Markman Ellis in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

What does coffee do to you? Dinah Lenney’s Coffee is a free-form exploration of such surprisingly complicated questions: Why do we drink coffee? What gives it its power? Humans have been considering these and other coffee-related queries (like “Is it good for my health?” and “Is it good for my society?”) for centuries, ever since they first encountered the substance. Lenney is most interested in coffee’s direct effects on our lived experience, and what they mean.

The active property of coffee is called caffeine, as we all know. The word for the compound was coined in 1830, as a result of research by two different groups of scientists — one in Jena, Germany, led by a young chemist Ferdinand Runge, and the other in France, led by Pierre Jean Robiquet and Pierre Joseph Pelletier. Both groups successfully isolated the active substance of coffee in an organic “base” or vegetable salt. They showed that this salt caused the effects associated with coffee in humans. Caffeine, in other words, is the drug, and coffee is its vehicle. In 1861, Adolph Strecker defined the molecular structure of caffeine in the formula C₈H₁₀N₄O₂. Caffeine isn’t everything, though: coffee still tastes reasonably like coffee without caffeine, and coffee’s distinctive flavors, we now think, reside in a different set of chemical substances, including aromatic oils and volatile flavonoids, most of which are produced during the pyrolytic roasting process.

More here.

Jørgen Veisdal in Cantor’s Paradise:

It is the beginning of November, 1943. The Manhattan project is in its fourth year of operations, and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos Laboratory is eleven months into its mission of designing and building the first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer had in 1942 been headhunted to the project by its Director, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (1896–1970) on the strength of the recommendation of physicist Arthur Compton (1892–1962). He was 39 years old at the time, and came to the project already a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. There, starting in the mid 1930s he had worked on deuteron-induced nuclear reactions, the so-called Oppenheimer-Phillips process, whose experiments were conducted at the newly built UC Berkeley cyclotron.

Although a classified endeavor, it was not uncommon for scientists and engineers on the project to communicate between themselves in letter-form about how things were proceeding. Indeed, communication across both institutions and scientific branches was imperative for ensuring a successful “Project Y”. Classified, of course, many such letters have since been made available to the public. When reading through Oppenheimer’s communications, one in particular stands out.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

I recall an illuminating moment a decade or so ago. Cathy Guisewite had just announced she would step back from creating new instalments of her long-running Cathy comic. The blogosphere, as it was called then, was all revved up, heatedly discussing the legacy of the perpetual dieter, hen-pecked by her mother, conflicted about her low-energy boyfriend Irving, never able to resist a box of chocolate, always discovering runs in her pantyhose, always frazzled. An acquaintance of mine, an up-and-coming journalist whom I knew in real life to have subtle opinions and an appreciation for the complexity of life, entered the online conversation. Cathy, she judged, was harmful to women’s self-image, and it is therefore good that she is —in the old sense of the word— to be cancelled.

Few people will know this about me, but I happen to like Cathy. I don’t think much about her, but to recall her to mind does make me happy for at least a moment. In fact I have to admit that I like all those comforting and mediocre representations traditionally and perplexingly known in the US as “the funnies”. What I wouldn’t give to read the Sunday comics in some hokey local American newspaper! Marmaduke, Ziggy, Garfield, Family Circus: none of them transformed into next-level memes on the internet, no Nietzsche Family Circus or Lasagna Cat, but just as they were meant to be by their hokey normie creators.

More here.

Jeremiah Moss at n+1:

ON MY DOORMAT, a large, greasy-golden rat is curled as if sleeping, tucked into the corner where my apartment door meets the wall of the hallway. Her dark, shining eyes are open. I can’t tell if she’s dead or dying, alive enough to dart into my apartment, so I close the door quick. I can’t get out of my apartment without stepping over the rat and I have no intention of doing that. She gives me the shivers. In twenty-five years, I have never seen a rat inside the building and this weird intrusion concerns me as an indication of entropic breakdown in the system gone too far. When the exterminator comes for his monthly visit, he will tell me that, since the pandemic began, the rats of New York have been leaving the subterranean zone to venture upwards into buildings, into hallways and apartments, searching for food. This, he will say, is unusual behavior for a rat.

more here.

