Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New York Times:

“Organisms are algorithms,” Yuval Noah Harari asserts in his provocative new book, “Homo Deus.” “Every animal — including Homo sapiens — is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution. . . . There is no reason to think that organic algorithms can do things that nonorganic algorithms will never be able to replicate or surpass.” In Harari’s telling, the human “algorithm” will soon be overrun and outpaced by other algorithms. It is not the specter of mass extinction that is hanging over us. It is the specter of mass obsolescence. To understand how Harari arrives at this conclusion, we might turn to his earlier book. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” was an attempt to write a genetic, anthropological, cultural, social and epistemological history of humans over the last 100,000-odd years. Historians, scientists and academic pedants carped about its audacity of scope — but the book, modeled after Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (a book that also received its share of carping and academic envy), presented a sweeping macrohistory, often marvelously. From the birth of a slight, sly, naked ape somewhere in the depths of Africa to the growth, spread and eventual dominance of that species over the world, “Sapiens” split the story of humankind into three broad “revolutions.” The first, the “cognitive revolution,” resulted in humans acquiring the capacity to think, learn and communicate information with a facility unprecedented in the animal kingdom. The second — the “agricultural revolution” — allowed humans to domesticate crops and animals, enabling us to form stable societies and intensifying the flow of information within them. The “scientific revolution” came last. Humans acquired the capacity to interrogate and manipulate the physical, chemical and biological worlds, resulting in even more potent technological advances that surround us today.

“Homo Deus” takes off where “Sapiens” left off; it is a “brief history of tomorrow.” What is the natural culmination of the scientific revolution, Harari asks. What will the future look like? “At the dawn of the third millennium,” he writes, “humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. ‘There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds. Oh well, it was just a bad dream.’ Going to the bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary, ‘Let’s see what’s on the agenda today.’ ” This is the kind of breezy prose that has catapulted Harari into an international star — and it is equally evident in this book. I’ll return to that brushed-off nightmare — the barbed wire and mushroom clouds — but Harari continues apace: “Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”

More here.

Aqdas Aftab in bitchmedia:

Last year, while working as a graduate student instructor for a composition course themed around gender justice, I asked my students to read Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival.” The last few lines of this poem—“So it is better to speak/ remembering/ we were never meant to survive”—were of special interest to my students, most of whom were white cis women. One of them understood these lines to allude to the experience of all women who are silenced by a patriarchal system that makes women’s survival difficult. Another talked about how she was moved by Lorde’s poetics because she identified personally with the pain of the narrator because “she knew how terrible it was to be boxed by patriarchal expectations.” This discussion about Lorde—and her poetics about seemingly “universal” womanhood—took place much later in the semester, after I had already discussed a brief history of Black feminist critiques of second-wave feminism with my students; among their readings was The Combahee River Collective Statement, which outlines the history, exigency, and goals of Black feminist organizing. So why were they so keen to find something in Lorde’s poem that spoke to their personal experiences? These students were not averse to discussing race in general; in fact,they demonstrated an admirable honesty as they worked through their own white privilege. Yet they had this urge to identify with Audre Lorde’s narratives, making Lorde’s personal voice their own.

Their responses speak to a larger problem in the appropriation of Audre Lorde by white feminists (and also non-Black and non-indigenous feminists of color), who find resonance in Lorde’s feminist framework, but fail (or refuse) to recognize that Lorde’s politics revolve around the importance of staying cognizant of racial difference in feminist movements. A lot of Lorde’s writing is about her personal experience as a Black, lesbian, feminist, and hence captures the lived reality of a specific community who is racialized, sexualized, and gendered in a certain way. But in many of her speeches and essays such as “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Lorde is speaking to white women, asking them to explore how they contribute to the erasure, tokenization, and dehumanization of Black women.

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Sam Metz at The Quarterly Conversation:

Less than a decade after gaining independence, Morocco, once again, found itself in the throes of turbulence. For many, “self”-rule—the return of the historical monarchy—hadn’t ameliorated the day-to-day indignities of the French colonial era, and by 1965 politics looked like it was reaching a breaking point. Protests were spreading quickly across the kingdom. Mehdi Ben Barka, the Moroccan Left’s most notable mouthpiece, had “disappeared” in Paris, and the student movement, active in universities throughout the kingdom, was ballooning in size, with high school students interpreting a newly implemented law that limited access to secondary school as a rallying cry.

