Sean Michaels at The Baffler:

Literary Theory for Robots is mainly concerned with an alternative view—the “Aristotelian,” instrumental idea that intelligence represents the ability to successfully do shit—and not some internal, mental model. Intelligence is a set of mechanisms that one applies to one’s problems. It doesn’t matter what’s contained in those mechanisms, how conscious or self-conscious or “correct” they are, just that they work. Negotiating a ceasefire; completing a jigsaw puzzle; shifting gears; turning bread into toast—each of these requires intelligence to solve, and the degree of this intelligence is evaluated by (a) how well the set of mechanisms performs; and (b) how capably the same cocktail can be applied to other problems. A toaster is intelligent, Tenen argues, because its mechanism succeeds at turning bread into toast. And it sits at the bottom rung of a ladder, incapable of applying its wits to any other test.

more here.

An Early Spring Moment

Still dark. Far off, a seagull’s cry,
then a car off to work and another
and another and another just outside
my window. I’m comfortable in bed,
listening, somewhere in my head, to
the comforting, lovely Welsh song,
“All Through the Night” assuring me
that a guardian angel had been there
all night long. Suddenly a morning one
comes as the red light from thermostat
flashes on to tell me a warmth is waiting
beyond my thick comforter.

I read for a while. Here’s a quotation.
“The best sex, probably, was the sex
people had when they really believed
they would go to hell for it–but craved
it so badly that they had it anyway.”
Later, with my coffee, I read a quotation
from Plato’s Republic, the famous one about
a soul waiting for reincarnation. It is told
by the Fates that its destiny is of its own
choosing, “Your daemon or guardian spirit
will not be assigned to you by lot; you will
choose him….Virtue knows no master;
each will possess it to a greater or less
degree, depending on whether he values
or disdains it. The responsibility lies with
the one who makes the choice; the god
has none.” I think of Achilles choosing
fame not happiness and while brooding
over destiny, I look out of my window
across the top of a tree just getting comfortable
with its new green, see a seagull turn
in a great curve above the 7-11, wonder
why I chose the one that got me here now.

by Nils Peterson
3/2024

Rachel Altman in The New Atlantis:

Young women’s social media feeds are flooded with plugs for Botox. By our early twenties, modernity is already dangling opportunities in front of us to flee from a universal fate: to age, to wrinkle, and to transition into new stages of life. Sometimes we all need to be shaken by the shoulders and reminded that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie does just that. The hot pink blockbuster about a perfectly beautiful plastic doll is actually an affirmation of the complex beauty of human life.

More here.

Ziyad Al-Aly in The Conversation:

From the very early days of the pandemic, brain fog emerged as a significant health condition that many experience after COVID-19.

Brain fog is a colloquial term that describes a state of mental sluggishness or lack of clarity and haziness that makes it difficult to concentrate, remember things and think clearly.

Fast-forward four years and there is now abundant evidence that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – can affect brain health in many ways.

In addition to brain fog, COVID-19 can lead to an array of problems, including headaches, seizure disorders, strokes, sleep problems, and tingling and paralysis of the nerves, as well as several mental health disorders.

More here.

John Halpin in Persuasion:

Donald Trump made an entire career out of whining about the mainstream media and still lives on nuggets of outrage dispensed to the faithful about how unfairly the media covered his glorious rule and the election he says was stolen from him. Democrats constantly gripe about the press identifying obvious weaknesses with Joe Biden, such as his age, his abysmal poll numbers, the lackluster support for his economic agenda, and his inability to hold together a basic coalition. Meanwhile, ideological outsiders and self-described “truth-tellers” have turned complaints about the media into a full-time business model of caterwauling about supposed censorship of their out-of-the-mainstream or conspiratorial views.

Politics used to be about “who gets what, when, how” in Harold Lasswell’s famous formulation. But today it’s more about who said what, when, and how—and why everyone is so upset about it.

More here.

Robert Crossley at the Hudson Review:

People are constantly telling Ophelia what to do. No sooner has Laertes left the room, with an injunction to remember his words to her, than Polonius, never one to mind his own business, asks Ophelia what her exchange with her brother was all about. The conversation between father and daughter that follows is squirm-worthy. The more Ophelia tries to explain how things stand between her and Hamlet—how he has behaved in courting her and how she has responded to the “many tenders / Of his affection to me”—the more her father belittles her. “You speak like a green girl”; “think yourself a baby”; “Tender yourself more dearly”; “Go to, go to.” Each time Ophelia tries to speak up for herself—and, for that matter, speak up for Hamlet—Polonius overrides her. Finally, in his last twenty lines, he stifles her effort at reasoning with him, adding a father’s authority to the brother’s condescension: “I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth / Have you so slander any moment leisure / As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet. / Look to’t, I charge you. Come your ways.” By the scene’s end any resistance left in Ophelia has wilted. Not for the last time she is silenced. “I shall obey, my lord.”

more here.

