Phil Christman in The Hedgehog Review:

It’s all wrong. The wrongness is pervasive; you could not, if asked, identify the it or the its that went wrong. Wrongness leaches into everything, like the microplastics you read about, which may or may not be reducing sperm count in men, which may or may not be good, in the long run—it’s something to do with the environment. Someone wanted you to feel one way or the other about it, but you can’t remember who or why or whether you agreed with him. Everyone speaks so authoritatively, whether it’s on the evening news or a podcast, in an Internet video or a book, or even in one of those Twitter threads that begins (irksomely, you once felt, but now you don’t notice) with the little picture of a spool. Authority makes them all sound the same; it crosses all their faces and leaves many of the same furrows. Only afterward, trying to add it all up, do you half-remember that none of them agreed with each other. But the wrongness you can be sure of. It is like God, undergirding all things.

More here.

Marco Ramponi at Assembly AI:

The creators have used a combination of both Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning to fine-tune ChatGPT, but it is the Reinforcement Learning component specifically that makes ChatGPT unique. The creators use a particular technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which uses human feedback in the training loop to minimize harmful, untruthful, and/or biased outputs.

We are going to examine GPT-3’s limitations and how they stem from its training process, before learning how RLHF works and understand how ChatGPT uses RLHF to overcome these issues. We will conclude by looking at some of the limitations of this methodology.

More here.

Ryan Costello and Francis Rooney in Politico:

For years, philanthropists have poured money into progressive climate groups, while largely overlooking opportunities to engage right-of-center communities on this topic. The data bear this out. According to an analysis by Northeastern University, less than 2 percent of climate philanthropy has gone to engaging conservatives on climate change. On a very practical level, this imbalance misses an opportunity to build a broader tent and delays the elevation of climate as a bipartisan priority.

As former GOP congressmen eager to see further movement on climate, we know firsthand how difficult it can be to mobilize Republicans on this issue. Some of the blame lies within our own party, which has been too skeptical on climate action for too long. But without real engagement from the environmental movement, it becomes easy for our Republican colleagues to dismiss the issue as a liberal concern rather than a challenge confronting us all.

More here.

Alex Vuocolo at Noema:

If you start talking with engineers about maintenance, somebody always brings up Incan rope bridges. Maybe you’ve seen an illustration or a digital rendering in a Hollywood movie. They’re the color of hay and hang with a bit of slack over rivers and canyons in Peru’s rugged terrain. Made from ichu grass threaded into progressively denser and denser bundles, they were ritualistically maintained by ancient Peruvians. They lasted for centuries. Most are long gone now, though at least one has been preserved for posterity as an infrastructural artifact, just like the R32 at the New York Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn.

It’s hard to imagine a modern ritual that would be equal to the task of perpetually renewing steel bridges, concrete highways and cement buildings. It would require an entirely new industrial paradigm.

more here.

Benjamin Nugent at The Paris Review:

After I’d wandered the grounds, I spent the weekend in Oxford, a heady experience for a Northern fetishist of things Southern. I ate catfish and grits, drank whiskey in a bar on the outskirts of town where old men in hats played guitars. I visited Faulkner’s grave and his birthplace, drove around the Mississippi hill country, and ate okra with congenial strangers. I tried to understand why I felt drawn to this part of the world. To that end, I drank whiskey in a second bar, this one downtown, overlooking the statue of the Confederate soldier who gazed “with empty eyes,” in Faulkner’s phrase, at the square. I decided the reason was this. I grew up in Amherst, a mile down the road from Dickinson’s house, and Massachusetts is the Mississippi of the North, Mississippi the Massachusetts of the South. They’re on opposite sides of the American political spectrum, but they’re both places where the present is dwarfed and chastened by the past. In Massachusetts, a given location is known as the spot where the minutemen faced the redcoats on the green, or where Jonathan Edwards delivered his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” or where the Mayflower landed, or where the whalers set sail, or where the tea was dumped in the harbor. In Mississippi, it’s the same: here’s where Grant’s army bivouacked; here’s where the formerly enslaved Union soldiers drove the Texans from the field; here’s where Elvis grew up; here’s where Emmett Till was murdered; here’s where the earliest blues music was performed. I’ve heard both Massachusetts and Mississippi maligned as boring, and I’ve tried to explain to the maligners: You need to stop living so much in the present.

more here.

