Jim Davies in Nautilus:

Do we need artificial intelligence to tell us what’s right and wrong? The idea might strike you as repulsive. Many regard their morals, whatever the source, as central to who they are. This isn’t something to outsource to a machine. But everyone faces morally uncertain situations, and on occasion, we seek the input of others. We might turn to someone we think of as a moral authority, or imagine what they might do in a similar situation. We might also turn to structured ways of thinking—ethical theories—to help us resolve the problem. Perhaps an artificial intelligence could serve as the same sort of guide, if we were to trust it enough.

Even if we don’t seek out an AI’s moral counsel, it’s just a fact now that more and more AIs have to make moral choices of their own. Or, at least, choices that have significant consequences for human welfare, such as sorting through resumes to narrow down a list of candidates for a job, or deciding whether to give someone a loan.¹ It’s important to design AIs that make ethical judgments for this reason alone.

More here.

Michael Marshall in Nature:

The missing earthworms were a sign. As archaeologist Harvey Weiss and his colleagues excavated a site in northeast Syria, they found a buried layer of wind-blown silt so barren there was hardly any evidence of earthworms at work during that ancient era. Something drastic had happened thousands of years ago — something that choked the land with dust for decades, leaving a blanket of soil too inhospitable even for earthworms.

The drought hit in roughly 2200 BC, when the Akkadian Empire dominated what is now Syria and Iraq. By 2150 BC, the empire was no more. The central authority had disintegrated, and many people had voted with their feet, leaving the region. The overlap between an epic drought and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire was no mere coincidence, according to Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. When he and his colleagues discovered the evidence of drought in the early 1990s, they proposed that the abrupt climate disruption had brought the ancient empire down¹. This example has become a grim warning of how vulnerable complex societies can be to climate change.

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Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

I was watching Oneohtrix Point Never in the related project of trying to figure out just what the heck exactly it is about The Weeknd, who released his most recent album, Dawn FM, a couple of weeks ago, and I have never quite been able to understand why I am both attracted to and repelled by everything that is The Weeknd. I say repelled because there is a kind of loosely held emptiness, a brazen cynicism and pure Pop indifference to the music of The Weeknd that often makes me feel frustrated both with The Weeknd (why do you have to be so glib?!?!) and then in some related way with myself and then also with nearly everything. But then when I listen to The Weeknd for a little longer I realize that he is also frustrated with himself, and by extension with me and also very much with more or less everything. His music is the music of that. And then somehow it is also at the same time the utmost in listenable and cherry-flavored fun-all-the-way-down meaningless Pop.

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Jing Tsu in Wired:

Quiet, cautious, and insistent, Zhi was also highly qualified. He earned a PhD in physics from Leipzig University but declined a job offer in the United States in order to return to China. He taught at two Chinese universities and later helped to devise China’s landmark 12-year Plan for the Development of Science and Technology of 1956. It was a hopeful time for scientists and technicians who were deemed useful for their contributing roles in a state-guided socialist economy.

Since his arrest in July 1968 for being a “reactionary academic authority,” Zhi had been cut off from his research, the news, and his devoted German wife. He was used to working on equations and engineering problems with teams of colleagues. No longer. His only company was the eight characters on the wall of his cell reminding him that prisoners faced two options from their minders: “Leniency to those who confess, severity to those who refuse.”

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Clifford Thompson at Commonweal:

A passage in Walt Whitman’s seminal 1855 work, Leaves of Grass, reads, “And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not / something else, / And the mocking bird in the swamp never studied the / gamut, yet trills pretty well to me.” Another reads, “For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be / slighted, / For me the sweetheart and the old maid…for me / mothers and the mothers of mothers, / For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears, / For me children and the begetters of children.”

Lines from “Song of Myself,” the book’s longest poem, help separate the chapters of the African-American poet Lucille Clifton’s Generations: A Memoir. Perhaps, in part, that is because of three qualities of Whitman’s work, evident in the lines above: celebration of life, acknowledgment of its difficulties, and recognition of beauty wherever it is found.

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Yanis Varoufakis in Project Syndicate:

The euro’s primary purpose was to facilitate integration by eliminating the cost of currency conversions and, more importantly, the risk of destabilizing devaluations. Europeans were promised that it would encourage cross-border trade. Living standards would converge. The business cycle would be dampened. It would bring greater price stability. And intra-eurozone investment would yield faster productivity growth overall and convergent growth between member countries. In short, the euro would underpin the benign Germanization of Europe.

