Morgan Meis in The Easel:

It was often the case in the late 19th century that if you wanted to add a little prestige to your life you had your portrait painted by a notable portrait painter. Or you had your family painted, or just your wife. This latter idea was the thought that occurred to Sir Andrew Agnew, the 9th Baronet of Lochnaw Castle in Wigtownshire, Scotland. He was proud of his wife, perhaps in the way one is proud of a horse, or an elegant piece of furniture. He wanted others to be proud too. There was a lot of pride going around.

So, Sir Andrew hired a fashionable portrait painter and, in 1892, a portrait was painted. The painting is known today by the name of its sitter, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. The painter was a Mr. John Singer Sargent.

The portrait shows a person of great wealth and privilege engaged in the act of enjoying that wealth and privilege. To this, we might respond with complete indifference or even hostility. We’re also given, in the portrait, all the trappings of docile femininity. The soft gauzy fabrics of the chair, backdrop, and dress highlight the soft gauziness that adheres to Lady Agnew herself. The painting is staid in every possible meaning of the term.

And yet, I want to say that the painting is also exciting.

More here.

Michael Wooldridge in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

AI is a broad church, and like many churches, it has schisms.

The fiercely controversial subject that has riven the field is perhaps the most basic question in AI: To achieve intelligent machines, should we model the mind or the brain? The former approach is known as symbolic AI, and it largely dominated the field for much of its 50-plus years of existence. The latter approach is called neural networks. For much of the field’s existence, neural nets were regarded as a poor cousin to symbolic AI at best and a dead end at worst. But the current triumphs of AI are based on dramatic advances in neural-network technology, and now it is symbolic AI that is on its back foot. Some neural-net researchers vocally proclaim symbolic AI to be a dead field, and the symbolic AI community is desperately seeking to find a role for their ideas in the new AI.

More here.

Rachel Bronson and Sharon Squassoni in The Hill:

Fears about President Trump’s unilateral access to nuclear launch codes in the remaining days of his troubled administration led Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and others to call for limiting the President’s ability to authorize a nuclear strike. What may have seemed like political theater is in fact a serious and known gap in accountability that lawmakers and scholars have tried to address for decades without success.

Trump was not the first embattled U.S. leader whose access to the launch codes spooked Congress. President Nixon, who revealed to the press in 1985 that he considered using nuclear weapons on four occasions, reportedly told two congressmen in the summer of 1974 that “I can go back into my office and pick up the telephone and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead.” Concerns about Nixon’s heavy drinking and pressure from the impeachment proceedings are said to have led Defense Secretary James Schlesinger to instruct the Joint Chiefs of Staff that any emergency order coming from the president — such as a nuclear launch order — should go through him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger first. But Schlesinger had no legal authority to intervene and it is not clear what would have happened if Nixon had ordered an attack.

Two years earlier, Senator J. William Fulbright sought to include an amendment to the landmark War Powers Resolution (which Nixon vetoed but Congress overrode) that would have required prior congressional authorization for nuclear weapons use except in response to a nuclear attack. The exception, presumably, was to cover the scenario of a surprise nuclear strike by the Soviet Union designed to disarm us. The amendment failed, but the conviction that the president needed full freedom of action lived on.

Today, there is less merit than ever to support unilateral authorization without consultation and many ways to structure a process that would still be flexible but accountable.

More here.

Ben Miller at The Baffler:

While some academics (like John Boswell and Terry Castle) spent years arguing, with ever-decreasing success, that something like the contemporary “gay” or “lesbian” had always existed in relatively similar ways, “constructionist” models like those offered by Foucault and D’Emilio have become dominant in today’s academic histories about gay, lesbian, and trans lives. In the mainstream, however, it’s almost the reverse. If in the 1970s and 1980s there was a vibrant public activist culture in which both Queer History One and Two were debated, today most gay and lesbian people firmly rely on the former. The wages of nationalism are generous, and Queer History One’s story—you have always existed, you have dignity because you are like Great Men/Women—has proven to be an easier position from which to argue for the dispensation of civil rights and protections from the state. It’s unsurprising that this has become the mass-market narrative about homosexuality in the contemporary West: we’re born this way, and we always have been. Recognize us, and we’ll marry, pay taxes, and serve in the military.

more here.

Sisonke Msimang at Lapham’s Quarterly:

Like all children in our exile community whose parents were members of the African National Congress, I attended Young Pioneers meetings every weekend. The meetings were like Sunday school sessions. Politics was our religion, and we worshipped at the altar of Marx. We rehearsed political slogans the way other children learned hymns, and we prayed to the socialist gods that the apartheid regime would come crashing down. The sessions were fun. They were run by Auntie Ruth, a Russian woman married to a South African man. She taught us Marxist theory and let us pretend that we were world-class gymnasts. Occasionally, Auntie Ruth would let someone else manage the Sunday sessions. By the time I was seven, a lot of our teachers were “young lions,” or the “children of ’76,” as they were often called.

more here.

