Parul Sehgal at the NYT:

How does great literature — the Grade A, top-shelf stuff — announce itself to the reader?

Nabokov spoke of the shiver between the shoulder blades. Emily Dickinson required more persuasion. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” she wrote in a letter, “I know that is poetry.”

I’m sorry to say that I occasionally experience it as the dishonorable and squirrelly impulse to hoard the book in question, to keep it my secret. This can prove difficult, as you might imagine, given my line. All of which is to say, I bring news of Tove Ditlevsen’s suite of memoirs with the kind of thrill and reluctance that tells me this must be a masterpiece.

more here.

On the Bearing of Waitresses

Always I thought they suffered, the way they huffed
through the Benzedrine light of waffle houses,
hustling trays of omelets, gossiping by the grill,
or pruning passes like the too prodigal buds of roses,
and I imagined each come home to a trailer court,
the yard of bricked-in violets, the younger sister
pregnant and petulant at her manicure, the mother
with her white Bible, the father sullen in his corner.
Wasn’t that the code they telegraphed in smirks?
And wasn’t this disgrace, to be public and obliged,
observed like germs or despots about to be debunked?
Unlikely brides, apostles in the gospel of stereotypes,
their future was out there beyond the parked trucks,
between the beer joints and the sexless church,
the images we’d learned from hayseed troubadours—
perfume, grease, and the rending of polarizing loves.
But here in this men’s place, they preserved a faint
decorum of women and, when they had shuffled past us,
settled in that realm where the brain approximates
names and rounds off the figures under uniforms.
Not to be honored or despised, but to walk as spies would,
with almost alien poise in the imperium of our disregard,
to go on steadily, even on the night of the miscarriage,
to glide, quick smile, at the periphery of appetite.
Read more »

Tom Standage in 1843 Magazine:

As Twitter and Facebook become more acrimonious and less trusted, an older means to get information has made a comeback: the email newsletter. Chances are that newsletters make up a larger part of your media diet than they did a couple of years ago. You may even be paying for some of them. In recent months several journalists have left jobs at established publications to earn a living by asking their most loyal readers to subscribe to a personal email newsletter instead. Entrepreneurs, cookery writers and academics have also embraced this model. Who needs a publisher if you can sell your writing straight to your readers? Most of these people are established experts in a particular field. They have chosen to bypass the involvement of advertisers and algorithms in favour of the pleasingly straightforward approach of delivering their thoughts directly to the inboxes of paying subscribers. Writers with large online followings can earn a respectable income even if only a small fraction of their fans sign up (typically for $5 a month, or $50 a year).

Substack, the newsletter-publishing platform that has championed this new model, takes 10% of the proceeds in return for handling distribution and billing. Launching a Substack newsletter today is like launching a blog 20 years ago, or a podcast five years ago, with one important difference: people are actually getting paid.

There are some enviable success stories. Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, is thought to make more than $1m a year from her politics newsletter, “Letters from an American”. The New York Times recently described her as “by accident the most successful independent journalist in America”. Substack paid Matthew Yglesias, co-founder of Vox, an American news website, an advance of $250,000 when he left his job to concentrate on his newsletter, “Slow Boring”. Other journalists who’ve gone solo include Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald and Haley Nahman. In January Twitter bought Revue, a Dutch startup and rival to Substack. Your inbox could soon be stuffed with new newsletters.

More here.

Robert Worth in The New York Times:

To the rest of the world, Saudi Arabia may look like a quasi-medieval kingdom where women still struggle for basic rights, where bearded clerics run the courts and where convicts are routinely beheaded by sword in public. But the Saudi monarchy — like its neighbors in Dubai and Abu Dhabi — has long cherished dreams of leapfrogging into a high-tech future. The last Saudi king created plans for six new cities in the desert, all billed as transformative steps toward a world beyond oil.

Now the Saudis have announced a fantasy that makes all their previous efforts look tame. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler, released a short film in January outlining his plans for the Line, a postmodern ecotopia to be built on the kingdom’s northwest coast. It will be a narrow urban strip 106 miles long with no roads, no cars and no pollution. M.B.S., as the crown prince is known, plans to pour $500 billion into the Line and related projects, which is a lot of money even by Saudi standards. He calls the Line a “civilizational revolution” to be inhabited by one million people “from all over the world.” Why anyone would want to move there, and why a city should be shaped like a strand of capellini, is anyone’s guess.

