Wednesday Links
Ketamine-fueled “psychedelic slumber parties,” the Einstein family at war, redefining the second, ancient diets, and more.
Good morning! Feeling sluggish (and lonely)? Maybe you need a ketamine-fueled “psychedelic slumber party” to get you back on track? Elana Klein explains in Wired: “We call it an off-site, not a retreat, because we’re not retreating from anything. We don’t do them big—nine or 10 clients—partially due to the importance of confidentiality. Our clientele is primarily CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, CFOs, C-level founders of startups. All of them are in a pressure cooker . . . Here are all the loneliest people. They have to lead and go through so many things by themselves. They can come and see that they’re not alone, and let go of the burden of being so protected all the time. They just want to be people.” Don’t we all.
Since 1967 the second has been defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of cesium’s resonance frequency. In other words, when the outer electron of a cesium atom falls to the lower state and releases light, the amount of time it takes to emit 9,192,631,770 cycles of the light wave defines one second. “You can think of an atom as a pendulum,” says NIST research fellow John Kitching. “We cause the atoms to oscillate at their natural resonance frequency. Every atom of cesium is the same, and the frequencies don’t change. They’re determined by fundamental constants. And that’s why atomic clocks are the best way of keeping time right now.”
But cesium clocks are no longer the most accurate clocks available. In the past five years the world’s most advanced atomic clocks have reached a critical milestone by taking measurements that are more than two orders of magnitude more accurate than those of the best cesium clocks. These newer instruments, called optical clocks, use different atoms, such as strontium or ytterbium, that transition at much higher frequencies. They release optical light, as opposed to the microwave light given out by cesium, effectively dividing the second into about 50,000 times as many “ticks” as a cesium clock can measure.
Ancient diets: “Human beings have long recognized that food is vital for health, but when it comes to determining what is good or bad for us, wise minds may disagree. Take the humble cabbage. While Cato the Elder praised it as ‘the vegetable that surpasses all others,’ Galen, a Roman and Greek philosopher and physician, insisted that it is ‘emphatically not a wholesome food.’ Olives may be seen as healthful today, but Galen said that they ‘provide very little nourishment to the body.’ Still, consensus is possible. When Dioscorides, a Greek physician, reported that ‘chicken soup is very often given to those in poor health in order to set them to rights,’ he sounded like one of our grandparents or even a current-day health influencer.”
The Einstein family at war: “What’s in a name? Well, if it’s Einstein, quite a lot. For Roberto Einstein, it was to prove a devastating connection, even though he had lived in Italy all his adult life, was married to an Italian Christian woman, Nina, with whom he had two children who regularly attended church, and was father to two motherless nieces who were brought up Catholic. In 1944, the increasingly paranoid German occupation decided that Roberto’s whole family was Jewish and inextricably linked to the world-famous Nobel prizewinning scientist Albert Einstein, now in America and high on the Nazi death list.”
Picasso and Pollock in Tehran: “It has been dubbed one of the world's rarest treasure troves of art but few people outside its host country know about it. For decades, masterpieces by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock have been kept in the basement of a museum in Iran's capital Tehran, shrouded in mystery. According to estimates in 2018, the collection is worth as much as $3bn.”
Peter Hitchens considers old clothes and old lives: “My father and I had been close when I was a small boy, but not much after that, and when he died we were more or less strangers. I wonder now exactly how this miserable estrangement happened. We could still meet cheerfully, but not intimately. The discovery of his life through his possessions emphasized that sad distance and made it permanent. There is still so much I do not know, which is why I urge everyone to get to know their parents while they can, and to ask, without restraint, about their lives. As it is, I came out of a mystery, and in this life I will never solve it. Re-opening my own cupboards was almost as powerful. These useless old scraps of cloth were what I wore while my children were still small (all are now adults) when we were busy, happy, generally short of money, trying to live according to principles that seemed right at the time, in a society that generally thought those principles were laughable or even wrong. Were they?”
Valerie Stivers reviews Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation in which “she sets out to discredit every form of feminism except her own, the obviously correct one in her eyes. This is another green-sky idea that not much of anyone wants, but examining it offers us the opportunity to ask some large and basic questions about feminism, such as: ‘Has it always been all good?’ And: ‘Is this still a category we need?’”
The Hunting Act at 20: “While many will celebrate this supposed milestone legislation, others may want to think a little more carefully about how bad law can have unintended consequences.”
The meteorite that fired Albrecht Dürer’s imagination: “In the late 15th century Albrecht Dürer produced a strikingly strange and unsettling image: an apocalyptic ball of fire hurtling through a dark sky, billowing clouds pierced by murky red rays. Painted on the reverse of his more famous Saint Jerome, it’s sometimes interpreted as a reference to the end of the world as described in the Book of Revelation. But rather than biblical prophecy, this may in fact be a recording of an event that the artist witnessed first-hand.”
Philip Ball reviews Peter Harrison’s Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age: “Peter Harrison’s Some New World makes a compelling case that the modern framing of the notions of natural and supernatural is a recent construct that do not reflect the historical ways in which such distinctions were understood.”
Kit Wilson reviews Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious: “In the end, Douthat never properly spells out how we get logically from, say, humble wonder at the remarkable powers of human reason to an all-consuming fear of damnation. But as the book progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that his crucial move here is not so much rational as it is drawn from his own particular interpretation of Scripture.”
