James Panero at The New Criterion:

What’s a museum? This is the question I asked in these pages some years ago, and one that museums now seem compelled to answer with ever more emphatic declarations. It is said that museums have gone from “being about something” to “being for somebody,” racing to shed their old skins and remaking themselves in our image. So all museums must now become revisions, articulated interventions and reinterpretations of their former selves and their place in the cultural world—a compulsion now embraced by the new Whitney.

We have heard the modern museum referred to as a “white box.” Here is the museum as sky-box, an institution built as much to be looked out of as looked in to, a place where see-and-be-seen has moved from the periphery to the main event. The difference between these two experiences, between the outside looking in and the inside looking out, defines the design. Indeed, the dichotomy reflects, reverses, and luxuriates in a quality of outsiderness that has always pervaded this particular institution.

The new Whitney Museum, designed by Renzo Piano and Renzo Piano Building Workshop, along with Cooper Robertson, at a cost of $422 million, opened to much fanfare on May 1.

more here.

Nathan Knapp at The Millions:

At the time of Roethke’s death in 1963 from a heart attack in a swimming pool on Bainbridge Island, which lies directly across Puget Sound from Seattle, he was regarded as one the preeminent living American poets, rivaled only in his generation by Robert Lowell. If you take a look at his place on the shelf of any large university library, you’ll find a hefty swath of scholarship on him dating from the late-’50s well into the early-’70s. In the early-’80s, though, scholarly work on Roethke dried up. Though his poetry was much lauded during the final decade of his life — he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for The Waking, and received both the Bollingen and the National Book Award for 1959’s Words for the Wind — he regarded himself principally as a failure. In comparison to other of his contemporaries whose places in literary history have for the most part solidified, Elizabeth Bishop being but one example, his star has fallen. This despite winning another National Book Award posthumously for The Far Field, released two years after his death, despite nearly winning another for his Collected Poems the next year, and though his work was a tremendous influence on both Sylvia Plath and, as poet August Kleinzahler pointed out recently in the London Review of Books, John Berryman. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1976, at what was probably the peak of Roethke’s posthumous fame, the poet James Dickey referred to him as “the greatest American poet,” even going so far as to say Walt Whitman was “no competition” for him. Yet in the years since, Roethke’s work has rusted into oblivion, largely unread and unremarked-upon.

more here.

Jacob Rosenberg in McSweeney's:

Damn. That was a really good point. When I started this discussion, which quickly turned into an argument that I keep demanding be called a “discussion,” I had no idea that you felt so passionately or had such a well-reasoned stance. Not only have you been calm throughout this ordeal, but you have skillfully dealt with my flailing attempts to “win” by concocting straw men of your points. You also seem to be putting forth a genuine effort to understand my position while explaining yours. And, can I just say (well, not so much say but rather think to myself as you make another well-reasoned point), that you are doing an excellent job. It’s been, maybe, 15 minutes that we’ve been talk-yelling, with you mainly talking and me mainly yelling, and not only do I agree with you, but I’ve come to the conclusion I have sounded like an idiot for years about this subject.

Upon realizing that I am totally wrong and you are totally right, I guess I only have one option: double the fuck down.

More here.

Alexandra Harris in TLS:

John who? Craske’s obscurity is part of the subject of this book, but surely his name will be remembered now that his paintings and astonishing embroideries are available to us in the abundant reproductions that fill these pages, and now that Julia Blackburn has empathetically filled out a possible life story from the sparse but striking threads of evidence that remain. Craske was a Norfolk fisherman too ill to fish. As a young man he worked with his brothers, crabbing and longshore cod fishing, until 1905 when he started a fish shop in Dereham. When the war came, his efforts to enlist were rejected on unknown medical grounds – until he at last received a commission in 1917, promptly suffered what his wife Laura called “a relapse”, fell into a “stuporous state”, and was sent to Norwich Asylum rather than to the war. The remaining twenty-six years of his life might have been spent in one asylum or another, had it not been for the determination of Laura, who found a small house where they could live on almost nothing, with daylight coming into the cramped room where Craske lay month after month in bed.

