Jeff Dolven at Cabinet Magazine:

Consider how you hold a piece of chalk. Not by the handle: it doesn’t have one. Or, if it does, that handle is of the chalk’s own substance, flesh of its flesh, distinguishable only because it is the bit left in your hand when you can’t write anymore. A useless nub, or stub, or butt. Its persistence is a faint embarrassment, a remainder you don’t know what to do with—maybe you should stuff it in your pocket, or leave it in the tray with the erasers, or drop it on the floor and grind it into dust with your heel. It’s a waste, surely, just to throw it out. But it cannot be grafted onto another piece of chalk, not without gratuitous ingenuity, nor can it be used to hold anything else. It’s like the end of a pencil or of a filterless cigarette. Life is a midden of such abandoned handles. You didn’t even know they were handles, until they lost their grip and you were left holding them in a pinch, a pinch that can narrow, without your noticing, to contempt.

more here.

Poem

and greenhouse and topsoil and basil greens
and cowshit and snowfall and spinach knife
and woodsmoke and watering can and common thistle

and potato digger and peach trees
and poison parsnip and romaine hearts
and rockpiles and spring trilliums and ramp circles

what song of grassblade
what creak of dark rustle tree
and blueblack wind from the north

this vetch this grapevine
this waterhose this mosspatch

sunflower gardens in the lowland
dog graves between the apple trees

this fistfull of onion tops
this garlic laid silent in the barn
this green this green this green

sweet cucumber leaf
sweet yellow bean

and all this I try to make a human shape
the darkness regenerating a shadow of a limb

my tongue embraces the snap pea
and so it is sweet

how does the rusted golfcart in the chickweed
inform my daily breath

I’m sorry I want to say
to the unhearing spaces
between the dogwood trees

for my tiny little life
I have pressed into
your bruising green skin

by Lucy Walker
from Pank Magazine

Sandra Newman in The Guardian:

AK Blakemore’s second novel is inspired by the real life story of Tarare, a showman in 18th-century France who made his living by demonstrating a prodigious ability to devour things: heaps of fruit, corks, stones, live animals, offal. Born to a peasant family, by his teens he was able to eat his own weight in meat in a day and was driven from home lest he ruin his parents. He became a street performer in Paris during the revolutionary period, and in the wars that followed he was a soldier and briefly a spy.

This is clearly a tale that begs to be fictionalised, and it’s hard to think of a better writer to do it than Blakemore. Her debut, The Manningtree Witches, about the witch-hunts of 17th-century England, won the Desmond Elliott prize and was shortlisted for the Costa. It was lauded for the extravagant beauty of its language, full of wild wordplay and precise imagery, and her vision of the period felt both accurate and vividly new, in the manner of the greatest historical fiction. Blakemore and Tarare seem like an unbeatable combination.

Indeed, The Glutton is remarkable for its beautiful language, for its hallucinatory imagery, and for its ability to mingle these things with the world of 18th-century poor folk.

More here.

Malmesbury at Telescopic Turnip:

It’s pretty clear that, on a direct one-v-one cage match, an asexual organism would have much better fitness than a similarly-shaped sexual organism. And yet, all the macroscopic species, including ourselves, do it. What gives?

Here is the secret: yes, sex is indeed bad for reproduction. It does not improve an individual’s reproductive fitness. The reason it still took over the macroscopic world is that evolution does not simply select for reproductive fitness.

Instead, the evolution of sexual dimorphism is a long sequence of strange traps, ratchets and outer-world eldritch cosmic forces that made it somehow inevitable. So let’s talk about those things your parents never told you about.

More here.

Yascha Mounk in the New York Times:

Mr. Trump and others on the right deride the new norms as “woke,” a term with strongly pejorative connotations. I prefer a more neutral phrase, which emphasizes that this ideology focuses on the role that groups play in society and draws on a variety of intellectual influences such as postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory: the “identity synthesis.”

Does it make sense to speak out against the well-intentioned, if wrongheaded, ideas that are circulating in progressive circles at a time when Mr. Trump retains a serious chance of winning back the White House? Is there a way to oppose such practices without turning a blind eye to genuine discrimination or falling for conspiracy theories? In short: Is it possible to argue against the identity synthesis without falling into the reactionary trap?

Yes, yes and yes.

More here.

