Gregory T. Clark at The New Criterion:

Over the course of the thirty years that I taught art history to college undergraduates, introducing my students to the manuscript illuminations and panel paintings of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck always gave me an especial pleasure. I wanted my students to share in my wonderment at Jan’s seemingly effortless ability to present nature rather than represent it, right down to the most infinitesimal details, without compromising the integrity of the whole, his powers of observation complemented by an uncanny ability to capture light, texture, and atmosphere.

The earliest surviving works of Jan—who is thought to have been born around 1390 in Maaseyck, modern-day Belgium—date to the first lustrum of the 1420s. In 1425, he was appointed court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, whose empire then comprised almost the entirety of the Low Countries and a large wedge of northeastern France together with his home duchy of Burgundy and the contiguous Franche-Comté (Free County) to the east.

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Erica Wagner at the New Statesman:

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.” So begins City of Glass, the first book in what became Paul Auster’s acclaimed New York Trilogy. Published in 1985, it marked the arrival of a truly unique voice in fiction, one quite distinct from many of the currents in American writing at the time. This was not the minimalism of Raymond Carver, or the expansiveness of Tom Wolfe; this was work much more connected to the traditions of European literature in which Auster was steeped. Paul Auster, who has died at the age of 77 in Brooklyn – where he lived his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt – leaves a lasting and distinctive legacy in English-language literature.

City of Glass, in which a writer of detective fiction is pulled both into and away from “the real world”, or the world at least as he has perceived it, reads like a mystery, but the real mystery at its heart is one of identity and the role that chance plays in all our lives. These issues would echo throughout Auster’s work, in novels such as Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990) and The Book of Illusions (2002).

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Jen Silverman in The New York Times:

When I was in college, I came across “The Sea and Poison,” a 1950s novel by Shusaku Endo. It tells the story of a doctor in postwar Japan who, as an intern years earlier, participated in a vivisection experiment on an American prisoner. Endo’s lens on the story is not the easiest one, ethically speaking; he doesn’t dwell on the suffering of the victim. Instead, he chooses to explore a more unsettling element: the humanity of the perpetrators.

When I say “humanity” I mean their confusion, self-justifications and willingness to lie to themselves. Atrocity doesn’t just come out of evil, Endo was saying, it emerges from self-interest, timidity, apathy and the desire for status. His novel showed me how, in the right crucible of social pressures, I, too, might delude myself into making a choice from which an atrocity results. Perhaps this is why the book has haunted me for nearly two decades, such that I’ve read it multiple times.

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Honeymoon Flight

Below, the patchwork earth, dark hems of hedge,
The long grey tapes of road that bind and loose
Villages and fields in casual marriages:
We bank above the small lough and farmhouse

And the sure green world goes topsy-turvy
As we climb out of our familiar landscape.
The engine noises change. You look at me.
The coastline slips away behind the wing-tip.

And launched right off the earth by force of fire,
We hang, miraculous, above the water,
Dependent upon the invisible air
To keep us airborne and to bring us further.

Ahead of us the sky’s a geyser now.
A calm voice talks of cloud yet we feel lost.
Air-pockets jolt our fears and down we go.
Travellers, at this point, can only trust.

by Seamus Heaney
from Death of a Naturalist
Faber and Faber, 1966

Erik Baker in the Boston Review:

One of the courses I teach is called “Science, Activism, and Political Conflict,” and one of my ambitions with that course is to show students that both of these things—activism and political conflict—are normal in science, and in academic life more generally. That’s a theme that we like to emphasize when speaking in “defense” of student protest. It’s part of a storied tradition, it’s respectable, it’s normal. But in order to explain why I think what you all are doing is so important, I want to start today by saying that actually, student protest is nowhere near normal enough in the history of higher education in this country. The real scandal is not that there has been student protest. It is that there has not been much, much more of it.

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Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:

An artificial intelligence system has proven it can save lives by warning physicians to check on patients whose heart test results indicate a high risk of dying. In a randomised clinical trial with almost 16,000 patients at two hospitals, the AI reduced overall deaths among high-risk patients by 31 per cent.

“This is actually quite extraordinary,” says Eric Topol at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, who was not involved in the research. “It’s very rare for any medication to [produce] a 31 per cent reduction in mortality, and then even more rare for a non-drug – this is just monitoring people with AI.”

