Ewen Callaway in Nature:

At the height of the pandemic, researchers raced to develop some of the first effective treatments against COVID-19: antibody molecules isolated from the blood of people who had recovered from the disease.

Now, scientists have shown that generative artificial intelligence (AI) can provide a shortcut through some of this laborious process, suggesting sequences that boost the potency of antibodies against viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and ebolavirus. A study published last week in Nature Biotechnology¹ is part of growing efforts to apply ‘neural networks’ similar to those behind the ChatGPT AI platform to antibody design.

More here.

Francis Fukuyama in Persuasion:

One of the staples of my teaching of comparative politics over the years was to point out the differences between European and American conservatives. The former were generally comfortable with the exercise of state power, and indeed sought to use power to enforce religious or cultural values (the old unity of “throne and altar.”) American conservatives, on the other hand, were different in their emphasis on individual liberty, a small state, property rights, and a vigorous private sector. In Seymour Martin Lipset’s account of American exceptionalism, American politics were thoroughly imbued with a Lockean liberalism that saw the government limiting its own power through a strict rule of law. These principles defined the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, which wanted lower taxes, deregulation, federalism, and multiple limits on state power.

This understanding of conservatism has now been upended with the rise of Trumpist populism.

More here.

Kim Hyesoon at Poetry Magazine:

Living trapped by viruses, surrounded by culturenature, and exposed to all kinds of media—writers, self-help books, chefs, singers, filmmakers, even comedians—I don’t want to be comforted, yet they pounce on me, to comfort me, to empathize. Startled, I get frightened. And, conversely, I become even more frightened when I’m asked who my poetry comforts. Therefore, when someone even utters the word comfort, I want to run and hide. I don’t think I’ve ever comforted anyone with my writing. Moreover, I think literature betrays the readers’ desire to be consoled. Perhaps literature crosses into a zone where consolation can’t intervene, evaporating any possibility of comfort. Just as there is no geometric or genetic consolation, literary work merely constructs an afterimage or alternative symmetrical pattern of the event that occurs. The ventriloquist lives inside literature. Ventriloquy is a deception. The writer first deceives herself. And she deceives the reader. Both are aware of the deception. The persona crosses into a zone of literature, the symmetrical world of existence. Thus literature is a lie. Fiction set as reality is a lie; poetry set as language is a lie. The ventriloquy of literature moves, riding the spiral of lies. And so there can be no consolation at the end of the lies. There is only failure, grief, and self-erasure.

more here.

Howard Hampton at Artforum:

Boredom: “If I ever bore you, it’ll be with a knife,” Louise Brooks once said, a line that sums up almost about every Fassbinder movie. RWF constantly employed Brechtian distancing devices to put the strange in estrangement, piercing our defenses of “relating to” and “identifying with” characters, situations. It is the feeling that the world’s a film stage and everyone on it is standing on a trapdoor. Fassbinder’s hand is on the lever and Death is in the wings, waiting for a cue. 

Personality crisis: Penman rather brilliantly embraces the Fassbinder segment in Germany in Autumn (1978) as the epitome of the man and his paradoxes; it’s a tour de force of let-it-all-hang-out psychodrama cut with the politics of depredation and exhaustion. Fassbinder prowls his apartment like a cocaine bear, strung out on angst and paranoia. It’s supposed to be about the political crisis in Germany but becomes a portrait of a private meltdown. Somehow its disjunction connects to the pathos of a person and a society, each on the verge of psychotic breaks.

more here.

Veronique Greenwood in Harvard Magazine:

IN A CAVERNOUS underground space behind Harvard’s Biological Laboratories, biochemist Peter Girguis frowns at the pressure vessel in his hand. The machined titanium cylinder, about the size of a French press, gleams as he works to release the cap, and he chuckles at his own stubbornness. He could probably find a tool to loosen it, he remarks. But Girguis has a calm self-assurance around physical objects more characteristic of aircraft mechanics in overalls than biochemists. With a flick of his wrist, the cap is out. The walls of the vessel turn out to be nearly an inch thick, the space inside about the size of a jam jar. This summer it will become home to a species of deep-sea snail scooped up by a remotely operated vehicle three miles down, where the pressure is about 3,200 pounds per square inch. The pressure on the surface is a mere 15 pounds per square inch—comfortable for humans, but inhospitable to creatures from the deeps—so on their research ship, Girguis and his colleagues have about 45 minutes to re-create the deep-sea pressure in the vessel and fill it with hydrogen sulfide, oxygen, and other essentials before the snail starts to die. Once they stabilize the conditions in the vessel, they have a compact, nearly intact fragment of an ecosystem so far removed from our own that, for a long time, there were few ways to study it directly.

More here.

