Paul Brown in Singular Discoveries:

The message in a bottle washed ashore on a rocky beach at Coldingham Bay, Scotland, on the morning of March 11, 1909. For anxious relatives and friends, the hastily-scrawled note seemed to confirm their fears that the two-masted sailboat and its ten crew members were lost at sea.

The Snowdrop had departed from Dundee almost a year earlier as part of a small whaling fleet bound for the Arctic waters of the Davis Strait between Greenland and Canada. It was last seen there in the summer of 1908 and reported as “All well.” But when the fleet returned to Dundee with its catch of fifteen whales that November, the Snowdrop was missing, and its fate unknown.

For several weeks, the Dundee whaling community awaited the Snowdrop’s return, expecting that it had been delayed by ice. But by the beginning of 1909, they began to call for shipping agents to send a relief ship in search of the missing boat and crew.

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Nicola Jones in Nature:

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, have become so advanced that they now very nearly match or exceed human performance in tasks including reading comprehension, image classification and competition-level mathematics, according to a new report (see ‘Speedy advances’). Rapid progress in the development of these systems also means that many common benchmarks and tests for assessing them are quickly becoming obsolete.

These are just a few of the top-line findings from the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024, which was published on 15 April by the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University in California. The report charts the meteoric progress in machine-learning systems over the past decade.

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Philip A. Goduti, Jr. in The Conversation:

In my view as a scholar of Kennedy’s life, he set the modern-day standard for public service that is all but absent in the 2024 presidential election dominated by the legal woes of Donald Trump and the age of 81-year-old President Joe Biden.

Kennedy’s lofty rhetoric, coupled with his energetic youth, propelled the nation into what he termed the “New Frontier,” the campaign slogan he used to inspire ordinary citizens to make the world a better place at a time of Cold War nuclear tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

“Let us begin anew … remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof,” Kennedy said during his inaugural address in 1961. “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

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Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

“Noise” is a fuzzy word—a noisy one, in the statistical sense. Its meanings run the gamut from the negative to the positive, from the overpowering to the mysterious, from anarchy to sublimity. The negative seems to lie at the root: etymologists trace the word to “nuisance” and “nausea.” Noise is what drives us mad; it sends the Grinch over the edge at Christmastime. (“Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!”) Noise is the sound of madness itself, the din within our minds. The demented narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” jabbers about noise while he hallucinates his victim’s heartbeat: “I found that the noise was not within my ears. . . . The noise steadily increased. . . . The noise steadily increased.”

Yet noise can be righteous and majestic. The Psalms are full of joyful noise, noise unto the Lord. In the Book of Ezekiel, the voice of God is said to be “like a noise of many waters.” In “Paradise Lost,” Heaven makes “infernal noise” as it beats back the armies of Hell. Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” marshals forces for a different kind of battle.

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Harmon Siegel at Artforum:

IF ITS POTENTIAL BEAUTY is one reason that my MAGA friend can appreciate Impressionism but not its avant-garde successors, another is the movement’s ambiguity between upholding and condemning the forms of authority that dominate modern society. On the one hand, we have the glassy stares of Morisot’s caregivers, the sickly pallor of Degas’s absinthe fiends, and the insectoid inhabitants of Pissarro’s anomic streetscapes––these seem to protest the quotidian cruelties of bourgeois existence, critiquing, respectively, patriarchal subjugation, social disintegration, and bureaucratic administration. On the other, we have Caillebotte’s weekend boaters, Cassatt’s loving families, and Renoir’s dancing couples––these seem to salute the little pleasures of modern life, affirming, respectively, suburban leisure, domestic femininity, and erotic gaiety. These oppositions occur not only between paintings, but even within individual works.

Take Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876. In Herbert’s book, the art historian writes that the painter adopted his exaggerated perspective to amplify the “cyclopean metalwork” of the iron bridge as an “embodiment of industrial power [and an] aggressive symbol of the transformation of Paris.”

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Elizabeth Winkler in The Guardian:

Scholars often say that no one doubted Shakespeare’s authorship until the 19th century. The response is a rote way of brushing off persistent questions about the attribution of the world’s most famous plays and poems – but it may not be true. New scholarship suggests that doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship first arose during his lifetime – in a book called Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, published in 1598 by the theologian Francis Meres. Roger Stritmatter, a professor at Coppin State University who has spent years studying Meres’ book, argues that Meres asserted “Shakespeare” as the pseudonym of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Stritmatter’s research has been published in the academic journal Critical Survey. Shakespeare scholar Graham Holderness, who edited the journal, worries that shutting down debate about the authorship endangers academic freedom. “When you come across traditional Shakespeareans comparing Shakespeare authorship doubt to conspiracy theories – anti-vaxxers or climate change deniers – I mean, I think that’s wrong … for all sorts of reasons”, he said.

Palladis Tamia is a “commonplace book” of sayings and comparisons. It has long been known to scholars as an essential text in Shakespeare studies. In a chapter titled, A Comparative Discourse of Our English Poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets, Meres compares English writers with classical writers using an as-so equation. For example: “As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagorus, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.”

