Incidental Art

In explaining how the author concluded that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual’s pedigree” – the individual being one Elizabeth Warren, Senator from Massachusetts – background information necessary to contextualize those results was presented. In the penultimate paragraph of that background information and indeed of the document itself, we are told the follow:

Smack dab in the middle of that paragraph, in parentheses no less, is quite a contextualizing statement: “It is not possible to use Native American reference sequences from inside the United States [for this analysis], since Native American groups within the US have not chosen to participate in recent population genetics studies.” There is so much bound up in that one single sentence – historical abuses of Indigenous Americans by the United States Government; desecration of environments, of remains, of resources belonging to said Indigenous Americans; continued medical establishment marginalization and mistrust; exploitation and/or further discrimination by both Native Americans and those seeking to identify as such – that to go into it all now, would, I think, perhaps, be excessive.

(Those interested are encouraged to dip their toes into these issues with a nice tidy summary of the relationships between (and the consequences of) Native American populations’ understanding of their “genetic identity” that can be read over at the Genetic Literacy Project.)

I note here, just for a moment, the irony.

A woman plainly seeking to ascend to the Presidency of the United States who at at least one critical juncture in her life claimed Native American ancestry, a man who has berated her publicly for her use of that identity to her possible benefit and openly doubted/mocked/belittled her/her claims, a scientific result contingent upon population wide genetic/genomic testing and analysis, a population of people of known Native American ancestry who have elected not to undergo genetic testing for any number of justifiable reasons, and a result that says only “yes, but…”

And so the story shall go on. History shall be written. And this little piece of it won’t get written down enough to be remembered. Still, at least we see it here.

The march began at about 2:45 p.m. local time.

The participants walked through E. William St. up to S. Main St. with a police escort at their front, their rear, and their sides, with multiple police vehicles blocking intersections and crosswalks to protect the demonstrators from traffic.

Leading the group were two women who initiated call and response shouts with those in tow such as “No justice”/ “No peace”, “What do we want?” / “Justice” / “When do we want it?” / “Now”, and “How do you spell ‘murder’” / “A-A-P-D”.

A couple of families participating brought up the rear.

From S. Main St. traveled north to E. Huron St. to stand for a moment at the intersection in front of the Washtenaw County Courthouse. Upon reaching the intersection, the leaders listed off names to be remembered including Aura Rosser, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. Two minutes of silence were asked for, only one was taken.

A police officer, having heard from a driver trying to make a northbound turn from Huron onto Main, directed traffic around the demonstrators.

The moment of silence observed, the protestors walked east down Huron St., where the street had been cleared for blocks by police in anticipation of the protestors route. Outside of City Hall, the leader with the microphone noted that rather than being fired for having killed a black person, an Ann Arbor Police Officer received a promotion.

Locals along the route watched with varying degrees of agreeableness.

The protestors turned south onto State St., close to the University of Michigan.

Finally, the protestors returned to the Diag for a short speech from the leaders commending their participation and urging them to continue in their efforts.

The event ended around 3:30 p.m.

Or we almost did.

Recomposition, “the contained, accelerated conversion of human remains to soil” as originally proposed in Senate Bill 5001 of the 66th Legislature of the State of Washington, is a peculiar concept from this stage of human history. It is generally recognized that large scale industrialization and urbanization has resulted in a winnowing of places to stack the dead. At least in the United States this has led to increased cremation as a means of disposal (50.2 percent of Americans having chosen cremation in 2016) and the continued decline of human burial (“expected to decline […] to 30.3 percent” by 2023). “Recomposition” joins a growing slate of alternatives to these “mainstream” disposal procedures (3).

Though the use of human remains for fertilizer is not a new idea, it is one that can provoke both revulsion and inspiration (4), and to this point has not be a legal option in the United States. In most of the country, death certificates are issued with a box that must either be checked for burial or cremation. The processes involved in human composting, which requires no burial or burning, pose a new disposal category currently without regulation.

Until now.

Wet with Governor Jay Inslee’s signature, the recently passed version of S. B. 5001, redefines “human remains” to include those which have been subjected to “alkaline hydrolysis” or “natural organic reduction” and defines the sorts of facilities required to carry out such an operation. This latter legalean term, “natural organic reduction”, has replaced the poetic “recomposition” in the final version of the bill though it still allows for human composting. Where there is progress in liberty, there is often turgidness in prose.

Still.

