by John Ambrosio

In The End of Reading is Here, an essay recently published in the Atlantic, Rose Horowitch argues that the U.S. has become a post-literate society, one in which people still read, but are increasingly unable to think logically, abstractly, and analytically. That is, while people are able to decode words, they lack the higher order thinking skills needed to comprehend and synthesize complex texts. She claims this is largely due to a growing reliance on digital technologies as primary sources of news and information.

In a partial rejoinder, David Wallace-Wells argues that despite the mass adoption of the smartphone around 2010, the amount of time U.S. adults spend reading has not changed significantly over the past few decades, except for older people, who read less, and that U.S. adults have never been avid readers. But the issue here is less a question of how much time U.S. adults spend reading, than of what and how they read: does their reading time consist mostly of scrolling social media on their smartphones or reading complex text?

According to the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2023, 28 percent of U.S. adults (16-65) scored below level two, and 57 percent scored below level three, on a five level typology of literacy proficiency.

The PIAAC measures reading competencies, what people can do, like fill out a job application. When the competencies are translated into grade level reading skills they indicate that 21 percent of U.S. adults, more than one in five, read below a fifth grade level and are classified as functionally illiterate, while 54 percent function below a sixth grade reading level. This is not primarily due to immigrants with low levels of literacy proficiency: two-thirds of functionally illiterate adults in the U.S. are native born.

The study also found that adult literacy scores in the U.S. dropped significantly between 2017 and 2023, which may be due, in part, to the effects of the pandemic. While literacy proficiency among U.S. adults is slightly below the average for all OECD countries that participated in the survey, the U.S. had the highest level of inequality in the distribution of scores, the biggest gap between the lowest and highest scores of any nation.

There are some ostensible paradoxes in the data. Read more »

Seen on a wall in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Derek Neal

What if you took Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” concept and transposed it to the vast expanse of the African desert? You would get something like Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), which shows that the room a man locks himself in doesn’t need to be literal—a prison can be made anywhere. In Denis’ film, the man in a room is Galoup, a French Foreign Legion sergeant who commands a group of some 15 men in Djibouti. He is, he tells us in voiceover, “a perfect Legionnaire,” and like Schrader’s protagonists, he writes in a journal and narrates his memories, a storytelling technique stretching back to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. The story thus proceeds along two timelines: one, with Galoup in Marseille, writing in his notebook after he has been dismissed from the Foreign Legion; and the other, the memories of the desert and the Legion that the notebook engenders.

The drama of the narrative begins when a new recruit, Gilles Sentain, arrives in the desert and disrupts the orderly and structured existence that Galoup has fashioned for himself. Sentain and Galoup are foils: Galoup is older (played by Denis Lavant, 39 years old in 1999 but looking closer to 50) and his face is weathered, pockmarked, and to put it bluntly, ugly. Sentain, played by Grégoire Colin, is young and beautiful (24 years old in 1999). His skin is smooth, his features angular and chiseled, yet retaining an air of innocence. His nose is long and elegant compared to Galoup’s, which is squat and stumpy, and Sentain has a vaguely androgenous look, while Galoup is clearly an ageing man, and monstrously so. Sentain, at least in Galoup’s estimation, exhibits a “calm” and “openness” that attracts others, whereas Galoup must work for everything, his effort and straining visible, and he exists apart from the group, unable to take part in the Legion’s camaraderie and brotherhood. In one incredible scene, the rivalry between Galoup and Sentain is dramatized as they circle each another against the backdrop of the sea, holding eye contact the entire time, while the soundtrack to the Billy Budd opera plays in the background (the film itself is loosely adapted from the Melville novella). Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

Last week I spent the night at my parents’ house for the first time in over a decade. I went for a jog through the neighborhood just like I used to only now, in my forties, I prefer run tracks that are a little less angry than The Sex Pistols. Then I was feigning anger to project an aesthetic. Now the world is maddening enough. I don’t need to blast rage into my skull as I work out. Houses in the neighborhood were familiar but rundown. The trees in the woods where I used to play seemed impossibly large. Ten-year-old me would now have quite the time finding my way out. Being in the spaces of my youth was unexpectedly intense, like I had intruded into someone else’s dream.

