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Chris Berdik in Harvard Magazine:

ALARMINGLY, the rate of obesity in the United States has tripled during the past six decades: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 42 percent of American adults are obese. Globally, more than a billion people live with the condition, according to an analysis published in The Lancet in March, which found that, worldwide, the prevalence of obesity has more than doubled among adults since 1990, while quadrupling among children and adolescents. Decades of public awareness campaigns about the tremendous physical and mental health toll of the condition and coordinated efforts to promote healthier eating and exercise have failed to stem what the World Health Organization has called “an escalating global epidemic.”

Many obesity experts argue that an oversimplification of this complex condition, particularly the reliance on body mass index (BMI)—a simple calculation of weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared—has hindered effective prevention and treatment efforts. BMI as a measure of obesity, they say, has diagnostic limitations, a problematic history in which white males were the measure of normal body types, and a tendency to make weight the focus of concern rather than a person’s overall health.

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From Nature:

Picturing the Mind

Simona Ginsburg & Eva Jablonka MIT Press (2023): The groundbreaking 2019 book The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul saw Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka — biologists well known for their philosophical expertise — argue that multicellular organisms must have been conscious at least from the Cambrian Explosion, a burst of evolutionary development that happened 538 million years ago. In Picturing the Mind, the same authors ask: does it follow, then, that all the animals of today that originated in that period, including shrimps and crabs, are conscious? And if so, how can we begin to imagine what that form of consciousness is like?

…Ignorance

Peter Burke Yale Univ. Press (2023): In Ignorance, social and cultural historian Peter Burke uses well-placed humour to explore the numerous ways in which a lack of knowledge has affected both individuals and societies, for good and bad. Is ignorance always a bad thing, asks the author, citing the theory of ignorance management, in which people recognize what they don’t know and choose to focus on their strengths. It’s a fascinating thought experiment, but should be treated with caution. The idea of ‘good ignorance’ is anathema to me, as a policy researcher who thinks that knowledge is crucial for governments to make informed decisions.

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Michael Pollak over at Left Business Observer:

Here is what mainstream economics thinks we know about managing the economy:

There was a debate in the 1920s and 1930s and central planning lost. It was proven, by people like Hayek and others, that central planning couldn’t work. Its outcomes would always be inferior to the market, and usually far inferior. Over the next century, with some fits and starts, everyone eventually accepted this conclusion and that’s where we are today. All that remains is a residual fight between those who think we ought to regulate a little bit around the edges and those who think every little bit hurts. That is the current division of the world’s ruling class, between neoliberals and ultras.

The problem is that large-scale planning is everywhere, and it started pretty much the same time as it was supposedly proven impossible. Admittedly it was still somewhat new even in the very last years of that debate. James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941 with the same air that many people wrote about the computer revolution in our lifetimes: it’s going to change everything. And then it did, vastly accelerated by the large-scale economic planning of World War II.

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Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq in The Ideas Letter:

After much wrangling and back-and-forth with myself, alternately accepting and refusing, believing and disbelieving, asking what the point would be, I have decided to start writing. 106 days since we were suddenly, startlingly, swept into the vortex of war once again, I am writing so as not to become brutalized, so as not to be consumed by the pitiless machine of war and turned into a monster in a dark hole.

I have spent days paralyzed, disoriented, doubting the truth of what is happening, and all the while running the grueling course that is daily life under wartime conditions: endless queues and unimaginable humiliation for a few rounds of bread or a gallon of drinking water or a gas canister that will save us having to cook our meals on an open fire, and the constant struggle to keep up with fast-moving events, which spread dementedly from one part of Gaza to another. Running in these never-ending circles, with the convoluted details and heart-rending sights they bring, occupies all my days. There is never a moment to contemplate the turn of events that has made all forms of life in Gaza into a perpetual hell.

It came all at once, smothering every last comfortable and pleasant space I was blessed with before the war restarted. My summer of 2023 was overflowing with life. Between my various jobs, I was busy at all hours, but I still made time now and then to meet up with my friends, who were much less busy than me, to play cards on the beach at Khan Younis.

