Tara John in CNN:

Ammar Kalia in The Guardian:

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice is quite unlike any other. At turns heavy and hulkingly powerful, yet also nimble and pointedly precise, his vocalisations have come to epitomise not only the tradition of the Sufi qawwali but the art of singing itself.

The qawwali is an Islamic devotional music designed to bring its performers and audience to a state of rapture and trance-like communion with the divine. Born of a 600-year-old line of qawwali singers, Khan’s grasp of music as a form of spiritual communication was acute. For the few thousand attendees at the Womad festival in 1985 witnessing Khan perform for the first time outside of south Asia, their experience would have been one of unexpected transcendence.

Peter Gabriel had begun the festival only three years earlier as a western showcase of music from around the world, as well as that of his peers. The first edition, held in the Somerset town of Shepton Mallet, saw performances by Gabriel, Indian sitar player Imrat Khan and free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry. Poor access to the festival site and low attendance almost sunk Womad in its first year, but a well-timed reunion concert for Gabriel’s old band Genesis kept them afloat.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

In 1931, the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel pulled off arguably one of the most stunning intellectual achievements in history.

Mathematicians of the era sought a solid foundation for mathematics: a set of basic mathematical facts, or axioms, that was both consistent — never leading to contradictions — and complete, serving as the building blocks of all mathematical truths.

But Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems, published when he was just 25, crushed that dream. He proved that any set of axioms you could posit as a possible foundation for math will inevitably be incomplete; there will always be true facts about numbers that cannot be proved by those axioms. He also showed that no candidate set of axioms can ever prove its own consistency.

His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring.

More here.

Mark Dominus in The Universe of Discourse:

There are two boxes on a table, one red and one green. One contains a treasure. The red box is labelled “exactly one of the labels is true”. The green box is labelled “the treasure is in this box.”

Can you figure out which box contains the treasure?

It’s not too late to try to solve this before reading on. If you want, you can submit your answer here:

A) The treasure is in the red box
B) The treasure is in the green box
C) There is not enough information to determine the answer
D) Something else

More here, including the solution to the puzzle.

Adrian Nathan West at The Baffler:

WHAT IS A WOMAN’S MARGINAL UTILITY? The marginal utility of her ecstasy, of her suffering, of her time and attention? Are representations of women a fungible good, or is an investment in the human capital behind them worthwhile? These questions, however perversely stated here, are essential to the economics of camming, a curious, new-ish phenomenon that combines elements of prostitution, pornography, therapy, and friendship-for-hire. I say “phenomenon” because the label “sex work” seems not quite adequate: first because it is hard to say something so depersonalized can be called “sex,” and second because “work” alone fails to encompass the demands its precariousness imposes. Like Uber drivers, Taskers, and others employed in the gig economy, webcam models have no guaranteed wages, no insurance, no paid leave, no pension. Instead, their success depends on a nebulous combination of factors spanning initiative, availability, submissiveness, good looks, personality, and luck. The popular press is filled with stories of cam girls making thousands a week––they seem to be a specialty of the UK tabloids––but my own perusal of some of the biggest sites––Chaturbate, LiveJasmin, and MyFreeCams––shows a preponderance of Russians and Romanians aged eighteen to fifty (the older they are, the more conspicuous their assorted implants and injections) sitting bored in tiny, tackily adorned bedrooms, swaying forlornly to club music or giggling and repeating “thank you” to a lone visitor who types banal variations on “ur so hot.”

more here.

Geoff Dyer at the TLS:

By the halfway point in my journey through Lonesome Dove two things started happening. As I began communicating my Keats-on-Chapman’s-Homer “discovery” to friends, it became clear that the book inspired something more akin to faith than admiration or love. People hadn’t just read the book; they had converted or pledged allegiance to it. When a friend came to dinner and saw my copy on the table she explained that she had been given the middle name MacRae, in honour of Gus. I fell prey to a kind of fanaticism myself, emailing an unsuspecting Zadie Smith to ask why anyone would bother with even a page of Saul Bellow when they could be immersed in Lonesome Dove. When she wrote back that she couldn’t bear Bellow or westerns I was tempted to respond, insanely, that it wasn’t a western. And yet – to deploy a favourite hesitation of Steiner’s – perhaps an underlying sanity or logic was at work.

more here.