In response, the newly minted King Hassan II cracked down violently on anti-monarchy demonstrators. “Allow me to tell you,” he once went on television and told his public, “there is no greater danger to the state than the so-called intellectual; it would have been better for you to be illiterate.”

Enter Souffles, a Moroccan magazine of culture and politics. Hassan II’s aforementioned broadcast had mapped a how-to of sorts—in this instance, how to best pose a threat to the monarchy—and, heeding the call, a group of young poets and artists decided to start a magazine.

more here.

Ray Kurzweil at The New York Times:

Many observers of A.I. and the other 21st-century exponential technologies like biotechnology and nanotechnology attempt to peer into the continuing accelerating gains and fall off the horse. Dormehl ends his book still in the saddle, discussing the prospect of conscious A.I.s that will demand and/or deserve rights, and the possibility of “uploading” our brains to the cloud. I recommend this book to anyone with a lay scientific background who wants to understand what I would argue is today’s most important revolution, where it came from, how it works and what is on the horizon.

“Heart of the Machine,” the futurist Richard Yonck’s new book, contains its important insight in the title. People often think of feelings as secondary or as a sideshow to intellect, as if the essence of human intelligence is the ability to think logically. If that were true, then machines are already ahead of us. The superiority of human thinking lies in our ability to express a loving sentiment, to create and appreciate music, to get a joke. These are all examples of emotional intelligence, and emotion is at both the bottom and top of our thinking. We still have that old reptilian brain that provides our basic motivations for meeting our physical needs and to which we can trace feelings like anger and jealousy. The neocortex, a layer covering the brain, emerged in mammals two hundred million years ago and is organized as a hierarchy of modules. Two million years ago, we got these big foreheads that house the frontal cortex and enabled us to process language and music.

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Adriana E. Ramírez at the LA Times:

I discovered Derek Walcott in graduate school after a professor of Caribbean literature recommended “The Prodigal.” I read it slowly, over the course of several weeks, taking in a section or a stanza at a time. His poetry demanded a certain kind of work from me, and I resented that.

But one afternoon, in order to humorously illustrate how many metaphors he could pack into one line, I read a Walcott poem aloud to a group of friends. Halfway through, I stopped to admit that OK, it sounded good. And later, I had to admit that yes, it was good. That Walcott, a more-than amateur painter and well-regarded theater director, had an exquisite ear for sound and eye for image.The more I worked on listening and looking at Walcott’s poetry, the more love I found for a poet I once resented. His lack of humility, something I’d originally misinterpreted as arrogance, became a form of resistance. I found his language choices unexpected and the images he presented familiar, but made new through his language.

With his passing, we lose a poet of grandeur. He was not without his controversies, and no one would call him modest (least of all himself). But Walcott brought an intensity of conviction, writing through a post-colonial lens, even as he incorporated 19th and early 20th century classically European style with the aesthetics of the Caribbean.

more here.

Kory Stamper in Slate:

It was 2001, three years into my tenure as a writer and editor of dictionaries at Merriam-Webster. There were about 20 of us lexicographers working on revising the Collegiate Dictionary for its eleventh edition. We had just finished the letter S.

By the time that last batch of defining and its citations—snippets of words used in context—for S had been signed back in on the production spreadsheet, the editors were not just pleased; we were giddy. You’d go to the sign-out sheet, see that we’re into T, and make some little ritual obeisance to the moment: a fist pump, a sigh of relief and a heavenward glance, a little “oh yeah” and a tiny dance restricted to your shoulders (you are at work, after all). Sadly, lexicographers are not suited to survive extended periods of giddiness. In the face of such woozy delight, the chances are good that you will do something rash and brainless.

Unfortunately, my rash brainlessness was obscured from me. I signed out the next batch in T and grabbed the printouts of the entries I’d be revising for that batch along with the boxes—two boxes!—of citations for the batch. While flipping through the galley pages, I realized that my batch—the entire thing—was just one word: “take.” Hmm, I thought, that’s curious.

