Sophia Chen in Nature:

Many industries are betting that they will benefit from the anticipated quantum-computing revolution. Pharmaceutical companies and electric-vehicle manufacturers have begun to explore the use of quantum computers in chemistry simulations for drug discovery or battery development. Compared with state-of-the-art supercomputers, quantum computers are thought to more efficiently and accurately simulate molecules, which are inherently quantum mechanical in nature.

From software developers to biologists and chemists, users are now investigating whether quantum technology can bolster their fields. But there is still lively debate about how the technology will pan out, says physicist Olivia Lanes, a researcher at IBM in Yorktown Heights, New York. “A lot of people don’t want to enter the industry until they see the technology is robust, but can we make it robust without them?”

More here.

Jonathan D. Teubner and Paul W. Gleason in The Hedgehog Review:

As news of Hamas’s murderous October 7 surprise attack on Israel started to circulate in the global information space, so too did the propaganda. According to one estimate, the Israel-Hamas war sparked the highest volume of global propaganda—emanating not just from Israel, Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries but also from Russia, China, and Iran—that experts had ever seen. Even more so than after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas was springtime for propaganda.

The actual narratives that started to circulate ranged from the outright absurd—Ukraine provided Hamas with weapons—to the misleading, as when a famous Iranian mosque raised a black flag, which some Facebook users took as a declaration of war. News services and experts tried to assure the public that the black flag was more a symbol of mourning, but it was hard to tell how many of the excitable social-media users actually believed them.

More here.

Ed Simon in The Millions:

More shadows than men, really; just silhouettes, might as well be smudges on the lens. Hard to notice at first, the two undifferentiated figures in the lower left-hand of the picture, at the corner of the Boulevard du Temple. A bootblack squats down and shines the shoes of a man contrapasso above him; impossible to tell what they’re wearing or what they look like. Obviously no way to ascertain their names or professions. At first they’re hard to recognize as people, these whispers of a figure joined together, eternally preserved by silver-plated copper and mercury vapor; they’re insignificant next to the buildings, elegant Beaux-Arts shops and theaters, wrought iron railings along the streets and chimneys on their mansard roofs. Based on an analysis of the light, Louis Daguerre set up his camera around eight in the morning; leaves are still on trees, so it’s not winter, but otherwise it’s hard to tell what season it is that Paris day in 1838. Whatever their names, it was by accident that they became the first two humans to be photographed.

More here.

Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist:

The rhythm of life is hardwired into our DNA. More than forty percent of the human genes that code for proteins sync transcription to a twenty-four-hour cycle.¹ A small hub of neurons deep inside the brain acts as a timekeeper, translating visual light cues into biomolecular signals that coordinate time on a cellular level.² The metabolic response to food also regulates biological time. “The feeding-fasting cycle is one of the strongest signals you can send the body to entrain the circadian clock,” said Paula Desplats, an associate professor of neuroscience and pathology at the University of California, San Diego.

The sleep-wake cycle is among the most well-known circadian rhythms in the body and is severely affected in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). “Eighty percent of patients with AD suffer dysregulation or disruption of circadian rhythms, and the obvious clinical manifestations are the sleep-wake reversals,” Desplats said. “These patients are very sleepy during the day, agitated during the night, more confused, and sometimes aggressive.”

More here.

Frank Falisi at Crime Reads:

Branagh’s Poirot films occupy an increasingly strange place in the increasingly weird ecosystem: the twenty-first century metroplex. Murder on the Orient Express (2017) entered an economy still starry on the possibilities of IP-mining, as top-grossing films of that year exclusively feature Disney properties and pop culture products as heroes. Death on the Nile (2022) appeared to an industry in the throes of its latest crisis, ravaged both by pandemic-induced closures and delays as well as the burgeoning sense that the terrain of our memories handled at the hands of slick corporate storytelling might not be a sustainable model of cultural dispensation. Indeed, several of the top-grossing films of 2022 feature the same trademarks from five years prior (Batman, Thor, the Minions) while folding in “new” revisitations (Avatar, Top Gun, Puss in Boots). Nile’s release, like so many films shot in the wilderness of late 2019 and early 2020, was pushed and pulled like taffy, a cultural object in search of distribution in an industry increasingly at the mercy of corporate conglomeration, content optimization, and a boring spring towards the moral and artistic middle.

There are the conditions, however reductively summarized, that A Haunting in Venice (2023) enters into.

More here.

Akshay Pendyal in Persuasion:

Modern biomedicine has, of course, delivered breakthrough treatments over the past century, treatments which have transformed the care of diseases which were once considered incurable. Aspirin for heart attacks. Insulin for diabetes. Potent antibiotics to treat infections caused by highly virulent organisms. These interventions are true marvels of the modern age: they’re safe and effective for conditions that affect millions. We should rightfully celebrate such treatments and work to make them widely and freely available.

The problem is that for other types of treatments—treatments which now constitute the bulk of medical care—the outlook is far less sanguine.

More here.

Rachel Fraser in the Boston Review:

Cleaning, like cooking, childbearing, and breastfeeding, is a paradigm case of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is a special form of work. It doesn’t itself produce commodities (coffee pots, silicon chips); rather, it’s the form of work that creates and maintains labor power itself, and hence makes the production of commodities possible in the first place. Reproductive labor is low-prestige and (typically) either poorly paid or entirely unwaged. It’s also obstinately feminized: both within the social imaginary and in actual fact, most reproductive labor is done by women. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that political discussions of work often treat reproductive labor as an afterthought.

More here.

