Part the First: Dolly Parton, American from an Old School. August 2026 was the cruelest month for me in a long time. Dolly Parton died, to be closely followed by Wendell Berry. Mr. Berry will be a topic for next week. But this Friday we will remember Dolly Parton. For me, she goes back to the late-1960s when she was one of Porter Wagoner’s “girl singers” on his syndicated television show, which we watched on 19-inch black and white TV set hooked up to the original version of cable TV in which the signal was captured by a tall commercial antenna and transmitted to each subscribing house by copper cable. I was in junior high school, but Dolly was memorable.
Elizabeth Stice covers her uncommon virtues at Front Porch Republic (FPR) in Dolly Parton: A Woman of Many Virtues:
Like many long-lived celebrities, Dolly Parton went through several stages in public perception. She was once a “girl singer” for Porter Wagoner, then a country artist in her own right, then a pop star and sex symbol, and a sometime movie star. Her look was at different times considered chic, or cheap, or even camp. There have been a lot of jokes over the years. But in the last decade, she has been seen as a somewhat saintly figure and a person worthy of study. There are university history classes about her.
There will only ever be one Dolly Parton. But there are many ways to look at her legacy and her relationship to our country and its culture. And there are many things we can learn from her life.
One way of looking at Dolly Parton is through the lens of the American Dream, which she certainly achieved. She was born in rural Tennessee in 1946. Her father was a hard-working, illiterate sharecropper and the family lived in a one-room cabin. She had eleven siblings. Her song “Coat of Many Colors,” was based on her real-life experience of being so poor that she had a coat of rags sewn together one winter by her mother. As she sang, others teased her, “But they didn’t understand it, and I tried to make them see / One is only poor, only if they choose to be / Now I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be / In my coat of many colors my momma made for me.”
As Mary Townsend wrote in Dolly Parton is Magnificent, Aristotle’s concept of kalos applies to Dolly: Something “good but also lovely, perfectly beautiful while astonishingly good, the kind of thing to aim for in word and deed that would never be boring, tired, or pedestrian; never merely a duty but always a pleasure.” This doesn’t go too far. Some were undoubtedly put off by her appearance, but as I remember it, she once broke up Johnny Carson when she said, “Honey, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap!” As Professor Stice notes in conclusion:
Somewhere someone is writing a piece explaining why Dolly Parton was not perfect and why many Americans are going too far in their idolization of her. Certainly no one is perfect and all human idols have feet of clay, but some people can still be exemplars. Dolly Parton pointed to what is possible, defying expectations and the excuses we often make for our own shortcomings. She is an example of human genius and generosity. In polarized times, she showed that it is still possible to be yourself without being polarizing. She showed that one can achieve success and enjoy it well and share it with family and community. It is possible to work hard and love what you do. It is possible to be a good citizen in your local and your national community. On Twitter, Miles Smith noted that the outpouring of grief over the loss of Dolly “is Appalachia’s version of the death of Queen Elizabeth.” Respectfully, that parallel may begin in Appalachia, but it extends to all of America. Dolly Parton achieved many things in her life, but one of her achievements was to become a national role model. Her legacy will continue, but her absence will be widely felt.
Amen. And last week I sent a contribution to her Imagination Library so that long into the future, another 300 million books, and more, will be distributed to young readers the world over.
Part the Second: Dolly Parton the Writer (and the Singer). More than thirty years ago, I wondered how many of those enamored with Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” knew the song was written by Dolly Parton as a gift to Porter Wagoner, whom she left to chart her own course. According to lore, Dolly Parton wrote over 3,000 songs. In Eagles Were Born to Fly, also in FPR, Michial Farmer has put together fifteen of her best. I listened to all of them, from her singing “Backwoods Barbie” to Bettye LaVette’s version of “Little Sparrow.” There is no accounting for taste, but these works of art represent pure genius, performed by others of genius, including Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Margie Joseph, and Norah Jones. Enjoy!
Part the Third: The Wages of Industrial Agriculture Is Death. Back to another world, where things are less beautiful and sublime, but where Wendell Berry was right. The dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River continues to wax and wane throughout the year, as told in Mapping America’s Largest Dead Zone (archived). As longtime readers know, I grew up close to the ocean and in my childhood visited my father’s siblings at their home on the other estuary in Louisiana. The two were different, but incredibly productive, as anyone could see. The shrimp boats in both places returned with abundant catches of the most remarkable creatures. But things have changed, in both places:
On a sweltering night in late July, a team of scientists gathered onboard the R.V. Pelican in Houma, La., a 116-foot blue-and-white vessel resting in a bed of water hyacinths under a stormy sunset.