Charon Collier in Newsweek:

In the quiet corner of a dimly lit hospice room, I stood beside my friend Diane and her son Hans, also one of my dearest friends, who was journeying home. I told Diane to rest as she moved over, and I continued holding Hans’ hand, as I watched Diane rest. The room was filled with a sense of peace and acceptance. At this moment, I realized I was no longer a hospice volunteer. I was living my purpose as a death doula, accompanying souls as they gracefully depart this world. My death doula journey began several years ago when I started as a hospice volunteer. I had no experience in end-of-life care, but I did possess a strong desire to become a better human being.

I recognized that there were people in the world facing much greater challenges than I was. I was young, healthy, educated, and had a decent income. It was in this moment of reflection that I realized how grateful I was for my life and how I could contribute to making the world a better place while shifting the focus away from myself.

More here.

Benji Jones in Vox:

With giant pincers and rough, spider-like legs, Caribbean king crabs don’t look like your typical heroes. Yet these crustaceans may be key to solving one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems: the decline of coral reefs. In recent decades, warming seas, diseases, and other threats have wiped out half of the world’s corals and 90 percent of those in Florida. And this past summer, the problem accelerated. A devastating heat wave struck the Caribbean, pushing the reef in the Florida Keys — the largest in the continental US — closer to the brink of collapse. The decline of coral reefs is an enormous problem for wildlife and human communities. Reefs not only provide habitat for as much as a quarter of all marine life, including commercial fish, but they also help safeguard coastal communities during severe storms. Simply put, we need coral reefs.

Coral reefs, meanwhile, need crabs.

Lucky for them, help is on the way. Scientists are in the process of building a crab army — hundreds of thousands of crustaceans strong — that they’ll unleash on Florida’s reefs, giving this ailing ecosystem a tool to fight back.

More here.

Charlotte Shane at Bookforum:

BRIAN WILSON HAS BEEN DEAF IN HIS RIGHT EAR since childhood. He mixed the Beach Boys’ albums, including Pet Sounds, in mono because he couldn’t hear them any other way. “It was sort of like being robbed of something, some pleasure of life,” he said in 1976. “I’m not complaining, but it’s a little bit of a setback.” I think the deafness might explain why the left side of his mouth reaches up when he speaks, like he’s addressing his good ear. (The affect has become more pronounced with age, but it’s visible in footage from the 1960s.) “I got one ear left and your big loud voice is killin’ it,” Brian yelled at his father and former band manager, Murry Wilson, during 1965’s “Help Me, Rhonda” recording session. Murry, drunk but not untrue to his sober form, had been berating the guys for almost forty minutes as they tried to get down the vocals.

While Brian’s hearing loss is undisputed, its cause has never been confirmed. In his second, most recent autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, Brian says another kid hit him in the head with a lead pipe.

more here.

Anthony Cummins at Literary Review:

Zadie Smith’s first historical novel spins a tangled web around the knotty case of the Tichborne claimant, a long-running legal saga that divided Victorian Britain. The book’s title, The Fraud, ostensibly refers to Arthur Orton, a butcher who, in 1866, claimed (falsely, in the eyes of the law) that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, an aristocratic heir long presumed lost at sea. Yet in Smith’s crowded narrative – crafted to imply that the much-debated phenomena of polarisation and disinformation are hardly new – the frauds multiply, the titular slur clinging to everything from writing novels (for Smith, always a suspicious enterprise) to neoliberal economics.

Orton’s case serves largely as a backdrop for emotional drama in the household of another real-life figure, William Harrison Ainsworth, a contemporaneous author of bestselling potboilers who is now forgotten and, the novel shows, fell into neglect in his own lifetime, overshadowed by Charles Dickens and even reckoned by one of his publishers to have died before he actually did.

more here.

Racists

Vas en Afrique! Back to Africa! The butcher we used to patronize in the
…… Rue Cadet market,
beside himself, shrieked at a black man in an argument the rest of the
…… import of which I missed
but that made me anyway for three years walk an extra street to a shop
…… of definitely lower quality
until I convinced myself that probably I’d misunderstood that other thing
…… and could come back.
Today another black man stopped, asking something that again I didn’t
…… catch, and the butcher,
who at the moment was unloading his rotisserie, slipping the chickens
…… off their heavy spit,
as he answered—how to get this right?—casually but accurately brandished
…… the still-hot metal,
so the other, whatever he was there for, had subtly to lean away a little,
…… so as not to flinch.

by C.K. Williams
from Selected Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994

Vauhini Vara in Wired:

One night, with anxiety and anticipation, I went to GPT-3 with this sentence: “My sister was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma when I was in my freshman year of high school and she was in her junior year.”