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Gillian Dohrn in Nature:

No one wants to eat when they have an upset stomach. To pinpoint exactly where in the brain this distaste for eating originates, scientists studied nauseated mice. The work, published in Cell Reports on 27 March¹, describes a previously uncharacterized cluster of brain cells that fire when a mouse is made to feel nauseous, but don’t fire when the mouse is simply full. This suggests that responses to satiety and nausea are governed by separate brain circuits.

“With artificial activation of this neuron, the mouse just doesn’t eat, even if it is super hungry,” says Wenyu Ding at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Martinsried, Germany, who led the study. Ding and colleagues suspected that this group of neurons was involved in processing negative experiences, such as feeling queasy, so they injected the mice with a chemical that induces nausea and then scanned the animals’ brains. This confirmed that the neurons are active when mice feel nauseous.

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King of the River

If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly’s blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.
If the knowledge were given you,
but it is not given,
for the membrane is clouded
with self-deceptions
and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.

Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.

Read more »

Alice Park in Time Magazine:

Each of us carts around a 3-lb. universe that orchestrates everything we do: directing our conscious actions of moving, thinking and sensing, while also managing body functions we take for granted, like breathing, keeping our hearts beating and digesting our food. It makes sense that such a bustling world of activity would need rest. Which is what, for decades, doctors thought sleep was all about. Slumber was when all the intricate connections and signals involved in the business of shuttling critical brain chemicals around went off duty, taking time to recharge. We’re all familiar with this restorative role of sleep for the brain–pulling an all-nighter or staying awake during a red-eye flight can not only change our mood, but also affect our ability to think clearly until, at some point, it practically shuts down on its own. When we don’t get enough sleep, we’re simply not ourselves.

Yet exactly what goes on in the sleeping brain has been a biological black box. Do neurons stop functioning altogether, putting up the cellular equivalent of a Do Not Disturb sign? And what if a sleeping brain is not just taking some well-deserved time off but also using the downtime to make sense of the world, by storing away memories and captured emotions? And how, precisely, is it doing that?

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Amanda Montell at Literary Hub:

The attempts I made to get out of my own head were sundry and full of nonsense.

I visited a petting zoo for adults. I tried learning to meditate from a British computer voice. I stocked up on an unregulated nutrition powder called “Brain Dust.” My brain felt like dust. In the last few years, “dread for no reason” became one of my most frequent Google searches, as if the act of typing my feelings to a robot would make them go away. I gorged myself on podcasts about women who’d “snapped,” at once repulsed and tantalized by those who wore their madness on their sleeves. How good it must feel to “snap,” I thought.

My most cinematic attempt at mental rehab involved picking herbs on a farm in Sicily under a light-pollution-free sky. (“At night here, the stars are so close, they could fall into your mouth,” the herb farmer told me, sending my heart to my throat.) With varying degrees of “success,” I was doing everything I could think of to defect from the state of overwhelm and consumption that had become my life in the roaring 2020s.

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James Dinneen in New Scientist:

Record rainfall hit the Arabian peninsula this week, causing flooding in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, as well as other coastal cities in the United Arab Emirates. The extreme weather prompted speculation on social media about whether the UAE’s longstanding cloud-seeding programme played a role. But cloud seeding almost certainly didn’t have any significant hand in the flooding.

In the UAE, it was the most extreme such event since records began in 1949, according to the state-run Emirates News Agency. Between 15 and 16 April, several parts of the country saw more rain in 24 hours than normally falls in an entire year. Heavy rains are unusual for the desert region, although not unheard of – the UAE saw heavy rain and flooding in 2016, for instance.

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Mariana Mazzucato and Fausto Gernone at Project Syndicate:

To be sure, AI models are evolving rapidly. When EU regulators released the first draft of the AI Act in April 2021, they hailed it as “future-proof,” only to be left scrambling to update the text in response to the release of ChatGPT a year and a half later. But regulatory efforts are not in vain. For example, the law’s ban on AI in biometric policing will likely remain pertinent, regardless of advances in the technology. Moreover, the risk frameworks contained in the AI Act will help policymakers guard against some of the technology’s most dangerous uses. While AI will develop faster than policy, the law’s fundamental principles will not need to change – though more flexible regulatory tools will be needed to tweak and update rules.

But thinking of the state as only a regulator misses the larger point. Innovation is not just some serendipitous market phenomenon. It has a direction that depends on the conditions in which it emerges, and public policymakers can influence these conditions.

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Kevin Jiang in Harvard Magazine:

The first signs of insufficient sleep are universally familiar. There’s tiredness and fatigue, difficulty concentrating, perhaps irritability or even tired giggles. Far fewer people have experienced the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation, including disorientation, paranoia and hallucinations. Total, prolonged sleep deprivation, however, can be fatal. While it has been reported in humans only anecdotally, a study in rats conducted by Chicago-based researchers in 1989 showed that a complete lack of sleep inevitably leads to death. Yet, despite decades of study, a central question has remained unsolved: why do animals die when they don’t sleep?