In that bed he became an artist. In the periods of lucidity between “stupors” (“have I been away again?”, he would ask), he carved and painted model boats, made oil paintings of tossed vessels at sea, and, from 1929, made some of the most ambitious embroideries of the twentieth century. In his “Panorama of the Norfolk Coast”, a rainbow arcs over the muds flats where channels of water glint between moored boats, and a pink haul is unloaded from a vessel named in tiny stitches THE PRAWN. There is a stiff breeze blowing. We gauge the precise speed and motion of the breakers in the distance; a waiting fisherman, bundled up in waterproofs, sits with his back to the sea in the little sheltering alcove of an upturned boat. Every detail is honoured, and there is pleasure, too, in the abstract design of it.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi, Quirin Schiermeier & Richard Hodson in Nature:

Fewer than four months before politicians gather in Paris to try to hammer out an international climate agreement, Islamic scholars have underscored the urgency of halting climate change. The Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, drawn up by a group of academics, Muslim scholars and international environment policy experts, was announced this week at a symposium on Islam and climate change in Istanbul. It calls on the 1.6 billion Muslims around the world to phase out greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels and switch instead to energy from renewable sources. Unlike Catholicism, for example, there is no central religious authority in Islam, but the declaration suggests Muslims have a religious duty to tackle climate change. Nature explains the intent of the declaration and what it might achieve.

What does the statement say?

In a nutshell, it says that climate change resulting from fossil-fuel burning must urgently be halted, lest ecosystems and human civilization undergo severe disruptions. “This current rate of climate change cannot be sustained, and the earth’s fine equilibrium (mīzān) may soon be lost,” it reads. “Excessive pollution from fossil fuels threatens to destroy the gifts bestowed on us by God, whom we know as Allah — gifts such as a functioning climate, healthy air to breathe, regular seasons, and living oceans.” Citing a 2014 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it warns that components of Earth's system are at risk of experiencing abrupt and irreversible change.

More here.

The Fall of Rome
.

The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast

by. W.H. Auden
from The Collected Poems
Farber & Farber, 1976

Jermey N. A. Matthews in Physics Today:

Now 91 years old, mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson continues to churn out fresh opinions and original ideas. He is well known for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics and random matrix theory, among other things. However, he also expresses broad views and visions in book reviews and essays, including on topics as varied as space exploration, genetic engineering, and nuclear weapons.

Two collections of Dyson’s writings were released earlier this year, within a month of each other: Dreams of Earth and Sky (New York Review of Books, 2015) and Birds and Frogs: Selected Papers, 1990–2014 (World Scientific, 2015). “One of the joys of both books is the pleasure of getting to know Dyson better,” writes theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek in his review for this month’s issue of Physics Today. Dreams of Earth and Sky, geared for the general reader, is a selection of Dyson’s reviews for the New York Review of Books. The second offering, Birds and Frogs “is more varied and on the whole more technical,” writes Wilczek.

Physics Today caught up with Dyson recently to talk about his new books and about his views on current issues.

PT: What prompted you to assemble these two collections around the same time? And what's new or different about them?

DYSON: The simultaneous publication of the two books was unexpected and unplanned.Dreams of Earth and Sky is a collection of book reviews published by the New York Review of Books. It is a sequel to The Scientist as Rebel (New York Review Collections, 2006). Birds and Frogs is a collection of writings—everything except for book reviews—published by World Scientific. It is a sequel to an earlier volume of selected papers published by the American Mathematical Society.

PT: The reviewer highlights your appreciation for the virtues of blunders and of wrong theories. At what point in your career did you begin developing these appreciations?

DYSON: I did not think much about blunders and wrong theories until I read the books by Mario Livio (Brilliant Blunders, Simon & Schuster, 2013) and Margaret Wertheim (Physics on the Fringe, Walker Books, 2011) and wrote reviews of them. Writing reviews gives me a chance to think new thoughts and express new opinions. Sometimes the opinions are sincere and sometimes not. Reviews are intended to entertain as well as educate.

More here.

Mark Edmundson at The Chronicle Review:

Maybe we are best off without ideals. Perhaps there can be something bleakly noble in affirming ourselves as fundamentally Darwinian creatures who live to sustain our existences with as little pain and as much pleasure as possible. But is that all there is to life? The question of the great states of being, self and soul, is in danger of dropping off the map of human inquiry. In its place there opens up an expanse of mere existence based on desire, without hope, fullness, or ultimate meaning. We can do better.

Critics have often identified Western culture as a culture of the image. We live, it’s been said, in a culture of simulation. But simulation of what?

Popular culture (as adored now by the elite as it is by the general populace) simulates soul. An enormous, complex, and stunning technological force, which might be used to feed the world or to rid it of disease, is instead devoted to entertainment — to delivering experiences that fabricate states of soul. These fabrications testify to both our fear of soul states — they are ways of holding dangerous ideals at arm’s length — and our hunger for ideals. They mean and have meant too much. We cannot quite let them go.

more here.