GPT-3 picked up where my sentence left off, and out tumbled an essay in which my sister ended up cured. Its last line gutted me: “She’s doing great now.” I realized I needed to explain to the AI that my sister had died, and so I tried again, adding the fact of her death, the fact of my grief. This time, GPT-3 acknowledged the loss. Then, it turned me into a runner raising funds for a cancer organization and went off on a tangent about my athletic life.

I tried again and again. Each time, I deleted the AI’s text and added to what I’d written before, asking GPT-3 to pick up the thread later in the story. At first it kept failing. And then, on the fourth or fifth attempt, something shifted. The AI began describing grief in language that felt truer—and with each subsequent attempt, it got closer to describing what I’d gone through myself.

When the essay, called “Ghosts,” came out in The Believer in the summer of 2021, it quickly went viral. I started hearing from others who had lost loved ones and felt that the piece captured grief better than anything they’d ever read. I waited for the backlash, expecting people to criticize the publication of an AI-assisted piece of writing. It never came. Instead the essay was adapted for This American Life and anthologized in Best American Essays. It was better received, by far, than anything else I’d ever written.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Biological organisms are paradigmatic emergent systems. That atoms of which they are made mindlessly obey the local laws of physics; even cells and organs do their individual jobs without explicitly understanding the larger whole of which they are a part. And yet the system as a whole functions beautifully, with apparent purpose and function. How do the small parts come together to form the greater whole? I talk with biophysicist Rosemary Braun about what we’re learning about collective behavior within organisms from the modern era of huge biological datasets, especially crucial aspects like timekeeping (with bonus implications for dealing with jet lag).

More here.

Kristen Arnett at Vox:

There’s a game people like to play online. In fact, there’s an entire website dedicated to it. It’s called the “Florida Man Birthday Challenge” and the premise is simple enough: You type your birthday into the site’s search bar — month, date — along with the words “FLORIDA MAN.” Whatever headline pops up becomes your official intro into the Florida Man historical record. When I type my own birthday on the site (December 16th, Sagittarius Sun), I discover that a naked Florida man once stole a pickup truck from a car dealership. That’s right. Simply walked into the dealership, fully nude, and then climbed inside a 2021 model Ram pickup and promptly drove off.

More here.

Jamie Ducharme in Time:

The night before my first book came out, I lay awake envisioning all the ways it could ruin my life. What if I get sued because I made a mistake? What if I get harassed online? What if I get such bad reviews I never work in journalism again?

I’d spent the past 18 months obsessing over the project, thinking about it on a loop. I often struggled to sleep, ruminating over all the ways it might fall short. I started seeing a therapist for the first time in my life. My career was at its high point, and I had accomplished a dream so big I’d never actually thought it would come true, but my mental health had never been worse.

More here.

Nicole Jones in Nature:

This June, in the political battle leading up to the 2024 US presidential primaries, a series of images were released showing Donald Trump embracing one of his former medical advisers, Anthony Fauci. In a few of the shots, Trump is captured awkwardly kissing the face of Fauci, a health official reviled by some US conservatives for promoting masking and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was obvious” that they were fakes, says Hany Farid, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of many specialists who examined the pictures. On close inspection of three of the photos, Trump’s hair is strangely blurred, the text in the background is nonsensical, the arms and hands are unnaturally placed and the details of Trump’s visible ear are not right. All are hallmarks — for now — of generative artificial intelligence (AI), also called synthetic AI.

More here.

Samuel Fury Childs Daly at the LARB:

Despite his Yale education and his patrician tone, Barney has a working-class sensibility; watch an interview with him and you’ll see someone who speaks like an academic but dresses like a teamster. This means that Barney cuts an unusual figure in the art world. He is thoroughly a jock, and his work is so unapologetically macho that describing it can sound like parody. A “cycle” of films named after part of the scrotum? A six-hour opera about Norman Mailer? This is art by, for, and about men, even though the machismo is more mottled than it might appear at first glance.

The scenes Barney stages can be so repellent that they end up being strangely beautiful (one scatological moment from 2014’s River of Fundament will be with me forever), or so reactionary that they come full circle and become radical. Barney celebrates, and seems to revel in, the rites and emblems of a traditional masculinity that is today almost universally pathologized—especially among people who tend to work in art galleries.

more here.