Kelly Clancy in Nautilus:

My father, a neurologist, once had a patient who was tormented, in the most visceral sense, by a poem. Philip was 12 years old and a student at a prestigious boarding school in Princeton, New Jersey. One of his assignments was to recite Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. By the day of the presentation, he had rehearsed the poem dozens of times and could recall it with ease. But this time, as he stood before his classmates, something strange happened. Each time he delivered the poem’s famous haunting refrain—“Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore’ ”—the right side of his mouth quivered. The tremor intensified until, about halfway through the recitation, he fell to the floor in convulsions, having lost all control of his body, including bladder and bowels, in front of an audience of merciless adolescents. His first seizure.

When my father heard this story, he decided to try an experiment. During Philip’s initial visit, he handed the boy a copy of The Raven and asked him to read it aloud. Again, at each utterance of the raven’s gloomy prophecy, Philip stuttered. His teeth clenched and his lips pulled sideward as though he were disagreeing with something that had been said. My father took the poem away before Philip had a full-blown fit. He wrote a note to the boy’s teacher excusing him from ever having to recite another piece of writing. His brain, my father explained, had begun to associate certain language patterns with the onset of a seizure.

The power of the nervous system lies in this ability to learn, even through adulthood. Networks of neurons discover new relationships through the timing of electrochemical impulses called spikes, which neurons use to communicate with one another. This temporal pattern strengthens or weakens connections between cells, constituting the physical substrate of a memory. Most of the time, the upshot is beneficial. The ability to associate causes with effects—encroaching shadows with dive-bombing falcons, cacti with hidden water sources—gives organisms a leg up on predators and competitors.

But sometimes neurons are too good at their jobs. The brain, with its extraordinary computational prowess, can learn language and logic. It can also learn how to be sick.

More here.

Girl of Water, I Could Swallow a Garden

engulf any overgrown plot in an afternoon
with my two ungloved hands
tear every undesirable by the root—
pile their light bodies neatly in the barrow.

I remember standing in a field of men at the botanical garden
holding my shining spade. I remember
what the frat boy doing community service
said to me when I told him to plant.

The sweet potato vines winced,
waved their purple leaves from small, black pots.

There is a photograph my father captured
when visiting: me roaming

those grounds I mulched & culled & greenhoused:
long-limbed slip of me,
doe-eyed by the ponds, a girl

full of yellowing waterlilies,
a green image left on paper.

My father has stopped photographing light,
misremembers my name, disappears me.

Now there are trees in that Carolina city
I planted that are twice, three times as tall
as my sons. Now I am so far from the red

dust and fire
ants that bit my skin every day.

People say I used to go around asking for smoke,
say I used to wander through the camellia collection
following boys who carried instruments.

I say I remember riding in the truck looking for coyote
on coffee breaks with Joey, I
remember the one true line I wrote
in those years of landscape and heat:

I’m really a poet. I’m just here for the snakes.

by Natalie Solmer
from the Echotheo Review

Nick Hornby at The Believer:

I have said it before, probably irritatingly, and I will say it again several more times: one of the most remarkable literary projects of this century is being undertaken right now, as we speak, by the social historian David Kynaston. Since 2007 he has been publishing a series of books about Britain between the years 1945 and 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power. There have been three so far: Austerity Britain: 1945–51, Family Britain: 1951–57, and Modernity Britain: 1957–1962—roughly 2,300 pages, or 135 pages per year. If you are going to treat a country as a person, full of personality, development, joy, tragedy, regression, and contradictions—and that is what Kynaston does—then an allocation of 135 per year is actually pretty disciplined. (If, in the year 2070, someone embarks on a similar project, then the year 2020 will demand several hundred thousand words of its own.) These wonderful books deal with politics and town planning, sport and literature, music and movies, cities and the countryside, and a rather gripping narrative somehow emerges, in the same way that improvising jazz soloists find melodies.

more here.