Bravo to Washington for serving as an incubator for new and ever bolder forms of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and all the stuff that comes before and after them. We are, when we are at our best, stewards to ourselves and our earth(s). I am hopeful to see what we make of them.

1. Consider, for example, Annwn, Asgard, the Asphodel Meadows, Barzakh, Diyu, Elysium, Hades, Hamistagan, Heaven, Hell, Iriy, Jahannam, Mictlan, Naraka, Purgatory, Tian, Tuonella, Valhalla, Yomi, and Youdu.

2. Science never lacking for heroic ironies offers at least the following for this specific tale. The evidence that is cited as responsible for convincing elected officials that such a means of disposal would not spread pathogens – “a research trial with six human bodies” led by one Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, Associate Professor of Sustainable and Organic Agriculture at Washington State University – is nowhere yet to be found. At least publicly. And though scant details are known, at least one speaks of a subset of science’s ironic heroes. The half dozen intrepid volunteers who wished for their remains to be used for the research trial demonstrating the safety/efficacy of composting human remains, had their own, “[b]ecause […] the university required” it, “incinerat[ed].” They join the ranks of the nameless who boldly strove across the biomedical landscape toward their horizon.

3. A short list of which includes but is not limited to “cryonics” in which as much as one’s body can be frozen is frozen as solidly as it can be frozen, “eternal reefs” in which the crushed bone material left over from cremations is mixed with concrete and dropped into undersea habitats, “mummification” in which one can get a taste of the pharaonic life, “plastination” in which one’s remains can be injected with plastic to remain semi-recognizable, “resomation” in which one’s tissues are dissolved via heated water and potassium hydroxide and the bones pulverized into fragments (a procedure made legal statewide with the recently passed Washingtonian legislation), and “space burial” in which a fraction of a fraction of an ounce of one’s cremated remains can be jettisoned into low-earth orbit for awhile.

4. A proponent of the bill, state Senator Jamie Pedersen is quoted as saying “The idea that your loved one could become soil that would be the basis for planting a lovely rhododendron or oak tree or whatever you want could be really popular.”

The day before, on my way down from “That School Up North”, somewhere in between a preëmptive Dayton, Ohio and my eventual destination, a billboard on the side of the road advertised a true-to-life recreation¹ of the ark built by Noah in the Bible nestled in the nearby hills of Kentucky. I stopped, paid $10 to park, paid $50 (+tax) to enter the park, and was bussed from a parking lot to the ark’s park ground. As I walked the length of the ark a few times and ascended its levels, passing through counterpulsing streams of communal body heat and industrial HVAC, I was tracked by a pair of young security guards for awhile (wearing a mask, as would be become a familiar refrain this trip, I was marked easily as “not from around here”) who  relented their front and following once I exited (through the gift shop!) to the accompanying Ararat Ridge Zoo & Petting Area which “encourages guests to consider a biblically consistent perspective on animal conservation” by facilitating camel rides and displaying kangaroos lounging in their enclosures. By chance, the charlatan Ken Ham was scheduled to put on a honky tonk piano performance interspersed between Christian-product hawking and anti-evolution evangelizing for a mild mannered crowd of mostly white senior citizens. I considered purchasing something from one of the gift shops, a memento of the excursion, and there was much I could choose from: an eight DVD box set explaining human physiology “in a Creator-honoring way!”, one of many $0.79 booklets on such topics as “What REALLY Happened to the Dinosaurs?”, “God’s Word on GAY “MARRIAGE””, and “The Purpose & Meaning of Life”, an illustrated edition of The Annals of the World by Bishop James Ussher ($44.99), a VIRTUAL REALITY EXPER IENCE t-shirt, and of course a “NEW BOOK BY KEN HAM” which several promotional posters assure us “Every committed Christians needs a copy of”. Tallying the debts already incurred and those still to go, I opted to continue my southerly trajectory.

In 1925, from a bit before July 10th and a bit after July 21th², Dayton, Tenn. was a center of the world’s attention as the young public school teacher stood trial for teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee law. Against the charge he was ably defended by a team of ACLU lawyers including arguably his generation’s most (in)famous civil libertarians, Clarence Darrow. Prosecuting the matter, a state’s Attorney-General, A Boy Named Sue³, and a former Secretary of State under the Wilson administration turned Chautauqua circuit orator, William Jennings Bryan. The whole process was written about, radio’ed to, telegraphed from, and spoken of hundreds, thousands of times per day by a couple hundred journalists from across the world. As Bryan noted during the court’s conclusion, “more words have been sent across the ocean by cable to Europe and Australia about this trial than has ever been sent by cable in regard to anything else happening in the United States.” Why?