As the clock ticked toward their midnight castoff, the scientists raced to set up the last of their equipment in the ship’s small laboratories. For the next week, they would be working 24-hour days in tight quarters to measure what little oxygen was left in the Gulf of Mexico’s infamous dead zone.
The dead zone results from excess nutrients, mostly from fertilizers, running off farmland into the Mississippi River and finally into the Gulf. The size of the oxygen-starved zone changes every year, growing as more nutrients make their way into the Gulf and shrinking when tropical storms or strong currents mix the water.
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Nutrients running from (industrial) farms into the Mississippi River are carried to the Gulf, where they encourage the growth of algae. It blooms and then dies, feeding bacteria that gobble up the water’s oxygen.
The long-running crisis endangers marine life and the livelihoods of thousands of shrimpers and fishers. The search for oxygen drives fish accustomed to life near the seafloor to venture higher into the water column, and bottom-dwelling creatures — like shrimp — to migrate to the dead zone’s edges.
This exodus of sea creatures leaves the top layers of the water vibrant and full of life, but the seafloor a practically barren muck.
The research these marine scientists do is essential, if only to mark devastation visited upon the natural world by human beings, said natural world including human beings, which is often forgotten during the Neoliberal Dispensation. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has seen its budget cut by 44% during the Current Administration. Nothing to see here, move along. This is just more research that very clearly doesn’t dovetail with the “priorities” of the powers that be. And so it goes. And so will our damage willfully continue, as Southern Louisiana loses roughly one football field of land every 100 minutes. Seven football fields here and another seven there, every day, 365 days a year, and pretty soon we are talking about real loss.
Part the Fourth: Is Junk Food Addiction Real? Big Ag and Big Food will fairly shout, “No!” And it is true that opioids and opiates produce effects in the brain that processed foods do not. Nor is tolerance (the need to use a larger dose to achieve a similar effect) seen in studies of food addiction. But it is clear that Big Food has become a master at producing industrial food-like products that tickle the human bliss point for salt, sugar, and fat (highly recommended and common in used bookstores). And therein lies the problem. Whether addiction to ultra-processed food (UPF) is the “same” as addiction to heroin is immaterial if UPFs are manufactured to be habit forming. In an upcoming post I plan to write about the scientist who retired from NIH early before the Current Administration could fire him for insisting on making the distinction, in this case without much of a difference, between “addictive” and “habit forming.” Kevin Hall, now of the University of Ottawa, will be speaking at the 2026 Trottier Symposium at McGill University on September 29th. Any readers in and around Montreal are encouraged to attend. I will eventually watch the available video and report back.
Emily Shore has a good, short article in the McGill Office for Science and Society on The Junk Food Addiction:
Ever feel like you’re addicted to food? Not all food, of course, but junk food. The type of food that my kids negotiate to consume daily, despite doing my best to teach the benefits of proper nutrition. The very fact that these foods are referred to as “junk” connotes just how little they have to offer besides empty calories. What they do offer, as we all know, is taste. The type of taste that triggers our taste buds – and our brains – to want more. And more. And more… And for some individuals, the need to consume these foods is so great that the only way to stop thinking about them is to give in to the craving.
The concept of “food addiction” has become more mainstream recently due to the increased access and consumption of highly caloric, highly processed, and highly palatable foods. But the term “addiction”, in the context of food, is not new, tracing back to 1956, when allergist Theron Randolph first used it in connection with corn, wheat, coffee, milk, eggs, and potatoes. Today, the concept of “food addiction” is linked with foods that are mechanically processed, generally contain significant amounts of additives, and are typically high in calories, fats, salt, and sugar. Such -ultra-processed foods are low in nutritional value and are formulated to be so highly palatable that they become “addictive. While, like “junk food”, they are often low in nutritional quality, their distinguishing feature is the way in which they are manufactured and formulated. The term “ultra-processed” is a technical one.
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The extent to which food producers have gone to produce hyperpalatable foods appealing to consumers’ taste buds has been likened by some to the same methods employed by tobacco companies to attract smokers.
And therein lies the other problem with our so-called “diet.” As with most of our other pressing problems, this one can be solved. Based on a fair amount of noise, this is a priority of the Current Administration. Whether they are serious, about the problem, that is, remains to be seen.
