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Luke Glowacki in Evolution and Human Behavior:

The role of warfare in human evolution is among the most contentious topics in the evolutionary sciences. The debate is especially heated because many assume that whether our evolutionary ancestors were peaceful or warlike has important implications for modern human nature. One side argues that warfare has a deep evolutionary history, possible dating to the last common ancestor of bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans, while the other views war as a recent innovation, primarily developing with the rise of sedentism and agriculture. I show that although both positions have some support warranting consideration, each sometimes ignores uncertainties about human evolution and simplifies the complex reality of hunter-gatherer worlds. Many characterizations about the evolution of war are partial truths. Bonobos and chimpanzees provide important insights relevant for understanding the origins of war, but using either species as a model for human evolution has important limitations. Hunter-gatherers often had war, but like humans everywhere, our ancestors likely had a range of relationships depending on the context, including cooperative intergroup affiliation. Taken together, the evidence strongly suggests that small-scale warfare is part of our evolutionary history predating agriculture and sedentism, but that cooperation across group boundaries is also part our evolutionary legacy.

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God Says Yes To me

I asked God if it was ok to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked if it was ok to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even ok if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

by Kaylin Haught
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

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James Campbell at The New Criterion:

I first met Thom Gunn in 1997 and last saw him in London in 2003, a year before his death. I’m not fool enough to contradict Nott and his well-informed witnesses, and maybe I was simply blinded time and again by Gunn’s charisma, but to me he was not the desolate figure who moves through the dismal second half of A Cool Queer Life. We sat for an entire afternoon on our first encounter in his house on Cole Street, me with his cat on my lap (immortalized in the poem “In Trust” from his last book, Boss Cupid) and a bottle of cheap white wine between us. (It had to be cheap: refined in so many ways, Gunn loved vulgarity in drink and music. “I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men,” he wrote in The Passages of Joy.) It counts as one of the most memorable conversations of my life. At intervals, he would rise to take down a book from the shelf, to read a poem in order to illustrate or affirm an enthusiasm. I remember him saying that he had a direct entry into poetry. Where he encountered barriers, he usually knew how to overcome them. He believed that Boss Cupid would be his final book, but his illuminating introduction to a short selection from Ezra Pound made in 2000 proves that his “writing life” continued in other forms.

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Tara Isabella Burton at The Hedgehog Review:

But if there was little obvious distinction between “religious” pilgrims and “regular” travelers, it was partly because the discourse of contemporary travel is so often geared toward the same ends as pilgrimage proper: a journey that results in the transformation, and ideally purification, of the searching self. This is the goal underlying, for example, travel-as-transformation narratives like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, an account of the author’s solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorce-and-self-actualization memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Travel, at least the kind of travel so often coded as “real” or “authentic” (as opposed to, say, the family resort vacation, the Instagram trip, or the perfunctory list-ticking of the much-derided “tourist”), is already treated as a kind of secular pilgrimage in which we find out who we really are only by untethering ourselves from those elements of our identities too closely linked to habit and home. Only when we are away from our daily routines, this ideology implies, from our bosses and spouses and children, when we are challenged by language barrier or public transit mishap or unexpected romantic chemistry, can we come to know who we really are.

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Herman Melville (1851) from Harper’s Magazine:

THE Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travelers than in any other part.

It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho, was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular’ accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Human life expectancy dramatically increased last century. Compared to babies born in 1900, those born at the turn of the 21st century could live, on average, three decades longer—with many living to celebrate their 100th birthdays. In other words, for much of the century, each passing year added something like three months to a person’s potential time on Earth. To optimists in the longevity field, the rapid rise in life expectancy will likely continue at a steady, if not accelerated, pace.

Others have a more pessimistic view. In their predictions, humans will hit a natural ceiling, with the average person in developed countries living to an age far less than 100. A new study adds to the debate with analysis of data from 1990 to 2019. After examining life expectancy from eight countries with the longest living populations, plus those from Hong Kong and the US, the team reached a troubling conclusion: Despite innovations in healthcare, the increase in overall life expectancy is slowing down.

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Emilie Owens in Psyche:

It is midday on a Friday, and I am in a room with about a dozen teenagers at an international school in Oslo, Norway. We are talking about how and why they use TikTok, the digital video-sharing application. The prevailing mood is laid-back: though I am technically a media researcher, and they are technically my research participants, this group of 16- and 17-year-olds are joking around with each other and with me as we chat about the role of TikTok in their everyday lives. It’s a beautiful day – warm and summery – and everyone, including me, is in a fun weekend mood.