Erik Davis at The Paris Review:

The Institute of Illegal Images (III) is housed in a dilapidated shotgun Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District, which also happens to be the home of a gentleman named Mark McCloud. The shades are always drawn; the stairs are rotting; the door is peppered with stickers declaring various subcultural affiliations: “Acid Baby Jesus,” “Haight Street Art Center,” “I’m Still Voting for Zappa.” As in many buildings from that era, at least in this city, the first floor parlor has high ceilings, whose walls are packed salon-style with the core holdings of the institute: a few hundred mounted and framed examples of LSD blotter.

The III maintains the largest and most extensive collection of such paper products in the world, along with thousands of pieces of the materials—illustration boards, photostats, perforation boards—used to create them. Gazing at these crowded walls, the visitor is confronted with a riot of icons and designs, many drawn from art history, pop media, and the countercultural unconscious, here crammed together according to the horror vacui that drives so much psychedelic art. There are flying saucers, clowns, gryphons, superheroes, cartoon characters, Escher prints, landscapes, op art swirls, magic sigils, Japanese crests, and wallpaper patterns, often in multiple color variations.

more here.

Laura Tran in The Scientist:

Macrophages serve as the Swiss army knives of the innate immune system, switching between phenotypes to perform different functions in response to the surrounding environment. One of their key attributes is their mobility to sites of inflammation, infection, and tumors. This trait garnered the attention of researchers who developed therapies to leverage macrophages’ abilities.¹ There are three different macrophage types, naïve (M0), antitumor (M1), and protumor (M2). M1 macrophages accumulate at the tumor and exert antitumor activity. Researchers have attempted to use them in adoptive cell therapies, but these cell therapies are in their early stages with limited clinical success.² One aspect that may influence treatment efficacy is how the macrophages traffic to the tumor. For now, the dynamics of macrophage movement are poorly understood.

Samir Mitragotri, a bioengineer at Harvard University, wondered, “If we look at the transport properties of activated M1 macrophages and the naïve M0 macrophages, is there a difference?” Upon investigation, Mitragotri and his team elucidated how macrophage phenotype alters its efficiency in tumor infiltration. Their findings, published in Applied Physics Reviews, offer insights into how macrophage dynamics may influence cell therapy development.³

More here.

Matene Toure in The Baffler:

AFTER THE NAKBA OF 1948 and the violent implementation of an Israeli state in historic Palestine, the revolution looked to cinema. The portrayal of Palestine in cinema goes back to the creation of cinema itself, in 1896; the creation of sound cinema posed a grave threat to burgeoning Zionist activities. Organizations like the Jewish National Fund and Histadrut (General Federation of Laborers) rounded up major financial and political support to back film productions that expanded the propaganda apparatus locally and abroad. As a consequence, as Ella Shohat notes in Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, “very few narrative features were produced until the early sixties, while documentary practice in Palestine became virtually a synonym for Zionist propaganda films.” Dominant visual regimes were oriented toward legitimizing modern Zionism in the eyes of the West and socializing new settlers internally, often using cinematic devices such as Americans playing Israeli soldiers (Paul Newman in Exodus) or the exotic Arab women-victim trope (Dina Doron in Clouds Over Israel) making these movies little more than vessels for paternalist, revisionist narratives and the advancement of Israeli nation-building.

In 1968, Palestinian cinema reemerged as part of the liberation movement, which believed in the power of film to cultivate solidarity in the Arab region and internationally. Recently restored by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, The Dupes (1972), directed by the Egyptian filmmaker Tewfik Saleh, resurfaces in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of October 7 and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. At the time of its release, the film was one of the first narrative Arab films to confront the Zionist cinematic propaganda machine by centering the tragic history of the Nakba, or or “catastrophe,” which had been purposely omitted from Israeli cinema. As Edward Said writes, “The whole history of the Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.”

More here.

Resurrection of the Wild

The country where he lives
is haunted
by the ghost of an old forest.
In the cleared fields
where he gardens
and pastures his horses
it stood once,
and will return. There will be
a resurrection of the wild.
Already it stands in wait
at the pasture fences.
It is rising up
in the waste places of the cities.
When the fools of the capitals
have devoured each other
in righteousness,
and the machines have eaten
the rest of us, then
there will be the second coming
of the trees. They will come
straggling over the fences
slowly, but soon enough.
The highways will sound
with the feet of the wild herds,
returning. Beaver will ascend
the streams as the trees
close over them.
The wolf and the panther
will find their old ways
through the nights. Water
and air will flow clear.
Certain calamities
will have passed,
and certain pleasures.
The wind will do without
corners. How difficult
to think of it: miles and miles
and no window.

by Wendell Berry
from Poetic Outlaws

Dana Dragunoiu at the IAI:

Forced into exile in 1917 by the October Revolution, Nabokov had good reasons to champion freedom as passionately and consistently as he did. From his point of view and that of most Russian émigrés, the Bolsheviks substituted the tsarist tyranny with a tyranny of their own. For Nabokov in particular, this was especially painful because his father had been one of the “liberationists” who dedicated his life to transforming Russia into a modern liberal-democratic state. His father’s political activism and his murder in a bungled political assassination by far-right extremists is one of the most poignant chapters of Nabokov’s biography. Nabokov’s philosophically complex account of freedom is a consistent seam throughout his major works – and it has also led to confusion in their popular and critical reception.

