Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

In a study with chilling modern resonance, the history don contends that the age of reason was betrayed by the greed, corruption and barbarism of Britain’s ruling elite

Britain, thought Thomas Paine, needed to be destroyed. Its monarchy must be toppled, its empire broken up and the mercantile system that propped up this debt-ridden, monstrous pariah state abolished. Only then could a better version – call it Britain 2.0 – arise. But how? In the 1790s, the revolutionary thinker and author of the bestselling Rights of Man was a member of the National Convention in Paris and advised republicans to invade. Later, Paine presented a plan to president Thomas Jefferson to send gunboats to make Britain a republic.

Sadly for egalitarians, anti-imperialists, anti-monarchists and those who regard the rapacious East India Company and the transatlantic slave trade as Britain’s leading contributions to the oxymoron that is western civilisation, neither happened. Had either been successful, Britain’s history might have been very different and such recent exposés of our imperial disgrace as William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy and David Olusoga’s Black and British might not have made such harrowing reading.

More here.

Matthew Hutson in Nature:

Will an artificial intelligence (AI) superintelligence appear suddenly, or will scientists see it coming, and have a chance to warn the world? That’s a question that has received a lot of attention recently, with the rise of large language models, such as ChatGPT, which have achieved vast new abilities as their size has grown. Some findings point to “emergence”, a phenomenon in which AI models gain intelligence in a sharp and unpredictable way. But a recent study calls these cases “mirages” — artefacts arising from how the systems are tested — and suggests that innovative abilities instead build more gradually.

“I think they did a good job of saying ‘nothing magical has happened’,” says Deborah Raji, a computer scientist at the Mozilla Foundation who studies the auditing of artificial intelligence. It’s “a really good, solid, measurement-based critique.” The work was presented last week at the NeurIPS machine-learning conference in New Orleans.

More here.

Peter Lunenfeld in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In his new book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (2023), Michael Lewis has the difficult task of explaining why his subject, wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of the multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who seemed tailor-made for the author’s patented oddball-outsider-disrupts-the-world shtick, was convicted for one of the biggest frauds in financial history. Like so many people both before and after crypto’s last big explosion in 2022, Lewis allows that he doesn’t know all that much about the underlying technologies, specifically blockchain, but is nevertheless compelled by the scene’s anarchic ambition. At one point, he throws up his hands and admits that crypto “often gets explained but somehow never stays explained.”

Regardless of what happens as Bankman-Fried pursues his appeals—a heavy lift, given that even his friends from math camp testified for the prosecution—there is one thing that is guaranteed. The general greed around cryptocurrencies, the nerdish interest in their underlying blockchain technologies, and the desire for something—anything—to fully commodify digital art has not abated.

More here.

Ujjwal Singh in Cantor’s Paradise:

When Einstein talks of someone in the superlative, you know that person would have been beyond special. Indeed, Kurt Gödel was no ordinary man. Perhaps the greatest logician of all time, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems altered the very fabric of the epistemology of mathematical systems.

Sadly, for the man himself, all his magnificent achievements were rather insufficient. Gödel struggled immensely with professional and personal insecurities, leading a very tormented life in his later years. So much so that he had to seek professional psychological help on the insistence of family members.

Presented below are the verbatim notes of Dr. Philip Erlich, Gödel’s psychiatrist, clearly highlighting Gödel’s pathetic mental condition at the time.

More here.

Anne-Marie Slaughter at Project Syndicate:

In 1951, just six years after World War II, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany signed the Treaty of Paris, establishing the European Coal and Steel Community.

It was a remarkable achievement, considering that France and Germany had fought three major wars between 1870 and 1945, leading to millions of deaths, the ravaging of lands and cities, and territorial conquest on both sides. Even decades later, my Belgian mother, who fled the German occupation of Brussels as a child with her mother and brother, trembled at the sight of a German customs uniform. Yet these former enemies agreed to pool their coal and steel production in ways that would prevent them from forging weapons to be used against one another ever again.

At a stroke, a handful of visionary statesmen – Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, and Alcide de Gasperi of Italy – laid the foundation for a new European future.

More here.

