Dan Musgrave at Longreads:

I had been volunteering at the ape house for four months before I was invited to meet Nathan. It was December and I’d just spent my first Christmas with the apes. Everyone but the director and I had left for the day. The night sky spilled over the glass-ceilinged, central atrium we called the greenhouse. Despite the snow outside, the greenhouse air was warm and ample. Moving toward the padlocked cage door, I felt light, as if I was about to float up into that dotted black expanse above me, rather than enter a room I’d cleaned feces and orange peels out of hours earlier.

I juggled my keys and the offering I’d brought with me — a tub of yogurt, a couple of bananas, Gatorade, and some blankets. With the two padlocks removed, I entered, sat, and arranged the gifts in an arc around me. Even though I was planted firmly on the glazed concrete floor, I swayed.

In the adjacent room, watching everything I did through the glass portion of a mechanical sliding door, was Nathan. Five years old to my 21. He was stout, wide-shouldered, with thick muscled arms, but almost twiggy legs. Nathan was, simply put, a cool little dude.

More here.

Tim Andersen at IAI News:

The common definition of free will often has problems when relating to desire and power to choose. An alternative definition that ties free will to different outcomes for life despite one’s past is supported by the probabilistic nature of quantum physics. This definition is compatible with the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, which refutes the conclusion that randomness does not imply free will.

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Ashoka Mody at Project Syndicate:

The recent public murder of notorious Indian gangster-politician Atiq Ahmed serves as a potent reminder that Indian society and politics remain plagued by crime, brutality, and lawlessness. In fact, Ahmed’s life and death suggests that the dysfunction is deepening.

More here.

Zaria Gorvett in BBC:

There was hysteria in the air at 81st Street Theatre in New York. Deep within the building, behind its white neoclassical arches and away from the steady chatter of crowds of adoring fans outside, a new kind of celebrity singer was walking onto a black-and-silver stage. It was February 1929, and just a few months earlier, Rudy Vallée had been an obscure graduate best known to the listeners of WABC radio in New York. He wasn’t considered particularly good looking: one biting critic later called him “a young man whose eyes are too close together and small to be called handsome“. His singing style, too, was highly unusual.

But that night, as Vallée began the opening lines of a characteristically sentimental song, the crowd exploded with rapturous applause. The venue had achieved record-breaking sales, mostly with women: so many had turned up, the police had to be called to contain them. His was no longer just a voice for radio.

As it happens, the evening did more than catapult Vallée to global stardom. The singer was one of the first singers to practice the art of “crooning”. This new style was a kind of soft, intimate singing, often likened more to lullabies than to the belting operatic or classical performances audiences were used to in the early 20th Century. Today the term is less well-known, but the style is still as popular as ever. In fact, this was the birth of modern singing as we know it.

More here.

Frank Bruni in The New York Times:

A Table

Table I

Only this table is certain. Heavy. Of massive wood.
At which we are feasting as others have before us,
Sensing under the varnish the touch of other fingers.
Everything else is doubtful. We too, appearing
For a moment in the guise of men and women
(Why either-or?), in preordained dress.
I stare at her, as if for the first time.
And at him. And at her. So that I can recall them
In what unearthly latitude or kingdom?
Preparing myself for what moment?
For what departure from the ashes?
If I am here, entire, if I am cutting meat
In this tavern by the wobbly l of the sea.

Table II

In a tavern by the wobbly splendor of the sea,
I move as in an aquarium, aware of disappearing,
For we are all so mortal that we hardly live.
I am pleased by this union, even if funereal,
Of sights, gestures, touches, now and in ages past.
I believed my entreaties would bring time to a standstill.
I learned compliance, as others did before me.
And I only examine what endures here:
The knives with horn handles, the tin basins,
Blue porcelain, strong though brittle,
And, like a rock, embattled in the flow
And polished to gloss, the table of heavy wood.

by Czeslaw Milosz
from Unattainable Earth
The Ecco Press, NY, 1986

Eric Schewe at JSTOR Daily:

The coincidence of artistic and academic talent is not uncommon in brilliant people; how to reconcile and channel those talents is often a challenge. The world is getting better acquainted with such a talent, 1950s singer-songwriter Elizabeth Converse, with the release of a new book about her life this month. Converse, who performed as “Connie,” sang self-penned solo songs with her guitar around New York City at a time that such a highly personal perspective was unusual. She was just a few years too early for the folk music revival around 1960, and she never received much recognition or a recording contract. As a result, her work only survives in archival home recordings, which were revived in radio shows in this century. Much of it is both hauntingly beautiful and wickedly funny, such as “The Witch and the Wizard.” The intriguing end to her story was her disappearance at age fifty in 1974. Downplayed in most recent accounts of her life is her work writing for and editing academic publications on international politics. JSTOR has articles from two phases of her scholarly career, before and after her folk music recordings.

more here.