Kevin Delaney in Time:

Authentically communicating the purpose of an organization is a critical leadership skill—key to long-term performance, retention, and perhaps even workers’ wellbeing. This was one of Steve Jobs’ superpowers, connecting his and his colleagues’ work to a higher mission. “We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better,” Jobs told a group of Apple employees in 1997. “And that those people that are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones that actually do.” (p. 103)

“It’s so important to pick very important things to do because it’s very hard to get people motivated to make a breakfast cereal,” Jobs noted in an interview published that same year. “It takes something that’s worth doing.” (p. 82) These observations are some of the many included in a new, free ebook released by the Steve Jobs Archive called Make Something Wonderful. While not presented as such, the book is effectively a master class in identifying and framing the purpose of organizations, as told through a chronological collection of Jobs’ speeches, interviews, emails, and notes to himself.

More here.

A man who lives never asks what is living
and he has no theories about living. It is only
the half-alive who talk about the purpose of life.
…………………………………… —Krishnamurti

A man who never questions the how and
why of life has cleaved off an essential part
of his being —living and its meaning are
not contradictory. ..………. —Roshi Bob
____________________________________

To go Beyond and Discover

We all talk of God: In every religion,
in every church and temple that
word is used, but always
in the image of the
known.

It is only the very, very few
who leave all the churches,
the temples, the books,
who go beyond and
discover…

If I really want to find out
what is on the top of the mountain
and beyond, I must go to it.

It is no good my sitting here speculating,
building temples, churches, and
getting excited about them.

What I have to do is to
stand up,
walk,
struggle,
push,
get there,
and find out;
but as most of us are
unwilling to do that,
we are satisfied to sit here
and speculate about something
that we do not know.

And I say such speculation
is a hindrance, it is a
deterioration of the mind,
it has no value at all; it only
brings more confusion,
more sorrow to man.

by Jiddu Krishnamurti
from Poetic Outlaws

Morgan Meis at The Easel:

Sometime probably in 1656 or 1657, Johannes Vermeer painted a painting that we now know as A Maid Asleep. I reference this painting because it hangs at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I’ve looked at it many times. I have a relationship with this painting. I’ve loved it for years and for that same amount of time I’ve been trying to figure out why.

There is, as many people have pointed out, a sense of quiet and mystery to A Maid Asleep that’s quite visceral. You just feel it. The overall mood of the painting is established, obviously, by the image of the half-sleeping maid resting her head on her hand. But the door opening into the room just behind, the spare room that beckons our gaze, this room is probably more important than the maid in creating the dreamily intriguing mood of this painting. The crucial factor here being a sense of revelation. The half-opened door reveals another room. The painting asks us to probe deeper, to look further. At the same time, it also suggests that there is nothing further to see. Because when we look into that back room, it’s just another room, another room that’s actually less interesting than the room we’re already in. So, this is a painting that structures itself like a revelation and then, simultaneously, pushes our probing minds and eyes back out onto the surface again. It is a painting that short-circuits itself, leaving the viewer fascinated and frustrated all at once.

That’s not an easy thing to do in a painting.

More here.

Victor R. Lee in Undark:

How will voters know whether a video of a political candidate saying something offensive was real or generated by AI? Will people be willing to pay artists for their work when AI can create something visually stunning? Why follow certain authors when stories in their writing style will be freely circulating on the internet?

I’ve been seeing the anxiety play out all around me at Stanford University, where I’m a professor and also lead a large generative AI and education initiative.

With text, image, audio, and video all becoming easier for anyone to produce through new generative AI tools, I believe people are going to need to reexamine and recalibrate how authenticity is judged in the first place.

Fortunately, social science offers some guidance.

More here.

Aaron Terr in Persuasion:

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, President Biden argued that “Big Tech companies” must “take responsibility for the content they spread and the algorithms they use.” To that end, Biden wants to “fundamentally reform” the law commonly known as Section 230, which protects online platforms from liability for most content their users post.

The president’s not alone.

For many politicians and critics on both sides of the aisle, the law has become a scapegoat for everything they don’t like about social media. Democrats think it facilitates the spread of hate speech and misinformation. Republicans complain that it lets social media companies freely censor conservatives. Proposals to reform or eliminate Section 230 abound.

But the attacks on Section 230 miss one important thing: it’s vital to free speech and innovation on the internet.

More here.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker:

For the past two weeks, in a courtroom in lower Manhattan, the journalist E. Jean Carroll has made a straightforward case: a quarter century ago, she says, Donald Trump raped her. The account she gave in the courtroom was the same as it has been since she first revealed this story, in an excerpt of her memoir which was published in New York magazine, in 2019. Carroll had a chance encounter with Trump in Bergdorf Goodman, she has said, and, flirting, she and Trump moved through the store, picking up a lacy bodysuit and going together into an unlocked dressing room. Maybe she should try the bodysuit on, he suggested. Maybe he should try it on, she suggested. Then, according to Carroll, Trump pulled down her tights, pushed her against the wall, and raped her. Within a few days, Carroll told two friends of the attack: the writer Lisa Birnbach, and the television anchor Carol Martin. Both of them testified this week, and Martin acknowledged that she had initially advised Carroll not to go public, saying, “I just volunteered that she shouldn’t do anything because it was Donald Trump and he had a lot of attorneys and he would just bury her.”

