by David Hoyt 

Do birds have a sense of beauty? Do they, or does any animal, have an aesthetic sense? Do they respond to beauty in ways we might find familiar – with a feeling of awe, suffused with attraction, mixed with joy? Do they seek it out, and perhaps even work to fashion it from their surroundings? Darwin thought so, and made the idea the subject of his second major work, The Descent of Man (1871). In it, he outlined a mechanism by which the sense of beauty might, by shaping mating preferences, work to shape the form of insects, fish, and birds in a manner parallel to the better known process of natural selection. The resulting beauty of form, sound, or movement, Darwin argued, is neither the result of intelligent design, nor a necessary indication of superior fitness. Beauty, as Richard Prum has put it, simply happens – but in an organized, understandable way that leads to the dazzling primary feathers of a Peacock, or the bewitching song of a Wood Thrush.

The idea was, as ornithologist Matt Ridley calls it in the subtitle of his recent book, Darwin’s “strangest idea.” It is probably safe to say that the idea, known as sexual selection, was also his most original, and perhaps even most controversial, even more so than the idea of a blind transformism capable of achieving astounding organic adaptations over time. Though it made steady headway after it was introduced, natural selection was challenging enough for many to accept in the second half of the nineteenth century. Sexual selection, on the other hand, premised as it was on idiosyncratic female preference driving the evolution of ever-more varied and harmonious displays among male suitors, was, in the late Victorian period, simply a step too far. As a number of recent authors on the subject have noted, including Ridley and Prum, by the early twentieth century the idea was ushered out the door like an embarrassing dinner guest.

How this happened is a story that has not been fully told outside the confines of ornithology or the history of biology. Read more »

I have given myself a halo and am now the saint of manholes. Also, my ears are not that big, I am wearing ear muffs. 🙂

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by John Ambrosio

In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine, Robert Reich, a progressive university teacher and prolific writer, who worked in three presidential administrations, including serving as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, commented that his views of conservatives had changed because of a close friendship with Alan Simpson, a former Republican Senator from Wyoming. After attending a dinner with approximately 20 Republicans at Simpson’s home, including some Trump supporters, Reich wrote that “they were, I think, it’s fair to say, absolutely lovely people. Generous and kind and totally enjoyable. Alan taught me that the humanity of people in Wyoming, and in the center of this country, and many, many Republicans is so much more important than whether they believe in Social Security.”

My experience living in a rural Midwest city for nearly two decades led me to a similar conclusion, that the community where I reside is mostly comprised of very decent people, who care deeply for their families and friends, who are hard-working, responsible, thrifty, and honest, all qualities that I value and admire. There is also a strong and genuine sense of community, of helping neighbors and others in need, which I also find very appealing.

All of this leaves me with a troubling question: How can such genuinely decent people consistently vote for Trump and MAGA Republicans? Part of the answer is simply the inertia of tradition, custom, and habit: voting Republican is an essential part of their identity that is deeply rooted in certain ways of thinking, being, and belonging that do not change easily. It is also due to a kind of complacency, to an ignorance of U.S. history and the structure and functioning of the federal government, and to being embedded in conservative religious and political ideologies that frame how they interpret and understand their lived experience. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

My late father-in-law was an old-school family physician. He didn’t believe a computer would ever be as good a diagnostician as a human being. He understood that – in principle at least – a computer could read all the medical literature in every language and remember everything it read. He understood a computer would never over-weight its recent “experience” the way a person might. He knew a computer would not be subject to confirmation bias or groupthink or the rest of the errors to which the human mind is susceptible. But he still believed a good human doctor would always be a better diagnostician than a machine. He believed his decades of experience gave him a special sense that could not be captured in zeroes and ones.

I don’t know what Old Doc Silk would say now that AI can pass the bar exam and write symphonies, solve complex math problems, read x-rays, and write code. I suspect he would change his mind. Nevertheless, I find myself taking his position with regard to the work I do. I don’t think there will ever be a satisfactory AI labor arbitrator or AI judge.

The distinction turns on what we are trying to accomplish. Let’s start with an easy case. We know what an AI chess player is trying to accomplish. It is trying to win chess games. If it can beat its opponents, it’s a good chess player. And if it can beat all its opponents, it’s a champion chess player. Beating all its opponents just is what a chess champion does. The same is true of an AI that reads radiology scans. We know what a tumor is, and we can tell when a tumor has been correctly identified. If we have an AI that correctly identifies more tumors than all the other tumor detectors available (without falsely identifying things that are not tumors), then it is the best tumor detector. There is nothing else to it.