Karl Steel in Lapham’s Quarterly:

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, rich, strange, and Scottish, died at eighty-four in 1799. He was known for exposing himself: he exercised naked before the open windows of his estate and eschewed travel by carriage, insisting instead on riding his horse Alburac through the damp gray of every Scottish season. Like many other men of his ilk and era—Rousseau, Condillac, Mandeville—he speculated at length about language’s origins among our primeval ancestors. He maintained, incorrectly but not unlaudably, that fully articulate speech first appeared in the Black civilization of ancient Egypt; that certain Native American languages were mutually intelligible with Gaelic; and, most notoriously, that orangutans were humans, though just too lazy to learn to speak. For Rousseau orangutans’ humanity was only a hypothesis, but Monboddo asserted it as fact so insistently that the universal wit Samuel Johnson likened him to a man with a tail, but without the shame to try to hide it.

The Scotsman should be remembered less indulgently for attempting, in 1778, to thwart the successful suit for liberty of Joseph Knight, an enslaved man brought by John Wedderburn from Jamaica to what Knight and his supporters maintained was the free soil of Scotland. Johnson’s friend and future biographer, the Scottish lawyer James Boswell, wrote to Johnson to inform him of the outcome. Eight judges ruled for Knight’s freedom—and with it the end of slavery in Scotland. Four ruled against it, including Monboddo, who, as Boswell reported, maintained that slavery should be honored as lawful, as it was present “in all ages and all countries, and that when freedom flourished, as in old Greece and Rome.” The classical pomp of Monboddo’s legal logic perhaps rested on more local foundations: his desire to keep his mastery over a Black man he called Gory.

More here.

From Prospect:

If the last 18 months haven’t got you thinking, then thinking probably isn’t your thing. We have witnessed microbes’ revenge on civilisation, seen the limits of the “politically possible” being reset and come to revere vaccinologists. We have learned how an economy can keep going after “business as usual” stops, and endured an enforced pause in which we could reconsider life’s priorities. Some of us were conscripted into teaching our children. Some may even have got round to reading the books they had always meant to. Many others didn’t, and got lost instead in armchair epidemiology.

There has been plenty to think about—but what sorts of thought are most important in a world emerging from a pandemic? In consultation with the experts who write for us, Prospect presents the world’s top 50 thinkers for this moment. In lively and occasionally heated discussions about who should make the grade, our criteria were not only originality and eminence within a field, but the singular pursuit of an identifiable idea and an ability to gain traction for it. We also insisted on some form of “intervention”—be it a book, speech or a public stand—over the past 12 months.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

It’s not easy, figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. It’s even harder when your chosen methodology is to essentially start from scratch, positing a simple underlying system and a simple set of rules for it, and hope that everything we know about the world somehow pops out. That’s the project being undertaken by Stephen Wolfram and his collaborators, who are working with a kind of discrete system called “hypergraphs.” We talk about what the basic ideas are, why one would choose this particular angle of attack on fundamental physics, and how ideas like quantum mechanics and general relativity might emerge from this simple framework.

More here.

Dani Rodrik and Stefanie Stantcheva in Project Syndicate:

Just as the pandemic was gathering pace in early 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron set up an international commission of economists to assess these longer-term challenges and make policy proposals. Headed by the former International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard and the Nobel laureate economist Jean Tirole, the commission debated each of these issues over the course of several months. Interesting proposals emerged from the three reports produced by a subgroup of authors and released at the end of June.

We prepared the report on inequality and economic insecurity. France is an interesting case, because it is one of the few major economies that did not experience an increase in overall inequality, measured by conventional indicators such as the Gini index. Yet, socioeconomic gaps across different strata have not closed, many regions lag behind in creating good jobs and economic opportunity, youth unemployment is very high, and social mobility remains low.

More here.