‘I dunno, it’s kind of hard to describe what I see on my For You page,’ says one of my participants.

‘Yeah, it’s like…’ another of them pauses, looking for the right word. ‘It’s just mostly brain rot, you know?’

I do not know. This is my first introduction to the term ‘brain rot’. Perplexed, I ask them what it means.

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Manuel Ansede in El País:

Terence Tao snorts and waves his hands dismissively when he hears that he is the most intelligent human being on the planet, according to a number of online rankings, including a recent one conducted by the BBC. He is, however, indisputably one of the best mathematicians in history. When he was two, his parents saw him teaching another five-year-old boy to count.

“That’s what my parents told me. I don’t remember this myself. They asked me who I had learned it from. I said, from Sesame Street,” says Tao, 49, who was born in the Australian city of Adelaide. When he was 11, he won a bronze medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. At 12, he took home silver. At 13, gold. At 21, he received his doctorate from Princeton University. At 24, he was already a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. And at 31, he won the Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize in his discipline.

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Seraj Assi in Jacobin:

The Palestinian Nakba produced, alongside death and displacement, a generation of writers who came of age in its aftermath. The moment seemed to demand a funereal tone from artists who had witnessed the tragedy. For them, a version of Theodor Adorno’s maxim, that to “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” rung true. Few broke the taboo.

Born in Haifa 102 years ago, Emile Habibi was an exception. His 1974 masterpiece, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, dared to approach the Nakba with irreverence; the Palestinian catastrophe was for him a tragicomic saga, which he depicted with a firm sense of irony. “Had it not been for your Shoah . . . then the calamity that remains the lot of my people would not have been possible,” he wrote in a 1986 article.

Habibi grew up under the system of military rule imposed on Palestinians within the newly established state of Israel between 1948 and 1966 and brought to an end in 1967, when Israel launched the Six-Day War against its Arab neighbors. This regime was, for Palestinians, a segregationist one: land appropriation and restrictions on movement as well as political and intellectual expression were its defining features.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

It’s not immoral to kick a rock; it is immoral to kick a baby. At what point do we start saying that it is wrong to cause pain to something? This question has less to do with “consciousness” and more to do with “sentience” — the ability to perceive feelings and sensations. Philosopher Jonathan Birch has embarked on a careful study of the meaning of sentience and how it can be identified in different kinds of organisms, as he discusses in his new open-access book The Edge of Sentience. This is an example of a question at the boundary of philosophy and biology with potentially important implications for real-world policies.

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David Mason at The Hudson Review:

For Christmas lunch, 1937, Virginia and Leonard Woolf hosted John Maynard Keynes and his wife, Lydia. Imagine the talk, which no doubt ranged widely, including gossip about younger writers like W. H. Auden, the recipient that autumn of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry from George VI himself. A lot of people were saying it: Auden was the man to watch. At only thirty, he was already regarded as England’s leading poet, head of a squadron of younger writers, including Louis MacNeice, C. Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender. According to Nicholas Jenkins’ important new book, The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England,^[1] Keynes was “offended by Auden’s standards of personal hygiene,” telling the Woolfs that the poet was “very dirty but a genius.”
 
We rarely associate Auden’s poetry with the slovenly and remember his tidy stanzas too often as something cold and oblique, iceberg verse. His early work has been published as The English Auden (1977), appearing to emphasize the national (even nationalist) poet, a thoroughly domesticated animal. As Jenkins argues in over 500 densely written pages, there is a lot of truth in this image.

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Social Security

No one is safe. The streets are unsafe.
Even in the safety zones, it’s not safe.
Even safe sex is not safe.
Even things you lock up in a safe
are not safe. Never deposit anything
in a safe-deposit box, because it
won’t be safe there. Nobody is safe
at home during baseball games anymore.

At night I go around in the dark
locking everything, returning
a few minutes later
to make sure I locked
everything. It’s not safe here.
It’s not safe and they know it.
People get hurt using safety pins.

It was not always this way.
Long ago, everyone felt safe, Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of wingéd dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

by Terence Winch
from Poetry 180
Edited by Billy Collins
Random House, 2003

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J. Hoberman at Artforum:

THERE’S A REASON why so many people regard Ronald Reagan as America’s last great leader. The further the monolithic Hollywood of the storied past recedes into the fragmented fun house of the media present, the more mythic the stellar avatars appear. One such divinity: straight-talking, honorable, unassuming, heroic Henry Fonda (1905–1982).

