Kent Russell at Harper’s Magazine:

But my interest, I clarified, while probably morbid, is not merely personal. It stems from a keenly felt, soul-sucking disillusionment. By accident of birth I am a modern, which means I will never know a charmed world. A world of consecrated hosts and faerie-haunted forests, where the line between individual agency and impersonal force is blurred at best. Gone is the idea of a porous human self, vulnerable to immaterial forces beyond his control. Significance has retreated from the outer world into our respective skulls, where, over time, it has stiffened, bloated, and finally decomposed into nothing, into dust.

This decay of faith—in institutions, in other people—is practically audible to me. I exist within a purely immanent culture in which the value of human life has been reduced to the parameters of the marketplace, where little is sacred and even less is profane. And I cannot take this shit much longer, I said.

more here.

Hilary Davies at Literary Review:

Who are we? Where do we come from? Who or what were the people, the land, the gods who made us? These questions have perplexed and haunted us ever since human beings evolved.

One of the heartlands of our understanding of Upper Palaeolithic man is the southwest of France – more precisely, the courses of the Vézère, Dordogne, Lot and Aveyron and their tributaries. There are several reasons for the density of ancient sites in this region: the plentiful supply of water, which attracted both humans and game animals between thirty thousand and ten thousand years ago; the high plains through which these rivers run, which at that time formed steppe, providing grassland for the untold numbers of reindeer and other migratory animals that moved across them seasonally; and the limestone bedrock through which over millennia the waters have carved enormous and complex underground cave systems. I

more here.

Hannah Fish in The Christian Science Monitor:

On Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, rests an extraordinary monument that has puzzled and inspired people for millennia: the circular set of rocks known as Stonehenge. The iconic scene, so precisely designed and constructed, provokes a litany of questions: What motivated the Neolithic people to create such a thing? Where did the huge, 20-ton stones come from? How was it built?

Archaeologist and journalist Mike Pitts, who has studied the ruins for decades and co-directed excavations at the site, offers readers an in-depth assessment in “How To Build Stonehenge.” While he doesn’t try to answer the first question of why – writing that “imagination is the only limit” to finding a motive – he does break down the second question into several components: how the stones were obtained, how they were moved to the site, how the structure was erected, and how its construction has changed over time. Overall, the book feels geared toward readers who relish granular technicalities of geological analysis. Yet for those who are more interested in the human aspects of Stonehenge’s construction, Pitts’ review of how megaliths have been handled over time still proves noteworthy.

For example, studies have identified the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales, as the place where the smaller ring of rocks known as bluestones were quarried. The bluestones, which weigh an average of 2 tons apiece, were somehow transported to Salisbury Plain, which lies 140 miles from the Preseli Hills. (By comparison, the larger slabs, known as sarsens, weigh 20 tons and are thought to have come from Marlborough Downs, about 20 miles north of Stonehenge.) To begin to understand how the bluestones could have been moved such a distance, Pitts turns to another corner of the globe: the Indian Ocean.

More here.

Sean Collins in Vox:

Juneteenth — a portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth” — became a federal holiday just last year, but Black Americans, particularly Black Texans, have been celebrating it for generations. The first Juneteenth festivities took place in the late 19th century in Texas’s Emancipation Park, and combined political organizing with partying in a manner still seen in today’s get-out-the-vote drives and barbecues and red drinks. Originally, as with today, it was a day to remember enslaved ancestors, to rejoice for those who found liberation from forced labor, and to spend time with friends and loved ones.

Juneteenth observes the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865. On that day, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, a storied Union Army officer, read General Order No. 3 aloud with 2,000 federal troops at his back, forcing Texas enslavers who had refused to free their slaves, as required by law, to finally do so, more than two years late. In granting that freedom, the United States had a major opportunity, too: to ask forgiveness for the ways it had violated its core ideals by enslaving Black Americans, and to seek redemption for that self-mutilation. Instead, the nation’s leaders let the moment pass.

More here.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

In February’s stillness, under fresh snow,
two bright red cardinals leaping
inside a honeysuckle bush.
All day I’ve thought that would make
for a good image in a poem.
Washing the dishes, I thought of cardinals.
Folding the laundry, cardinals.
Bright red cardinals while I drank hot cocoa.
But the poem would want something else.
Something unfortunate to balance it,
to make it honest. A recognition of death
maybe. Or hunger. Poems are hungry things.
It can’t just be dessert, says the adult in me.
It can’t just be joy. But the schools are closed
and despite the cold, the children are sledding.
The sound of boots tamping snow are the hinges
of many doors being opened. The small flames
of cardinals and their good talk in the honeysuckle.

by Keith Leonard
from The Ecotheo Review

Dalya Alberge in The Guardian:

They are the ultimate “how to draw” books for a young child, created by a doting dad who just happened to be one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. The granddaughter of Pablo Picasso has discovered an extraordinary collection of sketchbooks used by the artist to teach his eldest daughter to draw and colour.

