Nero’s Term

Nero was not alarmed when he heard
the prophesy of the Delphic Oracle.
“Let him fear the seventy-three years.”
There was still ample time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty years old. The term
the god allots to him is quite sufficient
for him to prepare for perils to come.

Now he will return to Rome slightly fatigued,
but delightfully fatigued from his journey,
which consisted entirely of days of pleasure
at the theaters, the gardens, the athletic fields . . .
evenings spent in the cities of Greece . . .
Ah the voluptuous delight of nude bodies, above all . . .

Those things Nero thought. And in Spain Galba
secretly assembles and drills his army,
the old man of seventy-three.

by C. P. Cavafy
from The Complete Poems of Cavafy
Harvest Books, 1961

Nicholas Dirks in Undark:

REVOLTS AGAINST SCIENCE are often deeply irrational, as we witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic, with political polarization around lifesaving vaccines and critical public health measures. But public distrust of science has too often been enabled through its manipulation by corporate interests, including big tobacco and oil, as well as by the dangers associated with its use in war.

The closing moments of Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award-nominated film “Oppenheimer” — based on the biography “American Prometheus” — depict a fictional scene in which the physicist is speaking with Albert Einstein by a pond at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Oppenheimer reminds Einstein of the time several years earlier, during the Second World War, when he asked him whether he thought there was any chance that nuclear fission might set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. Einstein had refused to offer an opinion, and Oppenheimer continued his work to develop the bomb.

Looking wistfully away from Einstein, he says that perhaps it did — that the bomb did set off an uncontrollable chain reaction that would, in the end, destroy the world. These final words give the lie to his hope that such a terrible weapon would stop all wars, an admission of his failure to fully anticipate the political reality of nuclear power.

Oppenheimer’s ambivalence is in a larger sense the story of modern-day science.

More here.

Freda Kreier in Nature:

An egg-laying amphibian found in Brazil nourishes its newly hatched young with a fatty, milk-like substance, according to a study published today in Science¹.

Lactation is considered a key characteristic of mammals. But a handful of other animals — including birds, fish, insects and even spiders — can produce nutrient-rich liquid for their offspring.

That list also includes caecilians, a group of around 200 limbless, worm-like amphibian species found in tropical regions, most of which live underground and are functionally blind. Around 20 species are known to feed unborn offspring — hatched inside the reproductive system — a type of milk. But the Science study is the first time scientists have described an egg-laying amphibian doing this for offspring hatched outside its body.

The liquid is “functionally similar” to mammalian milk, says study co-author Carlos Jared, a naturalist at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil.

More here.

Tim Brinkhof at JSTOR Daily:

Sad Cypress is hardly the only murder mystery to revolve around a flower. As writer and landscape historian Marta McDowell observes in her new book, Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers, gardens are popular settings in crime and detective stories, especially those published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The mysterious people that tend to them also feature commonly in these stories. Sometimes they’re the victims, sometimes the killers, sometimes the unlikely heroes who save the day. Gardens invariably lend setting, motivation, and symbolism. On occasion, as in Sad Cypress, gardening even provides the all-important clues to solving the crime.

Like those clues, the link between homicide and horticulture isn’t obvious. As a literary genre, murder mysteries matured during the Industrial Revolution, when rural villages turned into smog-covered suburbs replete with seedy establishments and dodgy alleyways.

more here.

Adam Smyth at the LRB:

Cummings takes ‘book’ in its widest sense – clay tablet, paperback, smartphone, codex, scroll. What is defining about the book is not a particular physical form, but rather the idea, as Cummings nicely puts it, ‘of a text with limits, which can be divided into organised contents’. This inclusivity enables Bibliophobia’s signature trait, which is its rapid vaulting across centuries of mark-making. Take the short span between pages 28 and 35. Cummings notes that in the Heroides, Ovid’s rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope writes Ulysses a letter, saying don’t write back, just come. This relationship between writing and presence takes us from the web of Penelope to the web of Tim Berners-Lee and Shoshana Zuboff’s theory of the ‘two texts’ of digital media: the search we type in on Google produces a mirror image in the form of a record of the searcher. And then, via Aristotle’s De interpretatione and Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique on writing’s relationship to speech, we’re on to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the relationship between inscriptions in stone and state power, and Freud’s theory of the double (‘an insurance against the extinction of the self’). At moments along the way, Cummings might provide a breathless history of alphabets or Islamic calligraphy.

more here.

The Editors of the MIT Press Reader:

Despite the vast diversity and individuality in every life, we seek patterns, organization, and control. Or, as cognitive psychologist Gregory Murphy puts it: “We put an awful lot of effort into trying to figure out and convince others of just what kind of person someone is, what kind of action something was, and even what kind of object something is.”

In his new book “Categories We Live By,” Murphy, a professor emeritus at New York University who has spent a career studying concepts and categories, considers the categories we create to manage life’s sprawling diversity. Analyzing everything from bureaucracy’s innumerable categorizations to the minutiae of language, his book reveals how these categories are imposed on us and how that imposition affects our everyday lives.

