Johanna Ekström at Cabinet Magazine:

When I was a child, there was a book about the Polish artist Balthus in the small library at our country home. It was dad’s book, big and heavy. The skin between my thumb and index finger stretched taut when I took it down from the shelf. Sometimes I would sit at the table there in the library and page through the book. The table was by a window that looked out on a forest of firs. The light from the window was dim and pale; it seemed to lack strength and direction.

I recognized the color palette in the book from museum visits with my parents. We always made our way to the hall with “the Dutch.” Those soft, melty tones, light filtering through a colored glass or an open window, tender and clarifying, causing skin or milk or the yellow fabric of a skirt to press forward and move the viewer. Balthus’s tranquility was Dutch. Still-life quiet. There was a desire for sleep or absence.

more here.

Marco Kaye in McSweeney’s:

When Guy Partnerman and Lady Millionaire purchased a brownstone in the most Brooklyn-themed neighborhood of Brooklyn, there was only one drawback: the home was too beautiful.

“Crown-molded ceilings, natural sunlight, not a trace of ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ decor. To call it a fixer-upper wouldn’t be right, but we had some ideas. That’s who we are. People with ideas and the means to execute them flawlessly,” said Ms. Millionaire, 37, a movement-based flautist.

“We couldn’t just raze the thing in the grand tradition of the heathens we pretend not to be,” added Mr. Partnerman, 69. “There were ordinances.”

Thanks to privilege, the couple moved quickly on an offer, an eye-watering sum that makes you feel karmically flawed. They inspected the home with their clear-frame glasses and unisex workwear. Mr. Partnerman, a commodities trader specializing in shorting pork futures, is a sustainable design buff. He realized he could rip up the floorboards, cabinets, walls, and every historic detail, replacing it with Amazonian timber salvaged from impending wildfires.

More here.

Larissa Pham at The Paris Review:

A figure drawing session frequently starts with gesture drawings—quick, thirty-second poses, which allow the artists to warm up with looser, broader marks, filling up the page. For quick poses, emphasizing vertical and horizontal lines, one might draw on some early examples of figurative sculpture: Egyptian funerary statues, in standing and seated poses, like this one of Hatshepsut at the Met. The ancient Egyptians believed in life after death; the statues were intended to be images of the body that the immortal soul could return to. As such, they’re made to last forever: sturdy, straight-spined, shoulders and hips in perfect alignment. The funerary and religious statuary of the ancient Egyptians wasn’t dissimilar to that of the Archaic Greeks, whose kouros sculptures depicted beautiful male youths, their backs straight, weight evenly distributed, one foot extended aristocratically as if midstride.

more here.

Bessie Smith

Homage to the Empress of the Blues

Because there was a man somewhere in a candystripe silk shirt,
gracile and dangerous as a jaguar and because a woman moaned for him
in sixty-watt gloom and mourned him Faithless Love
Twotiming Love Oh Love Oh Careless Aggravating Love,

….. She came out on the stage in yards of pearls, emerging like
….. a favorite scenic view, flashed her golden smile and sang.

Because grey laths began somewhere to show from underneath
torn hurdygurdy lithographs of dollfaced in heaven;
and because there were those who feared alarming fists of snow
on the door and those who feared the riot-squad of statistics,

….. She came out on the stage in ostrich feathers, beaded satin,
….. and shone that smile on us and sang.

by Robert Hayden
from The Norton Anthology
Norton & Company, 2003

From Phys.Org:

p53 is the most famous cancer gene, not least because it’s involved in causing over 50% of all cancers. When a cell loses its p53 gene—when the gene becomes mutated—it unleashes many processes that lead to the uncontrolled cell growth and refusal to die, which are hallmarks of cancer growth. But there are some cancers, like kidney cancer, that that had few p53 mutations. In order to understand whether the inactivation of the p53 pathway might contribute to kidney cancer development, Haifang Yang, Ph.D., a researcher with the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center—Jefferson Health probed kidney cancer’s genes for interactions with p53.

