Nathan Gardels at Noema:

The most salient issue of American politics revealed in the recent elections is “affordability” for all those earners not in the top 10%. It is an especially acute concern among young adults facing economic precarity and the lost expectation of upward mobility as technological innovation disrupts labor markets.

Ready to jump on this turn of events as a path forward for a moribund party, progressive Democrats are reverting to the standard reflex in their policy toolbox: Tax the rich and redistribute income to the less well-off through government programs. As appealing, or even compelling, as that may be as an interim fix, it does not address the long-term structural dynamic that’s behind the accelerating economic disparity heading into the AI era.

In the end, the affordability challenge can’t be remedied in any enduring way by policies that just depend on hitting up the richest. It can only be met by spreading the wealth of ownership more broadly in the first place in an economy where the top 10% own 93% of all equities in financial markets.

That means, instead of relying solely on redistributing other people’s income, forward-looking policies should foster the “pre-distribution” of wealth through forms of “universal basic capital” (UBC) wherein everyone gets richer by owning a slice of an ever-enlarging pie driven by AI-generated productivity growth.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

I guess it makes sense that for a lot of people, the potential negative externalities — deepfakes, the decline of critical thinking, ubiquitous slop, or the risk that bad actors will be able to use AI to do major violence — loom large. Other people, like artists or translators, may fear for their careers. I think it’s likely that in the long run, our society will learn to deal with all those challenges, but as Keynes said, “in the long run we’re all dead.”

And yet the instinctive negativity with which AI is being met by a large segment of the American public feels like an unreasonable reaction to me. Although externalities and distributional disruptions certainly exist, the specific concerns that many of AI’s most strident critics cite are often nonsensical.

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Alec Luhn at New Scientist:

Worldwide fossil fuel emissions are set to rise 1.1 per cent in 2025, reaching another record high as humanity burns hydrocarbons at ever greater rates, according to the annual Global Carbon Budget report.

In a positive sign, emissions from China, the world’s biggest emitter, appear to be levelling off, raising hopes that they may be reaching a peak and that global emissions might follow.

“We’re not yet in a situation where the emissions go down as rapidly as they need to to tackle climate change,” says Corinne Le Quéré at the University of East Anglia, UK, who worked on the report. “But at the same time there is a lot of positive evolution with China’s and India’s emissions growing less rapidly than before.”

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Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her by way of Romania, then Ukraine again—the Germans were coming from one direction, the Russians from another—then Lithuania. By the summer of 1940, he was back in Warsaw. There, he participated in various underground activities, including the sheltering and transportation of Jews. In 1944, he was captured and briefly held in an internment camp. As the Red Army moved closer to Warsaw and the Nazis burned the city in anticipatory vengeance, Miłosz and his wife, with little more than the clothes on their backs, made their way to a village near Kraków, finding a brief respite from history, though not from poverty. Then:

One afternoon in January 1945 I was standing in the doorway of a peasant’s cottage; a few small-caliber shells had just landed in the village street. Then, in the low ground between the snow-covered hills, I saw a file of men slowly advancing. It was the first detachment of the Red Army. It was led by a young woman, felt-booted and carrying a submachine gun. Like all my compatriots, I was thus liberated from the domination of Berlin—in other words, brought under the domination of Moscow.

History had once again found him. But how strict and severe its newest embodiment would be he did not yet realize.

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C. Brandon Ogbunu in Undark Magazine:

The stage play “A Disappearing Number,” conceived by Simon McBurney, focuses on the relationship between the mathematicians Srinivasa Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy. Ramanujan is famous for producing thousands of original results and pioneering new ideas in intricate areas of mathematics. His accomplishments are especially notable because he grew up at the turn of the 20th century in the region of southern India that is now Tamil Nadu. His prodigious talent seemingly arose from nowhere — that is, it developed in an environment disconnected from the university structures that existed in Europe and other parts of the world.

