationship with the business of self-help. On the one hand, philosophers offer systematic visions of how to live; on the other hand, these visions are meant to be argued with, not deferred to or chosen off the rack. Though it runs deep, this tension has not slowed the flood of titles, published in the last few years, that take a dead philosopher as a guide to life. These books will teach you How to Be a Stoic, How to Be an Epicurean, and How William James Can Save Your Life; you can take The Socrates Express to Aristotle’s Way and go Hiking with Nietzsche.

The latest victim, or beneficiary, of this popular treatment is David Hume, a giant of the Scottish Enlightenment widely regarded as the greatest philosopher to write in English. Hume gave birth to a slew of skeptical problems, about personal identity, substance, and causality; he forged a naturalistic moral theory that gave a central role to human sympathy; and, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), he wrote what Isaiah Berlin called “perhaps the most remarkable treatise upon this subject ever composed.” Hume was a pioneer in the nascent field of psychology — anticipating such discoveries as the “recency effect,” hyberbolic discounting, the role of heuristics in cognition, and the “fundamental attribution error” — as well as a brilliant essayist who published the best-selling work of history in Britain before Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–’89). (Gibbon called Hume “the Tacitus of Scotland.”) Even a hater like James Boswell, who was horrified by Hume’s irreligion, called him “the greatest Writer in Britain.” In The Great Guide, Julian Baggini offers a bright, engaging, reliable introduction to Hume’s life and work, extracting an extensive list of Humean maxims and aphorisms that make up an appendix to the book.

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Vishal Khetpal and Nishant Shah in Undark:

Last spring, physicians like us were confused. Covid-19 was just starting its deadly journey around the world, afflicting our patients with severe lung infections, strokes, skin rashes, debilitating fatigue, and numerous other acute and chronic symptoms. Armed with outdated clinical intuitions, we were left disoriented by a disease shrouded in ambiguity.

In the midst of the uncertainty, Epic, a private electronic health record giant and a key purveyor of American health data, accelerated the deployment of a clinical prediction tool called the Deterioration Index. Built with a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning and in use at some hospitals prior to the pandemic, the index is designed to help physicians decide when to move a patient into or out of intensive care, and is influenced by factors like breathing rate and blood potassium level. Epic had been tinkering with the index for years but expanded its use during the pandemic. At hundreds of hospitals, including those in which we both work, a Deterioration Index score is prominently displayed on the chart of every patient admitted to the hospital.

More here.

Tyler Cowen at Bloomberg:

Economics is one of the better-funded and more scientific social sciences, but in some critical ways it is failing us. The main problem, as I see it, is standards: They are either too high or too low. In both cases, the result is less daring and creativity.

Consider academic research. In the 1980s, the ideal journal submission was widely thought to be 17 pages, maybe 30 pages for a top journal. The result was a lot of new ideas, albeit with a lower quality of execution. Nowadays it is more common for submissions to top economics journals to be 90 pages, with appendices, robustness checks, multiple methods, numerous co-authors and every possible criticism addressed along the way.

There is little doubt that the current method yields more reliable results. But at what cost? The economists who have changed the world, such as Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes or Friedrich Hayek, typically had brilliant ideas with highly imperfect execution. It is now harder for this kind of originality to gain traction.

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William Dalrymple in The Guardian:

In the hot summer of 1840, the young orientalist Henry Rawlinson arrived in Karachi and began anxiously searching for his mentor, the pioneering archaeologist of Afghanistan, Charles Masson. The rumours he had heard profoundly alarmed him.

Rawlinson was a rising star: he had recently made his name by helping decipher ancient Persian cuneiform script; but he looked up to Masson as a far greater scholar. For more than a decade, Masson had wandered, alone and on foot, exploring Afghanistan, collecting coins and inscriptions, studying ruins and making sketches.

The bilingual Hellenistic coins Masson had sent to Calcutta, minted by men with names such as Pantaleon, King of North India and Demetrius Dharmamita, had been like miniature Rosetta stones. They had provided the key for scholars to understand the profoundly hybrid, Greco-Buddhist ancient history of the region. The coins of Heliochles of Balkh were typical: they showed a Roman profile on one side – large nose, imperial arrogance in the eyes – but on the reverse Heliochles chose as his symbol a humped Indian Brahmini bull.