Lexicography, like most professions, offers its devotees some benchmarks by which you can measure your sad little existence, and one is the size of the words you are allowed to handle. Most people assume that long words or rare words are the hardest to define because they are often the hardest to spell, say, and remember. The truth is, those are usually a snap. “Schadenfreude” may be difficult to spell, but it’s a cinch to define, because all the uses of it are very, very semantically and syntactically clear. It’s always a noun, and it’s often glossed, because even though it’s now an English word, it’s one of those delectable German compounds we love to slurp into English.

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Carl Tashian in Free Code Camp:

“As an instrument for selecting at random, I have found nothing superior to dice,” wrote statistician Francis Galton in an 1890 issue of Nature. “When they are shaken and tossed in a basket, they hurtle so variously against one another and against the ribs of the basket-work that they tumble wildly about, and their positions at the outset afford no perceptible clue to what they will be even after a single good shake and toss.”

How can we generate a uniform sequence of random numbers? The randomness so beautifully and abundantly generated by nature has not always been easy to extract and quantify. The oldest known dice (4-sided) were discovered in a 24th century B.C. tomb in the Middle East. More recently, around 1100 B.C. in China, turtle shells were heated with a poker until they cracked at random, and a fortune teller would interpret the cracks. Centuries after that, I Ching hexagrams for fortunetelling were generated with 49 yarrow stalks laid out on a table and divided several times, with results similar to performing coin tosses.

But by the mid-1940s, the modern world demanded a lot more random numbers than dice or yarrow stalks could offer. RAND Corporation created a machine that would generate numbers using a random pulse generator. They ran it for a while and gathered the results into a book titled A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. What now might seem like an absurd art project was, back then, a breakthrough. For the first time, a nice long sequence of high-quality random numbers was made available to the public. The book was reprinted by RAND in 2001 and is available on Amazon.

More here.

Stefanie Marsh in The Atlantic:

Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders lost by a significant margin in Wednesday’s elections, but his brother said the Netherlands shouldn’t be too quick to celebrate: Losing was exactly what Wilders wanted. And, although his Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) was overtaken by the ruling center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), Wilders still poses a grave threat.

In fact, according to Paul Wilders, losing the bid to become prime minister may be the optimal electoral outcome for Geert, who has campaigned on a platform of leaving the European Union, tolerating “fewer Moroccans,” imposing a “head rag tax” on hijab-wearing women, and paying settled Muslims to leave the Netherlands—promises on which it would be difficult to deliver.

More here.

Editorial Board of the Dallas Morning News:

It’s been said that the winners write the histories of any given place. In Dallas, like most places, that has meant that the majority culture — in our case, most often white, Christian, southern — has held the pen of history for all the generations who followed John Neely Bryan and Dallas’ earliest settlers. We see the markers to that history all over town, in the names of our buildings and our schools and streets, and in the statues, memorials and other testaments to the past. These physical reminders of our past speak through the ages, and will continue to speak to future generations about what went into the making of this place, and what values were most cherished by those who built it and have lived here since. By its definition, the history of the dominant culture in Dallas has been one that has had an impact on everyone who lived here and had the most profound influence on the development of our city. But the story of Dallas is made up of scores of smaller tributaries, stories that often transpire in the shadows, sometimes in conjunction with, and sometimes in conflict with, that top-line tale.

Those sometimes subtler stories, so often missing from the dominant histories of the city, are vital to understanding who we are and how we got to where we are. Take for instance the night of April 4, 1968. Violence erupted in cities across the country, especially in Detroit and Washington, on news that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered in Memphis. Here in Dallas, students and faculty members at Bishop College held instead an all-night vigil to mourn the slain civil rights leaders. That’s history that Dallas could stand to remember. Or consider the Saturday in June, a decade later, when San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk spoke at a gay rights convention at the Royal Coach Inn, a long-gone hotel on Dallas’ Northwest Highway. Milk, who had twice before lived in Dallas, was here as a celebrity, having been made the first openly gay elected official in America not long before. A few months later, he was murdered in San Francisco and instantly converted into an icon of the gay rights movement.