Jeff VanderMeer at The Paris Review:

Halfway through Sven Holm’s taut unfolding nightmare, Termush, the unnamed narrator encounters “ploughed-up and trampled gardens” where “stone creatures are the sole survivors.” Holm describes these statues as “curious forms, the bodies like great ill-defined blocks, designed more to evoke a sense of weight and mass than to suggest power in the muscles and sinews.” Later, a guest of the gated, walled hotel for the rich from which the novel takes its name relates a dream in which “light streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones, the leaves on the trees … to reveal the innermost vulnerable marrow of people and plants.” The same could describe the novel, which accrues its strange effects via both this stricken, continuous revealing and the “curious forms” of a solid, impervious setting, in which the ordinary elements of our world come to seem alien through the lens of nuclear catastrophe.

Long before the sanctuary of Termush becomes visibly unsafe, these tears at the fringes of reality signify the truth of the narrator’s situation. The very texture of the world becomes unknowable, imbued with a potency, vibration, or sheen that alters reality.

more here.

Joseph Hone at Literary Review:

Certain names carry with them the whiff of brimstone. In the world of bibliophiles and booksellers, perhaps no name is more sulphurous than that of Thomas James Wise. Celebrated in his lifetime as the greatest collector in a generation, an accolade made even more impressive by his humble origins, Wise is today notorious as a forger of Victorian first editions. His signature method of reprinting minor works by major literary authors with imprints antedating the acknowledged first editions had, by the time he was exposed in 1934, duped British and American collectors for fifty years. As a young man on the make, he had established a reputation for unearthing previously unknown rarities. When the exposé landed, the mirage was shattered.

The fraud was uncovered by a pair of young booksellers, John Carter and Graham Pollard, who set to the case with all the energy of Holmes on the trail of Moriarty.

more here.

queer ancestor(s)

at most, you are a whisper
that my mother covertly deals
over the kitchen table, eyes shifting
looking out for all vengeful ghosts
both dead and alive

she thumbs through photographs nonchalantly
her index finger stopping briefly
to shine a light, so fast, I almost missed you
but there, my pupil widens
and swallows whole
the proof of your existence

trailed by a story of maybes,
of beliefs,
of secrets,
passing by, burning bright
small shooting star
on the horizon of my life
I want to look back and wish upon you
to ask for your unabashed truth and
yank it down so that I can
thread the glow of your being through mine

by Amanda Gómez Sánchez
from Bodega Magazine

Sarah Bell on BBC:

Dani Blum in The New York Times:

Ozempic and other drugs like it have proven powerful at regulating blood sugar and driving weight loss. Now, scientists are exploring whether they might be just as transformative in treating a wide range of other conditions, from addiction and liver disease to a common cause of infertility. “It’s like a snowball that turned into an avalanche,” said Lindsay Allen, a health economist at Northwestern Medicine. As the drugs gain momentum, she said, “they’re leaving behind them this completely reshaped landscape.” Much of the research on other uses of semaglutide, the compound in Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, the substance in Mounjaro and Zepbound, is only in the early stages. One of the biggest questions scientists are seeking to answer: Do the benefits of these drugs just boil down to weight loss? Or do they have other effects, like tamping down inflammation in the body or quieting the brain’s compulsive thoughts, that would make it possible to treat far more illnesses?

We won’t likely know anytime soon. “We’re still learning how these medicines work,” said Dr. Daniel Drucker, one of the first researchers to study these drugs. (Dr. Drucker consults for Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy.) People with the conditions below, many of whom have few good options for treatment, could benefit in the long run if these trials are successful. And for weight-loss drugmakers, every new use could catapult the drugs even further into blockbuster status. Some of these applications — including for heart disease and sleep apnea, which each affects tens of millions of people — have become targets for these companies and could prove especially lucrative. These medications are a “gold mine,” Dr. Allen said. “There is no upper bound for where the market is going.”

More here.

Messiah (Christmas Portions)

A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
torn and sun-shot swaddlings:

over the Methodist roof,
two clouds propose a Zion
of their own, blazing
(colors of tarnish on copper)

against the steely close
of a coastal afternoon, December,
while under the steeple
the Choral Society

prepares to perform
Messiah, pouring, in their best
blacks and whites, onto the raked stage.
Not steep, really,

but from here,
the first pew, they’re a looming
cloudbank of familiar angels:
that neighbor who

fights operatically
with her girlfriend, for one,
and the friendly bearded clerk
from the post office

—tenor trapped
in the body of a baritone? Altos
from the A&P, soprano
from the T-shirt shop:

today they’re all poise,
costume and purpose
conveying the right note
of distance and formality.

Silence in the hall,
anticipatory, as if we’re all
about to open a gift we’re not sure
we’ll like;

how could they
compete with sunset’s burnished
oratorio? Thoughts which vanish,
when the violins begin.

