by Tim Sommers

My wife Stacey is irritated with the way Netflix’s machine learning algorithm makes recommendations. “I hate it,” she says. “Everything it recommends, I want to watch.”

On the other hand, I am quite happy with Spotify’s AI. Not only does it do pretty well at introducing me to bands I like, but also the longer I stay with it the more obscure the bands that it recommends become. So, for example, recently it took me from Charly Bliss (76k followers), to Lisa Prank (985 followers), to Shari Elf (33 followers). I believe that I have a greater appreciation for bands that are more obscure because I am so cool. Others speculate that I follow more obscure bands because I think it makes me cool while, in fact, it shows I am actually uncool. Whatever it is, Spotify tracks it. The important bit is that it doesn’t just take me to more and more obscure bands. That would be too easy. It takes me more and more obscure bands that I like. Hence, it successfully tracks my coolness/uncoolness.

The proliferation of AI “recommenders” seems relatively innocuous to me – although not to everyone. Some people worry about losing the line between when they just like what the AI recommends to them, and when they adapt to like what the AI says they should like. But that just means the AI is part of their circle of friends now, right? It’s the proliferation of AIs into more fraught kinds of decision-making that I worry about.

AIs are used to decide who gets a job interview, who gets granted parole, who gets most heavily policed, and who gets a new home loan. Yet there’s evidence that these AIs are systematically biased. For example, there is evidence that a widely-used system designed to predict whether offenders are likely to reoffend or commit future acts of violence – and, hence, to set bail, determine sentences, and set parole – exhibits racial bias. So, too several AIs designed to predict crime ahead of time, to guide policing (a pretty Philip K. Dickian idea already). Amazon discovered, for themselves, that their hiring algorithm was sexist. Sexist, racists, anti-LGBTQA+. anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslin language is endemic among large-language models. Read more »

Slogging

slogging along he was
partially absent as usual he was
just watching the river flow he was,
but then got a shutter-snap glimpse
of the real of its flow and went

……………… still

he stopped not at inch from its brink looking,
but not just looking, no,
deeper than looking, seeing
seeing the river flow, no, being
being the river’s flow

it was brief, that ecstatic glimpse,
been looking for it since in a welter of words,
held by their dam, sleepy, semi-alert, so

still slogging he is

Jim Culleny
11/26/22

by Ethan Seavey

There was a period in my life when I believed that all humans came from one man. This included his wife Eve. After that followed a period when I believed nothing and I thought that was enough.

I never negated the information that I loved as a child. In Catholic school they’ll teach you that Adam and Eve were factual human beings, and then a few years later, they’ll teach you that Adam and Eve didn’t exist, sure, but it’s an allegory. In fact, as if to dispel any rumors that their story had any basis in fact, they show you that the Bible has two different creation myths: the one with Adam and Eve, and the one where God takes a big nap after making the universe and an abundance of humans. So it doesn’t really matter that it’s a creation myth; that’s not the point. If you pay attention in religion class, you’d know that it means that humans are all connected to one another. If you speak to a stranger and trace your family trees back far enough, you’ll find a shared grandmother who gave birth to both of your families. And her name was Eve.

No, I didn’t believe Adam and Eve were the origin to humanity anymore. I did think the story had the power to bridge gaps between humans who look different from one another (of course, then, I did not know that historically it has had the inverse effect). And I suppose I figured that somewhere along the timeline, a monkey named Eve who must have had a uniquely enormous brain must have reproduced with a monkey named Adam who liked to walk on two feet. Read more »

Wendy Red Star. Winter – The Four Seasons Series, 2006.

Archival pigment print on sunset fiber rag

More here, here, and here.

by Christopher Horner

Man is that night, that empty Nothingness, which contains everything in its undivided simplicity: the wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful; it is the night of the world which then presents itself to us. —Hegel

In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations —Adorno

Here is the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ last novel. What is going on?

An ancient English Cathedral Town? How can the ancient English Cathedral town be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.

This is the strange opening of Charles Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. We come to learn pretty quickly that we are in the ‘stream of consciousness’ of a man in the grip of an opium induced hallucination – stream of unconsciousness might fit the case better. Note the way in which we get the effect of a double exposure, and not one of a still, but a moving picture. And the book proceeds, still written in the present tense, for most of the text that he completed. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Eric Bies

There was a time when Google replied with images of and information about a world-class jockey, an Englishman born the same year Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Lately, the results of the same query tend toward the man of our time, the subject of this interview. Call it a correction: Steve Donoghue the Boston book critic, Steve Donoghue the editor, Steve Donoghue the YouTuber.

His bylines regularly straddle Books columns at venues large (The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, The National) and small (Big Canoe News, The Bedford Times Press). He is a co-founder of Open Letters Review (where his annual end-of-year Best and Worst Books wrap-ups shouldn’t be missed). His work has been selected to appear at this very site. He reads faster and probably writes faster than you and me combined, and the proof is in the literary pudding: literally thousands of book reviews, articles, and essays to his name. “Prodigious industry” does not begin to tell the story; it’s his unconventional YouTube presence that registers a note of head-scratching astonishment.

For starters, not a single one of his videos has come close to going viral. His second most popular upload, “The Only Sure-Fire Way to Deal with Book-Mildew”—a parody of book restoration guides, instructing anxious owners of moldy tomes to shower the offending objects with water, then throw them away—boasts just 18,000 views. (And that’s an outlier: the typical Donoghue upload tends to clock in at around 850.) His subscriber count, by most measures modest, weighs in at 13,600. And yet stacked against this figure is the rather remarkable channel-wide tally of 5.7 million video views. Rain or shine, that number climbs at a steady rate of 20,000 new views per week. Read more »

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

This year marks the 42nd anniversary of the American release of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams’ “five-book trilogy,” of which Hitchhiker’s was the first installment, led readers through a melancholy universe in which bureaucracy is the ultimate source of evil and shallow, self-serving incompetents are the galaxy’s greatest villains. The best-selling series helped shape the worldview of Generation X, capturing the nihilistic cynicism of the Thatcher/Reagan 1980s.

Adams’ seminal work isn’t run-of-the-mill genre fiction in which heroes engage in a good-versus-evil battle, triumphing through bravery and cunning. (That’s the stuff you find in the Harry Potter series, the Millennial Generation’s literary equivalent.) In Hitchhiker’s, our hapless main character, Arthur Dent, is stuck in a world in which his good intentions fail miserably, wasted on an impenetrable system too big to succeed. His traveling companion Marvin, a robot with a brain the size of a planet, sees the truth, and the truth causes incurable depression.

To document the broader cultural impact of Hitchhiker’s, we’ve asked a number of public figures in science, the arts, the humanities, and government to reflect on how the book changed their own understanding of life, the universe, and everything. Read more »