Alexander Larman in The Critic:

If Sir Kingsley Amis was still alive today, on the occasion of his centenary — an event that would owe a quite remarkable amount to medical science, and might, given the context of this particular weekend, even be seen as a second Resurrection narrative — he might be amused by the way that he has been treated by posterity. I’ve written about the decline in Kingers’ fortunes, justified or not, for the May issue of The Critic, but one area that I was only able to touch on in the most passing of fashions was one that many Amis aficionados prefer not to dwell on. Yes — oh dear yes — Kingsley Amis wrote poetry. Many may have wished that it were not so.

This does one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant writers a disservice. One of the oft-repeated ironies of his epochal friendship with Philip Larkin is that, for a fair amount of their early lives, each man saw himself in the opposite sphere to the one in which he ended up excelling: Larkin wished to be a novelist, Amis a poet.

More here.

Morgan Meis in Slant Books:

Well Rick B. from the United States, it seems that you did not like the Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s newest film The Worst Person in The World very much. Your Amazon review is quite short, and pretty rough. You gave it one star. The title of your review is “tedious, annoying people talking too much.”  And then you followed that up with two words and an exclamation mark: “It sucks!”

I did like the film and so I found your annoyance annoying, which brings up the immediate question as to why I spend so much time reading Amazon reviews of things, films in particular, but also books, and I will also confess that when I read an Amazon review I find especially baffling I will often click on the name of the person leaving the review and look at other things they have reviewed.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

When the mathematicians Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai first posed their “expectation threshold” conjecture in 2006, they didn’t believe it themselves. Their claim — a broad assertion about mathematical objects called random graphs — seemed too strong, too all-encompassing, too bold to possibly be true. It felt more like wishful thinking than a reflection of mathematical truth. Even so, no one could prove it false, and it quickly became one of the most important open problems in the field.

Now, more than 15 years later, a pair of young mathematicians at Stanford University have done what Kahn and Kalai thought borderline impossible: In a surprisingly short preprint posted online just a few weeks ago, Jinyoung Park and Huy Tuan Pham have provided a complete proof of the conjecture.

“It’s strikingly simple and ingenious,” said Kalai. “It’s stunning. It’s wonderful.”

More here.

Jeff Bleich and Dr. Bradley J. Strawser at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next technological revolution, a breakthrough that poses both great risks and great rewards for human rights. Our ability to mitigate AI’s risks will depend not on its technical features, but on how and why those features are used. A hammer can build a house or break a skull — the impact of any tool depends on who wields it, their intentions behind its use, and what constraints, if any, have been built around the tool’s use.

Having studied leading AI technologies, we are optimistic about their capacity to enhance the core values of human rights — including the right to life, equality, freedom of movement, and a sustainable environment. But realizing that potential requires being clear-eyed about the threat AI technologies pose, then addressing those threats.

AI is already embedded in many aspects of our lives, from mail systems that anticipate our words to Alexa/Siri assistants learning our needs to bank systems recognizing out-of-pattern purchases to playlists shuffling to match our personal tastes. Some find these things convenient; some find them annoying. Few consider them an immediate threat to our lives and freedoms.

Yet, as AI advances, its presence in the world will come into sharper relief.

More here.

Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon:

Creativity is an essential element of the human condition. Yet unlike other elements of our humanity, there’s a perception that creativity seems to leave us as we age. Children, wrapped up in their imaginary play worlds and projects, are notoriously unhindered in their creativity. But adults are far less adept at conjuring the fantastical and bizarre imagination that their childhood selves had easy access to. Many adults long for those playful youthful days, when conjuring up a grand scene, on paper or on the playground, was as natural as breathing.

To write his new book on creativity, author Matt Richtel turned to a diverse group of individuals who exemplify the essence of the word — director Judd Apatow, entrepreneur Mike Lee, musician Rhiannon Giddens, Nobel prize laureate Dr. James Allison. He listened to their stories about what sparks them and how they’ve attained their achievements. And the good news is, you and I don’t have to be like any of them.

More here.

I Went Into the Maverick Bar

I went into the Maverick bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
………………………….. backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earing in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
…………………………..by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
…………………………..where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”
And with the next song,
…………………………..a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances
…………………………..in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
…………………………..and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness—
…………………………..America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders—
…………………………..under the tough old stars—
In the shadow of bluffs
…………………………..I came back to myself
To the real work, to
…………………………..”What is to be done.”

by Gary Snyder
from No Nature- New and Selected Poems
Pantheon Books, 1992

Heather Clark in The New York Times:

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was once the most famous poet in America. Her collections sold tens of thousands of copies, and her readings filled theaters from New York to Texas. She was the female voice of the Jazz Age, the New Woman incarnate whose passionate and iconoclastic verse earned her a devoted following. Her 1920 poem “First Fig” became an anthem for a generation tired of Victorian mores:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, and at the height of her fame she seemed unstoppable. But not long after World War I, modernist poets began rejecting rigid rhyme, meter and expressions of emotion. Millay’s wildly popular love sonnets suddenly seemed quaint when set beside the oblique and somber lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The modernists won the day, and the discrete, imagistic verse of Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore eventually crowded out the more decadent, romantic lyrics of Millay and Sara Teasdale. The poet Maxine Kumin remembered her Harvard professors dismissing Millay as “just a sentimental woman” in the mid-1940s.

Now, 72 years after her death, Yale University Press has published Millay’s diaries nearly in full. Their editor, Daniel Mark Epstein, hopes this landmark publication will revive interest in Millay’s daring, transgressive verse. And indeed, Millay’s best work — with its coy rhymes, bravado and playful sexual politics — deserves a contemporary reassessment. It’s something of a miracle that Millay was published at all. She grew up in poverty in Newburyport, Mass., and Camden, Maine.

More here.