When Franny Hammer Said

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired 

She meant
—No more turned cheek
—No more patience for the obstruction
—of black woman’s right to vote
—& plant & feed her family

She meant
—Equality will cost you your luxurious life
—If a Black woman can’t vote
—If a brown baby can’t be fed
—If we all don’t have the same opportunity America promised

She meant
—Ain’t no mountain boulder enough
—to wan off a determined woman

She meant
—Here
—Look at my hands
—Each palm holds a history
—of the 16 shots that chased me
—harm free from a plantation shack

—Look at my eyes
—Both these are windows
—these little lights of mine

She meant
—Nothing but death can stop me
—from marching out a jail cell still a free woman

She meant
—Nothing but death can stop me from running for Congress

She meant
—No black jack beating will stop my feet from working
—& my heart from swelling
—& my mouth from praying

She meant
—America! you will learn freedom feels like
—butter beans, potatoes & cotton seeds
—picked by my sturdy hands

She meant
—Look
—Victoria Gray, Anna Divine & Me
—In our rightful seats on the house floor

She meant
—Until my children
—& my children’s children
—& they babies too
—can March & vote
—& get back in interest
—what was planted
—in this blessed land

She meant
—I ain’t stopping America
—I ain’t stopping America

—Not even death can take away from my woman’s hands
—what I’ve rightfully earned

Mahogany L. Browne
from Vibe Magazine

Schuerle and Danino in The Scientist:

In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, a team of scientists is shrunk to fit into a tiny submarine so that they can navigate their colleague’s vasculature and rid him of a deadly blood clot in his brain. This classic film is one of many such imaginative biological journeys that have made it to the big screen over the past several decades. At the same time, scientists have been working to make a similar vision a reality: tiny robots roaming the human body to detect and treat disease.

Although systems with nanomotors and onboard computation for autonomous navigation remain fodder for fiction, researchers have designed and built a multitude of micro- and nanoscale systems for diagnostic and therapeutic applications, especially in the context of cancer, that could be considered early prototypes of nanorobots. Since 1995, more than 50 nanopharmaceuticals, basically some sort of nanoscale device incorporating a drug, have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. If a drug of this class possesses one or more robotic characteristics, such as sensing, onboard computation, navigation, or a way to power itself, scientists may call it a nanorobot. It could be a nanovehicle that carries a drug, navigates to or preferentially aggregates at a tumor site, and opens up to release a drug only upon a certain trigger. The first approved nanopharmaceutical was DOXIL, a liposomal nanoshell carrying the chemotherapeutic drug doxorubicin, which nonselectively kills cells and is commonly used to treat a range of cancers. The intravenously administered nanoshells preferentially accumulate in tumors, thanks to a leaky vasculature and inadequate drainage by the lymphatic system. There, the nanoparticles slowly release the drug over time. In that sense, basic forms of nanorobots are already in clinical use.

Scientists can manipulate the shape, size, and composition of nanoparticles to improve tumor targeting, and newer systems employ strategies that specifically recognize cancer cells. Still, precise navigation to tumor sites remains a holy grail of nanorobot research and development.

More here.

Tara Burton in The New Atlantis:

Socially and professionally, we create ourselves online. Just as the way we dress our bodies, position our gestures, or cultivate a class-specific accent allows us to occupy not just physical but social space, so too does our creation of a social media personality allow us to project our social selves into the dizzying realms of the disembodied. And the reach of these disembodied spaces — our ability to share content not just with a few “in real life” acquaintances but to the whole expanse of our followers — makes these digital-social selves brutally efficient, a way of projecting ourselves into the gaze of everybody we know, all at once. We cannot dissociate either our economic lives or our social selves from the creeping need for a personal brand. Digital self-creation as a form not just of expanded agency, but of attention-seeking, has become a requirement. We create ourselves not just as works of art, but as objects of commerce. Our digital selves, like our bodies, are vulnerable. “Miniature Gods”

The irony is that self-creation was traditionally seen as evidence not of man’s desperation, but his dignity. In Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (1486), shortly after creating the universe God tells Adam that creativity, and self-creativity in particular, is integral to what it means to exist in the image of God:

Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature…. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.

To self-create is a form of self-divinization.

More here.

