Justin E. H. Smith at his own website:

Mainstream philosophy and science at least since Aristotle have held to the view that each living body, under normal circumstances, should be inhabited by no more than one soul. If you don’t care for talk of souls, exchange that word for “individual”, and the point still stands: sharing bodily space is abnormal, a sign of pathology, to be corrected by flushing the worms out of your entrails, or by mulesing your sheep against flystrike.

It was this prejudice against mutualism that delayed by several years widespread recognition of the true nature of lichen: not a moss, not some low liverwort, but an intrication of two very different kinds of being, of fungus and algae, the former hosting the latter, as near as we can make out, farming it if you will for the miraculous calories it photosynthesizes out of pure light.

We continue to act surprised even though in truth this is the regular course of things. The human microbiome is home to over 5000 known species of microorganism, without which many basic bodily functions, notably digestion, could not continue. The baleen of a whale’s mouth constitutes a marine ecosystem more comparable to the biodiversity of a kelp forest than to a single animal’s body part. Biology furnishes us with abundant empirical examples of a truth that logic and metaphysics, in the form we have inherited them, still require us to reject on a priori grounds. If you do not wish to appear irrational, do not learn too well the lessons of natural science.

More here.

Jill Radsken in The Harvard Gazette:

Hecht, who joined the faculty in January, has published her first paper on our canine comrades in the Journal of Neuroscience, finding that different breeds have different brain organizations owing to human cultivation of specific traits. Using MRI scans from 63 dogs of 33 breeds, Hecht found neuroanatomical features correlating to different behaviors such as hunting, guarding, herding, and companionship. Sight hunting and retrieving, for example, were both tied to a network that included regions involved in vision, eye movement, and spatial navigation.

“In my career so far, there have been a couple times when you look at the raw images and know there is something there even before you do statistics. This was one of these times,” she said. “I was like ‘Holy cow! How come no one else has done this?’”

Hecht isn’t entirely sure why dogs have not been long considered proper study subjects, but she theorizes that it’s easy to dismiss what lies at your feet.

More here.

Richard Williams in The Guardian:

The Beatles weren’t a group much given to squabbling, says Mark Lewisohn, who probably knows more about them than they knew about themselves. But then he plays me the tape of a meeting held 50 years ago this month – on 8 September 1969 – containing a disagreement that sheds new light on their breakup.

They’ve wrapped up the recording of Abbey Road, which would turn out to be their last studio album, and are awaiting its release in two weeks’ time. Ringo Starr is in hospital, undergoing tests for an intestinal complaint. In his absence, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison convene at Apple’s HQ in Savile Row. John has brought a portable tape recorder. He puts it on the table, switches it on and says: “Ringo – you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”

What they talk about is the plan to make another album – and perhaps a single for release in time for Christmas, a commercial strategy going back to the earliest days of Beatlemania. “It’s a revelation,” Lewisohn says. “The books have always told us that they knew Abbey Road was their last album and they wanted to go out on an artistic high. But no – they’re discussing the next album. And you think that John is the one who wanted to break them up but, when you hear this, he isn’t. Doesn’t that rewrite pretty much everything we thought we knew?”

Lewisohn turns the tape back on, and we hear John suggesting that each of them should bring in songs as candidates for the single. He also proposes a new formula for assembling their next album: four songs apiece from Paul, George and himself, and two from Ringo – “If he wants them.”

More here.

Palle Yourgrau at IAI:

To choose another prominent example, consider what Francis Kamm writes in Morality, Mortality: “Life can sometimes be worse for a person than the alternative of nonexistence, even though nonexistence is not a better state of being.” For Kamm, nonexistence is never a better state of being than is exist­ence because for her, apparently, nonexistence is not a state of being at all.

Kamm and Kagan, however, are mistaken. What they say is true not of Socrates but of the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy is indeed not in a state of nonexistence for the simple reason that there is no such person as the tooth fairy. By con­trast, there is such a person as Socrates. Nathan Salmon, in “What Is Existence?” puts the matter succinctly: “‘Kripke exists’ is true whereas ‘Napoleon exists’ is false. Kripke has existence. Napoleon has nonexistence.”

