Lord,
……… when you send the rain,
……… think about it, please,
……… a little?
Do
……… not get carried away
……… by the sound of falling water,
……… the marvelous light
……… on the falling water.
I
……… am beneath that water.
……… It falls with great force
……… and the light
Blinds
……… me to the light.
by James Baldwin – 1924-1987
John Plotz in Public Books:
Comedy inverts norms and breaks barriers. But in order to reveal, as Northrop Frye suggested it must, “absurd or irrational [patriarchal] law,” comedy requires a fall guy. There has to be somebody on whom that law can come crashing down, in all its absurdity, all its irrationality—somebody who improbably emerges at the end, unscathed or even triumphant. Buster Keaton, that beautifully deadpan clown known as “The Great Stone Face,” had the pliability—and the subtle anarchic capacity for nonviolent resistance—to fill that role like nobody else before him. Or since.
Keaton is remembered now as a brilliant stuntman and inventor of trick shots (see, for instance, the cutaway walls of the house in 1921’s The High Sign). However, his true genius resides in his delightful disorientation from—and re-orientation to—a world that is never quite what he takes it to be.
More here.
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:
Emotions are at the same time utterly central to who we are — where would we be without them? — and also seemingly peripheral to the “real” work our brains do, understanding the world and acting within it. Why do we have emotions, anyway? Are they hardwired into the brain? Lisa Feldman Barrett is one of the world’s leading experts in the psychology of emotions, and she emphasizes that they are more constructed and less hard-wired than you might think. How we feel and express emotions can vary from culture to culture or even person to person. It’s better to think of emotions of a link between affective response and our behaviors.
More here.
Steven Levy in Wired:
ERDAL ARIKAN was born in 1958 and grew up in Western Turkey, the son of a doctor and a homemaker. He loved science. When he was a teenager, his father remarked that, in his profession, two plus two did not always equal four. This fuzziness disturbed young Erdal; he decided against a career in medicine. He found comfort in engineering and the certainty of its mathematical outcomes. “I like things that have some precision,” he says. “You do calculations and things turn out as you calculate it.”
Arıkan entered the electrical engineering program at Middle East Technical University. But in 1977, partway through his first year, the country was gripped by political violence, and students boycotted the university. Arıkan wanted to study, and because of his excellent test scores he managed to transfer to CalTech, one of the world’s top science-oriented institutions, in Pasadena, California. He found the US to be a strange and wonderful country. Within his first few days, he was in an orientation session addressed by legendary physicist Richard Feynman. It was like being blessed by a saint.
More here.
From Scientific American:
If some of the many thousands of human volunteers needed to test coronavirus vaccines could have been replaced by digital replicas—one of this year’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies—COVID-19 vaccines might have been developed even faster, saving untold lives. Soon virtual clinical trials could be a reality for testing new vaccines and therapies. Other technologies on the list could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by electrifying air travel and enabling sunlight to directly power the production of industrial chemicals. With “spatial” computing, the digital and physical worlds will be integrated in ways that go beyond the feats of virtual reality. And ultrasensitive sensors that exploit quantum processes will set the stage for such applications as wearable brain scanners and vehicles that can see around corners.
These and the other emerging technologies have been singled out by an international steering group of experts. The group, convened by Scientific American and the World Economic Forum, sifted through more than 75 nominations. To win the nod, the technologies must have the potential to spur progress in societies and economies by outperforming established ways of doing things. They also need to be novel (that is, not currently in wide use) yet likely to have a major impact within the next three to five years. The steering group met (virtually) to whittle down the candidates and then closely evaluate the front-runners before making the final decisions. We hope you are as inspired by the reports that follow as we are.
More here.
Meredith Hall in Paris Review:
We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemicals like THC, the active agent in cannabis. But why, they wondered, would we have neuroreceptors for a foreign substance? We don’t. Those receptors are for substances produced in our own brains. The researchers discovered that we produce cannabinoids, our own version of THC, that fit those receptors exactly. The scientists had stumbled onto the neurochemical function of forgetting, never before understood. We are designed, they realized, not only to remember but also to forget. The first of the neurotransmitters discovered was named anandamide, Sanskrit for bliss.
…People suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are often unable to forget the causative trauma. What if we could simply erase that moment, expunge it as if it never happened? Researchers are working to develop drugs that will mimic the cannabinoids produced in the brain, pharmaceuticals that will find their way to those waiting receptors and lock in—click—a perfect fit. Release from memory. Oblivion. Bliss.
Scientists with hard hearts can create mice with unusually high and unusually low levels of cannabinoids. In one experiment, the mice were subjected to a loud sound followed by an electric shock to their feet. The mice with low levels of cannabinoids remembered what was coming. An echo in their tiny brains warned them of harm on its way. They froze at the loud sound, with apparent dread. But the mice with high levels of cannabinoids didn’t freeze. The shock that followed was news each time. Which is the blessing—the memory of pain and with it the dread, the ability to make adjustments to keep ourselves safe? Or the bliss of forgetting, never imagining the harm that is coming?