Now Carroll has a prominent attorney, too: Roberta Kaplan, who famously represented Edie Windsor in the Supreme Court case that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act. In order to establish a pattern of behavior, Kaplan this week called two other witnesses who said that they had been sexually assaulted by the former President. A stockbroker named Jessica Leeds said that Trump groped her on a flight in the late nineteen-seventies—when he was not yet famous—sending her fleeing from first class to coach. Natasha Stoynoff, a People magazine writer, alleged that, while she was on assignment to interview Donald and Melania Trump at Mar-a-Lago, in 2005, Donald Trump had shut a door, trapping her in a room with him, and forcibly kissed her before being interrupted by a butler.

More here.

Rick Moody at Salmagundi:

It’s easy, when reading Ross Douthat, with his talk of a “tribe” of meritocrats and culture workers, with his feel-good conservative Catholicism, to know what you are against spiritually. Being against things is at the heart of Douthat’s article. It’s at the heart of certain kinds of evangelical practice, it’s at the heart of the ideologically pure Left and the ideologically pure Right. What’s much harder, especially in the Christianity of the present, is to say what you stand for, even if standing “for” things is theologically central to all that Christianity imagined of itself, when, e.g., it codified the Nicene Creed.
Let me, then, say what I imagine liberal Protestantism, e.g., stands for. In my daily reading of the work of Franciscan contemplative Richard Rohr I recently came across the following from Julian of Norwich, a profound early English mystical voice, and a writer much admired by Rohr and other contemporary thinkers about Christian theology: “Would you like to know our Lord’s meaning in all this? Know it well: love was his meaning. Who revealed this to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why did he reveal it to you? For love. Stay with this and you will know more of the same.”

more here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

The story, as often happens in science, sounded so appealing. Cells have a molecular clock that determines how long they live. If you can just stop the clock, cells can live indefinitely. And the same should go for people, who are, after all, made from cells. Stop the cell clocks and you can remain youthful.

The clocks come in the form of caps on the end of chromosomes — the long twisted strings of DNA carrying the cells’ genes. The caps on chromosomes, called telomeres, are chains of short, repeated segments of DNA. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get a little shorter, until finally they get so short that the cell dies. “Short telomeres were thought to be bad — people with premature aging syndromes had short telomeres — so, by analogy, long telomeres were thought to be good,” said Dr. Mary Armanios, professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Telomere Center at the medical school’s Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. “And the longer the better.”

But, of course, nothing in biology is so simple. And a paper published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, with results of a study that Dr. Armanios led, shows that the telomere story is no exception. While short telomeres do lead to health problems, long telomeres lead to health problems of their own. Far from extending life, long telomeres appear to cause cancer and a blood disorder known as CHIP, a condition that increases the risk of blood cancers and heart disease.

More here.

Lytle Shaw at Cabinet Magazine:

From December 31, 1957 until December 31, 1967, the artist and writer Henry Darger (1892–1973) kept a series of six ring-binder notebooks with almost daily entries on the weather in his native Chicago. On the outside cover of the first book, Darger describes the project, with encyclopedic enthusiasm, as a “book of weather reports on temperatures, fair cloudy to clear skies, snow, rain, or summer storms, and winter snows and big blizzards—also the low temperatures of severe cold waves and hot spells of summer.”

Though generally short, the entries abound in peculiarities. Darger is concerned, for instance, as much with periods of continuous temperature as with shifts—“3 to 7 am 57” (10/21/1958). Often up at 3am taking readings, Darger’s descriptive vocabulary also tends toward the moral and anthropomorphic: terms like “unsettled” and “threatening” are as common as “cool” or “hot.” Moreover, as the above epigraph suggests, the weatherman becomes a special figure. Darger’s notebooks can, in fact, frequently be read as an excruciatingly detailed moral account book of how well the weatherman was doing his job.

more here.

The Void

you,
the void i write into
your silence
is resounding
……….. on the edges of
……….. comings and goings
you make the word
break into
petals
dropping
……….. one
……….. by
……….. one
before my eyes
into
a hall of mirrors
you,
the void
i write
into

your silence is
resounding.

by Ayça Çubukçu

Bastian Fox Phelan in the Sydney Review of Books:

For the first six weeks I can’t walk further than a few hundred metres. I feel like I’m practicing a walking meditation without experiencing the mental effects of this exercise – to focus on one activity, to centre myself. I’ve just had a baby; I am profoundly de-centred. In my current state, I can’t push the pram, or wear my new baby on my body, or drive a car. When I lie down at night, it feels like all my organs will spill onto the bed. Other fluids seep out – milk, tears. My body produces these things, and I cannot control them. I had not planned for the baby to exit my body in the way that she did, and for some reason this causes me more pain than the scar that now bisects my abdomen.

More here.