Dinitia Smith in The New York Times:

Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who championed and defended the Western canon in an outpouring of influential books that appeared not only on college syllabuses but also — unusual for an academic — on best-seller lists, died on Monday at a hospital in New Haven. He was 89. His death was confirmed by his wife, Jeanne Bloom, who said he taught his last class at Yale University on Thursday. Professor Bloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose. “He is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century — and the most protean,” Sam Tanenhaus wrote in 2011 in The New York Times Book Review, of which he was the editor at the time, “a singular breed of scholar-teacher-critic-prose-poet-pamphleteer.”

At the heart of Professor Bloom’s writing was a passionate love of literature and a relish for its heroic figures. “Shakespeare is God,” he declared, and Shakespeare’s characters, he said, are as real as people and have shaped Western perceptions of what it is to be human — a view he propounded in the acclaimed “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” (1998).

More here.

Elizabeth Pannisi in Science:

The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) latest foray into turning emerging technologies into useful data sets is focusing on how the body’s trillions of cells interconnect and interact. The Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) aims to describe the biochemical milieu and the locations of individual cells in the body’s major organs, researchers write this week in Nature. It uses technology heralded by Science as the 2018 Breakthrough of the Year. The goal is to “establish a baseline of what constitutes a healthy system,” says HuBMAP grantee Julia Laskin, an analytical chemist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. That way, she says, researchers will be able to see what goes awry in disease. Until recently, biomedical scientists had just a broad-brush view of how organs functioned. In particular, they had succeeded in getting only a sense of gene activity—when genes turn on and off—in specific tissues. Gene activity defines what a cell does. But organs consist of many kinds of cells, each with their own molecular profiles.

In 2016, drawing on technologies that enable researchers to routinely study individual cells, a group of 90 scientists from the around the world launched the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), which aims to catalog how cells operate in different tissues. The effort now involves 1500 scientists from 65 countries, and draws support from many sources, including the Wellcome Trust and the European Union’s Horizons 2020 program, says Aviv Regev, one of the HCA’s founding members and a computational systems biologist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

HuBMAP represents the U.S. government’s commitment to this international grassroots effort, says the corresponding author on the 9 October Nature paper, genomicist Michael Snyder from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “Hopefully [HuBMAP] will have a major role in leadership and building the framework” that will help meld the HCA with about a dozen other projects focused on single cell analyses of specific organs, such as the brain, lungs, kidney, and pretumor and cancerous tissue, he explains. Such melding would involve establishing common standards, protocols, and ways of presenting the data. “As much as possible, we want to be able to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges,” Snyder says.

More here.

Trampoline

My mother bounced up and down
the night before I was born. Freckled
arms pumping, she prayed with each fall

that the confetti of us would rain down,
fly up, float for a moment, as I would—
a nest, awaited nine months and gone in a blink.

It would dissipate to settle around us
on the playful canvas still rippling,
straining under the weight of us.

We cry at the sight of one another, a part
of one another newly apart from one another.

All the while, woven strands strain.
The small spaces between are windows
we ignore until the woven strands fray,
give way, and all the small windows
become one, through which we fall.

We land years later on a lawn,
its green faded golden
and breath thick with morning
mosquitos and memories.
I, 24. She, 48.

Both of us dig through the roots
to those dry golden stalks, flimsy
and elusive. She looks for her lineage
before her, whose worried jawlines
look like hers, and I for the other half of
mine behind me, taut with absence.
My lineage stolen by ships, then
misunderstandings, miscommunications.
My fingers pierce precious places,

but my mother is milky
comfort, always confusing,
always forgiving,
my search for a blackness
to hide how different
she made me.

When, in all that mulched earth,
our frenzied fingers brush,
we lace them to butterfly and wiggle
their prints together into topsoil
growing sticky with effort and joy.

by Kendal Thomas
from Brooklyn Poets,
10/14/19

Zara Houshmand writes, in the introduction of the book, at her own website:

These rubaiyat, or quatrains, were composed by Jalal al-Din Mohammad Balkhi, known as Rumi, a thirteenth century Muslim theologian and Sufi mystic, and one of the greatest poets of the Persian language. They are a selection from almost two thousand such quatrains that, along with many longer ghazals, comprise the Divan-e Shams. These poems poured out during a period of Rumi’s life when he was intensely affected by his relationship with his spiritual mentor and soulmate, Shams al-Din Tabrizi.

