How to Dress Like David Bowie

Natalie Hammond at LitHub:

If you watch clips of his last appearance as Ziggy, at his infamous concert at the Hammersmith Odeon, you can see these rapid- fire changes in action. As Bowie starts “Ziggy Stardust,” he’s wearing a black diamond-shaped jumpsuit with shots of blue and red, his feet planted about a meter apart. Two pairs of hands materialize out of the darkness and deftly yank its sleeves, revealing the famously short white satin kimono, which is positively luminescent under the stage lights. He does the same thing again later with two more outfits by Kansai Yamamoto: the white cape revealing the marvelous, multicolored jumpsuit. At one point, Bowie goes offstage to change into his sculpted-shoulder two-piece, another number by Burretti, which he wears with the boots. You can tell how tight it is because he grimaces as it goes up his legs. He smooths out each of his sleeves so that they sit just so. He must have looked something like a red, blue, and silver mirage, a sensory assault on your eyes and ears that made them explode with color and sound. Exhilarating doesn’t even begin to describe it. This was nothing short of earth-shattering.

more here.

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Breakthroughs in image generation

Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

3QD Editor’s Note: This is a photo of me converted to “Ghibli Style” by ChatGPT

Over the past two weeks, first Google and then OpenAI rolled out their multimodal image generation abilities. This is a big deal. Previously, when a Large Language Model AI generated an image, it wasn’t really the LLM doing the work. Instead, the AI would send a text prompt to a separate image generation tool and show you what came back. The AI creates the text prompt, but another, less intelligent system creates the image. For example, if prompted “show me a room with no elephants in it, make sure to annotate the image to show me why there are no possible elephants” the less intelligent image generation system would see the word elephant multiple times and add them to the picture. As a result, AI image generations were pretty mediocre with distorted text and random elements; sometimes fun, but rarely useful.

Multimodal image generation, on the other hand, lets the AI directly control the image being made. While there are lots of variations (and the companies keep some of their methods secret), in multimodal image generation, images are created in the same way that LLMs create text, a token at a time. Instead of adding individual words to make a sentence, the AI creates the image in individual pieces, one after another, that are assembled into a whole picture.

More here.

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The Tech Lobby’s Playbook

Casey Mock at After Babel:

Meta’s governmental strategy and influence is now clearer than ever, thanks to Sarah Wynn Williams’s recently published memoir, Careless People. In her account of the culture of callousness, greed, unaccountability, and nepotism among Meta’s leadership – including Zuckerberg, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and current President of Global Affairs Joel Kaplan – she details the company’s well-honed political playbook. Without any apparent sense of irony for a company that itself now refuses to fact-check, Meta is engaged in a legal and PR campaign to silence Wynn-Williams, claiming that the book contains fabrications and was not properly fact-checked. The publisher, Macmillan, stands by the book.

As someone with over a decade of experience in tech policy—including four years on Amazon’s public policy team—I found Careless People compelling and credible. Her insider’s account makes clear how Meta, despite widespread public awareness (thanks in part to Frances Haugen’s testimony), has repeatedly evaded meaningful accountability, even as the company facilitated genocide in Myanmar, created political chaos in the US and Europe, and manipulated the emotional vulnerabilities of teenagers for profit. Wynn-William’s revelations provide a behind-the-scenes look into a regulatory avoidance strategy I know well, because it’s the same political playbook Amazon uses, as well as Google, Microsoft, and other large tech and social media companies.

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Yuval Noah Harari: ‘How Do We Share the Planet With This New Superintelligence?’

Interview by Michiaki Matsushima in WIRED:

WIRED: In the late ’90s, when the internet began to spread, there was a discourse that this would bring about world peace. It was thought that with more information reaching more people, everyone would know the truth, mutual understanding would be born, and humanity would become wiser. WIRED, which has been a voice of change and hope in the digital age, was part of that thinking at the time. In your new book, Nexus, you write that such a view of information is too naive. Can you explain this?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Information is not the same as truth. Most information is not an accurate representation of reality. The main role information plays is to connect many things, to connect people. Sometimes people are connected by truth, but often it is easier to use fiction or illusion.