Karin Wulf in Smithsonian:

In August of 1619, the English warship White Lion sailed into Hampton Roads, Virginia, where the conjunction of the James, Elizabeth and York rivers meet the Atlantic Ocean. The White Lion’s captain and crew were privateers, and they had taken captives from a Dutch slave ship. They exchanged, for supplies, more than 20 African people with the leadership and settlers at the Jamestown colony. In 2019 this event, while not the first arrival of Africans or the first incidence of slavery in North America, was widely recognized as inaugurating race-based slavery in the British colonies that would become the United States.

That 400th anniversary is the occasion for a unique collaboration: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by historians Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. Kendi and Blain brought together 90 black writers—historians, scholars of other fields, journalists, activists and poets—to cover the full sweep and extraordinary diversity of those 400 years of black history. Although its scope is encyclopedic, the book is anything but a dry, dispassionate march through history. It’s elegantly structured in ten 40-year sections composed of eight essays (each covering one theme in a five-year period) and a poem punctuating the section conclusion; Kendi calls Four Hundred Souls “a chorus.”

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Notice Breath

Notice breath, my yoga teacher says.
It’s the year of Corona and I take her class
in New Jersey from mu house across state lines,
and what I notice today is the lively unspecificity.
Not notice my breath, or hers, just breath itself
moving unhitched, animating each of us.

One friend with the virus describes
a burning like inhaled chemical fumes.
Another, a pressure like a cheetah
chose her ribcage as a place to rest.
So, yes, these days I notice breath
the way you’d notice a bouquet
on your scarred kitchen table, gathered
bursts so bright at first it’s easy to forget
they’ve been clipped from their roots,
their fading not even all that slow.

Mother’s day, I watched as two teenage girls
sung a hip hop love  song to a masked and gloved
woman on her porch. They stayed on the walk
and I on my side of the street,
but when their song ended, the mom, or aunt
or favorite neighbor, crossed the divide,
took those girls in her arms, deciding
the fee of their heat and heartbeats and sweat
was worth daring the beast for once.

Every day, we’re made to weigh like that,
sucking in our breath, letting it out
against paper r cloth,
noting its warmth as we do.

by Ona Gritz
from The Poetry Archive

Adam Grant in the New York Times:

As an organizational psychologist, I’ve spent the past few years studying how to motivate people to think again. I’ve run experiments that led proponents of gun rights and gun safety to abandon some of their mutual animosity, and I even got Yankees fans to let go of their grudges against Red Sox supporters. But I don’t always practice what I teach.

When someone seems closed-minded, my instinct is to argue the polar opposite of their position. But when I go on the attack, my opponents either shut down or fight back harder. On more than one occasion, I’ve been called a “logic bully.”

When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

As a semi-outsider, it’s fun for me to watch as a new era dawns in biology: one that adds ideas from physics, big data, computer science, and information theory to the usual biological toolkit. One of the big areas of study in this burgeoning field is the relationship between the basic bioinformatic building blocks (genes and proteins) to the macroscopic organism that eventually results. That relationship is not a simple one, as we’re discovering. Standard metaphors notwithstanding, an organism is not a machine based on genetic blueprints. I talk with biologist and information scientist Michael Levin about how information and physical constraints come together to make organisms and selves.

More here.

Yanis Varoufakis in Project Syndicate:

Former US President Donald Trump’s opponents call him a liar. But Trump is far worse than a liar. Many politicians lie to cover up inconvenient truths. But Trump can punctuate long sequences of eye-watering mendacity with verities that no other president would ever admit to, from dismissing the dominant view of globalization as unambiguously beneficial to acknowledging that, yes, he tried to defund the United States Postal Service to make it harder for Democrats to vote.

Scientists have good reason to celebrate Trump’s departure, judging by their evident relief that they can now present epidemiological data from the White House podium without fear of retribution. But to determine whether we can expect an across-the-board truth revival under President Joe Biden, we need to recall how our societies discern truth in the first place.

Liberals love the market analogy. Like gadgets, opinions are floated in the great marketplace of ideas, where a decentralized process, involving consumers and producers of views and news, evaluates them. True opinions outcompete the false.

Unfortunately, the marketplace of ideas is itself a lie.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFo140uk5Hc&ab_channel=BBCPodcasts

Saba Ahmed at Prospect Magazine:

Every month, 45,000 migrant workers arrive in the Pakistani port city of Karachi. This is just one remarkable fact in Samira Shackle’s compelling portrait of the “mega-city,” in which she turns her attention away from the affluent neighbourhoods of Defence and Clifton towards the municipalities of Orangi and Lyari, which are mired in gang violence, corruption and ethnic conflict.

Shackle travels further, sketching the geography of Sindh province: its mangrove forests, sandy beaches and dry riverbeds, as well as the arid scrubland where the ancestral homes of villagers are being illegally torn down to build gated suburbs for Karachi’s growing middle class. We hear the stories of residents, their histories of migration and resettlement, which stretch from Partition to the Bangladesh war and the rise of the Taliban.

more here.