Legend describes Shams—whose name means “sun”—as a wandering dervish, unschooled, an ugly man but charismatic. His own words, only recently made accessible in English, present a much subtler picture. He was an accomplished scholar who hid his learning, an iconoclast, and a fearsome enemy of all hypocrisy. He traveled widely in search of the great spiritual teachers of his time, but kept his distance from the dervish schools that would normally have accommodated such a traveler. He refused to beg, and instead earned a meager living at temporary jobs as he traveled.

His relationship with Rumi also defied categories, blurring the traditional roles of master and disciple. Rumi held the belief that at any one time, a single saint living in the world serves as an axis mundi, a center around which all spiritual energy revolves. He believed that in Shams he had found this saint. It is clear from Shams’s own teachings that he likewise saw Rumi as a saint, though one who had something to learn from him.

More here.  And you can pre-order the book here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

Vladimir Nabokov was not only being contrarian when he came out against the theory of evolution. He really meant it. “Natural selection in the Darwinian sense,” he wrote, “could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of ‘the struggle for life’ when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation.”[1]

Of course, few would mistake the stubborn Russian-American author for a typical representative of the creationist position, though the difference has to do mostly with emphasis. The creationist wants to say that nothing is nature, but all is art, or, more precisely, the artifice of a certain highly esteemed Artificer. Nabokov by contrast wants to say that art is natural, that our mimetic activity is not an exception to what nature is doing all the time, but rather an instance of it.

I will not help to lend legitimacy to creationism by agreeing with Nabokov here. Or at least I will not affirm his claim as a scientific claim. But as an opening to a general theory of art, he is surely onto something.

More here.

Helen Briggs in BBC:

Daniella Hodgson is digging a hole in the sand on a windswept beach as seabirds wheel overhead. “Found one,” she cries, flinging down her spade. She opens her hand to reveal a wriggling lugworm. Plucked from its underground burrow, this humble creature is not unlike the proverbial canary in a coal mine. A sentinel for plastic, the worm will ingest any particles of plastic it comes across while swallowing sand, which can then pass up the food chain to birds and fish. “We want to see how much plastic the island is potentially getting on its shores – so what is in the sediments there – and what the animals are eating,” says Ms Hodgson, a postgraduate researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London. “If you’re exposed to more plastics are you going to be eating more plastics? What types of plastics, what shapes, colours, sizes? And then we can use that kind of information to inform experiments to look at the impacts of ingesting those plastics on different animals.”

Microplastics are generally referred to as plastic smaller than 5mm, or about the size of a sesame seed. There are many unanswered questions about the impact of these tiny bits of plastic, which come from larger plastic debris, cosmetics and clothes. What’s not in dispute is just how far microplastics have travelled around the planet in a matter of decades. “They’re absolutely everywhere,” says Hodgson, who is investigating how plastic is making its way into marine ecosystems. “Microplastics can be found in the sea, in freshwater environments in rivers and lakes, in the atmosphere, in food.”

More here.

Peter Maass in The Intercept:

I honestly don’t know where to begin with this whole thing. But let me start by making clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that we should not read Handke’s literary work. My objection is not a version of the age-old question of whether we should listen to Richard Wagner. Go ahead and listen to Wagner. Go ahead and read Handke. My point is this: It is one thing to read him — it is quite another to bestow upon him a prize that delivers a great amount of legitimacy to his entire body of work, not just the novels and plays that are most impeccable and nonpolitical.

Handke’s most famous political offense was attending the funeral of Serbian strongman Slobodan Miloševic, who died in prison awaiting a trial for genocide and war crimes. Handke had visited Miloševic during his detention in The Hague and made a short eulogy during his funeral in Požarevac, Serbia, in 2006. This followed many years of Handke writing about how the Serbs were misunderstood and were unfairly given the lion’s share of blame for the bloodshed that occurred during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

More here.