The same is true of the natural world. Most of the information that exists in nature is not meant to tell the truth. We are told that the basic information underlying life is DNA, but is DNA true? No. DNA connects many cells together to make a body, but it does not tell us the truth about anything. Similarly, the Bible, one of the most important texts in human history, has connected millions of people together, but not necessarily by telling them the truth.

More here.

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The Social Turn: Psychoanalysis at an inflection point

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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Tuesday Poem

Stages

As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slaves of permanence.
Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.

by Herman Hesse
translation: Richard and Clara Winston

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Monday, March 31, 2025

Why does this 40-year-old book by a career academic still hit so hard?

Laura Miller at Slate:

Every so often an eye-opening work of social criticism becomes a surprise bestseller. In 1979, everyone was talking about Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, and in 1987, it was Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Last year, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation raised the alarm, encouraging readers outside the parenting-book world to consider what the teenage mental health crisis might mean for the culture at large. Typically the work of a professor with an aptitude for speaking to a general readership, this sort of book hits just as popular anxiety about a new technology or ideology—smartphones, the self-actualization movement, multiculturalism—is cresting. Ideas that may have been simmering away in academia suddenly burst into the common conversation. However, the very qualities that make these books feel tremendously relevant at a particular historical moment also tend to make them fade into obscurity when that moment passes. The blockbuster cultural criticism book tends to speak to its time—then become a curio as the culture changes around it.

But Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death has legs. For a book published 40 years ago about a medium—TV—no longer considered the prime driver of politics and culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death sure still turns up in op-eds, in podcasts, and in interviews, its central arguments about the media still startlingly relevant in the internet era.

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What the Mysterious Mating Habits of an Enigmatic Species Reveal About the Secrets of Evolution

Matt Ridley at Literary Hub:

In all animals mating is a deal: one sex donates a few million sperm, the other a handful of eggs, the merger between which—unless a predator intervenes—will result in a brood of young. Win-win for the parents, genetically speaking. But there are few creatures that behave as if sex is a dull, simple or even mutually beneficial transaction and many that behave as if it is an event of transcendent emotional and aesthetic salience to be treated with reverence, suspicion, angst and quite a bit of violence.

In the case of Black Grouse the males dance and sing for hours every day for several exhausting months, selling their little packages of sperm as passionately and persuasively (and frequently) as they can. To prepare for the ordeal they grow, preen and display fancy, twisted, bold-colored feathers. They gather together in one spot, putting themselves at conspicuous risk of attack by hawks and forgoing opportunities to feed. They fight with deadly intent again and again, suffering significant injuries. As excitement builds they expand the bright red, swollen, fleshy combs over their eyes, covered with hundreds of tiny tentacles like vermillion sea anemones. The act of sexual congress itself, the consummation of the deal, takes seconds. The rest has taken months of practice and preparation and is elaborate, extravagant, exhausting and elegant. Why?

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How Kerala got rich

Tirthankar Roy and K Ravi Raman in Aeon:

With roughly 35 million people, Kerala, which sits along India’s southwestern tip on the Indian Ocean, is among the smaller Indian states, though it is densely populated. In the 1970s, Kerala’s average income was about two-thirds of the Indian average, making it among the poorest states in India. This difference persisted through the 1980s. In the coming decades, a miracle occurred. Kerala, one of the poorest regions in India, became one of the richest. In 2022, Kerala’s per-capita income was 50-60 per cent higher than the national average. What happened?

Even when it was poor, Kerala was different. Though income-poor, Kerala enjoyed the highest average literacy levels, health conditions and life expectancy – components of human development – in all of India. Among economists in the 1970s and ’80s and among locals, ‘Kerala is different’ became a catchphrase. But why, and different from whom?

More here.

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Achmed Abdullah, Swinging Caravan

Tom Lutz at the LARB:

ACHMED ABDULLAH was, during the early decades of the previous century, a playwright with successes on Broadway and the West End, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, an author of dozens of books, and a writer of adventure and fantasy stories for the pulps, including ArgosyThe All-StoryMunsey’s, and Blue Book. The gossip columns reported his comings and goings as a man about town.