Twenty years later, none of these promises has been fulfilled. Since the eurozone’s formation, intra-eurozone trade grew by 10%, substantially lower than the 30% increase in global trade and, more significantly, the 63% increase in trade between Germany and a trio of European Union countries that did not adopt the euro: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

More here.

Michael Fried at nonsite:

What all this comes down to, then, is that Berger accepts a priori a militant and often staggeringly vulgarized brand of Marxism from which all his judgments about art derive, in language anyway. (Since we are never allowed to view the actual procedure by which Berger judges that one painting is “subjective” or “decadent” and another not—this would involve defining Marxist terminology in visual terms—we can say no more than this.) Furthermore, when Berger finds himself in a position that, even to the layman, is pretty obviously untenable, he is prepared to deny its apparent meaning and then reintroduce the untenable notion through the loaded use of supposedly neutral or descriptive words—such as “improvement” in the above example. My fundamental objection is not that Berger begins from a position of accepting Marxist theory. In the world we live in more and more critics of art may be expected to start from similar political premises. But what is imperative is that the critic define his terms; that he show with sensitivity and logical rigor the usefulness and, if possible, the necessity of employing Marxist concepts and terminology. Unless he can do this his judgments will reveal nothing more than the strength of his bias and the slovenliness of his mind: they can say nothing about the works of art in question.

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A Small Bang

Syllables pour into a hundred-word universe shocked as the first hydrogen atoms. Each has a music. They circle, join suddenly — word sounds — “Crew went the curlew as it flew in a curlicue.” They rhyme. “Ache did” pairs with “naked.” They gather into galaxies, “He did not know who he was until she taught him desire, then he did not know who he was,” until here at the end of the dictionary of the Milky Way we dangle from a participle, aware of dark matter, what has not as yet been seen, so not as yet said.

I wake from yesterday’s mild exercise
this body’s not immortal though sometimes
I’m hard to convince .. if I came back what would I be?
something small, quick, and sly? A night creature,
fox maybe or ..water rat ..nose in the air ..feet in water?

……. it’s good to live in two worlds at once
……. what lives between fire and earth?

or will we have no bodies then? just location?
like a point in geometry? I would miss this aging
aching frame .. the heaviness that anchors spirit
here in spring like the pull of earth that keeps
the moon from swinging away

by Nils Peterson
from 1001 Words – Thinking of Scheherazade

Akhil Sharma in The New Yorker:

Not long after we began dating, my now wife, Christine, and I started making up stories about the child we might have.

We named the child—or, in the stories we told about him, he named himself—Suzuki Noguchi. Among the things we liked about him was that he was cheerfully indifferent to us. He did not wish to be either Irish (like Christine) or Indian (like me). Suzuki was eight, and he chose this name because he was into Japanese high fashion. When we told him that he couldn’t just go around claiming to be Japanese, Suzuki said that he was a child of God and who were we to say that God was not Japanese. In addition to being a dandy, Suzuki was a criminal. He dealt in yellowcake uranium and trafficked in endangered animals. Sometimes we asked him how his day at school had gone and he would warn, “Do you really want to be an accessory after the fact?” We imagined him banging on our bedroom door when we were having sex and shouting, “Stop! You can’t get any child better than me.”

My wife was forty-eight and I was forty-seven, and we started inventing these stories as a form of play. It also soothed some hurt part of us.

More here.

Annie Roth in The New York Times:

Smashing the patriarchy in the human world has been easier said than done. But last year, a 9-year-old female Japanese macaque in a reserve in southern Japan showed humans how it’s done by violently overthrowing the alpha male of her troop to become its first female leader in the reserve’s 70-year history. The macaque, named Yakei, presides over a troop of 677 monkeys in Takasakiyama Natural Zoological Garden, which was established as a reserve for monkeys in 1952. There are two troops on the island reserve, and they spend most of their time roaming the forested mountain at its center. They also make daily visits to a park at the base of the mountain, where the staff provides food. Since the reserve opened, its staff has kept tabs on the romantic and political struggles of its simian residents.

Yakei’s ascent to alpha status surprised both scientists and reserve workers, who are now closely observing Yakei’s reign to see how long she can maintain her supremacy. And with breeding season sending Yakei into the middle of something like a messy love triangle, some experts wonder if she may be vulnerable to a usurper.

More here.