Chrissie Giles in mosaic:

“She kept saying to me, ‘It’s going to be fine, isn’t it?’ And I’m saying, ‘We’ll do everything we can, let’s just do a few tests and figure out what’s going on.’ At that stage in my mind, I knew it was bad, but I still had to figure out exactly what flavour of bad it was.”

The woman was anxious to be home on New Year’s Eve to make a call to family overseas. But blood tests confirmed that she’d need to stay.

“She said to me, ‘Tell me the worst-case scenario.’ I looked at her. She looked at me. And in my mind I was thinking, ‘She’s not ready for this diagnosis.’ Then her relative stepped in and she said, ‘No, no, she means what’s the worst-case scenario in terms of how long does she have to stay in hospital?’

“At that moment, you realise that we all know exactly what we’re talking about, but we’re all accepting it to different degrees.”

Read the full piece here.

Stephanie Barbe Hammer in The Nervous Breakdown:

For Alan Dann

A woman came up to me in Bloomingdales and said she liked my glasses and I told her where to get them and she said, “what do you think I am — a millionaire?” and stomped off.

A woman came up to me in grad school and said she wished she was as smart as I was and I told her where to find the good theory books at the library and she said “what do you think I am — stupid or something?” and threw down her copy of Derrida’s On Grammatology and stomped off.

A woman came up to me in the airport in Montpellier and said “Ce livre — De La Grammatologie par Derrida – c’est à vous?” and I told her I had picked it up off the ground in North Carolina, and the woman said “Quoi? Vous êtes un connard Americain?” and lit a Gauloise and stomped off.

A woman came up to me in the hospital and said “this is your baby,” and I took the baby, but she said, “I can tell already you’re a terrible mother,” and threw the baby blankets at my husband and stomped off.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

McGill University researchers have identified a network of neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex of the brain that interact with one another to enable us to quickly filter visual information while ignoring distractions. The discovery could have far-reaching implications for people who suffer from diseases such as autism, ADHD, and schizophrenia and for brain-mind interface devices. Our ability to pay attention to certain things while ignoring distractions determines how good we are at a given task, whether it is driving a car or doing brain surgery.

Predicting where a monkey will look next

The researchers recorded brain activity in macaque monkeys as they moved their eyes to look at objects being displayed on a computer screen while ignoring visual distractions. These recorded signals were then input into a decoder (running on a computer) that mimicked the kinds of computations performed by the brain as it focuses. There were some startling results. “The decoder was able to predict very consistently and within a few milliseconds where the macaques were covertly focusing attention even before they looked in that direction,” says Julio Martinez-Trujillo, of McGill’s Department of Physiology and the lead author of the paper. “We were also able to predict whether the monkey would be distracted by some intrusive stimulus even before the onset of that distraction.”

More here.

Mujib Mashal in Bloomberg Businessweek:

In a few minutes we reach the compound of the 1st Battalion 9th Marines—“The Walking Dead,” as a yellow logo proclaims inside one of its rooms. The U.S. Marines packed up a year ago, and all that’s left is a series of shipping-container offices that once housed U.S. Agency for International Development contractors. The desks and furniture are locked inside; the windows are covered in dust and cobwebs. But when the Marines ruled Nawa—the district governor’s office was within their compound—the Americans started Matie on his road to prosperity. In the U.S., wartime contracting is often associated with such names as Blackwater (now known as Academi), DynCorp International, Triple Canopy, and others, but on the ground in Afghanistan, the Pentagon depended on a small army of locals. And as hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money poured into the country, it created a new class of wealthy, entrepreneurial Afghans.

The October 2001 U.S.-led invasion and the subsequent allied military campaigns transformed the country. At the end of 2014, however, as the American troop presence draws down to 10,000 from a height of 98,000, it’s becoming clear that the U.S. dollar has reshaped Afghanistan even more than the military did. In private, U.S. officials admit they don’t know how much they’ve spent on the Afghan war. Independent analysts estimate its cost at about $1.6 trillion—factoring in inflation and long-term care for veterans. The money found its way not just into the hands of ruthless oligarchs, as in post-Soviet Russia, but also into those of teachers, translators, restaurant owners, and drivers who tapped into the gusher of cash to become millionaires and multimillionaires.

Read the rest here.

Philip Ball in Nautilus:

Is the natural world creative? Just take a look around it. Look at the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, the diverse pattern and shape of leaves, the cunning stratagems of microbes, the dazzling profusion of climbing, crawling, flying, swimming things. Look at the “grandeur” of life, the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” as Darwin put it. Isn’t that enough to persuade you?

Ah, but isn’t all this wonder simply the product of the blind fumbling of Darwinian evolution, that mindless machine which takes random variation and sieves it by natural selection? Well, not quite. You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive. “Darwin’s theory surely is the most important intellectual achievement of his time, perhaps of all time,” says evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner of the University of Zurich. “But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded his theory. And he couldn’t even get close to solving it.”