One story he loved to tell was about a certain Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff, whose father was Grand Duke Nicholas Romanoff, a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, and whose mother was Princess Nourmahal Durani, daughter of the amir of Afghanistan. The scion Alexander was born in Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula, growing up in the Romanoffs’ Livadia Palace (the villa where Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin later met to carve up Europe after Germany’s surrender in 1945). In Abdullah’s story, the boy was sent from there to England for his education—where, for some reason, he went incognito, changing his name to an Arabic one, his mixed parentage allowing him to easily pass as an Arab. He attended Eton and then Oxford and joined the British armed services, which, given his many languages and changeable looks, employed him as a spy.

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The mad king of a high-tech feudal state

Oscar Schwartz in The Drift:

As Isaacson surveyed the landscape in search of a new genius, one name kept coming up: Elon Musk. He was, without a doubt, a man with grand vision — electric cars, space travel, telepathy. He was unyielding in this vision, too, sometimes belligerently so.

…Nevertheless, when Musk was published in September of last year, it was clear from the dust jacket alone that the book would situate Elon in the Isaacson lineage, painting him as the true heir to Jobs — a brilliant, if troubled, Silicon Valley genius. The cover features a head shot of Musk staring directly into the camera, fingers on his chin — like Jobs, in a thinking position — and the epigraph consists of two quotes, the first from Musk: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” Directly below it is one attributed to Jobs: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

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In Genetics, a Tense Coexistence of Mainstream and Fringe Views

Ashley Smart in Undark:

In the summer of 2022, Abdel Abdellaoui was set to give a keynote at the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. But when he learned he’d be sharing a speaker roster with Emil Kirkegaard, Abdellaoui announced on Twitter that he was cancelling his lecture.

Kirkegaard is perhaps best known for his provocative writing on genetics and race. On his blog, he has asserted that Black Americans are less honest and less intelligent than their White counterparts; that affirmative action produces Black and Hispanic doctors who kill people with their incompetence; that Africans are excessively predisposed to violence; and that the hereditarian hypothesis of intelligence — roughly, the idea that races or ancestry groups differ in average intelligence in ways that are substantially attributable to genetics — is “almost certainly true.”

More here.

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The German Peasants’ War

Peter Marshall at Literary Review:

Historians call it the Bauernkrieg or German Peasants’ War, but to people at the time it was simply the Aufruhr (‘the turmoil’). Through the second half of 1524 and into the summer of 1525, rebellion on an unprecedented scale swept across swathes of southern and central Germany. There is no real earlier point of comparison, and Europe would see no equivalent outbreak of popular fury prior to the French Revolution.

In the end, the rebels were comprehensively defeated by their masters, the German princes and ecclesiastical lords; as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have been killed in a succession of one-sided battles and the pitiless retribution that followed. And yet, as Lyndal Roper argues in this hugely impressive study – the first comprehensive account of the events to appear in a generation – the uproar of 1524–5 fully deserves the designation ‘revolution’. In one sense, the rebels achieved none of their aims; in another, nothing was ever the same again.

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Sunday, March 30, 2025

Essay on Eid

From Stella Young with EssayGenius’s AI:

The origins of Eid can be traced back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. Eid al-Fitr, which translates to the “Festival of Breaking the Fast,” is celebrated at the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. The significance of this festival lies in the completion of a month-long spiritual journey of self-discipline, reflection, and devotion to Allah. It is a time for Muslims to express gratitude for the strength and patience shown during Ramadan. The celebration of Eid al-Fitr is not only a personal milestone but also a communal event that reinforces the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood among Muslims.

Eid al-Adha, or the “Festival of Sacrifice,” commemorates the willingness of Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) to sacrifice his son Isma’il (Ishmael) in obedience to God’s command. This event is rooted in the Quranic narrative and symbolizes faith, obedience, and submission to divine will. The festival occurs during the Islamic month of Dhu al-Hijjah, coinciding with the Hajj pilgrimage, one of the Five Pillars of Islam. The connection between Eid al-Adha and Hajj emphasizes the importance of sacrifice and devotion in the Islamic faith, making it a time of reflection on one’s relationship with God.

More here.

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