Ostensibly the trial was for the state of Tennessee to prove to a jury of his (white, male) peers Scopes violated “The Butler Act”, a law “prohibiting the teaching of Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State”, effective for all teachers once approved by the Governor on March 21, 1925. To be in violation of the act, the state contended, one had to (1) be a teacher (“any teacher”), (2) teach in a school that received state public school funds and (3) “teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals”.

Employed in “a coaching-and-teaching job”⁴ at the Rhea County High School in Dayton at that point for approximately eight months, by mid-April of 1925, the 24-year old John Scopes was substituting for Prof. Ferguson, the typical biology teacher (and Principal of Rhea County High School), and expected to review material with students in preparation for their final exams on April 28.

During the trial, the prosecution had four witnesses testify against Scopes: the Superintendent of Rhea County schools, two boy students⁵, and the proprietor of a local drug store. The questioning of these witnesses by the state and the defense, the entirety of the evidence presented to the jury, took less than two hours.

At issue:

Did John Scopes teach evolution?

Maybe. Probably not. Probably not in any substantive way. Certainly not as an iconoclastic pedagogue impressing upon his students the significance of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

I offer below variety of answers offered to the question of if/when did he teach “that man has descended from a lower order of animals” in violation of the Butler Act, mainly sourced from the transcript itself.

1. “about the 2d of April” – Howard Morgan
2. “he said that he had reviewed it the last two or three weeks [of April]” (est. weeks of April 6, 13, 20) – F. E. Robinson reported on a conversation he had with John Scopes
3. “About three weeks” before school was out; “about the middle of April” (est. week of April 13) – Harry Shelton
4. “reviewed that [“Pages 194 and 195 of this book”, Hunter’s Civic Biology] about the 20^th of April” – Attorney General Stewart
5. Morris Stout and Charles Hagley would have testified “This book [Hunter’s Civic Biology] was reviewed about the 20th of April” – Attorney General Stewart
6. “reviewed it somewhere about the twenty-first of April” – Attorney General Stewart
7. “April 24, 1925” – State of Tennessee in the indictment against him
8. “during certain days in April, somewhere” – Walter White
9. “To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I had taught evolution.” – John T. Scopes (from his autobiography, Center of the Storm)
10. “He never taught it.” – Bill Scopes, John T. Scopes’ son (from an article “What John Scopes Told His Family & Friends about His Trial” by Randy Moore)

On two very different days, the defense put two very different witnesses on the stand: Maynard M. Metcalf, a zoologist, and Williams Jennings Bryan, Counsel for the Prosecution. Each was spectacle. Neither was heard by the jury.

Issues of freedom of thought, expression, and religious practice swirled with scientific advancement, missteps, and uncertainty. Or at least that is how we may paint the grand panel at this historical distance. The days’ details dwelled on arcane points of the language of law and intended policy (e.g., did the state legislature intend that the first clause of the act encompass the second clause such that if the second clause be violated, necessarily so too is the first, or are the first and the second clauses independent such that both portions must each be violated, that is must one violate both the first and the second clause to be in violation of the statute?). Where there is a chance for disagreement by one side, it is taken. Where there is opportunity for the defense to cry foul, the Judge listens patiently before dismissing the concern. Where some see the law as stating clearly its intent and meaning (“it shall be unlawful for any teacher…to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals”), others see the reconciliation of the fact of our evolution origins with religious belief, spiritual meaning, and a sense of the numinous in the universe. Those latter points are only levied by the defense in type- and hand-written affidavits by its expert witnesses which are not given to the jury for consideration.

At each turn, everyone mugs for the camera. (Who can’t see the stars in flashbulbs or from the hills of Walden Ridge?) William Jennings Bryan, commonly known as “The Commoner” and three time U.S. presidential candidate, acting as counsel for the prosecution (due in part to his being an initial proponent of the bill and other state bills like it) probably did more than most to excite folks in Dayton. Darrow as counterpoint, a principled agnostic, unconcerned with meeting folks in the next world, told them what he thought in this one. Half a dozen other lawyers joined each as the state sought to prove its case. The Judge made sure the newspapermen had plenty of time for photographs.

