Paul Begala in The New York Times:

“Built for giants, inhabited by pygmies.” That’s what the legendary Texas politician Bob Eckhardt used to tell awe-struck visitors about the Texas Capitol. The Goddess of Liberty, who stands atop Austin’s dome, peers down 302 feet at the mortals below, 14 feet higher than the U.S. Capitol.

As a University of Texas law student in 1985, I was one of those pygmies. I worked for a 20-something cowboy turned newbie state representative. So, when I encountered Sonny Lamb, I felt like I’d known him for years.

Lamb is the protagonist of Lawrence Wright’s rollicking satire “Mr. Texas.” He is a soldier-rancher-failure who, by way of accidental heroism and a Machiavellian lobbyist, finds himself elected to the Texas Legislature. This is where Mr. Wright’s task becomes daunting: parodying politicians who are, in real life, parody-proof. When I worked at the Legislature, the speaker of the House was Gib Lewis, a good ol’ boy from Fort Worth who loved hunting and feared polysyllabic words. He was a veritable redneck Yogi Berra. How do you satirize a place where the speaker of the House once said, “This is unparalyzed in the state’s history,” and “I cannot tell you how grateful I am; I am filled with humidity”?

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Catherine Quan Damman at Artforum:

THE ICONIC LOUISE NEVELSON sculpture would appear straightforward to summarize: monochrome, modular, monumental. In general, such qualities—and to them we might add wooden, assemblage, usually black, comprising found objects—indicate an artist singularly absorbed, working through a set of formal propositions over a career, pursuing the archetypal enterprise of the modernist master. In particular, though, up close and personal, Nevelson’s sculptures are, well, defiantly weird.

In confronting their grids and boxes, their all-consuming size, and their dedication to a particular color, the scholar or critic is firmly set upon recognizable, even overly familiar grounds. Looser underfoot is the works’ insistence on so much unnecessary filigree, their many wonky flanges and cavities. More destabilizing still are the ways that the artist’s preferred dusky hues unsettle the eye’s disciplined construal of recess and protrusion, how the voluptuous curves of lathe-turned wood jostle against the firm perpendiculars of the crates that contain them, or the sculptures’ magpie dedication to hodgepodge and their often visibly precarious construction.

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Timothy Jacobson at The New Criterion:

One sort of travel writing we read merely for easy information about a place and its vendors. Another sort we read for vicarious experience because we are all ignorant of so much. trips was the latter sort, and it was a sadly short trip. Even today, when more people seem to be going everywhere all the time, more people yet armchair travel from home. And, I speculate, fewer and fewer of them actually read in that armchair. As countless television shows attest, travel, like cooking, has proven a natural fit for the video age. But there has been a loss here. Watching the screen requires nothing of us but our eyeballs and a half hour of our time during which we can also be doing something else—low investment, low reward. Reading about travel and faraway places, meanwhile, takes at least a modicum of intellectual effort and rewards us in proportion to our preparation and desire to know. “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him,” wrote Samuel Johnson back in the eighteenth century when “the Indies” evoked the height of exoticism. (Johnson obviously did not know about Little Rock.) He went on: “So it is with traveling; a man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.” Two hundred years later, in the last pre-digital moment before travel became further commodified and mostly digitized, trips tried to show us the world, fresh and filled with wealth, through great writing and design, with wonder, not apology. It might have been too late even in 1988, but it was a noble attempt. I miss the second issue.

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“You can’t write poems about the trees when the woods are full of policemen.” 
     ………………………………………………………………………………………. —Bertolt Brecht

Broken Ghazal for Walter Scott

A video looping like a dirge on repeat, my soul—a psalm of bullets in my back.

I see you running, then drop, heavy hunted like prey with eight shots in the back.

You: prostrate on the green grass, handcuffed with your hands tied to your back.

for taking the blindfold off Lady Justice, dipping her scales down with old weight

another black body, another white cop. But let us go back to the broken tail light,

Papa. Let us chant Papa don’t run! Stay, stay back! Stay here with us. But Tiana—

another story will come to your feed, stay back. But whisper—stay, once more,

with tiny hallelujahs up & down the harp of his back. Praise his mother hugging

we go back, click replay at any moment. A video looping like a dirge on repeat—

by Tiana Clark
from I Can’t Talk About Trees Without the Blood
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018

Gary Shteyngart in The Guardian:

Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer. Throughout the tome, Musk’s confidantes, co-workers, ex-wives and girlfriends present a DSM-5’s worth of psychiatric and other theories for the “demon moods” that darken the lives of his subordinates, and increasingly the rest of us, among them bipolar disorder, OCD, and the form of autism formerly known as Asperger’s. But the idea that any of these conditions are what makes Musk an “asshole” (another frequently used descriptor of him in the book), while also making him successful in his many pursuits, is an insult to all those affected by them who manage to change the world without leaving a trail of wounded people, failing social networks and general despair behind them. The answer, then, must lie elsewhere.

More here.