After attending a showing at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2014, I debriefed with a mathematician about the play and its two main characters. He spoke about the differences between the largely self-taught Ramanujan and Hardy, the latter of whom was British and formally educated at the University of Cambridge. Ramanujan, he described, worked through huge numbers of problems with endless vigor and through repetition; Hardy, on the other hand, was more formal in his approach.

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Lesley Chamberlain at the Dublin Review of Books:

In May 1911, a few months before Gustav von Aschenbach first became a figment of his pen, Thomas Mann was staying with his wife and brother Heinrich on the wooded island of Brioni on the Istrian peninsula, holiday haunt of the Habsburg monarchy. Moving the holiday across to the other side of the Adriatic was not yet in prospect, but a disrespectful countess was disturbing dinner with her late arrivals and early departures. The irritable Manns had to stand up to defer to her grandeur and when enough was enough they took the ferry to Venice instead.

Mann insisted that Death in Venice was rooted in many real coincidences. Accordingly, starting in Munich, it takes a detour to Pula, the nearest port to Brioni, before establishing Aschenbach on the Venetian Lido. Still, Mann’s admission seems deliberately to lead the reader off the real, symbolic track of the story. Aschenbach in Pola, then an Austro-Hungarian military port writing its name in Italian, was suffering from a lifetime of excessive self-discipline. He disliked his fellow guests but it mattered more that Pola did not give him ‘the right relationship to the sea’. In fact the beaches near Pula are blissful small coves, with turquoise water lapping at low rocks. But for Mann their paradisical aspect was less suited to fevered imaginings than the flat, faintly mysterious expanses of the Lido.

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Gus O’Connor at The Nation:

At the height of his prominence, Luigi Pirandello was the principal darling of Italian drama. His plays were performed throughout Europe and the United States; Mussolini threw 700,000 lire at him when he decided to found an arts theater in Rome; and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, praised for his “bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art.” His acclaim was widespread: Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as the most timely modern dramatist of the 20th century. And when Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered in 1953 in Paris, the writer Jean Anouilh estimated that the evening at the Babylone Theater was “as important as the first Pirandello produced by [George] Pitoëf in Paris in 1923.” Jorge Luis Borges felt a great kinship with him; Thomas Bernhard namechecked him. How, then, did Pirandello end up a half-forgotten castaway of European letters by the 1980s? The answer, in part, appears straightforward: Pirandello was a fascist.

Pirandello’s work betrayed a fascination with violence and its supposed power to cleanse society, and he approached his art with the attitude of giving form to chaos. His writing was popular, though, because of his highly developed style, which was characterized by a ceaseless desire to understand the world from the standpoint of the individual. Pirandello was startlingly modern: He committed himself to an ironic self-consciousness, to creating characters that struggled impossibly for individual freedom and to live up to their ideals.

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When War Makes a Child

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Mike Hamilton at Coffee with Claude:

My science feeds have delivered two pieces this morning that arrive in productive tension. A June editorial in Nature Reviews Bioengineering declares that “Writing is Thinking,” calling for continued recognition of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large language models. A September essay in 3 Quarks Daily fires back with the counterpoint: “Writing Is Not Thinking.” The author, Kyle Munkittrick, dismantles the logical claim with precision—if writing is thinking, then Socrates was incapable of thought, and you are not thinking right now as you read these words.

Both pieces miss something essential, but their collision illuminates a question I have been living with for forty years: what is the relationship between the tools we use to extend perception and the minds that wield them?

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Blaise Agüera y Arcas in Nature:

Large language models can be unreliable and say dumb things, but then, so can humans. Their strengths and weaknesses are certainly different from ours. But we are running out of intelligence tests that humans can pass reliably and AI models cannot. By those benchmarks, and if we accept that intelligence is essentially computational — the view held by most computational neuroscientists — we must accept that a working ‘simulation’ of intelligence actually is intelligence. There was no profound discovery that suddenly made obviously non-intelligent machines intelligent: it did turn out to be a matter of scaling computation.

