Elementaries

Held at the proper angle, a lens will rip the sun’s flames from the sky.
Cast them down upon sidewalks, cremate full colonies of ants,
turn brown leaves to smoke and ash, and send mothers screaming
in shame for giving birth to a pyromaniac.

A Queen of Diamonds pulled from a fresh deck when clipped to a Schwinn
with a wooden clothespin will run its fingers the bike’s spokes
like a Hells Angel with a harp and roar like a Harley.

Casseroles are leftovers mixed in the same bowl
with Campbell’s Mushroom Soup to drown the truth.
Corn kernels covered with mashed potatoes disappear.
Peas go orbital upon a plate’s brown-gravy sky.

Mud slow dances with little boys’ soles, holds and hugs tight
the way thirteen-year-olds cuddle to the final tune at the first school dance.
The dirt has a mind of its own, prefers to disembark to the carpet, spread itself around.

Snow is hard water, pasted to hills. Cardboard boxes are the sleds of the poor.
Oak trees at the bottom of hills are acorns come of age, ready to do battle,
stand at attention, singing “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

The child who snuggles without prayers feels guilty,
climbs from bed to kneel, and places hands together, reciting
“Now I lay me….” then, absolved of omission, returns to sleep.
The day will come; he will fail to kneel.
The world will be much the same. No one cares; no one knows.

by Jim Gustafson
from Autumn Sky Poetry

Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian:

At about the age of 18 months babies start to get sneaky. They hide food they don’t like and go in for bouts of fake crying. In other words, they have learned that reality, far from being set in stone, is something that can be performed, tinkered with or even made to disappear completely. This, suggests Aja Raden, is the great foundational moment of life, indeed of all our lives. From now on we spend our time tiptoeing along the boundary between true and false, with a dizzying sense of how little there is to choose between them.

From here Raden takes us on a whistle-stop tour of hoaxes and cons. She’s not talking here about little fibs, the grownup version of hiding your spinach under your plate, but rather the swaggery whoppers that are capable of bringing down a whole peer group. Something like the Bernie Madoff scandal, a long con that lasted three decades and involved a lot of very rich people believing a criminal when he promised to make them even richer, without explaining how. In effect, and on Madoff’s own eventual admission, he was running a $65bn pyramid scheme, which used the money from new investors to pay off the marks who had been in the game for longer. All fine and dandy until the day came when he ran out of fresh meat and the whole wonky structure came tumbling down.

Why on earth would anyone – especially smart, rich anyones – fall for such obvious nonsense? Raden explains that it’s because, in the grand scheme of things, it benefits us to take information on trust. If we felt obliged to test knowledge before believing it, most us would have to spend at least a decade of our adult lives satisfying ourselves that the Earth is indeed round (assuming our maths was even up to it). Raden isn’t suggesting for a moment that the Earth is actually flat, simply that we have learned to rely on collective intelligence and majority decisions as a way of shortcutting a lot of tedious grunt work. In the case of Madoff, investors believed that his scheme must be a Good Thing simply because so many other people, including CEOs and Hollywood stars, already thought it so.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oElCz-HIBZk

At Music and Literature:

Jinny: How do the topics of language and writing in the novel reinforce and strengthen Dagestani identity?

AG: You know, when I was writing the novel I thought that maybe the readership would be confined to people interested in the Caucasus specifically—people who lived there, or people who work in the field as linguists, or maybe journalists—but it turned out that the topics raised there are quite universal. The concepts of walls being built around us, of isolation and alienation between people and races, and of nationalism started to thrive right after this novel came out in Russian. There was Brexit; there was Trump’s election. There were so many things. The immigration crisis in Europe. Real walls started to be built. That was so bizarre to witness, especially when the so-called Islamic State was created. In my novel, I was just thinking about this virtual state being erected and the Caucasus being a part of it. It’s interesting to me how local things turn out to be universal, and language barriers turn out to not be as insurmountable as they seem.

more here.

Katie Kadue at n+1:

What makes Twitter so axiomatically hellish? It’s a place where even the most well-intentioned attempts at intellectually honest conversation inevitably devolve into misunderstanding and mutual contempt, like the fruit that crumbles into ash in the devils’ mouths in book 10 of Paradise Lost. It amplifies our simultaneous interdependency and alienation, the overtaking of meaningful political life by the triviality of the social. It is other people. But mostly Twitter is Hell because we—a “we” that, in Twitter’s universalizing idiom, outstretches optimistically or threateningly as if to envelop even those blessed souls who have never once logged on—make it so. It’s our own personal Hell, algorithmically articulated and given back to us, customized enough that I can complain to another very online friend about something that’s “all over Twitter” and he can reply, in confusion, “hmm, not my Twitter,” but shared enough that another friend can affirm, “on my Twitter too.” Pathetic fallacy subtends the most viral memes, either on the individual level (“it me”) or from the perspective of the willed collective of Twitter itself.

more here.

