Brigid Hains in aeon:

We are shackled to the pangs and shocks of life, wrote Virginia Woolf in The Waves (1931), ‘as bodies to wild horses’. Or are we? Serge Faguet, a Russian-born tech entrepreneur and self-declared ‘extreme biohacker’, believes otherwise. He wants to tame the bucking steed of his own biochemistry via an elixir of drugs, implants, medical monitoring and behavioural ‘hacks’ that optimise his own biochemistry. In his personal quest to become one of the ‘immortal posthuman gods that cast off the limits of our biology, and spread across the Universe’, Faguet claims to have spent upwards of $250,000 so far – including hiring ‘fashion models to have sex with in order to save time on dating and focus on other priorities’.

It’s easy to roll our eyes at such outré displays of entitlement, seemingly endemic in the Silicon Valley set. Beyond Faguet, ‘transhumanist’ true believers awaiting their version of the rapture include the entrepreneur Elon Musk, the Googler Ray Kurzweil and the philosopher Nick Bostrom. Their transhumanist ideal resembles a late-capitalist rendering of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man: an individual super-human, armed with a wealth of cognitive and physical enhancements, elevated to a state of unassailable strength and power, devoid of all dependency, and, often enough, endowed with the ability to reproduce without the inconvenience of women. As they describe it, ‘immortality’ sounds like nothing so much as manspreading into the future.

What’s most instructive about transhumanism, though, isn’t what it exposes about the hubris of rich white men. It’s the fact that it represents a paradigm case of what happens when a particular cast of mind, made from the sediment of centuries of philosophy, gets taken to its logical extreme. Since Plato, generations of philosophers have been gripped by a fear of the body and the desire to transcend it – a wish that works hand-in-hand with a fear of women, and a desire to control them. In the dialogue Timaeus, Plato likens the force of his ideal, immaterial forms to a disciplinarian father, imposing order on all this unwieldy material stuff that was nonetheless ‘the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible things’. Here Plato deploys a well-worn technique for suppressing corporeal angst: carving off the mind (rational, detached, inviolable, symbolically male) from the body (emotional, entangled, weak, symbolically female).

More here.

The Immortality Ode

Bill Evans is quiet, fingers still above the keys,
But ready to begin again and again and again
The first twelve bars before the drums come in,
Just as I am ready for inspiration this evening,
Fingers rehearsing an entrance above the keyboard
Of the Olivetti Lettera 32 I pounded years ago
On Charles Street, nights I wore my father’s
Black cashmere overcoat whenever the steam
Failed to make it up five flights, and back then
Evans waited, too, for his entrance, rain on glass
Waiting to accompany him, and on the B side?
Everlastingness is still there, and all Camus
Said it was, the boulder, the hill, the boulder again
That we come to over and over, pushing—
Quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua
As Lucky said and which my annotated Beckett
Traces to the Latin (qua) for in the capacity of.
As in I qua Sisyphus, I quaquaquaqua greybeard
Old father shuffling along in black cashmere:
The Child is father of the Man, a looped immortality,
While happiness, per Camus, if patently absurd,
Nonetheless may rise with the struggle to old heights
And just might be enough to fill a man’s heart,
Even as Evans once more lifts his fingers for
“You and the Night and the Music,” his solo fresh
As when he first sat down, and the night is young.

by Brian Culhane
from Plume Poetry
Issue #94 June 2019

Mohammed Hanif in the Columbia Journalism Review:

The Pakistani media is now enduring its darkest phase yet. Major General Asif Ghafoor, the head of the Pakistan Army’s public relations department, has been circulating the online profiles of journalists he judges to be involved in antistate activities. In a press conference last December, he issued a heartfelt plea: if journalists filed positive stories for just six months, Pakistan would become a great nation. Mostly, Pakistani journalists obliged. Writers who were once bold and boisterous, taking on military dictators and civilian rulers and extremist organizations, have now become patriotic—or have found themselves out of work. Without jobs, some of the country’s top columnists and prime-time TV journalists are learning to start their own YouTube channels. Others receive threats from anonymous entities claiming to represent the state intelligence services.

Against this backdrop, I was relieved when an inspector from an intelligence agency called me, introduced himself, and said that he wanted to debrief me about my recent visit to Bangladesh.

More here.

From Phys.org:

Quantum computers, which use light particles (photons) instead of electrons to transmit and process data, hold the promise of a new era of research in which the time needed to realize lifesaving drugs and new technologies will be significantly shortened. Photons are promising candidates for quantum computation because they can propagate across long distances without losing information, but when they are stored in matter they become fragile and susceptible to decoherence. Now researchers with the Photonics Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY have developed a new protocol for storing and releasing a single photon in an embedded eigenstate—a quantum state that is virtually unaffected by loss and decoherence. The novel protocol, detailed in the current issue of Optica, aims to advance the development of quantum computers.

