Rachel Syme in The New Yorker:

About halfway through a recent episode of “POOG,” a new podcast that is essentially one long, unbroken conversation about “wellness” between the comedians and longtime friends Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak, the hosts spend several minutes trying—and failing—to devise a grand theory about the existential sorrow of eating ice cream. “The pleasure of eating an ice-cream cone for me,” Novak says, in the blustery tone of a motivational speaker, “involves the attempt to contain, catch up, stay present to the cone. Because the cone will not wait.” Berlant, a seasoned improviser, leaps into the game. “And it’s grief,” she says, with no trace of irony. “And it’s loss, because it’s so beautiful, it’s handed to you, and you’re constantly having to reckon with the fact that it is dying, and yet you’re experiencing it.”

From here, the conversation begins to warp into almost sublime absurdity. Novak suggests that what she ultimately desires is not the cone itself but the emptiness that comes after the cone has been consumed, or what she calls “the dead endlessness of infinite possibility.” She makes several attempts to refine this idea, in a state of increasing agitation. And then she begins to cry. “Are you crying because you are still untangling what this theory is?” Berlant asks. “No,” Novak blubbers. “I’m crying out of the humiliation of being seen as I am.”

At first, listening to this meltdown, I wondered what, precisely, was going on. Novak and Berlant are brilliant comics, denizens of the alternative-standup scene that bridges the gap between punch lines and performance art. They had to be up to something. And then, after several incantatory hours of listening to them talk, it became clear: “poog” is a show about wellness which is, in a dazzling and purposefully deranged way, utterly unwell. Of course Novak can’t process her desire to have everything and nothing at once; like so much of the language of being “healthy” in a fractured world, her yearning can never compute. “poog” is not just “Goop” (as in Gwyneth Paltrow’s life-style empire) spelled backward—it’s an attempt to push the wellness industrial complex fully through the looking glass. Each episode begins the same way. “This is our hobby,” Berlant says. “This is our hell,” Novak adds. “This is our naked desire for free products,” Berlant concludes.

More here.

Monique Brouillette in Scientific American:

A lot of worry has been triggered by discoveries that variants of the pandemic-causing coronavirus can be more infectious than the original. But now scientists are starting to find some signs of hope on the human side of this microbe-host interaction. By studying the blood of COVID survivors and people who have been vaccinated, immunologists are learning that some of our immune system cells—which remember past infections and react to them—might have their own abilities to change, countering mutations in the virus. What this means, scientists think, is that the immune system might have evolved its own way of dealing with variants.

“Essentially, the immune system is trying to get ahead of the virus,” says Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at the Rockefeller University, who conducted some recent studies that tracked this phenomenon. The emerging idea is that the body maintains reserve armies of antibody-producing cells in addition to the original cells that responded to the initial invasion by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Over time some reserve cells mutate and produce antibodies that are better able to recognize new viral versions. “It’s really elegant mechanism that that we’ve evolved, basically, to be able to handle things like variants,” says Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, who was not involved in Nussenzweig’s research. Whether there are enough of these cells, and their antibodies, to confer protection against a shape-shifting SARS-CoV-2 is still being figured out.

More here.

Jonathan B. Imber in The Hedgehog Review:

As we learn in The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel’s view of meritocracy rests in part on the historical claim that it is grounded in the Calvinist understanding of predestination. “Combined with the idea that the elect must prove their election through work in a calling,” he writes, such a doctrine “leads to the notion that worldly success is a good indication of who is destined for salvation.” In this he follows Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but Sandel extends this thesis to the present moment, citing the evangelical idea of the “prosperity gospel” and the secular rationalizations of such well-known achievers as Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs) and John Mackey (founder of Whole Foods), who represent the understanding of health and wealth “as matters of praise and blame…a meritocratic way of looking at life.”

Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University, believes that two accounts of what constitutes a just society have been made in market terms. He calls one “free-market liberalism” (or “neoliberalism”) and the other “welfare state liberalism” (or “egalitarian liberalism”). Neither has adequately explained or proposed ways to restrain inequality. The same is especially true of libertarian philosophers, or “luck egalitarians,” who justify inequality by distinguishing between those who are responsible for their misfortunes and those who are victims of bad luck. Meanwhile, the progressive investment in education has had the unintended consequence of widening inequality: “The weaponization of college credentials,” Sandel notes, “shows how merit can become a kind of tyranny.” One damaging effect of this is the “eroding of social esteem accorded those who had not gone to college,” which is particularly bad when you remember that only about one in three American adults graduates from a four-year college.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

“Time” and “the brain” are two of those things that are somewhat mysterious, but it would be hard for us to live without. So just imagine how much fun it is to bring them together. Dean Buonomano is one of the leading neuroscientists studying how our brains perceive time, which is part of the bigger issue of how we construct models of the physical world around us. We talk about how the brain tells time very differently than the clocks that we’re used to, using different neuronal mechanisms for different timescales. This brings us to a very interesting conversation about the nature of time itself — Dean is a presentist, who believes that only the current moment qualifies as “real,” but we don’t hold that against him.

More here.

Brendan Greeley in the Financial Times:

The hardest thing about teaching someone how to drive a boat is that it’s not at all like driving a car. To steer a car, you turn the wheel until your nose is pointing where you want to go, then you straighten out and go there. This works because the car is attached to the road. It’s when the car itself is no longer attached to the road that things get weird. When you turn too hard, for example, the rubber in your tyres loses purchase on the street, and you are “in drift”. The normal rules no longer apply.

When you drive a boat, you are always in drift. You are attached to nothing. Stuff happens in the water beneath you that does not make any intuitive sense. Sometimes your stern (your tail) moves faster than your bow (your nose), and in a different direction. Sometimes both stern and bow are moving in the same direction at the same speed, but it’s not the direction the bow is pointed. On a boat, you don’t always go where you’re pointed.

On Wednesday, the Golden-Class container ship Ever Given made an unplanned berth in the sand on both sides of the Suez Canal, stopping trade between Europe and Asia.

More here.

Man and Boy

I

‘Catch the old one first’
(My father’s joke was also old, and heavy
And predictable). ‘then the young ones
Will all follow, and Bob’s your uncle.’

On slow bright river evenings, the sweet time
Made him afraid we’d take too much for granted
And so our spirits must be lightly checked.

Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed be highs!
Blessed be the attachment of dumb love
In that broad-backed, low-set man
Who feared debt all his life, but now and then
Could make a splash like the salmon he said he was
‘A big as a wee pork pig by the sound of it’.

II

In earshot of the pool where the salmon jumped
Back through its own unheard concentric soundwaves
A mower leans forever on his scythe.

He has mown himself to the center of the field
And stands in a final perfect ring
of sunlit stubble.

‘Go and tell your father,’ the mower says
(He said it to my father who told me),
‘I have it mowed as clean as a new sixpence.’

My father is a barefoot boy with news,
Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks
On the afternoon of his own father’s death.

The open, black half of the half-door waits.
I feel much heat and hurry in the air.
I feel his legs and quick heels far away

And strange as my own—when he will piggyback me
At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned,
Like a witless elder rescued from the fire.

by Seamus Heaney
from Seeing Things
Faber & Faber, 1991

Steve Nadis in Harvard Magazine:

DIGITAL-DATA PRODUCTION is expanding so fast that, within two decades, storing it in flash-drive memory chips could consume 10 to 100 times the anticipated supply of microchip-grade silicon. With new ways of storing information desperately needed, Winthrop professor of genetics George Church is turning to one of the oldest means of doing so: the DNA molecule, which has been replicating and mutating on Earth for three and a half billion years. By 2025, accumulated global data is expected to reach 175 billion trillion bytes—all of which could, in principle, be contained in less than 180 pounds of DNA, housed within a 15-gallon drum. DNA stores information in a “modern” way, explains Church, who heads the synthetic biology group at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (see “Engineering Life,” January-February 2020, page 37, for more about synthetic biology). Digital information storage, he explains, “is based on just two numbers, 0s and 1s, and DNA is analogous.” Its code has just four letters: A (adenine), T (thymine), C (cytosine) and G (guanine)—the bases or nucleotides comprising the rungs of DNA’s double helix-shaped ladder, which can be arranged in whatever order scientists choose.