Philosophers spend plenty of time discussing what it is to persist through time and change. Some think a person at a later time is one and the same as a person at some earlier time if the later person has the same body as the person at the earlier time. This view is viscerally tempting. My body bears the scars of falling off of my bike and sliding down a large neighborhood hill when I was nine and of a glue gun mishap while making a wreath for Mother’s Day when I was eleven. Others argue that it is a memory connection that makes a person the same person through time and change. There is something undeniably true about this too. As I moved through the streets I could have run with my eyes closed, I could almost hear the laughter of old friends and smell sprinkler water and plastic swimming pools. Those memories are indelible.

It’s reasonable to spend plenty of time thinking about persistence of identity. Living a meaningful life seems to require that we can put the pieces, separated out in time and space, together in a way that we can make sense out of. Perhaps I only understand my current craving for adventure by remembering the little girl who would jump in any body of water. Maybe my philosophical interest in justice was caused by watching peers be bullied or left out. All of these things matter because we want to understand our character traits as enduring and developed and our life arcs as the plot of a good story we’re still in the process of writing.

We spend less time thinking about the urgency, even the necessity of change. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Owen Jones and Rob Kurzban have new books out. Jones is the director of the Weaver Program in Law, Brain Sciences, and Behavior at Vanderbilt. He previously led the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. Kurzban is a former psychology professor at Penn and the author of Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind. Both men are deeply knowledgeable thinkers and graceful writers. Both books are extensively researched and thoroughly annotated. I enjoyed them, and I recommend them without hesitation. So, what’s the problem?

I can’t resist telling a story from my youth that kept occurring to me as I read. Many years ago, my mother had a friend whose son was a dope fiend (her term). At her wit’s end, the distraught woman managed to get an audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Mendel Schneerson. She explained the situation and pleaded for his advice. He said, “Keep a kosher home.”

Of course he did.

I suspect we can agree with D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson that, “Everything is the way it is because it got that way.” And we can agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” We might even agree with Daniel Dennett that evolution by natural selection is “the single best idea anyone has ever had.”

Still, there is something about books by evolutionary thinkers that is reminiscent of books by Marxists. Where Marxists have historical materialism and class struggle, evolutionists have reproductive advantage. It explains everything.

Jones’s book, Force of Nature: Understanding Evolution’s Deepest Logic – and Putting It to Use, explains natural selection and shows how understanding it can illuminate problems in medicine, agriculture, artificial intelligence, economic decision making, and law. Read more »

Treiborlang Lyngdoh Mawlong. From “Somewhere, Elsewhere, Here”, 2020.

Woodcut.

More here and here.

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by Malcolm Murray

The OpenAI Hugging Face incident last month will likely not be the final nail in the coffin that will convince the world of the risks from frontier AI. However, it is still a sizable nail, as it were, that should give people pause. Many smart people are still arguing that today’s frontier AI are just stochastic parrots or “Google-Clever-Hans” (as the economy blogger Bradford DeLong calls it) repeating patterns mindlessly rather than independently thinking. However, the incidents of the last few months are making this position increasingly untenable. One piece of evidence of models engaging in their own form of thinking came with Anthropic’s paper on “J-Space” earlier this year. This described how concepts are represented in the model’s “brain”.

Then we had the mentioned OpenAI Hugging Face incident, quickly followed by additional similar revelations from Anthropic, UK AISI and Meta. Each of these are very interesting in what they suggest regarding the ability of models to do independent and highly abstract thinking. Looking at these events makes it very hard to keep claiming that these are the results of stochastic parrots regurgitating patterns. Many striking behaviors in these incidents point to highly abstract thinking, sophisticated theory of mind and social cognition. Read more »

“Researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on Mars . . .(the) principle of “following the water” is key to astrobiology – the study of potential life beyond Earth.” —BBC News 7/25/18

Astrobiology

—a nod to Robert Frost

Now science tells
of a water lake on Mars
seen through algorithmic lenses,
so we hear again the Sirens of
first life:
……………. we still hope
to scratch that itch
imagining its synthesis

……………. we still hope
to catch the whale
tormenting us since we turned
from Simply –Is  to  Unknowable
and built a babbling tower
of creation tales, all incredible,
that end in fire
or ice

Jim Culleny
7/26/18 —Edit:8/15/26
Copyright 2018
Frost’s Poem  “Fire and Ice” Here

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by David William Sheehan

There is a white marble panda at the edge of the pier road in Sneem, and as a boy I walked past it most mornings on the way to Christian’s shop without once wondering why a panda should be standing in Kerry. It was cold in the mist and faced whatever the morning brought in off the bay, and I gave it about as much thought as I gave the wet tarmac.

