The so-called marketplace of ideas is broken. Turns out that neither markets nor people can be counted on to embrace the rational or the true Ironies
To love one’s country, one must acknowledge its past. In America, that means unpacking false universalism and examining its history of ideas
WOW: Australian surgeons restore hand and arm function to paralysed patients.
Why Is Measles Back? Atlantic. Um, someone needs to ask? Resilc: “We’ve run down the path toward public goods are bad and stupid…every person for his/herself….stage 2 of 5 stages toward USSR full on mode.” Moi: “The difference will be that in the USSR, there were hardly any goods in stores. In the US, shelves will be stocked but ordinary people will be able to buy very little.”
Why does he think we so much enjoy reading about miserable failure and imperfect characters? “Because it’s a twofer: a mixture of schadenfreude and self-reflection. Misery and imperfection belong to all of us.”
What’s more titillating than news spread mouth to mouth, hearsay crystallizing into legend? Kim Stafford’s apocryphal account of one celebrated novelist’s beginnings unfolds as a tale within a tale, its unassuming opening drawing us in as ineluctably as the first words spun out over a campfire. As a self-proclaimed “citizen of these dark times,” Stafford, who is Oregon’s poet laureate, bears witness to the resilience of the human spirit, intertwining ordinary people’s lives with his own ardent (and unabashedly romantic) insights into the wellsprings of inspiration. I’m sure Willa Cather, passionate herald of the American frontier, would agree. Selected by Rita Dove
APPARENTLY, LOW TESTOSTERONE IS BAD FOR COGNITION: Prostate cancer treatment linked to heightened Alzheimer’s risk. “Soon after a man is diagnosed with prostate cancer, drugs that lower levels of testosterone are often offered as treatment, since testosterone fuels the cancer’s growth. But a major new study suggests that this approach might have an unwanted side effect: Higher odds for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.”
Actually, the evidence that testosterone “fuels” prostate cancer is rather weak, and I have a friend with low-grade prostate cancer who has actually continued testosterone supplementation for several years with no problems. As I understand it, the thinking now is that it’s actually estrogen that’s the culprit. Lowering testosterone lowers estrogen in men, because men make their estrogen from testosterone, but it’s a drastic way compared to administering estrogen blockers.
Laird is by turns witty and sentimental, and I think that mixture compels me more toward poems of the latter mode, as in “Silk Cut”:“I was five and stood beside my dad / at a junction somewhere in Dublin / when I slipped my hand in his / and met the red end of a cigarette.” Years pass, cynicism and pain accrues, and then father and son get a pint. The old man’s “voice tears up a bit // about the emptiness in the house.”
Later, “waiting / at the turn for the traffic, / when I find / I have to stop my hand from taking his.” Then there’s the moving lines of “Incantation”:
“Depending where one stands, each circle / back is a possible fall, a fail, a spiral, / and I would like you to take a few seconds / to write me out one beautiful sentence / to carry now across the night and ocean.” Feel Free never feels maudlin, though, because Laird reminds us to not get too complacent,
as in “Temple of Last Resort”: “I wanted the real God to turn and say // I was just kidding. // About everything.”
At Qantara.de Schayan Riaz has a Q & A with The Perfect Nanny-author Leïla Slimani. Among her responses:
As a child, I was an inveterate liar, always living in a fantasy world. I dreamt about having an extraordinary life, a passionate life, the life of a great author. I wrote poems and wanted to kill myself.Before you go through this entire piece, imagine a figure in your mind (and note it down on a piece of paper) as how much data – according to you – gets generated in a minute. According to Domo (cloud-based operating system), the internet users have risen from 2.2 billion in 2012 to whopping 3.8 billion in 2017. That is nearly 48% of the entire world’s population. In its 6th Data Never Sleeps report, Domo took into consideration online consumer behavior besides analyzing the amount of data which gets generated in a minute across various platforms. The graph for social media has predictably gone way up as Snapchat witnessed a sharp and enormous increase of 294% in the amount of pictures which are shared every minute