Samuel Jay Keyser in Rorotoko:

I don’t believe in coincidences, at least not big ones. That’s why the sea change the sister arts of poetry, painting, and music underwent at the turn of the 20th century has always intrigued me. All of them veered off course at virtually the same time and in virtually the same way. To paraphrase Yul Brynner in The King and I, “It was a puzzlement.” It was as if a group of high achieving artists had met, mafia-style, in some non-disclosed location to plan mischief against the art world. It had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy. They would do something so radical, so scandalous that it would turn the art world on its head.

And they did.

In a remarkably short period of time poetry, painting, and music abandoned all that was tried and true.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Are you racist? And, if so, how would I know? I used to think that a good gauge may be whether you call me a ‘Paki’, or assault me because of my skin colour, or deny me a job after seeing my name. But, no, these are just overt expressions of racism. Even if you show no hostility, or seek to discriminate, you’re probably still racist. You just don’t know it. Especially if you’re white. And if you protest about being labelled a racist, you are merely revealing what the US academic and diversity trainer Robin DiAngelo describes in the title of her bestselling book as your ‘white fragility’.

You either accept your racism, or reveal your racism by not accepting it. Indeed, as DiAngelo explains, it’s ‘progressives’ confronting racism who ‘cause the most damage to people of colour’ because they imagine that they are anti-racist. Racism is, as she puts it, ‘unavoidable’.

More than 30 years ago, Ambalavaner Sivanandan warned against ‘the sort of psychospiritual mumbo-jumbo which… by reducing social problems to individual solutions, passes off personal satisfaction for political liberation’. A radical whose writings influenced a generation of activists in the 1970s and 80s, Sivanandan was an early critic of what was then called ‘racial awareness training’.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

We gather empirical evidence about the nature of the world through our senses, and use that evidence to construct an image of the world in our minds. But not all senses are created equal; in practice, we tend to privilege vision, with hearing perhaps a close second. Ann-Sophie Barwich wants to argue that we should take smell more seriously, and that doing so will give us new insights into how the brain works. As a working philosopher and neuroscientist, she shares a wealth of fascinating information about how smell works, how it shapes the way we think, and what it all means for questions of free will and rationality.

More here.

Matthew Sitman at Commonweal:

Depression forces itself through the cracks of one’s life, finding the weak spots particular to the person it inundates. Like consciousness itself, depression seems to dwell in that hazy realm where matter and spirit meet, and we turn inward to pursue its elusive essence. Exploring what caused a person’s depression, however, what set it off on the particular course it ran, necessarily ends in an overdetermined tangle—one reason why the shelves overflow with depression memoirs. We keep trying to pin depression down, but fail again and again. Styron’s depression set upon him when he was around sixty years old, likely “triggered” when he suddenly gave up alcohol and began taking a dangerous sleeping medication. But as Styron meditates on what happened to him, the chain of causation extends ever backward—he realizes three main characters in his novels kill themselves, a fact that suggests the storm had been gathering for many years. Then he presses on to childhood wounds. Would a man who’d led a different life sink into depression after he quit drinking? Styron gets to the end of Darkness Visible and confesses, “The very number of hypotheses is testimony to the malady’s all but impenetrable mystery.”

more here.

Tim Griffin at Artforum:

SURVEYING OUR CULTURAL LANDSCAPE through the prepositional prism of after is hardly a new approach among critics and historians writing on art during the past quarter century. Yet, as articulated in the title of Hal Foster’s new book, the premise is newly intriguing for being tethered to—and eclipsed in blunt rhetorical force by—the sad comedy of “farce.” Here Foster borrows the term from Marx’s famous adage regarding the French bourgeoisie’s willingness in 1851 to cede democratic values to a second Bonaparte emperor some fifty years after the first—a scenario that resonates strongly with our circumstances today, Foster suggests, insofar as Donald Trump’s arrival on the American scene must be understood not as a singularity but rather as another iteration of the authoritarian impulses that originally took root in the wake of 9/11. If “alternative facts” and conspiracy theories now flourish along the banks of the mainstream, they first needed the rich soil fertilized by the nationalist kitsch proffered at the start of the second Iraq war. To bolster his point, Foster cites novelist Milan Kundera’s observation that “in the realm of totalitarian kitsch all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions,” adding that such an epistemology met the fuel of populist affect at the dawn of the 2000s.

more here.