More here.

Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability By Numbers:

A Moloch Trap is, in simple terms, a zero-sum game. It explains a situation where participants compete for object or outcome X but make something else worse in the process. Everyone competes for X, but in doing so, everyone ends up worse off.

It explains the situations with externalities or the preference for short-term gains at the sacrifice of the long-term future.

The problem is that it’s incredibly hard for any “player” to break the trap. If they do, they will lose out in the short term (and they might still be exposed to the downsides in the long term). Everyone is stuck in a “game” or “race” that they don’t want to be in, but it’s impossible to stop.

More here.

KC Hoard at The Walrus:

Court and Spark starts in a familiar Jonian fashion: mournful piano chords, poetic lyrics, Mitchell’s skyscraper voice. “Love came to my door with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul,” she coos. “He thought for sure I’d seen him dancing in a river in the dark, looking for a woman to court and spark.” But when she unfurls the title of the album, something unexpected appears: a stuttering hi-hat. A beat in a Joni Mitchell song. And with that rhythm, the Joni of the past was gone. Joni the Confessional Poet, Joni the Selfish and Sad, Joni the Lonely Painter was no more.

By 1974, Mitchell had grown tired of her old style. “I feel miscast in some of the songs that I wrote as a younger woman,” she told CBC Radio a couple weeks after Court and Spark’s release. “You know, you wouldn’t ask Picasso to go back and paint from his Blue Period.” She was done playing the starry-eyed hippie. She was tired of singing dirges. She wanted to find new, challenging, exciting ways to write pop music.

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Jackson Arn at The New Yorker:

Many other fine pieces in the Central Exhibition are textile-based: a dense, earthy slab of threads by the Colombian Olga de Amaral, who turns ninety-two this year; a selection of embroidered burlap pieces by the anonymous Chileans known as Arpilleristas; large, cool compositions by Susanne Wenger, who spent most of her long life in Nigeria, practicing the Yoruba religion and mastering batik, the art of wax-resist dyeing. Her pieces, which show mortals and deities floating side by side, stick to the same spiky patterns and subdued hues but never retrace their steps; you could imagine them continuing forever, and might well want them to. If not, walk a few feet to the exhibition’s other main batik specialist, Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá, who passed away in 2021. His creations are as religiously inclined as Wenger’s—he was her adopted son—but with a livelier clamor of bodies pressed together. There’s almost too much to savor; the intricate coloring, combined with pale spiderweb shading, gives the figures a pimpled texture I can’t remember seeing in art before and now can’t stop noticing everywhere. Àjàlá, Wenger, and the rest of the fibre brigade may be the snappiest retort to the gripe that there are too many dead artists this year: when we’re dealing with textiles, one of the oldest visual art forms and still backlogged with brilliance, the distinction between new and old stops mattering so much. Good is good, even if it takes decades for anyone to notice.

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Emily Joshu in Eating well:

Chances are, if you have put on a few pounds, the cause is deeper than eating too much junk food or skipping one too many workouts. Chronic, low-grade inflammation that swells in the body is to blame for this gain. And the relationship is cyclical. Weight and inflammation go hand in hand, and working to maintain a healthy weight through diet, exercise, sleep and stress management can help tame inflammatory markers as well.

Inflammation, however, comes in two varieties: acute and chronic. Most of us are accustomed to acute inflammation, such as after sustaining an injury. This temporary response doesn’t serve as a catalyst for serious health conditions but actually protects the body.

Chronic inflammation manifests as a slow burn in the body. “Inflammation is designed so once your body needs some healing, inflammation rushes in, but it’s only supposed to be short term. Chronic inflammation is more subtle, and it’s caused by irritation in the body,” says Carolyn Williams, Ph.D., R.D., author of Meals That Heal. “And that may be environmental things, that may be food-related things, that may be stress, that may be lack of sleep. Just about any kind of irritation to the body can trigger subtle inflammation.” Williams compares chronic inflammation to a fire in the body that will continue to grow without intervention. Research suggests that reducing chronic, low-grade inflammation may even be as crucial a component as diet and activity, Williams says. And the relationship goes both ways.

More here.