When you die and cease to exist, you aren’t ‘erased’, you aren’t ‘rubbed out’, nor do you turn into a different kind of being. You forfeit your existence, not your essence. Death affects that you are, not what you are. Thus, assuming, for the sake of argument, that persons are concrete objects and that that is part of their essence, when Socrates died he didn’t cease being concrete. He went from being an existent concrete object to being a nonexistent concrete object.

more here.

Jennifer Abbots at Tenderly:

“The Odyssey” by Homer

It’s an 8th century narrative poem about the devastation wrought by toxic masculinity, so of course THE DOG DIES. To be fair, the dog doesn’t die until the end; he is old and dies of joy when his master returns from being lost at sea. But before that happens, a couple dozen bulls are sacrificed to various gods; flocks of sheep and goats are killed for food and also to trick a Cyclops; and there’s a whole lot of symbolic bird-on-bird violence. On the human side, scores of Greeks and Trojans hack each other to death or are killed by monsters,various immortals, or Penelope’s shitty suitors. Rough.

“Moby Dick” by Herman Melville

ALL THE ANIMALS DIE — at least one squid, numerous sharks, a couple of sea-birds, hundreds of fish, lots of whales. There are entire loooong chapters devoted the horrific practices of whaling and sperm-oil harvesting. When not literally rolling around in fish guts, Melville also writes eloquently about falling in love with The Other (a very tattooed, weed-smoking Pacific Islander prince) and dissects the ills of religious and cultural dogma, nihilism, and obsession. If the reader skips the most gruesome chapters, there’s truly gorgeous writing and metaphysical interludes.

more here.

Tzvi Gluckin at Premier Guitar:

Whether you’re talking about the polyrhythmic complexity of bands like the Talking Heads, the understated virtuosity of Television’s Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine, or even the deep chops of drummer Marc “Marky Ramone” Bell (Dust, Voidoids, Ramones), the punk scene was a wellspring of talent. Punk’s focus, for the most part, was song-centric and eschewed extended jamming, and the scene’s musicians prized restraint, as opposed to flash. But ability—despite their short hair, leather, and safety pins—wasn’t lacking. They were a reaction to the milquetoast fluff on popular radio (Debbie Boone, the Eagles), and took pains to distinguish themselves as misfits. But even the punks had their outliers, and a prominent delegate was guitarist Robert Quine.

Quine was an idiosyncratic force of nature. He was much older than most of his colleagues, he didn’t dress like a punk—he wore sport coats and cheap button-down shirts, and his guitar playing was a synthesis of his eccentric, yet specific, aesthetic. He was a master musician, but he wasn’t a jack-of-all-trades, and his instrumental voice was cultivated and singular.

more here.

Samuel Earle in New Statesman:

If every philosopher has a home that is not a house – the mountains, the sea, the city streets – for Martin Heidegger, it was the Black Forest. This sprawling woodland, situated by the French border in south-west Germany, imbued Heidegger’s language – his writings are filled with references to “forest paths”, “waymarks” and “clearings” – and shaped his thought. There, in the solitude of his small wood cabin, he wrote his great work, Being and Time.

The forest even infused Heidegger’s love life. During his affair with Hannah Arendt, which began in 1924 while she was his student, Heidegger referred to her as his “wood nymph”. Following Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, Arendt, who was Jewish, was forced to flee. But their relationship resonated long after, in what the late scholar of comparative literature Svetlana Boym called a “lover’s discourse”. In language, if not in life, “the poetic landmarks of their interaction” – an exchange of concepts such as home, world and freedom; a shared aching for ancient Greece; and a small chest of classical quotes to call upon – stood until the end.

But today it’s another of Heidegger’s relationships that overshadows his life and legacy: his affiliation with the Nazi Party, which he joined in 1933 and never truly renounced. Heidegger and Hitler also shared a lover’s discourse of sorts: terms such as Heimat (homeland), Volk (people) and “historical destiny”, a fondness for the German forest, and contempt for cosmopolitanism and “humanism”. Since the posthumous publication of Heidegger’s private notebooks, their common foe is also beyond doubt, despite his feelings for Arendt: “World Jewry”.

More here.