More here.

Damian Carrington in The Guardian:

The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said.

Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of law.

Alston is critical of the “patently inadequate” steps taken by the UN itself, countries, NGOs and businesses, saying they are “entirely disproportionate to the urgency and magnitude of the threat”. His report to the UN human rights council (HRC) concludes: “Human rights might not survive the coming upheaval.”

The report also condemns Donald Trump for “actively silencing” climate science, and criticises the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, for promising to open up the Amazon rainforest to mining.

More here.

More here.

Paul O’Mahoney at the Dublin Review of Books:

Placed together, the book’s two longest chapters, “Big Bad Science” and “The Medical Misinformation Mess”, lay out the charge sheet against modern scientific research in medicine. Medical research, particularly “Big Science” or “Big Data”, has always promised far more than it has delivered, and Big Science has in fact contributed little to medical advances; research and clinical trials, meanwhile, are in the midst of a “replication crisis”, where a huge percentage of trials either never are or cannot be replicated. The first issue medical research must face if it is to reform is “that the culture of contemporary medical research is so conformist that truly original thinkers can no longer prosper in such an environment, and that science selects for perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity”. O’Mahony quotes Bruce Charlton: “[the requirements of contemporary research are] enough to deter almost anyone with a spark of vitality or self-respect … Modern science is just too dull an activity to attract, retain or promote many of the most intelligent and creative people”. “Real scientists,” says O’Mahony, “tend to be reticent, self-effacing, publicity-shy and full of doubt and uncertainty, unlike the gurning hucksters who seem to infest medical research.”

more here.

William T. Vollmann at Harper’s Magazine:

Let us now meet the migrants themselves. We begin with one quietly cheerful shelter for asylum seekers. Although the Methodists had started it, “We have Unitarians, we have Catholics, we have Presbyterians, Lutherans, and some people who are atheists. I even have a couple of Republicans helping out! They talk to me about the wall but are still here helping out.” In keeping with the regional mood, I was asked not to identify the place (“in the Tucson foothills”), and the co-coordinator who showed me around (she was called Diane) declined to provide her last name, because “we’re just kinda protecting our folks. We don’t want location or names or anything like that, because I worry about protesters.” No location, then, but I will say that planted in the gravel in front of the building stood a sign from that brave organization No More Deaths: humanitarian aid is never a crime—drop the charges, with a hand reaching up for a water jug somewhere between two saguaro cacti.

more here.

Thea Lenarduzzi at the TLS:

Caradec’s Dictionary, newly translated into English by Chris Clarke, lists some 850 gestures that “successively address each part of the body, from top to bottom, from scalp to toe by way of the upper limbs”, and may be used as well as or instead of speech. They are numbered and ordered in a taxonomy running from 1.01 (“to nod one’s head vertically up and down, back to front, one or several times: acquiescence”) to 37.12 (“to kick an adversary in the rear end: aggression”), and accompanied by Philippe Cousin’s illustrations. The majority of them are what the psychologist David McNeill has called “imagistic”, by which parts of the body are arranged to figure an imagined object or action (such as blowing a kiss, or proffering one’s middle finger), and are “effected voluntarily by humankind in order to communicate with each other”. The emphasis designates this type of non-verbal expression – Adam Kendon calls it “visible action as utterance” in his seminal Gesture (2004) – as a sub-category of body language more broadly, which comprises both conscious (that is, learnt) and unconscious (instinctive) movements.

more here.

Alice O’Keeffe in The Guardian:

Sameer Rahim’s debut novel is a tender, pin-sharp portrait of a marriage and a community. It is a wonderful achievement; an invigorating reminder of the power fiction has to challenge lazy stereotypes, and stretch the reader’s heart. Asghar Dhalani and Zahra Amir are young west Londoners, from a tight-knit but fractious east African Muslim community. They have known each other since childhood, but their families have very different approaches to the challenge of making a life in England. The Amirs pride themselves on their refinement and open-mindedness – Zahra left home to study at Cambridge, and is fond of saying things like, “it’s textbook Orientalism, Mummy”. The Dhalanis are “the most traditional of the traditional”; 19-year-old Asghar won’t eat a cheese sandwich until he’s checked it’s halal. Everyone, not least Asghar, is surprised when Zahra accepts his proposal.