In the interview that follows, Murphy discusses his lifelong interest in studying concepts and categories — “the glue that holds our mental world together,” as he’s described them — the impact of his research on his worldview, and the complex relationship between language and categorization across cultures.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in The Poetry of Reality:

In our galaxy of a hundred billion stars, only three supernovas have been recorded by astronomers: in 1054, in 1572, and in 1604. The Crab Nebula is the remains of the event of 1054, recorded by Chinese astronomers. (When I say the event “of 1054” I mean, of course, the event of which news reached Earth in 1054. The event itself took place six thousand years earlier. The wave-front of light from it hit us in 1054.) Since 1604, the only supernovas that have been seen have been in other galaxies.

There is another type of explosion a star can sustain. Instead of “going supernova” it “goes information.” The explosion begins more slowly than a supernova and takes incomparably longer to build up. We can call it an information bomb or, for reasons that will become apparent, a replication bomb. For the first few billion years of its build-up, you could detect a replication bomb only if you were in the immediate vicinity. Eventually, subtle manifestations of the explosion begin to leak away into more distant regions of space and it becomes, at least potentially, detectable from a long way away. We do not know how this kind of explosion ends. Presumably it eventually fades away like a supernova, but we do not know how far it typically builds up first. Perhaps to a violent and self-destructive catastrophe. Perhaps to a more gentle and repeated emission of objects,moving, in a guided rather than a simple ballistic trajectory, away from the star into distant reaches of space, where it may infect other star systems with the same tendency to explode.

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

In We Can Already Stop Climate Change If We Want To, I explained that we have a path to solve climate change (renewables, nuclear, batteries, olivine weathering), but it will take at least a few decades to get there. In the meantime, CO₂ emissions will keep growing, there’s nothing we can do to reverse them fast enough, and global temperatures will keep increasing.

There is only one thing we can do to avoid these potentially catastrophic consequences: Cooling the Earth artificially until we get CO₂ levels in hand. And the best way we know to do that is sending SO₂ to the stratosphere.

I outlined that solution in the article linked above, but I didn’t go in depth, and many of you had questions:

Does it really work? How?
Is this really the best solution? What are the alternatives?
How safe is it? What are the downsides?
Will states allow this? Is it legal?
How much will it cost?
Where should we release this SO₂?

So I dove into this, talked with the only company that I know that is trying to do this at scale, and as a result of this deep dive, I am trying to invest in the company. Here’s what I found…

More here.

Jacob Evans in BBC:

From Phys.Org:

We breathe, eat and drink tiny particles of plastic. But are these minuscule specks in the body harmless, dangerous or somewhere in between?

A small study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine raises more questions than it answers about how these bits—microplastics and the smaller nanoplastics—might affect the heart. The Italian study has weaknesses, but is likely to draw attention to the debate over the problem of plastic pollution. Most plastic waste is never recycled and breaks down into these particles. “The study is intriguing. However, there are really substantial limitations,” said Dr. Steve Nissen, a heart expert at the Cleveland Clinic. “It’s a wake-up call that perhaps we need to take the problem of microplastics more seriously. As a cause for heart disease? Not proven. As a potential cause? Yes, maybe.” WHAT DID THE STUDY FIND?

The study involved 257 people who had surgery to clear blocked blood vessels in their necks. Italian researchers analyzed the fatty buildup that the surgeons removed from the carotid arteries, which supply blood and oxygen to the brain. Using two methods, they found evidence of plastics—mostly invisible nanoplastics—in the artery plaque of 150 patients and no evidence of plastics in 107 patients. They followed these people for three years. During that time, 30 or 20% of those with plastics had a heart attack, stroke or died from any cause, compared to eight or about 8% of those with no evidence of plastics.

More here.

Kieran Setiya at The Point:

In the past decade or so, there’s been a flowering of philosophical self-help—books authored by academics but intended to instruct us all. You can learn How to Be a Stoic, How to Be an Epicurean or How William James Can Save Your Life; you can walk Aristotle’s Way and go Hiking with Nietzsche. As of 2020, Oxford University Press has issued a series of “Guides to the Good Life”: short, accessible volumes that draw practical wisdom from historical traditions in philosophy, with entries on existentialism, Buddhism, Epicureanism, Confucianism and Kant.

In the interest of full disclosure: I’ve planted seeds in this garden myself. In 2017, I published Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and five years later, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. Both could be shelved without injustice in the self-help section. But both exhibit some discomfort with that fact. When I wrote Midlife, on the heels of a midlife crisis—philosophy, which I had loved, felt hollow and repetitive, a treadmill of classes to teach and papers to write, with tenure a gilded cage—I adopted the conventions of the self-help genre partly tongue-in-cheek.

more here.

Norma Clarke at Literary Review:

Barbara Comyns (1907–92) was a true original. The word ‘unique’ was often applied to her writing, along with ‘bizarre’, ‘comic’ and ‘macabre’. Her characteristic tone of faux-naïf innocence was established in her first novel, Sisters by a River (1947), which, as the Chicago Tribune observed in 2015, mixed ‘dispassion, levity and veiled ferocity’. Her friend and fellow novelist Ursula Holden put it this way: ‘Barbara Comyns deftly balances savagery with innocence, depravity with Gothic interludes.’ That balance of savagery and innocence is the underlying theme of Avril Horner’s compelling biography of an extraordinary woman.