Luc Sante at The Paris Review:

When I was a teenager I was, like most teenagers, preoccupied with the idea that somewhere on the horizon there was a Now. The present moment came to a peak out there; it achieved a continuous apotheosis of nowness, a wave endlessly breaking on an invisible shore. I wasn’t quite sure what specific form this climax took, but it had to involve some concatenation of records, poems, pictures, parties, and behavior. Out there all of those items would be somehow made manifest: the pictures walking along in the middle of the street, the right song broadcast in the air every minute, the parties behaving like the poems and vice versa. Since it was 1967 when I became a teenager, I suspected that the Now would stir together rock ’n’ roll bands and mod girls and cigarettes and bearded poets and sunglasses and Italian movie stars and pointy shoes and spies. But there had to be much more than that, things I could barely guess. The present would be occurring in New York and Paris and London and California while I lay in my narrow bed in New Jersey, which was a swamplike clot of the dead recent past.

more here.

David Frum in The Atlantic:

The smart play for Trump is to postpone the nomination to reduce the risk of Democratic mobilization, and to warn Republicans of the risks should he lose. Trump’s people do not usually execute the smart play. They are often the victims of the hyper-ideological media they consume, which deceive them about what actually is the smart play. This time, though, they may just be desperate enough to break long-standing pattern and try something different.

Will the conservative legal establishment play ball?

The judicial status quo enormously favors conservatives. Even should Democrats win big in November, it will take many years for them to catch up to the huge Republican lead in judicial appointments. By then, who knows, the GOP may have retaken the Senate, and of course it may well find a way to hold on in 2020. But a last-minute overreach by McConnell could seem so illegitimate to Democrats as to justify radical countermoves should they win in November: increasing the number of appellate judges and Supreme Court justices; conceivably even opening impeachment hearings against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

McConnell may want the win badly enough to dismiss those risks. But many conservative-leaning lawyers in the country may be more cautious. And their voices will get a hearing in a contentious nomination fight—not only by the national media, but by some of the less Trump-y Republican senators. This could be enough to slow down a process that has no time to spare. Mitch McConnell has gotten his way so often that it’s hard to imagine he might ever lose. But the political balance of power is shifting this fall, and for once, McConnell may be on the wrong side of a power dynamic.

More here.

Sarah DeWeerdt in Nature:

Over the course of two decades spent developing treatments for the genetic lung disease cystic fibrosis, biologist Fredrick Van Goor has had hundreds of conversations with patients. But he remembers one in particular. The discussion was about the genetics of cystic fibrosis, a disease that develops when a person inherits two faulty copies of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene. This gene encodes the CFTR protein, which resides in the cell membrane and transports chloride and bicarbonate ions out of the cell. More than 2,000 variants of CFTR have been identified, and more than 350 of them are known to produce enough disruption in the protein’s function to trigger the debilitating and life-shortening condition. The focus of the conversation was the inevitable inequities of personalized medicine, which can be highly effective for people who meet certain criteria, but will leave others behind — as was the case for this patient. “He described it as being on a sinking ship, when all of the other lifeboats have left,” Van Goor recalls. “That image has stuck with me.”

Van Goor, the head of cystic fibrosis research at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, California, had a major role in building the biggest lifeboat for cystic fibrosis yet: the blockbuster combination drug Trikafta. The drug achieved sales of US$420 million in the first 10 weeks after its launch in late 2019, far exceeding expectations. “I think it has made a big difference,” says Martina Gentzsch, a molecular biologist studying CFTR at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The success in the clinic really justifies that this is an absolutely outstanding treatment.” Trikafta is indicated for people with cystic fibrosis who carry at least one copy of a mutation known as F508del. This is the most common cystic fibrosis mutation, present in more than 80% of the over 90,000 people with cystic fibrosis worldwide.

More here.

