Hua Hsu at The New Yorker:

The idea for publishing a novel posthumously came to Kingston after learning of Mark Twain’s autobiography, which wasn’t released in uncensored form until 2010, a hundred years after his death. If Kingston knew that she wouldn’t have to answer for her work, perhaps she would be able to write more freely. At first, her notes represented an attempt to capture each day’s “intensity,” she said. In time, she realized that she had written about twelve hundred single-spaced pages. She continued writing. She told her agent, Sandy Dijkstra, that the book would remain unpublished for a hundred years. “I was stunned, shocked, and more,” Dijkstra said in an e-mail, “and told her that I could not promise to be a living and functioning agent a century from now.” Kingston has not shown her any of it. “Maybe you can persuade Maxine to show it to us much sooner,” she said. “Magical thinking works on the page, but not so well in real life.”

more here.

Gary Indiana at Harper’s Magazine:

From time to time, Andy Warhol entertained the wish to host a television show called Nothing Special, and to operate a chain of cafeterias for solitary diners, the Andy-Mat. A social oddity since his Dickensian childhood, Warhol retained the imprint of not-having and not-belonging into adulthood, acquiring vivid people he didn’t much care about and pricey objects he never looked at. To a society poised to reject him, he presented a façade of detachment from other people’s lives, even from his own: in an interview with Alfred Hitchcock, he said that getting shot had been “like watching TV.”

What everybody knows about Warhol: He grew up in the Thirties and Forties in a cloacal, polyglot slough of Pittsburgh. He later said it was the worst place he had ever been.

more here.

Joshua Craze in n + 1:

In January, I lived in two worlds. In the first, every day contained catastrophes, loud and insistent. Most of them had already happened by the time I woke up and turned on my phone. I would hear from humanitarians reporting casualty numbers from clashes in Jonglei, pastoralists telling me about raids on the Mayom-Warrap border, and politicians whispering about tensions in Juba, South Sudan’s capital. It was morning in America, mid-afternoon in East Africa, and everything seemed to be on fire. I’ve spent a decade working as a conflict researcher in South Sudan, for an alphabet soup of organizations, and I know the slow pace of life across much of the country. In Mayom, despite South Sudan’s ongoing civil war, most of the day is played to the rhythm of the area’s beloved cattle. Raiding takes place alongside milking and grazing. However, if you were to only read my WhatsApp and Signal messages, life in South Sudan would appear to be an endless train-wreck of catastrophes piling up on each other. No one sent me messages about milk. My mornings were spent finding out all I could about the conflict in the country, writing up reports, and then, finally, East Africa would sleep, and my other world could begin.   

I was staying in a small town in upstate New York, where, I told myself, I could finally sit down, after my last trip to South Sudan, and do some writing.

More here.

Stephen Ornes in Quanta:

By now, people treat neural networks as a kind of AI panacea, capable of solving tech challenges that can be restated as a problem of pattern recognition. They provide natural-sounding language translation. Photo apps use them to recognize and categorize recurrent faces in your collection. And programs driven by neural nets have defeated the world’s best players at games including Go and chess.

However, neural networks have always lagged in one conspicuous area: solving difficult symbolic math problems. These include the hallmarks of calculus courses, like integrals or ordinary differential equations. The hurdles arise from the nature of mathematics itself, which demands precise solutions. Neural nets instead tend to excel at probability. They learn to recognize patterns — which Spanish translation sounds best, or what your face looks like — and can generate new ones.

The situation changed late last year when Guillaume Lample and François Charton, a pair of computer scientists working in Facebook’s AI research group in Paris, unveiled a successful first approach to solving symbolic math problems with neural networks.

More here.

Vanessa A. Bee in In These Times:

Anthony Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, believes a vaccine is unlikely to arrive within a year. Others in the field suggest even 18 months is optimistic, and that’s assuming it can be quickly mass produced and nothing goes wrong. As Bill Ackman, the billionaire and founder of investment firm Pershing Square, warns on CNBC, “Capitalism does not work in an 18-month shutdown.”