In an October 2020 paper in Nature Communications, Church and colleagues described an advance that brings DNA information storage closer to commercial feasibility. They showed for the first time that DNA could be synthesized, and information thereby encoded, in an enzyme-facilitated process controlled by light. The team also demonstrated another first: the use of enzymes to achieve parallel synthesis of multiple DNA strands. They pulled two measures of music from a Super Mario Brothers video game, digitized it, converted it to a DNA code, and synthesized it. The DNA was then sequenced to decipher its code, redigitized, and converted back to a musical format. The point was to test a new approach to synthesis involving both enzymes and light. The first of these steps was demonstrated in 2019 when Church’s group showed that terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT)—an enzyme found in immune cells—could be used for DNA synthesis and information storage. TdT works well, says Wyss staff scientist Daniel Wiegand, “because its only job is to find the end of a DNA chain and add a base to it.”

More here.

Michael Gordin in Boston Review:

Where do you place the boundary between “science” and “pseudoscience”? The question is more than academic. The answers we give have consequences—in part because, as health policy scholar Timothy Caulfield wrote in Nature last April during the first wave of COVID-19, “tolerating pseudoscience can cause real harm.” We want to know which doctrines count as bona fide science (with all the resulting prestige that carries) and which are imposters.

This is the “demarcation problem,” as the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper famously called it. The solution is not at all obvious. You cannot just rely on those parts of science that are correct, since science is a work in progress. Much of what scientists claim is provisional, after all, and often turns out to be wrong. That does not mean those who were wrong were engaged in “pseudoscience,” or even that they were doing “bad science”—this is just how science operates. What makes a theory scientific is something other than the fact that it is right.

Of the answers that have been proposed, Popper’s own criterion—falsifiability—remains the most commonly invoked, despite serious criticism from both philosophers and scientists. These attacks fatally weakened Popper’s proposal, yet its persistence over a century of debates helps to illustrate the challenge of demarcation—a problem no less central today than it was when Popper broached it.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzN_gNPSkR0

Gregory E. Sterling at Marginalia Review:

What should I say about Philo whom critics call…the ‘Jewish Plato’?” So said Saint Jerome, who spent the later years of his life as an ascetic in the cave traditionally associated with the birth of Jesus. He went on to defend Philo’s integration of philosophy and biblical interpretation and was the first to report the widely circulated bon mot among early Christian authors: “either Plato philonizes or Philo platonizes,” recognizing the degree to which Philo had incorporated Hellenistic philosophy–especially Platonism– into Judaism.

It was the knowledge of God that most interested Philo. While he did not restrict this to Platonism, he was particularly attracted to it, especially in the form in which the tradition developed in Alexandria in the first century BCE.

more here.

Nicole Rudick at the Paris Review:

According to Panter, he didn’t set out to create Jimbo, “he just showed up.” Jimbo made his first public appearance in the punk magazine Slash in 1977 and his cover debut two years later. His pug-nosed mug moved to Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s radical art-comics anthology Raw in 1981; some of Jimbo’s stories there made up the first Raw One-Shot, a spin-off of the periodical, the following year. He joined an ensemble cast in Panter’s Cola Madnes, written in 1983 but not published until 2000, and landed his first full-length book, Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise, in 1988, published by Raw and Pantheon. Jimbo has since starred in four issues of a self-titled comic published by Zongo in the nineties and stood in for Dante in two illuminated-manuscripts-cum-comic-books: Jimbo in Purgatory (2004) and Jimbo’s Inferno (2006). He is, as you read these words, being sent out into fresh adventures by Panter’s fervid imagination and tireless pen.

