Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

There is a scene in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead in which the main character, John Ames, a pastor, walking to his church, comes across a young couple in the street. “The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet,” he recalls. The young man ahead of him “jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress”. It was “a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth”. In such moments, “it is easy to believe… that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash”.

It is a wonderful, luminous passage, typical of Robinson’s ability to discover the lyrical even within the mundane. Deeply Christian, and Calvinist, there is in her writing a spiritual force that springs from her faith. She would probably describe that scene as the discovery of a divine presence in the world. And yet, flowing out of that scene, is also an awareness that transcends the religious. It is the uncovering of something very human, a celebration of our ability to find the poetic in our simplest activities.

I was reminded of that passage as I was wandering through the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam last week.

More here.

Brishen Rogers in the Boston Review:

For more than a decade, scholars, journalists, and tech leaders have focused on two ways that data-driven technologies are altering jobs: by automating tasks and therefore displacing certain workers, and by discriminating on the basis of race, sex, national origin, or disability. Those are critical issues, but surveillance technologies are having another effect on work as well. Companies across today’s vast service economy are using such technologies as tools of class domination, deploying them to limit wage growth, prevent workers from organizing, and enhance labor exploitation. Workers’ increasing resistance to surveillance is therefore also a process of class formation—and reforms that support such resistance could encourage a more democratic politics of workplace technology.

More here.

Gary Marcus in his Substack newsletter:

Is AI going to kill us all? I don’t know, and you don’t either.

But Geoff Hinton has started to worry, and so have I. I’d heard about Hinton’s concerns through the grapevine last week, and he acknowledged them publicly yesterday.

Amplifying his concerns, I posed a thought experiment:

Soon, hundreds of people, even Elon Musk, chimed in.

It’s not often that Hinton, Musk, and I are even in partial agreement.

More here.

Abdelkebir Khatibi at The Baffler:

The perspective of my inquiry changed over the course of this itinerary: the more I read and explored this so-called exotic literature about different parts of the world (especially East Asia and the Arab world), the more I encountered an abundance of texts of unequal value: while Asia is the object of beautiful texts by Claudel, Perse, Michaux, Barthes, and above all Segalen, and while all this richness set me to dream and to work, I didn’t discover a single valuable text on Black Africa. Gide’s travel diaries on the Congo and Chad don’t amount to an original work, whether in terms of form or of thought on cultural difference. I was almost amused when I realized that the best French text on Africa is Impressions of Africa. But the Raymond Roussel book is completely imagined, built upon a play between two words: billiard (billard) and pillager (pillard). I remind myself: Africa is truly a black continent in this imagination, a sort of unknown planet.

more here.

Olivia Kan-Sperling and Thomas Demand at the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

What does paper mean in your work?

THOMAS DEMAND

Paper is a formidable, malleable material that everyone touches on a daily basis. We all share this experience—we know its haptic and aesthetic possibilities more than perhaps anything else. We mostly use paper for temporary purposes—napkins, newspaper, coffee cups, the Amazon box, and so on. We make notes on it and throw it away, wrap our gifts in it and rip it to receive them. I find that important to consider, if I look at the more commonplace iconography in my work, like in The Dailies. I’m also interested in paper’s relations to information, model-making, and geometry.

more here.

Paul Broks in aeon:

In the summer of 2021, I experienced a cluster of coincidences, some of which had a distinctly supernatural feel. Here’s how it started. I keep a journal and record dreams if they are especially vivid or strange. It doesn’t happen often, but I logged one in which my mother’s oldest friend, a woman called Rose, made an appearance to tell me that she (Rose) had just died. She’d had another stroke, she said, and that was it. Come the morning, it occurred to me that I didn’t know whether Rose was still alive. I guessed not. She’d had a major stroke about 10 years ago and had gone on to suffer a series of minor strokes, descending into a sorry state of physical incapacity and dementia.

I mentioned the dream to my partner over breakfast, but she wasn’t much interested. We were staying in the Midlands at the time in the house where I’d spent my later childhood years. The place had been unoccupied for months. My father, Mal, was long gone, and my mother, Doreen, was in a care home drifting inexorably through the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. We’d just sold the property we’d been living in, and there would be a few weeks’ delay in getting access to our future home, so the old house was a convenient place to stay in the meantime. I gave no further thought to my strange dream until, a fortnight later, we returned from the supermarket to find that a note had been pushed through the letterbox. It was addressed to my mother, and was from Rose’s daughter, Maggie. Her mother, she wrote, had died ‘two weeks ago’. The funeral would be the following week. I handed the note to my partner and reminded her of my dream. ‘Weird,’ she said, and carried on unloading the groceries. Yes, weird. I can’t recall the last time Rose had entered my thoughts, and there she was, turning up in a dream with news of her own death.

So, what am I to make of this?

