Marvellous Error

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here in my heart.

by Antonio Machado
from Times Alone
Translation-Robert Bly
Wesleyan University Press, 1983

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Ron Charles in The Washington Post:

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Henry Oliverin The Guardian:

The words we use feel inevitable. We take them for granted. But they began life about 6,000 years ago, when copper was being smithed in the lands to the west of the Black Sea. Spinney says “an aura of magic must have hovered around the early smiths, who drew this gleaming marvel from blue-green rock”. New language hovered around them, too.

Novel technologies needed a novel vocabulary to describe them. The goods produced were transported across the Black Sea, which required the language of travel and exchange, as well as words that prepared merchants to meet with bears, boars and lions. Smithing brought new specialisations: metallurgy, casting, mining, charcoal-burning. All had to be named.

As the traders travelled, the words they shared went with them across the Black Sea and then around the world: from the forests of Romania to the steppe of Odessa, now with the development of larger and larger settlements, now with steppe herders becoming global traders, now with roads, now with the crossing of the Volga, sped up by the wheel, and on to the edge of China.

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Heidi J. Larson & David M. Bersoff in Nature:

Science has a trust problem — at least, that is the common perception. If only, the argument goes, we could get people to ‘trust’ or ‘follow’ the science, we, as a society, would be doing more about climate change, childhood vaccination rates would be increasing rather than decreasing and fewer people would have died during the COVID-19 pandemic. Characterizing the problem as ‘science denialism’, however, is misleading and wrongly suggests that the solution is to build greater trust between scientists and the public.

Indeed, the research produced by our organizations — the Edelman Trust Institute think tank and the Global Listening Project non-profit organization — suggests that trust in science and scientists remains high globally. But scientists and scientific information exist in an increasingly complex ecosystem in which people’s perception of what counts as reliable evidence or proof is influenced by myriad other people and factors, including politics, religion, culture and personal belief. In the face of this complexity, the public are turning to friends, family, journalists and others to help them filter and interpret the vast amounts of information available.

Our work suggests that the crux of science’s current challenge is not lost trust, but rather misplaced trust in untrustworthy sources.

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Rebecca Ruth Gould at JSTOR Daily:

“What if we view street activities not as organic, evolving phenomena but as calculated efforts to challenge and subvert the state rules governing street dynamics?” Pamela Karimi asks in Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran, her study of work that has emerged from the protest movement of the same name that began in 2022. This question guides Karimi as she endeavors to understand artistic production in an age of political repression and upheaval across the region and world. An architect and associate professor of art and architectural history at Cornell University, Karimi brings her considerable expertise to bear on the contemporary struggle for women’s freedom in Iran and its formidable creative legacies, introducing along the way the pioneering artists who are responding to the recent uprising in the country.

Using imagery, interviews, avant-garde magazines, and feminist manifestos to situate Iranian artistic production both within Iran and in the diaspora, Karimi concentrates on work that engages with the “politics of the street” in the broadest sense.

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Maggie Doherty in Harper’s Magazine:

On the morning of February 2, 2023, I exited the subway at 57th Street to find the air growing colder. It had been a warm winter. But the first proper cold front was moving in, and I already felt underdressed. I propelled myself toward the warmth of the Midtown Hilton, where the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA, as it’s styled) was gathering for its winter meeting.

APsA has long been the institutional center of psychoanalysis in the United States. Founded in Baltimore in 1911 by, among others, Ernest Jones, Freud’s first biographer, its goals were to consolidate the profession and to standardize both training and treatment. Since then, the organization has overseen virtually every aspect of mainstream psychoanalysis in this country—research, education, and practice—and has resisted changes to many of its standards, casting a suspicious eye on analysts who proposed new ideas. In Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Janet Malcolm described APsA as having an “iron hold” over psychoanalysis in the United States.

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Laura Tran in The Scientist:

Atrip to the grocery store is a sensory adventure, with aisles brimming with eye-catching packages designed to tempt shoppers. Each display promises a delicious and memorable food adventure. “We’ve all experienced this moment where we crave a specific food, even if we’re not physically hungry,” said Guillaume de Lartigue, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, who studies how the brain controls food intake.

Even a single whiff of fresh bread from a nearby bakery can evoke mouthwatering memories, instantly sparking hunger. This connection between memory and appetite led de Lartigue to wonder how memory centers in the brain influenced eating behavior and whether they contributed to obesity risk.

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Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer in the New York Times:

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Eric Drexler at AI Prospects: Toward Global Goal Alignment:

Today’s AI technologies are based on deep learning, yet “AI” is commonly equated with large language models, and the fundamental nature of deep learning and LLMs is obscured by talk of using “statistical patterns” to “predict tokens”. This token-focused framing has been a remarkably effective way to misunderstand AI.

The key concept to grasp is “latent space” (not statistics, or tokens, or algorithms). It’s representation and processing in “latent space” that are fundamental to today’s AI and to understanding future prospects. This article offers some orientation and perhaps some new perspectives.

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Nicholas Smyth in The Hedgehog Review:

In recent decades, a paradox has haunted American political life. Given that political progressives wielded considerable political, economic, and cultural influence, how is it possible that our actual social order was so resistant to real change? Why did the black-white wealth gap remain unchanged, and why did economic inequality steadily increase?  Why did basic access to affordable housing plummet? And why has higher education become a nightmarish debt sentence for poor and underprivileged people seeking a better life?

Enter sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi and his important and troubling book, We Have Never Been Woke, which provides a startling answer: Too many self-described progressives aren’t actually progressive. Rather, their progressivism is simply a means to power and social status, conveniently forgotten when it conflicts with those real aims.  For those on the left seeking to formulate a positive vision in the wake of Trump’s recent victory, Al-Gharbi’s book may offer a valuable form of self-understanding, a guide to a less hypocritical and more socially effective politics.