James Mickens at Harvard’s website:

I’ve received tenure at Harvard! I want to thank all of the enemies that I had to destroy to achieve this great honor. Roger Davis at Princeton’s department of nutrition—you questioned my research on the efficacy of an all-Pop-Tart diet, but I am living proof that the diet works. Yes, I have nose bleeds every day and my pancreas has the dysfunction of a failing Soviet client state, but I believe that having constant double vision makes me twice as optimistic about life. Lawrence Adler at Yale—you claimed that Yale, not Harvard, has the best paintings of dead white men doing questionable things in recent antiquity. Your foolishness was revealed when I personally oversaw the restoration of Harvard’s painting “Archibald Montgomery, Law School Dean, Gazes Upon His Eighth-favorite Mistress Whose Name He No Longer Remembers As He Wears A Pith Helmet And Asks A Colored Man Why He Isn’t Ten Feet Tall And Swaying To Savage Jungle Rhythms.” You are my eighth-favorite enemy, Lawrence of Yale; DON’T EVER CHALLENGE A HARVARD MAN. My seventh-favorite enemy is obviously Alan Fontaine of Iowa State University.

More here.

Franklin Foer in The Atlantic:

Where in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? Andrew Carnegie’s hearths forged the steel that became the skeleton of the railroad and the city. John D. Rockefeller refined 90 percent of American oil, which supplied the pre-electric nation with light. Bill Gates created a program that was considered a prerequisite for turning on a computer. At 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism.

Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google, which has allowed Bezos to build an advertising business as valuable as the entirety of IBM. One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry—institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers. Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company; Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day. Add The Washington Post to this portfolio and Bezos is, at a minimum, a rival to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger or the suits at AT&T, and arguably the most powerful man in American culture.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4spsf3G33eg

Ode to Left-Handedness

I sat at my kindergarten desk,
Surrounded by others,
Either cheerful
Or bored, who were
Cutting
The requisite circles
With ease,
Or slicing down
Straight, penciled lines
As the teacher directed.
.
I did my dutiful best,
But the scissors
Hurt my fingers
In a minor,
Distracting way,
And I was too young
To realize the handle
Was biased
For a right-hand child,
So all I could do
Was cut in clumsy zigzags
And feel like a fool.
.
Staring hard at the blades,
I tried to will them
To obey,
Who couldn’t conceive
I was being freed
That day
By those little silver wings
Of a bird
Intent on the erratic,
Authentic pattern
Of its own flight
Through a sky of colored paper.
.
by Gregory Orr
from Narrative Magazine

Ben Juers at Sydney Review of Books:

Terry Eagleton’s Humour and Peter Timms’ Silliness: A Serious History are two recent additions to the patchy field of humour studies. Both authors are hemmed into the Anglocentric comedy canon that sees absurdist comedy peaking with The Goon Show, Pete and Dud, and Monty Python, and going downhill ever since. They’re also both in their seventies. This puts you in the weird position of feeling unreasonable for expecting them to be up-to-date on their subject. But neither would you want their lukewarm take on, say, ‘meme commentator’ @gayvapeshark or the HBO series Los Espookys.

To be fair, cutting-edge relevancy isn’t Eagleton or Timms’ priority. Humour is a critical survey not of humour but its theory – like a literature review for a PhD, albeit more reader-friendly. Its most interesting aspect is its Marxist subtext (Eagleton’s famously a comrade), which occasionally breaks ground but never erupts into a full-blown theory of how humour can serve Leftist aims.

more here.

Alex Preston at The Guardian:

First, a warning: this is a life-changing book and will alter your relationship to food for ever. I can’t imagine anyone reading Safran Foer’s lucid, heartfelt, deeply compassionate prose and then reaching blithely for a cheeseburger. There’s some dispute as to precisely what proportion of global heating is directly related to the rearing of animals for food, but even the lowest estimates put it on a par with the entire global transportation industry. A well-evidenced 2009 report by the Worldwatch Institute claimed that livestock-related emissions accounted for 51% of all greenhouse gases, “more than all cars, planes, buildings, industry and power plants combined”. Whichever the case, Safran Foer’s thesis is clear and compelling: by making “a collective act to eat differently” (he suggests “no animal products before dinner”) we can turn the tide of the climate crisis.

more here.