Chris Sims in Comics Alliance:

When you look back at pop culture, you can occasionally follow the threads back to these points that change everything. They’re the projects that paved the way for so much that came after, the ones that introduced their audiences to a strange new way of thinking that eventually becomes the new standard, these massive influences that vast sections of the things we love almost certainly wouldn’t exist without. And for my generation, Gary Larson’s The Far Side is one of those points.

Through a daily strip that ran for fifteen years in over 1,900 newspapers — and got dropped from a handful for being too weird in the process — Larson introduced an entire generation to the surreal, random, and occasionally very dark humor that would become part of the language that we all speak. And today, August 14, as Larson celebrates his birthday, it’s a pretty great time to look back on his work.

More here.

Jerry Kaplan in the New York Times:

Last month over a thousand scientists and tech-world luminaries, including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak, released an open letter calling for a global ban on offensive “autonomous” weapons like drones, which can identify and attack targets without having to rely on a human to make a decision.

The letter, which warned that such weapons could set off a destabilizing global arms race, taps into a growing fear among experts and the public that artificial intelligence could easily slip out of humanity’s control — much of the subsequent coverage online was illustrated with screen shots from the “Terminator” films.

The specter of autonomous weapons may evoke images of killer robots, but most applications are likely to be decidedly more pedestrian. Indeed, while there are certainly risks involved, the potential benefits of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — to soldiers, civilians and global stability — are also significant.

The authors of the letter liken A.I.-based weapons to chemical and biological munitions, space-based nuclear missiles and blinding lasers. But this comparison doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.

More here.

Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

Didion came from a family of Republicans. She was born in Sacramento in 1934, a fifth-generation Californian. Her father started out in insurance, speculated in real estate, and ended up spending most of his career in the military, a very California trifecta. Turned down by Stanford, Didion attended Berkeley, in an era when campus life was socially conventional and politically dormant. In 1955, she won a guest editorship at Mademoiselleand spent a few months in New York City. A year later, she won a similar contest at Vogue, and she moved to New York in the fall of 1956 and began her magazine career there. Leaving home, she later said, “just seems part of your duty in life.”

Didion worked at Vogue for ten years. She continued to write for Mademoiselle, and, in 1960, she began contributing to The National Review, William F. Buckley’s conservative weekly. She wrote pieces about John Wayne, her favorite movie star, and, in the 1964 Presidential election, she voted for Barry Goldwater. She adored Goldwater. It was hardly a surprise that she found Haight-Ashbury repugnant. Her editors at the Post understood perfectly how she would react. They designed the cover before she handed in the piece.

Didion’s transformation as a writer did not involve a conversion to the counterculture or to the New Left. She genuinely loathed the hippies, whom she associated with characters like Charles Manson, and she thought that the Black Panthers and the student radicals were both frightening and ridiculous.

more here.

John Lysaker at nonsite:

We have come some way from the days when a stone torso fixed a poet and lead him to speak of its gaze, one that saw, even read him head to toe. For many if not most, it is now the reader or viewer or listener that sets the terms of such encounters, attenuated as they are. That is, it is no longer simply beauty that is in the eye of the beholder, but everything there is to say about a work and whatever might be found there. Not that “reader response criticism,” whether based in affect, cultural identity, and/or the neuro-Kantian turn, is the principal variable in this turn away from the sensibility that enabled Rainer Maria Rilke to write “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” But even without exploring the art market and museum culture, one has a firm sense that the basics of aesthetic engagement have changed in our age of digital reproduction.

Permit me an anecdote. I asked my “What is Art?” class: “How often do you listen to music?” “All the time,” I was told, each reporting that he or she listened for at least an hour a day. “But what do you mean by listen,” I asked. “Do you play the music just to listen to it, to follow it, to see where it goes and where it takes you? And then again, maybe a day or two later, listen again, armed with a few anticipations that, if you’re lucky, will cede to more intriguing discoveries? And might all that then ask of you something, something dear?” No. Music accompanied some other activity: studying, working-out, walking to class. For these students, and I do not believe they are unique, though they certainly were talented and a pleasure to engage, music had become ambient, what Brian Eno glosses as “an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint.”

more here.