Pure Mathematics

I’ve been told it is all theory in the end, no letter
…. applying to number
That stands for a thing, no principal accruing interest
…. in a practical account,
Only the pure joy of theory and the theory of theories
…. I heard
My drunk mathematician friend try to explain one night
…. in a Country & Western bar,
Collaring the few who’d listen, truckdrivers and ex-jocks,
…. to show them proof
That followed some premise they didn’t care to understand.

We might have been crabs comprehending opera or sibyls
…. poking the blue entrails of frogs,
And still his logic accumulated napkins in an orderly pile
…. that the red-haired waitress,
Who finally asked him to leave, swept away and dumped
…. under the counter in a barrel.
And driving home later on that icy farm-to-market road,
…. he was still
Expounding, jubilantly, maniacally, as the way weaved
…. and the universal values
Of arbitrary points unrolled an infinitely expanding line.

It was the clean relish of his mind that made me forget
…. the hard curves, the trees
That loomed from snowy shoulders down to the creek.
…. My mind was never like that.
What I liked best the year I studied calculus was chance
…. error, my lame prayer
That I might arrive like Columbus, who came by wrong
…. to the right unknown. Nothing applied.
O hypothetical mind, we many who are left behind know
…. we can never know. We
Stand grounded under the twin wings of the infinite sign.

Read more »

Joanna Kavenna at Literary Review:

What is health anyway, when everyone dies in the end? The World Health Organization defines it as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. This is a long way from the attitude of the ‘last of the great Bakhtishu family of physicians, around the year 1000 in Baghdad’, writes Bamforth: they found that the perfect state of health ‘does not exist’. What about Schopenhauer and his definition of humanity as a synthesis of the infinite and the finite?

Acutely aware of the overarching weirdness of all of the above, Bamforth has created a fascinating ‘medical dreambook’, full of night terrors and waking visions. He dreams of ‘rales’ and ‘crépitations’, crackles in the lungs heard via stethoscope. He dreams of Thomas Mann and his magic mountain, where Hans Castorp meets Dr Hofrat Behrens, aka Rhadamanthus, judge of the dead.

more here.

Samantha Culp in The Atlantic:

The pandemic, which has seemed stranger than science fiction in so many ways, has occasioned much debate about the role of speculative fiction in imagining the future: The possibilities of such stories have felt, to some, like answers amid uncertainty, even as others have questioned the limits of dystopian visions. But perhaps an equally relevant literature to revisit is speculative nonfiction: the constantly evolving genre we might call “pop futurism.”

What are the telltale signs of a “pop futurist” book? It sketches out possible tomorrows, highlights emergent trends to watch, and promises ways for even nonspecialists to apply these insights to their own life and work. It’s likely to sport an arresting cover, a style dating back to the work that arguably pioneered this genre and still casts a long shadow. Future Shock—the book by Alvin Toffler that helped popularize “futurism” as a concept in mainstream culture and business, and which recently marked its 50th anniversary—was printed in multiple colorways so that it would jar the eye as a neon rainbow beaming off bookstore shelves. Other titles have kinetic lettering that judders off the page, as if traveling at high speed. The writing’s tone usually sits somewhere between start-up pitch and self-help mantra, with the oracular confidence of the returned time traveler.

More here.

Jennifer Hallam in Thirteen:

When Africans were taken from their homes and forced into slavery, they were separated from mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers and were torn from extensive kinship networks. Enslaved in the British colonies of North America or the free states of the American Union, the ability of Africans to reestablish nuclear families and familial support systems depended on many factors including the needs and desires of the slave owner. As the circumstances of slavery changed across time and place, the opportunities for slaves to marry, have children, and create stable family units fluctuated.

Slave trade to the original thirteen colonies was slow and sporadic. In places like New York and Virginia, where small farming units were the norm, slaves were bought by handfuls rather than shiploads. The preference for male laborers limited the ability of most black slaves in early colonial society from developing relationships with black women. Among the Atlantic Creole population in New Amsterdam, however, a more balanced male to female ratio made as many as twenty-six marriages possible. These unions took place within the Dutch Reformed Church. The church became an institution through which New Amsterdam blacks were able to form independent familial units. In addition to marriage papers, archives of the Dutch Reformed Church contain baptism records that list children according to fathers rather than owners and name black godparents as witnesses.

Enslaved blacks attempted to provide for their family members financially, as well as spiritually. At a time when slavery was still a concept rather than a legal institution, blacks from New Amsterdam to the Chesapeake Bay used the courts to ensure the well-being of family members. Numerous slaves made bequests of property to wives or children in wills.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

Do bees have generals? Do they constitute a nation? A tribe? Perhaps a clan?

How we answer these questions may reveal something about our implicit convictions regarding what might be called “the metaphysics and politics of the swarm”. What is it exactly that forms when several individual entities, human or animal or something different still, come together after the manner of the bees, and act as one? And what are the political potentials and hazards of human individuals in particular coming together in this way?

Answering these questions in turn may help us to make some sense of the political promise of such frenzies as we have seen over the past few days, when a concerted effort on the part of the lads from Reddit drove up the price of GameStop stock, squeezing the hedge-fund managers who had hoped to short it, costing Wall Street billions of dollars, and sending the market into chaos.

More here.