by Peter Wells

Seventy years ago, according to William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (Carey, 2009), the future Nobel prizewinner was a middle-aged English teacher in a private boys’ school in Salisbury, UK, and not enjoying it. He had written three novels, none of them published, though some of his poems had gone into print. His novel about schoolboys killing each other on a tropical island, originally entitled Strangers From Within, was begun in 1951 and first sent to a publisher in 1952. It was rejected by seven publishers before Golding sent it to Faber & Faber in 1953, where the reader, Polly Perkins, pronounced it:

An absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atomic bomb on the colonies and a group of children who land in the jungle near New Guinea. Rubbish and dull. Pointless.

Golding might have continued for a further twenty years in the job he hated, had not a new member of the Faber & Faber team, Charles Monteith, picked up the well-thumbed manuscript from the reject pile and taken it home. Should we be grateful to him? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Varun Gauri

The narrator and main character of Ishiguro’s new novel is Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF, for short). In other words, she’s an artificial intelligence, a robot, a machine. Klara’s job is to befriend and care for a sick young teenager, Josie.

Why would Josie, or any human being, want to befriend an artificial intelligence?

To being with, Klara is “really cute.” Her hair is “neat and short.” Not only does she resemble a human, Josie observes, but Klara looks French! Klara is also “really smart.”  She has “many unique qualities,” perhaps foremost “an appetite for observing and learning,” unlike many of the other AFs, especially the ones that have all the latest technical advances but which people don’t seem to take to. For these reasons, Josie instinctively picks out Klara at the AF store.

Klara’s descriptions of human life are direct and novel. The reader notices her language, which, as James Wood observes, powerfully makes the real truly strange, defamiliarizing, and thereby renewing, our perceptions of the world. For instance, she repeatedly acknowledges the sun not for its warmth or the lovely shadows it casts, as a human narrator might, but for the sun’s “patterns” and its “nourishment,” as a a solar-powered machine would, one imagines. Her accounts of human emotions are alternately astute and bizarrely precise: “My impression was that the Mother was at that moment the most lacking in tension I’d witnessed since my arrival.” Klara is especially attuned to the ways in which loneliness creeps into human life, and says this about the importance of Josie joining her mother for morning coffee before the mother leaves for work: “I understood then that if she failed to join the Mother for the quick coffee, there was the danger of loneliness creeping into her day, no matter what other events filled it.” Read more »

This was one of the earliest videos I made after I learned to fly drones some years ago, in the Milland neighborhood of Brixen, South Tyrol. I was mainly just testing out the capabilities of my DJI Phantom drone, which flew quite beautifully, even with some wind.

by Brooks Riley

Time is a double-jointed trickster, bending this way and that to elude the tempi of one’s needs.

Time isn’t what it used to be. The pandemic has altered our perception of it. This is why time is no longer quite as valuable as it was before we were suddenly assaulted with too much of it. It used to be a commodity in short supply. It’s even been called a currency (time is money), but the reverse was never true. No matter how many billions Mr. Bezos has, he has no more hours in his day than I do.

Utilization of time has also changed. Novels still require the same amount of time to read as they always have, but audiobooks actually slow down the storytelling process: Where eyes once flew over the page, a human voice now dictates the pace at which we enjoy the authorial content as we keep our eyes on the road and our hands on the wheel.

All this leads to the question of just how our grasp of time or time-passing has been altered aesthetically by the convergence of that motherlode of time, the pandemic, with the rising popularity of elongated storytelling formats like TV series—those time-indulgent, episodic ways to weave a tale, unhurried by a two-hour time limit. Where movies used to define—and confine—our consumption of a narrative, series now populate the streaming platforms, becoming increasingly dominant in the menu listings and more sophisticated in their dramaturgy.