Courtney Sexton in Smithsonian:

Humans are almost constantly connected to devices and electronics that generate a significant amount of data about who they are and what they do. Many commercially available products like Fitbits, Garmin trackers, Apple watches and other smartwatches are designed to help users take control of their health, and tailor activities to their lifestyle. Even something as unobtrusive to wear as a ring can collect data on sleep patterns, body temperature, heart rate variability, calorie burn, and steps, and even go a step beyond to analyze these biostatistics and package the information so it can be read on a user’s smartphone. Similar, less common but more precise monitoring devices are also being used at clinics and hospitals to help health care providers individualize treatments for a range of conditions from cardiac care to stroke rehabilitation. Researchers working to contain COVID-19 are increasingly turning to these sleek new wearables for a diagnostic solution. But there is some debate about the best way to do so. Can commercially available devices be leveraged as a tool, or would clinical-grade wearables be more effective?

In April, the Journal of the American Medical Association identified fever, cough and shortness of breath as primary symptoms in both positive and false negative COVID-19 cases. Around the same time, medical thought leaders in the Chicago area approached John Rogers, the director of Northwestern University’s Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics. Rogers and his team are known for developing next-generation, flexible, wearable devices with clinical-grade monitoring capability that mount on relevant body areas. The patches look and feel much like a Band-Aid, but contain biosensors, onboard memory, data processing and wireless transmission features. The quality of data the devices can capture is high enough that they can reliably be used in settings and on patients with limited hospital access to run specialty-care tests like electrocardiograms (EKGs). Others reduce the need for complicated machines used to monitor premature infants in intensive care units.

More here.

Exit Strategy

Tell me there is a way to believe it all,
an exit strategy with groggy murmurs
of nothing but rest and a quiet universe.

All I can think of is my child, asleep
in bed, dealing with whatever birthright
his dreams afford his fears, waiting to wake.

Sometimes I feel like Kepler, poised to inherit
pages of wrinkled data, but grumbling,
What a holy-fucking mess Tycho left behind.

Under the surface of the crowd’s rumble
is a song. We could have danced, you know,
to the how-not-why of these perfect heartbeats.

It’s true. You’ve not been asked to understand.
You’ve been asked to listen, and work it out.

by George Murray
from Rush to Here
Nightwood Editions, 2007

Luke Timmerman in Undark:

TWO WEEKS BEFORE Christmas 1999, Lee Hood appeared to have it all: A loving family. Money. Fame. Power. He counted Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men, as a friend and supporter. Eight years earlier, Gates had given the University of Washington $12 million to lure the star biologist from Caltech in what the Wall Street Journal called a “major coup.” Hood’s assignment on arrival: build a first-of-its-kind research department at the intersection of biology, computer science, and medicine. Even at 61, the former high school football quarterback could still do 100 pushups in a row. He ran at least three miles a day. He climbed mountains. He traveled the world to give scientific talks to rapt audiences. At a time when many men slow down, Hood maintained a breakneck pace, sleeping just four to five hours a night. He owned a luxurious art-filled mansion on Lake Washington, but otherwise cared little for the finer things in life, sporting a cheap plastic wristwatch and driving an aging Toyota Camry. Those who worked closely with him said he still had the same wonder and enthusiasm for science he had as a student.

Yet here, at the turn of the millennium, Hood was miserable.

His once-controversial vision for “big science” was becoming a reality through the Human Genome Project, yet he didn’t feel like a winner. He felt suffocated. He had a new vision, a more far-sighted and expansive one that he insisted would revolutionize healthcare. But he felt the university bureaucrats were blind to the opportunity. They kept getting in his way. It was time, Hood felt, to have a difficult conversation with his biggest supporter. On a typically dark and gray December day in Seattle, Hood climbed into his dinged-up Camry and drove across the Highway 520 floating bridge over Lake Washington to meet Gates, the billionaire CEO of Microsoft. Hood shared some startling news: he had resigned his endowed Gates-funded professorship at UW. He wanted to start a new institute free from university red tape. It was the only way to fulfill his dream for biology in the 21st century.

Gates was well aware of Hood’s record of achievements and its catalytic potential. Hood had led a team at Caltech that invented four research instrument prototypes in the 1980s, including the first automated DNA sequencer. The improved machines that followed made the Human Genome Project possible and transformed biology into more of a data-driven, quantitative science. Researchers no longer had to spend several years — an entire graduate student’s career — just to determine the sequence of a single gene. With fast, automated sequencing tools, a new generation of biologists could think broadly about the billions of units of DNA.

More here.