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Suzanne Schneider at Know Your Enemy:

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Jacob Baynham in Noema:

The universe was born small, unimaginably dense and furiously hot. At first, it was all energy contained in a volume of space that exploded in size by a factor of 100 septillion in a fraction of a second. Imagine it as a single cell ballooning to the size of the Milky Way almost instantaneously. Elementary particles like quarks, photons and electrons were smashing into each other with such violence that no other matter could exist. The primordial cosmos was a white-hot smoothie in a blender.

One second after the Big Bang, the expanding universe was 10 billion degrees Kelvin. Quarks and gluons had congealed to make the first protons and neutrons, which collided over the course of a few minutes and stuck in different configurations, forming the nuclei of the first three elements: two gases and one light metal. For the next 100 million years or so, these would be the only elements in the vast, unblemished fabric of space before the first stars ignited like furnaces in the dark to forge all other matter.

Almost 14 billion years later, on the third rocky planet orbiting a young star in a distal arm of a spiral galaxy, intelligent lifeforms would give names to those first three elements. The two gases: hydrogen and helium. The metal: lithium.

This is the story of that metal, a powerful, promising and somehow still mysterious element on which those intelligent lifeforms — still alone in the universe, as far as they know — have pinned their hopes for survival on a planet warmed by their excesses.

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The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

……………… Human movements,
……………… but for a few,
……………… are Westerly.
……………… Man follows the Sun.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

……………… Or follows what he thinks to be the
……………… movement of the Sun.
……………… It is hard to feel it, as a rider,
……………… on a spinning ball.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

……………… Centuries and hordes of us,
……………… from every quarter of the earth,
……………… now piling up,
……………… and each wave going back
……………… to get some more.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

……………… “My face is the map of the Steppes,”
……………… she said, on this mountain, looking West.

……………… My blood set by singing it,
……………… to the old tunes,
……………… Irish, Still,
……………… among these Oaks.

by Lew Welch
from Ring of Bone
Grey Fox Press, 1979

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

He begins with Rousseau, and in particular his 1755 Discourse on Inequality, the Swiss philosopher’s entry to an essay competition run by the Academy of Dijon – a sort of Enlightenment France Has Got Talent – that addressed how we ended up in a world in which “an imbecile should lead a wise man, and a handful of people should gorge themselves on superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities”. Briskly examining Jean-Jacques’s rewind into human prehistory to explain this state of affairs, Runciman is able to collapse certain myths, not least that persistent idea that Rousseau was the “friendly” and “natural” philosopher, the first hippy, the consummate rewilder, by reminding the reader that so indifferent was he to the “artificial” and “constraining” bonds of society, that he put all his five children into a foundling home, dramatising his belief that even family ties were a “sham”, and that the individual and his relationship with nature was all that counted.

At the other “bracing” extreme from Rousseau he argues that Nietzsche, another great unraveller of human political DNA, comes at the “how the hell did we get here?” question from the diametrically opposed position: not “how did the privileged few come to dominate the many” but how did the many, through religion and democracy, come to dominate the few, the elite, the powerful, their true masters?

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Huw Price in Pearls and Irritations:

In 2012 I was in Cambridge, newly enthroned as the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy. The town had a new Duke and Duchess that year, too, in William and Kate. When they announced they were expecting their first child, I wrote a piece for The Conversation. Welcome as Baby Cambridge would be, I said, she or he was entitled to normal choices in life. 

I followed up with a second piece, after George’s birth. I pointed out that if we moved quickly, he could be allowed a comparatively normal childhood, with the opportunity to choose his own path. Like the then Prince of Wales, I became a grandfather that year. I congratulated him, but said that his grandson should not be denied freedoms that mine would take for granted.

I didn’t get much traction at the time, but the window has been shifting. In the wake of Harry’s book Spare, several writers made similar points. In the Guardian, for example, Jonathan Freedland compared the Windsors to the Truman Show. Kate Williams argued we don’t need a spare, and that Windsor children except the heir should be allowed a normal life. And Catherine Bennett said, “If the country can’t do without the family entirely, we could surely ration ourselves to one child victim per generation.”

This is progress, by my lights, especially Bennett’s use of the phrase ‘child victim’. But even she doesn’t spell out the important point.

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Erica Klarreich in Quanta:

A group of nine mathematicians has proved the geometric Langlands conjecture, a key component of one of the most sweeping paradigms in modern mathematics.