Who’d have thought
they’d be so good? Every valley,
proclaims the solo tenor,
(a sleek blonde

I’ve seen somewhere before
—the liquor store?) shall be exalted,
and in his handsome mouth the word
is lifted and opened

Read more »

Zine Magubane at Jacobin:

Kenan Malik’s Not So Black and White: A History of Race From White Supremacy to Identity Politics is a detailed yet broad examination of how race was invented as a logic to organize people’s experience of themselves as well as to channel political activity. The book is organized around four themes: 1) a retelling of the story of race, demonstrating how it emerged as an elite discourse to justify restricting equality and liberty to the few; 2) an exploration of how mass resistance, particularly against slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow, expanded the ideas of liberty and equality in order to make them truly universal; 3) an examination of the relationship between racial inequality and class inequality, with special attention to how a narrow focus on racial inequality obscures how class exploitation works to produce and reproduce racial inequality; and 4) how identity politics is a form of class politics that operates with equal perniciousness on the Right and the Left. Not So Black and White is not only a searing indictment of how “our preoccupation with race frequently hides the realities of injustice,” it is also a call for a different kind of politics — one that is class-based and worker-focused — to free us from the prison of identity. Although the book is not explicitly framed as a critique of epistemology, it is a provocation to think even more critically about analytical categories and the politics of historiography. Not So Black and White invites us to evaluate how race has become not only the primary way to organize political life but also the preferred epistemological category for explaining the march of history. As such, it demonstrates that debates over historiography and epistemology are not simply of academic interest. They are informed by class politics and are weapons in political struggle.

More here.

Lars Erik Schönander in The New Atlantis:

Any time you walk outside, satellites may be watching you from space. There are currently more than 8,000 active satellites in orbit, including over a thousand designed to observe the Earth.

Satellite technology has come a long way since its secretive inception during the Cold War, when a country’s ability to successfully operate satellites meant not only that it was capable of launching rockets into Earth orbit but that it had eyes in the sky. Today not only governments across the world but private enterprises too launch satellites, collect and analyze satellite imagery, and sell it to a range of customers, from government agencies to the person on the street. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites bring the Internet to places where conventional coverage is spotty or compromised. Satellite data allows the United States to track rogue ships and North Korean missile launches, while scientists track wildfires, floods, and changes in forest cover.

The industry’s biggest technical challenge, aside from acquiring the satellite imagery itself, has always been to analyze and interpret it. This is why new AI tools are set to drastically change how satellite imagery is used — and who uses it.

More here.

Monica Duffy Toft in The Conversation:

The ongoing horrors unfolding in Israel and Gaza have deep-rooted origins that stem from a complex and contested question: Who has rights to the same territory?

I am a scholar of international affairs, as well as territory and nationalism. Territory has been a central cause of conflict throughout history.

Today, Israelis and Palestinians both claim the same swath of land as their own. Each group has its own historical narratives, its own names for the territory – Israel or Palestine, depending on whom you ask – and many people from each group believe strongly that sharing the land is impossible.

Palestinians and Israelis also look to this same land as a way to define their identities and protect their futures.

More here.

Laura Kipnis in Critical Quarterly:

In 2010, when a book I’d written called How to Become a Scandal was going to press, my editor contacted Christopher to ask for a blurb. He sent back three choices, the first of which read, ‘Laura Kipnis promised me a blowjob if I endorsed her latest triumph, which I hereby warmly and devotedly do.’ I’m sure it says nothing good about me that I found this funny, especially since using it would have so perfectly – and devilishly – enacted the premise of the book. Though generally no prig, sadly my editor insisted we go with the more conventional third option (the second was a double entendre about a now mostly forgotten Republican senator caught in a clumsy men’s room encounter). She did forward me their subsequent correspondence: ‘Christopher – you are a scream!’ she’d written back, to which he responded, ‘Yeah? Well a lot depends on which one she picks.’

I can be as humourless as the next leftwing feminist but for some reason Christopher’s, what to call it – lasciviousness? antiquarianism? – amused more than offended me, though his public anti-abortion stance was noxious and, one suspects, hypocritical. Colour me surprised if that particular edict was upheld in practice. In any case, I never thought of him as someone you’d go to for instruction on feminism, and increasingly not on any political question, yet it was perplexingly hard to hold his bad politics against him.

More here.