Jocelyn Kaiser in Science:

Cancer drug developers may be missing their molecular targets—and never knowing it. Many recent drugs take aim at specific cell proteins that drive the growth of tumors. The strategy has had marked successes, such as the leukemia drug Gleevec. But a study now finds that numerous candidate anticancer drugs still kill tumor cells after the genome editor CRISPR was used to eliminate their presumed targets. That suggests the drugs thwart cancer by interacting with different molecules than intended. The study, published this week in Science Translational Medicine, points to problems with an older lab tool for silencing genes that has been used to identify leads for such drugs. The results also hint that the drugs in question, most of which are in clinical trials, and perhaps others could be optimized to work even better by pinning down their true mechanism. “The work is very well done and it’s a great public service. I hope people talk about it. I don’t find any of it surprising, unfortunately,” says William Kaelin of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who has written about why promising preclinical findings are often not reproducible, or fail to lead to drugs.

Leads for many recent targeted drugs emerged from experiments in which cancer cells were dosed with RNA strands that disrupt the natural RNAs that convey a gene’s protein-building instructions. After using this RNA interference (RNAi) method to zero in on genes essential to the growth of cancer cells, researchers screened libraries of molecules to find compounds that block the genes’ proteins.

More here.

Xan Brooks interviews Stephen King in The Guardian:

You started out being dismissed by the literary establishment as a lowly peddler of cheap horror. You’re now a lauded national treasure. How does it feel to be respectable?

It feels good to be at least semi-respectable. I have outlived most of my most virulent critics. It gives me great pleasure to say that. Does that make me a bad person?

Isn’t it also partly because the boundary between literary fiction and genre fiction has become more porous? The old high/low distinction doesn’t exist in the same way.

Well, there’s still a strange – to me, anyway – and totally subjective line between high culture and low. An aria from Rigoletto, La donna è mobile, for instance – is high culture. Sympathy for the Devil by the Stones is low. They’re both cool, so go figure.

I’ve heard that you like to write to loud music. Isn’t that really distracting?

I’m listening to Fine Young Cannibals [right now]. Soon to be followed by Danny and the Juniors and the Animals. I love rock – the louder the better.

More here.

Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis in the New York Times:

Artificial intelligence has a trust problem. We are relying on A.I. more and more, but it hasn’t yet earned our confidence.

Tesla cars driving in Autopilot mode, for example, have a troubling history of crashing into stopped vehicles. Amazon’s facial recognition system works great much of the time, but when asked to compare the faces of all 535 members of Congress with 25,000 public arrest photos, it found 28 matches, when in reality there were none. A computer program designed to vet job applicants for Amazon was discovered to systematically discriminate against women. Every month new weaknesses in A.I. are uncovered.

The problem is not that today’s A.I. needs to get better at what it does. The problem is that today’s A.I. needs to try to do something completely different.

In particular, we need to stop building computer systems that merely get better and better at detecting statistical patterns in data sets — often using an approach known as deep learning — and start building computer systems that from the moment of their assembly innately grasp three basic concepts: time, space and causality.

More here.

Carlyn Zwarenstein in Reasons to be Cheerful:

Those in the harm reduction world know Portugal as a harm reduction Mecca: renowned for its 2001 legislation that decriminalized possession of small amounts of substances—including “hard” drugs like heroin and cocaine—and prioritized the health and human rights of people who use drugs over punishing them for it.

I have traveled here from Canada, where one person is dying roughly every two hours from an opioid-involved overdose, to attend Harm Reduction International’s 26th global conference, and to learn about Portugal’s own radical experiment.

Back in the city, I find myself in an enormous conference room, surrounded by policy makers, doctors and researchers from some 90 countries around the world. They see harm reduction measures as fundamental to achieving the UN’s goal of eliminating AIDS by 2030 (Portugal is one of the few nations on track to meet its goal) as well as dramatically reducing rates of viral hepatitis and tuberculosis.

More here.

Lily Scherlis at Cabinet Magazine:

The basic function of a doorbell is to facilitate a call and response through walls. Depressing the button, the visitor closes an electrical circuit, sending a signal through the infrastructure toward a piece of hardware that emits noise in the chosen room. In a multi-apartment building, the resident, now aware of the presence of an unseen visitor on the threshold, can press a button that sends a current back downstairs, releasing the door’s lock.