Vanessa Zoltan in The Paris Review:

The summer that I did my chaplaincy internship was a wildly full twelve weeks. I was thirty-two years old and living in the haze of the end of an engagement as I walked the hospital corridors carrying around my Bible and visiting patients. “Hi, I’m Vanessa. I’m from the spiritual care department. How are you today?” It was a surreal summer full of new experiences hitting like a tsunami: you saw them coming but that didn’t mean you could outrun them. But the thing that never felt weird was that the Bible I carried around with me as I went to visit patient after patient, that I turned to in the guest room at David and Suzanne’s or on my parents’ couch to sustain me, was a nineteenth-century gothic Romance novel. The Bible I carried around that busy summer was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

I love the idea of sacredness. I want to be called to bigger things, outside of myself. I don’t want my life to be a matter of distractions from death and then death. I want to surprise myself and to honor the ways in which the world surprises me. I want to connect deeply to others, to the earth, and to myself. I want to help heal that which is broken in us. Which is why I went to divinity school at thirty years old. But God, God-language, the Bible, the church—none of it is for me. And halfway through divinity school, I realized that my resistance to traditional religion was never going to change. I wanted to learn how to pray, how to reflect and be vulnerable. And I didn’t think that the fact that I didn’t believe in God or the Bible should hold me back.

I, like many of us, have such complicated feelings about the Bible that it’s distracting to even try to pray with it. Too many caveats feel necessary to even begin to try. So I asked my favorite professor, Stephanie Paulsell, if she would spend a semester teaching me how to pray with Jane Eyre. Throughout the semester, we homed in on what I was searching for, a way to treat things as sacred, things that were not usually considered to be divinely inspired. The plan was that each week I would pull out passages from the novel and reflect on them as prayers, preparing papers that explored the prayers in depth. Then, together, we would pray using the passages.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

A University of Alberta-led research study followed more than 400 infants from the CHILD Cohort Study (CHILD) at its Edmonton site. Boys at one year of age with a gut bacterial composition that was high in the bacteria Bacteroidetes were found to have more advanced cognition and language skills one year later. The finding was specific to male children. “It’s well known that female children score higher (at early ages), especially in cognition and language,” said Anita Kozyrskyj, a professor of pediatrics at the U of A and principal investigator of the SyMBIOTA (Synergy in Microbiota) laboratory. “But when it comes to gut microbial composition, it was the male infants where we saw this obvious connection between the Bacteroidetes and the improved scores.”

“The differences between male and female gut microbiota are very subtle, but we do know from CHILD Cohort Study data that girls at early ages are more likely to have more of these Bacteroidetes. So perhaps most girls have a sufficient number of Bacteroidetes and that’s why they have improved scores over boys,” added Kozyrskyj. The researchers, led by Kozyrskyj and associate professor of pediatrics Piush Mandhane, studied bacteria found in fecal samples from the infants and identified three different groups exhibiting similar dominant clusters of bacteria. They then evaluated the infants on a variety of neural developmental scales. Of those groups, only the male infants with Bacteroidetes-dominant bacteria showed signs of enhanced neurodevelopment.

More here.

Dan Egan at the NYT:

So, Chicago’s leaders got creative. Instead of putting sewers under the streets, they put sewers on top of the streets, then built new roads atop the old ones. They effectively hoisted the city out of the swamp.

Buildings in downtown were raised by as much as eight feet, an enterprise that required placing immense beams and jackscrews beneath their foundations. Then, a conductor would direct hundreds of laborers in the precisely choreographed turns of the screws to lift the structures out of the muck.

“The superintendent takes his stand,” the Chicago Tribune wrote at the time, and with a “shrill whistle” directs the crew to begin.

more here.

Christabel Cooper in Prospect:

We all know the story by now. The “culture wars” used to only be fought in America. In Britain, party support was strongly linked to views on an economic left-right axis; if you believed in extensive government intervention and redistribution then you voted Labour, if you believed in a small state and leaving markets to their own devices, you voted Conservative. But in the last decade, beliefs around values and identity have become increasingly important in UK as well as American politics—at the last UK general election, a voter’s position on values (for example whether they thought the death penalty should be reintroduced) was just as likely to determine their vote as their position on economics.