More here.

Erica Goode in Undark:

“The problem isn’t your memory, it’s that we have the wrong expectations for what memory is for in the first place,” Ranganath writes in his introduction, a theme that he returns to throughout the book. “Severe memory loss is undoubtedly debilitating, but our most typical complaints and worries around everyday forgetting are largely driven by deeply rooted misconceptions.”

Those misguided notions include the idea that memory is an archival repository of our life stories; that memories are fixed and unchangeable, and perhaps most of all, that our memories can always be trusted, when in fact they are eminently corruptible.

What scientists know about how memory works has increased significantly over the last decades. Ranganath early on introduces readers to a basic distinction between episodic memory, the ability to recall life events and experiences — where you were going and what you were feeling the day you left your wallet sitting on a bench in Central Park, for example — and semantic memory, the ability to recall factual information, like how many justices sit on the Supreme Court.

More here.

Mihir Dalal in Aeon:

To understand Narendra Modi’s India, it is instructive to grasp the ideas of the Hindu Right’s greatest ideologue, the world of British colonial India in which they emerged, and the historical feebleness of the present regime.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was a polymath who read law in London, enjoyed Shakespeare, admired the Bible, wrote important historical works, and became an accomplished poet and playwright. His lifelong obsession was politics.

Savarkar took up political activity in his teens and became a cherished anti-British revolutionary. While serving a long prison sentence for inciting violence against the British, he transformed into a Hindu supremacist bent on dominating Indian Muslims.

More here.

Nicholas Heron in the Sydney Review of Books:

In the 1969 postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn distinguished two different senses in which ‘paradigm’, the technical term his book popularised, had been used. On the one hand, a paradigm denoted the ‘entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community’. In this first sense, paradigm was employed sociologically, an application Kuhn regretted in retrospect. ‘Disciplinary matrix’ became his preferred locution for the shared commitments defining a specific scientific community.

On the other hand (and in a stricter sense), paradigm denoted only one element in that constellation: a model or an example that could ‘replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science’. In this second, ‘deeper’ understanding of the term, paradigms were equated with the concrete problem-solutions (the example Kuhn gives is Newton’s Second Law of Motion, typically written f = ma) enshrined in a scientific community’s textbooks, lectures and laboratory exercises that scientists learned to apply in their research.

More here.

Let This Darkness be a Belltower

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes
more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am

by Rainer Maria Rilke
from Poetic Outlaws

Geoffrey Engelstein in Nautilus:

One of the primary motivators of human behavior is avoiding regret. Before the legendary behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky formalized prospect theory and loss aversion, they believed that regret avoidance was at the root of the human behaviors they were studying. However, they learned that there are behaviors that regret avoidance could not explain and were led to a broader picture.

Let’s take a look at a simple game that sheds a bit more light on the psychology of regret.

I have two dice—one red, one white—and two identical cups. I secretly place one die under each cup (no trickery), mix them up, and ask you to select the cup with the red die. You did not see me put the dice under the cups, so you have absolutely no information on which to base your decision. If you make the right choice, I give you $5. If not, you gain nothing.

Go ahead and select one of the cups. Let’s say you pick the cup on the right. I slide it toward you but don’t let you look underneath.

I then ask you if you want to switch to the cup on the left, to change your choice.

Would you switch? The majority of people do not; about 90 percent do not switch, according to studies. Personally, I do this experiment with my class and at other presentations, and I have yet to have someone switch when offered the opportunity.

Why is that? The odds of being right are 50-50, so why not switch?

More here.

David Denby in The New Yorker:

Who here comes from a savage race?” Professor James Shapiro shouted at his students.

“We all come from Africa,” said the one African-American in the class, whom I’ll call Henry, calmly referring to the supposition among most anthropologists that human life originated in sub-Saharan Africa. What Henry was saying was that there are no racial hierarchies among peoples—that we’re all “savages.”

Shapiro smiled. It was not, I thought, exactly the answer he had been looking for, but it was a good answer. Then he was off again. “Are you natural?” he roared at a girl sitting near his end of the seminar table. “What are the constraints for you? What are the rivets? Why are you here getting civilized, reading Lit Hum?”

It was the end of the academic year, and the mood had grown agitated, burdened, portentous. In short, we were reading Joseph Conrad, the final author in Columbia’s Literature Humanities (or Lit Hum) course, one of the two famous “great books” courses that have long been required of all Columbia College undergraduates. Both Lit Hum and the other course, Contemporary Civilization, are devoted to the much ridiculed “narrative” of Western culture, the list of classics, which, in the case of Lit Hum, begins with Homer and ends, chronologically speaking, with Virginia Woolf. I was spending the year reading the same books and sitting in on the Lit Hum classes, which were taught entirely in sections; there were no lectures. At the end of the year, the individual instructors were allotted a week for a free choice. Some teachers chose works by Dostoyevsky or Mann or Gide or Borges. Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar from the Department of English and Comparative Literature (his book “Shakespeare and the Jews” will be published by Columbia University Press in January), chose Conrad.

More here.