August? —Impossible

yesterday
walking
deep in myself
in a kind of sweet
melancholy
the sound of a curled
oak leaf woke me
as it skittered across
my path on small, dry feet
into the pond
my eye followed
and saw beyond
the black-green water weed
along the shore
the reflection
of trees already bare.
Summer had gone
while my thoughts
were elsewhere

I carried
because of the wind
my broad-brimmed
hat in my hand
“It is filled with
sky-longing,” I thought
and so I looked up
into the over-arching blue
beyond the thin clouds
born again into the world
of things, no longer
just in the thought of things

by Nils Peterson

Aaron Hirsh in Nautilus:

Epidemics have a way of making one wonder about death. To put it plainly, in the raw form it takes as it first rises from our hearts: Why? Why on Earth does it have to be this way?

In The Plague, Albert Camus’ novel of harrowing disease in an Algerian city, Father Paneloux, a faithful Jesuit, steps to the pulpit and offers his explanation. “This same pestilence which is slaying you,” Paneloux says, “works for your good and points your path.” In another sermon, Paneloux goes further: “The suffering of children was our bitter bread, but without this bread our soul would perish from its spiritual hunger.”

A young Charles Darwin, too, wondered about this problem, and for a while, he thought perhaps he had found an answer. Indeed his argument had something in common with Paneloux’s sermon: Death and suffering were linked inescapably to a higher good, though Darwin’s good was different from Paneloux’s. Where the Jesuit placed spiritual direction and nourishment, Darwin inserted the evolution of wondrous living things. The final paragraph of On the Origin of Species includes this remarkable sentence: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”

More here.

Barbara Kennedy in BBC:

In the darkness of her small bedroom in Peru’s Sacred Valley of the Incas, Sara Qquehuarucho Zamalloa packed her bag, thoughts racing: Would the weather be good? Would the team be friendly? Would she encounter park rangers with bad attitudes toward women? Would her mum, who suffers from chronic pain, be okay while she was gone?

She pushed aside the ruminations. She was headed out the next morning as an assistant guide on the Inca Trail, the precipitous pathway leading to the famous 15th-Century Inca citadel of Machu Picchu. She loved the job. It paid more than anything else she could be doing, and, perhaps most importantly, it empowered her in Peru’s patriarchal society. Knowing she could tackle the Inca Trail – both physically and mentally – as a guide made her feel like she could accomplish anything she set her mind to. She double checked to make sure she had her guiding ID and her water bottle, and ensured her pack was not too heavy (every kilogram counts on the trail), then went to say farewell to her mother in the house’s other room. Zamalloa slipped her mother some money, noticing how their roles had changed since childhood, and crawled into bed for six hours of solid sleep. She always slept well the night before a trek.

Zamalloa’s boldest hope as a child in the village of San Martin, located in the cloud forests high above the Amazon jungle, was to become an administrative assistant, a job that in Peru would have landed her in a male-dominated office with no hope of upward mobility.

More here.

David Brooks in The Atlantic:

The class structure of Western society has gotten scrambled over the past few decades. It used to be straightforward: You had the rich, who joined country clubs and voted Republican; the working class, who toiled in the factories and voted Democratic; and, in between, the mass suburban middle class. We had a clear idea of what class conflict, when it came, would look like—members of the working classes would align with progressive intellectuals to take on the capitalist elite.

But somehow when the class conflict came, in 2015 and 2016, it didn’t look anything like that. Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite. These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is. Because of this, the U.S. has polarized into two separate class hierarchies—one red and one blue. Classes struggle not only up and down, against the richer and poorer groups on their own ladder, but against their partisan opposite across the ideological divide.

More here.

John Preskill (among others) in Physics Today:

By the summer of 1981, I had completed my PhD under Steve’s supervision and was starting a junior faculty position at Harvard. I knew that my parents, who were visiting, would enjoy meeting Steve and Louise, so we all had dinner together in my backyard. Realizing how much it would please my parents, Steve made some kind remarks about me during dinner. But the most memorable moment was when we were discussing how to make ice cream, and Steve expressed puzzlement over why one adds salt to the ice-cream maker. My Dad, who was not a scientist, helpfully suggested, “Isn’t it to lower the melting point of the ice, so the ice cream will be cold enough to solidify?” “Of course!” Steve replied, slapping his forehead. “I never understood that before. Thank you!” And for the rest of his life, my Dad would relish the time he gave the great Steven Weinberg a physics lesson.

More here.

