Discovery

I believe in the great discovery.
I believe in the man who will make the discovery.
I believe in the fear of the man who will make the
…. discovery.

I believe in his face going white,
his queasiness, his upper lip drenched in cold sweat.

I believe in the burning of his notes,
burning them into ashes,
burning them to the last scrap.

I believe in the scattering of numbers,
scattering them without regret.

I believe in the man’s haste,
in the precision of his movements,
in his free will.

I believe in the shattering of tablets,
the pouring out of liquids,
the extinguishing of rays.

I am convinced this will end well,
that it will not be too late,
that it will take place without witnesses.

I’m sure no one will find out what happened,
not the wife, not the wall,
not even the bird that might squeal in its song.

I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.

These words soar for me beyond all rules
without seeking support from actual examples.
My faith is strong, blind, and without foundation.

by Wistlawa Szymborska
from View With a Grain of Sand
Harcourt Brace 1993
translation: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Peter Conrad at The Guardian:

In more innocent or credulous days, the faithful sat in the dark to gaze at strange beings with detachable heads who were actually phantasms of light. Among the stars in this custom-made galaxy, the most alluring and yet the most distant was Greta Garbo, whose persona alternated between carnal heat and ascetic frost. After wickedly enticing her male victims in The Temptress, she redeemed herself as the dying courtesan in Camille; in Queen Christina, she was exalted by sacrifice and in a last mesmerising closeup all emotion blankly drained from her face as she renounced the throne and sailed into exile.

Gradually this astral creature edged down to Earth. Publicists issued an excited proclamation when Garbo talked for the first time on screen in Anna Christie, even though she began by gruffly demanding a whisky in a waterfront bar.

more here.

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

Even if Peter Bogdanovich, who died on Thursday, at the age of eighty-two, had never exposed a frame of film as a director, he’d be one of the history-making heroes of the world of movies. Bogdanovich, born in 1939, grew up in Manhattan as a precocious adolescent cinephile. In 1961, at the absurdly young age of twenty-one, he organized the first-ever American retrospective of Orson Welles’s films, at the Museum of Modern Art, and wrote a monograph about the director’s work. He did the same, at the same museum, the following year with the films of Howard Hawks, and, in 1963, with Alfred Hitchcock. These screenings, along with the symbolism of the entry into the museum’s ranks of three of the greatest filmmakers who were also Hollywood directors—and who were still working at the time—were something of a slow-motion coming-out party for the notion of Hollywood as a hotbed of directorial artistry.

more here.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

It was exactly two years ago that it first became publicly knowable—though most of us wouldn’t know for at least two more months—just how freakishly horrible is the branch of the wavefunction we’re on. I.e., that our branch wouldn’t just include Donald Trump as the US president, but simultaneously a global pandemic far worse than any in living memory, and a world-historically bungled response to that pandemic.

So it’s appropriate that I just finished reading Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, by Broad Institute genetics postdoc Alina Chan and science writer Matt Ridley. Briefly, I think that this is one of the most important books so far of the twenty-first century.

Of course, speculation and argument about the origin of COVID goes back all the way to that fateful January of 2020, and most of this book’s information was already available in fragmentary form elsewhere. And by their own judgment, Chan and Ridley don’t end their search with a smoking-gun: no Patient Zero, no Bat Zero, no security-cam footage of the beaker dropped on the Wuhan Institute of Virology floor. Nevertheless, as far as I’ve seen, this is the first analysis of COVID’s origin to treat the question with the full depth, gravity, and perspective that it deserves.

More here.

Loukia Papadopoulos in Interesting Engineering:

Last June, we brought you news of TuSimple, a transportation company focused on driverless tech for trucks, completing a 950-mile (1,528-km) trip 10 hours faster than a human driver could. At the time, eighty percent of the journey was conducted by the autonomous system, while a human was at the wheel for the other 20 percent of the trip, and at the ready to take over the reins if anything faulted with the technology.

Now, according to a new press release, the same company has managed to run an 80-mile (129-km) route with absolutely no human on board. The run, which took place on December 22^nd, saw the firm’s autonomous semi-truck begin its journey from a large railyard in Tucson, Arizona, and end at a distribution center in the Phoenix metro area.

More here.

