“Wrecked is the ship of pearl!”
…………..– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nautilus: An Ode

I fantasize about inhabiting a nautilus, how each chamber
is bigger than the last, how the shell, when seawater
leaves a chamber, achieves
weightlessness,

how I could put down barriers like the creature,
how unoccupied spaces could grow, or how, in buoyant
separate rooms, we could find ourselves again
floating,

but we were so dissimilar in our turning, spiraling
away, so I have left you behind, wall by wall.
(No need to go back to our spira mirabilis.)
At great depths,

the shell implodes: I’m not going any deeper.
Inside now I, too, am nacre, mother
of pearl. Even if I crack, I isolate the fissure.
That’s how I could outgrow a shell, crawl its corridors,

feel my way through the smooth walls until suddenly—
light

(I am defenseless, but I am no longer inhabiting dread.)

by Elinor Ann Walker
from Plume Magazine

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In more than 1,500 animal species, from crickets and sea urchins to bottlenose dolphins and bonobos, scientists have observed sexual encounters between members of the same sex. Some researchers have proposed that this behavior has existed since the dawn of the animal kingdom. But the authors of a new study of thousands of mammalian species paint a different picture, arguing that same-sex sexual behavior evolved when mammals started living in social groups. Although the behavior does not produce offspring to carry on the animals’ genes, it could offer other evolutionary advantages, such as smoothing over conflicts, the researchers proposed.

“It may contribute to establishing and maintaining positive social relationships,” said José Gómez, an evolutionary biologist at the Experimental Station of Arid Zones in Almería, Spain, and an author of the new study. But Dr. Gómez cautioned that the study, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, could not shed much light on sexual orientation in humans. “The type of same-sex sexual behavior we have used in our analysis is so different from that observed in humans that our study is unable to provide an explanation for its expression today,” he said.

More here.

Mark Johnson in The Washington Post:

Lee Braver at IAI News:

Few philosophers have given rise to an entire movement, far fewer to two. Along with Heidegger, Wittgenstein counts among this select number in the 20th Century. Wittgenstein capped his early career with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a dense cryptic book whose truth he found “unassailable and definitive” in finding “on all essential points, the final solution of the problems” (T Preface)–until he came back years later to assail its solutions. He returned to give not just different solutions, but an entirely different take on the nature of knowledge, reality, and what philosophical views about such matters must be like. These two phases of his thought shaped much of roughly the first half of analytic philosophy’s history. The Tractatus brings Frege, Russell, and Moore’s logicism to its culmination and inspired the Vienna Circle. His later work, generally represented by the posthumous Philosophical Investigations, is a foundational work of the ordinary language philosophy practiced by Austin and Ryle and, despite his personal hostility to naturalism, contains elements that pushed analytic thought in that direction where Quine and others then took over. One of the central topics Wittgenstein changed his mind about was on the question of realism – whether we can know the world as it really is and whether our language can map onto reality.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Our planet and its environment are in bad shape, in all sorts of ways. Those of us who want to improve the situation face a dilemma. On the one hand, we have to be forceful and clear-headed about how the bad the situation actually is. On the other, we don’t want to give the impression that things are so bad that it’s hopeless. That could — and, empirically, does — give people the impression that there’s no point in working to make things better. Hannah Ritchie is an environmental researcher at Our World in Data who wants to thread this needle: things are bad, but there are ways we can work to make them better.

More here.

Yiftach Ofek in The Hedgehog Review:

The recent death of Milan Kundera brought me back to the fall of 2006, to the aftermath of what we Israelis call the Second Lebanon War, when I first read his work.

It was the first year of my military service as a junior spokesman to the foreign press. And like much of the Israeli population, I was angry and confused. What began as a limited military operation quickly escalated into an all-out conflict with what turned out to be a well-armed, well-trained, and well-funded militia. The Israel Defense Forces, too accustomed to the relative low intensity that characterized the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, was caught radically underprepared. Cities as far from the northern border as Haifa were targeted daily. The government responded with weakness and hesitation, or so it seemed at the time.

Experts say we did not lose that war. But it felt as though we did.

It was then that I picked up The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book I had intended to read for some time. It provided the perfect antidote to my personal and existential malaise.

More here.

Nora Claire Miller at The Paris Review:

As the owner of fifty lava lamps, I felt validated when I found out about Cloudflare’s wall. I bought all the lamps within a six-month span I now refer to as my “lava period.” It started when I broke my lava lamp of eight years by leaving it on for two weeks. The lamp had survived the dumpster I found it in, and two cross-country moves, but it couldn’t endure its own heat. Many things went wrong at once: the wax (the “lava,” the substance that moves) started sticking to the glass, the liquid lost its color, and the spring that sat at the base of the globe broke into pieces. Little bits of metal bobbed at the surface, as though drowning and reaching up for help.

Bereft, I went on the internet, where I quickly learned that we were in the midst of a lava lamp shortage. It was 2022 and Schylling, the leading U.S. manufacturer of lava lamps, had temporarily shut down the LAVA® online store, citing supply chain issues.

more here.

Sue Prideaux at Literary Review:

You long for sublime artists to be sublime people. Or, if they’re bad, to be magnificently so. Possessing ‘a vanity born of supreme egoism’, Claude Monet ‘believed his art conferred a right to good living’ and that ‘his welfare must be … the immediate concern of others’, writes Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times. With great honesty, Wullschläger records her subject’s wearisome scrounging letters and his propensity for petty and often pointless mendacity. At the end of his life, when he was earning millions, he at last became generous with money. We chafe at his domestic tyranny, but that was par for the course at the time. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, and we’d forgive Monet a lot more than this for his divine art. 