A grimmer story, but one important to never forget, unfolded in a police cruiser parked at 2301 Cedar Springs Road in 1973. That’s where Dallas police Officer Darrell L. Cain shot and killed 12-year-old Santos Rodriquez, Russian-roulette-style, while questioning him and his brother over missing coins from the Fina station’s Coke machine. The murder, and subsequent sentencing of Cain to just five years in prison, caused widespread and lasting grief throughout Dallas’ Mexican-American community.

We’d like to invite all of Dallas to help tell the story of communities often overlooked here.

Picture: Faculty, staff and students walk toward Bishop College Chapel for an all-night prayer vigil on April 4, 1968, after the murder of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis.

More here.

Margaret Atwood in The New York Times:

Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. “It can’t happen here” could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.

…Back in 1984, the main premise seemed — even to me — fairly outrageous. Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship? In the book, the Constitution and Congress are no longer: The Republic of Gilead is built on a foundation of the 17th-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew. The immediate location of the book is Cambridge, Mass., home of Harvard University, now a leading liberal educational institution but once a Puritan theological seminary. The Secret Service of Gilead is located in the Widener Library, where I had spent many hours in the stacks, researching my New England ancestors as well as the Salem witchcraft trials. Would some people be affronted by the use of the Harvard wall as a display area for the bodies of the executed? (They were.) In the novel the population is shrinking due to a toxic environment, and the ability to have viable babies is at a premium. (In today’s real world, studies are now showing a sharp fertility decline in Chinese men.) Under totalitarianisms — or indeed in any sharply hierarchical society — the ruling class monopolizes valuable things, so the elite of the regime arrange to have fertile females assigned to them as Handmaids. The biblical precedent is the story of Jacob and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two handmaids. One man, four women, 12 sons — but the handmaids could not claim the sons. They belonged to the respective wives.

And so the tale unfolds.

When I first began “The Handmaid’s Tale” it was called “Offred,” the name of its central character. This name is composed of a man’s first name, “Fred,” and a prefix denoting “belonging to,” so it is like “de” in French or “von” in German, or like the suffix “son” in English last names like Williamson. Within this name is concealed another possibility: “offered,” denoting a religious offering or a victim offered for sacrifice.

More here.

Viet Thanh Nguyen in the New York Times:

You own a house or rent an apartment. You live with your family or by yourself. You wake in the morning and drink your coffee or tea. You drive a car or a motorbike, or perhaps you take the bus. You go to work and turn on your computer. You go out at night and flirt and date. You live in a small town or big city, although maybe you are in the countryside. You have hopes, dreams and expectations. You take your humanity for granted. You keep believing you are human even when the catastrophe arrives and renders you homeless. Your town or city or countryside is in ruins. You try to make it to the border. Only then, hoping to leave, or making it across the border, do you understand that those who live on the other side do not see you as human at all.

This is the dread experience of becoming a refugee, of joining the 65 million unwanted and stateless people in the world today. It is also the experience that Mohsin Hamid elicits quietly and affectingly in his new novel, “Exit West,” which begins “in a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.” The city and the country are unnamed, unlike the two characters at the story’s center: Saeed and Nadia, a young man and woman whose courtship begins in this moment of impending crisis. They are cosmopolitan city dwellers who meet in “an evening class on corporate identity and product branding,” and whose first date is at a Chinese restaurant.

More here.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in the Harvard Business Review:

There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes, that prevents women from accessing the ranks of power. Conservatives and chauvinists tend to endorse the first; liberals and feminists prefer the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. But what if they all missed the big picture?

In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.

More here.

Richard Lea in The Guardian:

The poet and playwright Derek Walcott, who moulded the language and forms of the western canon to his own purposes for more than half a century, has died aged 87.

His monumental poetry, such as his 1990 epic Omeros, a Caribbean reimagining of The Odyssey, secured him an international reputation which gained him the Nobel prize in 1992. Walcott also had an accomplished theatrical career, being the writer and director of more than 80 plays that often explored the problems of Caribbean identity against the backdrop of racial and political strife.

The former poet laureate Andrew Motion paid tribute to “a wise and generous and brilliant man”.

