Bryan Vandyke in The Millions:

In my second year of college I applied for a spot in a creative writing program. If I got in, I could graduate in two years with a writing major. If I didn’t, well, I needed a new major. I fussed over the application for months. Attended info sessions, met with the program director, revised my portfolio of poems so often that one professor finally said, Bryan, relax. Let the poems speak. I didn’t grow up saying I wanted to be a writer, but the signs were there, like a secret wish I kept from everyone, myself included. A stroll through the half-hearted journals and failed diaries of my teenage years turns up observations like: “I want to write books, but you can’t make a living that way.” Such a Midwesterner: The arts just aren’t practical.

Then one cold October afternoon my parents came to visit campus and I stumbled through a confession of sorts: I want to be a poet, I said. I want to declare a major in poetry. To their credit, they took the news quite well. My mom, who captained the family finances, asked a familiar question: How does a poet make a living, exactly?

I got the good news on a Tuesday afternoon. I don’t know how many other people applied, but I felt like one of God’s own elect. I met with Mary Kinzie, the poet who ran the writing division. Her office had books piled on the desk and floor. Propped behind a chair in the corner was the promotional poster for a reading she gave at Barnes & Noble for Ghost Ship, her most recent book published by Knopf. Knopf! I can’t recall a word she said that day, just the halo of high hopes that encircled our conversation.

More here.

(Note: Please take 12 minutes to listen to what this wise man said nine years ago.)

My Son My Executioner

My son, my executioner,
…… I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir,
…… And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument
…… Of immortality,
Your cries and hunger document
…… Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,
…… Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
…… And start to die together.

by Donald Hall
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986

Carrie Arnold at Noema:

However, a growing collection of new experiments is challenging the old consensus. Far from being six-legged automatons, they can experience feelings akin to pain and suffering, joy and desire. When Chittka gave bumblebees an extra jolt of sucrose, their favorite food, the bees buzzed with delight. Agitated, anxious honeybees, on the other hand, responded with pessimism when researchers shook them to simulate a predatory attack. Other researchers found that they “scream” when under threat. Ants display rudimentary counting abilities, can understand the concept of zero and make tools. Fruit flies learn from their peers. Cockroaches have complex social lives. Fruit flies drown themselves in booze when deprived of mating opportunities. Some earwigs and other insects play dead when threatened by a predator.

In other words, insects have thoughts and feelings. The next question for philosophers and scientists alike is: Do they have consciousness?

more here.

Ed Simon at Hyperallergic:

Though firmly a Renaissance painter in regard to technical acumen, Grünewald was Medieval in his vision, an inheritor of the 14th and 15th centuries’ comfort with the horrors of embodiment. In Germany, in particular, there existed then a form of devotion that took succor precisely in visualizing the sort of gruesome tableaux that Grünewald expertly painted, especially as regards the paradox of an almighty God himself suffering and dying. “Be assured of this,” wrote Suso’s contemporary, the mystic Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418–27), “that you must live a dying life.” The so-called Imitatio, whereby the penitent would imagine the degradations of the passion, was common in Medieval Catholicism, and reinvigorated by the Ignatian exercises of the Jesuits centuries later.

As such, nothing is philosophically novel in the Isenheim altarpiece, with its Christ who appears slick with the clammy sweat of death, stinking with the purification of the sepulcher. But to see something so ugly so perfectly depicted remains shocking five centuries later.

more here.

John Gray at The New Statesman:

There were “many Jesuses, many Christs – many of them unimaginably strange to us today” – alongside other magi who resembled some of these Christs. Sometimes Jesus had a physical body; at others he was an apparition that left no footprints. There was a Jesus who warned his disciples against “filthy intercourse” and instructed them never to have children. In one account, an angry young Jesus curses a small boy, who becomes withered and deformed; later Jesus curses another boy, who falls down dead. There were Jesuses that hung in agony on the cross, and others who suffered no pain. In addition to diverse Jesuses, there was Apollonius, a first-century Greek philosopher and miracle-worker, sometimes called “the pagan Christ”.