Other researchers disagree with my assessment of where we are with AI. But in what follows, I want to accept the premise that intelligent machines are already here, and turn the mirror back on ourselves. If scaling up computation yields AI, could the kind of intelligence shown by living organisms, humans included, also be the result of computational scaling? If so, what drove that — and how did living organisms become computational in the first place?

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Heather Treseler at the LARB:

“DEAR JEEM,” the poet Seamus Heaney wrote to his friend, the poet and novelist Seamus Deane, in 1966, as both writers’ careers were finding their runway, “Here are the proofs [of your poems …] have you anything else to bung in here?” That summer, Heaney was editing a chapbook of Deane’s poems for the Belfast Festival. The two writers had met in grammar school at ages 11 and 10, respectively, and remained close friends throughout their lives—Heaney going on to become a globally acclaimed poet, translator, and Nobel laureate, while Deane’s career as a scholar, critic, and editor helped to spearhead Irish studies as a disciplinary field.

Yet on the heels of his warm address to “Jeem” (in other letters, Heaney calls his friend “Deansie” and “a stóirín,” or “my little treasure”), Heaney critiques the poems of Deane’s that had appeared in a recent edition of the prestigious British journal Encounter. “[T]he very luxuriance of the sounds is distracting,” he notes, “and possibly a bit too much: agglutinate, exfoliate, organically eviscerate all in three lines is too much for me.”

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Tom Stoppard interviewed at the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

What actually led you to write plays? Could you describe the genesis of your plays other than Hapgood and Jumpers?

STOPPARD

I started writing plays because everybody else was doing it at the time. As for the genesis of plays, it is never the story. The story comes just about last. I’m not sure I can generalize. The genesis of Travesties was simply the information that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin were all in Zurich at the same time. Anybody can see that there was some kind of play in that. But what play? I started to read Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce, and came across Henry Carr, and so on and so on. In the case of Night and Day, it was merely that I had been a reporter, that I knew quite a lot about journalism, and that I should have been writing another play about something and that therefore it was probably a good idea to write a play about journalists. After that, it was just a case of shuffling around my bits of knowledge and my prejudices until they began to suggest some kind of story. I was also shuffling a separate pack of cards that had to do with sexual attraction. Quite soon I started trying to integrate the two packs. And so on.

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Benjamin Storey and Jon A. Shields at Persuasion:

Giving students an occasion to discover the divergence between the depth of the conservative intellectual tradition and the shallowness of the contemporary online right is one of the major attractions of teaching conservatism for one of our session leaders, Emory’s Frank Lechner. Lechner said that one typical student “had expected a class dealing with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens” but instead “got something much more interesting and serious.”

One reason is that conservatives are often, paradoxically, devoted to the liberal order. Partly because liberalism is our most important tradition, American conservatives are often consumed with preserving what is best in it, not burning it down like the online right. That also means many conservative intellectuals are hard to put into a tidy philosophical box. UNC’s Rita Koganzon, another of our seminar leaders, reported that teaching conservative intellectuals reveals “that no really good writer is merely conservative, just as none is simply a liberal. They all have strange, heterodox, often politically uncategorizable ideas.”

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Andrea Lius in The Scientist:

Adult ants that have been infected with deadly pathogens often leave the colony to die so as not to infect others. But, “like infected cells in tissue, [young ants] are largely immobile and lack this option,” said Sylvia Cremer, a researcher at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) who studies how social insects such as ants fight diseases collectively as superorganisms, in a statement. Cremer’s team previously found that invasive garden ant pupae that have been infected with a deadly fungal pathogen produced chemicals that induced worker ants to unpack their cocoons and kill them, preventing the disease from spreading to the rest of the colony.¹ However, the researchers did not know if the chemicals were simply a result of the fungal infection or if the sick pupae specifically released them to call for their own demise.

In a new study, Cremer and her colleagues discovered that the infected pupae only released chemicals when there were workers nearby, suggesting that the sick young ants put these events in motion.² The researchers’ findings, published in Nature Communications, are the first evidence of altruistic disease signaling in a social insects and share similarities with how sick and dying cells send a “find me and eat me” signal to the immune system.

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