The novel opens on their wedding day, and follows the progress of their “love marriage” through its first year. At first, it seems clear that they are heading for disaster. Their wedding night is a flop, despite Asghar’s frantic cribbing from an advice manual called The Making of an Islamic Marriage (“a sharia-compliant Kama Sutra”). A honeymoon in Spain heightens the tension, when Asghar befriends Tariq, a Spanish convert set on bringing back the caliphate. Zahra despairs that her new husband is “a bit of a fundo”. However, as time passes the couple inch towards mutual understanding, and it begins to seem possible that the bonds of their shared background might, after all, be enough to see them through.

…But at its core this is a book not about being British Muslim, but about the universally deep and difficult business of making a marriage work. As Zahra observes: “People talked about mixed marriages as though they only existed between people of different religions or backgrounds: but every marriage was mixed, and every one needed the same painful compromises.”

More here.

Emily Singer in Simons Foundation:

As scientists record from an increasingly large number of neurons simultaneously, they are trying to understand what structure the activity pattern takes and how that structure relates to the population’s computing power. A number of studies have suggested that neuronal populations are highly correlated, producing low-dimensional patterns of activity. That observation is somewhat surprising, because minimally correlated groups of neurons would be able to transmit more information. (For more on this, see Predicting Neural Dynamics From Connectivity and The Dimension Question: How High Does It Go?)

In the new study, Carsen Stringer and Marius Pachitariu, now researchers at the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, and previously a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher, respectively, in Harris’ lab, used two photon microscopy to simultaneously record signals from 10,000 neurons in the visual cortex of mice looking at nearly 3,000 natural images. Using a variant of principal component analysis to analyze the resulting activity, the researchers found it was neither low-dimensional nor completely uncorrelated. Rather, neuronal activity followed a power law in which each component explains a fraction of the variance of the previous component. The power law can’t simply be explained by the use of natural images, which have a power-law structure in their pixels (neighboring pixels tend to be similar). The same pattern held for white-noise stimuli.

Researchers used a branch of mathematical analysis called functional analysis to show that if the size of those dimensions decayed any slower, the code would focus more and more attention on smaller and smaller details of the stimulus, losing the big picture. In other words, the brain would no longer see the forest for the trees. Using this framework, the researchers predicted that dimensionality decays faster for simpler, lower-dimensional stimuli than for natural images. Experiments showed this is indeed the case — the slope of the power law depends on the dimensionality of the input stimuli. Harris says the approach can be applied to different types of large-scale recordings, such as place coding in the hippocampus and grid cells in the entorhinal cortex.

More here.

Rain Travel

I wake in the dark and remember
it is the morning when I must start
by myself on the journey
I lie listening to the black hour
before dawn and you are
still asleep beside me while
around us the trees full of night lean
hushed in their dream that bears
us up asleep and awake then I hear
drops falling one by one into
the sightless leaves and I
do not know when they began but
all at once there is no sound but rain
and the stream below us roaring
away into the rushing darkness

by W.S. Merwin
from The Essential W.S. Merwin
Copper Canyon Press, 2019.

Parul Sehgal in the New York Times:

The voice is instantly, almost violently recognizable — aloof, amused and melancholy. The metaphors are sparse and ordinary; the language plain, but every word load-bearing. Short sentences detonate into scenes of shocking cruelty. Even in middling translations, it is a style that cannot be subsumed; Natalia Ginzburg can only sound like herself.

Ginzburg died in 1991, celebrated as one of the great Italian writers. Her work is making its way again into the Anglophone world, encouraged, perhaps, by the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Ginzburg’s 1963 autobiographical novel, “Family Lexicon,” was published in an agile new translation by Jenny McPhee two years ago, and two other works of fiction, “The Dry Heart” and “Happiness, as Such,” have just been reissued, one in a new translation.

The family was her great obsession; it is “where everything starts,” she once said, “where the germs grow.” The families in these newly available books are petri dishes of fizzing dysfunction.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

When the last of a species disappears, it usually does so unnoticed, somewhere in the wild. Only later, when repeated searches come up empty, will researchers reluctantly acknowledge that the species must be extinct. But in rare cases like George’s, when people are caring for an animal’s last known representative, extinction—an often abstract concept—becomes painfully concrete. It happens on their watch, in real time. It leaves behind a body. When Sischo rang in the new year, Achatinella apexfulva existed. A day later, it did not. “It is happening right in front of our eyes,” he said.

Hawaii was once known for its snails, or kāhuli. Most are smaller than the average garden snail, and far more beautiful. Their shells swirl with the palette of a chocolate box—dark brown, chestnut, white, the occasional splash of mint. Sischo compares them not only to candy but also, because many live in trees, to Christmas ornaments. All of them descended from ancestral mollusks that arrived in Hawaii millions of years ago, perhaps on the bodies of birds. Those stowaways gave rise to more than 750 species—an incredible radiation that turned the snails into exemplars of evolution’s generative prowess.