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

Shortly after September 11, 2001, Bruno Latour for example began to suspect the intellectual fashion to which he himself had contributed so much was at least in part responsible for creating a global environment in which “we each have our own truths”. This realization came for him when, returning to his native village in Bourgogne and speaking with the common people who work the Latour family vineyards, he learned that, for a good number of them, “their own truths” told them it was “the Jews” who brought down the Twin Towers. Other science-studies luminaries too, who had previously delighted in stoking the idea that science is but a discourse alongside others, came to realize that they shared at least some responsibility for a wide array of suspicious attempts to join the narrativity train, to spin the past according to taste, such as the Creation Science Museum of Petersburg, Kentucky, or the crypto-creationist Discovery Institute, both of which were, if run by reactionaries, nevertheless effective illustrations of the usefulness of postmodernism.

The reckoning with what “theory” had wrought was broad and various. Even the Catholic postmodernist philosopher Jean-Luc Marion felt compelled, in the preface to a later edition of his 1982 apophatic summa, God Without Being, to reply to critics who worried that he was tiptoeing right up to the brink of atheism. Don’t worry, he reassured them, notwithstanding the title of this book, God is.

More here.

Moshe Behar at the University of Notre Dame’s website Contending Modernities:

I am a non-white Mizrahi Jewish academic who has been studying Israel/Palestine and the history of Jews in the Middle East for two decades. My family hails from Ottoman Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, and the Greek islands of Zakynthos and Corfu. All too many of us were murdered by Nazi Génocidaires (and rest assured that we will not forget or forgive). Precisely because of this scholarly and biographic background I was embarrassed to read the letter sent by England’s Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, to all university vice chancellors. Utilizing an authoritarian tone devoid of understatement, Williamson demanded that all universities in England adopt formally what is called “the working definition of antisemitism” drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Born in 1976, Williamson has been a Tory politician for 25 years. He and his party have not been noteworthy for their passionate activism against racism, antisemitism included. Nor did Williamson find it problematic to serve under Boris Johnson, author of Seventy-Two Virgins (HarperCollins, 2004), a novel that disappointingly recycled antisemitic tropes and stereotypical portrayals of Jews and other British minority ethnic groups.

The letter Williamson authored is littered with antisemitic tropes.

More here.

Joshua Rapp Learn in Discover:

The largest animals that have ever existed on our planet descended from a miniature deer-like creature that walked on four legs in the swamps of ancient India.

Cetaceans include everything from dolphins to whales. They are fairly unique among mammals in that they live permanently in the sea — something they share with only a few other types of live-bearing, warm-blooded species.

But their evolutionary ancestors weren’t always the seafaring types. In fact, just 50 million years ago, ancestors of all cetaceans were small creatures called Indohyus that waded through swamps on four legs.

“Indohyus basically looked like a tiny little deer, a deer the size of a cat,” says Hans Thewissen, a professor at Northeast Ohio Medical University who has studied whale evolution for years and wrote the book The Walking Whales: From Land to Water in Eight Million Years.

How did these creatures go from that to blue whales the length of about two city buses? It took a lot of small changes over tens of millions of years.

More here.

Paul Giamatti and Stephen Asma in Aeon:

Like other artists, the actor is a kind of shaman. If the audience is lucky, we go with this emotional magician to other worlds and other versions of ourselves. Our enchantment or immersion into another world is not just theoretical, but sensory and emotional. How do actor and audience achieve this shared mysterious transportation? This shared ritual draws upon a kind of sixth sense, the imagination. The actor’s imagination has gone into emotional territories of intense feeling before us. Now they guide us like a psychopomp into those emotional territories by recreating them in front of us.

