π.ο. at The Sydney Review of Books:

Which brings me to the question of just why Les’s poetry — the poetry of the ‘bush’, and not the poetry of the ‘street’ or city say. It must be remembered (as Guy Debord told us in The Society of the Spectacle) that the aesthetic credo under Capitalism is ‘That which appears is good, that which is good appears’ — cos aesthetics is also a socially-constructed activity, and our heads have been steered, not only towards the bush, but away from the sea or city, or anything else starting with C. John Kinsella sez in his posthumous tribute that Les ‘strangely’ had ‘more in common with many experimentalists than with the more conservative traditionalists who lionise him’ — which i suggest you take with a grain of salt — as one wonders what Kinsella means by the word ‘experimentalists’ here — no family that i belong to that’s for sure.

But why is this word ‘Genius’ being bandied around so much in poetry here, in Australia in particular – the noun in particular — not so much the adjective which very loosely is a synonym for ‘ingenious’ meaning ‘well thought out’.

more here.

Grace

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

by Joy Harjo
from In Mad Love and War
Wesleyan University Press, 1991

Newly appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo stopped by the Academy of American Poets office for a pop-up reading. In this video, she reads her poem “Grace.”

Elizabeth Toohey in The Christian Science Monitor:

Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” has given birth to a cottage industry of sequels, variations, and modernizations, from “Bridget Jones’s Diary” or the Bollywood film “Bride and Prejudice,” to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” Now comes an update set among Muslim Canadians, “Ayesha at Last,” the debut novel of Uzma Jalaluddin, who writes a humorous advice column on parenting for the Toronto Star. Does the world need “Pride and Prejudice and Muslims”? Indeed, it does – at least, it needs Jalaluddin’s version, which is full of wit and verve and humor. Like “Pride and Prejudice,” “Ayesha at Last” is not just about a heroine finding her man, but how she navigates her small community’s narrow expectations for women and her family’s foibles and financial struggles, finding strength in her voice.

“Ayesha at Last” is packaged as chick lit, with a silhouetted face with a dash of lipstick, around which swirls a purple hijab on its golden cover, but that’s just the book’s mask – and this is a book that’s all about the masks we wear to protect ourselves or please others. Where the novel shines is as “immigrant lit,” painting a nuanced portrait of an immigrant community and exploring themes like the intergenerational conflicts that can arise around tradition and assimilation. These become even more fraught in our current political landscape, with its rising tides of Islamophobia and nationalism. Yet “Ayesha at Last” is light and incandescent and deeply pleasurable from start to finish. You know it’s a good book when it’s obvious from the start who is going to get married, and yet you still can’t stop reading.

More here.

Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian:

In 1969, when the New York police raided the Stonewall Inn and encountered unexpected resistance from LGBT protesters, homosexuality was still criminalised in most countries. Even in more tolerant societies, venturing out of the closet was often akin to social and professional suicide. Today, in contrast, the prime minister of Serbia is openly lesbian and the prime minister of Ireland is proudly gay, as are the CEO of Apple and numerous other politicians, businesspeople, artists and scientists. In the United States, the average Republican today holds far more liberal views on LGBT issues than the average Democrat held in 1969. The argument has moved from “should the state imprison LGBT people?” to “should the state recognise same-sex marriage?” (and almost half of Republicans support same-sex marriage). That said, about 70 countries still criminalise homosexuality today.

…Nothing has been determined yet, and however gloomy the future may seem to some of us, in 1969 the future looked ever gloomier. In the end, most of the dystopian scenarios that frightened people in 1969 did not materialise, because many people struggled to prevent them. If you wish to prevent the dystopian scenarios of the 21st century, there are many things you can do. But the most important thing is to join an organisation. Cooperation is what makes humans powerful. Cooperation is what the Stonewall riots were all about. They were the moment when a lot of individual suffering crystallised into a collective movement. Until Stonewall, LGBT people conducted isolated survival struggles against a terribly unjust system. After Stonewall, enough people organised together to change the system itself.

The lesson of Stonewall is as true today as it was in 1969, and is relevant to all humans, not just to those who identify as LGBT. Fifty people working together as members of an organisation can accomplish far more than 500 individuals. Technology now poses the greatest challenges in our history. To cope well with these challenges, we need to organise. I cannot tell you which organisation to join – there are many good options – but please do it soon. Do it this week. Don’t sit at home and complain. It is time to act.

More here.