Now, Harvard Medical School neuroscientists have identified an unexpected, causal link between sleep deprivation and premature death. In a study on sleep-deprived fruit flies, published in Cell on June 4, researchers found that death is always preceded by the accumulation of molecules known as reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the gut. When fruit flies were given antioxidant compounds that neutralize and clear ROS from the gut, sleep-deprived flies remained active and had normal lifespans. Additional experiments in mice confirmed that ROS accumulate in the gut when sleep is insufficient.

The findings suggest the possibility that animals can indeed survive without sleep under certain circumstances. The results open new avenues of study to understand the full consequences of insufficient sleep and may someday inform the design of approaches to counteract its detrimental effects in humans, the authors said. “We took an unbiased approach and searched throughout the body for indicators of damage from sleep deprivation. We were surprised to find it was the gut that plays a key role in causing death,” said senior study author Dragana Rogulja, assistant professor of neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. “Even more surprising, we found that premature death could be prevented. Each morning, we would all gather around to look at the flies, with disbelief to be honest. What we saw is that every time we could neutralize ROS in the gut, we could rescue the flies,” Rogulja said.

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Tadhg Hoey at The Millions:

Toward the end of Percival Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees, about a series of murders in present-day Money, Mississippi, the small town where 13-year-old Emmet Till was brutally lynched in 1955, a list of Black Americans who died by lynching is read aloud by an academic who is researching the origins of racial violence. The list, compiled by a local mystic, is only partial, but it is long and overwhelming. It contains many victims whose names remain unknown. One of the names on the list is David Walker, along with his wife and four small children, who are nameless. Walker and his family were murdered in front of their Kentucky home on October 3, 1908, by 50 members of the racist vigilante group the Night Riders, which accused Walker of swearing at a white woman. The lynching was well-documented, but the names of Walker’s wife and children are never mentioned.

After the publication of The Trees, a reader from Tennessee wrote to Everett to tell him that David Walker’s wife was named Annie. Everett reflected on what this correction meant to him during his acceptance speech after winning the PEN/Jean Stein Award for his 2023 novel Dr. No.

more here.

How To Build a Cathedral

The leaves outside my window shake with a deeper
movement than the continuing ripple of the morning,
midsummer breeze. “Squirrels,” I think, and think
of how I know they’re there although I cannot see them,
not a large movement, but enough if you paid
attention. This is how the ancients found the holy places,
then followed the ley lines that led from one to another.
Earth makes a gesture. Some subtle thing moves.
“Ah,” you say, then “Ah” again, if you are paying
attention and mark where you are. Maybe you leave
a stone you’ve carried because it felt good in your hand.
Another person does the same. Soon there’s a cairn,
then a cathedral where boys like me pay no
attention, but sing the mass beautifully anyway.

Nils Peterson
from A Letter

Suzi Ronson at Literary Hub:

Angie calls in a high state of excitement: they’re going to see Elvis at Madison Square Garden in New York City. “Come over, David must look wonderful!” I want to go with them…there’s no chance of that happening, but still, a girl can dream. As I drive to Haddon Hall, I can’t help but think over and over…they’re going to see ELVIS!

When I get there, David is full of nervous energy, pacing up and down, smoking one cigarette after another. All he talks about is meeting Elvis—how it will be, what he should say, what he should wear and, above all else, how can he look really young? He wants to be seen as the heir apparent; he’s planning a photo of him and Elvis where he’ll be looking up at the older man.

“I’d sell my soul to be famous.” It just comes out.

Angie and I look at each other in silence. I feel as if I’m in a melodramatic black-and-white 1940s movie. It doesn’t feel quite serious, like he’s trying out saying it. Elvis has been a huge star my whole life. Even before The Beatles there was Elvis, so it’s a surprise to me that David compares himself to Elvis and I marvel at his confidence. I mean, David’s good, he’s really good—but Elvis?!

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Jason Castro in Aeon:

What is the distance between the scent of a rose and the odour of camphor? Are floral smells perpendicular to smoky ones? Is the geometry of ‘odour space’ Euclidean, following the rules about lines, shapes and angles that decorate countless high-school chalkboards? To many, these will seem like either unserious questions or, less charitably, meaningless ones. Geometry is logic made visible, after all; the business of drawing unassailable conclusions from clearly stated axioms. And odour is, let’s be honest, a bit too vague and vaporous for any of that. The folksy idea of smell as the blunted and structureless sense is at least as old as Plato, and I have to confess that, even as an olfactory researcher, I sometimes feel like I’m studying the Pluto of the sensory systems – a shadowy, out-there iceball on a weird orbit.

In recent years, however, things have changed dramatically, and understanding what one might call ‘the geometry of smell’ is a field that now enlists task forces of neuroscientists working together with mathematically trained theorists and artificial intelligence (AI) experts.

More here.