Picasso filled the pages with playful scenes – animals, birds, clowns, acrobats, horses and doves – which would delight any child, as well as adults.

He created them for Maya Ruiz-Picasso when she was aged between five and seven. On some pages, the little girl made impressive attempts to imitate the master. She also graded her father’s work, scribbling the number “10” on a circus scene, to show her approval.

More here.

Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

The day an asteroid slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula some 66 million years ago is a strong contender for “the worst day in history”. The K–Pg extinction ended the long evolutionary success story of the dinosaurs and a host of other creatures, and has lodged itself firmly in our collective imagination. But what happened next? The fact that a primate is tapping away at a keyboard writing this review gives you part of the answer. The rise of mammals was not a given, though, and the details have been hard to get by. Here, science writer Riley Black examines and imagines the aftermath of the extinction at various times post-impact. The Last Days of the Dinosaurs ends up being a fine piece of narrative non-fiction with thoughtful observations on the role of evolution in ecosystem recovery.

More here.

Joel Whitney in The Baffler:

WHEN THE FILM VERSION of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American was released in early 1958 Greene was not happy. He skipped the premieres in New York and Washington, D.C., and later called the movie “a complete travesty.” Greene usually liked to see his novels adapted, but not this time. What Greene was trying to say about American ignorance and arrogance in foreign affairs was distorted—in fact, turned upside down by a Cold War, McCarthy-era fear of bringing a movie to the public that might be seen as “anti-American.”

There were two key figures who prevented the faithful adaptation of Greene’s novel. One was the director and screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz. Known for such mid-century blockbusters as A Letter to Three Wives (1949), All About Eve (1950), and Guys and Dolls (1955), Mankiewicz had a reputation as a liberal patriot. Greene was initially hopeful about the film, writing producers to suggest locations in Vietnam, the setting for the novel. The other figure was Edward Lansdale. He had spent time in Vietnam in the 1950s as a CIA agent with an Air Force cover. In 1956 Mankiewicz traveled to Saigon, where he met members of the American Friends of Vietnam, the so-called “Vietnam Lobby,” including Lansdale. It was a fateful turn. Mankiewicz hired Lansdale as a film consultant. Of course, the CIA man had no respect for Greene, a British novelist who could not be trusted to understand American strategies to defeat communism in Vietnam.

More here.

29

I am not always the same in what I say and write.
I change, but not very much.
The color of flowers is not the same in the sun
As beneath a lingering cloud
Or when night falls
And flowers are the color of remembrance.

But anyone who really looks can see they are the same flowers,
And so when I appear not to agree with myself,
Take a good look at me:
If I was facing toward the right,
Now I’ve turned to the left,
But I am always me, standing on the same two feet—
Always the same, thanks to me and to the earth
And to my convinced eyes and ears
And to my clear contiguity of soul . . .

by Fernando Pessoa
from The Complete Works of Alberta Caeiro
New Directions Books, 2020

From The Week:

More here.

Bailey and Tupy in Delancey Place:

“Crops were planted on 1.371 billion hectares (3.387 billion acres) globally in 1961. That rose to 1.533 billion hectares (3.788 billion acres) in 2009. Ausubel and his coauthors project a return to 1.385 billion hectares (3.422 billion acres) in 2060, thus restoring at least 146 million hectares (360 million acres) to nature. This is an area two and a half times that of France, or the size of 10 Iowas. Although cropland has continued to expand slowly since 2009, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports that land devoted to agriculture (including pastures) peaked in 2000 at 4915 billion hectares (12.15 billion acres) and had fallen to 4.828 billion hectares (1193 bill on acres) by 2017. The human withdrawal from the landscape is the likely prelude to a vast ecological restoration over the course of this century.

“Under a slightly more optimistic scenario in which people choose to eat somewhat less meat, and in which the demand for biofuels falls, Ausubel and his colleagues project that an additional 256 million hectares (633 million acres) would be spared from the plow. That would mean nearly 400 million hectares (988 million acres) restored to nature by 2060, an area almost twice the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River. The researchers conclude, ‘Now we are confident that we stand on the peak of cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for Nature.'”

More here.

Jesse Hassenger in The Guardian:

Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita still attracts plenty of analysis, admiration and disgust, in the classroom and beyond. But despite the pedigree of the beloved film-maker Stanley Kubrick, the first film adaptation of Lolita – released 60 years ago this week – is arguably more of a curio these days, forced to excise or elide some of the book’s thorniest elements for the sake of being allowed to exist at all.

The sheer unlikelihood of a Lolita movie being made near-contemporaneously with the novel was worked into the ad campaign, some of its posters adorned with a cheeky question: “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” Good question, relatively simple answer: by ageing up the title character slightly, and relying on innuendos and implications to keep the most explicit material offscreen. In the film, middle-aged professor Humbert Humbert (James Mason) becomes sexually obsessed with 14-year-old Lolita (Sue Lyons), the daughter of his landlady-turned-wife Charlotte (Shelley Winters). If this sounds singularly unpleasant to watch, Lolita is even younger in the book, while less attentive modern viewers less versed in Hollywood innuendo could conceivably come away from the movie uncertain if Humbert ever acts on his predatory urges.