Matt Taibbi in his Substack Newsletter:

100 years ago yesterday — on July 29, 1921 — Adolph Hitler was elected leader of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, later known as the Nazi Party. The combustible Army corporal succeeded the party’s original leader, Anton Drexler, whom Hitler originally been sent to spy on, but whose ideas he came to admire (he may even have shaved his mustache to emulate his predecessor). The 533-1 delegate vote set in motion a series of events that would dominate the next two and a half decades of world history.

A young Jewish Internet commentator named Manny Marotta wanted to call attention to the date, for educational purposes. Marotta has been maintaining popular accounts on both Twitter and Instagram called 100 Years Ago Live. His simple, clever, and enlightening mission is to describe history as an actual contemporary might have, in the language of modern social media tools. It’s popular, earning 26,000 followers on Twitter.

Marotta’s accounts remind us that the past was once news, that stories we now remember as ossified, fixed narratives captured in black and white were once fresh, suspenseful events, that filled contemporaries with excitement, and uncertainty.

More here.

The Lesson of the Sugarcane

My mother opened her eyes wide
at the edge of the field
ready for cutting.
“Take a deep breath,”
… she whispered,
“There is nothing as sweet:
Nada más dulce.”
Father left the flat he was changing
in the road-warping sun,
and grabbing my arm, broke my sprint
toward a stalk:
“Cane can choke a little girl: snakes hide
where it grows over your head.”

And he led us back to the crippled car
where we sweated out our penitence,
for having craved more sweetness
then we were allowed,
more than we could handle.

by Judith Ortiz Cofer
from Touching the Fire
Anchor Books, 1998

James Surowiecki in 1843 Magazine:

We used to make things. Now we have meetings. On any given weekday some 50m meetings are held in American workplaces alone. The average executive now spends 23 hours in them each week, a figure that has more than doubled since the 1960s. The number of meetings proliferated in the 1980s as Western economies moved away from manufacturing towards “knowledge” industries that seemed to require a lot of talking. And while covid-19 may have shut down the office (at least temporarily), it magnified the importance of meetings, which now take place on our laptops. During the pandemic we’ve spent more time in them than we ever did in person.

Despite their centrality to modern life, few of us have a good word to say about meetings. Surveys suggest we consider at least half the ones we attend to be ineffective – the same bores drone on, the people with something useful to say don’t speak and nothing of importance gets decided. In many office cultures, a meeting is a byword for a tedious, time-wasting exercise.

Frustration with meetings has fuelled a mini-industry in management books – “How to Hold Successful Meetings”, “Meeting Design” and “Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable” – dedicated to solving what one author labels “the most painful problem in business”.

More here.

Nick Hilden in Scientific American:

The list of mycologists whose names are known beyond their fungal field is short, and at its apex is Paul Stamets. Educated in, and a longtime resident of, the mossy, moldy, mushy Pacific Northwest region, Stamets has made numerous contributions over the past several decades— perhaps the best summation of which can be found in his 2005 book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. But now he is looking beyond Earth to discover new ways that mushrooms can help with the exploration of space.

In a new “astromycological” venture launched in conjunction with NASA, Stamets and various research teams are studying how fungi can be leveraged to build extraterrestrial habitats and perhaps someday even terraform planets. This is not the first time Stamets’s career has intersected with speculative space science. He also recently received an honor that many researchers would consider only slightly less hallowed than a Nobel Prize: the distinction of having a Star Trek character named after him.

Scientific American spoke with Stamets about the out-of-this-world implications for the emerging field of astromycology.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofGnBpQwL3k

The Log Lady of the Quiet Zone lived a few miles away and had the mysterious power to “detect” WiFi, cell signals, and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. I was told I might find the Log Lady at church—perhaps the only church in America quiet enough for her to attend.

Pocahontas County had about three dozen active churches, approximately one for every 230 people, compared with a national average of one for every 1,000 people. The churches were community gathering places, and I’d found myself relying on them to better understand the area. Most were Methodist or Presbyterian. Some were Baptist and Brethren. Three were Catholic. And Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church, built in 1897 on a hillside about five miles from the observatory, seemed to be the designated church of the so-called electrosensitives.

Wesley Chapel was quiet both by law and by default.

more here.

