Steve Lagerfeld in The Hedgehog Review:

In the 1980s, I got to know a man who seemed to be the walking embodiment of privilege. He was an elderly but vigorous WASP, tall and lean, with ancestry in this country that reached back to the seventeenth century. A Princeton man, he had gone into finance and risen to become CEO and chairman of a major regional bank. He had one of those WASP names one can barely resist satirizing, but he had been known all his life by his childhood nickname, Curly.

This was just the first hint that this man was something of an anomaly. (Curly was also, inevitably, almost entirely bald.) Long retired by the time I met him, he had chalked up the expected array of civic and charitable activities during his career. But in retirement he was pursuing with characteristic energy an assortment of more hands-on volunteer jobs. One of them in particular struck me. He was a hospital orderly, pushing carts here and there, assisting patients’ families, and doing various tasks too small or tedious for the nursing staff. “A candy striper,” he joked. As far as I know, he was never asked to empty bedpans, but I’m pretty sure he would have done it.

Where, I have often wondered, does such a spirit of service come from? How could it be revived? Today’s elites are often generous givers of money, yet it’s hard to imagine, say, Bill Gates, a magnificently prolific philanthropist, pushing a cartful of sheets and towels down a hospital corridor.

More here.

Ben Libman at Poetry Magazine:

The 1980 reading—one of the few scenes etched in the history of Québécois literature—also marked the public debut of Marie Uguay, a 25-year-old poet with two published collections. Her brief appearance, halfway through the night’s program, proved the apex of her meteoric streak as a writer. It took all of four minutes—and it was audible. The third of four poems she recited, which begins “And yet oranges and apples do exist” and ends “Gently Cézanne claims his kinship with the earth’s suffering / with its structures / and all of summer’s vitality comes to wake me / comes gently passionately to bequeath its every fruit to me,” gave way to thunderous applause. It was as if a switch had been flipped, the suddenness with which a public epiphany descended palpably upon the room: This is a poet.

Yet, Uguay was not to enjoy the rites of a major artist. She did not have a long career punctuated by award ceremonies, readings, and frequent publications. The year after her reading at La nuit de la poésie, at age 26, she died of cancer, having just put together her third collection.

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Skye Arundhati Thomas at Artforum:

“No one who saw the photo thought I would survive,” said Mohammad Zubair, describing an image, taken by Siddiqui, which came to define last year’s anti-Muslim pogrom in New Delhi. Zubair was beaten by a mob of Hindu men, many wearing bike helmets. “It was like a war zone,” Siddiqui said, recounting how he had walked over the rubble of broken bricks and batons. He stood about a yard away from the group, his mask flecked with Zubair’s blood. He was spotted, and the attackers paused, looking right at his camera. Siddiqui fled just as Zubair lost consciousness. A group of young Muslim boys found Zubair and asked the neighborhood doctor to perform emergency stitches on his head wounds. Siddiqui looked for him later, relieved to find him alive in a local hospital. He made a portrait against the pale blue wall of the intensive treatment wing, Zubair’s head wrapped in gauze, eyes bruised and swollen. Siddiqui often said that he photographed “the human face of a breaking story.”

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Amy Sorkin in The New Yorker:

It was embarrassingly obvious that Governor Andrew Cuomo wanted the address, on Tuesday, in which he announced his resignation, in the face of allegations of sexual harassment, to stir up memories of his pandemic press conferences. Within a sentence or so, he was talking about “New York tough,” and he used the phrase—a rallying cry in the days when ambulance sirens were the signature sound of New York City—as the organizing rhetorical device for his speech. But it’s worth suggesting a different point of reference. Compare the image of Cuomo now with that of the Governor almost three years ago, on September 7, 2018, at the “grand opening” of a replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge, which he had managed to rename the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, after his father. To celebrate, he drove across the new span with one of his daughters, Cara, and his then partner, Sandra Lee, in a 1932 Packard convertible that had belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been the governor of New York before he became President.

Did Cuomo hope that he might follow in F.D.R.’s path? Almost certainly. Did the state pay more than ten thousand dollars to make F.D.R.’s Packard roadworthy so that the Governor could drive it on ceremonial occasions? It did. Did Cuomo also hope that people might eventually just start calling the bridge the Cuomo Bridge, and be surprised to learn that it was named for Mario, rather than Andrew? Possibly, unless he had a vision of the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge renamed for him. Does Cuomo have an issue with his father’s legacy that he seems to play out through political games in which he must be the center?