To watch the crown prince’s promotional video is to be immersed in a distinctively Saudi form of arrogance, blending religious triumphalism and royal grandiosity. The film begins with a fast-moving montage of the 20th-century’s greatest scientific and technical breakthroughs, including an incongruous image of Saudi Arabia’s founding king — as if he’d been a Steve Jobs-style innovator rather than a camel​-riding desert warrior. Dates flash on the screen in a vintage font as we see images of the first commercial radio broadcast (1920), the first color TVs (1953), the first successful kidney transplant (1954), the first man on the moon (1969), the birth of the internet. After flicking past the glories of YouTube and virtual reality, the screen goes blank and the words appear, white on a black background: “What’s next?”

More here.

Bill and Melinda Gates in Gates Notes:

We are writing this letter after a year unlike any other in our lifetimes.

Two decades ago, we created a foundation focused on global health because we wanted to use the returns from Microsoft to improve as many lives as possible. Health is the bedrock of any thriving society. If your health is compromised—or if you’re worried about catching a deadly disease—it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Staying alive and well becomes your priority to the necessary detriment of everything else.

Over the last year, many of us have experienced that reality ourselves for the first time. Almost every decision now comes with a new calculus: How do you minimize your risk of contracting or spreading COVID-19? There are probably some epidemiologists reading this letter, but for most people, we’re guessing that the past year has forced you to reorient your lives around an entirely new vocabulary—one that includes terms like “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” and the “R0” of a virus. (And for the epidemiologists reading this, we bet no one is more surprised than you that we now live in a world where your colleague Anthony Fauci has graced the cover of InStyle magazine.)

More here.

Charles Sabel and David G. Victor in the Boston Review:

Can the world meet the challenge of climate change?

After more than three decades of global negotiations, the prognosis looks bleak. The most ambitious diplomatic efforts have focused on a series of virtually global agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015. With so many diverse interests across so many countries, it has been hard to get global agreement simply on the need for action; meaningful consensus has been even more elusive. Profound uncertainty about the effectiveness of various mitigation measures has made it difficult to estimate the cost of deep cuts in emissions.

What is not uncertain is that cuts will pose a threat to well-organized high-emitting industries. Prudent negotiators have delayed making commitments and agreed only to treaties that continue business as usual by a more palatable name. Between the delays and superficial compacts, emissions have risen by two-thirds since 1990, and they keep climbing—except for the temporary drop this year when the global economy imploded under the coronavirus pandemic.

More here.

But if you prefer more of a quick rant, here’s Dave Portnoy:

From the blog of the University of Chicago Press:

Terrorism has often been described as a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. In her new book, Epidemic Empire, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb tracks this persistent trope of terrorism as a “social contagion,” from its roots in anti-rebellion colonial rhetoric through to the global war on terror. Raza Kolb’s demonstrates that the metaphor surfaces again and again at moments of crisis—including the current COVID-19 crisis. We asked the author a few questions about her book.

Epidemic Empire has turned out to be quite prescient. We began preparing the book for publication in early 2020, just before we entered COVID-19 lockdown. How have the events of this past year sharpened your understanding of the themes in the book?

Thank you for asking this question—it’s been on my mind constantly over the last ten months. Also, suddenly, on everyone else’s mind! In the early days of my research, I was getting a lot of pushback on my work’s relationship to what’s casually called “social construct” theory, an effect of deconstruction, which argues that certain seemingly stable ontological categories like gender or race are in fact products of the social. Judith Butler’s monumental Gender Trouble is a good example here, and it’s also a good example of how saying something is socially constructed never means saying it’s ethereal or random or unimportant.

How can “disease” be construed as a social construct? Isn’t there something plainly material about when someone falls sick? I heard these questions a lot.

More here.

Bijan Stephen at The Nation:

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, the latest album from Daniel Lopatin—who records under the name Oneohtrix Point Never—feels as though it’s been beamed from the antenna of a deep space probe directly into your ears. The album registers like a radio broadcast from another reality, perhaps one parallel to our own, almost inchoate and yet somehow fully formed.

Part of that otherworldliness comes from the way Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is structured. It hangs around a series of cross-talk interludes, which are themselves mashed-up FM broadcasts recorded across America. They spin between daytime and nighttime talk formats—morning news chatter and sultry call-in shows collaged with and against each other—and the effect is orienting: The mood of each interlude attunes the listener to new frequencies.

more here.