Worm Moon

1
In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.

2
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

3
because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping –
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run
over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.

4
Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

5
Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

6
and probably
everything
is possible.

by Mary Oliver
from Twelve Moons

David Conrads in The Christian Science Monitor:

It has been over two years since a violent mob attacked and occupied the United States Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election. While blame has been laid at the feet of then-president Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters, religion scholar Bradley Onishi takes a close look at the historical events and forces that led up to the attack.

In “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – and What Comes Next,” Onishi examines the history of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. and the movement’s increasing involvement with political extremism since the late 1950s. Examining cultural and political movements that reshaped society, he shows how conservative evangelical Christianity has melded with political extremism to exert an outsize influence on contemporary society. His thorough research, close observation, and clear writing are invaluable in helping to understand the insurrection as well as some of the many puzzling aspects of the Trump presidency.

“January 6 was not an aberration or even some historically bewildering event,” he writes. “It was the logical outcome of the Trump presidency and election defeat but also of the long history of White Christian nationalist rhetoric, organizing, and influence across the United States.”

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross at n+1:

FOR MANY AMERICANS, it is easier to acquire a new car than to find a rental apartment they can afford. But there is a high price, in sheer debt, to pay for getting that ride on the road. The average monthly loan payment for a new vehicle recently passed the $700 mark, a figure that does not include insurance and the steep costs of maintenance. Currently, Americans owe 1.52 trillion dollars in auto debt—a staggering sum that has doubled over the last decade, due in large part to the migration of subprime loans from the housing to the auto market.

Buyers routinely drive off the lot in cars that are beyond their means. This is especially true for the more than one in three American consumers with subprime credit scores, which a cycle of bad auto debt will only tank further. No other asset loses value so rapidly, or is financed by such loosely regulated lenders, prone to predatory practices. With loan terms now being stretched to more than 84 months, many owners never succeed in paying off their debt.

more here.

Anthony Cummins at Literary Review:

The American crime writer James Ellroy, born Lee Earle Ellroy, chose his pen name because it was ‘simple, concise and dignified – things I am not’, a statement perhaps underscored by another name he likes being called, ‘Demon Dog’. We learn from Steven Powell’s sober new biography that an overseas publisher who wanted to translate Ellroy’s work (‘an almost unendurable wordstorm of perversity and gore,’ according to one critic) found that translators, deterred by his difficult language and right-wing sympathies, refused to do it.

Ellroy started to read crime fiction as a boy in 1950s Los Angeles when his estranged father gave him Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer books to read while looking after him at weekends. His youth was a troubled one: drink, drugs, jail. In his thirties, he began writing a novel so as not to be bested by a friend who told him he was writing one himself.

more here.

Joan E. Strassmann in The Common Reader:

There are three main themes to this book. First, people revered eagles and used them and their images to define their group, be it native or settler. Second, people killed bald eagles by the thousands, nearly wiping out this magnificent bird, a job that DDT practically completed. The third theme is redemption and shows the efforts some people are making to rescue our emblematic bird.

The first chapter, Searching for a Seal, was one of my favorites because of the way it showed the development of something that seems so timeless, the seal of the United States, the seal that is on every podium, every official banner, and every dollar bill. Now it seems almost inevitable, but there were several other contenders that might have prevailed. Our great seal shows a bald eagle looking left holding in its bill a ribbon that says E Pluribus Unum, from many one. But you know the rest of the image or can easily pull it out of your wallet.

More here.