Sisters by a River was avowedly autobiographical. Comyns began it as an exercise in recalling scenes from her childhood for the benefit of her offspring. Virago reissued the novel in 2013 (complete with the misspellings that appeared in the original) and Barbara Trapido wrote an introduction. Trapido described family life in the book as a ‘minefield of lunacy and violence’, with adults ‘as arbitrary and dangerous as tigers’.

more here.

Piano Epistemology

I’m pretty sure this piano exists,
taking up a whole corner of this room as it
does
with its grand heaviness,
its black curviness,
and its 2 legs in front, 1 in back. 

But just to make sure,
instead of kicking it
or banging my forehead against it,
I’m going to sit down on the adjustable bench,
lift the long glossy cover,

and try to play “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”
in such a way that the notes will represent
the many undeniable things of the world
and the chords the way
we can’t help feeling about them.

by Billy Collins
from Plume Magazine

Sam Lansky in Time:

The filmmaker Greta Gerwig was in west London the other day when she walked past a movie set—not her own, but something that just happened to be filming on the street—and stopped for a moment to watch. A light was positioned in front of the house; a car pulled up and an actor got out, shaking the gates and yelling. There was an intensity to the scene, and a vulnerability to his performance. Then, abruptly, the spell was broken. Someone yelled: “Cut! Going again.” A groomer ran out to fix the actor’s hair, a mundane but crucial bit of business.

“Movies!” Gerwig says, almost in the manner of an old-timey studio executive, recalling the moment. “Love ’em!” We’re having lunch in Soho; she’s in London while her husband, the writer-director Noah Baumbach, preps production on his next film, and while she works on a new adaptation of the first book in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series. It’s one of the biggest pieces of intellectual property of all time, but that’s a fitting thing to tackle after what’s been, for Gerwig, a remarkable year. Her dazzling, subversive Barbie, which she co-wrote and directed, grossed more than $1.4 billion at the box office, making it the biggest movie of the year, and the highest-grossing film ever directed by a woman. Barbie has since become a pop-culture phenomenon, from I Am Kenough hoodies to discourse over a third-act monologue delivered by America Ferrera about the impossible pressures women face. Alongside Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Barbie was credited with keeping the theatrical model afloat last year; in January, the film received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture as well as Best Supporting Actress for Ferrera.

More here.

Elizabeth Barber in Harper’s Magazine:

In the summertime, Alex and Dietz decided to take a road trip. The two had met years earlier on Instagram, as fellow animal-rights activists, and had discovered that they agreed on much more than veganism. Actually they agreed on basically everything, including that new human life is not a gift but a needless perpetuation of suffering. Babies grow up to be adults, and adulthood contains loneliness, rejection, drudgery, hopelessness, regret, grief, and terror. Even grade school contains that much. Why put someone through that, Alex and Dietz agreed, when a child could just as well never have known existence at all? The unborn do not appear to be moaning at us from the void, petitioning to be let into life. This idea—that having children is unethical—has come to be known as antinatalism, and in 2021 Dietz set up an Instagram account for a new organization he called Stop Having Kids. By then, the two were dating, although most of the time still living apart. Every so often, they met to hold demonstrations for Stop Having Kids, which Dietz has over time built into a real operation with donors who fund billboards that say things like procreation is not a responsibility and make love not babies.

For their road trip, Alex and Dietz met up in Tucson. Their itinerary was ambitious. They would do outreach from Texas to the East Coast and up through Ontario, occasionally demonstrating with like-minded people. But the trip ran into trouble right from the start. An hour out of El Paso, Dietz lost all his weed, more than two hundred dollars’ worth, at a highway checkpoint.

More here.

Michiko Kakutani at Literary Hub:

In the mid-1960s, network TV was suddenly awash in what scholars would later call “supernatural sitcoms.” My Favorite Martian featured an anthropologist from Mars who crash-lands in Los Angeles and hides out at a newspaper reporter’s apartment while he tries to repair his spacecraft. Mister Ed starred a talking horse who only speaks to his bumbling owner, Wilbur, and constantly gets him in trouble. Bewitched depicted a nose-twitching witch named Samantha who marries a nervous ad executive who insists she refrain from using her magical powers.

I Dream of Jeannie recounted the story of a genie named Jeannie who falls in love with an astronaut who finds her bottle when his space capsule splashes down near a deserted island. And The Addams Family concerned a macabre family with supernatural gifts who don’t understand why their neighbors think they are weird.

At the time, such shows were regarded as simple ditzy, escapist fun. Later, academics would argue that the sitcoms were products of the civil rights era of the day: They metaphorically examined the subjects of “mixed marriages” and integration; and in the case of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie they reflected growing tensions between empowered women and men who want them to just be ordinary, stay-at-home housewives.

More here.