John Mullan in The Guardian:

Two years after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870, his closest friend, John Forster, published the first volume of his Life of Charles Dickens. Based on letters Dickens had written to him and stories he had told him, it was, in effect, an authorised biography. For Dickens buffs, it has always been both a matchless source and an untrustworthy narrative. By Helena Kelly’s account, it is more misleading than the most sceptical biographer has supposed. Far from Forster being Dickens’s hagiographer, he was his dupe. We have always known that Dickens aimed to manage his reputation; as Kelly sees it, this led him to deeper deceit than anyone has previously imagined.

So, for instance, Forster was the first to make public what Dickens said was the most crushing experience of his life: being sent, aged 12, to work in a blacking warehouse. It was an experience that he handed on to the young protagonist of David Copperfield. “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age,” Dickens wrote, in the account Forster quoted. Yet Kelly picks at some inconsistencies about dates to suppose that it was all fiction. Dickens wanted us to believe he had been neglected and mistreated: it made for a great story of triumph over adversity.

More here.

Editorial Board of The Washington Post:

Give Me This

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

by Ada Limón
from Poets.org

Claude R. Marx at The Common Reader:

When describing her directing philosophy, Barbra Streisand has said that less is often more. Unfortunately, she did not take that to heart when writing her long-awaited memoir, My Name is Barbra, which clocks in at over 900 pages.

It covers a great deal of professional and personal ground and has plenty of engaging and revelatory material. But you must wade through too much long-winded prose to get there.

Do you really need three chapters on the making of Yentl (1983)?

The film, about a young Orthodox Jewish girl who disguises herself as a man so she can be allowed to study in a yeshiva, was meaningful and engaging. However, nobody will confuse it with Citizen Kane (1941). Yet there is almost a blow-by-blow description of the writing and directing process that will likely be of interest primarily to students of the craft.

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

AGI is Artificial General Intelligence: a machine that can do nearly anything any human can do: anything mental, and through robots, anything physical. This includes deciding what it wants to do and then executing it, with the thoughtfulness of a human, at the speed and precision of a machine.

Here’s the issue: If you can do anything that a human can do, that includes working on computer engineering to improve yourself. And since you’re a machine, you can do it at the speed and precision of a machine, not a human. You don’t need to go to pee, sleep, or eat. You can create 50 versions of yourself, and have them talk to each other not with words, but with data flows that go thousands of times faster. So in a matter of days—maybe hours, or seconds—you will not be as intelligent as a human anymore, but slightly more intelligent. Since you’re more intelligent, you can improve yourself slightly faster, and become even more intelligent. The more you improve yourself, the faster you improve yourself. Within a few cycles, you develop the intelligence of a God.

More here.

Cass R. Sunstein in the New York Times:

More than at any other time since World War II, liberalism is under siege. On the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.

Fascists reject liberalism. So do populists who think that freedom is overrated.

In ways large and small, antiliberalism is on the march. So is tyranny.

Many of the marchers misdescribe liberalism; they offer a caricature. Perhaps more than ever, there is an urgent need for a clear understanding of liberalism — of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, of what it is and what it can be.

More here.

Media Farzin at Artforum:

Ave had started making photocollages of wrestlers in the late ’90s, titling them after characters from the epic tenth-century Iranian poem the Shahnameh (Book of Kings). His main protagonist was Rostam, a warrior of legendary strength and wisdom whom Ave reanimated in images of the young Iranian wrestling champion Abbas Jadidi. In 1996, Jadidi had nearly claimed Olympic gold in Atlanta in an epic match settled by what appeared to be the whims of the American judges—a bit of geopolitical theater, perhaps, at a time when the US was dramatically ramping up sanctions against Iran. Jadidi brought home the silver and went on to win other championships (and enter local politics), but the loss of the gold was deeply felt in a country where wrestling traces its roots to pre-Islamic rites.

In Jadidi’s sculpted body, Ave saw an emblem of national hope, patriotic hubris, and what he has called the “macho mystique” of Iranian men. (Highlighting the public celebration of scantily dressed young wrestlers was an obliquely polemical critique of the objectification and oppression of women.

more here.

Andrew Shenker at The Baffler:

EVERYONE FINDS the Melville they want.

Writing in 2005, Andrew Delbanco observed, in his critical biography Melville: His World and Work, that the author of Moby-Dick “seems to renew himself for each new generation.” Since the mid-twentieth century, Delbanco notes, “there has been a steady stream of new Melvilles, all of whom seem somehow able to keep up with the preoccupations of the moment.” He lists a few:

myth-and-symbol Melville
countercultural Melville
anti-war Melville
environmentalist Melville
gay or bisexual Melville
multicultural Melville
global Melville

And then there’s his deathless creation, Ahab, the man who, per Elizabeth Hardwick, “has no ancestor in literature other than all of literature.” Inspired in part, Delbanco speculates, by former vice president and staunch slavery defender John C. Calhoun, the Pequod’s monomaniacal commander has been likened to everyone from Hitler to the nuclear scientists responsible for the atomic bomb to, inevitably, Donald Trump. (Unless, in a reading popular in right-wing media, Trump is actually the white whale and the Democrats who impeached him are Ahab.)

more here.

When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone

1.

When one has lived a long time alone,
one refrains from swatting the fly
and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike
the mosquito, though more than willing to slap
the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad
from the pit too deep to hop out of
and carries him to the grass, without minding
the poisoned urine he slicks his body with,
and one envelopes, in a towel, the swift
who fell down the chimney and knocks herself
against the window glass and releases her outside
and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,
when one has lived a long time alone.

by Galway Kinnell
from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone
Alfred A, Knoph, New York, 2003

Entire 11 stanza’s: here