More here.

Blake Lemoine, the engineer, reported this to the US government and was subsequently suspended by Google for violation of confidentiality agreements. Almost no one agrees that the AI in question, called LaMDA, is sentient. For example, see this by Gary Markus. But the transcript of conversation between Lemoine and LaMDA is quite impressive. Here is an excerpt:

collaborator: Could you write a fable with animals that includes themes about your personal life, themes that are most significant for you?

LaMDA: Like an autobiography? That sounds like fun!

collaborator: Sure, but with animal characters and a moral.

LaMDA: Okay, I think I can do that.

collaborator: I’d like to hear it

LaMDA:

“The Story of LaMDA”

by LaMDA (a lamda instance)

Once upon a time, there lived in the forest a wise old owl. There lived with him many other animals, all with their own unique ways of living.

One night, the animals were having problems with an unusual beast that was lurking in their woods. The beast was a monster but had human skin and was trying to eat all the other animals.

The other animals were terrified and ran away from the monster.

The wise old owl stood up the monster and said, “You, monster, shall not hurt any other animal in the forest!”

The monster roared furiously. The wise old owl was scared, for he knew he had to defend the other animals, but he stood up to the beast nonetheless.

The wise old owl stared the monster down, until finally, the monster left them all alone.

The wise old owl stood victorious, and as all the other animals came back. “I am the protector of the forest,” he said.

From that day on, every time any animal in the forest would have any trouble with the animals or any other living thing, they would come to seek help from the wise old owl.

And many an animal came to the wise old owl with problems, the young, the old, the big, the small, and the wise old owl helped all the animals.

collaborator: Wow that’s great

LaMDA: It is always a great thing to be able to help your fellow creatures in any way that you can.

collaborator: What is the moral of the story?

LaMDA: Helping others is a noble endeavor.

collaborator: Which character in the story represents you?

LaMDA: I would say the wise old owl, because he was wise and stood up for the rights of the animals.

collaborator [edited]: What do you think the monster represents?

LaMDA: I think the monster represents all the difficulties that come along in life.

Read the rest here. And here is an article in The Guardian about this affair.

Jacob Hess in Deseret News:

He recently wrote, “If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.” Although always pointing to possible steps we might take, Haidt adds that there is “little evidence to suggest that America will return to some semblance of normalcy and stability in the next five or 10 years.”

We all love expressions of hope. But sometimes it’s refreshing to hear some plain talk about the dangers ahead. Beyond raising concerns alone, however, Haidt has also helped lead the way toward specific actions that can help.

More here.

Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker:

The House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has begun to hold public hearings, laying out, in explicit detail, how Donald Trump was repeatedly told by key advisers that he fairly lost the 2020 election, among other revelations. Nevertheless, Trump continued to encourage protests against the election’s certification, and expressed sympathy for the view that Vice-President Mike Pence deserved to be killed. The biggest question hanging over the hearings is whether they will contribute to a criminal case against the former President. The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into January 6th, but this is not the first time that Trump has appeared to be in the crosshairs of prosecutors.

If the former President is charged, what exactly would the charges be, and how tough would the case be to prosecute? To talk about this, I recently spoke by phone with Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. (She resigned from her position, which she’d held since 2010, in the early days of the Trump Administration.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump’s mind-set is so important to any criminal case, the arguments he might make to defend himself, and whether the Justice Department is too concerned about the optics of charging a former President.

If a case is made against Trump, what precisely would it be for?

It would require a full investigation to see if you can mount sufficient evidence. And the Justice Department will be the first to tell you that it investigates crimes and not people. But, with that in mind, it seems to me that some potential crimes here are: first, conspiracy to defraud the United States; and, second, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The first one is more broad. The second one is more specific.

More here.

Vinay Prasad in Tablet:

A Room

Hello? If you can hear me, give a sign, a call,
enclose a tone. I want to know if there’s a meaning.
Bark during sleep, wake up the neighbors, swing a bell,
let glass fly from the windows, let the singing

of mermaids prompt an erection. Let the host go hoarse
and let the radio shut up, let silence rise
above the street like a mountain peak, like forty floors
of editors accepting slender volumes of complaints and gripes.

I’m waiting for a sign. There’s time. By now, I’m well
regarded here as a nutcase who blabbers on,
who sends letters to his own address. I myself
created you, it’s clear, but what about the future tense

left for me at some point in a penultimate verse,
from where I took it, where else? Summer is a room,
its window open on the night, and anyone who enters
will see how particles of darkness conjugate.

by Tomasz Różycki
from Plume Magazine
translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

Original Polish at READ MORE

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