So how did the United States, dubbed “the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed” by New York Times pundit Thomas L. Friedman, end up so sorely unprepared?

Perhaps one clue lies in Texas, where a potentially effective vaccine has been stalled since 2016. Dr. Peter Jay Hotez and his team at Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development created a potential vaccine for one deadly strain of coronavirus four years ago—which Hotez believes could be effective against the strain we face now—but the project stalled after the team struggled to secure funding for human trials. Even the looming crisis did not guarantee additional money.

More here.  [Thanks to Daniel Jimenez Avarez.]

Nicholas Cannariato at The Hedgehog Review:

The soul exists. That’s what it does. It doesn’t need traditional religion or occultist speculation to justify, let alone explain, its existence. The soul can simply be a thing-in-itself, free from purpose or the need to be redeemed or maintained or isolated for study. We often talk about the soul simply as the nonmaterial and thus mysterious aspect of our being, something we feel but can’t point to—or what is silent and constant, enclosed in our mortal coil. It’s also entirely possible that there’s no nonmaterial part of our being, and whatever intangible dimension of ourselves we feel or think we feel is just, as yet, unexplained by science. Or maybe we do have souls, but they die with the body. Given such speculative uncertainty, the closest approach to the soul for many without recourse to religious reassurance is “consciousness,” though this may amount to no more than replacing one word with another.

But if one wishes to give form to spirit, as well as cast off the yoke of moralism and dogma, the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87), a nineteenth-century German physicist, philosopher, and psychologist, may be one place to begin.

more here.

Ed Simon at the LARB:

Though Almond doesn’t outright say it, God: A New Biography implies that the various Reformation theologies emerging in early modernity were responsible not just for separating God from rational philosophical approximation, but for a certain anemic flattening of our language concerning the divine as well. What is thus born is the “God” whom most of us think of when we hear that word; not the cloud of unknowing of apophatic mystics or the “Ground of Being” of post-modern theologians, but the white-haired “Nobodaddy” dismissed by William Blake. Such a God has little to do with conceptions of ultimate meaning, and is rather a projected dictatorial figure, not the domain of ultimate significance to be discussed, but rather an idol to be dismissed. Rejected, for that matter, by the forward-thinking peasants of Soira and dismissed by many today (including myself). It would be a mistake to read that as necessarily an atheism. Speaking for myself, what I reject is that limited definition of God, rather than the discourse toward ultimate meaning which Almond so capably describes over the course of his book.

more here.

Eduardo Baptista in MIL:

Welcome to Cowardly Police News!” booms Zung Jung-ngai. Dressed in a crisp white shirt, black tie and bin bags that cover his neck and hands, Zung beams at his audience of prospective recruits to the Hong Kong Police Force. Want a job that guarantees good health? Where you can get “protective biohazard suits’’ quicker than front-line medics fighting coronavirus? Where you can obtain AR-15s, water cannons and gas masks? Zung looks into the camera: all you need to do, he says, is join the police.

Zung is not a real cop. Dressed in his plastic regalia, he is lampooning the city’s police force as “rubbish” in “Headliner”, Hong Kong’s leading satirical television programme. “Headliner” has been ridiculing Hong Kong’s political elite for the past 30 years. Now the elite seems to have lost its sense of humour and the show’s future is in jeopardy. After Hong Kong’s police chief complained to the city’s media regulator in February that “Headliner” was inaccurate and had denigrated the force, the watchdog duly warned the show against “insulting” the police. On May 19th Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), the territory’s official broadcaster which produces the programme, said it would suspend the show after the series ends in mid-June. Previously it was one of the most viewed of RTHK programmes on YouTube; now many of the current season’s episodes can no longer be watched.

More here.