Diana Kwon in Scientific American:

Humans boast a rich trove of words to express the way we feel. Some are not easily translatable between languages: Germans use “Weltschmerz” to refer to a feeling of melancholy caused by the state of the world. And the indigenous Baining people of Papua New Guinea say “awumbuk” to describe a social hangover that leaves people unmotivated and listless for days after the departure of overnight guests. Other terms seem rather common—“fear,” for example, translates to “takot” in Tagalog and “ótti” in Icelandic. These similarities and differences raise a question: Does the way we experience emotions cross cultural boundaries?

Scientists have long questioned whether human emotions share universal roots or vary across cultures. Early evidence suggested that, in the same way that primary colors give rise to all of the other hues, there was a core set of primary emotions from which all other feelings arose. In the 1970s, for instance, researchers reported that people in an isolated cultural group in Papua New Guinea were able to correctly identify emotional expressions in photographed Western faces at rates higher than chance. “This was largely taken as evidence that people around the world could understand emotions in the same way,” says Kristen Lindquist, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But more recent studies have challenged this idea. Work from a variety of fields—psychology, neuroscience and anthropology—has provided evidence that the way people express and experience emotions may be greatly influenced by our cultural upbringing. Many of these studies have limitations, however. Most have either looked only at comparisons between two cultures or focused on big, industrialized countries, says Joshua Jackson, a doctoral student in psychology at Chapel Hill. “We haven’t really had the power to test [the universality of emotion] on an appropriate scale.”

More here.

Katharine Young in Inference Review:

In Not Enough, Samuel Moyn addresses a disjunction between the language of human rights and the facts of inequality. Our unequal world, Moyn observes, is one in which the rich have grown ever richer, but the poor have remained poor, or, at best, not quite as poor as they once were. The language of human rights may not have been the cause of economic inequality, he argues, but neither has it done much to prevent it. Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale University, draws upon a wide range of sources in making his claims: nineteenth-century debates about distributive ethics, eighteenth-century Jacobin texts and treatises, medieval and ancient sources. Moyn also considers more recent events that have long been associated with the history of human rights: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and later efforts to emphasize material equality and social justice in the context of decolonization. These efforts, Moyn believes, were too easily assimilated in welfare states, or outpaced in others. They converted none to the cause.

More here.

Kent Sepkowitz in Undark:

Twenty-six years into the war, a harsh assessment titled “Cancer Undefeated” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, declaring it open season on any claims of victory, and the criticism has been steady ever since. Recently, Clifton Leaf echoed this dour perspective in his 2013 book, “The Truth in Small Doses: Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer — and How to Win It,” while the poet Anne Boyer recounted her own cancer experience (and profound disappointment in modern care) this year in “The Undying.”

Enter Azra Raza, a prominent cancer specialist at Columbia University. Although she doesn’t consider herself a pessimist, her new book, “The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last,’’ argues that we have wasted precious time and zillions of dollars barking up the wrong scientific tree. We are using wrong-headed experimental models (animals, cells, and the entire 20th-century repertoire of discovery) and we are giving federal grants to all the wrong ideas.

Most importantly, she argues that current cancer research is looking at the wrong end of the problem — late-stage disease, when the cancer is large and perhaps has already spread, when patients are sick and failing, when even the most wonderful new wonder drug is unlikely to work.

More here.

Jeffrey Lewis in Prospect:

In January 2018, Russia secretly launched a cruise missile powered by a small nuclear reactor at a military testing range in the northern region of Arkhangelsk. The test of this bizarre doomsday weapon was a failure—it landed in the sea just a few kilometres from the launch site. The test would have remained a secret, but in August 2019 Russian scientists attempted to lift the wreckage off the Arctic seafloor. There was an explosion—one powerful enough to be detected by monitoring stations in Finland, Norway and Sweden. Five scientists were killed and a brief spike of radiation was detected in the nearby city of Severodvinsk. Images on social media showed emergency service workers responding in Hazmat suits. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty Organisation, the body charged with detecting nuclear explosions, predicted that any plume of radionuclides from the accident would soon drift over monitoring stations in central Russia. Then those stations mysteriously stopped working. Viewers of the drama series Chernobyl might not have been surprised.

The story of how modern Russia found itself in a Soviet-style effort to suppress information about a nuclear accident is a story about the collapse of the post-Cold War peace. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is resurrecting Soviet-era nuclear weapons programmes, and covering them up with Soviet-era disinformation because Russia and the US are drifting back into the logic of the Cold War. Even worse, they are drifting towards the free-for-all of the early Cold War, before there were any restrictions on the terrifying competition of the arms race.