A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a “forgotten man” in the original “Bonnie and Clyde” film, You Only Live Once (1937). He was the protagonist of The Wrong Man (1956) and The Best Man (1964), and of 12 Angry Men (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and—thanks to his rebellious children—the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, Henry Fonda for President, the “quintessential American”? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary—what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life.

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Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

How does the brain process language—using sounds to form words, and assigning words their meaning? Recording the activity of single neurons in the language region of patients undergoing deep brain stimulation, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and MIT have been able for the first time to observe how semantic information is processed and represented by these cells during language comprehension. They’ve discovered that the brain uses contextual clues to decipher meaning, implying that understanding words and sentences is a dynamic, interpretive process.

Using tiny electrodes with radio antennas, they recorded neural activity from about 300 cells as participants (receiving treatment for conditions such as Parkinson’s and essential tremor dystonia) listened to stories read aloud. By tracking these neurons’ activity during natural speech processing, the scientists observed that individual cells responded selectively to specific word meanings, and reliably distinguished words from nonwords. And they found that the neurons’ activities were dynamic, reflecting the words’ meanings based on their specific sentence contexts (“He picked the rose” versus “He finally rose,” for example), rather than responding to the words as fixed memory representations. They were even able to show how the activity of ensembles of these cells could be used to accurately predict the broad semantic categories of related words (such as “rat” and “mouse”) as they were heard in real time during speech.

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Nic Fleming in Nature:

Reboot your immune system with intermittent fasting. Help your ‘good’ bacteria to thrive with a plant-based diet. Move over morning coffee: mushroom tea could bolster your anticancer defences. Claims such as these, linking health, diet and immunity, bombard supermarket shoppers and pervade the news. Beyond the headlines and product labels, the scientific foundations of many such claims are often based on limited evidence. That’s partly because conducting rigorous studies to track what people eat and the impact of diet is a huge challenge. In addition, the relevance to human health of results from studies of animals and cells isn’t clear and has sometimes been exaggerated for commercial gain, feeding scepticism in nutrition science.

In the past five or so years, however, researchers have developed innovative approaches to nutrition immunology that are helping to close this credibility gap. Whereas nutrition scientists have conventionally studied the long-term impacts of loosely defined Mediterranean or Western diets, for example, today they have access to tools that allow them to zoom in on the short-term effects — both helpful and harmful — of narrower food groups and specific dietary components, and to probe the molecular mechanisms underpinning the effects of foods on immunity.

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Witold Rybczynski at Literary Hub:

The car I bought in Hamburg had distinctive oval German export license plates, and an international registration sticker marked with a D, for Deutschland. As I drove through Holland on my way to Paris, more than once when asking for directions I received dirty looks, especially from older persons for whom the wartime German occupation was a living memory.

And, after all, my car’s godfather was Adolf Hitler himself. Opening the 1933 Berlin Motor Show as the newly appointed reich chancellor, he had announced a national policy to motorize Germany, which despite having invented the automobile a half century earlier, lagged other European countries in car ownership. Hitler called on the auto industry to produce an affordable people’s car, a volkswagen.

The automotive engineer who would realize Hitler’s vision was not a German native. Ferdinand Porsche (1875–­1951) was born in the small Bohemian market town of Maffersdorf in the Austro-­Hungarian Empire; after the First World War, he would become a citizen of the newly created Czechoslovak Republic.

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Daniel James Sharp at The Freethinker:

In The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (2008), Richard Dawkins writes:

Our ability to understand the universe and our position in it is one of the glories of the human species. Our ability to link mind to mind by language, and especially to transmit our thoughts across the centuries is another. Science and literature, then, are the two achievements of Homo sapiens that most convincingly justify the specific name.

And I think I am justified in saying that Dawkins himself is one of the few who have really managed to combine these two greatest achievements of humanity. In a corpus of work written over half a century, Dawkins has innovated and explained, and he has done so with the ear and eye of a poet. It is appropriate, then, that his new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, is a medley and a melody: a revisiting and extension of his previous ideas about evolution written with elegance and beauty. The very word ‘reverie’ suggests a pleasant and roaming meditation, which is exactly what The Genetic Book of the Dead is. Come to think of it, the quintessentially Dawkinsian phrase ‘a Darwinian reverie’ might just sum up Dawkins’s entire career. Call this book a Dawkinsian medley, or a Dawkinsian melody, then.

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