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:

James Mattis, the esteemed Marine general who resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 to protest Donald Trump’s Syria policy, has, ever since, kept studiously silent about Trump’s performance as president. But he has now broken his silence, writing an extraordinary broadside in which he denounces the president for dividing the nation, and accuses him of ordering the U.S. military to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens. “I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis writes. “The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.” He goes on, “We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

In his j’accuse, Mattis excoriates the president for setting Americans against one another.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis writes. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”

More here.

Diaspora

If the meaning of the prayer was not passed down to you,
find it through holier means than translation.
Cling to the rhythm instead.

If you were not taught the rhythm, memorize the clang
of knife against yam against wooden cutting board.
Keep it ringing, ringing in your ears.

If not the ring,
then the Bombay jazz club
and its green lanterns swaying in the long, long night

If you were not given the religion, then at least
Boompa’s rosary beads,
with their memories
indented in thick amber,
the gold Zarathustra hanging from a neck
and tattooed on a sunburnt back.

If the traditions were never taught to you,
then cling to tea time always served at 2pm.
Display the cups and remember
elders do not take their tea with sugar,
like you do.

You have only a fraction of their blood.
You thicken your water with milk.

If home did not fit in the carry on compartment,
then the sprigs of lemongrass from the garden will do.
The tea bags brought from India will do.
The reusable garland will do.

The passport’s golden lions
show a compass of 3 directions.
The fourth will do, too.
With its back facing you,
and its open jaws the homeland.

If the orthodox genealogy did not show up to the altar
of any of the son’s weddings, identity will celebrate
the melting pot mothers. Inheritance
blooms a grateful garland
around the brownish baby’s plump smile.

Her laughter, an anthem.
Her heartbeat, a golden rhythm.

by Azura Tyabji
from Split This Rock

Rumaan Alam at The Nation:

But musically, Fetch astonishes, the work of an artist absolutely confident in the experiment she’s conducting, her objective aligning happily with the listener’s pleasure. This is a true rarity, the artistic advancement that offers joy or surprise or comfort. (I thought of Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns or Björk’s Vespertine or David Bowie’s Station to Station.) The album’s tactics—heavy beats, cut-and-paste vocal play—might frustrate some who prefer Apple’s earlier work, waltzy and cutting.

Apple’s ambition is evident from the opening—Casio drum!—of “I Want You to Love Me.” The jokey beat ripens into a lush cascade of piano, and the admission, “Next year, it’ll be clear, this was only leading me to that, and by that time, I hope that you love me.” It could be the ballad at the center of a Broadway show’s first act, but it is not.

more here.

Alexander Watson at Literary Review:

The year 1918 was an extraordinary historical moment. As the Great War roared to an end after four long years of blood and horror, it appeared briefly that the future of the world lay wide open. The old order was overthrown. States were collapsing. Monarchs, the sons of dynasties that had ruled eastern and central Europe for centuries, abdicated and fled. Noisy, violent crowds of hungry civilians and grim, weary soldiers flooded grey city streets, demanding peace and a better life. In the countryside, peasants chased away the lords who had ruled over them and seized their land. Mad, bad and dangerous revolutionaries pushing radical ideals and preaching utopia saw that their hour had struck. The German theologian Ernst Troeltsch aptly named this time, when no one had a firm grip on power and anything appeared possible, ‘the dreamland of the armistice period’. These excellent books by Jonathan Schneer and Robert Gerwarth both show just how much was at stake and capture the breathless excitement and mortal fear that the upheaval generated.

more here.

Christopher de Bellaigue in the New York Review of Books:

In the eighteenth century a career with the East India Company was a throw of the dice for unattached young British men. Arriving in India wan and scurvy after a year at sea, many quickly succumbed to disease, madness, or one of the innumerable little wars that the company fought in order to embed itself on the subcontinent. The salary was hardly an incentive. In the 1720s junior clerks, or “writers,” received just £5 per year, not enough to live on in Bengal or Madras and a pittance when set against the handsome 8 percent annual dividend the company’s shareholders awarded themselves back in London. Such drawbacks tended to put off all but those whom circumstances had already disfavored: second sons, members of the down-at-heel Anglo-Irish gentry, dispossessed Scottish landowners who had backed the losing side in a rebellion against the crown.