1. Surely, out there someone is teasing out each of the layers of irony in the Ark Encounter being recreation as both a “creation again” and a “leisure activity”.

2. At least until July 26th, on the afternoon of which William Jennings Bryan died during a nap in the home of F. R. Rogers.

3. Whispers in the footnotes of history even suggest that’s where the song comes from.

4. “The vacancy had appeared in late summer as the football coach had resigned unexpectedly, leaving the school without a coach or anyone to teach algebra, physics, and chemistry.”

5. Two others were also prepared to substantially testify to the same details, according to the Attorney General.

To wit, the recent investigation by Kaiser Health News and Fortune Magazine indicating that the average physician in America is feeling overburdened by the clicks, clacks, and clatter of the modern electronic health record and that this is leading to direct and quantifiable harms to patients. Though over $36 billion have been spent to bring to fruition that potential of the net-connected health record, it has led to fraud and cover-up, burdens and “by accident” treatment. More than anything, it has changed what the job of a physician is without asking or telling anybody.

I have in mind this single fact, quoting from a 2013 paper from the American Journal of Emergency Medicine: “physicians spend significantly more time entering data into electronic medical records than on any other activity, including direct patient care“. The job of a doctor has gone from “treating patients” to “recording treatments given to patients”. Consider the graph seen below, showing the adoption of electronic health records the moment federal funds became tied to their use.

Ten years ago, twenty years ago, when all these doctors heading out to that “real world” were first thinking about becoming doctors, this was not an aspect of medicine. While documenting cases has always been part and parcel of the profession, the temporal dominance of the activity in practice is only a recent phenomenon. According to the same 2013 study referenced above, an average physician spends approximately 28% of their time directly treating patients, 12% of their time reviewing test results and records, 13% of their time in discussion with colleagues, and 44% on data entry.

What was meant to streamline the process of documentation and to make that documentation more easily accessible to doctors has had the unintended consequence of turning our highly trained medical professionals into data entry specialists. It’s not the job they signed up for and frankly it’s not the job they should be doing. When one learns that the average number of mouse clicks performed by an emergency medicine physician approaches 4,000 during any given day and when one recognizes the fact that almost no one can do something 4,000 times without error (and certainly not those tasked with saving the precarious lives of our most vulnerable patients), then it dawns on us: this isn’t the way it should work.

This goes to the larger discussion of how healthcare centers in our country ought to work. Indeed, how health ought to be preached and practiced in the country as a whole. And if this the sort of discussion you’d like to have, please consider a spot at table for the upcoming Universal Healthcare Group talks. Let’s figure out ways in which data can get to where it needs without human arbitration. Let’s figure out what needs a doctor’s script and what scripts can help out doctors. Let’s figure out how to get patients in front of caretakers, instead of screens in front of each.

A half-way academic debate whispers across the land, How many letters should we be using to express that community referred to by the initialisms GLB, LGB, LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTTQQIAAP, QUILTBAG? The question, so far as I can tell is How should we strike a balance between including as many as we can into that community (/those communities) by explicit acknowledgement and/or implicit branding (including but not limited to folks identifying as asexual, bisexual, curious, gay, genderqueer, intersex, lesbian, other, pansexual, polyamorous, queer, questioning, trans, transgender, transexual, transvestite, two-spirit, unsure; ABCGGILOPPQQTTTTTU at first pass) and brevity/efficacy of communication (ABCGGILOPPQQTTTTTU is, if nothing else, a mouthful).

I offer here the term “LGBTQRS” as one striking an optimal balance between inclusion of the many in the letters of the few.

From a spoken voice, the letters L, G, B, T, and Q in a row have a good cadence, keep all the rhyming letters together, and pay historical tribute to the founders of the community and its accompanying movements. Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans, and those questioning Sex In All Its Forms have each in their own way and with the help of others created a space for these liberties to exist. (The latter Q, especially to younger audiences, can equally represent “queer” folk who themselves also contribute(d) significantly to the community and its rights.)

Recognizing that the facets of Sex In All Its Forms are myriad and those that wish to support the freedoms of others to dis/engage in Sex In All Its Forms are multiplied daily (🤞), from there I hope it is safe to presume in the long run we hope to include all of “those of us yet living” (we cannot, alas, convince the dead of their wrongs against us). A serviceable-enough criterion for “those of us yet living” includes a heartbeat, generally including P-, Q,- R-, S-, and T-waves in a typical clinical-grade electrocardiogram. Lasting approximately 50 to 100 milliseconds, the most obvious pattern in this electrical display of the heart’s activity is the “QRS complex”. Thus, to recognize “those of us yet living”, the “QRS community” ought not to be too off the mark as a description of those still alive.