Meredith Somers at the website of the MIT Sloan School:

What did you think of the last commercial you watched? Was it funny? Confusing? Would you buy the product? You might not remember or know for certain how you felt, but increasingly, machines do. New artificial intelligence technologies are learning and recognizing human emotions, and using that knowledge to improve everything from marketing campaigns to health care.

These technologies are referred to as “emotion AI.” Emotion AI is a subset of artificial intelligence (the broad term for machines replicating the way humans think) that measures, understands, simulates, and reacts to human emotions. It’s also known as affective computing, or artificial emotional intelligence. The field dates back to at least 1995, when MIT Media lab professor Rosalind Picard published “Affective Computing.”

Javier Hernandez, a research scientist with the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab, explains emotion AI as a tool that allows for a much more natural interaction between humans and machines.“Think of the way you interact with other human beings; you look at their faces, you look at their body, and you change your interaction accordingly,” Hernandez said. “How can [a machine] effectively communicate information if it doesn’t know your emotional state, if it doesn’t know how you’re feeling, it doesn’t know how you’re going to respond to specific content?”

More here.

From the website of the Doha Debates:

Q: Is AI growing for better or for worse?

ALI: Both. AI poses many dangers that people are now waking up to, such as biases in automated decision-making, the creation of hyper-realistic false information, the profiling and micro-targeting of people for commercial exploitation. And then there is the fear that AI will take away millions of jobs. One area where there’s serious alarm is autonomous weapons. Every technology that can be used as a weapon ultimately has been throughout history. It is guaranteed to happen with AI. In principle, when you have an intelligent weapon, it could reduce unintended casualties, but it will also be much more lethal and tempting to use. That’s why it is critical to develop rules and treaties for intelligent autonomous munitions just as we have for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Unfortunately, military imperatives often trump regulations and treaties.

On balance, I think the benefits of AI are greater. While weapons will become more lethal and the loss of jobs will hit some people hard, humanity will also benefit immensely. Diseases will be diagnosed better, robots will perform complex surgery more reliably, self-driving cars will allow disabled people to travel more easily, and assistive technologies will improve the lives of elderly people. All these benefits probably outweigh smart weapons and economic dislocation in the end, just as happened with past technological revolutions. But yes, for the person at the other end of that smart weapon or pink slip, AI will be a serious problem.

More here.

Prashanth Ramakrishna in the New York Times:

Prashanth Ramakrishna: Artificial general intelligence, A.G.I., is a system capable, like us humans, of performing open-ended tasks independent of specific problems or contexts — conversation, common-sense reasoning, experiential learning and so on. The popular science fiction example is HAL 9000 from the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Is A.G.I. achievable? And if it is, does our civilizational conversation seem sufficiently robust on this topic?

David Chalmers: I think artificial general intelligence is possible. Some people are really hyping up A.I., saying that artificial general intelligence is just around the corner in maybe 10 or 20 years. I would be surprised if they turn out to be right. There has been a lot of exciting progress recently with deep learning, which focuses on methods of pattern-finding in raw data.

Deep learning is great for things we do perceptually as human beings — image recognition, speech recognition and so on. But when it comes to anything requiring autonomy, reasoning, decisions, creativity and so on, A.I. is only good in limited domains. It’s pretty good at playing games like Go. The moment you get to the real world, though, things get complicated. There are a lot of mountains we need to climb before we get to human-level A.G.I. That said, I think it’s going to be possible eventually, say in the 40-to-100-year time frame.

Once we have a human-level artificial intelligence, there’s just no doubt that it will change the world.

More here.

George Craig at Music & Literature:

Between 1948 and 1952 there took place a particularly remarkable correspondence: that between Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit. In the course of his life Beckett wrote something approaching 20,000 letters. Fascinating as many of these are, they offer nothing that can match this explosion of words. But then Duthuit was not just any correspondent: he was a highly cultured and intellectually rigorous art historian and critic, with total confidence in his own judgement. For Beckett, recognising these qualities and drawn by Duthuit’s impatient refusal of cultural orthodoxies, he represented something close to an ideal interlocutor: someone to whom, in the areas that mattered, anything could be said.

These voluminous letters are in French. Beckett’s years in France – at first in Paris before the War, then, during the Occupation, in hiding in the South, finally, after the Liberation, back in Paris – were a time during which, slowly at first but with increasing urgency, the move to writing in French took shape. The risks were huge, but by the mid-1940s the impulsion was irresistible. It issued in two bodies of writing: the early stories and Molloy; and the letters.

more here.