More here.
“The older I get the more I see how our struggles as Indigenous people take root in colonialism and capitalism.” —Tanaya Winder
Ask me about the time
my brother ran towards the sun
arms outstretched. His shadow chased him
from corner store to church
where he offered himself in pieces.
Ask me about the time
my brother disappeared. At 16,
tossed his heartstrings over telephone wire,
dangling for all the rez dogs to feed on.
Bit by bit. The world took chunks of
my brother’s flesh.
Ask me about the first time
we drowned in history. 8 years old
during communion we ate the body of Christ
with palms wide open, not expecting wine to be
poured into our mouths. The bitterness
buried itself in my tongue and my brother
never quite lost his thirst for blood or vanishing
for more days than a shadow could hold.
Ask me if I’ve ever had to use
bottle caps as breadcrumbs to help
my brother find his way back home.
He never could tell the taste between
a scar and its wounding, an angel or demon.
Ask me if I can still hear his
exhaled prayers: I am still waiting to be found.
To be found, tell me why there is nothing
more holy than becoming a ghost.
by Tanaya Winder
from the Academy of American Poets, 2020
Eugene Ostashevsky and Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. at Music & Literature:
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., would seem to write discrete lyrics but no reader gets far in her work without succumbing to an overwhelming sense that a quest is relentlessly underway. It’s a quest that can only be fathomed through a total immersion in history and landscape and immediate psychic needs of those en route: kids out for a journey to the east, soldiers heading into death, the somewhat hidden but ever present presiding consciousness of her two long poems, Series India and Salient, the poet herself as a pained and adamant devotee to some ancient faith on a pilgrimage to the edge of the abyss. The immersion is at times so deep that we might doubt the existence of the wisdom that the figures in her poems are in search of and that the poet herself feels an unassuageable need for, and yet the force of the imagination brought to bear on this imperative for transcendence, and the acute mastery of cadence, phrasing, and image, make us want it too: to see the other side of death, to feel within ourselves some ecstatic completion.
Her first book, Series India, reveled in the counterpointing of two realities—that of the naïve and pained journeyers with that of an uncompromising narrative intelligence devoted to the divine. The book moves back and forth between the authentic pains and foibles of the partially informed on a spiritual spree, and the informed curiosities of a poet deeply at home in thinking about ritual practice, worship, and yes, the fate of the soul.
more here.
Ruth Franklin at The New Yorker:
From his iconic “Deathfugue,” one of the first poems published about the Nazi camps and now recognized as a benchmark of twentieth-century European poetry, to cryptic later works such as the poem above, all of Celan’s poetry is elliptical, ambiguous, resisting easy interpretation. Perhaps for this reason, it has been singularly compelling to critics and translators, who often speak of Celan’s work in quasi-religious terms. Felstiner said that, when he first encountered the poems, he knew he’d have to immerse himself in them “before doing anything else.” Pierre Joris, in the introduction to “Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his new translation of Celan’s first four published books, writes that hearing Celan’s poetry read aloud, at the age of fifteen, set him on a path that he followed for fifty years.
more here.
Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:
Among the Domitian questions I enjoy freely pondering, I sometimes wonder how our religious and metaphysical representations of the afterlife would be different if, rather than dying and leaving a rotting corpse for others to dispose of, we instead disappeared in a flash of light, or floated upwards into the sky and out beyond the atmosphere. It recently occurred to me that this latter scenario is at least something like what whales experience when their loved ones die.
We think of aquatic animals as being able to move freely not just to and fro, but also up and down. In fact most are confined to a fairly narrow zone outside of which they could not survive, either because of the adaptation of their bodies to a particular amount of water pressure, their need for light or for the absence of light, or some other reason still. Most cetacean species inhabit a narrow band of water between the surface and the mesopelagic zone, characterised by a certain amount of light, but no photosynthetic microorganisms. Blue whales, a fairly average species in this regard, can dive to about 300 metres. Sperm whales and certain beaked whales hold the deep-dive record, descending 2500 metres or so to hunt for giant squid and other prey in the abyssopelagic zone.
More here.
Wendy Orent in Undark:
As far as scientists and historians can tell, the bacterium that caused the Black Death never lost its virulence, or deadliness. But the pathogen responsible for the 1918 influenza pandemic, which still wanders the planet as a strain of seasonal flu, evolved to become less deadly, and it’s possible that the pathogen for the 2009 H1N1 pandemic did the same. Will SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, follow a similar trajectory? Some scientists say the virus has already evolved in a way that makes it easier to transmit. But as for a possible decline in virulence, most everyone says it’s too soon to tell. Looking to the past, however, may offer some clues.