Anton Howes at Age of Invention:

Back in 2011, the field of psychology went into crisis. Some of the most famous and widely-cited experimental results — like the finding that powerfully posing for a few minutes gives you a hormonal boost in confidence, or that priming people with words to do with ageing makes them walk faster — could not be replicated by others. These were findings published in the field’s most prestigious academic journals, and going back for decades. Many of them had made mistakes in the experiments, through negligence, unintended bias, or simple error. A few, quite simply, had been faked. Whole swathes of research and media coverage, including some globally best-selling books, turned out to be based on foundations of sand. And since then, more and more scientific fields have turned out to have been the victims of replication crises.

Nobody had bothered, for years and years, to go to the trouble of actually checking the more unusual and interesting findings. The Scottish psychologist-turned-science journalist Stuart Ritchie wrote an eye-opening book about the scandals in science called Science Fictions. He and another science journalist, Tom Chivers, have also lately started a podcast to sort the reliable findings from the media froth, diving into the details of what scientific studies actually show — it’s called The Studies Show (har har).

But I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis.

More here.

Mark Bailey in The Conversation:

There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily.

But AI systems have a significant limitation: Many of their inner workings are impenetrable, making them fundamentally unexplainable and unpredictable. Furthermore, constructing AI systems that behave in ways that people expect is a significant challenge.

If you fundamentally don’t understand something as unpredictable as AI, how can you trust it?

More here.

Karim Sadjapour in Time Magazine:

The Islamic Republic of Iran has thus far proved too ideologically rigid to reform and too ruthless to collapse. As in the late stages of the Soviet Union, however, the foundations decay in plain sight. Outside their homeland, women of Iranian origin become world-class mathematicians and astronauts; inside Iran, the ruling clerics debate whether women should be allowed to ride bicycles.

One year ago this month, the regime’s “morality police” detained and beat a 22-year-old woman—Mahsa Jina Amini—for allegedly showing too much hair beneath her compulsory veil. Her death in custody triggered Iran’s longest anti-government protests since the 1979 revolution that transformed the country from a U.S.-allied monarchy to an anti-American Islamist theocracy. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei managed these protests as he always does, by crushing dissent, dividing adversaries, and refusing to offer any concessions. Over 20,000 people were arrested and over 500 killed, including several who were executed. Compromising under pressure, Khamenei believes, only projects weakness and emboldens dissent.

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Elena Kazamia in Nautilus:

The ceremony takes place on the night of the full moon in February, which the Tibetans celebrate as the coldest of the year. Buddhist monks clad in light cotton shawls climb to a rocky ledge some 15,000 feet high and go to sleep, in child’s pose, foreheads pressed against cold Himalayan rocks. In the dead of the night, temperatures plummet below freezing but the monks sleep on peacefully, without shivering.

Footage of the ritual exists from the winter of 1985 when a team of medical researchers led by Herbert Benson, a Harvard cardiologist, were allowed in as observers at a monastery just outside the town of Upper Dharamsala in northern India.¹ Benson had the blessing of the Dalai Lama, with whom he had developed a friendship; the physician was driven to understand the physiological mechanisms that allowed the monks to survive the night. Their bodies had entered a state that required years of meditative and physical practice that the Dalai Lama called miraculous. Had Benson’s research taken place today, it is very likely he would have called it “biostasis.”

Our bodies run a very tight ship. To keep living, we need a constant supply of oxygen, and our temperature is allowed to fluctuate within narrow limits. A fever can turn deadly, as can severe hypothermia. Healthy bodies have a steady heartbeat and a dependable oxygen consumption rate, which physicians use as a measurement of metabolism. If the life burning within us is a symphony, then metabolism is its score—the perfect sum of all the chemical reactions that take place inside our cells, carefully orchestrated.

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Milton Mermikides in Aeon:

Some 14 billion miles from here floats a 12-inch gold-plated record. This artefact was placed onboard the Voyager 1 space probe in 1977 (and another on the Voyager 2 sister vessel) and now, having long completed its scheduled planetary flybys, it hurtles at nearly 500 times the speed of sound into deep space. Created to communicate the story of human civilisation to any extraterrestrial who happens to encounter it, the Golden Record includes images, mathematical equations, astronomical coordinates and sounds. Its aim is to convey – in the absence of a common language – not just the facts of human existence, but also evidence of our intelligence.

One elegant method of how this might be possible is through the medium of music, which – aside from lyrical content – has the advantages of neither needing visual representation nor a lexicon of phonic objects. It speaks for itself through the common fabric of frequencies – amplitude over time – which can be etched directly and unfiltered into the surface of the disc. The importance of music to the project is clear: hand-etched on the record’s surface is the inscription ‘To the makers of music – all worlds, all times.’

When deciding which music could represent the pinnacle of human spirit and intelligence, Johann Sebastian Bach was inevitably suggested but – according to an unverified but irresistible anecdote – there was some dissent, because presenting music of such beauty and intelligence to any extraterrestrial listener would be ‘just showing off’.