Elizabeth Svoboda in Undark:

Walter Freeman was itching for a shortcut. Since the 1930s, the Washington, D.C. neurologist had been drilling through the skulls of psychiatric patients to scoop out brain chunks in the hopes of calming their mental torment. But Freeman decided he wanted something simpler than a bone drill — he wanted a rod-like implement that could pass directly through the eye socket to penetrate the brain. He’d then swirl the rod around to scramble the patient’s frontal lobes, the brain regions that control higher-level thinking and judgment.

Rummaging in his kitchen drawer, Freeman found the perfect tool: a sharp pick of the sort used to shear ice from large blocks. He knew his close colleague, surgeon James Watts, wouldn’t sanction his new approach, so he closed the office door and did his “ice-pick lobotomies” — more formally, transorbital lobotomies — without Watts’ knowledge.

Though the amoral scientist has been a familiar trope since Victor Frankenstein, we seldom consider what sets these technicians on the path to iniquity. Journalist Sam Kean’s “The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science,” helps fill that void, describing how dozens of promising scientists broke bad throughout history — and arguing that the better we understand their moral decay, the more prepared we’ll be to quash the next Freeman.

More here.

Arika Okrent in Aeon:

Part of the problem is that English spelling looks deceptively similar to other languages that use the same alphabet but in a much more consistent way. You can spend an afternoon familiarising yourself with the pronunciation rules of Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish and many others, and credibly read out a text in that language, even if you don’t understand it. Your pronunciation might be terrible, and the pace, stress and rhythm would be completely off, and no one would mistake you for a native speaker – but you could do it. Even French, notorious for the spelling challenges it presents learners, is consistent enough to meet the bar. There are lots of silent letters, but they’re in predictable places. French has plenty of rules, and exceptions to those rules, but they can all be listed on a reasonable number of pages.

English is in a different league of complexity.

More here.

Paul Voosen in Science:

Next month, after a yearlong delay because of the pandemic, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will begin to release its first major assessment of human-caused global warming since 2013. The report, the first part of which will appear on 9 August, will drop on a world that has starkly changed in 8 years, warming by more than 0.3°C to nearly 1.3°C above preindustrial levels. Weather has grown more severe, seas are measurably higher, and mountain glaciers and polar ice have shrunk sharply. And after years of limited action, many countries, pushed by a concerned public and corporations, seem willing to curb their carbon emissions.

But as climate scientists face this alarming reality, the climate models that help them project the future have grown a little too alarmist. Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models, which in other respects are more powerful and trustworthy than their predecessors, into useful guidance for policymakers. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

More here.

Siddharth Varadarajan in The Wire:

In hindsight, it was only fitting that a story about surveillance and spyware in India should have begun with more than a touch of cloak and dagger.

Sometime in the middle of March, Sandhya Ravishankar, a reporter who had done a series of stories for The Wire on the sand mining mafia in Tamil Nadu, and who I knew and trusted, called me with a single question: “Do you have an iPhone?”

When I said yes, she said she wanted to fly up from Chennai right away to meet me and my fellow founding editor at The Wire, M.K. Venu. She said she couldn’t say anything about the purpose of the meeting but I guessed from her reticence that it was about something important.

On the appointed day, she came home and promptly asked that we switch off our telephones and place them in another room. Then, via a secure video link, she connected me to Sandrine Rigaud and Phineas Rueckert, two editors from the French media non-profit, Forbidden Stories, who explained that based on records they had accessed, they had good reason to believe our smartphones might be infected with the deadly spyware, Pegasus.

More here.

Rebecca Panovka in Harper’s:

In a 1959 letter to her friend Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt paused to commiserate on a harrowing experience they had in common: having their writing fact-checked by The New Yorker. In her previous correspondence, McCarthy had mused that the magazine’s checking department was “invented by some personal Prosecutor of mine to shatter the morale,” and Arendt shared her frustration. Fact-checking, she replied, was a “kind of torture,” a “rigmarole,” and “one of the many forms in which the would-be writers persecute the writer.” Arendt’s opposition to the practice of fact-checking ran deeper than personal irritation. Throughout her work, she was critical of the infiltration of scientific terminology and methods into all aspects of human life. Couching an argument in language that sounded scientific, she thought, was a way of claiming the ability to know or predict things that could never be predicted or known. Fact-checking was a part of that larger trend: the practice, she wrote to McCarthy, was a form of “phony scientificality.”