The History of Everything II

a lament for the lost phrase, a lay for the never-said
a song for the thoughts that timid knocked but
were not asked in, who wander lonely looking for drink,
dance, welcome, setting up camp on the edge of a dream,
fleeing just before you open your eyes

“Out of the four elements, all things are formed.”
In the kitchen, the dishwasher sings a sloshy song.
Over the airwaves, the Modern Jazz Quartet brings
an obbligato of silver fire. I said “Air,” so must look for earth
and find her in the garden jamming with Forsythia.

waking to the sun rising thinking how
long Light took to get here from the first
let there be thinking how far it has to go
before “Time that takes survey
of all the world, Must have a stop”

Day in gray pajamas yawns, stretches behind
the far hills then dresses in bright clothes
to walk about the backyard with his friends.
He reaches through the window to touch
my forehead with a father’s blessing.

Forest Floor Seen as a Prayer Rug

Rot of leaf, twig, branch. Bits, pieces
of fallen trees, armies of mushrooms
beneath cap helmets. The droppings
of small animals upon the grainy moss.
What place better to ask blessing?

Thinking of Angels

Sometimes we see a sliver of light like the reflection
off a shiny surface but there is no shiny surface, sometimes
between you and the sea, a transparent opaqueness.
They haven’t fallen – they’ve drifted down, drawn
by the gravity of what? flesh? love? hunger? ending?

by Nils Peterson
from All the Marvelous Stuff
Caesura Editions, 2019

Olivia Durif in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“Prisons are created internally / and are found everywhere.” My conversations with Spoon Jackson keep returning to this point, a line from one of his poems. Prisons are both real and imaginary. All people experience some kind of prison, some to a greater degree than others. Those degrees are not coincidental. Jackson, a 63-year-old Black man, has been serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for 42 years and has lived in a series of prisons. He discovered poetry one day, about 30 years ago, sitting in his cell, looking over the bay at San Quentin. At least that’s how he tells it.

Since then, he has won four PEN America Prison Writing Awards for his poetry. In 1988, Jackson played Pozzo in a historic production of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin. In 2010, he co-authored By Heart, a joint memoir he wrote with his poetry teacher, Judith Tannenbaum. Jackson’s poetry and life have inspired more than one full-length documentary. I had known of him and his poetry since 2016, when I spent a New York spring doing editorial work for Die Jim Crow, now the first nonprofit record label for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians.

More here.

Diane Peters in Undark:

There are as many as 9 million feral swine across the U.S., their populations having expanded from about 17 states to 38 over the last three decades. Canada doesn’t have comparable data, but Ryan Brook, a University of Saskatchewan biologist who researches wild pigs, predicts that they will occupy 386,000 square miles across the country by the end of 2020, and they’re currently expanding at about 35,000 square miles a year.

“I’ve heard it referred to as a feral swine bomb,” says Dale Nolte, manager of the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program at the United States Department of Agriculture. “They multiply so rapidly. To go from a thousand to two thousand, it’s not a big deal. But if you’ve got a million, it doesn’t take long to get to 4 [million], then 8 million.”

More here.

James Gleick in the New York Review of Books:

“Which category have they put you in?”

This sinister question—at least, it was meant to sound sinister—headlined the advertising copy for The 480, a 1964 novel by Eugene Burdick. His previous best sellers, The Ugly American and Fail-Safe, had caused sensations in political circles, and the new one promised to do the same. Its jacket featured the image of a punched card. The title referred to 480 categories of voter, defined by region, religion, age, and other demographic characteristics, such as “Midwestern, rural, Protestant, lower income, female.” Many readers recoiled from the notion of being sorted into one of these boxes. The New York Times’s reviewer called The 480 a “shock novel” and found it implausible.

What was so shocking? What was implausible? The idea that a company might use computer technology and behavioral science to gather and crunch data on American citizens, with the nefarious goal of influencing a presidential election.

