Jonathan Blake at Noema:
Baldwin Hills juts up 500 feet from the flat expanse of the Los Angeles Basin, the result of millennia of seismic activity along the Newport-Inglewood Fault, a dextral strike-slip fault that runs for 47 miles from Culver City through Signal Hill to Newport Beach. The fault, formed some 30 million years ago when the Pacific plate collided with the North American plate (an intersection that now sits at the San Andreas Fault), expresses on the surface as a series of low, irregular hills. Below the surface, seismic activity created a series of oil and gas reservoirs, including the Inglewood Oil Field.
LA’s geologic past is more than a niche interest for rockhounds and petroleum engineers. Deep time processes shaped the city’s contemporary urban geography, and still do. Rather than grow along transportation lines — the typical pattern of residential sprawl during the 19th and 20th centuries — LA’s new developments often followed oil strikes. Subterranean discoveries helped to produce the city’s famous suburbanized sprawl — a network of “black gold suburbs” that oozed away from the city’s urban core.
more here.
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I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church—in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without. What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked—at first avid, then groaning—on their sexual careers. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.
Like many adolescents, Deenie has a secret.
This notion — that LLMs are “just” next-word predictors based on statistical models of text — is so common now as to be almost a trope. It is used, both correctly and incorrectly, to explain the flaws, biases, and other limitations of LLMs. Most importantly, it is used by AI skeptics like [Gary] Marcus to argue that there will soon be 
Qamar-ul Huda opens the first chapter of his new book Reenvisioning Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution in Islam with the differing American and Norwegian approaches to Afghanistan, illustrating how international efforts to end wars and support peace in Muslim countries can be successful, especially when conducted on Islamic terms.
As a musician, Charli XCX was born online. Her first album circulated via CD-Rs and MySpace when the artist was just fourteen. Journalists love to drop this detail, but seldom do they follow up on how this ever-shifting www. vernacular inflects her songwriting style. Her compositions often hinge on the repetition of single words or phrases, like “focus,” “airport,” or “number one.” Syncopation spins the familiar into an earworm, disarticulating the very meaning of a lyric into a melodic vibe. After a couple of major-label albums failed to connect, Charli saw promise in how this approach might marry with the emergent underground PC 
Yuichi Hirose has a dream—a dream that someday everyone will have access to a machine capable of knitting furniture.
Simply put, downtowns matter less and less. In Austin and elsewhere, we are witnessing an epochal shift away from the highly concentrated urban center first described by Jean Gottmann in 1983 as the “
Every so often someone writes an essay with a title like “Against Travel,” “The Case for Staying on One’s Couch,” or “Germans in Sweatpants: Why Going Places Was a Mistake.” Such pieces usually go viral, since they appeal to the two itches few readers seem able to resist scratching—the itch to be agreed with and the itch to be mad at a stranger. I always root for the writers of these pieces. I want them to win the impossible fight they’ve picked.
If there’s one phrase the June 2024 U.S. presidential debate may entirely eliminate from the English vocabulary it’s that age is a meaningless number. Often attributed to boxer 
In 2016, a historically unprecedented incident took place. And yet, barely anyone even noticed. Even years later, we’ve failed to acknowledge it or to have begun the process of understanding it. Because we still can’t even see it.
When Tintin is captured by an ancient Inca tribe in his fourteenth adventure, Prisoners of the Sun, he finds an article on his cell floor that forecasts a coming solar eclipse. This will prove to be significant since he, Captain Haddock, and Professor Calculus are to be burned at the stake. Tintin manages to see to it that the execution is staged at the right moment. When the Inca Prince of the Sun orders the pyre to be lit, Tintin invokes the Sun God: “O God of the Sun, sublime Pachacamac, display thy power, I implore thee! … If this sacrifice is not thy will, hide thy shining face from us!” In this patronizing Occidental fable of mathematical calculation triumphing over traditional belief, the weather god gives way to the scientist, whose knowledge gives Tintin the power to produce an apparent miracle.
JOHN TOOBY (July 26, 1952-November 9, 2023) was the founder of the field of Evolutionary Psychology, co-director (with his wife, Leda Cosmides) of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, and professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. He received his PhD in biological anthropology from Harvard University in 1989 and was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Tooby and Cosmides also co-founded and co-directed the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology and jointly received the 2020 Jean Nicod Prize.
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