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Jim Davies in Nautilus:

During this Olympics, I’ve been rooting for Kelleigh Ryan, who is on the women’s foil team. She’s from Ottawa, where I live. Whenever she scored a point, she’d emit a victory scream, probably feeling a rush of pleasure. Watching her on television, I did, too. Getting better at something involves emotion. When we do well, we have good feelings—pride, pleasure, excitement—and these emotions help reinforce whatever behaviors we just engaged in. Similarly, the pain of failure makes recent behaviors less likely in the future. This is conditioning, and we’ve all experienced it—when we’re awake. But what about when we sleep?

Sleep reinforces memories. We know this because after half an hour of sleep, people can remember things better than when they spend half an hour doing something else, like watching TV. Studies of rats show that their brains rehearse running through mazes while they sleep, in a process known as sleep replay. Memory’s function is to store information that will be useful. Because of this, our mind prioritizes remembering some things over others. Studies have shown, for example, that it’s easier to remember things that are useful for survival. Might sleep similarly focus on things that are particularly good or bad for us, like food and dangerous animals, and ignore things that are irrelevant to our well-being, like the exact shape of a cloud?

A recent study by the University of Geneva’s Virginie Sterpenich and colleagues tried to find out. They had subjects play two computer games, which were designed to be engaging and to use two very different brain areas.

More here.

The Love for my Culture

Maybe it’s the Spanish running through my veins
That’s the only way I know how to explain it
Maybe it’s the r’s rrrolling off my tongue
See,
When I speak in Spanish
It takes the air from my lungs
The love for my culture reaches the sky
The love for my culture will never die
And while you get up and have your milk and cereal
Siempre desayuno con platano de mangu
Not no cheerios
I always mix it up
Con salsa y merengue
Constantly side ways glanced at
Like, she speak no ingles
Yo si puedo hablar, ingles y espanol
Hasta puedo entender dos y tres
Languages!
Confronted with problems like immigration
Forced to have my parties down in the basement
Confined to the more popular story that my family
Criss, crossed, and slid past borders
Trying to find a new place to live
Guilty of chasing paper
without papers
but when that visa is blinking green
It’s saying
“Go, go m’jita! Fight for your dreams!”
Read more »

Phillip Lopate in The Paris Review:

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been an uneasy time of rupture and anxiety, filled with historic challenges and opportunities. In that close to twenty-five-year span, the United States witnessed the ominous opening shot of September 11, followed by the seemingly unending Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the effort to control HIV/AIDS, the 2008 recession, the election of the first African American president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the contentious reign of Donald Trump, the stepped-up restriction of immigrants, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, and the coronavirus pandemic, just to name a few major events. Intriguingly, the essay has blossomed during this time, in what many would deem an exceptionally good period for literary nonfiction—if not a golden one, then at least a silver: I think we can agree that there has been a remarkable outpouring of new and older voices responding to this perplexing moment in a form uniquely amenable to the processing of uncertainty.

When the century began, essays were considered box office poison; editors would sometimes disguise collections of the stuff by packaging them as theme-driven memoirs. All that has changed: a generation of younger readers has embraced the essay form and made their favorite authors into best sellers.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

CO2 concentrations now sit at 412 ppm, Earth’s temperature is a full 1.3 °C (2.3 °F) above pre-industrial levels, and still, no meaningful, sustained initiatives to reduce our global carbon emissions have been taken. In fact, they’re presently at an all-time high. The longer we delay meaningful climate action, the more severe the consequences will get not just for all of humanity today, but for generations and even millennia to come. Although our climate future intimately depends on how global emissions unfold in the coming years and decades, the latest IPCC report provides unprecedented clarity on a number of important issues. Here are the top six takeaways we should all accept and understand.

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John Keefe and Curt Merrill at CNN:

In June, an unprecedented heat wave in the Pacific Northwest killed hundreds of people and shattered records in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Canada logged a new national record high when a town in British Columbia soared to 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Historic heat waves are so clearly caused by human-driven emissions that researchers can now easily link them to climate change. Scientists at World Weather Attribution concluded this summer’s Northwest heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without it.