The EU referendum result exemplified this split: overwhelmingly people with very liberal attitudes voted to remain in the EU whereas those with more conservative views (who, for example, were often hostile towards immigration) tended to vote for Brexit. At a certain point the analysis becomes stretched. The winning Leave vote has frequently been portrayed as a protest by this socially conservative majority against aloof, unresponsive liberal Remainers. Five years on, much of the UK press still paints a picture of a country riven by splits over culture and values, where social conservatives angrily reject the continued attempts of a liberal minority to enforce an unpopular “woke” agenda. The recently-launched GB News was founded on the idea that there is a large, conservative audience which feels that its side of the culture war is being ignored by existing media outlets.

But new research from the Policy Institute presents a different picture. Much of the public, it finds, is confused about terms such as “culture war” or “woke.”

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in his Substack Newsletter:

The original Coronavirus variant has an R0 of ~2.71. Alpha—the “English variant” that caused a spike around the world around Christmas—is about 60% more infectious. Now it appears that Delta is about 60% more transmissible yet again. Depending on which figureyou use, it would put Delta’s R0 between 4 and 9, which could make it more contagious than smallpox. Just to give you a sense of the dramatic consequence of such an increase in R, this is what two months of growth get you with the previous transmission rate of 2.7 vs. with an R of 6 [see figure].

This is why so many graphs of cases look like rockets these days. Delta is very contagious.

Apparently, somebody in Australia was infected by the Delta variant just by walking past an infected person, in a 5- to 10- second encounter. Although this is probably an outlier, and we shouldn’t be scared of walking past other people as a rule of thumb, it illustrates how much more transmissible Delta is.

Mark Dunbar in The Hedgehog Review:

Identities are dangerous and paradoxical things. They are the beginning and the end of the self. They are how we define ourselves and how we are defined by others. One is a “nerd” or a “jock” or a “know-it-all.” One is “liberal” or “conservative,” “religious” or “secular,” “white” or “black.” Identities are the means of escape and the ties that bind. They direct our thoughts. They are modes of being. They are an ingredient of the self—along with relationships, memories, and role models—and they can also destroy the self. Consume it. The Jungians are right when they say people don’t have identities, identities have people. And the Lacanians are righter still when they say that our very selves—our wishes, desires, thoughts—are constituted by other people’s wishes, desires, and thoughts. Yes, identities are dangerous and paradoxical things. They are expressions of inner selves, and a way the outside gets in.

Our contemporary politics is diseased—that much is widely acknowledged—and the problem of identity is often implicated in its pathology, mostly for the wrong reasons. When it comes to its role in our politics, identity is the chief means by which we substitute behavior for action, disposition for conviction. Everything is rendered political—from the cars we drive to the beer we drink—and this rendering lays bare a political order lacking in democratic vitality. There is an inverse relationship between the rise of identity signaling and the decline of democracy.

More here.

Larry Tye at Cabinet Magazine:

The United Fruit Company was born over a bottle of rum. In 1870, Lorenzo Dow Baker, skipper of the Boston schooner Telegraph, pulled into Jamaica for a taste of the island’s famous distilled alcohol and a load of bamboo. While he was drinking, a local tradesman came by offering green bananas; Baker bought 160 bunches at twenty-five cents each. He resold them in New York for up to $3.25 a bunch, a deal so sweet he couldn’t resist doing it again. By 1885, eleven ships were flying under the banner of the new Boston Fruit Company, bringing to the United States ten million bunches of bananas a year. United Fruit was formed in 1899, with assets that included more than 210,000 acres of land across the Caribbean and Central America and enough political clout that Honduras, Costa Rica, and other countries in the region became known as “banana republics.”