Jamieson Webster at Artforum:

I WONDER HOW people will think of psychoanalysis after they see the show “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter,” currently at the Jewish Museum in New York. Will it rise in their esteem, having fallen to the level of a silly, obsolete science, a worn-out, clichéd set of interpretations? Bourgeois’s relationship to psychoanalysis is rich, layered, and, importantly, long, as psychoanalysis is wont to be: beginning in 1951 with her treatment following her father’s death, lasting until 1985 with her psychoanalyst’s death. She calls it “a jip,” “a duty,” “a joke,” “a love affair,” “a bad dream,” “a pain in the neck,” and “my field of study.”¹ It is, indeed, all of these things and more. And it is, in ways I think have been neglected or rarely glimpsed, also sculptural.

more here.

Bryan VanDyke in The Millions:

Some years ago, I attended a conference featuring boldface names and their thoughts on the topic of the essay as art. At 39, I’d written three failed novels, and essays felt like the last form left to me. I was desperate for tips, tricks, and whatever writerly chum they throw to audiences at events like these.

“An essay,” said Philip Lopate on the day of the conference, “is an invitation to think alongside me.”

I jotted his words in a Moleskine notebook and have been turning them over in my head and on the page ever since. The best essays are trips to terra nova, yes; but at heart, all essays depend on a simple sense of camaraderie. From the first word to the last, the writer of an essay is a guide, even if the piece never gets out of first gear. Each essay is a fellowship.

By Lopate’s definition, there’s no better essayist than Annie Dillard. Her thoughts go places no one else can see. Following in her path, you can sip the cold fire of eternity, cheat death in a stunt plane, or trace God’s name in sand, salt, or cloud. She didn’t invent the essay. Her most famous work isn’t classified as an essay. But in the cosmos of essayists, there’s Annie Dillard, and there’s everyone else.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The arrow of time — all the ways in which the past differs from the future — is a fascinating subject because it connects everyday phenomena (memory, aging, cause and effect) to deep questions in physics and philosophy. At its heart is the fact that entropy increases over time, which in turn can be traced to special conditions in the early universe. David Wallace is one of the world’s leading philosophers working on the foundations of physics, including space and time as well as quantum mechanics. We talk about how increasing entropy gives rise to the arrow of time, and what it is about the early universe that makes this happen. Then we cannot help but connecting this story to features of the Many-Worlds (Everett) interpretation of quantum mechanics.

More here.

Josep Borrell and Paolo Gentiloni in Project Syndicate:

Multilateralism has been on the defensive in recent years. In a global setting that is more multipolar than multilateral, competition between states seems to prevail over cooperation nowadays. However, the recent global agreement to reform international corporate taxation is welcome proof that multilateralism is not dead.

But it is not healthy, either. While globalization has continued during the COVID-19 pandemic – albeit more unevenly than before and despite people’s feelings of increased isolation – interdependence is ever more conflictual. Even soft power is being weaponized, with vaccines, data, and technology standards all becoming instruments of political competition.

The world is also becoming less free. Democracy itself is under attack, amid a pitched battle of narratives over which political and economic system can best deliver for its citizens.

More here.

Jesse Lee Kercheval at the New England Review:

It is 1966 and I am sitting on a stool at the Burger King on Merritt Island, Florida, eating French fries. My view is Highway 520 and the cars speeding up to the rare stoplight just beyond where I sit. My father, my sister, and I have been to Cocoa Beach to swim and are on our way home. I always beg to stop at the Burger King. I am always famished after swimming and there is nowhere to eat on the beach. Also, we are not a fast food family so this is a treat, something my mother, who never goes to the beach, does not know about. I love how, after being at the beach, the French fries taste doubly salty.

Then a station wagon with a surfboard on top smacks into the rear end of a long, low convertible with its top down, which is stopped for the red light. There is a tremendous noise. I feel it in my body, metal on metal, and the surfboard goes flying off the top of the station wagon, through the air. It decapitates the driver of the convertible. Just like that.

more here.

Calvin Tomkins at The New Yorker:

For the first thirty years of his career, Kerry James Marshall was a successful but little known artist. His figurative paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and videos appeared in gallery and museum shows here and abroad, and selling them was never a problem. He won awards, residencies, and grants, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, but in the contemporary-art world, which started to look more closely at Black artists in the nineties, Marshall was an outlier, and happy to be one. He had an unshakable confidence in himself as an artist, and the undistracted solitude of his practice allowed him to spend most of his time in the studio. The curator Helen Molesworth told me that during the three years it took to put together “Mastry,” Marshall’s first major retrospective in the United States, which opened in 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, “there were still people in the art world who didn’t know who he was.”

This is no longer the case. The exhibition outed Marshall as a great artist, a virtuoso of landscape, portraiture, still-life, history painting, and other genres of the Western canon since the Renaissance.

more here.