Much of Nixey’s case rests on the revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Bible contains only four gospels, which gave us the received image of Jesus. But there were many others, with titles such as the “Gospel of Thomas” and the “Gospel of Truth”, discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the Qumran Caves on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea.

more here.

Mark Blyth and Brett Christophers discuss:

Patrick Honner in Quanta:

Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place?

This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a math teacher, I love it because there are so many different ways you can arrive at the solution, and the diversity and interconnectedness of those strategies beautifully illustrate the power of creative thinking in math.

One solution goes like this: Start with each person shaking every other person’s hand. Ten people, with nine handshakes each, produce 9 × 10 = 90 total handshakes. But this counts every handshake twice — once from each shaker’s perspective — so the actual number of handshakes is $\frac{90}{2}=45$. A simple and lovely counting argument for the win!

There’s also a completely different way to solve the problem.

More here.

Raja Menon in the Boston Review:

On Friday, March 22, gunmen toting assault rifles stormed Crocus City Hall, west of Moscow in the Krasnogorsk district, shot the guards and, as graphic videos show, opened fire on the concert audience without restraint. More than 6,000 tickets had been sold for the performance by the famed Russian rock band Piknik. At least 137 people were killed and many more wounded, some critically; the final death tally could be higher. That even more people were not shot may owe to the perpetrators’ plan to decamp before Russian security forces arrived on the scene. In a move that seemed calculated to maximize the terror, generate publicity, and broadcast the Russian government’s ineptitude, the assailants set parts of the building ablaze. According to some reports, 90 minutes elapsed before Russian special forces arrived. Putin waited until Saturday afternoon before addressing the Russian people in a televised address. By then, an offshoot of the Islamic State, Islamic State–Khorasan (IS-K), had already claimed responsibility.

The attack reverberated through Russian society, but also rattled the government, which was caught unaware and unprepared. For Putin, the attack came at a particularly bad time.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Old mice developed more youthful immune systems after scientists reduced aberrant stem cells in the aged animals¹. The technique strengthened the old rodents’ responses to viral infection and lowered signs of inflammation.

The approach, published on 27 March in Nature, treats older mice with antibodies to diminish a population of stem cells that give rise to a variety of other cell types, including those that contribute to inflammation. Excess inflammation can wreak havoc in the body, and these pro-inflammatory stem cells become dominant as mice and humans age.

It will be years before the approach can be tested in people, but many aspects of the stem-cell biology that underlies immune-cell production are similar between mice and humans. “It’s a really important first step,” says Robert Signer, a stem-cell biologist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research. “I’m excited to see where they take this work next.”

More here.

Melina Moe in LARB:

“I FOUND IT extremely honest, forthright, and moving in ways I had not expected it to be,” Toni Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist in 1977, “but it is a shuddering book and one that offers no escape for any reader whatsoever.” Still, Morrison, then a senior editor at Random House, liked the manuscript so much that, before responding, she passed it around the office to drum up support. The verdict was “intelligent,” but also “very ‘down,’ depressing, spiritually abrasive.” Whatever the merits of the writing, Morrison’s colleagues predicted, the potent mix of dissatisfaction, anger, and mournfulness would limit the book’s commercial appeal—and Morrison reluctantly agreed. “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape,” her letter concludes, “but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.”

During her 16 years at Random House, Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters. Usually typed on pink, yellow, or white carbonless copy paper, and occasionally bearing Random House’s old logo and letterhead, these are now filed among her correspondence in the Random House archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. While many of the letters were mailed to New York, Boston, and even Rome, others were sent to writers in more obscure places; some are addressed to “general delivery” in various small towns across the United States.

More here.