The idea that circulating pathogens gradually become less deadly over time is very old. It seems to have originated in the writings of a 19th-century physician, Theobald Smith, who first suggested that there is a “delicate equilibrium” between parasite and host, and argued that, over time, the deadliness of a pathogen should decline since it is really not in the interest of a germ to kill its host. This notion became conventional wisdom for many years, but by the 1980s, researchers had begun challenging the idea.
More here.
Eric B. Schnurer in The Hedgehog Review:
Government has descended into near-permanent deadlock. The resulting populist movements, on both the right and left, are highly democratic: intensely broad-based and grassroots, and at least rhetorically anti-elite. But they are neither liberal nor tolerant. On an operational level, it has become more important to “own the libs” or “cancel conservatives” than to achieve any meaningful objective, let alone compromise. All opposition is now treated as an existential threat.
Yet the increasing acceptance of incivility, the denigration and ridicule of opponents, the political violence and even death threats against anyone who takes a position that someone dislikes isn’t the problem itself. It’s simply the iceberg’s tip of a deeper and larger social phenomenon that constitutes our new normal. That new normal, in short, rather than either autocracy or democracy, is vetocracy: Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature,” but one in which weak and strong alike can thwart each other’s objectives yet none can attain their own.
More here.
Adil Najam in Dawn:
Historic is not a word that should be used lightly. It should nearly never be used for anything contemporary and only sparingly for events long past. Yet, it is being used with considerable frequency to describe the 2020 US Presidential elections; maybe, not inappropriately.
But leaving judgements of history to history, as we should, does not diminish the truly exceptional importance of these elections. Not just because of the trauma of the presidency they bring to an end, but even more for the turbulent times that they foretell ahead.
Even before the election results began coming in, it had become commonplace to describe America as divided. It is, in fact, so. But these elections — in their run-up as well as in their results — have also revealed the inadequacy of that word. Maybe angst is a better word to describe the state of this Union. This essay argues that the 2020 US elections have not only confirmed that Mr Trump leaves America in the grip of an epoch-defining angst, but that this angst will continue, possibly intensify, into the Biden presidency.
Here are three reasons why.
More here.
Nathaniel Manderson in Salon:
Based on the last two presidential elections, there is clearly a failure in reporting, polling and understanding of almost half of America. Perhaps liberals would simply like to govern and run for office by only mobilizing their half of the population and overlooking that other half, but I would imagine this country won’t get closer to equal opportunity with that type of thinking. It’s true that much of the divisive language comes from Trump supporters who seems to enjoy Trump’s deplorable approach to life and politics. Does that embody every single person who voted for Donald Trump in the last two elections? If you think that, then you are as lost as the narrow reporting and polling I have witnessed during the last four years.
My life has brought me across the lives of many other people, which has allowed me to understand the viewpoints of both sides in a more personal and complicated way. I’m a former pastor, and my favorite family in one of my churches was one that actually attended a Glenn Beck rally. Do you realize how kooky you need to be to travel from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., to attend a Glenn Beck rally as a family? Yet I have nothing but warm feelings for them: Best family in the church by far. They were close to each other, kind and down to earth — and as far from me politically as anyone I have ever met. My least favorite family was full of hate, judgment and self-righteousness — yet I agreed with them on every single political issue. In fact, that liberal family is the sole reason I left formal ministry.
More here.
Meilan Solly in Smithsonian:
When Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer exchanged vows on July 29, 1981, the archbishop officiating the ceremony declared, “Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made—the prince and princess on their wedding day.” Departing from the standard storybook ending of “they lived happily ever after,” he continued, “Our [Christian] faith sees the wedding day not as the place of arrival, but the place where the adventure really begins.”
For the 32-year-old heir to the British throne and his 20-year-old bride, this assessment proved eerily prescient. Idolized by an adoring public, the newly minted Princess Diana found herself thrust into the spotlight, cast as Cinderella to Charles’ Prince Charming. But beneath this mirage of marital bliss, the royal family was in crisis—a history dramatized in the fourth season of Netflix’s “The Crown,” which follows Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman) and Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) as they navigate the events of 1979 to 1990, from Charles’ (Josh O’Connor) courtship of Diana (Emma Corrin) to Margaret Thatcher’s (Gillian Anderson) tenure as prime minister and the Falklands War.
Looming over the season, too, is the eventual dissolution of Charles and Diana’s relationship. The prince remained enamored with his ex-girlfriend, Camilla Parker Bowles, and in 1986, when Charles decided that his marriage had “irretrievably broken down,” the former couple embarked on an affair. Diana also started seeing other men, and the royals formally divorced in 1996 after a four-year separation. One year later, the beloved princess died in a car crash. Ahead of the new episodes’ arrival this Sunday, November 15, here’s what you need to know about arguably the most anticipated event of the season: the royal wedding.
More here.