Because the likelihood of Li Bai dying from simple infirmity in 762 isn’t as strange and beautiful as the traditional story of his demise—that he drowned in the Yangtze River while drunkenly trying to embrace the moon’s reflection—the apocryphal tale is to be preferred. The greatest of classical Chinese poets deserves a death commensurate with his wild verse. Dying because he wished to possess the moon has about it the necessary resonance of parable: this is what the mystic is willing to do to merge with the infinite. “The birds have vanished down the sky. / Now the last cloud drains away,” Li Bai writes in the first of two couplets of “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain” as translated by Sam Hamill, concluding: “We sit together, the mountain and me, / until only the mountain remains.”

This is startlingly religious verse. The disintegration of the soul, the extinguishing of the ego, the snuffing of the person is required so that one becomes a part of the cosmos’ warp and weft. It’s erotic verse as well, as only the truest of devotional poems can be, because it presupposes the desire to lose oneself in another, to twist into something greater. In that spirit, then, the “world is neither place nor thing. / The world is a spell,” claims a gnostic demiurge, a genderless, serpentine deity in The Invention of the Darling (W.W. Norton, 2024), the remarkable new collection by the Chinese-American poet Li-Young Lee. This is a gnomic, paradoxical book in which every word is a charm and every sentence a conjuration—a poetics of the body, the mind, and the soul.

It’s as risky to detect Li Bai’s intoxicated traces in Lee as it is to talk about Shakespeare’s effect on Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, or Whitman’s ghost in the verse of Philip Levine and Robert Pinsky. But Lee himself acknowledges the influence. In The City in Which I Love You (1990), he describes both Li Bai and Du Fu as “those two / poets of the wanderer’s heart,” an apt description of his own peripatetic youth. Lee was born in Jakarta to Chinese parents forced to flee Indonesia in 1959 during President Achmad Sukarno’s pogroms (“People have been trying to kill me since I was born,” Lee writes in his 2008 collection Behind My Eyes). The family variously settled in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, before arriving in the unlikely refuge of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, a largely Italian-American community some 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that once featured the planet’s largest sheet steel mill. (“That scraping of iron on iron when the wind / rises, what is it?” Lee writes in Rose, his 1986 debut.) Having traded the dreamlike image of Li Bai’s Yangtze for the polluted reality of Vandergrift’s Kiskiminetas River, Lee still felt connected to Chinese culture. After all, he is the great-grandson of the first president of the Chinese Republic, and the son of a physician who once treated Mao Zedong. Lee’s is a life lived in exile east of Eden, for as he asks in Behind My Eyes, “Childhood? Which childhood? / The one that didn’t last?” He seems to have always desired a return to a lost home (the origin of religion), lusting for the consummation with something powerful and good (the origin of faith), where he is “Still talking to God and thinking the snow / falling is the sound of God listening.”

“you rigorously dissect it, you realize that everything is a shape of the totality of causes. What’s another name for the totality of causes? The Cosmos. So everything is a shape of Cosmos or God. It feels like something bigger than me— that I can’t possibly fathom—but am embedded in.”

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“The Chocolate War,” published 50 years ago, became one of the country’s most challenged books. Its author, Robert Cormier, spent years fighting attempts to ban it — like many authors today.

In the 50 years since it came out, “The Chocolate War” has become one of the country’s most challenged books. But the tensest battle over the novel may have been fought in Panama City, Fla., in the mid-1980s. That’s when an attempt to ban “The Chocolate War” divided the town, leading to arson and death threats against middle-school teachers.

Robert Cormier stayed up late at night, spinning Pete’s minor act of defiance into “The Chocolate War.” The book follows a small-town freshman named Jerry Renault, whose refusal to sell candy for his school earns him the ire of a manipulative headmaster and the vengeance of an underground student group known as the Vigils. By the book’s end, Jerry has been harassed, beaten and ostracized, leaving him just as alone as ever.

“The Chocolate War” wasn’t an easy sell: Several editors rejected the book, citing its violence, language and pessimistic message. But teens in the 1970s were eager for stories that reflected their angst and anxieties, and novels like S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders” and Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” had become hand-me-down hits.

The relatably bummed-out tone of “The Chocolate War” — paired with Cormier’s economical prose and hyper-specific recall of adolescent cruelty — was aimed at young readers who’d become skeptical of the grown-ups running their world.

Still, for all his regrets about the trouble “The Chocolate War” had caused for others, Cormier continued to defend it staunchly in the last years of his life.