They get no respect. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

Some decades back the typical voting pattern in many democracies used to be that the rich and upper middle classes used to vote in general for right-leaning parties, while the relatively poor voted for left-leaning parties. But in recent decades this pattern has been shifting: many of the professional or more educated voters in some of those countries are increasingly going for left or green parties, while many of the poor working-class voters are turning to right-wing parties, sometimes led by populist demagogues. Thomas Piketty and his associates in a new paper issued by the World Inequality Lab have provided data to show that for 21 western democracies the more educated voters have over the years become more left supporters than the less-educated voters. Piketty has described this elite division between high-education and high-income people colorfully as that between the Brahmin Left and the Merchant (the corresponding Indian caste term would have been ‘bania’) Right. He does not go much into explaining this pattern but it is clear that as education expands (measured by average years of schooling of the adult population) the left or center-left parties now can have a viable base even in the relatively rich or upper middle classes. Education often makes one appreciate more liberal values, which may sometimes outweigh their worries about higher taxes that the left parties may inflict.

But this still leaves unexplained why the less-educated poor are leaning right. Of course the shocks of job losses due to global integration and automation have hurt them (particularly as low education makes it more difficult to adjust to changes in market demand and technology), but why are they turning right instead of turning toward far-left parties which are often anti-globalization and in favor of more social protection for working classes? I’d suggest that this is for two major reasons. The first has to do with economic policy, and the second predominantly cultural. Read more »

by Ali Minai

Among all the fascinating mythical creatures that populate the folklore of various cultures, one that stands out is the golem – an artificial, half-formed human-like creature that comes to us from Jewish folklore. Though the idea goes back much further, the most famous golem is the one said to have been created and brought to life by the great Rabbi Loew of Prague in the 16^th century. Stories of various other golems have also come down through history, each with its own peculiarities. Most of them, however, share some common themes. First, the golem is created to perform some specific function. For example, the golem of Prague was created to protect the Jews of the city from pogroms. Second, the golem is capable of purposive behavior, but in a limited way. And third, the golem is activated by a human master by tagging it with a word (or words), and can be deactivated by removing or changing the word.

The golem has made many appearances in literature – especially in science fiction and fantasy – and its linkage with artificial intelligence is implicit in many of these instances. Though the golem is often portrayed as not particularly intelligent, the analogy with AI is clear in that the golem can act autonomously. More pertinent here, though, is another aspect of the golem’s behavior: Obedience. The golem has no purposes of its own, and is obedient to the desires of its master – though, interestingly, golems do rebel in some stories, which makes the analogy with AI even more apt.

The End of AI

The present time is seen by many as the golden age of AI, despite the fact that other “golden ages” have come and gone up in smoke in the past. The thinking is that this time AI has truly arrived because it is more grounded and has infiltrated down to the very core of modern human life. No aspect of life today – from medicine and finance to education and entertainment – remains unaffected in some fundamental way by AI. It is built into cars, cameras, and refrigerators. It analyzes investment portfolios and consumer preferences. It recognizes faces for security and for logging into digital devices. It lies at the core of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and many of the other technology and consumer giants that shape our lives. In these last fourteen months of the COVID pandemic, tools enabled by AI have been used extensively in data analysis, clinical practice, and pharmaceutical innovation. Indeed, so pervasive has AI become that, in many cases, it is not even noticed. We take it for granted that things in our lives – phones, watches, cameras, cars, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and even homes – will be “smart”. Increasingly, we expect things to understand what we are saying, and in the near future, we may expect them to understand our thoughts as well. The time is also at hand when more and more of the complicated things we do, from driving to writing legal briefs, will be left to AI. In a real sense, we humans are outsourcing our minds and bodies to algorithms. No wonder some very smart people are worried that AI may make slaves of us all, while others seem to be relishing the prospect of merging with smarter machines to become gods. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Beech Bark Landscape. June, 2021.

Digital photograph.

by Charlie Huenemann

Suppose you are Father God, or Mother Nature, or Mother God, or Father Nature — doesn’t matter — and you want to raise up a crop of mammals who can reason well about what’s true. At first you think, “No problem! I’ll just ex nihilo some up in a jiffy!” but then you remember that you have resolved to build everything through the painstaking process of evolution by natural selection, which requires small random shifts over time, with every step toward your target resulting in some sort of reproductive advantage for the mammal in question. Okay; this is going to be hard.