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Charlie English in The Guardian:

Mishra is a relative latecomer to the Palestinian cause. It was Israeli heroes, not Arabs, with whom he was infatuated as a boy growing up in India: he even had a picture on his wall of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defence minister during the Six Day War. Conversion came during a 2008 visit to Israel-Palestine, where Mishra was shocked to witness the humiliations heaped on the inhabitants of the West Bank. “Nothing prepared me for the brutality and squalor of Israel’s occupation,” he writes, “the snaking wall and numerous roadblocks … meant to torment Palestinians in their own land … the racially exclusive network of shiny asphalt roads, electricity grids and water systems linking the illegal Jewish settlements to Israel.”

Crucially, he felt a strong racial bond with the Arabs. “Here,” he writes, “was a resemblance I could not deny.” They were “people who looked like me”. It is in this connection – their shared presence on the darker-skinned side of what WEB Du Bois identified as the “colour line” – that Mishra locates both his credentials and the origins of his critique. India had freed itself of western white supremacism, but the Palestianians “now endured a nightmare that I and my own ancestors had put behind us”.

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Blake Morrison at The Guardian:

You’d think a sleep room would be cosy, but the one on Ward 5 of the Royal Waterloo hospital in London, back in the 1960s, was dark and airless, a twilight zone where up to six patients – almost always young women – would lie comatose on grey mattresses for weeks, even months on end. They had come in with schizophrenia, anorexia or, in a few cases, a youthful waywardness that their parents hoped could be cured. For William Sargant, the psychiatrist in charge, the cure lay not only in prolonged narcosis but insulin shock therapy, ECT and, if need be, lobotomy. Afterwards, the patients had no memory of what had been done to them. The Sargant method was to wipe their minds clean.

Celia Imrie, later a famous actor, was admitted to Ward 5 in 1966, when she was 14. To her it was “like being in a prison camp” and her recovery “owed nothing” to the “truly horrifying” Sargant and his “barbaric treatments”. Sara (not her real name) was a year older, just 15, and remembers the “hideous cocktail of drugs” that kept her in a zombified state.

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Dwight Garner at the NYT:

Once upon a time, during the last quarter of the 20th century, it was possible to argue that one person was America’s best novelist and best literary critic. I am talking about John Updike, whose long and elegant reviews in The New Yorker set reading agendas. Such was Updike’s influence that readers paid heed when, in the mid-1980s, he developed a sustained literary man-crush on the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday at 89.

More than once in his reviews of Vargas Llosa’s novels, Updike took note of the author’s handsomeness and urbanity. He was more impressed by Vargas Llosa’s substantial intelligence, his learning, his versatility and his imagination, which could conjure the comic fussiness of a tiny left-wing splinter group in solemn session, or the nauseated feelings of a young wife who discovers that her husband is gay, or the mixed feelings of a citified idealist engaging in a gun battle in the Andes while beset with altitude sickness. Vargas Llosa “has replaced Gabriel García Márquez” as the South American novelist North American readers must catch up on, Updike wrote in 1986, four years after García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature and 24 years before Vargas Llosa himself would.

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Huang Yiping in Project Syndicate:

US President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of sweeping new tariffs on imports from more than 180 countries will be remembered as a man-made economic tsunami. Many are already comparing it to President Herbert Hoover’s 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which slashed global trade by 66% in five years and deepened the Great Depression. Trump’s tariffs – most of which have been abruptly paused for 90 days – have rattled financial markets, prompting analysts to warn that the United States could enter a recession in 2025.

The global implications can hardly be underestimated. As the world’s largest economy, the US has an outsize impact on other countries’ exports and growth. Adding to the uncertainty is Trump’s erratic approach to policymaking, which is nurturing doubts about the US dollar’s viability as a global reserve currency.

Even more alarmingly, as the US withdraws from its international commitments, the world risks falling into the “Kindleberger trap” – a scenario reminiscent of the 1930s, when no major power was able or willing to provide the global public goods necessary to sustain the world economy. If current trends persist, the international economic architecture the US helped build 80 years ago could unravel.

How should other economies respond to Trump’s tariffs?

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Quinn Slobodian in Boston Review:

In 2013 Charles Murray traveled to the Galápagos Islands to deliver an address to the Mont Pelerin Society—that font of neoliberalism, founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek. But Murray’s talk didn’t run through the usual neoliberal script: economic liberty, free trade, the genius of the entrepreneur. Instead, his subject was “the rediscovery of human nature and human diversity.” New discoveries in genetics, he argued, would induce “reversions to age-old understandings about the human animal” and undo “the intellectual eclipse of human nature and human diversity in the United States.” He welcomed these developments not only to fight the pernicious effects of what he called the “equality premise” but to better recognize and organize patterns of aptitude in a changing economy.

Though it’s not part of conventional wisdom about the ideological core of neoliberalism, this appeal to nature was a central part of neoliberal thought in the aftermath of the Cold War. Communism had died, but neoliberals feared Leviathan would live on. The poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative action, and ecological consciousness—forged in the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s—had suffused the body politic, emboldening what they saw as an overbearing state and breeding an atmosphere of political correctness and “victimology,” which in turn stultified free discourse and nurtured a culture of government dependency and special pleading.

Neoliberals sought an antidote to all that, and they found one in hierarchies of gender, race, and cultural difference, which they imagined to be rooted in genetics as well as tradition. Meanwhile, changing demographics—an aging white population matched by an expanding nonwhite population—led some of them to rethink the conditions necessary for capitalism. Perhaps cultural homogeneity was a precondition for social stability, and thus the peaceful conduct of market exchange and enjoyment of private property?

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