Leavings

They sleep in one large room:
Sonia, Tin, Zaida, Hectico, Roly.
And I cut through Peralta’s Backyard
to their tiny apartment, where at night
Hectico and I find our way to the roof
to count the stars.
Zaida is almost fifteen,
and Sonia and I take the bus downtown
every Sunday to collect the discarded ice cream
cups to hold the pasta salad Sonia will make
for her birthday party.
Mother doesn’t think we’ll be able to go
to see her dance in her long, pink dress
as she smiles her way into womanhood.
Aunt Velia has called us to America.
Mother says that means I’ll never again
sit on Sonia’s tar-papered roof,
that Uncle Armando will move into our house,
and we’ll be able to send gum in our letters
like Aunt Velia does now,
that the twins will learn English
before they remember these first
few years.

In dreams Aunt Velia waves,
signaling for us to come,
her tall body wrapped in an airmail
envelope, like a cloak.
Mother waves back, clutching the twins
in her arms, and begs me to hurry,
but I hesitate, knowing Sonia has had
a slow day.

by Sandra M. Castillo
from Paper Dance-55 Latino Poets
Persea Books, New York, 1995

Ted Farris at Aeon Magazine:

One of the most difficult aspects of Tillich’s thought is the ambiguity that characterises much of his writing. Among the most puzzling and paradoxical ideas in his Systematic Theology (1951) is his statement that ‘God does not exist’ and that ‘to argue that God exists is to deny him.’ Tillich goes on to state that the word ‘existence’ should never be used in conjunction with the word ‘God’. These assertions fit with the idea of God as a symbolic object that is a repository of ultimate concern, but not a being. Tillich scholars have disagreed on the meaning and significance of these passages. Does Tillich mean that, since God is ‘beyond essence and existence’ and exists outside of time and space, God is not part of existence? Or is Tillich implying that God really doesn’t exist and is not required to do anything in the Universe? Certainly, in Tillich’s theology, God is an abstract and somewhat inactive concept. The action all comes from the human side through faith. God is the unreachable object of our ultimate concern. This illustrates some of the difficulties of interpreting Tillich’s intentionally paradoxical and deliberately ambiguous assertions as he tries to avoid discussing the literal nature of God.

more here.

Michael Prodger at the New Statesman:

In May 1606, Caravaggio’s rackety life caught up with him. He already had a long list of misdemeanours against his name. He had been twice arrested for carrying a sword without a permit; put on trial by the Roman authorities for writing scurrilous verses about a rival, Giovanni Baglione (or “Johnny Bollocks” according to the poems); arrested for affray and assault, in one incident being injured himself (his testimony to the police survives: “I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs. I don’t know where it was and there was no one else there”); arrested again for smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter; for throwing stones and abusing a constable (telling him he could “stick [his sword] up his arse”); and for smearing excrement on the house of the landlady who had had his belongings seized in payment of missed rent. There were more incidents, all meticulously recorded in the Roman archives.

more here.

Sierra Bellows in The American Scholar:

In February 1995, New York Governor George Pataki announced plans to close the Willard Asylum for the Insane, a state-run institution that opened in 1869 on the eastern shore of Seneca Lake. Portions of the hospital would be converted into a drug treatment center for prisoners; the rest would be permanently shuttered. Before this could happen, however, the hospital’s many artifacts—for example, its 19th-century medical equipmenat—needed to be documented and preserved. This is what Craig Williams, then a curator at the New York State Museum in Albany, did for much of the spring of 1995. One morning that April, Beverly Courtwright, a longtime storehouse clerk at Willard, told Williams that he needed to see something. She took him to the deteriorated brick structure that once housed Willard’s medical labs and occupational therapy rooms. Together they went up several flights of stairs to the attic, an open loft with exposed wood rafters and a brick wall at one end. In the brick wall was a door. Courtwright didn’t open it, so Williams went through alone.

More here.

James Bradley in The Guardian:

The discovery of animals around hydrothermal vents has led to a dramatic broadening of our understanding of the sorts of environments in which life can survive. This has significant implications for the search for extraterrestrial life – if life thrives in such environments on Earth, it is plausible it might flourish in similar conditions in the oceans of ice moons such as Enceladus, which orbits Saturn. It has also shifted assumptions about where life on Earth began: perhaps it was not in a shallow pool, but somewhere in the depths of the primordial sea. In other words, the deep ocean might not be a place of death and forgetting, but rather the birthplace of life on our planet.