This seems strange to me now because there is nothing remotely local about it. It looks as though it has been dropped out of another country and told to make the best of things. But children are good at accepting whatever is already present when they arrive. You could not have called it beautiful, though it was not ugly either. The panda belonged to Sneem in the same way as the smell of the sea, the sound of the Sneem River gathering itself under the bridge, and the grey light coming slowly over Lomanagh.

It came from China.

In 1986 the People’s Republic of China sent the sculpture to the village in memory of Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh. Sneem had fewer than three hundred people, which makes the whole business stranger the longer you look at it — states do not, as a rule, send diplomatic gifts to remote villages on the edge of the Atlantic. When they do, it is a sign that the real work was finished somewhere else long before. Ó Dálaigh had been Chief Justice of Ireland, a judge of the European Court and, in the end, President; he had also supported the admission of the People’s Republic to the United Nations at a time when saying so cost something. The panda arrived eight years after his death, and I knew none of this, growing up beside it.

Sneem was full of things like that. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

Sixty years ago this month, Reprise Records released a Frank Sinatra single, “The Summer Wind.” If there is such a thing as perfection in music, this comes close.

Sinatra’s version was not the first recording of the song. In fact, the song he recorded wasn’t even the first version of the piece at all. “The Summer Wind” started life a year earlier as “Der Sommerwind,” written by a German composer and a German lyricist. Sometime in 1965, the American songwriter Johnny Mercer happened to hear the song being sung by the Danish singer Grethe Ingmann, who two years previously had won the Eurovision title. She submitted “Sommerwind,” with Danish lyrics, for the 1965 contest and didn’t win. But Mercer heard her singing it, and the rest is history. (Twenty-five years later, Ingmann died at 52, becoming the first Eurovision winner to die.)

Mercer rewrote the lyrics “into pure poetry,” as James Kaplan, one of Sinatra’s biographers, put it. He thus became the first of two geniuses, aside from Sinatra, who combined to produce this gem. Mercer, of course, was perhaps the greatest lyricist of all time. It would take another column just to list his songs, and a dozen more columns to even attempt to convey the beauty of the words, but a few well-known examples would include “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” “I Remember You” (with the sublime opening line “I remember you/You’re the one that made my dreams come true / Just a few kisses ago”), “Days of Wine and Roses,” and “Moon River.”

According to Sinatra’s daughter Nancy, Johnny Mercer was her father’s favorite lyricist. Mercer wrote, among others, another of Sinatra’s greatest hits, “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” “The Summer Wind” wasn’t even Mercer’s first great rewrite of a song originally written in another language. Fifteen years earlier he had taken a French tune, “Les Feuilles Mortes,” changed the feel of the lyrics, and turned it into one of the all-time jazz standards, “Autumn Leaves.”

Later in 1965, Wayne Newton recorded “Summer Wind” as the title track of an album. For good reason, it went nowhere on the charts. Perry Como recorded it that year too. Neither of these versions sounds remotely like what was to come from Sinatra the next year.

Genius number two now came into the picture. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

We went to the movies the other day, a rare occurrence. It wasn’t easy to find a film, since in Zurich at the moment most cinemas seem to be showing The Odyssey, which I don’t particularly want to see. This is for idiosyncratic reasons, some private red flags that were unfurled when the trailer evoked my last excruciating experience of a star-studded cinematic makeover, Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet. (Anyone who remembers Billy Crystal’s cameo as the First Gravedigger may feel the same way.) My resolve was then strengthened by Emily Wilson’s attack on Nolan’s Odyssey in the London Review of Books, as equivocal and self-serving as that piece is; nor was it tempered by her fellow Odyssey translator (and erudite cineaste) Daniel Mendelsohn’s more even-handed appraisal.