Stewart Sinclair in The Morning News:

A sheep that is born and bred at a major US slaughterhouse has a much different experience. After a life in a small pen, she is one day led into a large room with four or five other sheep and a worker wielding what looks like a pair of oversized Walkman headphones, only they’re connected to a high-voltage cable descending from the ceiling. The worker then positions the pads on the sheep’s temples, subjecting her to electronarcosis, a shock that according to the Humane Slaughter Association instigates “a gran mal epileptic fit, during which the brain is stimulated, the body exhibits tonic/clonic activity, and the result is complete loss of consciousness.” The sheep collapses and stops breathing. Her front legs extend rigidly while her hind legs contract, pulling them inward like child’s pose in yoga. Then her body relaxes, her legs involuntarily kick, her body shakes in spasmodic fits, eyes dipping in their sockets as if she were experiencing a spiritual awakening. She might urinate or defecate, but there is still no pain. Then the worker straps her hind legs to a line that raises her through an entrance in the ceiling leading to the killing floor, where another worker “sticks” her, slicing her throat with a sharp knife until she bleeds. In a kind and considerate world, this happens within 15 seconds of electronarcosis, and the sheep doesn’t feel a thing. But this isn’t always the case.

The typical slaughterhouse worker is a Latino who nets $12.50 an hour and quits within a year, leaving employers little incentive to invest any time or money into training, which makes operator error—to say nothing of outright disregard and cruelty—a frequent occurrence. If the pads are misplaced on the sheep’s temples, she might not be fully unconscious. And even if they are placed correctly, the operator might take too long to attach her to the conveyor belt, and the poor sheep begins to recover, to breathe rhythmically and regain awareness of her surroundings—and to be able to respond to painful stimuli—just as the worker’s knife sticks her in the throat, leaving her wide-eyed, panicked, writhing, and struggling to breathe for up to a minute as the conveyor belt transports her soon-to-be carcass down the line.

More here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

It may be hard to imagine a ménage à trois, satisfactory to all parties, in which one member tries to dislodge another with a toxic gas and a third eats the offspring of the other two. But such an arrangement exists, and one of its members may even be sitting quietly in your kitchen’s spice rack. The story begins with the Large Blue, a butterfly that lays its eggs on the wild oregano plant. The caterpillar munches on the plant’s flower buds for two weeks and then one night drops to the ground. Most ants forage at noon, but by timing its descent at dusk, the infant caterpillar gets adopted by a red ant known as Myrmica that forages only at day’s end. The caterpillar deceives an ant into thinking it is a stray grub from the ant’s own nest. It does so by adopting the grub’s posture and by exuding a scent that mimics that of the ant’s own species. Taken underground to the Myrmica nest, the adopted caterpillar doesn’t remain a helpless foundling for long. It starts to acquire influence in the ant society by imitating the little clucking sounds made by the ants’ queen. And having gained high status in the nest, it can fulfill the purpose of its visit: to feast on the ants’ larvae. The ants themselves use their larvae as a food source when times are tough, so for their queenly guest to behave like a cannibal may not strike them as all that abhorrent.

The caterpillar gorges on the ant grubs for 10 months, increasing its weight nearly 50 times until it is time to turn into a pupa and then a butterfly. The Large Blue’s association with ants has been known for more than a century. Only recently have researchers started to explore how the butterfly pulls off the feat of detecting the underground nests of a single species of ant to which its caterpillars are adapted. (The butterfly, widespread in Europe, seeks out a single species of the Myrmica family of ants, but the particular species varies from one region to another in the Large Blue’s territory.) Considerable puzzlement ensued when experiments to test the butterfly’s ability to sense the presence of Myrmica came up blank. “It was a huge mystery that none of the experiments seemed to work,” said Naomi E. Pierce, an expert on butterfly-ant interactions at Harvard University. A surprising solution has been proposed by researchers led by Dario Patricelli and Emilio Balletto at the University of Turin in Italy and Jeremy A. Thomas of the University of Oxford. They have developed evidence that the oregano plant is the crucial mediator between the ants and the Large Blue butterfly.

More here.

Recursive

More neurons in the brain  than stars in the Milky Way—  some structure, however tentative—  and the fact of other forms  doesn’t fail to astound me  so much as it renders me  speechless, the lawful world  incomprehensible, the arbitrary world  consumed by lapses— coffee and oranges  in an office lonely as a picture occurs—  your hand on a book— and in this body  more transactional than animal  the day goes by— quite by—

.

by Shannon Tharp
from Echotheo Review, January 2015