“As a member of the great Nobel-winning poetic generation that included Brodsky and Heaney, he did as much or more than anyone to win the global respect for Caribbean writing that it deserves and now enjoys,” Motion said. “The rich sensualities of his writing are deeply evocative and also definitive, and its extraordinary historical and literary reach – in his long Homeric poem Omeros especially – gives everything in the present of his work the largest possible resonance. He will be remembered as a laureate of his particular world, who was also a laureate of the world in general.”

For the Jamaican poet Kei Miller, Walcott’s most important contribution was perhaps his assertion of his Caribbean identity and his confidence that this identity was enough to encompass all of human experience.

More here. And the NY Times obituary is here.

David Velasco at Artforum:

Before Pictures is a strange and shimmering chimera: Part memoir, part theory, it swerves and circles, often paragraph to paragraph, from anecdote to argument and back again, a graceful, unfussy waltz that sometimes seduces you into thinking that it’s “simply” autobiography. But the writing is also a performance of the necessary entanglement between serious thought and its “decor”—an entanglement that fascinates Crimp, and that makes him such an exceptional protagonist.

The animating juxtaposition is announced early on, in the book’s introduction, “Front Room, Back Room,” whose title describes the generative architectonics of the restaurant/club Max’s Kansas City in the late 1960s. In the front are the serious (mostly straight) artists; in the back are the unwieldy queers, lit up by amphetamines and the lambent red halo of an imposing Dan Flavin. Crimp prefers the back room, but you must work your way through the front to get there. This negotiation of two rooms, of two worlds—a give-and-take whose physicality Crimp articulates via persistent, prosaic descriptions of his urban ambulations—and his ability to find pleasure, if not peace, in both, constitute the book’s central friction and vivid donnée.

Crimp wants to be a serious critic. But he also wants to fuck. Gay liberation, spilling into that cruelly short moment between Stonewall (1969) and AIDS (1981–), demands reinvention, novel couplings, and sexual experimentation.

more here.

Amy Butcher at Harper's Magazine:

Fun, in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, is a calendar event. Out here, on the largest and most remote oil field in the United States, thousands of workers rise each morning in endless summer, eternal darkness, mosquitos, and snow, to begin twelve-hour shifts, which on the drilling rigs requires a discipline that is taken seriously: a mistake, however small, could cause this entire place to explode, as it did in West Texas two years ago, or in Texas City twelve years ago. For a change of landscape one can board a bus with elderly tourists to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, point out the artificial palm tree, suggest a dip, and laugh—the water is 28 degrees—but even that route grows dull: the single gravel lane that traces tundra abuts miles of pipeline. For the oil workers, there is little to look forward to before the end of a two-week shift except for scheduled socialization. Each summer, such fun goes by the name Deadhorse Dash, a 5K race traced across nearby Holly Lake.

“Last year, someone dressed up as a dancing polar bear,” Casey Pfeifer, a cafeteria attendant, tells me when I arrive at the Prudhoe Bay Hotel for lunch on the afternoon of the race. Casey is wearing purple eyeliner and a sweatshirt that reads MICHIGAN in looping gold-glitter cursive. Every two months Casey travels between Idaho and Prudhoe Bay—for her, life in Alaska is synonymous with adventure—to work in the service industry at places like the Hotel, which is not actually a hotel at all but a work-camp lodge, with hundreds of tiny rooms housing twin-size cots and lockers.

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Clifford Thompson at Threepenny Review:

On the one such night that I’m recalling, in the warm months of 1968, when I was five, the insularity of my world suffered a brief, bizarre jolt. My brother, then nineteen, was beside me on the porch and remembers what I remember, which for nearly half a century was all that kept me from thinking of it as a dream.

We were gazing at the full moon. Then, beside it, part of the sky began to change color, as if an invisible dial was spinning and painting as it went around, until at the end of a second there was a perfect white sphere. Where a moment before there had been one moon, we now saw two.

Small children are, for the most part, rational beings, operating in the world based on their feelings but also on what they’ve learned. When children see things they want, they simply grab them, until they are told, and remember, not to. When pleased that things they’ve said have made others laugh, they’ll say them again, soon filing away the lesson that funny lines almost never work a second time. And when confronted with things that go radically against their learned notions of how the world ought to work, children, like adults, become upset, even frightened.

more here.