There is a building in the neighborhood of Bötzowviertel in northeast Berlin with a panel of doorbells that make no sound. This special bell board at 35 Käthe-Niederkirchner-Straße is a memorial: the names listed next to the bells belong to eighty-three Jews who occupied the building’s forty apartments prior to their deportation, escape, or death during the Nazi era.

The silent bell board was designed over the past year by Simon Lütgemeyer, an architect who has lived in the building since 1999.

more here.

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo at n+1:

DURING THE DAY, the pig units become like furnaces, and they barely cool down at night. Pigs are unable to sweat and have difficulty regulating their body temperature.

Since they cannot wallow in mud, they sprawl listlessly in their own excrement, panting in distress. The men get up at daybreak, refill the drinking troughs, hose down the animals. They throw open the doors of the pig sheds in the hope that a through breeze might drive away the humidity and the stench, but this means they have deal with the blowflies and horseflies that swarm in and hov­er in clouds over the stalls, clustering around every orifice of the pigs. Before the sun has even risen, they are forced to fold doors.

The sons rake droppings from under the slatted floors and push the slurry into the drainage channels. The pig sheds are two thousand square meters, and the stalls are two meters by three, each containing between five to seven pigs shitting and wallowing in their excreta.

more here.

Brendan and Constance Simms at the New Statesman:

With the coming of the Third Reich, Nolde let the mask drop completely. He not only denounced his fellow artist Pechstein as a “Jew” (he wasn’t), but in the summer of 1933 drafted a plan, which he later destroyed, for how to remove Jews from German society. And unfortunately for him, plenty of other evidence has survived. In the autumn of 1938, for example, Nolde wrote that one could “understand” that “the operation for the removal of the Jews, who have burrowed so deep into all peoples” could not be carried out without “a lot of pain”. Not long afterwards, Nolde wrote to the Nazi press chief Otto Dietrich that he had spent his entire life fighting against the “too-great dominance of Jews in all matters artistic”. In November 1940, he praised Hitler’s speech on the anniversary of the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, especially the passages attacking “the Jews”.

If this was not clear enough, Nolde responded to the famous Dambuster raids in 1943, which Nazi propaganda attributed to the machinations of German-Jewish refugees, with “the war is becoming more and more ‘the Jewish War’”, adding that “they” were assiduous in pursuing their “plans for domination”.

more here.

Anechoic

George Foy stayed in the anechoic chamber
for 45 minutes and nearly went mad.
He could hear the blood rushing in
his veins and began to wonder if he was
hallucinating. He had been to a monastery,
an American Indian sweat lodge,
and a nickel mine two kilometers underground.
In the anechoic chamber, the floor’s design
eliminates the sound of footsteps.
NASA trains astronauts in anechoic chambers
to cope with the silence of space.
Without echo, in the quietest place on earth,
what else can we hold onto? What replaces sound
in concert with what you see? The human voice,
the timber when a person says kamsahamnida
or yes, please, or fuerte, is 25 to 35 decibels.
Hearing damage can start around 115 decibels.
Metallica, front row, possible damage
albeit possible love. The Who, 126 decibels.
A Boeing jet, 165 decibels. The whale, low rumble
frequency and all, 188 decibels, can be heard
for hundreds of miles underwater.
I once walked around inside a whale heart,
which is the size of a small car. The sound
was like Brian Doyle’s heart that gave out
at 60 after he wrote my favorite essay
about the joyas voladoras and the humming
bird heart, the whale heart, and the human
heart. Glass can break at 163 decibels.
Hearing is the last sense to leave us.
Some say that upon death, our vision,
our taste, our touch, and our smell
might leave us, but some have been
pronounced dead and by all indication
are, but they can hear. In this moment,
when the doctor pronounces the time
or when the handgun pumps once more,
what light arrives? What sounds, the angels?
The Ultrasonic Weapon is used for crowd
control or to combat riots—as too many
humans gathered in one place for a unified
purpose can threaten the state. The state
permits gatherings if the flag waves. Sound
can be weaponized or made into art.
It can kill. It can heal a wound. It is
a navigation device and can help determine
if the woman has a second heart inside of her
now, the beating heart of a baby on the ultrasound,
a boy or a girl, making a new music in the body
of another body, a chorus, a concert, a hush.