Colm Tóibín at Bookforum:

Henry James did not wish to be known by his readers. He remained oddly absent in his fiction. He did not dramatize his own opinions or offer aphorisms about life, as George Eliot, a novelist whom James followed closely, did. Instead, he worked intensely on his characters, offering their consciousness and motives a great deal of nuance and detail and ambiguity.

James was concerned with his privacy, burning many of the letters he received. Most of the time, he conducted his own correspondence with caution and care. But at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, when James was in his late fifties and early sixties, he began to write letters to younger men whose tone had a mixture of open affection and something that is more difficult to define.

more here.

Italo Calvino at The Paris Review:

Natalia Ginzburg is the last woman left on earth. The rest are all men—even the female forms that can be seen moving about belong, ultimately, to this man’s world. A world where men make the decisions, the choices, take action. Ginzburg, or rather the disillusioned heroines who stand in for her, is alone, on the outside. There are generations and generations of women who have done nothing but wait and obey; wait to be loved, to get married, to become mothers, to be betrayed. So it is for her heroines.

Ginzburg comes an outsider to a world in which only the most conventional signs, tracing from an ancient era, can be deciphered. From emptiness there emerges, here and there, an identifiable object, a familiar object: buttons, or a pipe. Human beings exist only according to schematic representations of the concrete: hair, mustache, glasses. You can say the same about the emotions and behaviors; they reveal nothing. She doesn’t reveal so much as identify already-established words or situations: Ah ha, I must be in love … This feeling must be jealousy … Or, now, like in The Dry Heart, I will take this gun and kill him.

more here.

Kirsten Weir in Nautilus:

But can you really teach yourself to be creative? A study published in the Creativity Research Journalin 2004 reviewed 70 studies and concluded that creativity training is effective. But it wasn’t entirely clear how it worked, or which tactics were most effective. More recent studies, however, take us inside the brain to tap the source of our creative juices, and in the process upend longstanding myths about what it takes to be Hemingway or Picasso.

Some of the earliest scientific studies of creativity focused on personality. And some evidence suggests that innovation comes easier to people with certain personality types. A 1998 review of dozens of creativity studies found that overall, creative people tend to be more driven, impulsive, and self-confident. They also tend to be less conventional and conscientious. Above all, though, two personality traits tend to show up again and again among innovative thinkers. Unsurprisingly, openness to new ideas is one. The other? Disagreeableness.

More here.

Jessica Valenti in Medium:

This week, racists marched through the streets of Orlando, flashing white power symbols in advance of a Donald Trump rally; the Democratic presidential frontrunner bragged about his ability to hobnob with segregationists; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the U.S. doesn’t need reparations because “we’ve” made up for slavery by electing a black president; and a political debate erupted over what exactly constitutes a concentration camp. And so, in the midst of what feels like pride week for bigots, I find it difficult to muster empathy for Kyle Kashuv, the Parkland-shooting-survivor-turned-conservative-activist, whose admission to Harvard was rescinded after violently racist comments he made in 2016 resurfaced. In this time of emboldened racism, we need schools, employers, clubs, and everyone else to send a clear message about what kind of behavior our society values, and what we find intolerable. The language Kashuv used is about as intolerable as it gets.

Prominent conservatives have argued that Kashuv shouldn’t be punished for something he said when he was 16-years-old. (Although what is college admission if not a judgment of who you are at 16?) More disturbingly, they argued that expecting young white people to not use racial slurs is an unreasonable standard of behavior. Conservative podcast host Ben Shapiro, for example, tweeted that Harvard’s decision “sets up an insane, cruel standard that no one can possibly meet.” No one? Really?

More here.

Arthur C. Brooks in The Atlantic:

The field of “happiness studies” has boomed over the past two decades, and a consensus has developed about well-being as we advance through life. In The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, Jonathan Rauch, a Brookings Institution scholar and an Atlantic contributing editor, reviews the strong evidence suggesting that the happiness of most adults declines through their 30s and 40s, then bottoms out in their early 50s. Nothing about this pattern is set in stone, of course. But the data seem eerily consistent with my experience: My 40s and early 50s were not an especially happy period of my life, notwithstanding my professional fortunes.

So what can people expect after that, based on the data? The news is mixed. Almost all studies of happiness over the life span show that, in wealthier countries, most people’s contentment starts to increase again in their 50s, until age 70 or so. That is where things get less predictable, however. After 70, some people stay steady in happiness; others get happier until death. Others—men in particular—see their happiness plummet. Indeed, depression and suicide rates for men increase after age 75.

More here.