Joshua Bennett at Cabinet Magazine:

One of the more difficult parts of raising a Black child in the United States of America—and it bears mentioning from the beginning that the joys are innumerable—is the question of where they will go to school. Most of us know, through both memory and a wealth of empirical data testifying to this difficult truth, that the classroom is a battleground. It is a site of suffering. It is, in the first instance, a space wherein our hair, our diction, our social practices and modes of cognition are denigrated as a matter of institutional mission and everyday protocol. The Black aesthetic tradition, in one sense, is a single front in an ongoing war against this and other forms of asymmetrical violence against our children. In the poems and plays, stories and essays, we are mapping out a set of alternatives. Another world, another way that things might eventually be if we are brave.

more here.

Immigrant Centuries

These are immigrant times
And the lines are long,

The signs for jobs few,
The songs sadder, the air meaner.

Everyone is hungry.
Everyone is willing.

Jobs are not jobs but lives lived
Hard at the work of being human.

These are immigrant times,
And the lines are long again.

by Alberto Rios
from Not Go Away is My Name
Copper Canyon Press

Felipe De La Hoz in The Baffler:

If anyone is tried for sedition after this whole wretched ordeal, it should be Donald Trump and the repellent congressional creatures who cravenly believed they could direct the QAnon crowd and keep them in their control. The fact of their failure, their monumental miscalculation, does not absolve them of their culpability. We’re already seeing figures like the pusillanimous Missouri Senator Josh Hawley denounce the diehard supporters they’ve spent years whipping into a frenzy, no doubt breathing a sigh of relief that they have a convenient scapegoat to absorb the heat of their misdeeds.

We all feel like we’re standing on the edge of a precipice, but in egging on the trampling of civil liberties, we’re in danger of joining the modern conservative movement in signaling that our convictions are negotiable, or a convenient smoke screen obscuring a primary objective of primacy and oppression, already a pervasive fantasy in their fevered imaginations. Not that we should hit the breaks in a display of good faith to people who will never in an eon give us the benefit of the doubt, but rather out of our own compass, because our tenets aren’t fungible.

If anything, it’s during moments of crisis that it’s particularly important to remember what anchors us, and it certainly isn’t a belief in expansive law enforcement powers and a harsh and retributive penal system. Besides the fact that we would bear the brunt of this arrangement, these convictions are the only thing we have in the end. We might relish in bringing down the hammer on these easy targets, leaving our values by the wayside, but to give in is to risk that when this storm blows past, we’ll find ourselves unmoored, adrift, and unprepared for the squalls to come.

More here.

Sofia Moutinho in Science:

The naked mole-rat may not be the most attractive rodent on the block, but it’s still a social butterfly. These hairless, mostly blind and deaf animals live in colonies of up to 300 individuals, which communicate with high-pitched squeaks. Now, researchers have discovered that, like humans and many birds, mole-rat communities have their own dialect, which is kept alive by their queen. “The study is exciting because it provides the first evidence for vocal learning in a rodent,” says evolutionary biologist Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna, who was not part of the work. More research, he says, may help scientists better understand how complex vocalizations evolved in social animals, including humans.

Naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are renowned for a vast list of weird features: They rarely get cancer, for instance, they live longer than any other rodent, and they have a high pain tolerance. Researchers became interested in them in the 1970s because they are also a rare example of mammals living—like bees and ants—in colonies of workers ruled by a single breeding matriarch or “queen.” Scientists knew naked mole-rats used chirps to communicate, but until now, they had no idea how complex their vocalization was.

More here.

Ronald W. Dworkin in National Affairs:

We all yearn for happiness, and yet so many Americans are unhappy. Polls document a rising tide of unhappiness — especially now, as the pandemic has upended life, with 23% of Americans claiming to be unhappy. This represents the highest figure on record since 1972. Yet even in 2019, with the economy humming, levels of unhappiness had been rising for some time.

The medical literature confirms the unhappiness trend in a different way. Up to half of today’s Americans regularly numb themselves with mood-modifying substances ranging from the legal, such as anti-depressants, to the illegal, such as heroin. In the case of anti-depressants, people justify their prescriptions by “medicalizing” their unhappiness, calling it a neurotransmitter problem. Whether they are right to do so has framed the unhappiness debate for the last 20 years.

But that debate is ending, and a new one has begun. The focus of the “medicalization of unhappiness” debate was whether unhappiness should be considered a scientific problem. That issue has given way to the “politicization of unhappiness.” Whatever unhappiness Americans feel in their private lives has spilled over into the public realm, with ramifications far beyond whether people who take drugs to feel happy should be doing so.

More here.