The film we did agree on that evening, Tuner (2025), by the young Canadian director Daniel Roher, is quite marvelous, both for its performances and for its unexpected commentary on two contemporary issues of some urgency. I’ll get to that in a moment, but let me first say another word or two about the Nolan Odyssey, since my chief aversion to it—or at least, to its putative genre—is directly proportional to my admiration for Tuner.

My reluctance to spend time and money on Christopher Nolan’s film was ultimately bolstered by a review of the film’s soundtrack in The Guardian, which forced me to recall my only other viewing of a Nolan production, Oppenheimer. I found that atomic biopic unbearable principally because Nolan seemed unable to allow a single scene of dialogue to go without background music. And so if, as The Guardian’s reviewer reported, this latest film also insists on subjecting its audience to similarly relentless acoustic carpet-bombing, I could in good conscience object.

Now, given my taste for opera, this general distaste of mine for “non-diegetic music”—to the soundtrack grafted onto a movie’s action, audible only to its audience and not to the characters portrayed in it—is admittedly eccentric. After all, particularly in its 19th-century verismo instantiation, opera also famously features a continuous fabric of music, not all of which is “heard” by the protagonists of the work, but which may accompany their more prosaic exchanges as well as their obviously sung arias. So why can’t I enjoy traditional film music? Read more »

A young rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) tree, catching some sun in the woods near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Eli Rarey

I was one of those who bought tickets to see Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm weeks before it opened in theaters—and I was also one of those disappointed by my experience of the movie. I had been listening to an audiobook of Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of Homer’s epic in preparation. With repeated stock phrases and unusual syntax, Mendelsohn preserves the profound strangeness of the original rather than trying to render it in language that sounds natural to a modern ear. (I highly recommend this translation and the audiobook, which Mendelsohn narrates.) Nolan’s approach, I knew, would be the opposite; but I hoped that at least he would be inspired by the source material to make something like a great road movie. The road movie is one of my favorite film genres—the mechanical propulsion of the car somehow fuses in my imagination with the mechanics of the film reel unspooling (even if I’m watching it digitally over wifi) to create a perfect marriage of form and content. Walter Salles in his “Notes for a Theory of the Road Movie” says, “In terms of storytelling, The Odyssey seemed to me the basis of it all.” Nolan’s film, perhaps because of the fractured chronology, felt less like a road movie than a war film, concerned less with the sensory experience of moving through a landscape than the psychological effects of encounters with extreme violence.

It may have been naive of me to expect The Odyssey to easily adapt into a road movie, despite so many hailing it as the ur-text for the entire action-adventure genre. It seems to me that our road movie quests, and our adventure quests in general, follow the mythic model of the medieval chivalric romances more than they do Homer’s epic. There is no longing for home—the opposite in fact. The hero goes out into the world, seeking his fortune in foreign lands. The motion is outward, into the unknown; this is better suited to our modern ambitions and anxieties. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Marie Snyder

We want help to know the best approach to take to life. In lieu of church services or complex readings, many turn to influencers for their formulas for “winning” at life that often judge us based on challenging perceptions of beauty or endurance or wealth. The trend towards optimizing provokes people to track everything they do, from the number of steps, to hours of sleep, but for what? To prove they have a right to be here? To belong? To be loved? It definitely doesn’t appear to be making people happier. That may be the cost of simplification of complex advice that edits down more complex ideas into a more superficial draft. The profits come with the reality that it works. People will click on these videos, subscribe to podcasts, and buy all the books. At some point we stopped looking for how to be a good person and instead aimed to be impressive or even just base-line likeable.

There’s a capitalist benefit to convincing people they’re somehow defective by providing unattainable standards to work towards that, of course, involve products to buy. But it also feels like, culturally, we’re not growing up. Kant called it immature, lazy cowardice whenever people try to figure out how to live by blindly following advice instead of heeding their own reason:

“If I have a book to have my understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.” 

In the 250 years since he wrote that, we’ve figured out some of the mechanisms that enable us to develop a conscience. We have mirror neurons that help us feel bad when we’ve exploited someone or made them suffer in any way, provided we direct any attention towards them. It’s only possible to be happy while knowingly harming others by not looking too closely at the effect of our actions. Luckily, we’re surrounded by distractions.  Read more »