But what would a champion labor arbitrator or a champion judge do better than its competitors? If the answer is it would dispense justice better, that’s fine. But then we need to know what justice is. And that’s the problem we started with. Identifying justice is what we need judges and arbitrators for in the first place. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

Humans agonize over the inevitability of death. Across a range of philosophical traditions, philosophers advise people to recognize that the present moment is the only time that really exists; the past is over, and the future has not yet come. Meditation on this fact can help us to respond in healthy ways to anxieties about the future and to fear of death in particular. At the same time, we treat non-human animals as if they are less deserving of consideration because we view them as living in a perpetual present. It is common for humans to justify their behavior toward animals by appeal to the claim that animals do not have a sense of past and future. In what follows, I’ll dive into arguments of this type, and I’ll sketch some general responses to them.

We kill non-human animals for all sorts of human purposes: for food, for sport, for research, when they engage in “unacceptable” behaviors or when we view members of their species as inherently “undesirable,” when we want their fur, when we view them to be nuisances, and so on. We kill animals for reasons for which no rational person would ever kill a human being. The evidence provided by our behavior as a species suggests that humans, as a group, do not view the lives of non-human animals as deserving of protection and defense. It is not only that we take non-human animal lives to be lower in comparative worth when compared to the lives of humans; it is also that we tend to treat the lives of many non-human animals as if they are not valuable at all. We feel strongly about our companion animals and grieve them when they die, but don’t extend that concern more broadly. Most people these days readily recognize non-human animals as sentient creatures. They recognize that such creatures can experience pleasure and pain. They may even believe that it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering to a non-human animal. These same people often stop short of accepting the conclusion that it is wrong or even bad to kill a non-human animal. One potential explanation may be that we think whatever it is that makes death bad for a human being simply does not apply to the death of a non-human animal.

What explains this perception of difference? Anthropocentrism, or human bias, are related explanations. Are there other, more defensible accounts of difference? Read more »

by River Lerner

If one strolled into Lovestruck Books, a floor-level shop that tucked itself into Cambridge’s Brattle Street just over a year ago, one would indeed be struck by the cheery, colorful atmosphere, the warm aroma of coffee from the adjacent cafe, and the giggles of gaggles of women (and odd folks such as myself) leafing through endless volumes and kinds of illicit romance. One might earn a free bookmark, as did this writer, that declares: “In a love triangle with my book boyfriends.” Index card placards line the rows of featured texts adorned by gilded covers of dragons and bloody roses. On the homemade placards are endorsements by the staff for this week’s top literary picks.

Book after book, in different handwritten fonts, these voices join in chorus: “If you’re a fan of ACOTAR…”

Everyone at Lovestruck knows ACOTAR: the beloved, worn acronym for A Court of Thorns and Roses book-turned-series by Sarah J. Maas, penned when she was only twenty-three. This 2015 genre gateway book took contemporary romantasy by storm as a respun tale of Beauty and the Beast… with significantly more magic and make-outs. Here I presume my reader is familiar with the first two books, namely ACOTAR and ACOMAF (A Court of Mist and Fury, the sequel.) I also presume my reader is likewise heartwrenched by not the love story we are initially spoon-fed between Feyre and Tamlin, but rather her verboten dynamic with the night-cloaked, jasmined, infuriatingly cocky and transcendently clever dandy known as Rhysand.

Rhysand is more than, in Feyre’s words, the face of a thousand dreams and nightmares. He is also the subject of many a heated online debate about the morally grey character [1-8]… i.e. what it is (if it exists) and whether Rhys qualifies. The ACOTAR community has polarized views on this matter, with many individuals shifting positions as they receive the revelations offered in ACOMAF. But consider the tense year between their publication dates—May 2015 to May 2016—when the community was left on the cliffhanger of why Rhys takes a special interest in Feyre while he also tortures, torments, and belittles her. Utilizing ACOTAR alone, it takes some real book biopsy and tasseography to get a sense of his true ethical temperature, motivational drivers, and north star.