More here.

Adam Wilson at Bookforum:

Lutz’s stories are resistant to summary, not because nothing happens in them, but because it can be difficult to decipher what does. For Lutz, narrative is a by-product of language, not the other way around, and it unfolds musically rather than logically, resulting in sharp shifts and turns that are hard to track. I’m pretty sure, for example, that one story involves a man being fitted for dentures made in the molds of houses he lived in as a child, but I wouldn’t put money on it. I’m slightly more confident that another involves the use of a tennis racket in a backroom orchiectomy. The opacity is by design. These stories glory in language, but Lutz also seems to suggest that it’s an insufficient tool for representing experience. Characters constantly worry they’re not providing the right details or explaining things correctly. Their statements are subject to endless retractions and qualifications, and their cataloguing and quantifying never quite add up. The linguistic acrobatics can be read, in part, as a futile rebuff against the limits of expression.

more here.

Becca Rothfeld at The Hedgehog Review:

Graduate school is psychologically punishing for people in every field, not just for people who worry that their topic is especially ineffectual. The more you read, the more you realize you should have read already. But philosophy’s claim to despair is unique. As Stanley Cavell writes in the introduction to Must We Mean What We Say?, “It is characteristic of philosophy that from time to time it appear—that from time to time it be—irrelevant to one’s concerns…. just as it is characteristic that from time to time it be inescapable.”¹ In other words, it is not just the current conditions of economic precarity that render philosophy alternately irrelevant and inescapable—or, peculiarly and more often than not, irrelevant and inescapable at once. David Hume lived two centuries before the horrors of the academic job market kicked into high gear, but that did not stop him from worrying that his philosophical musings remained remote from real life. At the end of Book I of A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), he paused to reflect that the skeptical concerns he had just spent a hundred pages developing were wont to dissipate as soon as he headed to the pub:

I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.²

more here.

Thomas Blaikie at Literary Review:

What is the language of the internet? Most of us have probably heard of LOL (or lol), omg, emojis and even memes, and come face to face with unconventional confections of exclamation marks, repeated letters and novelty punctuation. For people like us, top-end book lovers, the language of the internet might seem, well, rather ghastly: illiterate, limited, debased, invasive like Japanese knotweed, a frightful triffid threatening to obliterate decent standards of communication. They, the internet lovers, if they even bother to glance in our direction, will think: omg!!!!11!!! sad lol.

I recently heard of somebody who no longer laughs. Instead she says ‘lol’, which might be a new internet way of laughing. An urban myth, perhaps, but there’s a common assumption that too much online activity transforms people into zombies in ‘real’ life. As is perhaps inevitable, linguists like Gretchen McCulloch take a different view.

more here.

Veronica Chambers in Smithsonian:

Maya Angelou published the first of her seven memoirs not long after she distinguished herself as the star raconteur at a dinner party. “At the time, I was really only concerned with poetry, though I had written a television series,” she would recall. James Baldwin, the novelist and activist, took her to the party, which was at the home of the cartoonist-writer Jules Feiffer and his then-wife, Judy. “We enjoyed each other immensely and sat up until 3 or 4 in the morning, drinking Scotch and telling tales,” Angelou went on. “The next morning, Judy Feiffer called a friend of hers at Random House and said, ‘You know the poet Maya Angelou? If you could get her to write a book…’” That book became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which recently celebrated its 50th birthday. In the memoir, Angelou (born Marguerite Johnson) boldly told the heartbreaking truths of her childhood, including how she was raped at the age of 7 by her mother’s boyfriend. She would later explain, “I stopped speaking for five years. In those five years, I read every book in the black school library. When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say.”

One of the women who helped Angelou find her voice was a teacher in Stamps, Arkansas, named Bertha Flowers. She was the kind of woman you rarely got to read about in American literature in the 1960s. Angelou’s writing is cinematic; in Caged Bird, she transports the reader to another time:

Mrs. Bertha Flowers was the aristocrat of Black Stamps. She had the grace of control to appear warm in the coldest weather, and on the Arkansas summer days it seemed like she had a private breeze which swirled around, cooling her. She was thin without the taut look of wiry people and her printed voile dresses and flowered hats were as right for her as denim overalls for a farmer. She was our side’s answer to the richest white woman in town.

