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Alice Neel, "Richard in the Era of the Corporation." 1978-79.

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Today's necessary noise.

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In the era before refrigeration, encasing meat or seafood in an air-tight, collagen-rich dome was an effective method of keeping harmful bacteria at bay. Cooks in 12th-century Europe quickly latched on to the concept. Long before the rise of powdered Jell-O packets, the binding agents came from all sorts of sources: The boiled feet of pigs or calves, or the bones and heads of river fish were popular options, but hardly the only options. Grated hartshorn, from the dried antlers of a stag, or isinglass, from the swim bladder of a sturgeon, made for an almost-instant jelly.

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Marcelyn McNeil, "Smalls 13." 2024.

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Today's necessary noise.

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The idea of zero, originally called sunya for “empty” in Sanskrit, first made its way out of India to the Arab world. Then, in the 13th century, a humble traveler by the name of Fibonacci picked up the idea in North Africa and brought it back to medieval Europe, along with the base-10 number system and Indo-Arabic numerals.

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Eduardo Luiz, "Girofle-Girofla." 1958.

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Today's necessary noise.

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Friss reminds readers that, from the colonial period through the present, bookbuying, especially at bookstores, has been the province of “the well-educated and the upper classes.” But as sociologist Laura J. Miller argues in her classic study of American bookselling, Reluctant Capitalists, in the twentieth century, innovations in the trade expanded the classes of people who might buy books. Starting in the 1920s, the Book-of-the-Month Club made literature more accessible to the middle class. When Pocket Books created the modern mass-market format in 1939, it made literature into mass culture—even if you were unlikely to find the small, cheaply made books in most bookstores, intimidating places known to judge a customer’s taste and recommend toward moral uplift.

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Juliane Hundertmark, “Shooter.” 2022.

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Today’s necessary noise.

mHz, Same Room, Another Day. (Line, 2022.)

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The recent explosion of biomedical technologies lends itself to an optimistic outlook on life extension. Engineered immune cells can now fight off previously untreatable cancers and are beginning to tackle deadly autoimmune diseases. Organ transplant and “smart” implants can rejuvenate broken down organs. Medical imaging technologies capture diseases at early stages and help expecting mothers track pregnancies, lowering the risk during delivery. If the pace of discovery continues, more treatments and technologies could be on the horizon.

The pessimists also have a case. In their view, human lifespan has a hard ceiling. Like houses, cars, or other complex structures, our bodies eventually break down. Cells deteriorate, aggregating clumps of toxic waste that cloud the brain. Heart cells and blood vessels struggle to keep blood pumping. Kidneys and livers lose their function. Efforts to reverse age-related diseases—dementia, heart disease, cancer, sensory, and metabolic problems—only temporarily reverse or slow aging.

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Sadamasa Motonaga, [Untitled]. 1969.

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Today's necessary noise.

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Blakely’s approach has much to recommend it. It emphasizes the ways ideology can create social meaning and come to replace religion and other transcendent sources of meaning in modernity. Ideologies, Blakely emphasizes, can also bleed into each other and blend into new hybrids. Marxists and conservatives can share worries about the way unchecked capitalism erodes sources of meaning; fascists can “go green.” While Blakely stresses that because of its basis in human culture, ideology can’t have a science, he also manages to steer clear of a hands-off relativism. Just because we all need some kind of ideology doesn’t mean we can’t judge other ideologies based on their internal contradictions or outright falsehoods. To extend the metaphor, we may all need glasses, but some of us are at least aware of them and have the good sense to get our prescription adjusted once in a while.

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Midway, State Fair of Texas, September 29, 2024. Shot with a Digital Harinezumi 3.0.

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Today’s necessary noise.

Empty House Cooperative, Hudson River Trilogy 1. (Self-released; recorded in 2001, released in 2017.)