The proof represents the culmination of three decades of effort, said Peter Scholze, a prominent mathematician at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics who was not involved in the proof. “It’s wonderful to see it resolved.”

The Langlands program, originated by Robert Langlands in the 1960s, is a vast generalization of Fourier analysis, a far-reaching framework in which complex waves are expressed in terms of smoothly oscillating sine waves. The Langlands program holds sway in three separate areas of mathematics: number theory, geometry and something called function fields. These three settings are connected by a web of analogies commonly called mathematics’ Rosetta stone.

Now, a new set of papers has settled the Langlands conjecture in the geometric column of the Rosetta stone.

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Gary Saul Morson in Commentary:

Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead of recognizing how much he had missed when cut off from New York, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, this ex-Soviet dissident not only refused to accept superior American ideas but even presumed to instruct us. Harvard was shocked at the speech he gave there in 1978, while the New York Times cautioned: “We fear that Mr. Solzhenitsyn does the world no favor by calling for a holy war.”

For his part, Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that Westerners would not want to hear all he had learned journeying through the depths of totalitarian hell. “Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”

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Claire Dederer at The Guardian:

I know too much about Joan Didion. I’ve seen her image on tote bags and Celine ads; I’ve scrolled past her beautiful sulking face on countless Instagram feeds; I’ve streamed multiple documentaries about her. You’ll notice that I’m not describing her work; I’m describing her fame: the Didion spectacle. I’m impatient with this fame of hers. I believe she is famous for the wrong reasons; in other words, that she is loved wrongly and maybe too widely. I want her to be loved only the way I love her: as the author of a few specific pieces of writing.

I’m not alone in this feeling. My kid texted me the day Didion died: “I loved her but Twitter today is going to be unbearable.” So I came with some trepidation to The Uptown Local. Some reviewers have complained that the book – an account of Cory Leadbeater’s time working as Didion’s assistant – is a little too light on the Didion and a little too heavy on Leadbeater’s own experiences of joy and death.

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Robert Schmerling in Harvard Health Publishing:

Not so long ago, a friend texted me from a coffee shop. He said, “I can’t believe it. I’m the only one here without a tattoo!” That might not seem surprising: a quick glance around practically anywhere people gather shows that tattoos are widely popular. Nearly one-third of adults in the US have a tattoo, according to a Pew Research Center survey, including more than half of women ages 18 to 49. These numbers have increased dramatically over the last 20 years: around 21% of US adults in 2012 and 16% of adults in 2003 reported having at least one tattoo. If you’re among them, some recent headlines may have you worried:

Study Finds That Tattoos Can Increase Your Risk of Lymphoma (OnlyMyHealth)

              Getting a Tattoo Puts You At Higher Risk of Cancer, Claims Study (NDTV)

              Inky waters: Tattoos increase risk of lymphoma by over 20%, study says (Local12.com)

              Shocking study reveals tattoos may increase risk of lymphoma by 20% (Fox News)

What study are they talking about? And how concerned should you be? Let’s go through it together. One thing is clear: there’s much more to this story than the headlines.

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Michael Kimmage in TNR:

Alcove 1 at the City College of New York is surely the most famous lunch table in American intellectual history. No Ivy League dining hall can compete. In the 1930s, a remarkable coterie of students gathered there. (The neighboring alcove, Alcove 2, was a meeting place for students who hewed closer to the party line in Moscow, for the “Stalinists” as they would have been called in Alcove 1.) By now many books and documentaries have been made and written about Alcove 1 and its legacy, which in miniature is the saga of the “New York intellectuals.” They were mostly Jewish, uniformly gifted, and fabulously influential at midcentury. Their history can have the aura of myth.

In Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, Ronnie Grinberg, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, has reconfigured the story of the New York intellectuals. As she notes, many of the most prominent New York intellectuals were not just Jewish—they were men. This circumstance has sociological implications. These intellectuals inhabited and created male spaces like Alcove 1 and mostly male institutions like Partisan Review and Commentary, their pivotal magazines. The writings of Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, and Norman Mailer, New York intellectuals all, showed an obsession with masculinity, their own and that of others. They developed an “ideology of secular Jewish masculinity,” Grinberg writes, which was expressed in a style of writing that merged “verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation.”

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