Given what you know about reasoning and truth, the mammal is going to have to have access to some way of abstractly representing the world to itself, or language. That in turn will require a community of language users; and that will require a community of beings who fare better through cooperation. This immediately raises the problem of how to evolve beings who are both selfish and social. Selfishness requires cheating whenever you can get away with it, but sociability requires trustworthiness. Striking a workable balance between selfishness and sociability is tricky, but not impossible, as anyone who has worked in corporate knows.

As if that tension isn’t hard enough: if what you want in the end are mammals who can reason well about what’s true, that raises even more problems. Reasoning well about what is true profiteth a mammal little. It does not reliably help a mammal in its selfish strivings, since it is often better for the mammal to believe all sorts of falsehoods that give it undue confidence (hope), or steer it clear of dangers (superstition), or hate its competitors (envy and jealousy). Nor does reasoning well about what is true help the mammal in terms of sociability, since a mammal is often more sociable by being stubbornly loyal to its clan (tribalism), or by taking on risks or burdens on behalf of the group (altruism), or caring for those who offer it no advantage (selfless love). Selfishness, sociability, and rationality: pick two, but you can’t have all three. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

I’ve always loved the name Sinus Iridum (Bay of Rainbows), which describes a beautiful semicircular dark feature on the face of the Moon. Browsing a lunar map reveals other names equally beautiful or evocative: Sinus Concordiae (Bay of Harmony) and Sinus Aestuum (Seething Bay), for example. Other lunar plains with watery names include Mare Anguis (Serpent Sea), Palus Somni (Marsh of Sleep), and Mare Imbrium (Sea of Showers). Montes Harbinger is a group of mountains in Mare Imbrium; when they’re lit by the rising sun, they herald the approach of sunrise to Aristarchus crater.

Alexander von Humboldt, who is remembered in place names all over Earth, is also recognized on the Moon. Mare Humboldtianum lies on the divide between the near and far sides of the Moon; in the 1830s, Johann Heinrich von Mädler named this lunar sea for Humboldt because it extends from the known into the unknown.

The Moon has a lake for every season (literally—Lacus Autumni and so on) and lakes for many moods: lakes of happiness, fear, dreams, hatred, and hope; also the lake of forgetfulness (who doesn’t sometimes want to take a swim there?), the lake of time, the lake of solitude.

We’ve cast a net of words over the Moon for as long as we’ve had words. Before we could see individual features in any detail, the enigmatic markings on the Moon provided a Rorschach test of sorts, a space onto which we projected our imagination. To me, the man in the Moon has always meant the sort-of face that you can see on the Moon (and its many stylized representations), but the traditional stories about the man in the Moon in Western culture often involve punishment or banishment. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mark Harvey

Mormons and Indians of the old west don’t have a nice history. In 1865, just as the Civil War ended, Ute Indians and Mormons began their own version of a seven-year war near Manti, Utah, over land, grass, cattle, and survival. It was called The Black Hawk War, named after a particularly capable Ute warrior. When the war finally ended, some 75 Mormons and several hundred Indians had been killed. The Indians put up a ferocious fight, but ultimately the Mormons prevailed and settled vast parts of Utah and Nevada.

So it’s not always easy to bring Mormons and Native Americans to the same side of a fight, but the city of Las Vegas managed to do so when it made an aggressive water grab on ranch lands and sacred grounds to its north a few years ago. With the explosive growth of the city, drought, and a limited water supply from the Colorado River, the town’s elders went looking for precious groundwater hundreds of miles to the north. What entailed was a thirty-year quest that involved big money, lots of lawyers, questionable science, wildlife biology, and sacred Indian grounds. When the Las Vegas water authority began that quest, little did they know they’d meet the wrath and fast war footing of Mormons and Indians. Ultimately the plan failed.