Born in 1840, the petted son of a prosperous family who disdained the arts, Monet grew up in Le Havre.

more here.

Allie Volpe in Vox:

Oversharing in conversation is nothing new. Throughout thousands of years of social interaction, people have divulged certain secrets, vulnerabilities, and desires to perhaps the wrong listener, with results ranging from mild embarrassment to shattered reputations. Thanks to social media, the ability to make these confessions to a potentially much wider audience is easier than ever.

What isn’t as straightforward is defining what constitutes oversharing online. Each platform has its specific norms and users who have their own opinions on what content they consider too cringe or vulnerable for public consumption. For instance, when people express negative emotions on Facebook, it doesn’t seem so out of place, according to a 2017 study. On the contrary, Instagram is where users expect to see positive content — albeit content that isn’t particularly authentic. One study, from 2021, suggests the norms on TikTok empower users to embrace both difficult and positive experiences when they post.

More here.

The Pitchfork

Of all the implements, the pitchfork was the one
that came near to an imagined perfection:
When he tightened his raised hand and aimed with it,
It felt like a javelin, accurate and light.

So weather he played the warrior or the athlete
Or worked in earnest in the chaff and sweat,
He loved its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash
Grown satiny from its own natural polish.

Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain,
Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.
Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.
The springiness, the clip and dart of it.

And then when he thought of probes that reached the farthest,
He would see the shaft of a pitchfork sailing past
Evenly, imperturbably through space,
Its prongs starlit and absolutely soundless—

But has learned at last to follow that simple lead
Past its own aim, out to another side
Where perfection—or nearness to it—is imagined
Not in the aiming but the opening hand.

by Seamus Heaney
from Seeing Things
The Noonday Press, 1991

Elie Dolgin in Nature:

RNA-based vaccines were the heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic. They set records for the highest-grossing drug launches in history, and their development was recognized in this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But it was long known that this technology had a key shortcoming: RNA, in its usual linear form, is short-lived. Within hours, enzymes in cells descend on the molecule, chewing it to pieces. RNA’s fleeting nature isn’t a big problem for a vaccine: it needs to encode proteins only for a short time to trigger an immune response. But for most therapeutic applications, it would be much better to have RNA that could stick around for longer.

That’s where circular RNAs, or circRNAs, come in. Tie the ends of an RNA transcript together, and many RNA-munching enzymes have nothing to sink their teeth into. As a ring, RNA gains stability and longevity that, in theory, could increase its therapeutic potential, even at low dose levels. “With a single delivery, you can get quite durable protein production,” says Howard Chang, a molecular geneticist at Stanford University School of Medicine in California and a scientific co-founder of Orbital Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts — one of the dozen or more biotechnology firms that are now pursuing therapeutics based on engineered circular RNA. These biotech firms have collectively raised well in excess of US$1 billion in venture-capital funding over the past three years, and many big pharmaceutical companies are now dabbling in the technology as well. They are driven by the belief that whatever linear RNA can do, its more resilient circular counterpart can do better.

More here.

James Brown in the Public Domain Review:

In 1751, the engraver and satirist William Hogarth created Gin Lane, his celebrated visual retrospective about the devastating effects of this newfangled spirit on the lives of London’s poor. The print, a companion piece to Beer Street, offers a harrowing panorama of poverty, addiction, insanity, violence, infanticide, and suicide; the only people and institutions who thrive amongst the mayhem and despair are an undertaker, “Gripe” the pawnbroker, and the two purveyors of the “deadly draught”: a cellar gin shop and “Kilman” the distiller. In the words of Hogarth’s most recent biographer, Gin Lane’s “racked scene of dissolution . . . imprints itself indelibly on the mind”.¹ Derivatives are beloved of political cartoonists, and so frequent and dependable is its appearance at academic conferences on alcohol history that a “gin lane klaxon” is scurrilously sounded on social media. However grotesquely transfixing the image, its dominance within both the history of alcohol and art has occluded a wider and subtler range of representations of gin and the environments in which it was consumed, which flourished across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

More here.

Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

One summer’s day in 1976, the philosopher Daniel Dennett was driving along the Massachusetts turnpike when he had a disquieting thought. “If somehow my brain were moved into my chest cavity without destroying any connectivity, wouldn’t I still think my mind was right behind my eyes and between my ears?” Perhaps he could be decapitated and still be a professor of philosophy.

By the time he reached Poughkeepsie in New York state, Dennett recalls in his paradoxically engaging and annoying memoir, this thought experiment had become even wilder. What if his brain was kept alive in a vat connected to his body with radio links? Would his mind be in the vat? Bewitched by the possibility, he gave university talks in which he, like some philosophical PT Barnum, would toggle a switch on a metal box with a radio antenna and tried to convince his audience that he was being controlled by his remote brain.

The 1970s was the decade in which nutty professors such as Dennett regularly dreamed up thought experiments to explore the limits of what it is to be human.

More here.

Virginia Heffernan in Wired:

Maybe AI that aims to seem human is best understood as a tribute act. A tribute to human neediness, caprice, bitterness, love, all the stuff we mortals do best. All that stuff at which machines typically draw a blank. But humans have a dread fear of nonhumans passing as the real thing—replicants, lizard people, robots with skin. An entity that feigns human emotions is arguably a worse object of affection than a cold, computational device that doesn’t emote at all.

More here.