But in recent decades, kāhuli have come to exemplify the opposite force: extinction.

More here.

Usha Alexander in Pangyrus:

Human beings are the type of animal that depend upon the diversity and plenitude of other life to sustain us. It’s no coincidence that our presence arrived concomitant with the richest biota the earth has ever developed. This wealth of life created the complex and flexible niche that we’ve come to fill, not only passively, as our food source, but even actively, as symbionts living on our skin and in our guts, literally as part of us. Beyond this too, our fellow living things each play their part in providing what we call “ecosystem services,” like preparing the soil, adding in nutrients, oxygenating the air and water, pollinating plants, breaking down waste, and sustaining one another in an environmental balance that supports our survival. Without them, we would have no food to eat nor air to breath.

Microbiota, fungi, plants, and other animals, including those of which we remain unaware, constitute an interdependent web of life, complex beyond our ken. This rich diversity of species is essential for maintaining this world as we know it. And to sustain resilient, adaptable populations of each kind of living thing, each must remain in great enough number and genetic variety to represent a diversity within species, as well.

More here.

Joseph Epstein at First Things:

Perhaps Stefan Zweig’s current low reputation as a storyteller is owing to his not having written a single great work of fiction of novel length, unlike his friend Joseph Roth (whom Zweig financially supported for nearly a decade) with The Radetzky March, or Ivan Goncharov with Oblomov, or Boris Pasternak with (his one novel) Dr. Zhivago. In The World of Yesterday, Zweig provides a clue to why he never wrote a great novel, and it lies in his method of composition. One of the many divisions among writers is that between those who endlessly add to their manuscripts (Balzac and Proust spring to mind) and those who cut them down. Zweig was one of the latter. Calling himself an impatient reader, suffering keenly from tedium—“anything long-winded, high-flown, or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct”—he readily took the cleaver to his own writing. (Though not everywhere: His excellent biographies of Marie Antoinette and of Balzac both come in at around four hundred pages.) “If I have mastered any kind of art,” Zweig wrote, “it is the art of leaving things out. . . . So if anything at least partly accounts for the success of my books, it is my strict discipline in preferring to confine myself to short works of literature, concentrating on the heart of the matter.” But the concision that made for popular success in his day may have hurt his reputation in ours.

more here.

Jiayang Fan at The New Yorker:

Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize. In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug. “I don’t begin with some conceit in mind. I’m just trying to tell a good story.”

The trilogy’s success has been credited with establishing sci-fi, once marginalized in China, as a mainstream taste. Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration.

more here.

Siddhartha Deb at The Paris Review:

I first came across the work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014) about a decade ago in Calcutta, after a long afternoon of wandering conversation of the kind that Bengalis call adda, a session that no doubt included numerous cups of tea, many cigarettes, much talk about books, films, and politics before peaking, in the evening, with kebabs and cheap Indian rum. These freewheeling hours of aimless mental flaneurie that make no concessions to modernity’s iron cage of productivity and self-improvement have their own usefulness. Somewhere in the course of that day, from the recommendations of my companions, I ended up buying a copy of Harbart.

The book was printed, in the manner characteristic of Bengali publishing, as an emaciated hardboard volume that resembled a pamphlet more than a hardback. Yet appearances can be deceptive, and in this case, in more ways than one. The slimness of Harbart, like the seeming fragility of its eponymous protagonist, was mere camouflage. It wasn’t a book so much as a bomb, assembled with precision and intent.

more here.

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
………………………………………….. the people of the world
…………. exactly at the moment when
………………………. they first attained the title of
……………………………………………….  ‘suffering humanity’
………..…….They writhe upon the page
……………………………………………….. in veritable rage
…………………………………………………………….. of adversity
…………..………..Heaped up
…………………………………… groaning with babies and bayonets
……………………………………………………………………… under cement skies
……………………….. In an abstract landscape of blasted trees
     …..bent statues bats wings and beaks
………slippery gibbets
………………………….cadavers and carnivorous cocks
……………………… and all the final hollering monsters
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,of the
…………………………………….‘imagination of disaster’
…………………..they are so bloody real
………………………………………………..it is as if they really still existed

……And they do

…………………….only the landscape has changed

They still are ranged along the roads
…………. plagued by legionaires
…………………………………….false windmills and demented roosters

They are the same people
………………………………….. only further from home
….. On freeways fifty lanes wide
…………………………… on a concrete continent
…………………………………… spaced with bland billboards
……………………….illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

The scene shows fewer tumbrils
………………………..but more maimed citizens
 …………………………………………… in painted cars
…………. and they have strange license plates
….and engines
…………………… that devour America

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
from A Coney Island of the Mind
New Direction Books, 1958