This Arendt—snide, melodramatic, disdainful of the concept of factual verification—is not quite the picture that emerged after the election of Donald Trump, when she was rebranded as something of a patron saint of facts. “Welcome to the post-truth presidency,” the Washington Post opinion editor Ruth Marcus wrote, crediting Arendt as the thinker who had “presciently explained the basis for this phenomenon.” Michiko Kakutani, in an article titled the death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with trump, likewise cast Arendt as a prophet whose “words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling description of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today.” how hannah arendt’s classic work on totalitarianism illuminates today’s america, ran a headline in the Washington Post. In Arendt’s work, the scholar Richard Bernstein declared in the New York Times, “we can hear not only a critique of the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism, but also a warning about forces pervading the politics of the United States and Europe today.” The think pieces proliferated, reciting the same handful of Arendt quotations from her 1967 New Yorker essay “Truth and Politics” and her 1951 opus The Origins of Totalitarianism. Soon enough, Amazon sold out of Origins. “How could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment?” asks a blurb at the top of its product page.

Arendt was deemed relevant when Trump was elected, relevant when he refused to wear a mask, relevant even in his defeat—with each successive crisis cast as confirmation of the predictions extrapolated from her prose.

More here.

Biz Markie & Me

I saw him in New Orleans in 2005,
fifteen years after his smash hit “Just a Friend.”
He was crossing the street with an entourage of four.
I was at a red light on Decatur and Canal.

Early spring, already hot, not a lot
of people out. I think it was a Thursday.
My left hand on the steering wheel,
I sort of pointed and thought: Biz!

His crew must have sensed it—
they elbowed him like Look boss, a true fan.
And “true” would have been accurate
because it’s not as if he was conspicuous.

He was just a guy walking down the street with friends.
So my spotting him revealed a nuanced appreciation
not only for obscurely-iconic American faces

but also for the texture of fading stardom
against the backcloth of time’s passing.
They were right to be impressed.

But here’s the remarkable thing:
he jump-stopped, turned, and pointed at me!
Smile full of tongue, the Clown Prince
of Hip Hop, the Human Beatbox!

Who’d made one of the all-time best anthems to unrequited love
with a crazy catchy chorus any vocally-challenged asshole
could feel good about singing in the car or the club:

Yoouuu … got what I neeeed.
But you say he’s just a friend.
You say he’s just a friend.
Ohhh baby yoouuu …

And there we were: the Biz and me in Nola
one spring afternoon in 2005, pointing at each other
for a good long second. Then he walked on.

Marcel Theo Hall.
Read more »

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

Are you enjoying the pingdemic? Huge numbers of people are being told to self-isolate by the NHS Covid-19 app, which issues the instruction even if you have been sitting on the other side of a solid wall from an infected person. But what exactly is a “ping”? From the early 19th century, “ping” was used onomatopoeically for a high-pitched metallic sound, and also for the sound of bullets flying overhead or ricocheting, perhaps borrowing some of the older sense of “ping”, to prick or stab (from the Latin pungere). From 1983, it could also mean a message sent from one computer to another to establish a connection, and so our modern use combines both.

It might be annoying, meanwhile, when someone says they will “ping” you (to mean email or text, since 1990), but it is at least better than being shot with a gun, as a Utah newspaper reported in 1892: “When Gib Welsh, the Deputy Sheriff, tried to nab him Jake pinged him.”

More here.

Nicholas Frankel in Literary Hub:

Oscar Wilde’s ship docked in New York Harbor on the evening of January 2, 1882, one week before he was scheduled to speak at Chickering Hall. During the crossing he had composed his first lecture, but the journalists who swarmed onto the ship as it lay at anchor off Staten Island were more interested in Wilde himself than in the theories he had come to expound. “His outer garment was a long ulster trimmed with two kinds of fur, which reached almost to his feet,” reported the New York World; “he wore patent-leather shoes, a smoking-cap or turban, and his shirt might be termed ultra-Byronic . . . His hair flowed over his shoulders in dark-brown waves, curling slightly upwards at the ends . . . His teeth were large and regular, disproving a pleasing story which has gone the rounds of the English press that he has three tusks or protuberants.” His face presented “an exaggerated oval of the Italian face carried into the English type of countenance,” the World reporter continued, while his “manner of talking” was “somewhat affected . . . his great peculiarity being a rhythmical chant in which every fourth syllable is accentuated.” “The dress of the poet was not less remarkable than his face,” declared the San Francisco Chronicle, “and consisted of a short velvet coat, rose-colored necktie and dark-brown trousers . . . cut with a sublime disregard of the latest fashion.”