“The message of ‘The Chocolate War’,” he noted, “is that evil succeeds when good people allow it.”

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In many students’ eyes, the war in Gaza is linked to other issues, such as policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, racism and the impact of climate change.

Talk to student protesters across the country, and their outrage is clear: They have been galvanized by the scale of death and destruction in Gaza, and will risk arrest to fight for the Palestinian cause.

But for many, the issues are closer to home, and at the same time, much bigger and broader. In their eyes, the Gaza conflict is a struggle for justice, linked to issues that seem far afield. They say they are motivated by policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, discrimination toward Black Americans and the impact of global warming.

In interviews with dozens of students across the country over the last week, they described, to a striking degree, the broad prism through which they see the Gaza conflict, which helps explain their urgency — and recalcitrance.

“It’s in our name: mutual liberation,” Ms. McAllister said. “That means we’re antiracist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist organization. We believe that none of us can be free and have the respect and dignity we deserve unless all of us are free.”

Almost all protest groups want an immediate cease-fire, and some kind of divestment from companies that have interests in Israel or in the military. But because everything is connected, some protesters have other items on their agenda.

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By YASEMIN SAPLAKOGLU
If you stretched out all the DNA in a single human cell, it would be more than 6 feet long. But only a sliver of that DNA makes proteins, the biological machinery for life. In 2003, the Human Genome Project quantified just how little: Only 1% to 2% of our DNA — about 1.5 inches out of those 6.5 feet — encodes genes for protein. The noncoding sequences that make up the other 98% are often referred to as “junk DNA,” a term coined in 1972 by the geneticist Susumu Ohno, who suggested that just as the fossil record is full of extinct species, our genomes are full of extinct or badly copied genes damaged by mutations.
 
But even though 98% of the genome is noncoding, it isn’t precisely dead weight. In 2012, a consortium of hundreds of scientists reported in the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements that at least 80% of the genome is “active” in the sense that some of the DNA is being translated into RNA, even if that RNA isn’t then being translated into proteins. There’s little evidence that most of this RNA from broken genes does anything.
 
However, some of the noncoding sequences, making up roughly 8% to 15% of our DNA, aren’t junk at all. They serve important purposes, regulating which genes in cells are active and how much protein they produce. Researchers are still discovering new ways that noncoding DNA does this, but it’s clear that human biology is massively influenced by the noncoding regions, which don’t directly code for proteins but still mold their production. Mutations in these regions, for example, have been linked to diseases or disorders as varied as autism, tremors and liver dysfunction.
 
Moreover, by comparing human genomes to those of chimpanzees and other animals, scientists have learned that noncoding regions may be a big part of what makes us uniquely human: It’s possible that gene regulation by noncoding DNA differentiates species more than genes and proteins themselves do.
 
Researchers are also finding that new mutations can sometimes confer new abilities on noncoding sequences, which makes them a kind of resource for future evolution. As a result, what deserves the label “junk DNA” can be controversial. Scientists have clearly started to clean out the junk drawer since 1972 — but how much to keep in there is still up for debate.

What’s New and Noteworthy

Scientists have been working to understand a type of noncoding DNA known as “transposons” or “jumping genes.” These snippets can hop around the genome, making copies of themselves that sometimes get inserted into sequences of DNA. Transposons have increasingly been found to be critical to tuning gene expression, or determining which coding genes get turned on to be transcribed into proteins. In part for that reason, they are proving to be important to an organism’s development and survival. When researchers engineered mice to lack transposons, half of the animals’ pups died before birth. Transposons have left marks on the evolution of life. Quanta has reported that they can jump between species — such as from herring to smelt and from snakes to frogs — sometimes even providing some kind of benefit, such as protecting fish from freezing in ice-cold waters.
 
Geneticists are also investigating “short tandem repeats,” in which a stretch of DNA only one to six base pairs long is heavily repeated, sometimes dozens of times in a row. Scientists suspected that they help regulate genes because these sequences, which make up about 5% of the human genome, have been linked to conditions like Huntington’s disease and cancer. In a study covered by Quanta in February, researchers unraveled one possible way that short tandem repeats could regulate genes: by helping to convene transcription factors, which then help turn on the protein-making machinery.
 
Then there are “pseudogenes,” the remnants of working genes that were duplicated and then degraded by subsequent mutations. However, as Quanta reported in 2021, scientists have been finding that sometimes pseudogenes don’t remain pseudo or junk; instead, they evolve new functions and become genetic regulators — sometimes even regulating the very gene from which they were copied.

Quanta Magazine News Letter

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