Nigel Crisp in Prospect:

More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle wrote about eudaimonia—commonly translated as human flourishing—and discussed how we can best live our lives. It is a concept that has influenced philosophers through the ages, from Thomas Aquinas to Martha Nussbaum, who have in different ways developed theories about how we can live the good life and fulfil our true capability and potential as human beings.

The Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us all just how important these ideas are and shown the interconnection of every aspect of our lives, from health to the economy, the environment and education. As we build for the future, we need to think again about the well-lived life and the values—or virtues, in Aristotle’s terms—by which we live it.

In the 10 manuscripts that make up the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle also describes the concept of phronesis—practical wisdom—which means, in broad terms, understanding ends and means and the differences between them. Or as we might say today, knowing what is the right thing to do and knowing how to do it.

More here.

Concert in the Garden

—for Carmen Figueroa de Meyer

It rained,
The hour is an enormous eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.
The rivers of music
enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where?

The world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness at having come,
joy of being here.

I walk lost in my own center.

by Octavio Paz
from Octavio Paz, The Collected Poems
translation: Eliot Weinberger
Carcanet, 1983

~~~~

Concierto En El Jardín

Llovió
La hora es un ojo inmenso.
En ella andamos como reflejos.
El río de la música
entra en mi sangre.
Si digo: cuerpo, contesta: viento.
Si digo: tierra, contesta: ¿dónde?

Se abre, flor doble, elmundo:
tristeza de haber venido,
alegría de estar aquí.

Ando perdida en mi propio centro.

by Octavio Paz

Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times:

Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, has interviewed many people who’ve lived through civil wars, and she told me they all say they didn’t see it coming. “They’re all surprised,” she said. “Even when, to somebody who studies it, it’s obvious years beforehand.”

This is worth keeping in mind if your impulse is to dismiss the idea that America could fall into civil war again. Even now, despite my constant horror at this country’s punch-drunk disintegration, I find the idea of a total meltdown hard to wrap my mind around. But to some of those, like Walter, who study civil war, an American crackup has come to seem, if not obvious, then far from unlikely, especially since Jan. 6.

Two books out this month warn that this country is closer to civil war than most Americans understand. In “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” Walter writes, “I’ve seen how civil wars start, and I know the signs that people miss. And I can see those signs emerging here at a surprisingly fast rate.” The Canadian novelist and critic Stephen Marche is more stark in his book, “The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future.” “The United States is coming to an end,” Marche writes. “The question is how.” In Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon, a scholar who studies violent conflict, recently urged the Canadian government to prepare for an American implosion. “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,” he wrote. “By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.” As John Harris writes in Politico, “Serious people now invoke ‘Civil War’ not as metaphor but as literal precedent.”

More here.

Jonny Diamond in Smithsonian:

I meet Bob Leverett in a small gravel parking lot at the end of a quiet residential road in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We are at the Ice Glen trailhead, half a mile from a Mobil station, and Leverett, along with his wife, Monica Jakuc Leverett, is going to show me one of New England’s rare pockets of old-growth forest. For most of the 20th century, it was a matter of settled wisdom that the ancient forests of New England had long ago fallen to the ax and saw. How, after all, could such old trees have survived the settlers’ endless need for fuel to burn, fields to farm and timber to build with? Indeed, ramping up at the end of the 17th century, the colonial frontier subsisted on its logging operations stretching from Maine to the Carolinas. But the loggers and settlers missed a few spots over 300 years, which is why we’re at Ice Glen on this hot, humid August day.

To enter a forest with Bob Leverett is to submit to a convivial narration of the natural world, defined as much by its tangents as its destinations—by its opportunities for noticing. At 80, Leverett remains nimble, powered by a seemingly endless enthusiasm for sharing his experience of the woods with newcomers like me. Born and raised in mountain towns in the Southern Appalachians, in a house straddling the state line between Georgia and Tennessee, Leverett served for 12 years as an Air Force engineer, with stints in the Dakotas, Taiwan and the Pentagon, but he hasn’t lost any of his amiable Appalachian twang. And though he’s lived the majority of his life in New England, where he worked as an engineering head of a management consulting firm and software developer until he retired in 2007, he comes across like something between an old Southern senator and an itinerant preacher, ready to filibuster or sermonize at a moment’s notice. Invariably, the topic of these sermons is the importance of old-growth forest, not only for its serene effect on the human soul or for its biodiversity, but for its vital role in mitigating climate change.