More here.

Zhengyang Wang in Nautilus:

In eastern Tibet, high in the Himalaya, Tenzin stopped at a cliff edge. He lit another cigarette. In front of us, Mt. Gongga dazzled in spring’s morning light, a dizzying 24,800 feet above sea level. Tenzin is not his real name. His perilous occupation—collecting and selling caterpillar fungus—is fraught with competition and secrecy, and I didn’t want to put him in jeopardy with the local authorities.

Tenzin (a common local name meaning “holder of Dharma”) had reluctantly agreed to show me how to find the treasured fungus. He was in his mid-30s and generally taciturn. But his growing dissatisfaction with my ability to keep up on the trek began to show in his furrowing eyebrows. It was 2016, and I was a first-year doctoral student in search of a thesis. I, too, grew up in this part of the world—my hometown in the Sichuan lowland was only a day’s drive away. But I was naive enough to think that training on an elliptical machine was adequate preparation to hunt caterpillar fungus in person. Whenever I fell too far behind, Tenzin sat down and smoked a cigarette in ostensible boredom.

More here.

Matt Sheehan in Foreign Policy:

Over the past two years, China has enacted some of the world’s earliest and most sophisticated regulations targeting AI. On the surface, these regulations are often anathema to what U.S. leaders hope to achieve. For instance, China’s recent generative AI regulation mandates that companies uphold “core socialist values,” whereas Schumer has called for legislation requiring that U.S. AI systems “align with our democratic values.”

Yet those headline ideological differences blind us to an uncomfortable reality: The United States can actually learn a lot from China’s approach to governing AI. Of course, Washington shouldn’t require that AI systems “adhere to the correct political direction,” as one Chinese regulation mandates. But if we can look beyond the ideological content of the rules, we can learn from the underlying structure of the regulations and the process by which China has rolled them out. If taken seriously, those structure- and process-oriented lessons could be invaluable as U.S. leaders navigate a morass of AI issues over the coming years.

More here.

Liam Sherwin-Murray in The Paris Review:

There were less intimate places available, so it was odd when a woman took the seat directly facing mine across the subway aisle. I looked up from my book and right back down: a couple of months before, we’d gone home together. She had a Southern accent and a boy’s name she swore was given. Bobby. Probably spelled Bobbie or Bobbi but she didn’t say “Bobbi with an i,” which I thought cool of her. Good sex, great chemistry, and I promised but then failed to text; encountering her on the subway might have been awkward even if I weren’t reading What Were You Expecting?: A New Manual for New Parents by Drs. Laurie and Lawrence Shriver. No point hiding the cover now. Bobbi had seen it before she sat down—that much was clear when we made eye contact. She chose the seat to shame me.

The train stopped and neither of us got off. I tried to continue reading. I’d been pretending to read since noticing Bobbi, but now I made myself concentrate. Did you know that fetuses float in their own pee? That’s what my book said: After twenty weeks, the amniotic fluid is mostly urine. It had the feel of a fact everyone knew, like the Earl of Sandwich or you eat bugs in your sleep, but I hadn’t known unless I’d forgotten.

“Congratulations!”

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Ewen Callaway in Nature:

The protein universe just got a lot brighter.

Researchers have mined a database containing the structures of nearly every known protein — more than 200 million entries predicted using Google DeepMind’s revolutionary AlphaFold neural network. The work has uncovered completely new shapes, surprising connections in the machinery of life, and other insights that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. “Thanks to AlphaFold we can now explore entire families of proteins we knew nothing about,” says Eduard Porta Pardo, a computational biologist at Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC) in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in a pair of studies published^1,2 on 13 September in Nature. Last year, Google DeepMind used AlphaFold to predict the structure of nearly every known protein from organisms with genome data, amassing some 214 million structures in the AlphaFold database, which is hosted by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK.

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Holy Land

I want the earth to last
I want it to last beyond Saturday night
and the onion soup
Out beyond walks in the hills
among wild poppies and black dogs
Past Crusader castles and the Jordan River
past Arab guns and Jewish stubbornness
Through rivers and eucalyptus trees
and white horses standing in tall yellow clover
I want the earth to last.

by Natalie Goldberg
from Top of My Lungs
Overlook Press, 2002

Lachlan Summers at Noema:

“Geological time,” or “deep time,” as Robert MacFarlane describes it in his wonderful book “Underland,” is the vastness of planetary history that “stretches away from the present moment.” While the Scottish geologist James Hutton first described the idea in 1788, the term “deep time” is often attributed to the nature writer John McPhee, who wrote, a couple of hundred years later: “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”

And yet, despite the geological timescale ostensibly rendering humans obsolete, the warming climate has brought it into everyday politics. Deep time has become an analytic frame, albeit a contested one; some argue we ought to develop it to overcome short-termism, others that we should not in order to avoid flattening history or inflating the present, and still others that we cannot due to ontological limitations.

more here.