More here.

Alia Ahmed at The Hudson Review:

Rushdie’s opening essay, “Wonder Tales,” takes us back to first things: the ancient mythology, both Eastern and Western, that would provide a blueprint for the literature that followed, and the subsequent “wonder tales” that captured his childhood imagination. Treasured among his memories are trips to the university library of Aligarh, riding behind his grandfather on a bicycle (fictionalized as Dr. Aziz in Midnight’s Children, in those pages biking instead in Agra). Yet these were not moralizing gods. Zeus and the gang behaved as badly as their human subjects, as did their Hindu counterparts. But while the Western gods of Olympus and their stories are today relegated to the sidelines of daily life, no longer occupying center stage, the pantheon of Hindu deities are alive and well in India. When, in 2012, Jyoti Singh died of horrific wounds after being raped and thrown off a moving bus in New Delhi, sparking outrage worldwide, an Indian state minister said that she had crossed the Lakshman rekha line—the magical line in the epic poem Ramayana that the god Ram draws around his lover Sita to keep her safe while he is away.

more here.

Kyle Beachy at The Paris Review:

For a fairly simple activity, skateboarding’s internal code of competition is more nuanced and complex and fluid than any single contest could possibly model. Because the Illusion is a burner from Malibu, he speaks of this nuance in terms of the cosmos. This cosmic side has led to some ironies over the years, like a photo I keep pinned to my bulletin board of a Nike 6.0 hoodie that says “Jocks Suck” across the chest. It is usually pretty clear who to call the best skater at any given session, or among a group of friends. But what looks like victory among pack dogs and, I suppose, salespeople and law students and most other worlds premised on rankings, is among skaters almost wholly irrelevant.

Oh, children will think differently about this.

more here.

Andrew Anthony in The Guardian:

The Australian historian and Regius professor of history at Cambridge, Christopher Clark, is best known for his commanding study of the origins of the first world war, Sleepwalkers. The historian Thomas Laqueur admiringly observed that it was not only the best book on the subject, “but a brilliant and intellectually bracing model for the writing of history”.

In this new collection of essays, Prisoners of Time, Clark displays that brilliance and bracing intellect to exhilarating effect. He is not only a learned historian but an engaging historiographer, able to combine a far-reaching grasp of research with a critical understanding of how history is created. The long opening essay, entitled The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar, is a bravura exploration of the role of political power in history. It begins with the Book of Daniel and the king of the neo-Babylonian empire’s disturbing dream, which the imprisoned Daniel interprets as a prophecy, thus rendering the grateful king his worshipful servant.

The story is both a fable of power and, as Clark explains, the beginning of the understanding of history as a foreordained “sequence of hegemonies”. Until the modern era, that was the conventional means of delineating the march of time, a tendency that was only slightly amended by Hegel’s notion of historical progress. Even today, having emerged from what Henry Luce called the “American century”, there is much talk of China’s assumption of the mantle of world power. “The habit of imagining history as a succession of empires has been hard to shake.” And it’s a habit that in its era-defining clarity promotes a picture of the struggle for power that obscures its complex nature. As Clark notes: “Power is at once the most ubiquitous and most elusive theme of historical writing.”

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

The disembodied brain in a vat is an amusing trope of science fiction. Without a vat, the brain needs a body to generate the nutrients to maintain itself and to furnish information about its environment. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell and proprioception help us to navigate, and find food or reproductive partners. Science fiction assumes that, with those basic needs taken care of by the vat, the brain can devote its full energies to developing genius intelligence.

Not so, argues science writer Annie Murphy Paul. Her book The Extended Mind lays out arguments that the body — and the world more generally — is part of being smart. The human brain is a structure with serious limits: in memory, in attention, in handling abstract concepts. But it can extend its thinking apparatus beyond its skull-bound membranes. Given that the modern world is ever more centred on non-intuitive ideas and abstractions, we need all the help that mind extension can offer. Society fails to recognize this, is Paul’s claim.

More here.

Sacha Golob in Psyche:

A few years before he died in exile from Nazism, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil delivered a lecture in Vienna, ‘On Stupidity’ (1937). At its heart was the idea that stupidity was not mere ‘dumbness’, not a brute lack of processing power. Dumbness, for Musil, was ‘straightforward’, indeed almost ‘honourable’. Stupidity was something very different and much more dangerous: dangerous precisely because some of the smartest people, the least dumb, were often the most stupid.