An interview with Vinayak Chaturdevi in Jacobin:

More here.

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein in TNR:

Each story begins in the mid-century, when the New Deal created a new need for economists. The New Deal inflated the size of the federal government, and politicians turned to economists to make sense of their new complicated initiatives and help rationalize their policies to constituents. Even Milton Friedman, the dark apostle of market fundamentalism, admitted that “ironically, the New Deal was a lifesaver.” Without it, he said, he may have never been employed as an economist. From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s the number of economists in the federal government swelled from about 2,000 to 6,000.

The New Deal also gave rise to cost-benefit analysis. Large projects, like dam building or rural electrification, needed to be budgeted and constrained. In 1939, Cambridge economist Nicholas Kaldor asserted that the political problem with cost-benefit analysis—that someone always loses out—wasn’t a problem. This was because the government could theoretically redirect a little money from the winners to the losers, to even things out: For example, if a policy caused corn consumption to drop, the government could redirect the savings to aggrieved farmers. However, it didn’t provide any reason why the government would rebalance the scale, just that it was possible. What is now called the Kaldor-Hicks principle, “is a theory, “ Appelbaum says, “to gladden the hearts of winners: it is less clear that losers will be comforted by the possession of theoretical benefits.” The principle remains the theoretical core of cost-benefit analysis, Appelbaum says. It’s an approach that sweeps the political problems of any policy—what to do about the losers—under the rug.

More here.

Gabriel Winant in n+1:

First formulated by Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich in a pair of essays in the journal Radical America in the late 1970s, the idea of the “professional-managerial class” was originally part of an attempted materialist explanation of the political stability of American capitalism in the 20th century, and in particular the failure of the New Left to overthrow it. While industrial capitalism had liquidated the 19th-century middle class, much as Marx had predicted, society had not subsequently polarized into two hostile camps. Instead, the “monopoly capitalism” that evolved in the 20th century—the bureaucratic, administered, managerial system that replaced the entrepreneurial chaos of Victorian laissez-faire—had thrown up a new middle class, whose purpose was to supervise the accumulation process and keep the unruly proletariat in line: researchers and engineers to transform the production process; teachers, doctors, nurses, and managers to sculpt, maintain, and control the workforce; cultural workers to produce commercialized mass entertainment and ideology, displacing the pathologized pleasures of the ghetto; social workers and lawyers to deal with the ensuing social problems when people deviated from this disciplinary grid.

In the early years of the 20th century, the professions emerged in their modern forms, establishing uniform standards of practice and conduct in all these fields. The new professionals were in general politically progressive, seeing their purpose as the renovation of American democracy and the modernization of conditions of work and life, in keeping with the momentous social and technological changes that had remade the world.

More here.

Troy Vettese in Boston Review:

 Environmental history lacks an overarching, consensus narrative for the last two centuries, and the environmental movement still does not have a plan for what to do when things get rough. Two recent books—Simon Pirani’s Burning Up and Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering—hint, though, that the movement is at last starting to offer strategic thinking commensurate with the crisis at hand. They reveal how the environmental movement must thoroughly understand neoliberalism to avoid underestimating it as an adversary—or, worse, falling for its charms.

As a researcher at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, Pirani might sound like yet another energy analyst, but what sets him apart is his approach, for there aren’t many dyed-in-the-wool Marxists in this line of work. A former member of the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party, Pirani has traded on his close acquaintance with Russia to have a second career studying its methane industry. He has also worked as a journalist and penned books on the Russian revolution and contemporary politics during the Putin era. Burning Up represents the convergence of his parallel professions: it is a history of fossil fuels couched in a Marxist armature. To explain his aim for the book, he quotes the economic historian Adam Tooze, who in 2016 called for “a history that shows how consumption and production became tied together in an expanding feedback loop of ever greater economic and material scope.” Pirani hopes “this book is a step on that path,” but he is too modest. He has written an ambitious history of fossil fuels.

More here.