Part the Fifth: AI Meets Its Match. The current near-universal assumption is that algorithmic intelligence, broadly defined, will be a boon to all scientific research. I think this is correct, when the problem has boundaries that are understood and the training set is legitimate. For example, the development of AlphaFold has revolutionized the study of protein structure and function.
The protein folding problem has been a thing since Christian Anfinsen showed in 1961 that the amino acid sequence of bacterial ribonuclease (an enzyme that degrades RNA) is necessary, but not sufficient, to produce an active enzyme. The “but not sufficient” part is usually left out of the story told to students, and when I have brought this up in the presence of protein folders, they just give me that look that means, “Who left the door open and let the biologist in?”
Perhaps too much information, but Anfinsen produced functional enzyme in meaningful quantity only when he added small amounts of reducing agent to the solution containing the unfolded protein. This allowed the chain of amino acids to search conformational space, without reaching an irreversible dead end, and fold into the active enzyme. This reducing environment in the test tube mimicked the intracellular environment. Therefore, Anfinsen actually showed that an amino acid sequence needed no more genetic information to specify an active protein. The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology (DNA makes RNA makes protein) was only a few years old at the time, so this was the question at the forefront of molecular biology in 1961. The cellular inheritance present in every cell since the very first one appeared about three billion years ago is also an absolute requirement for the production of functional proteins. This is still forgotten, way too often.
Now, back to a story of biological function and AI. The bacterial virus ΦX174 was the first genome to be completely sequenced when I was an undergraduate, to universal acclaim. As much is known at the molecular level about ΦX174 as any other “organism.” And for this reason, the first viral genomes designed by AI were versions of ΦX174. Now researchers have “systematically mutated nearly every single nucleotide – another first for a full genome – and determined the consequences.”
Most of these mutations were detrimental to the virus’s survival, but for many of them, it was difficult to pinpoint why. “Even in this super well-studied system, we can’t explain why one-quarter of the mutations kill the virus,” says Ben Lehner, a molecular biologist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, who co-led the study, which was posted on the bioRxiv preprint server in July (NB: as a preprint, the paper has not yet been validated by peer review, to the extent that peer review is validation in the current world of pay-to-publish-anything).
Cutting-edge AI systems for biology research that have shown promise in identifying harmful mutations struggled to predict the effects of the changes in the phage. The findings underscore the need for more, and better, experimental data to power these biological-AI tools.
The Abstract from the preprint is worth reading in full:
The bacteriophage ΦX174 was the first genome to be sequenced and the first to be chemically synthesised. Here we present a complete map of the consequences of changing every nucleotide in the ΦX174 genome and every amino acid in the proteome. In total, half of nucleotide and >60% of amino acid changes impair fitness. However, this varies substantially across proteins and non-coding regions. Surprisingly, the most important mechanistic cause of reduced fitness is disruption of protein interaction interfaces, accounting for nearly half of detrimental protein variants. A further one quarter of damaging variants disrupt protein cores but one in four lack a mechanistic explanation. Mutational effects are only moderately-well predicted by state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models, but, combined with structural modelling, provide mechanistic hypotheses and insights into the DNA replication machinery. This complete mutagenesis of a biological system quantifies the limits of our current understanding of, and ability to predict, molecular biology.
So, what to say about this? My answer as the biologist in the room is that these scientists have left out three billion years of cell inheritance in their assumptions. “More, and better, experimental data” will not powerup these “biological-AI tools.” That “protein-protein interaction interfaces” represent the most important mechanism here is totally unsurprising. These interactions are the stuff of biological life, the cell inheritance that makes genetic inheritance possible, in the real world. Which came first, cell inheritance or genetic inheritance, is a question for late-night bull sessions in the lab. They are two legs of the three-legged stool essential for life, with the third being an environment that permits biological life in the first place. Which leg of a three-legged stool is most important is a nonsense question..
This brings us back to our near future with AI ruling our world. Cell inheritance, too complex for algorithmic intelligence now and probably forever, is the often undefined but very real ground truth of biological life. Similarly, institutional memory and knowledge of the workarounds that make useful work possible, except that done by robots in a completely determined environment, are the known but ignorable ground truths of cultural, social and, political life at every level. A “simple” virus infecting a “simple” cell is beyond the “ken” of AI. The complex life of individual human beings in society is most certainly beyond AI. The coming damage to be wrought by AI is inevitable, though, as the lords of the universe strive to turn us all into robotic serfs, but serfs for which they have no responsibility. Or, we can just say “No!” and make it stick.
