John Pavlus in Quanta:

He began studying machine learning, eventually fusing it with his doctoral research in astrophysics at Princeton University.

Nearly a decade later, Cranmer (now at the University of Cambridge) has seen AI begin to transform science, but not nearly as much as he envisions. Single-purpose systems like AlphaFold can generate scientific predictions with revolutionary accuracy, but researchers still lack “foundation models” designed for general scientific discovery. These models would work more like a scientifically accurate version of ChatGPT, flexibly generating simulations and predictions across multiple research areas. In 2023, Cranmer and more than two dozen other scientists launched the Polymathic AI(opens a new tab) initiative to begin developing these foundation models.

The first step, Cranmer said, is equipping the model with the scientific skills that still elude most state-of-the-art AI systems.

More here.

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Adam Garfinkle at Quillette:

Reality can sometimes seem even stranger than fiction, and the second Trump administration has done what many people supposed to be six impossible things within the first month of its tenure. The upshot is that we are now living in a post-NATO world where black is white, up is down, friends are foes (and vice versa), and once-unthinkable impossibilities have become our new reality.

The first impossibility accomplished by the new administration saw Donald J. Trump and J.D. Vance win the only two elected offices of the US executive branch with a campaign of wild lies about the November 2020 election and what happened at the Capitol on 6 January 2021. After the inauguration, they turned those lies into loyalty tests required of nominees to plum jobs in the administration, including on the National Security Council staff and the Policy Planning staff at the State Department.

Second, on his first day in office, the president used his pardon power to release a loyal and violence-prone cohort of 1,600 insurrectionists.

Third, the White House won Senate confirmation of manifestly unsuitable nominees to head executive-branch departments and agencies, many of whom are openly hostile to the stolidly apolitical missions of their own offices.

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Anne Carson interviewed at the Paris Review:

When people ask me, “How are Canadians different from Americans?” I say, “Canadians have one characteristic: they’re polite, but wrong.” All the time, polite but wrong.

“Wrong” I put in the title because, well, because of the Canadian thing. And also, something you always feel in academic life is that you’re wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical. Getting tenure depends on XYZ being “not wrong” every time you speak. So it’s kind of a mentality I was interested in disabling.

It’s something Simone Weil says in an essay she has about contradiction, because people find contradiction in philosophical texts so perplexing, and she specializes in contradiction. She says it’s a useful mental event, because it loosens the mind. And once you can loosen, you can go on to think other things or wider things or the things underneath where you were. It’s just suddenly a different landscape. And that loosening, I think, is what wrongness allows in.

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Jared Pollen in The Point:

Michel de Montaigne is often upheld as a model of the examined life. In her introduction to What Do I Know? (the latest selection of Montaigne’s essays, translated by David Coward and published in 2023 by Pushkin Press), Yiyun Li writes: “For me, his writing serves as a reminder, a prompt, even, a mandate: a regular meditation on selfhood, like daily yoga, is a healthy habit.” And in M.A. Screech’s introduction to his translation of the Essays, he describes it as “one of Europe’s great bedside books.” Alain de Botton likewise included Montaigne in his book The Consolations of Philosophy as a helpful guide for thinking about the problem of self-esteem, and in his book The School of Life, he writes that the Essays “amounted to a practical compendium of advice on helping us to know our fickle minds, find purpose, connect meaningfully with others and achieve intervals of composure and acceptance.”

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Mother Nature is perhaps the most powerful generative “intelligence.” With just four genetic letters—A, T, C, and G—she has crafted the dazzling variety of life on Earth.

Can generative AI expand on her work?

A new algorithm, Evo 2, trained on roughly 128,000 genomes—9.3 trillion DNA letter pairs—spanning all of life’s domains, is now the largest generative AI model for biology to date. Built by scientists at the Arc Institute, Stanford University, and Nvidia, Evo 2 can write whole chromosomes and small genomes from scratch. It also learned how DNA mutations affect proteins, RNA, and overall health, shining light on “non-coding” regions, in particular. These mysterious sections of DNA don’t make proteins but often control gene activity and are linked to diseases.

The team has released Evo 2’s software code and model parameters to the scientific community for further exploration. Researchers can also access the tool through a user-friendly web interface. With Evo 2 as a foundation, scientists may develop more specific AI models. These could predict how mutations affect a protein’s function, how genes operate differently across cell types, or even help researchers design new genomes for synthetic biology. Evo marks “a key moment in the emerging field of generative biology” because machines can now read, write, and “think” in the language of DNA, said study author Patrick Hsu in an Arc Institute blog.

More here.