Aristotle called this imaginative power phantasia. We might mistakenly think that phantasia is just for artists and entertainers, a rare and special talent, but it’s actually a cognitive faculty that functions in all human beings. The actor might guide us, but it’s our own imagination that enables us to immerse fully into the story. If we activate our power of phantasia, we voluntarily summon up the real emotions we see on stage: fear, anxiety, rage, love and more. In waking life, we see this voluntary phantasia at work but, for many of us, the richest experience of phantasia comes in sleep, when the involuntary imagination awakes in the form of dreams.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE to visit Bombay, but the city, or rather the ghost of it, lingered in the plotline of my Pakistani childhood. Both sides of my family were from Bombay: on one side were Iranian exiles from the uprooting of the Qajar dynasty in the 1920s, and on the other, Muslim businessmen from the heart of the city. Both sides decided to leave after Partition in 1947 and come to Karachi, where I was born. Disparate as their worlds may have been in Bombay, they had merged in Karachi, then a desert backwater. Neither seemed particularly sanguine about the choice, a judgment I made based on the frequency with which the magical Bombay of their memories and imaginations appeared in conversation. As a Pakistani born in the place wrested from India and the British, I could not go and see the city of Bombay. Naturally this has meant that I relish any chance to catch a glimpse of the “real” Bombay, even if it is provided via the very unreal creations of Bollywood or, more recently, the reality dramas dished up on Netflix. I devoured Indian Matchmaking in an afternoon, the tone and timbre and accent of matchmaker “Seema Aunty” as familiar to me as the soundtrack of my childhood, made up of just such gossipy fare exchanged by my migrated grown-ups. Then came The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives, and now another one, a show called Bombay Begums.

Unlike Indian Matchmaking and Bollywood Wives, Bombay Begums is a drama, its protagonist played by the actress Pooja Bhatt, a once-upon-a-time Bollywood star looking to make a comeback in the relatively less-ageist environs of the Netflix drama. Her character, Rani Irani, is the just-ascended CEO of a powerful bank (the fictional Royal Bank of Bombay). Having beat out many men for the job, Irani has a lot to prove and she sets about doing just that. She is clad in the most resplendent silk saris, many of which hang in her office, a deliberately feminized backdrop to the conversations about sex or money or bribes that take place in the cream upholstered and tastefully backlit space.

More here.

Karen Hao in the MIT Technology Review:

In 2014 researchers at the MIT Media Lab designed an experiment called Moral Machine. The idea was to create a game-like platform that would crowdsource people’s decisions on how self-driving cars should prioritize lives in different variations of the “trolley problem.” In the process, the data generated would provide insight into the collective ethical priorities of different cultures.

The researchers never predicted the experiment’s viral reception. Four years after the platform went live, millions of people in 233 countries and territories have logged 40 million decisions, making it one of the largest studies ever done on global moral preferences.

A new paper published in Nature presents the analysis of that data and reveals how much cross-cultural ethics diverge on the basis of culture, economics, and geographic location.

The classic trolley problem goes like this: You see a runaway trolley speeding down the tracks, about to hit and kill five people. You have access to a lever that could switch the trolley to a different track, where a different person would meet an untimely demise. Should you pull the lever and end one life to spare five?

More here.

Making

Quilted
patches, unlike the smooth silk loveliness
of the bought,
this made-ness out of self-madness
thrown across their bones to keep them warm.
It does.

Making
under the patches a smooth silk loveliness
of parts;
two bodies are better than one for this quilting,
throwing into the dark a this-ness that was not.
It does.

Fragments
of the splintered irrelevance of doubt, sharp
hopes, spear and splice into a nice consistency as once
under the pen, the brush, the sculptor’s hand
music was made, arises now, blossom on fruit tree bough.
It does.

Exercise
exegesis of the will captures and lays
haloes around bright ankles of a saint.
Exemplary under the tree,
Buddha glows out now
making the intolerable, accidental sky
patch up its fugitive ecstasies.
It does.

From the making, and, made, now making
certain order—this excellent despair
is laid, and in the room the patches of the quilt
seize light and throw it back upon the air.
A grace is made, a loveliness is caught
quilting a quiet blossom as a work.
It does.

And do you,
doubting, fractured, and untaught, St. John of the Cross,
come down and patch the particles and throw
across the mild unblessedness of day
lectures to the untranscended soul.
Then lotus-like you’ll move upon the pond,
the one-in-many, the many-in-one,
making a numbered floral-essenced sun
resting upon the greening padded frond,
a patched, matched protection for Because.
And for our dubious value it will do.
It always does.

by Phyllis Webb
from Poet’s Choice
Time/Life Books, 1962