In the 1950s and 1960s this seemed like science fiction. Actually, The 480 was a thinly disguised roman à clef, based on a real-life company called Simulmatics, which had secretly worked for the 1960 campaign of John F. Kennedy. Burdick had been a political operative himself and knew the Simulmatics founders well. The company’s confidential reports and memoranda went straight into his prose. And the 480 categories—listed in an appendix to the novel—were the real Simulmatics voter types, the creation of what one of its founders called “a kind of Manhattan Project gamble in politics.”

Simulmatics was founded in 1959 and lasted eleven years. Jill Lepore mentioned its involvement in the Kennedy campaign in These Truths (2018), her monumental history of the United States; she was already on the trail of the story she tells in her new book, If Then.

More here.

Jackson Arn in The Point:

For good reason, The Great Gatsby is one of the most admired and talked-about books of the twentieth century. And that reason is, of course, that it’s really short—47,094 words, to be exact. I read it for the first time in a few hours at a swim meet (the aptness of the setting wasn’t clear to me until Chapter 8) and probably would have finished sooner had it not been for the snatches of Eminem coming from somebody’s boombox. You can count the book’s speaking roles on your fingers, and any high school sophomore can skim it the night before the big exam. Assign that to millions of teenagers for sixty-odd years, and a Great American Novel is born.

I don’t mean to belittle what Fitzgerald achieved in his most famous work: the grandeur of his themes, or the calm thrust of his narrator’s voice, or the fine shading of his descriptions (the bit about the juice machine button pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb has mocked my feeble attempts at lyricism for years). But not all beautifully written books sell half a million copies a year, and it’s no coincidence that Gatsby—rather than The Adventures of Augie March, Invisible Man or Gravity’s Rainbow, to name three American novels of equal splendor but considerably more bulk—is the rare classic that everyone remembers the gist of. There is much less of it to forget.

So much less, in fact, that readers may find themselves remembering things Fitzgerald never wrote.

More here.

Eli Alshenatsky in aeon:

What is it about the proposal that strikes me as so disturbing?’ Reading through an article describing a local government measure, I feel opposition rising within me. Normally, forming an opinion about such things would take me some time. But not here. The proposal instantly strikes me as unjust. My reaction is not just intellectual; it is visceral. My emotions are engaged. My imagination is exercised. As I imagine the proposal playing out in practice, the distinctive brand of injustice seems to be jumping out of every word on the page.

I decide to sort out my problem with the proposal in writing, by replying to the colleague who forwarded me the article. ‘It’s unfair!’ Impatiently, I blurt out the kernel of what bothers me about it. But the statement is so general as to be almost empty. ‘Heavy-handed. Quietly authoritarian. Positively harmful.’ More words suggest themselves to me and, after a few false starts, I regain my confidence and press the formulation forward with each sentence. I edit some words, and the correction puts everything in order. Reading over what I wrote, I recognise that, even though there is room for elaboration, at this moment these words accurately capture my position. I have found the words to express my thought.

The gulf between our solitary thoughts and the words that would convey them to others constantly confronts us all. The thoughts we struggle to articulate might be as momentous as a transformative moral epiphany or as ordinary as an insight into a movie or the hurtful behaviour of a friend. They might seem hopeful or alarming, frivolous or serious, lead us to find value in certain things, or worry about others. They might be thoughts that we long had but never articulated or instantaneous insights in which something entirely new and unfamiliar suddenly comes to mind. In many cases, we articulate these thoughts in order to get clear on what they are; we wouldn’t bother making the effort if they were clear to us already.

More here.

A Portrait in Greys

Will it never be possible
to separate you from your greyness?
Must you be always sinking backward
into your grey-brown landscapes—and trees
always in the distance, always against a grey sky?
……………………… Must I be always
moving counter to you? Is there no place
where we can be at peace together
and the motion of our drawing apart
be altogether taken up?
…………………………………. I see myself
standing upon your shoulders touching
a grey, broken sky—
but you, weighted down with me,
yet gripping my ankles,—move
……………………. laboriously on,
where it is level and undisturbed by colors.

by William Carlos Williams