Musil’s lecture bequeaths us an important set of questions. What exactly is stupidity? How does it relate to morality: can you be morally good and stupid, for example? How does it relate to vice: is stupidity a kind of prejudice, perhaps? And why is it so domain-specific: why are people often stupid in one area and insightful in another? Musil’s own answer, which centred around pretentiousness, is too focused on the dilettantism of interwar Vienna to serve us now. But his questions, and his intuition about stupidity’s danger, are as relevant as ever.

More here.

Philip Ball in Physics World:

Like many science writers, I have often adopted the conceit that quantum mechanics and general relativity are our two principal (if incompatible) theories of the physical world. With his superb new book Einstein’s Fridge: the Science of Fire, Ice and the Universe, documentary filmmaker Paul Sen has made me doubt that this is the right way to express it. Those two theories might be better positioned as the terms of engagement with the universe: relativity describing the backdrop of space–time, and quantum theory giving a fine-grained account of the stuff within it. But to explain what we actually see happening amid all the teeming particles, we are better served by the subject of Sen’s book: thermodynamics, in all its guises.

Einstein’s Fridge offers an accessible and crystal-clear portrait of this discipline’s breadth, largely told through its history. Beginning as an attempt to understand and improve the machinery of the Industrial Revolution, thermodynamics soon provided the most profound of what physicists today call no-go theorems – statements about what is physically impossible – in the form of the first two laws of thermodynamics. First, energy is conserved in the universe; second, in all that comes to pass, some energy is unavoidably dissipated into a form that cannot be used to do work. From those ingredients, 19th-century scientists realized that we can make deductions about the beginning of the universe (it must have had an unlikely, low-entropy configuration) and its end (in a “heat death” of useless energetic uniformity).

Thermodynamics tells us everything from the prosaic (why ice cream melts), to the global (what powers the engine of the world’s climate system) and even the cosmic (why the Big Bang has left a pervasive microwave background hum).

More here.

Emily Conover in Science News:

At every moment, subatomic particles stream in unfathomable numbers through your body. Each second, about 100 billion neutrinos from the sun pass through your thumbnail, and you’re bathed in a rain of muons, birthed in Earth’s atmosphere. Even humble bananas emit positrons, the electron’s antimatter counterpart. A whole universe of particles exists, and we are mostly oblivious, largely because these particles are invisible.

When I first learned, as a teenager, that this untold world of particles existed, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And when I thought about it, I could barely breathe. I was, to steal a metaphor from writer David Foster Wallace, a fish who has only just noticed she’s swimming in water. The revelation that we’re stewing in a particle soup is why I went on to study physics, and eventually, to write about it.

To truly fathom matter at its most fundamental level, people must be able to visualize this hidden world. That’s where particle detectors come in. They spot traces of the universe’s most minuscule constituents, making these intangible concepts real. What’s more, particle detectors reveal beauty: Particles leave behind graceful spirals of bubbles, flashes of light and crisp lines of sparks.

More here.

Robert S. Levine in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Once a specialized school of thought developed in law schools, critical race theory (CRT) has become a favorite wedge issue for the Republican Party. During the final months of his presidency, Trump warned that CRT was infiltrating American schools and ordered a halt to what he claimed was CRT-inspired diversity training in federal agencies. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, regularly refers to CRT as a Marxist plot to undermine the nation, and Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the conservative Discovery Institute, terms it “a grave threat to the American way of life.”

In a recent Washington Post piece, Christine Emba attempts to explain why conservatives find CRT so threatening: they become anxious when they believe white people are under attack, and their anxiety is exacerbated by the fact that they view CRT as standing in “for anything that reexamines the United States’ racial history.” In Idaho, one state legislator, in the service of promoting anti-CRT legislation, cited To Kill a Mockingbird to call for banning Critical Race Theory from public schools because the book supposedly makes white people look bad.

Frederick Douglass could just as easily be banned from school systems in states adopting anti-CRT legislation, for this is a man who from the beginning of his career in the late 1830s to his death in 1895 viscerally and intellectually understood the centrality of slavery and race to American history and culture.

More here.