Like modern tabloid journalists, they peppered him with questions both flippant and straight: what time did he get up in the morning? Did he like his eggs fried on both sides or just one? Did he trim his fingernails in the style of the Empress of Japan? Was he here to secure copyright in his play? If Wilde was thrown by this barrage of questions, he did not betray it.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Two decades after the draft sequence of the human genome was unveiled to great fanfare, a team of 99 scientists has finally deciphered the entire thing. They have filled in vast gaps and corrected a long list of errors in previous versions, giving us a new view of our DNA.

The consortium has posted six papers online in recent weeks in which they describe the full genome. These hard-sought data, now under review by scientific journals, will give scientists a deeper understanding of how DNA influences risks of disease, the scientists say, and how cells keep it in neatly organized chromosomes instead of molecular tangles.

For example, the researchers have uncovered more than 100 new genes that may be functional, and have identified millions of genetic variations between people. Some of those differences probably play a role in diseases.

More here.

Katharine Gammon in The Guardian:

A new study tracking the planet’s vital signs has found that many of the key indicators of the global climate crisis are getting worse and either approaching, or exceeding, key tipping points as the earth heats up.

Overall, the study found some 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content and ice mass, set worrying new records.

“There is growing evidence we are getting close to or have already gone beyond tipping points associated with important parts of the Earth system,” said William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University who co-authored the new research, in a statement.

“The updated planetary vital signs we present largely reflect the consequences of unrelenting business as usual,” said Ripple, adding that “a major lesson from Covid-19 is that even colossally decreased transportation and consumption are not nearly enough and that, instead, transformational system changes are required.”

More here.

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker:

Facebook has a save-the-world mission statement—“to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”—that sounds like a better fit for a church, and not some little wood-steepled, white-clapboarded, side-of-the-road number but a castle-in-a-parking-lot megachurch, a big-as-a-city-block cathedral, or, honestly, the Vatican. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., announced this mission the summer after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, replacing the company’s earlier and no less lofty purpose: “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Both versions, like most mission statements, are baloney.

The word “mission” comes from the Latin for “send.” In English, historically, a mission is Christian, and means sending the Holy Spirit out into the world to spread the Word of God: a mission involves saving souls. In the seventeenth century, when “mission” first conveyed something secular, it meant diplomacy: emissaries undertake missions. Scientific and military missions—and the expression “mission accomplished”—date to about the First World War. In 1962, J.F.K. called going to the moon an “untried mission.” “Mission statements” date to the Vietnam War, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff began drafting ever-changing objectives for a war known for its purposelessness. (The TV show “Mission: Impossible” débuted in 1966.) After 1973, and at the urging of the management guru Peter Drucker, businesses started writing mission statements as part of the process of “strategic planning,” another expression Drucker borrowed from the military. Before long, as higher education was becoming corporatized, mission statements crept into university life. “We are on the verge of mission madness,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 1979. A decade later, a management journal announced, “Developing a mission statement is an important first step in the strategic planning process.” But by the nineteen-nineties corporate mission statements had moved from the realm of strategic planning to public relations. That’s a big part of why they’re bullshit. One study from 2002 reported that most managers don’t believe their own companies’ mission statements. Research surveys suggest a rule of thumb: the more ethically dubious the business, the more grandiose and sanctimonious its mission statement.

Facebook’s stated mission amounts to the salvation of humanity. In truth, the purpose of Facebook, a multinational corporation with headquarters in California, is to make money for its investors. Facebook is an advertising agency: it collects data and sells ads. Founded in 2004, it now has a market value of close to a trillion dollars.

More here.

Shi En Kim in Smithsonian:

More than two decades ago, when Elizabeth Turner was still a graduate student studying fossilized microbial reefs, she hammered out hundreds of lemon-sized rocks from weathered cliff faces in Canada’s Northwest Territories. She hauled her rocks back to the lab, sawed them into 30-micron-thick slivers—about half the diameter of human hair—and scrutinized her handiwork under a microscope. Only in about five of the translucent slices, she found a sea of slender squiggles that looked nothing like the microbes she was after. “It just didn’t fit. The microstructure was too complicated,” says Turner. “And it looked to me kind of familiar.”

Istanbul

Woke sleeping on the floor in a hotel room— Bos’n &
Chief Cook on the bed. Got outside and found a place to eat,
all soup and bread in mutton-smelling room; soup dashed with
vinegar. Then found a map and worked my way up the hills
and alleys to Hagia Sophia. What emptiness, what coolness. I
was alone in it. Mary and child mosaic—shivering and
half-crying, the image of lost ceremony, heart and splendor,
once hanging lamps and echoing chants beneath the dome.

Gary Snyder
from Earth House Hold
New Directions Books, 1969