Being on the company payroll was rather a means to an end; moonlighting was where the money lay in one of the richest places on earth. In 1700 India is estimated to have accounted for 27 percent of the world economy and a quarter of the global textile trade. A considerable number of company employees who survived the shock of arrival went on to make fortunes from off-books trading in textiles, saltpeter, indigo, opium, salt, tobacco, betel, rice, and sugar; sidelines also included selling Mughal-issued tax exemptions and lending money to distressed Indian grandees.

More here.

Laura Spinney in The Guardian:

Neuroscientist Karl Friston, of University College London, builds mathematical models of human brain function. Lately, he’s been applying his modelling to Covid-19, and using what he learns to advise Independent Sage, the committee set up as an alternative to the UK government’s official pandemic advice body, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).

How well have your predictions been borne out in this first wave of infections?

For London, we predicted that hospital admissions would peak on 5 April, deaths would peak five days later, and critical care unit occupancy would not exceed capacity – meaning the Nightingale hospitals would not be required. We also predicted that improvements would be seen in the capital by 8 May that might allow social distancing measures to be relaxed – which they were in the prime minister’s announcement on 10 May. To date our predictions have been accurate to within a day or two, so there is a predictive validity to our models that the conventional ones lack.

More here.

Scott Newstok in The Dallas Morning News:

In our current political climate, it’s sad but not surprising that a U.S. senator would accuse China’s “brightest minds” of studying in America only to return home “to compete for our jobs, to take our business, and ultimately to steal our property.”

But the junior senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, didn’t stop there, adding in a recent interview with Fox News that they — the Chinese — should “come here and study Shakespeare … that’s what they need to learn from America.”

I love exploring myriad-minded Shakespeare with college students from across the globe — American, Botswanan, Cambodian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese and, yes, even students from the bard’s native England. Yet as I’ve never taught Shakespeare as some kind of a vehicle for American values, I feel “I am bound to speak” (Othello 5.2) about Sen. Cotton’s confused, and troubling, statement.

More here.

Charles Kaiser in The Guardian:

Few things are more unexpected than a genuinely inspirational memoir by a freshman member of Congress. If you’re looking for the perfect antidote to the perpetual tweetstorm of insanity and hatred from Donald Trump, try this beautiful new book from the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar. This migrant from Somalia came from a family of teachers and civil servants who lived in a guarded compound. Ilhan had a chauffeur to drive her to school. But all of that disappeared when Somalia was engulfed by civil war. “Bullets flew from one side of the conflict to the other,” Omar writes, “… directly over our house”. The house took direct hits, food became scarce and 350,000 died in the first year of the conflict. Omar’s family was forced to the oceanside town of Kismayo, where she was told that her father and brothers were dead. But the next day she followed what she thought was her father’s voice, “and toward the end of the stretch where everyone was sleeping, there he was … I put my hand on his face, just to make sure he was real. And he was.” Her brothers were alive, too.

They fled to Kenya, where they faced malaria, dysentery and near starvation. The family survived in a refugee camp for 334,000 people, bartering kidney beans for kerosene and batteries for a radio. When she needed entertainment, Omar snuck under the barbed wire to walk to a nearby village, where an enterprising Kenyan charged a few shillings to watch movies on his TV. When six children who were distant relatives lost both their parents, Omar’s family looked after them, Ilhan paying special attention to the baby, Umi. Her father discovered that they could apply through the United Nations to go to Norway, Canada or Sweden. But the US was his first choice.

“Only in America you ultimately become an American,” he said. “Everywhere else we will always feel like a guest.”

More here.