Las Vegas was once a tiny town in a vast desert where there lived but a few farmers and their families. The town wasn’t always short of water, primarily because at its beginning there were far fewer people and the valley where it sits had productive artesian wells. The very name, Las Vegas, means “The Meadows” in Spanish and was coined by a Spanish trading party in 1829 as it traveled to Los Angeles on the Old Spanish Trail. The party actually stopped there for water. Archeological evidence shows that Native Americans lived in the area beginning over ten thousand years ago. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

A very bad man once said that essence of politics is constituted by the distinction between friends and enemies, with enemies being the more important of the two. A very silly man later turned that around and articulated a politics of friendship. But let’s not indulge silliness.

The sense of enmity imagined by the very bad man was carefully distinguished from other kinds of opposition. It was not the rivalry of contestants trying to win a competition bounded by rules. It was not the opprobrium of judging some other to be morally unworthy. It was not the animosity bred by personal or parochial vendetta.

Pure enmity, which frames an opposition of properly Political character, consists in this: that in order for one’s enemy to create the world they desire, they must preclude the creation of the world which one desires oneself. And vice-versa. One may even like one’s enemy on a personal level, and attribute no moral fault or ill will to them. One may imagine that one’s enemy has no idea that they are an enemy. No matter. If, in realizing her ends, Alice (or the Republic of Alice) is likely to deny Bob (or the Commonwealth of Bob) the possibility of realizing his ends, they are politically oriented towards each other as enemies.

It need not be quite that dire. Many conflicts of interest and disputes can be resolved, or mitigated by some compromise. That is the stuff of much small “p” politics, the transactional and procedural grind of jockeying and brokering. It is infused with a logic of procedure and careerist ambition, and often some good faith attempts at governance. But such “normal” politics, the grist of political gabfests, is not a matter of existential or transcendental importance, despite histrionic appeals to the rubes about how some fiscal tweak will precipitate the end of civilization.

But some matters really don’t admit of compromise, at least between those people who take them to be the issue of their Political existence. Read more »

Kasheer

Saleem morukh
Salaam morukh
Habeeb morukh
Heshaam morukh

Ye shahar morukh
Ye ghaam morukh
Kasheer hund
Subh o shaam morukh

Kashmir

They killed Saleem
They killed Salaam
They killed Habeeb
They killed Heshaam

They killed this city
That town they killed —
All of Kashmir’s blood
They spilled

***

By Abdur Rehman Rahi (b. 1926), a Kashmiri poet and critic. He was awarded the Indian Sahitya Akademi Award in 1961. Translated from the original Kashmiri by Rafiq Kathwari.

by Philip Graham

It’s the middle of July, 2020, the middle of a heat wave in the middle of the pandemic, and my first day in the radiation room. I stand in socks and starchy hospital gown before the Star Trek-ish linear accelerator, waiting for the technicians to fit me on the machine’s bed-like tray for best positioning. But in my mind I’m standing four years ago in the kitchen of my new home in Rhode Island, where beside me a cable company worker tapped in a phone number for advice about how to maneuver spotty Internet service into a happy ending. While he waited for his boss to call back, he mentioned, with a hint of wonder in his voice, “Y’know, this is my first day on the job after four months.”

“Oh,” I replied, startled by this sudden personal offering. “Were you injured?”

“Yeah, my foot. So bad that the doctors said I might not walk on it again.”

“But here you are,” I observed. Then I asked the question he clearly wanted to answer. “How’d you get better?”

“Well, I read that a cat’s purr vibrates at just the right hertz cycles per second to be a healing vibration.”

This was news to me. Wondering if this fellow was simply a feline obsessive, I tested that theory by asking, “Hmm, how many cats do you own?”

“None! I don’t like cats much. So I thought, maybe there’s another way. If the vibrations of a cat’s purring can heal you, why not the vibrations of music? I set up stereo speakers on either side of my foot, and sat there all day, day after day.”

“It really worked?”

He grinned. “Here I am.” Read more »

Part of the platform at the train station in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Photo taken in May, 2021.