The Story of Keys

If you would give me
the key to your house
I would think of it
as a one-dimensional
mountain range.
I would hold it up
to the sky
and study how clouds
drink in its valleys.
Think of it
as a tiny file
that cuts through
vertical shadows.
The door of your house
would be a rectangle of light

that shuts behind me
trapping the moon
by the coattails.
I would no longer need
the twisted path
that brought me to you.
It would disappear
along with the forest
propped up
on springs and hinges.
And the stagehands
and roadies of my dreams
could put away their props—
cups, pools, musical perfumes
darker than your hair.

by Richard García
from Touching the Fire
Anchor Books, 1998

Robert D. Hershey Jr. in the New York Times:

Daniel Kahneman, who never took an economics course but who pioneered a psychologically based branch of that field that led to a Nobel in economic science in 2002, died on Wednesday. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his partner, Barbara Tversky. She declined to say where he died.

Professor Kahneman, who was long associated with Princeton University and lived in Manhattan, employed his training as a psychologist to advance what came to be called behavioral economics. The work, done largely in the 1970s, led to a rethinking of issues as far-flung as medical malpractice, international political negotiations and the evaluation of baseball talent, all of which he analyzed, mostly in collaboration with Amos Tversky, a Stanford cognitive psychologist who did groundbreaking work on human judgment and decision-making. (Ms. Tversky, also a professor of psychology at Stanford, had been married to Professor Tversky, who died in 1996. She and Professor Kahneman became partners several years ago.)

As opposed to traditional economics, which assumes that human beings generally act in fully rational ways and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised, the behavioral school is based on exposing hard-wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results.

More here.

Candida Moss in Time:

It is an unlikely success story. A first century religious leader named Jesus was brutally executed as a criminal in first century Jerusalem. His death should have ended the movement. He left behind him a ragtag group of poorly educated Aramaic-speaking fishermen and craftsmen; men with some street smarts who lacked resources, experience, or connections. And yet, tradition insists, this handful of men seeded the religion that would change the world.

The improbability of Christianity’s success has always been part of its rhetorical power; how could this small group of misfits have succeeded against such odds? There is a lengthy intellectual tradition that attempts to explain the expansion, rise, and spread of Christianity from its beginnings in the Galilee to its ‘conquest’ of the Roman Empire. At least part of the answer, though neglected, is simple: The disciples had help. An overlooked aspect of the famous Road to Damascus story is how dangerous it was. The Apostle Paul’s vision of Christ left him in a perilous situation: newly blind and stranded several miles away from sustenance and shelter. It was only with the assistance of those in his entourage that he made it into the city and avoided an unpleasant death from starvation and dehydration. These helpers are almost invisible in the story, but they are critical to Paul’s success.

The contributions of invisible assistants go much further than their underappreciated but essential roles as local guides and travelling companions.

More here.

Sarah Chihaya at Bookforum:

FILMMAKER ANNA BILLER begins her debut novel, Bluebeard’s Castle, with a warning: “Some husbands,” she writes, “are pussycats, some are dullards or harmless rogues, and some are Bluebeards.” Folklore and literary history are full of Bluebeards: Charles Perrault’s original fairy tale, two Brothers Grimm versions, Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, modern retellings by writers, composers, and directors ranging from Georges Méliès and Béla Bartók to Helen Oyeyemi and Catherine Breillat. The elements of the story remain essentially the same: a young woman marries a mysterious, wealthy widower. Despite warnings (sometimes from her husband, sometimes from outsiders), she explores the recesses of his house and discovers that he has murdered all his former wives and keeps their bodies in a hidden chamber. The intrepid bride eventually reveals his secret, and the monster is punished—hacked to bits or burned alive. Though the story often has fantastic aspects—a talking bird, people who miraculously come back to life when their dismembered parts are reunited, a magical key or egg that proves that the wife found the chamber—true anxiety lies at its heart. Marriage is a gamble, it reminds us, and any husband could turn out to be a wife-killer.

more here.