From Phys.org:

The periodic table of elements that most chemistry books depict is only one special case. This tabular overview of the chemical elements, which goes back to Dmitri Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer and the approaches of other chemists to organize the elements, involve different forms of representation of a hidden structure of the chemical elements. This is the conclusion reached by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig and the University of Leipzig in a recent paper. The mathematical approach of the Leipzig scientists is very general and can provide many different periodic systems depending on the principle of order and classification—not only for chemistry, but also for many other fields of knowledge.

It is an icon of natural science and hangs in most chemistry classrooms: the periodic table of elements, which is celebrating its 150th birthday this year. The tabular overview is closely linked to Dmitri Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer—two researchers who, in the 1860s, created an arrangement of elements based on their atomic masses and similarities.

More here.  [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Sanjukta Paul in Aeon:

There does economic power come from? Does it exist independently of the law? It seems obvious, even undeniable, that the answer is no. Law creates, defines and enforces property rights. Law enforces private contracts. It charters corporations and shields investors from liability. Law declares illegal certain contracts of economic cooperation between separate individuals – which it calls ‘price-fixing’ – but declares economically equivalent activity legal when it takes place within a business firm or is controlled by one.

Each one of these is a choice made by the law, on behalf of the public as a whole. Each of them creates or maintains someone’s economic power, and often undermines someone else’s. Each also plays a role in maintaining a particular distribution of economic power across society. Yet generations of lawyers and judges educated at law schools in the United States have been taught to ignore this essential role of law in creating and sustaining economic power. Instead, we are taught that the social process of economic competition results in certain outcomes that are ‘efficient’ – and that anything the law does to alter those outcomes is its only intervention.

These peculiar presumptions flow from the enormously powerful and influential ‘law and economics’ movement that dominates thinking in most areas of US law considered to be within the ‘economic’ sphere.

More here.

Alicia Kennedy at The Baffler:

Impossible Foods seems to have created heme out of a belief that it’s the visual stimulation of blood oozing from a burger that gives it an addictive taste. What Specht’s book reveals about beef, though, is that its extraordinary success has always had little to do with its taste and everything to do with its ubiquity, increasing cheapness, and cultural status. Red Meat Republic doesn’t bring the reader up to date with innovations in plant-based beef, but it doesn’t have to. By laying down the political and economic history of beef production and culture in the United States, he demonstrates why the tech-meat industry isn’t spending time, money, or marketing dollars on chicken and goat.

Beef is more American than fried chicken, apple pie, and turkey on Thanksgiving. And it has always been political, as Specht chronicles.

more here.

Dominique Eddé at the NYRB:

Beirut—Lebanon is both the center of the world and a dead end. The broken little village of a planet that is sick. Chaotic, polluted, and corrupt beyond belief, this is a country where beauty and human warmth constantly find ways to break through. It is impossible to name that feeling of being assaulted and charmed at the same time. You are in the city center, you stroll down a sidewalk eighteen inches wide, assailed from all sides by the confusion of buildings and traffic, torn between the appeal of the sea and the stench of garbage, and suddenly your gaze is soothed by the play of light on a stone wall, by bougainvilleas cascading from an ancient balcony, by the balcony itself.

You continue on your way, head down. Refugee children’s eyes beg you for something to eat, your impatience gives way to sadness and guilt. You hurry into a shop to buy some reels of yarn, and it’s the beginning of a journey.

more here.

Leaf Arbuthnot at the TLS:

Formally, aesthetically, “Tithonus” is a remarkable work. But it is made even more remarkable by its language. Trapped in his decaying body as day knits itself around him, Tithonus notices all. At first, the “bleak shapes of last efforts of / the night”. A little later, “bodiless black lace woods” peopled with songbirds asking one another “is it light is it light”. Later still the “whisper of a grasshopper scraping / back and forth as if working at rust”. The features of dawn concatenate and though Tithonus has seen them all before (and will see them all again), he cannot help but testify to the beauty of breaking day, with its “peach-pale air” and its rustling solitudes. At one point, a lone snail “pokes out of sleep too feelingly / as if a heart had been tinned and / opened”. It is a weird image, ghoulish and frightful, but a moving one.

The two major themes that fill the “pipe-work” – in a phrase from the first poem here – of Falling Awake are classical subjects and nature. Without the buttress of a private or grammar school education readers would not necessarily know who Tithonus is or what resonance the River Hebron has (it features in the superb “Severed Head Floating Downriver”, about Orpheus being torn to pieces by Maenads).

more here.