Kelefa Sanneh at The New Yorker:

When King was assassinated, in 1968, he was generally viewed as a leader with a mixed record. President Lyndon B. Johnson had grown frustrated with him, and he was beset by detractors who found him either too much or not enough of a troublemaker; the year before, an article in The New York Review of Books had referred to his “irrelevancy.” But in the years after his death the skeptics grew quieter and scarcer. In 1983, Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, over the objection of twenty-two senators. And now, as national heroes of all sorts are being reassessed, the question is usually not whether King was great but, rather, which King was the greatest. The 2014 film “Selma” reverently dramatized his voting-rights activism; some people these days focus on his anti-poverty campaign and his opposition to the Vietnam War; others emphasize his advocacy of integration, and his vision of a time when Black children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The proof, and the price, of King’s success is that everyone wants a piece of him.

more here.

Jane Ciabattari in Literary Hub:

T.C. Boyle lives in Santa Barbara, an area in California that has been steadily ravaged by extreme weather in recent years. His 2011 novel When the Killing’s Done is set there and on the nearby Channel Islands and tracks a conflict set off by an environmental conundrum—the killing off of a predator species in order to preserve an endangered one—which triggered a real-life conflict in 2002.

In his satiric and provocative new novel, Blue Skies, which mirrors Santa Barbara’s drought, wildfires and windstorms, he is once again skewering a contemporary environmental standoff modeled on real life events. Does he continually update the environmental crises around him to inspire his work?

“I do,” he says. “If I feel helpless living a baffling existence on an unfathomable planet in an indifferent universe, my being cries out for redemption, for purpose, for hope, but climate change just compounds the uncertainty and existential misery of day-to-day life lived in this deteriorating shell of an animal body.

More here.

Yoshua Bengio at his website:

There have recently been lots of discussions about the risks of AI, whether in the short term with existing methods or in the longer term with advances we can anticipate. I have been very vocal about the importance of accelerating regulation, both nationally and internationally, which I think could help us mitigate issues of discrimination, bias, fake news, disinformation, etc. Other anticipated negative outcomes like shocks to job markets require changes in the social safety net and education system. The use of AI in the military, especially with lethal autonomous weapons has been a big concern for many years and clearly requires international coordination.

In this post however, I would like to share my thoughts regarding the more hotly debated question of long-term risks associated with AI systems which do not yet exist, where one imagines the possibility of AI systems behaving in a way that is dangerously misaligned with human rights  or even loss of control of AI systems that could become threats to humanity.

More here.

Elina Nerantzi in the European Review of Books:

The core moral thread that holds the modern criminal law doctrine together is that only morally culpable humans should be convicted of a stigmatic criminal offense. A pig cannot be a sensible target of blame. Neither can a child, nor a mentally ill person, nor an offender who lacked the necessary « guilty mind » (that is, she did not act with intention, recklessness or criminal negligence), nor an offender who acted in self-defense or in a state of necessity. The culpability principle that stands as the moral foundation of twentieth-century criminal law doctrine is a victory of rationality. The loser, here, is the human id that cannot let go — that asks: « Am I supposed to forgo blame because the conduct of the perpetrator of the crime did not match the legal test of recklessness? »

A similar, but newer challenge for that same id: am I supposed to forgo blame because the perpetrator of the crime was a robot? I work in criminal law and artificial intelligence, and the main question in my research is: When an autonomous AI system commits a crime, who is to blame?

More here.

Malloy Owen at the Hedgehog Review:

If all that is not enough, the critical theorists also have to reckon with the strange allure the Frankfurt School and French theory have in certain corners of the right. Michel Foucault, never a reliable ally of the left, was taken up anew by conservatives during the COVID pandemic, when the concept of biopower seemed eerily apt. Giorgio Agamben, an heir to Foucault’s account of biopower, has alienated large parts of the left and won new friends on the right through his power analysis of the global pandemic response. The critical theory journal Telos, along with some of its regular contributors, was never averse to thought from outside the left but is now seen in some quarters as positively right-wing. One of the intellectual godfathers of the latest incarnation of the New Right is Nick Land, who was once a leading figure in a cutting-edge school of digital media studies influenced by the French theory luminaries Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard.