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Supplication

The sea took a sailor to its deep —
His mother, unsuspecting, goes to light

a tall candle before the Virgin Mary
for his speedy return and for fine weather —

and always she cocks here ear to windward.
But while she prays and implores,

the icon listens, solemn and sad, knowing well
that the son she expects will no longer return.

by Constantine Cavafy
from A Book of Luminous Things
Houghton Mifflin, 1996

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5Owq_xFmdI

Matthew Daddodna in McSweeney’s:

The first public literary reading I ever gave was at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge for a now-defunct magazine’s issue showcase. I was 21 years old and had never read my poems in front of a live audience. More important, I had never built up the requisite nerves to read my poems aloud, and, as a way of coping, I had spent that afternoon day drinking in nearby Washington Square Park with a group of strangers from the Bronx who could have been troubadours from Kentucky. By the time I got to the venue, drunk on whiskey siphoned from their flasks and cheap beer from the local bodega, I was shocked to see that some of my friends and professional peers had shown up to watch me perform. If it wasn’t enough to want to impress them by reading at a public space, I had also trained myself to recite the poems, sans paper. Hours earlier, I had even been so bold as to crumple the printed poems and pour beer on them as a final act of humiliation. Now, in the impractically lit basement that functioned as a lounge, a bar, and a performance space, the lines of the poems melted away and the humiliation was turned inward. Once I was called up to the stage, I looked into the far recesses of the dim basement for something—call it a friendly face, call it a sign—to look back. But I saw nothing; I heard only applause and a couple glasses clink as they were placed on the bar. I put my sweaty palms inside my pocket in an attempt to dig out poems that were no longer there.

“Thank you for coming,” I said to the expectant crowd.

John Vincler in The Paris Review:

I will remember 2020 not as a year of looking but as a year of listening. For months as the pandemic overtook New York, ambulance sirens sounded at all hours in strange choruses. When the sound of the sirens would break occasionally or fade into the distance after dawn, it was replaced not by eerie silence but by birdsong: the shrieks of the blue jays, the playful cheeps of the sparrows in the bushes, the eeks, chirps, and oddly varied sounds of the grackles everywhere. I wondered then, Were these sounds always here, and it was we who were made quiet? I rarely left my neighborhood of Ditmas Park, in Brooklyn, except to take my partner, Kate, pregnant with our second child, to appointments at the Manhattan hospital complex that was itself a hive of sirens that grew louder each time we approached. In my memory the sirens and birdsong were followed by police helicopters seemingly always overhead, as the city erupted in Black Lives Matter protests and the violent police response that only ensured they should continue. The helicopters loomed in the skies above as I ran circles over the same patch of weeds in the small plot of our shared backyard, playing a game my four-year-old daughter, Leo, calls “dinosaur chase” (she is the dinosaur, I am her lunch). Half the year was marked by interrupted sleep—first the constant fireworks at all hours of the night and then, by the end of the summer, the squawking and cooing of the baby, unaware of the distinction between day and night. As I write this, collecting a year, it is spring again. The neighborhood seems to be returning to some approximation of the old sounds from before. That is, if we can recall the way it used to sound. Even the old sounds are heard differently now. With my daughter in her mud boots, bird book and binoculars in hand, as the baby sleeps at home on Kate, we begin each day our circuit. Leo collects sticks, rocks, and seed pods, stomps in puddles, and pauses to track blue jays in a tree, following their noisy stutter.

More here.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

On 21 May​ Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire after eleven days of fighting, but the days of ‘quiet’ – as the New York Times tellingly describes the last seven years, in which Israel intensified its domination over the Palestinians with impunity – are over. Dead, too, is Trump’s plan to bypass the Palestinian question through ‘normalisation’ between Israel and Arab autocrats keen to do business with the Jewish state (and to buy its surveillance technology to monitor their own dissidents). If Netanyahu imagined that by attacking Gaza he could inflict defeat on Hamas, and rescue his own precarious political career, he has miscalculated. Hamas fired more than four thousand rockets across the border, hitting deep inside Israel and killing a dozen people, shifting the balance of fear. It also gained politically from the fighting by presenting itself as a defender of the Palestinians facing expulsion from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, and, even more important, as a protector of al-Aqsa Mosque, under siege from Israeli security forces.

The territory it governs lies in ruins, but Hamas has reason to celebrate. While 90 per cent of its rockets were repelled by Iron Dome, Israel’s defence system, 100 per cent hit their other target: the Palestinian Authority, which looks even more impotent than usual. Hamas’s performance in the war has not only raised its prestige among Palestinians; it has made them forget for the moment its mismanagement and authoritarian rule inside Gaza. If the PA held an election, Hamas would almost certainly win, which may be the real reason that, in late April, President Mahmoud Abbas indefinitely postponed the legislative election scheduled for 22 May.