Refugee

The day, Mubarak Ali
Trailing his father
Traversing the lanes of Tonk
In Rajasthan
Boarded the train for Karachi
It rained heavily

All that rain
Mubarak Ali
Hoarded in his tiny hands
And carried with him
He felt as if nowhere else
The water would be as sweet

Time passed
Mubarak Ali prospered
Became a father himself
But continued drinking the same water
That he had hoarded and carried with him

Then, one day
That water ran low
Mubarak Ali returned to Tonk
This time
He was met in the lanes
With blistering heat
Heat and drought

It had not rained in Tonk this time

by Harbans Mukhia
from Kuchh Udaas Nazmein [Some Sad Poems]
Published by Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind), New Delhi
Translation: Anjum Altaf
Forthcoming April 2024, ISBN : 978-81-970897-3-2
Price Rs. 300

Mubarak Ali is a renowned and highly respected historian in Pakistan.
Biographical information for Professor Harbans Mukhia is here.

Original Urdu @ More

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The Trans Haggadah Companion

On this night
……….. I remember Nachshon
……….. who was not Moses who
………………….. walked into the Red Sea
………………….. and called for God
………………………………………..  to meet him there
On this night
………….I am only a body and you
………………………………………….. are only a body
On this night
………………….. nothing is hidden
….. ………………only the afikomen
On this night
…………… ……..God was here and I
……………………………………………………. I knew it

by Bev Yockelson
from Poetry, February 2019

afikomen: The origin of the term is obscure.
a plausible explanation is that it comes from a
Greek word for dessert.

Ed Yong in the New York Times:

In some birding circles, people say that anyone who looks at birds is a birder — a kind, inclusive sentiment that overlooks the forces that create and shape subcultures. Anyone can dance, but not everyone would identify as a dancer, because the term suggests, if not skill, then at least effort and intent. Similarly, I’ve cared about birds and other animals for my entire life, and I’ve written about them throughout my two decades as a science writer, but I mark the moment when I specifically chose to devote time and energy to them as the moment I became a birder.

Since then, my birder derangement syndrome has progressed at an alarming pace.

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Rahul Rao in Scientific American:

Few computer science breakthroughs have done so much in so little time as the artificial intelligence design known as a transformer. A transformer is a form of deep learning—a machine model based on networks in the brain—that researchers at Google first proposed in 2017. Seven years later the transformer, which enables ChatGPT and other chatbots to quickly generate sophisticated outputs in reply to user prompts, is the dynamo powering the ongoing AI boom. As remarkable as this AI design has already proved to be, what if you could run it on a quantum computer?

That might sound like some breathless mash-up proposed by an excitable tech investor. But quantum-computing researchers are now in fact asking this very question out of sheer curiosity and the relentless desire to make computers do new things. A new study published recently in Quantum used simple hardware to show that rudimentary quantum transformers could indeed work, hinting that more developed quantum-AI combinations might solve crucial problems in areas including encryption and chemistry—at least in theory.

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Joseph E. Stiglitz at Literary Hub:

The system that evolved in the last quarter of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic came to be called neoliberalism. “Liberal” refers to being “free,” in this context, free of government intervention including regulations. The “neo” meant to suggest that there was something new in it; in reality, it was little different from the liberalism and laissez-­faire doctrines of the nineteenth century that advised: “leave it to the market.”

Indeed, those ideas held such sway even into the twentieth century that, decades earlier, the dominant economists had said “do nothing” in response to the Great Depression. They believed the market would restore itself relatively quickly as long as the government didn’t fiddle around and mess things up.

What really was new was the trick of claiming neoliberalism stripped away rules when much of what it was doing was imposing new rules that favored banks and the wealthy.

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Daniel Bessner in Harper’s Magazine:

In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film. Smith was looking for a job in television. She had an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and had lived and worked as a playwright in New York City for years—two of her productions garnered positive reviews in the Times. But playwriting had begun to feel like a vanity project: to pay rent, she’d worked as a nanny, a transcriptionist, an administrative assistant, and more. There seemed to be no viable financial future in theater, nor in academia, the other world where she supposed she could make inroads.

For several years, her friends and colleagues had been absconding for Los Angeles, and were finding success. This was the second decade of prestige television: the era of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Girls. TV had become a place for sharp wit, singular voices, people with vision—and they were getting paid. It took a year and a half, but Smith eventually landed a spot as a staff writer on HBO’s The Newsroom, and then as a story editor on Showtime’s The Affair in 2015.

More here.