More here.

Yascha Mounk and Coleman Hughes in Persuasion:

Coleman Hughes: I think there’s a lot of people that might agree with some points I make about the prevalence of racism, the decline of racism, but they might think, “Well, what’s the harm in exaggerating racism a little bit? I can see the harm in under-exaggerating racism, but shouldn’t we err on the side of assuming that there’s more racism and white supremacy out there so that we’re really facing the problem?” And I wanted to highlight the fact that there is a potential harm, including to black people, but people of color in general, to exaggerating racism.

My grandfather wrote a short memoir of his life. He just turned 90 last year. And in this memoir, he writes of a time in the 1950s where he was one of the few black Americans in those days to have an engineering degree from Ohio State. He grew up in segregated D.C., and he started working at General Electric in the 1950s. And at that time there were basically two paths: You could be an engineer or you could be a manager. And the manager’s path had upward mobility. But he was warned by a well-meaning white colleague that the white engineers at GE would not work for a black manager. And he took that seriously and believed it. And so he just stayed in his humble engineering spot for many years. But then, something changed. The managing spot opened up, and he had been there for a long time, and he decided to go for it. And his boss was surprised, saying “I didn’t know you had any interest in this. You never displayed any interest.” He got the job, and lo and behold, it turned out his white colleagues had no problem working for a black manager.

More here.

Nick Ripatrazone in Humanities:

The Latin renders to “who is blessed for ever” and concludes an enigmatic, brief paragraph. First published in 1294, La Vita Nuova is a tantalizing prelude to the Florentine poet’s masterpiece, La Commedia, known today as The Divine Comedy. For centuries, readers and scholars have pored over La Vita Nuova (Italian for, literally, the new life)—convinced, as we often are, that a gifted writer’s nascent work contains the answers to longstanding mysteries.

La Vita Nuova’s ultimate paragraph follows a sonnet that Dante wrote for “two gracious ladies” of “noble lineage.” The poem begins: “Beyond the widest of the circling spheres / A sigh which leaves my heart aspires to move.” The sigh was a heavy one; a protracted sigh, in fact, that Dante had exhaled for much of his life. “As it nears / Its goal of longing in the realms above / The pilgrim spirit sees a vision”—a vision of Beatrice, the woman he loved for much of his life. “This much,” the sonnet concludes, “I know well.”

Dante finishes La Vita Nuova by describing that his sonnet was followed by “a marvellous vision in which I saw things which made me decide to write no more of this blessed one until I could do so more worthily.” Dante promises that he will write toward her glory, “as she indeed knows,” and he prays that God will grant him enough years so that he can “compose concerning her what has never been written in rhyme of any woman.” Even more, Dante prays—he pleads—that “my soul may go to see the glory of my lady, that is of the blessed Beatrice, who now in glory beholds the face of Him.” As in much of Dante’s work, it is both humble and ambitious: The poet wished to join his beloved in eternity while affirming that she is in sight of the divine. The request concludes with that Latin phrase, appended with a bit of mystery: Is it God who is blessed forever, or is it Beatrice?

Was there a meaningful distinction between the two—for Dante?

More here.

Dana Smith in The New York Times:

According to some estimates, consumers spend $62 billion a year on “anti-aging” treatments. But while creams, hair dyes and Botox can give the impression of youth, none of them can roll back the hands of time.

Scientists are working to understand the biological causes of aging in the hope of one day being able to offer tools to slow or stop its visible signs and, more important, age-related diseases. These underlying mechanisms are often called “the hallmarks of aging.” Many fall into two broad categories: general wear and tear on a cellular level, and the body’s decreasing ability to remove old or dysfunctional cells and proteins. “The crucial thing about the hallmarks is that they are things that go wrong during aging, and if you reverse them,” you stand to live longer or be healthier while you age, said Dame Linda Partridge, a professorial research fellow in the division of biosciences at University College London who helped develop the aging hallmarks framework.

So far, the research has primarily been conducted in animals, but experts are gradually expanding into humans. In the meantime, understanding how aging works can help us put advice and information about the latest “breakthrough” into context, said Venki Ramakrishnan, a biochemist and Nobel laureate who wrote about many of the hallmarks of aging in his new book, “Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality.”