more here.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

In 1849 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the 21-year-old poet-artist and founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, met a milliner’s assistant named Elizabeth Siddal. She was the daughter of a cutlery maker and had artistic aspirations. He was from a highly cultured Anglo-Italian family – his father was a Dante scholar, one of his mother’s brothers was John William Polidori, Lord Byron’s doctor and author of the first vampire story. By 1852 Siddal had become Rossetti’s pupil, lover and primary model and he was possessive enough to stop her sitting for other painters in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. There was a degree of transmutation in the relationship, too: at times Lizzie was more than flesh and blood, personifying his idea of perfect womanhood that justified a love that transgressed social station.

That sort of veneration is inherently fragile and although the pair married in 1860 their liaison was far from tranquil. He painted and drew her obsessively but he also feared his parents’ disapproval and refused to introduce Lizzie to them.

more here.

Catherine Thimmesh in DelancyPlace:

With alarms sounding and fuel running out, Neil Armstrong came within seconds of crashing the Apollo 11 landing module: “BAM! Suddenly, the master alarm in the lunar mod­ule rang out for attention with all the racket of a fire bell going off in a broom closet. ‘Program alarm,’ astronaut Neil Armstrong called out from the LM (‘LEM’) in a clipped but calm voice. ‘It’s a “twelve-oh-two.”‘ “‘1202,’ repeated astronaut Buzz Aldrin. They were 33,500 feet from the moon.

“Translation: We have a problem! What is it?

“Do we land? Do we abort? Are we in danger? Are we blowing up? Tell us what to do. Hurry!

“In Mission Control, the words TWELVE OH TWO tumbled out of the communications loop. The weight of the problem landed with a thud in the lap of twenty-six-year-old Steve Bales. Bales, call name GUIDO, was the mission con­troller for guidance and navigation.

“A moment earlier (after some worries with navigation problems), Bales had relaxed with a deep breath, thinking at last: We’re going to make it. Now, wham! His mind, again sent rac­ing; his blood rushing; his heart fluttering; his breath — still as stone. But he wasn’t alone. “A voice on another loop — belonging to one of Bales’s backroom support guys, twenty-four-year-old computer whiz kid Jack Garman — burst in to make sure Bales was aware of the 1202.

More here.

Dancers at Banstead

I went inside the place to find
The madmen dancing inside the hall,
The witless women whirling by
Like phantoms, trailing scarfs and smiles;
A little band, with lips of tin,
Kept puffing out the ancient cry:
To dance! To dance! To happiness! —
And round they went, without a pause.

At midnight when I drove away,
And back to dreams the madfolk went
Tucked into sleep with lullaby,
I flung my questions to the air.
But nothing cared to answer me:
The dark hills humped down everywhere
With matted arms; and over all,
Full-blown and white, the neutral moon
Was dancing to another time.

Ahead I saw the city lights
And thought, if earth can only wait
Another thousand thousand nights,
Surely this grief will balance out
In some unguessed nativity.
Meanwhile, indeed, the nights are long,
And there is little we can do,
Except to let the dancers dance;
Except to know the moon is wrong.

by Mary Oliver
from Heartland
Northern Illinois University Press, 1967

Warren Zanes at Literary Hub:

Shortly after the birth of his sister Virginia in 1951, Springsteen’s family moved in with his paternal grandparents. They would stay there through 1956, but the years spent in that house would remain with Springsteen, a thing to untangle. It was a period of his childhood that, in his telling, would come to the fore in Nebraska.

“I know the house was very dilapidated,” Springsteen told me. “That was something that embarrassed me as a child. It was visibly ramshackle, my grandparents’ house. On the street you could see that it was deteriorating. I just remember being embarrassed about it as a child. That would have been my only sense that something wasn’t right with who we were and what we were doing. I can’t quite describe it. It was intense. The house was eventually condemned. Really, it fell apart around us. I lived there when there was only one functional room, the living room. Everything else was pretty much finished.”

In the living room was the portrait of his aunt Virginia, his father’s sister, an image Springsteen has described on a few occasions. Virginia, at age six and out riding her bicycle, was hit and killed by a truck as it pulled out of a gas station on Freehold’s McLean Street. In some misguided tribute to Virginia’s early and sudden death, Springsteen’s grandparents withheld discipline from their first grandchild, Bruce. It was a twisting of logic that likely seemed beneficent, if only to minds stuck in grief. His was a terrible freedom. When Bruce pushed, there was nothing there to push against.

More here.