It is all there—life, not just in the American South but this American life, period—waiting for you to take the ride, the heartbreaking and brave journey that is Marguerite Johnson’s young life.

More here.

Shrine

That small deceptive bend
in what seems like a fast straight, where the boy-
racers would come to grief – remember?

Now the scars on the big sycamore tree
have all grown over

and the last of the silk flowers tied to it
are tattered, grey, that were kept
renewed through all these years.

I saw her once: a red-haired woman
middle-aged, in a pink top
wading into the ditch, her armful of artificial sunflowers
held high above the nettles

and her car parked in the bend
where everything northbound had to swerve around it
into the hidden traffic
coming the other way.

Like she could care
her heart dead
to the world, her only thought in that corner

not to forget him
not to permit forgetting him.

Where has she gone
to leave his garlands fading?
Has she laid down outliving him
after so long, her beautiful

careless boy?
What but death could keep her away
from the place of pilgrimage he gave her
by this cold road?

And who is left behind now
to remember all that sorrow
or to lay flowers
(and where in the world) for her?

by Judith Taylor
from Not in Nightingale Country
Red Squirrel Press.

Jennifer Wilson in The New Republic:

Nabokov, who made ends meet by giving boxing lessons, assured his genteel audience there was nothing frightful in the violent punches: “I hasten to add that in such a blow, which brings on an instantaneous blackout there is nothing terrible. On the contrary. I have experienced it myself, and can attest that such a sleep is rather pleasant.”

Nabokov spent much of his writerly life sparring. He fought with readers (aggressively dividing them into the categories “good” and “bad” in his university lectures), interviewers (he refused to sit if questions were not sent to him in advance), and—of course—literary critics. The only point of criticism, he said, was that “it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence.” Though often pictured as a detached, professorial aesthete, cloistered away in a Swiss hotel, Nabokov was, in fact, deeply confrontational. He wrote countless letters to the editor demanding corrections (even for college newspapers) and was famously unkind in his estimation of fellow writers: Of Portnoy’s Complaint, he said, “It is a ridiculous book. It has no literary worth whatever. It is so obvious and not at all funny—a ridiculous book.” He was a frighteningly ungenerous book critic; in one of his more charitable reviews, of an anthology of Russian literature (for The New Republic), he offered this in the way of praise: “This seems to be the first Russian anthology ever published that does not affect one with the feeling of intense irritation.”

More here.

Jim Daley in Scientific American:

Toward the end of the Stone Age, in a small fishing village in southern Denmark, a dark-skinned woman with brown  hair and piercing blue eyes chewed on a sticky piece of hardened birch tar. The village, dubbed Syltholm by modern archaeologists, was near a coastal lagoon that was protected from the Baltic Sea by sandy barrier islands. Behind them, the woman and her kin built weirs to trap fish that they skewered with bone-tipped spears. The woman may have worked the tar until it was pliable enough to repair a piece of pottery or a polished flint tool—birch tar was a common Stone Age adhesive. Or she might have simply been enjoying what amounted to Neolithic chewing gum. In any case, when she discarded the tar, it was sealed away under layers of sand and silt for some 5,700 years until a team of archaeologists found it. Amazingly, they were able to extract the woman’s complete genome from the birch tar, along with her oral microbiome and DNA from food she may have recently eaten.

More here.

Thom Hartmann in AlterNet:

Bank robber Willie Sutton famously said that banks were “where the money is,” and the money available for politics in 1992 had moved from the pockets of working people (wages had been flat for more than a decade) and their unions (unionization was in freefall) into the pockets of banks, insurance companies, drug companies, defense contractors, and other big corporations. And the Supreme Court had legalized taking their money in exchange for favors just before Reagan’s election in 1976 and 1978 (and tripled down on it in 2016).

“In April 1989,” From’s book notes, he “traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas, to recruit the state’s young governor, Bill Clinton, to be chairman of the DLC.” The result of their partnership was the creation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and a new mantra for the Democratic Party: “[E]conomic centrism, national security, and entitlement reform…” that brought with it a flood of corporate and billionaire money.

The party of big government solutions had become the party of big corporate money.

More here.