by Lee Herrick
from Scar and Flower
Word Poetry, 2019

Maya Jasanoff in The Guardian:

About a century ago, a series of giant murals was unveiled in the Palace of Westminster depicting the “Building of Britain”, which bounded in eight set-pieces from King Alfred’s long-ships beating back the Danes in 877 to bewigged parliamentarians presenting Queen Anne with the articles of Union in 1707. The penultimate scene travels to India in 1614, where the Mughal emperor Jahangir receives an ambassador from King James I, on a mission to promote trade with the newly chartered English East India Company.

From the hindsight of the 1920s, this embassy looked like a key step in the building of a British imperium that would end with Britain’s monarchs as India’s emperors. But the arrival of the British in India in the early 1600s looked very different at the time – and from the other side. A contemporary painting by the Mughal master miniaturist Bichitr shows a supersized Jahangir on his throne, bathed in a halo of blinding magnificence. He hands a Qur’an to a white-bearded Sufi, a pious gesture that doubles as a majestic snub: pressed into a lower corner is none other than James I, an overlooked supplicant, depicted in three-quarter profile, “an angle reserved in Mughal miniatures for the minor characters”.

More here.

Robert Sapolsky in Nautilus:

The other day I fixed something—a rarity for me. The flotation device in the toilet water tank was rubbing against the side, getting stuck halfway up so that the tank didn’t fill completely. I own a hammer and know how to operate it. But I couldn’t fit it into the tank to whack the device back into place. Ditto for owning and using a wrench. It wouldn’t fit either. But fortunately I also own a plunger and I used its handle to push the floating thing back the other way, using the side of the tank as a fulcrum. It worked, although the device got bent so that the top of the tank didn’t quite fit. That overwhelmed me, so I called it a good day’s work. I was proud of myself. “There,” I thought smugly. “It’s not just chimps who can use tools.”

Humans used to be unique in lots of ways. We were the only species who made tools, murdered each other, passed on culture. And each of those supposed defining features has now been demonstrated in other species. We’re not so special after all. But there are still ways that humans appear to stand alone. One of those is hugely important: the human capacity to think symbolically. Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech—they exert enormous power over us. We kill for symbols, die for them. Yet symbols generate one of the most magnificent human inventions: art.

In recent years scientists from leading universities, including UCLA, University College London, and Yale, have made remarkable insights into the neurobiology of symbols. A major finding from their work is that the brain is not very good at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal. In fact, as scientists have shown us, symbols and metaphors, and the morality they engender, are the product of clunky processes in our brains. Symbols serve as a simplifying stand-in for something complex. (A rectangle of cloth with stars and stripes represents all of American history and values.) And this is very useful.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Porch Magazine:

Consider the opening shots of the movie Human Desire, directed by Fritz Lang and released by Columbia Pictures in 1954. We see a man on a train. He’s the engineer. He sits at the front of the train, driving it along the tracks. His demeanor is one of comfort and ease. Then we move to another shot. The camera has been positioned at the side of the train looking forward. Another train comes into view moving toward us, on the opposite track. It seems, for a moment, that there is not enough space for the two trains to pass one another safely. A collision is imminent. But then, with a whoosh, the trains pass one another without incident. We’ve all experienced this fear as two trains pass at high speeds. The margin of error is so small. The violence of the rush of air smacking both trains is startling.

The first few minutes of Human Desire are a study in the joys and contradictions of train travel, back and forth, back and forth between the scary almost overwhelming power of this form of locomotion, and the quiet contemplation that is the unexpected byproduct of a train’s motion along its fixed track. Finally, the train pulls into a station. It is difficult to describe the sense of comfort and completion in this final terminus. And then the giant hanger looms into view, ushering the train into a place of rest.

These opening scenes of Human Desire are a direct tribute to another film. That’s La Bête humaine by Jean Renoir (1938).

More here.