More here.

Ingrid Fadelli in Phys.Org:

Researchers at University of Oxford have recently created a quantum memory within a trapped-ion quantum network node. Their unique memory design, introduced in a paper in Physical Review Letters, has been found to be extremely robust, meaning that it could store information for long periods of time despite ongoing network activity. “We are building a network of quantum computers, which use trapped ions to store and process quantum information,” Peter Drmota, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “To connect quantum processing devices, we use single photons emitted from a single atomic ion and utilize quantum entanglement between this ion and the photons.”

Trapped ions, charged atomic particles that are confined in space using electromagnetic fields, are a commonly used platform for realizing quantum computations. Photons (i.e., the particles of light), on the other hand, are generally used to transmit quantum information between distant nodes. Drmota and his colleagues have been exploring the possibility of combining trapped ions with photons, to create more powerful quantum technologies.

More here.

Singularity

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up  to what we were
—when we were ocean    and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all—nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

Marie Howe
from Poets.org

Andrew Dean in the Sydney Review of Books:

Compare the following two paragraphs. One is a mission statement for a university in regional Australia. The other is generated by AI from the prompt ‘write a mission statement for university based in Australia, with a regional focus’.

1. 1. Our innovation and excellence in both education and research generate ideas that transform lives and communities. We will be the region’s most progressive and responsive university, leading in blending digital capability with our distinctive campus precincts. We will leverage strong partnerships to maximise the social, cultural and economic impact we deliver regionally, nationally, and globally.
   2. Our university is dedicated to providing quality education with a regional focus. We strive to prepare our students to become responsible citizens who positively impact their communities, while also fostering a sense of global awareness. Our goal is to produce graduates who are well-rounded, critical thinkers with the skills necessary to succeed in an ever-changing world.

Which was written by AI, and which by humans?

More here.

Emily Conover in Science News:

A 13-sided shape known as “the hat” has mathematicians tipping their caps.

It’s the first true example of an “einstein,” a single shape that forms a special tiling of a plane: Like bathroom floor tile, it can cover an entire surface with no gaps or overlaps but only with a pattern that never repeats.

“Everybody is astonished and is delighted, both,” says mathematician Marjorie Senechal of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., who was not involved with the discovery. Mathematicians had been searching for such a shape for half a century. “It wasn’t even clear that such a thing could exist,” Senechal says.

Although the name “einstein” conjures up the iconic physicist, it comes from the German ein Stein, meaning “one stone,” referring to the single tile.

More here.

Will Holub-Moorman in the Boston Review:

The specter of parental neglect no longer orders U.S. politics as it did in the late twentieth century. But as indispensable recent books by sociologists Lynne Haney and Dorothy Roberts demonstrate, the knotty legal infrastructures and punitive policies inspired by this rhetoric have endured, with devastating consequences for poor families. These books focus on different areas of U.S. family policy—Haney writes about child support enforcement, Roberts about child protective services—but together they expose the state’s massive and creeping apparatus for surveilling and disciplining parents.

Through extensive interviews and firsthand observation of family courts, both authors show how parents are subjected to an array of humiliating burdens at the ever-blurrier boundaries between the welfare state and the criminal justice system.

More here.

Sam Leith in The Guardian:

David Baddiel was six years old when his mother told him death was like a long sleep from which you never wake up. “I think from that point,” he says, “I never really wanted to go to sleep again.” That night, he lay on the top bunk of his bed, fervently praying – “probably” the first and last time he has prayed with any sincerity – that “my life as it was in Dollis Hill in 1971 would still somehow continue after death”.

More than half a century later Baddiel is still an insomniac, and he’s still terrified by the prospect of dying. “I don’t quite believe anyone who says they’re not,” he says. That childhood memory, and that conviction, is what kicks off his latest book, The God Desire, which delivers in a brisk 110-odd pages what Baddiel considers “an absolutely slam-dunk argument” against the existence of God.

More here.

Some Days

I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

by Billy Colllins
from Sailing Alone Around the Room
Random House, 21002

Lisa Niven-Phillips in Vogue:

From Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages to Ariana DeBose’s viral BAFTAs rap, there are certain topics you just can’t avoid if you spend any significant amount of time online. One of the most oft-discussed subjects of recent months? The irrepressible rise of semaglutide medications. A class of injectable drugs which work to suppress appetite and slow down digestion by replicating hormones produced naturally within the body, semaglutide medications such as Ozempic and Wegovy can control high blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes, as well as facilitating weight loss in those with obesity. But, perhaps unsurprisingly in a culture which places thinness on a pedestal, this ability to help users shed pounds rapidly has piqued the interest of those beyond just the patients it was initially intended to treat. And with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) having just approved Wegovy for use in the UK specifically as a weight loss aid, the conversation looks set to get more complicated still.

More here.