More here.

Love is not Concerned

Love is not concerned
with whom you pray
or where you slept
the night you ran away
from home
love is concerned
that the beating of your heart
should kill no one.

by Allice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1998

Morgan Meis at The Easel:

This photograph is the kind of photograph you’d throw away. If you’re working with a digital camera, you would immediately delete it. It’s a disaster. Trash it and move on. There’s a big metal bar in the middle of the shot. It must be from a gate or something. The metal bar not only dominates the very center of the picture, it’s also so close to the camera that the bar is blurred at the top. Technically speaking, that is a no-no. This is a terrible photograph.

And yet, the very thing that seems at first so terrible is what makes the picture so compelling. If the obscuring bar wasn’t there, we would know too much, visually speaking, about the woman behind the bar. As it is, she is obscured in just the right way. Her one looming and seemingly unblinking eye gets all the attention it needs and deserves. The woman further in the background, with her timid glance and questioning mouth, only heightens the self-assured intensity of the giant eye.

Look closer.

More here.

Pagan Kennedy in Undark:

I’ve spent the last five years digging deep into the history of American crime forensics, writing a widely read 2020 New York Times story about the origins of the rape kit and interviewing people for a forthcoming book. I’ve learned that the rape kit is the unsung hero of forensics — when used correctly, it can identify violent criminals and also prevent wrongly accused men from going to prison. But unfortunately, it has never really been given a chance to work. It could be so much better.

More here.

Mordecai Kurz at Project Syndicate:

Does free-market capitalism buttress democracy, or does it unleash anti-democratic forces? This question first emerged in the Age of Enlightenment, when capitalism was viewed optimistically and welcomed as a vehicle of liberation from the rigid feudal order. Many envisioned an equal-opportunity society of small producers and consumers, where no one would have undue market power, and where prices would be determined by the “invisible hand.” Under such conditions, democracy and capitalism are two sides of the same coin.

Domestic propaganda in the United States has pushed the same optimistic vision over the past century, aiming to convince voters that free-market capitalism is essential to the “American Way,” and that their liberty depends on supporting unfettered free enterprise and distrusting government. But economic developments in recent decades suggest that we should re-examine such beliefs.

To see why, allow me first to clarify some background ideas about what I call technological competition among innovating companies seeking to amass market power.

More here.

Carol Clark at the website of Emory University:

Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal — who pioneered studies of animal cognition while also writing best-selling books that helped popularize the field around the globe — passed away March 14, 2024, from stomach cancer.

De Waal, Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Psychology and former director of the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution at the Emory National Primate Research Center, was 75.

From his groundbreaking 1982 book “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes” to 2019’s “Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves,” de Waal shattered long-held ideas about what it means to be an animal and a human.

“One thing that I’ve seen often in my career is claims of human uniqueness that fall away and are never heard from again,” de Waal said in 2014. “We always end up overestimating the complexity of what we do. That’s how you can sum up my career: I’ve brought apes a little closer to humans but I’ve also brought humans down a bit.”

More here.

The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling.

—Poems from Issa -excerpt

In the next life,
butterfly,
a thousand years from now,

we’ll sit like this
again
under the tree

in the dust,
hearing it, this
great thing

~~~~

I sit in my room.

Outside, haze.

The whole world
is haze

and I can’t figure out
one room.

by C.K. Williams
from Selected Poems
Noonday Press, 1994

Allyson Chiu in The Washington Post:

The famed coastal dunes that inspired the shifting sand landscape of the desert planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel “Dune” are also under siege — from climate change and human development.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Since the 1950s, scientists have had a pretty good idea of how muscles work. The protein at the centre of the action is myosin, a molecular motor that ratchets itself along rope-like strands of actin proteins — grasping, pulling, releasing and grasping again — to make muscle cells contract.

The basics were first explained in a pair of landmark papers in Nature^1,2, and they have been confirmed and elaborated on by detailed molecular maps of myosin and its partners. Researchers think that myosin generates force by cocking back the long lever-like arm that is attached to the motor portion of the protein.

The only hitch is that scientists had never seen this fleeting pre-stroke state — until now.

In a preprint published in January³, researchers used a cutting-edge structural biology technique to record this moment, which lasts just milliseconds in living cells.

More here.