The company also soon had a kingpin worthy of its swashbuckling history: Samuel Zemurray, better known as Sam the Banana Man.

more here.

Tanya Harrod at Literary Review:

This year, Tate is hosting four exhibitions devoted to women artists: Paula Rego, Lubaina Himid, Yayoi Kusama and Sophie Taeuber-Arp (a further show devoted to Magdalena Abakanowicz is in the pipeline). Opening on 15 July at Tate Modern, the exhibition ‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction’ comes with an excellent catalogue, which includes sixteen essays that survey her remarkable range. This Swiss artist, born in Davos in 1889, created textiles, beadwork bags and necklaces, cross-stitch embroidery, carnivalesque outfits for costume balls and a family of haunting marionettes, as well as designing furniture and interiors. She was also a Laban-trained dancer, a sculptor, an illustrator, co-editor of the important journal Plastique, a brilliant photographer and a significant abstract artist. And as if that were not enough, she gave continuous support to her husband, Jean Arp, and designed the modern vernacular house at Clamart in the southwestern suburbs of Paris where she and Arp lived from 1928 until being driven south by the German invasion in 1940. Her husband, whom she married in 1922, is regularly name-checked in surveys of 20th-century art, from Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting to Norbert Lynton’s The Story of Modern Art. By contrast, Taeuber-Arp’s reputation was only properly recuperated in 2005 in Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh’s generous Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism.

more here.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker:

Television suits Peter Buttigieg. He is a dispassionate figure in an emotional medium. In response to ridiculousness, his face stays largely still, but his peaked eyebrows rise a notch. As a politician, Buttigieg’s great trick (it’s also a flaw) is to never take anything personally: he blinks away the noisy, slanderous business of daily politics in pursuit of what political consultants might call the point of essential contrast.

Lately, Buttigieg has been not taking things personally on Fox News. Liberals, even those who had grown tired of his dogged reasonableness, have celebrated each of his three recent appearances on the network as a tour de force and a rout. Just before the Vice-Presidential debate, last Wednesday, Buttigieg was asked on Fox News about the policy differences between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. He replied, “Well, there’s a classic parlor game of trying to find a little bit of daylight between running mates, and if people want to play that game we could look into why an evangelical Christian like Mike Pence wants to be on a ticket with a President caught with a porn star.” Pence, President, porn—he captured the basic deal Republicans had made with power in three tight plosives. (Slayer Pete, Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times named this persona, brilliantly.)

It’s tempting to conclude that Buttigieg’s recent star turns on Fox News say less about him than they do about the network, whose hosts spend so much time ridiculing liberal positions that they can find themselves at a loss when those positions are presented in earnest. Last week, the “Fox and Friends” host Steve Doocy asked Buttigieg about President Trump’s choice not to participate in a virtual debate with Biden. “All of us have had to get used to virtual formats,” Buttigieg said, pointing out that parents trying to manage home learning had it much rougher than the President of the United States. He went on, “The only reason that we’re here in the first place is that the President of the United States is still contagious, as far as we know, with a deadly disease.” That clip, like his response to the question about Harris, went viral, partly because Doocy kept encouraging Buttigieg, as he usually does ideologically friendlier guests, with a series of confident-sounding local-news-anchor noises: “Sure . . . Right . . . Yeah . . . Sure . . . Right . . . Right . . . Sure.”

Fox News has always been a good venue for Buttigieg, for reasons that don’t have much to do with the dimness of its morning hosts. Last spring, a Fox audience stood at the end of a town hall with Buttigieg. “Wow! A standing ovation!” the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said, apparently surprised by it. The network’s orientation, on both the hyperbolic evening shows and the Doocified morning ones, borrows the spirit, if not the prudity, of religious conservatives: the heartland is virtuous, and the liberal city sinful. Beamed in from Indiana, Buttigieg has a way of inverting all of that.

More here.