Moral grey attempts to capture the unflattening of heroes and villains into complex characters who waver, err, and do not always live up to their ideals or our expectations of either pole. I postulate there are three shades to be considered: ambivalent, ambiguous, and neutral. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Blizzard in Fractals. Boston, February, 2026.

Digital photograph.

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by Malcolm Murray

Over the past year, there has been significant movement in AI risk management, with leading providers publishing safety frameworks over the past year that function as AI risk management. However, the problem is that these are not actually proper risk management when you compare them to established practice in other high-risk industries.

In other industries, risk management typically has 5 components. These are all interconnected and important. They are: Risk Identification, Risk Assessment, Risk Evaluation, Risk Treatment and Risk Governance. These go by different names depending on the framework, and are sometimes also grouped differently. For example, in the International AI Safety Report, we call them Identification, Analysis/Evaluation, Mitigation and Governance. In a recently published paper that I worked on, Open Problems in Frontier AI Risk Management, they are instead Risk Planning, Risk Identification, Risk Analysis, Risk Evaluation and Risk Mitigation.

The exact wording and grouping does not matter, what matters is the activity. I have found that a good way to explain what the key activities are can be done using the concept of the map and the territory. Basically, first, we want to understand which territory we are in – this is risk identification. Then we create a map of that territory – that is risk assessment. Third, we determine alternative paths to proceed through the territory. This can be compared to risk evaluation. We then need to choose a path and pursue it. This is risk treatment. And finally, the risk governance equivalent aspect can be expressed as stopping once in a while to get a second pair of eyes on the compass, to determine that we’re still going in the right direction.

However, in what has become the norm in current AI risk management, only a limited subset of these are actually being done. What typically happens is an assessment of capabilities, and then, if the capabilities reach a specific threshold, a corresponding implementation of predetermined safeguards.

This means there are several missing areas where risk management is not happening. Read more »

by Laurie Sheck

1.

Always when I think of him, I picture him alone in a room, bedridden for months at a time. How from late childhood on, he suffered from osteomyelitis, an incurable infection of the bone that set flame to raw nerve fibers, induced recurring fevers, skin lesions, intense, crippling pain. And how in that enforced solitude he wrote about the ways the self is not isolate but comes into being through contact with others. How this is its beauty and its freedom. “I become myself only when revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another.”

In his great work on Dostoevsky, he wrote, “Every thought…senses itself to be from the very beginning a rejoinder in an unfinalized dialogue. Such thought is not impelled toward a well-rounded, finalized whole. It lives a tense life on the borders of someone else’s thought, someone else’s consciousness.”

Bedridden and alone in his room, far from the clamor of everyday life, he wrote of how language moves through one body to another, one mind to another, and in that movement changes and is changed.

2.

These are some of the rooms he lived in:

An apartment in Kustani, a town in northwestern Kazakhstan where he was sentenced to internal exile for “subversive activity.” Its climate was so harsh and its winds so strong there were cables to grab onto while walking. Here he reported once a week to the security police and was forbidden to teach school; the charges against him involved corrupting the thoughts of the young. He found work as a bookkeeper. His only known publication from this period was an article for the periodical, Soviet Trade, where he discussed economic indicators, including such minutiae as how many pairs of galoshes were ordered by the local collectives. This sentence lasted from 1930-1934. Read more »

Einstein & Etta James

I’m fourteen when Einstein
is in Princeton

He’s old & heading out of breath
as I am fresh and new at breathing
in some

But there the landscapes of the space
between our ears divides

Al used levers of his mind for lifting
mass in time, while mine
took to bass guitar of R & B
which thumped in head
and loins in adolescent
instants

Einstein’s gone, but his poster’s on our wall
—if you were stepping down our stairs you’d
glimpse him in overcoat and hat
strolling through our stairwell, wry smile,
moustache, life-sized poster, white and black,
shedding light on light (you couldn’t miss him)

Same thing, mid-fifties, bluesy
Etta James, to me, was winsome

Strong and sexy
beautiful and sure,

So I weighed the heft of
his and hers and took them both
to heart and mind, and in terms
of back-and-forth between the two,
there certainly has been some

I took to both, and
then some

by Jim Culleny
12/15/18

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by Eric Feigenbaum

On Christmas Eve 1965 – roughly five-and-a-half months after the nascent Singapore’s independence – “The Mexicans” arrived. Their job: to help build and train a Singaporean military. At the time, the British remained nominally committed to protecting Singapore as part of a planned military phase-out, but Singapore needed its own defensive capabilities.