Bill Gates in the New York Times:

Imagine there’s a small fire in your kitchen. Your fire alarm goes off, warning everyone nearby about the danger. Someone calls 911. You try to put the fire out yourself — maybe you even have a fire extinguisher under the sink. If that doesn’t work, you know how to safely evacuate. By the time you get outside, a fire truck is already pulling up. Firefighters use the hydrant in front of your house to extinguish the flames before any of your neighbors’ homes are ever at risk of catching fire.

‌We need to prepare to fight disease outbreaks just as we prepare to fight fires. If a fire is left to burn out of control, it poses a threat not only to one home but to an entire community. The same is true for infectious diseases, except on a much bigger scale. As we know all too well from Covid, an outbreak in one town can quickly spread across an entire country and then around the world.

When the World Health Organization first described Covid-19 as a pandemic just over three years ago, it marked the culmination of a collective failure to prepare for pandemics, despite many warnings. And I worry that we’re making ‌‌the same mistakes again.

More here.

Richard Haass in Project Syndicate:

Whatever progress had been made in Afghanistan after the US invaded and removed the Taliban government that had provided a safe haven to the al-Qaeda terrorists who planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, it was deemed inadequate. Many in the Bush administration were motivated by a desire to bring democracy to the entire Middle East, and Iraq was viewed as the ideal country to set the transition in motion. Democratization there would set an example that others across the region would be unable to resist following. And Bush himself wanted to do something big and bold.

I should make clear that I was part of the administration at the time, as the head of the Department of State’s Policy Planning staff. Like virtually all my colleagues, I thought Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs, namely chemical and biological weapons. Even so, I did not favor going to war.

More here.

The Return

He doesn’t know it yet, but when my father
and I return there, it will be forever.
His antihypertensives thrown away,
his briefcase in the attic left to waste,
the football game turned off—he’s snoring now,
he doesn’t even dream it, but I know
I’ll carry him the way he carried me
when I was small: in 2023,
my father’s shrunken, eighty-five years old,
weighs ninety pounds, a little dazed but thrilled
that Castro’s long been dead, his son impeached!
He doesn’t know it, dozing on the couch
across the family room from me, but this
is what I’ve dreamed of giving him, just this.
And I carry him upon my shoulders,
triumphant strides across the beach so golden
I want to cry, that’s when he sees for sure,
he sees he’s needed me for all these years.
He doesn’t understand it yet, but when
I give him Cuba, he will love me then.

by Raphael Campo
from El Coro
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Hannah Ritchie in Vox:

We environmentalists spend our lives thinking about ways the world will end. There’s nowhere that I see doomer culture more vocal than on my home turf.

With leading activists like Roger Hallam, co-founder of the popular climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion, telling young people that they “face annihilation,” it’s no surprise so many of them feel terrified. In a large recent international survey on youth attitudes toward climate change, more than half said that “humanity is doomed” and three-quarters said the future is frightening. Young people have good reasons to worry about our ability to tackle climate change, but this level of despair should be alarming to anyone who cares about the well-being of future generations — which is, after all, what the climate movement is all about.

More here.

Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

Researchers have discovered an entirely new kind of taste receptor that allows fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to detect alkaline substances — those that have a high pH — and avoid toxic meals and surfaces. Finding a new taste receptor in such a well-studied animal is unexpected, says Emily Liman, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “I found it quite surprising that there is this whole new type of taste,” says Liman. “It is really beautiful work.” The discovery, published in Nature Metabolism this week¹, could “potentially inform future research into the physiological mechanisms underlying alkaline taste in other organisms”, says Lai Ren, a biochemist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Most animals function in a narrow pH range, which makes sensing acids and bases important for their survival. Studies in the past few decades have detailed the receptors, cells and neural circuits involved in detecting sour and acidic tastes², which occur at low pH, but sensing alkaline substances is not well understood, says Lai. Some early work in people³ and cats⁴ suggests — but does not prove — that the alkaline sensation could be a type of taste, he adds.

More here.