What Wagner is talking about is how evolution innovates: as he puts it, “how the living world creates.” Natural selection supplies an incredibly powerful way of pruning variation into effective solutions to the challenges of the environment. But it can’t explain where all that variation came from. As the biologist Hugo de Vries wrote in 1905, “natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.” Over the past several years, Wagner and a handful of others have been starting to understand the origins of evolutionary innovation. Thanks to their findings so far, we can now see not only how Darwinian evolution works but why it works: what makes it possible.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

By the end of the day yesterday, “I think, therefore I am,” alongside “Je suis Charlie,” had become one of the central slogans of the mass demonstrations, in Paris and around France, against the murder of the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo. For me this phrase has long been banalized by misappropriation (“I windsurf, therefore I am,” &c.), and routinized by its occurrence in a pedagogical setting: at least once every year for the past fifteen years I have attempted to explain to classes full of undergraduates what it means, and what it does not mean.

Yesterday, however, when I saw the phrase in its original Latin on a placard at the Place de la République, it suddenly came to life for me again. In a flash I was reminded of the full profundity of what René Descartes had meant to say in his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy. I also understood, as if suddenly, why this slogan had become so politically important in the current moment in France, and how, perhaps, it fails to capture what is truly at stake.

The French philosopher means to establish, in the second of his six Meditations, that thought is an indubitable indicator, indeed the only indubitable indicator, of his own existence as a metaphysical subject. No evil genius, however powerful, could possibly convince you that you exist, when in fact you don't exist, if you are able to think about the question of your own existence. Descartes proceeds to give a short list of various forms of thinking or cogitation (the Latin term is cogitatio): doubting, affirming, willing, denying, and so on. Even if you are simply doubting your own existence, it follows of necessity that you exist, since doubting is a form of thinking.

More here.

Jonathan Meades at Literary Review:

Ian Nairn famously made his name with an edition of the Architectural Review entitled 'Outrage', a noisy jeremiad against the uniformity, insipidity and imaginative bereavement of the suburbs he encountered on a long, dispiriting drive from Southampton to Carlisle.

That was in 1955. The date is significant. Building licences had been lifted only a few months previously. Materials were in short supply. Rationing, officially abolished the previous year, continued in effect. Construction was in the doldrums. Britain was not yet being remade. Architects were waiting to be called on. Nairn was only twenty-four years old. His widely disseminated vituperation against what he called 'subtopia' (essentially dull sprawl and characterless terrains vagues) was matched by a touchingly naive faith in the curative power of architecture, a faith that is perhaps easily professed when architecture remains on the page or a matter for discussion. It was a faith he was to lose. He felt betrayed by the men of clay in bow ties. In early 1966 he published a two-page article in The Observer entitled 'Stop the Architects Now'. Architects, he contended, more often than not delivered a 'soggy, shoddy mass of half-digested clichés' (plus ça change).

This prompted a number of enjoyably bitter ad hominem attacks from, inter alia, the old fool Lionel Esher (president of the Royal Institute of British Architects), the apparently rather dense editor of Architects' Journal and countless affronted dunces demanding they be told what 'qualifications' Nairn held to mete out such sweeping condemnation.

more here.

Abby Scher at Dissent:

The first thing you notice about Reading, Pennsylvania, the small city that lies an hour and a half north of Philadelphia, is its many parks and muscular civic buildings. Mount Penn anchors the east of the city with a steeply landscaped park and a historic district of graceful homes. The Blue Mountains rise in the distance.

“This is all WPA [the federal building program during the Great Depression] and the Socialists,” says Bill Vitale, an architect who serves as chair of the Mayor’s Sustainability Committee, waving his hand at the park’s greenery. Reading was one of those rare cities, like Milwaukee, whose working-class voters regularly elected socialists to represent them both in the statehouse and in the mayor’s offices from 1910 to the mid-1940s. In Reading, the Socialists were the good-government party, and their administrations extended and modernized the sewer system, built playgrounds, and turned private-sector jobs into better-paying municipal ones.

Before I arrived, civic leaders warned me that because of its good bones, I wouldn’t be able to tell at first glance that Reading was under Act 47, the Pennsylvania law governing municipal bankruptcy, or that it is one of the poorest cities of its size in the nation. Just over 39 percent of its 88,000 residents lived in poverty in 2013. Many of them are the working poor: Reading’s unemployment rate in the summer of 2014 was about 6 percent.

more here.