Today it’s easy to look at Singapore and wonder what enemies it could possibly have. But in 1965, Singapore was surrounded by hostile powers – most specifically Indonesia and Malaysia, which for slightly different reasons were resentful, if not opposed to Singapore becoming its own country.

Malaysia was a scorned lover who at the last minute prior to independence from Britain tossed Singapore out of the Malaysian Federation largely for refusing to subscribe to the “Bumiputera First” movement – a set of legal principles that among Malaysia’s multi-ethnic population, gives additional rights and privileges to the indigenous Malays, or “Sons of The Soil”.

Indonesia’s founding leader and dictator, Sukarno – who styled himself with a mononym like Socrates, Charlemagne, Cher and Madonna – believed the Malaysian Federation (later Malaysia and Singapore) was a “neocolonialist” plot by the British to encircle and disempower Indonesia. He particularly resented formerly British Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo going to Malaysia.

As a result, roughly 1.9 million people, 75 percent of whom were Chinese ethnic living on a 500 square kilometer island, relying on water from their hostile northern neighbor, having insufficient agriculture to self-sufficiently feed themselves and being surrounded by enemies found themselves vulnerable. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

Last week, on Presidents’ Day, President Trump lost in court. This is hardly news. The administration has already lost hundreds of cases in just a little over a year. And this isn’t the first time it has lost on a day when courts aren’t even open.

The ruling came in a case officially entitled City of Philadelphia v. Burgum. Of the many, many cases the administration has lost, this is not remotely the most important. The day before I submitted this column, for example, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump in the tariffs case. (Trump, naturally, immediately called the justices who ruled against him — including three of the six conservatives on the court, two of whom he had appointed and all of whom had given him wide and unprecedented immunity —  “fools and lapdogs” and an “embarrassment to their families.”)  And just the day before that, a federal judge in West Virginia granted a habeas corpus petition filed by an ICE detainee. He began his opinion as follows:

Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.

In our constitutional republic, governmental force derives its authority from the Constitution. But that authority is not unlimited. The Government’s power is legitimate only because it is derived from the People and exercised through law by identifiable public officers answerable to the public and to the courts. The structure of the Constitution guarantees visibility. Both the officer and the force he employs are traceable to authority delegated by the People and subject to the limits imposed by law. When the Government uses force against the public, the citizen can recognize the officer as a lawful representative. The public can evaluate the act. The judiciary can later review it. Every stop, arrest, detention, and use of force can be tested against the Constitution’s protections. Not so here. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

If she hadn’t died in July 1987, at the age of 81, my maternal grandmother would be celebrating her 120th birthday this week. One-hundred-and-twenty is a proverbial age among Ashkenazi Jews, who recite the Yiddish formula Biz hundert un tsvantsik, or “[You should live] to 120,” on the anniversary of a birth. That’s a full 20% markup over their Goyish compatriots in the Old Country, who grant honorees a mere Sto Lat!— “100 years”—in the traditional Polish song of birthday congratulations.

I never once said Biz hundert un tsvantsik to my grandmother, however, on any of her birthdays, although not for want of wishing her well. This was because, despite her birth in the canton of Aargau, the traditional Swiss “Pale of Settlement” for Jewish residents until the late 19th century, and her own eventual close family ties with Jews, my Grossmutti was not herself Jewish. But neither was she in fact a Swiss citizen, despite the place of her birth. She was German.

Eva Bertha Strassner was born on February 23, 1906, in Baden, Switzerland, to Johann Simon Emil Strassner and Maria Elisabeth Sander, immigrants from Löbelstein, which was, at the time of their births and until 1918, in the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and is today a part of Bavaria. Eva Bertha’s father had come with his burgeoning family in search of employment as a handyman, which he found with a variety of enterprises in the industrialized regions of Switzerland at the turn of the 20th century. Over the next decades the family moved, in keeping with Johann Strassner’s fortunes and economic exigencies, from Baden in the canton of Aargau to nearby Wettingen, then to Töss, at the time a village in the canton of Zurich, now a district of Winterthur, the canton’s second city, and from there, in the 1920s, to Schwerzenbach, on the edge of Zurich’s Oberland, within shouting distance of Zurich itself, the cantonal capital and today Switzerland’s largest city. Read more »