More here.

Jackson Arn at Art in America:

If John Chamberlain hadn’t planted his flag and declared himself crushed car guy back in 1957, somebody else probably would have, and they’d probably be famous today. But I doubt they’d have done as much with the territory. All but one of the eighteen sculptures in “Stance, Rhythm, and Tilt,” an exhibition at Gagosian in New York, were made from beat-up car parts. It’s one of those rare gimmicks that transcends mere gimmickry, so packed with symbolic import (the waning of America’s manufacturing base? the violence endemic to American society? something about America?) that you could almost miss the subtle mastery of the execution.

The most impressive thing about this show, with all due respect to the art, is that the word “car” never appears—not in the title, not in the press release, not anywhere. Form is the star. This is probably the way Chamberlain, who died in 2011 at the age of 84, would have wanted it. He always denied that he was trying to evoke crashes or industrial decay, or even that he made sculptures “about” cars.

more here.

Daniel Marcus at Artforum:

WRITER CHRIS KRAUS devotes a long section of her 1997 book I Love Dick to artist Hannah Wilke, who had passed away from lymphoma a few years earlier. Identifying with Wilke’s reputation as a “female monster,” Kraus glimpsed what few other writers at the time could see. Over a career spanning more than three decades, from the late 1950s until her last days in the cancer ward, where she died at age fifty-two, Wilke treated her art as a vector of her desire, “continuously exposing [herself] to whatever situation occurs,” as she put it in a 1976 statement. Rejected as a shameless exhibitionist, she carried on unhindered, refusing to place her sexuality—or her body—under wraps. Her striptease was relentless and ruthless, never more so than in her final body of work, “Intra-Venus,” 1992–93, a series of large-scale color photographs and videos in which the artist, sick with cancer, stunts for the camera in the costume of illness, still every bit the goddess in bandages and with an IV drip.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZaxiassX48

Julia Kristeva at Bookforum:

The initiated had been familiar with the first edition for a long time, but with this new one, Bakhtin’s Dostoyevsky became a social phenomenon, a political symptom. At the center of this new furor was my friend and mentor, Tzvetan Stoyanov, well-known literary critic, anglophone, francophone, and obviously russophone. He had already introduced me to Shakespeare and Joyce, Cervantes and Kafka, the Russian formalists and the breakthrough postformalism of a certain Bakhtin. Now we could reimmerse ourselves, day and night, out loud and in Russian, Bakhtin’s book in hand, in the novels of Dostoyevsky. I heard the vocal power of tragic laughter, the farce within the force of evil, and that contagious, drunken flow of dialogues composed as story that Bakhtin calls slovo, translated as mot (word) in French. Through the vocabulary and syntax, I heard, as Logos incarnate, the Word stirring biblical deliverance into a new multivocal, multiversal narration…

more here.

Laith Al-Shawaf in Psychology Today:

Emotions are crucial to our lives, so you might be surprised to hear that psychologists don’t have a consensus definition of what they are or how they work.

Despite the chorus of different voices, there are some things emotion scientists agree on. Most researchers agree, for example, that all emotions have a physiological component, a phenomenological component (what it feels like to experience that emotion), and a behavioral component (for instance, some emotions prime you to fight, whereas others make you more likely to play).

There’s a prominent evolutionary view that expands on this idea. According to this view, an emotion is a coordinating mechanism or a “mode of operation” for the entire body and brain. In other words, when an emotion like fear takes hold, it affects everything in your body and mind: it influences what you can see, what you are able to focus on, what is readily available to your memory, where metabolic resources are distributed in your body, the manner in which you categorize objects as safe or dangerous, how you prioritize your goals, and pretty much everything else about the way you parse the world.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can’t kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There’s surely a kind of reality there. On the other hand, Luke Skywalker isn’t a real person, but we talk about him all the time. Maybe we can talk about unreal things in useful ways. Jody Azzouni is one of the leading contemporary advocates of nominalism, the view that abstract objects are not “things,” they are merely labels we use in talking about things. A deeply philosophical issue, but one that has implications for how we think about physics and the laws of nature.

More here.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in Areo:

A lifetime as an Oxford tutor has ingrained in me the Socratic habit of raising questions for discussion, often topics with a mildly paradoxical flavour, conundrums, apparent contradictions or inconsistencies that seem to need a bit of sorting out. I have continued the habit on Twitter, often ending my tweets with the word, “Discuss.” That tweet was one such.

More here.