Portmanteau the two, paying deference to the history of those who fought for these rights, and we have the “LGBTQRS community”, a community I am proud to support.

Three flags hang on three poles: the United States, Michigan, and the University.

History was meant to bring the three together tonight not too far from where I sit.

The site of the original second presidential debate – before it was canceled, before it was moved, before COVID – was here, now.

This place, this moment.

A person (or set of persons) doing stomp percussion in a building in the distance.

A periodic runner hustles by.

I wear a mask.

Now, the Michigan flag blows with the wind.

Now, it hangs limp with the others.

If I do not say much here, it is because there is not much to say. Things were supposed to go one way. They went another. History cannot be planned. Only witnessed.

I bear witness to the silence in this place on this night. The lines of the flags rustling against their poles. Thirty second bursts of percussive improvisation. The hum of distant HVAC systems. Buses braking, accelerating, kneeling at vacant stops. Lights are on, streetlights at least. The inside of Crisler is dark, empty.

Even the air feels absent. Sitting at that autumnal temperature of neutral heat transfer, equilibrium, balance. Without the occasional chilled gust I might not know I was anywhere at all.

History might not either. It doesn’t/can’t see all. Even we who bear witness report only this much.

How much else is hidden in memories of forgotten futures?

As producer, provider, and consumer of literally millions of tons of peanuts each year, and uniquely positioned to add or remove amounts of it just about anywhere they desire in the food supply chain of most inhabitants of this planet, what Nestle intends to do with the company whose treatment, Palforzia, comprises capsules of steadily escalating precise doses of peanut flour with the goal of desensitizing an individual’s allergic reaction is unclear. It is certainly worrying. Not enough to the Federal Trade Commission or the Antitrust Division or the U.S. Department of Justice or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But certainly to some!

Some estimate the treatment may net as much as $1,000,000,000 annually, generally from families by way of their health insurance. It costs approximately $900 per month or about $11,000 a year.

That 20% of participants in Aimmune’s clinical trial had to discontinue before completing a year of treatment, with most due to adverse events stemming from systemic allergic reactions (including at least one case of severe anaphylaxis), should not be left unmentioned. There is a point at which the frequency of severe side effects for individuals negates the collective benefits of the treatment. Given its FDA approval, dear reader, we know that point is not one in five patients.

Most concerning perhaps in this diffuse moral quagmire is the consequence of this kind of “vertical integration”. Putting it far more concisely than I ever could, Jack Donaghy explains the situation to Liz Lemon:

“Imagine that your favorite corn chip manufacturer also owned the number one diarrhea medication.”

“That’d be great because then they could put a little sample of the medicine in each bag.”

“Keep thinking.”

“Except then they might be tempted to make the corn chips give you–”

“Vertical integration.”

No doubt those same countless readers saw that I emphasized a phrase in there that just sticks in my craw every time I set out to read the 2018 National Football League Rulebook. “a kicking surface that conforms to that of a normal kicking shoe” I don’t even like to give the punctuation, let alone dare capitalize the first letter of a phrase like that. It says, in minimally uncertain terms, that Football as a sport is to be played by the National Football League with feet in the arena conforming to a strict set of geometries.

Some say, it may have something to do with this fellow,

,

Tom Dempsey.

See, Tom Dempsey was a special kind of kicker. He is best known for a truly transcendental moment in sports history wherein he kicked a football 63 yards to put the New Orleans Saints up 2 over the Detroit Lions on November 8, 1970. This feat, just belting a football half way across the field through some small uprights, would not be matched until the Clinton administration nor topped (by “a single yard”) until the Obama administration.

Well, it turns out that Tom Dempsey was we might call “special needs” with a certain kind of “special emphasis” in the words to mask the sting of “disability”. Tom Dempsey was born without toes (or fingers on one hand!). At the time of the field goal, the Later Stages of the Nixon Administration, this meant Tom Dempsey would wear whatever shoes were comfortable and available to him. At some point he settled on that snazzy little number seen in the photograph.

Some thought this conferred an unfair advantage. Seeking such that not one is gotten over on them, they wrote some changes specifically into the rulebook, starting in 1974, because of this guy. Some, like that quoted and emphasized above, stay with the game at least as late as the Later Stages of the Trump Administration.