Jonathan Clarke at The Millions:

In 1943, Dwight MacDonald, one of the co-founders of the literary journal Partisan Review, lost an internal power struggle over its editorial direction and left to found a new magazine, Politics, that better suited his vision. The reasons for MacDonald’s split with the other PR founders, Phillip Rahv and William Phillips, are complex and have been examined at length elsewhere, but in principle they involved both a difference of opinion regarding the participation of the United States in the war against Germany and Japan (which MacDonald opposed) and the question of whetherPartisan Review would be principally a journal of leftist politics (as MacDonald wished) or one equally committed to independent-minded literary and cultural criticism. After MacDonald’s departure, Partisan Review did not abandon politics, but it remained known as a journal open to distinguished work even from those who differed from the editors ideologically. Before finally closing in 2003, PR would go on to publish criticism — by fellow travelers (Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin) and ideological enemies (Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren) alike — that set a standard that other journals of opinion still strive to match.

Ancient squabbles at a now-defunct literary magazine, involving a good deal of now dated Marxist cant, are not inherently very interesting. But the Partisan Review, both in its high editorial standards and in its struggles to resolve inherent tensions between the domains of politics and art, continues to be a point of reference in our literary culture. The founders of n + 1 have cited PR as an example, even as they have produced a journal with a hipper, more contemporary voice; several of the core PR critics, including Lionel Trilling, remain culture heroes; and New York Times critic A.O. Scott maintains what amounts almost to an obsession with PR, citing its writers in his work, contributing an admiring introduction to a collection of essays by another PR stalwart, Mary McCarthy, and undertaking a book project surveying the American novel since World War II that seems consciously to invoke Kazin’s landmark study of the preceding period, On Native Grounds.

more here.

Spencer Lenfield in Harvard Magazine:

The subtitle of former Harvard president Neil L. Rudenstine’s new book, Ideas of Order, announces that it is “A Close Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” But it is not really a “close reading” in the usual sense—and that is the heart of its strengths. Rudenstine instead interprets the sonnets as a sequence, paying special attention to how the poet develops his increasingly pessimistic concerns about the honesty and durability of romantic love in these 154 lyric poems.

“Close reading” was the favored term of the New Critics in the 1930s to describe and denote the method of interpretation they advocated to replace the philological criticism and belletrism then dominating the study of literature. They wanted to study poetry not just as an instance of language, but as art. However, they insisted that literary study should be more like a science than like mere book-reviewing, with a rigorous consideration of a poem as a self-enclosed object possessing its own internal coherence. At its best, close reading is the literary equivalent of microscope work in a biology lab: scrutinizing every element of a poem, no matter how minute, and its impact on the poem’s range of meaning. The technique, which has long outlasted the doctrine that gave it rise, has forcefully shaped the way poetry is taught in the English-speaking world in both high schools and colleges. Entire class sessions are often spent on a handful of short lyric poems. It is somewhat unusual to find a syllabus assigning an entire volume of poetry by a single poet that is taught as a continuous whole rather than as a set of discrete texts.

More here.

Natalie Angiers in The New York Times:

The 10 hibernating little brown bats hang from a corner of their tailor-made refrigeration chamber at Bucknell University like a clump of old potato skins, only less animated. In torpor, bats become one with their wintry surroundings, their body temperatures falling to just above freezing, their heart rates slowing to one or two beats a minute, their breathing virtually undetectable. But suddenly, a male yanks himself free of the bunch and hops down to a dish on the floor. After taking a long, slow drink of water, the bat uses the claws on his folded wings to hoist himself along the wire mesh of the chamber, his motions angular, deliberative and spidery. A second bat rappels down for a drink, and then a third. “Well, that’s a lucky break,” said Thomas Lilley, a tall and crisply composed postdoctoral fellow from Finland. “Multiple rounds of bat drama.”

As Bucknell’s de facto bat concierge, Dr. Lilley helps wild bats acclimate to life in captivity, a difficult task with an urgent spur. He and his colleagues are laboring mightily to understand white-nose syndrome, a devastating fungal disease that has killed at least six million North American bats since it first appeared in Albany a decade ago and that threatens to annihilate some bat species entirely. Because the fungus attacks bats as they hibernate in caves, the researchers are exploring the complex biology of normal bat hibernation, and so-called arousal bouts turn out to be a big part of the puzzle, said Kenneth Field, an associate professor of biology. Hibernating bats will warm themselves out of torpor every week or two throughout the winter, for several hours at a stretch. Though researchers don’t yet understand the reasons for the thermal interludes, they have quantified just how important such thaws must be to bat survival.

More here.

Late Summer Fires

The paddocks shave black
with a foam of smoke that stays,
welling out of red-black wounds.

In the white of a drought
this happens. The hardcourt game.
Logs that fume are mostly cattle,

inverted, stubby. Tree stumps are kilns.
Walloped, wiped, hand-pumped,
even this day rolls over, slowly.

At dusk, a family drives sheep
out through the yellow
of the Aboriginal flag.

by Les Murray
from Subhuman Redneck Poems, 1996

Annie Lapin. Feel, 2009.

More here, here, and here.