Thomas Lewton in Wired:

In 1987, A giant star exploded right next to our own Milky Way galaxy. It was the brightest and closest supernova since the invention of the telescope some four centuries earlier, and just about every observatory turned to take a look. Perhaps most excitingly, specialized observatories buried deep underground captured shy subatomic particles called neutrinos streaming out of the blast.

These particles were first proposed as the driving force behind supernovas in 1966, which made their detection a source of comfort to theorists who had been trying to understand the inner workings of the explosions. Yet over the decades, astrophysicists had constantly bumped into what appeared to be a fatal flaw in their neutrino-powered models.

Neutrinos are famously aloof particles, and questions remained over exactly how neutrinos transfer their energy to the star’s ordinary matter under the extreme conditions of a collapsing star. Whenever theorists tried to model these intricate particle motions and interactions in computer simulations, the supernova’s shock wave would stall and fall back on itself. The failures “entrenched the idea that our leading theory for how supernovas explode maybe doesn’t work,” said Sean Couch, a computational astrophysicist at Michigan State University.

More here.

Bernard Freamon in Aeon:

The six city-states on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf, each formerly a sleepy, pristine fishing village, are now all glitzy and futuristic wonderlands. In each of these city-states one finds large tracts of ultramodern architecture, gleaming skyscrapers, world-class air-conditioned retail markets and malls, buzzing highways, giant, busy and efficient airports and seaports, luxury tourist attractions, game parks, children’s playgrounds, museums, gorgeous beachfront hotels and vast, opulent villas housing fabulously affluent denizens. The six city-states ­– Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Manama in Bahrain, Dammam in Saudi Arabia, Doha in Qatar, and Kuwait City in Kuwait ­– grew into these luminous metropolises beginning in the 1970s, fuelled by the discovery of oil and gas, an oligarchic accumulation of wealth, and unconditional grants of political independence from the United Kingdom, the former colonial master of the region. Thereafter, the family-run polities that took control of these city-states began to attract huge amounts of financial capital from all over the world. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE, has been described as ‘the richest city in the world’, with wealth rivalling that seen in Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Like those cities, Abu Dhabi is swimming in over-the-top affluence. According to a 2007 report in Fortune magazine, Abu Dhabi’s 420,000 citizens, who ‘sit on one-tenth of the planet’s oil and have almost $1 trillion invested abroad, are worth about $17 million apiece’.

More here.

There is Just One Sure Harmony

There’s just one sure harmony: follow the Way.
But how will you know the Way?

It has no quality or form.
It hides in implication.
It expresses nature to its smallest point.
It inhabits all motion.

The Way is a fountain of sense and memory.
The Way is the source of everything known,
without exception.

There’s only one way to understand the source:
accept it.

from the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu

Katherine Wright in Physics:

Today, poetry and science are often considered to be mutually exclusive career paths. But that wasn’t always the case. The mathematician Ada Lovelace and the physicist James Clerk Maxwell were both accomplished poets who wrote rhymes about rainbows and verse about scientific societies. Conversely, the poet John Keats was a licensed surgeon. Combining the two practices fell out of favor in the 1800s, when science moved from a hobby of the elite to a legitimate profession. But translating research into lyrics, haiku, and other poetic forms is resurging among scientists as they look for alternative ways to inspire others with their findings.

“Poetry is a great tool for interrogating and questioning the world,” says Sam Illingworth, a poet and a geoscientist who currently works as a lecturer in science communication at the University of Western Australia. Through workshops and a new science-poetry journal, called Consilience, Illingworth is helping scientists to translate their latest results into poems that can attract appreciation from those outside of their immediate scientific sphere. “There are so many amazing science stories out there that people don’t know about because they are hidden in the jargon of scientific papers,” he says. “Poetry is a really powerful way to change that and to enable communication to take place.”

One scientist who has started using poetry as a communication tool is Stephany Mazon, who studies problems related to gas condensation in the atmosphere at the University of Helsinki in Finland. In May, Mazon joined one of Illingworth’s workshops, which took place via Zoom as part of the European Geophysical Union’s annual meeting. In the workshop, she, along with 300 other scientists, were split into groups of three. Each group was then tasked with writing a haiku, a 17-syllable-long poem that traditionally focuses on nature. Mazon was inspired to join the workshop, as she wanted to try her hand at this unconventional method of science communication. “We can’t all be Twitter stars,” she jokes. Her group only had a few minutes to come up with their haiku, which spotlighted water, a fluid that serendipitously featured in all of the group members’ research projects. “It was a lot of fun, and surprisingly easy to write the poem,” Mazon says.

More here.