A pretty tidy summary of the whole situation can be gleaned from the clip below.

However, as a supporter of doing whatever you can with the body you got, it’s a shame – a shame – that some, out of fear or tired prejudice cannot simply leave possible what is possible. That choose to make a rule, one just as many like it, that say how the (male) body is to become spectacle…to the spectator footing the ESPN bills. That may not have been the best route by which to have this conversation (the question plaguing us even neonatally, “what are feet?” ), nor the most sensible (let alone sensitive) approach to have taken while there, but it’s a rule, in their rulebook, for their sport, so who am I to tell the good people of the National Football League how to conduct their business? Empires got rules and they got thousands of them.

So, indelibly stamped it is. The “normal kicking shoe” having been elsewhere defined. But here, perhaps just because I’m looking for it, perhaps just because I know where it comes from, perhaps just because I know where it can lead, I see that word “normal” and I can’t help but figure, there goes another.

Presented with an open field and a horizon, people make their way through a thicket of possibilities to progress. Whether that way is forward depends on the map you consult. For what it’s worth, those I consulted to navigate the Shanghai Metro added the names of stops constructed since the maps’ printing as vinyl stickers locating where they are now on routes and presumably will be in a future map’s printing.

I include as supplement to these three perspectives of the place, a slate of textures, which, were they more than pictures to brush our finger ridges over, might hone even truer to what I felt.

People

“严禁 大小便 违 者 罚款”

–– From a large sign posted at eye-level on the exterior of a building.

Possibilities

“他们 都 选择 了 同 一种 更酷 的 工作 方式”

–– From a subway stop digital billboard whose center panel of LEDs were dead.

Progress?

“下 一次 大 灭绝 , 离 我们 有 多远?”

–– From a science museum exhibit.

Textures

“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.

A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.”

–– From “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” by James Agee and Walker Evans.

The week before he was inaugurated comprises, by the published recorded, the largest mass death event (from a single cause) in United States history thus far, with approximately 4,170 – 4,406 Americans dying within a 24 hour period from Covid-19. The single deadliest day before that for Americans happened near a creek in Maryland a century and a half ago.

There a battle during a Civil War took the lives of 2,108 Union soldiers and 1,567 Confederates outright (and wounded ~17,000 more). Four days later, Emancipation was Proclaimed.

For some. Equality for all aways off. Recall, the cornerstones of the capital of the nation were founded a mere four score years earlier.

Since then, the country has grown into something vast and beautiful and different. Changed and changing, its image contorts with time, forms from habit.

What we see becomes what we tell others becomes what we tell ourselves becomes what we are.

Sights change as much as those seeing them. Our stories become different, then eventually become history. New tales for old stars.

New stories to replace the old ones forgotten.

Idols rise and fall, live and breathe, pass away. Memory resurrecting for a moment.

What remains the same is that “soul of the nation” we hope to redeem, make clean, and stand up again and again.

Some, usually for profit, ascertain they can cut the soul in ’twain.

Yet, as the poet sang, “Don’t fall asleep at the wake of a nation”.

Millions, still, believe in the nation.

Of its eight original founding scientists, one of whom I would personally walk any plank for, only two remain. Former employees describe “a chaotic internal culture […] characterized by intense demands and a sometimes haphazard rush to carry out projects and, just as quickly, to kill them.”

In about 72 hours, an event described as “an all-hands-on-deck scramble” will presumably reveal information about motor cortex transcoding, primate research (why the rush?…O, yeah, we know why…), and chronic implant stuff. Probably some meme-inspiring demo with a patient. Heart warmth, incredulity, future still seen hazily in the distance.

Artificial intelligence, so in vogue, is liable to draw from the lips “machine learning”, “reinforcement”, pop culture reference.

I’ve read from this script before. Science as either boring or boisterous, as either peer-reviewed literature or as press-release. “All my life I’ve put it from me saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t tried everything. And I resume[] the struggle.” Why tell the same story again? That tale of sensation – triumph under pressure! – excites the mind, quickens the blood. What is so wrong with putting a positive spin on things? Surely, we can still learn new things from old words. Whether we will on Friday, history be our judge.

In response to the report published by STAT, the company sent a two-sentence statement: “There are a number of things here that are either partially or completely false. We recommend publishing after the 28th or your article will look foolish.”