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Thomas Meaney in Sidecar:

Family lore has it that during the First Russian Revolution – 1905 – his mother carried anti-Czarist pamphlets in her school knapsack, and that she later worked briefly as a secretary to Rosa Luxemburg. That is where any biographer of Marshall Sahlins might want to begin. Or with the 18th-century mystic, the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidic Judaism, from whom the Sahlins clan sometimes claimed descent. Born in 1930, Sahlins grew up on Chicago’s West Side, in a family unaffiliated with any Russian faction, but the radical nimbus remained. His interest in anthropology came early, as a boy, playing cowboys and Indians, with a decided preference for the latter. The discipline attracted the children of Jewish immigrants in the interwar decades. Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld, fellow West Siders, also started out in anthropology, which provided critical purchase on their otherwise headlong plunge into American society, along with the means to levitate thrillingly above the folkways of the old country that persisted in their families and neighbourhoods.

Sahlins is sometimes treated as an heir to the grand American anthropology tradition of Franz Boas. In fact, he stemmed from a rival line. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the 1950s, he studied with the Mencken-like maverick – and anti-Boas brawler ­– Leslie White. A former student of Veblen and a member of the Socialist Labor Party, White had toured the Soviet Union on the eve of the Great Depression and wrote for Party publications under the name ‘John Steel’. He was a paradoxical figure. Culture, in his conception, was both a reflection of a society’s underlying economic constraints, but also an autonomous force organizing its social life. He developed a theory of technological determinism in human history, but also insisted that most of his contemporaries had underplayed the degree to which humans were a symbolically constituted species (these were among the antinomies that Sahlins would try to resolve).

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Rebecca Stropoli in Chicago Booth Review:

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Hollywood mogul David Geffen enraged many social media users when he posted a photo of his yacht, Rising Sun, on calm waters. “Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus,” Geffen wrote on Instagram. “I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.”

The photo of billionaire life aboard a 454 ft., $590 million yacht inspired plenty of outrage, and even a parody song by singer John Mayer titled “Drone Shot of My Yacht.” As an example of conspicuous consumption, the post highlighted stark global inequalities in wealth and opportunity, and didn’t land well with the millions of people stuck at home in lockdown or risking their health and lives performing essential work.

But when it comes to wealth inequality, a billionaire’s yacht is a sideshow, says Chicago Booth’s Amir Sufi. After all, a yacht is rooted in the real economy. A good chunk of the money originally spent on the yacht went to pay workers and buy equipment, and had a multiplier effect as it circulated in the broader economy. The real problem could be that much of the money owned by billionaires and other wealthy people never makes it that far. “People get angry about seeing the rich consuming a lot,” Sufi says, “but that’s better than what they’re actually doing.”

What’s happening, he says, is that disparities in income and wealth have fueled ever more saving by the top 1 percent. But while many economists think more saving leads to productive investment, Sufi, Princeton’s Atif Mian, and Harvard’s Ludwig Straub make a different argument. They find that these savings are largely unproductive, being remade by the financial system into household and government debt. And their research outlines a cycle whereby the savings of the top 1 percent fuel the debt and dissavings of the lower 90 percent, which in turn leads to more savings at the top.

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Oliver Soden at The Guardian:

This biography’s value and novelty are level-headedness and fine-grained research. Clayton explains rather than exculpates, narrates rather than judges. She sets Hepworth talking through the pages, quoting generously from letters that correct, or complicate, previous accounts of her humourless self-absorption. A passionate and stylish correspondent, Hepworth makes strings of her words: “one’s mind is so turned towards France & the weather & winds & sea!”; “the feel of the earth as one walks on it, the resistance, the flow the weathering the outcrops the growth structure, ice-age, flood”. Clayton uses letters to show again and again how Hepworth doted on her children. On parting with the triplets: “it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to think about. I am so deeply happy about the babies & want them with me all the time”. This confirms what Hepworth’s work had already made clear: motherhood and family nourished and inspired her. Many of her sculptures of babies are exquisitely tender, the infant’s skull properly outsized and somehow translucent, as if veins pulsed beneath wooden skin and marble bone.

more here.

Jonathan Russell Clark at the LA Times:

It all goes back, strangely, to a trip the French thinker took to left-wing California — and a trip he took once he got there. Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora’s new book, “The Last Man Takes LSD,” focuses on Foucault’s final decade, from 1975, when he took the hallucinogen in California for the first time, until his death in 1984 of complications from AIDS. During this period, Foucault shifted from the leftist politics of the ’60s toward a more centrist position, a drift hardly rare for his generation under the Cold War. As Dean and Zamora put it, “Foucault and many other post-’68 intellectuals took part in the process of thinking about a Left that was not socialist, a Left that would wipe out the legacy of post-war socialism.”

In this view, a government given too much power by its citizens would invariably lead to totalitarianism. Socialism was viewed as “crypto-totalitarian.” For Foucault, such regimes didn’t merely control their populace, they defined them.

more here.