Parting Shot: AI Still Makes Us Stupid but At Least We Will Sound Like One Another. Researchers worry that generative AI is homogenizing culture and cognition. That horse left the barn some time ago, and now scholars are worrying about it?
Emily Wenger, a computer scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says the risk of homogenization is an existential one. “If we’re all using AI to write our e-mails or whatever, what do we become as a species?”
We might fall prey to groupthink, she warns. “We have suffered as a society when we silence or ignore edge voices.”
Whatever. Another thing, Professor Wenger: Edge voices, when they are not cancelled outright, are becoming illegal in a reprise of our various and sundry Red Scare hysterics, and this has had little to do with AI. However, AI diagnosis of pre-crime doesn’t seem to be too far beyond our horizon in a world of total information awareness.
On that note, thank you for reading! See you next week. For those of us in the United States, Happy Labor Day! Debout! les damnés de la terre! Debout! les forçats de la faim!
A wonderful Dolly story from my old neighbor George Kahn:
In 1977 I was on tour with Parker McGee as his synth player. Parker was a successful singer songwriter (Tanya Tucker, Seals and Crofts, England Dan and John Ford Coley, others) who decided to launch a solo performing career. We played on American Bandstand and toured the US for 7 weeks as an opening act for various artists (Billy Joel, Steve Martin, Ambrosia, Michael Murphy…)
We had the pleasure of opening for Dolly Parton on March 19 at Freedom Hall Civic Center in Johnson City, Tennessee. It was a magical performance. This was back in the days when it was customary for Country artists to hang out after the show, sit on the edge of the stage and sign autographs or album covers for fans.
So Dolly was hanging out, and this guy comes up and says, “Dolly, I am the fire chief for Johnson City, and I’d love to have a picture with you. She says, “Sure thing!”, and as he stood next to her she grabbed his head, pulled it down to her boobs and said, “Smile!”
That was pure Dolly.
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My favorite Wendell Berry Quote:
“What we’re up against
is an extractive economy
run by a tiny minority of the wealthiest people
and from that
the impoverishment, pollution and poisoning of the natural world
the disintegration of all human communities
and the ill health of individuals and families.”
Wendell Berry
“The Need To Be Whole”
A friend of mine who is/was also friends with WB said, “Wendell Berry is the greatest Kentuckian who ever lived, which puts Muhammad Ali or Abraham Lincoln in second place.”
Best…H
Re: AI meets its match
One of the many criticism of AI is that it has no “tacit knowledge”, which is another name for what you call “institutional memory and knowledge of the workarounds that make useful work possible, ”
I think you just added “tacit ignorance” to the list. If humans can’t even figure out what’s going on, the AI hasn’t got a chance.
Yup. And it’s really not possible for molecular or system biologists to study mechanisms that can’t exist (as in “are not sustainable in vitro”) in cells or phages. Thus no research for the AI to peruse and apply.
Happy Labor Day to Usonians.
As Bugs notes in the scheduling thread, you are on the wrong day. Bring back May Day, which became the workers’ holiday in Chicago after some events there.
Thanks for the mention of the remarkable Bettye LaVette. Here she sings “Little Sparrow.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5CG3hl8P2nc
Albert and Lucy Parsons, Presente!
I won’t be the one saying mean things about Dolly because I don’t know any. But I will suggest that Nashville isn’t the real or fake innocent place it once was. Altman seemed to be getting at this in his now very dated movie. Apparently surveys show Nashville is now the number one Dixie destination for fleeing Yankees. Last time I passed through Teslas were rife.
September isn’t off to a great start either with the loss of one of my favorites, Cassandra Wilson at only 70.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9o1K2nyarY&t=2s
“One is only poor, only if they choose to be” That’s a variant on one of the basic themes of capitalist rationalization- if you’re poor, it’s really down to you. I’ll just add that Dolly Parton played Sun City. When afterwards she was subjected to criticism, she claimed she hadn’t known about apartheid. In 1982.
Dolly, who wasn’t much of a singer by academia standards, who wasn’t an intellect by those standards, heard, observed and thought everything she needed, to hear, sing in tune and articulate with passion her necessary reality. A reality shared by so many. Whether with her songwriting or her comportment as a public person. So was I fan? Not really, except for enormous respect, she defined her own life. I like that, she was very smart.