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Black Silk

She was cleaning—there is always
that to do—when she found,
at the top of the closet, his old
silk vest. She called me
to look at it, unrolling it carefully
like something live
might fall out. Then we spread it
on the kitchen table and smoothed
the wrinkles down, making our hands
heavy until its shape against Formica
came back and the little tips
that would have pointed to his pockets
lay flat. The buttons were all there.
I held my arms out and she
looped the wide armholes over
them. “That’s one thing I never
wanted to be,” she said, “a man.”
I went into the bathroom to see
how I looked in the sheen and
sadness. Wind chimes
off-key in the alcove. Then her
crying so I stood back in the sink-light
where the porcelain had been staring. Time
to go to here, I thought, with that
other mind, and stood still.

by Tess Gallagher
from Willingly
Graywolf Press 1984

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Jeannette Cooperman in The Common Reader:

Tom Wolfe’s books are being reissued, in homage, by Picador. But he would never put the news so blandly.

WHOOSH! Off the press they come, slicked bright and hot, ready to be grabbed by woke undergrads in Lululemon who’ve never heard of him but have a vague sense—floated in between the clicks swipe-lefts and scrolled TikToks—that he might be an Influencer….

Ach. Wolfe would write his blurb far better, sweeping angst and desire into trends we have yet to name. He grasped the various ways we see and think, transcribed our slang, and spelled out the sounds that surround us. With a few choice words, he could nail a scene, a trend, or a decade. Sharply aware of class divisions, subcultures, and self-anointed elites, he pitted us against each other with such wit, we barely minded.

I have spent my adult life grateful to this man for loosening and livening up journalism, freeing us from that damned “inverted pyramid” (which frontloads all the facts in an ugly crush on the assumption that no one will read to the end) and the obligatory “nut graf,” placed early to tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em. He preferred suspense. An elegant trickster, he bent journalism toward the rhythms of literature.

Now I am wondering if, in the process, he killed democracy.

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Ben Orlin in Science News:

Here, count with me: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, T, 11, 12 … Oh, what’s that? You write ten with “zero”? Fair enough. Zero, we have been told, is the foundation of our number system. Mathematician Tobias Dantzig once called it “a development without which the progress of modern science, industry or commerce is inconceivable.” But that changed in 1947, when mathematician James Foster laid out a system that works like ours in every way — except that it lacks nothing. He called it “a number system without a zero-symbol.”

Think of our familiar system as a series of boxes. You can leave up to nine loose objects unboxed. But if a tenth object arrives, you must pack the ten into a box. When this happens, we use zero to denote an absence of loose objects. The numeral 30 means three boxes of ten, and no additional objects.

This principle continues. For example, in 407, the zero signifies that there are no loose tens; they’ve all been boxed up as hundreds.

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Andrew Gelman and Andrew King at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The publication process in social science is broken. Articles in prestigious journals use flawed data, employ questionable research practices, and reach illogical conclusions. Sometimes doubts over research become public, such as in the case of honesty scholar Francesca Gino, but most of the time research malpractice goes unacknowledged and uncorrected. Yet scholars know it is there, hiding below the surface, leading to frustration and cynicism. Research “has become a game of publication and not science,” as one professor wrote in response to a survey on research practices.

The current focus on the “game” of publishing encourages authors and outlets to search for surprising and interesting results rather than those that are scientifically justified. Journals have published outlandish studies (a 2007 paper claimed that attractive parents are 26 percent more likely to have girls, a 2011 study found evidence for extrasensory perception, etc.), as well as costly and even dangerous studies (a paper linking vaccines to autism in 1998, a 2022 meta-analysis of “nudges” drastically overestimating their effects, etc.). These papers gained wide publicity and influence, partly via the credibility provided by peer review. Fortunately, all became so well known that they were eventually rebutted or corrected. More insidious are those cases of flawed research that remain hidden from popular outlets and thus require correction by the journals themselves.

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Becca Rothfeld at Bookforum:

DON DIEGO DE ZAMA works as a counselor for the provincial Gobernador, but what this post entails is difficult to discern, because he takes great pains to do anything and everything but his job. Instead of performing his duties, he seethes, nurses grudges, squanders his money, erupts into paroxysms of rage, and lusts after women he does not succeed in courting. Occasionally, he performs the odd bureaucratic task or half-heartedly meets with a petitioner, but his true vocation is resentment. He is an Americano—a white man and an officer of the Spanish crown who was born in Latin America, for which reason he cannot aspire to the promotions or privileges afforded his Spanish-born colleagues. At most, he can hope for a transfer to a more central Latin American city and a reunion with his wife and sons, who remain in a distant part of the viceroyalty. In the meantime, he victimizes his mixed-race and Indigenous subordinates, loses his temper, and waits. “My career was stagnating in a post that was, it had been implied from the start, only a stopgap appointment,” he groans. In the first scene of the book, he spots a monkey corpse floating in the water by the docks without drifting further down the river and immediately identifies himself with it: “There we were: ready to go and not going.”

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Alex Clark in The Guardian:

It starts with a lump on the neck, noticed while shaving and briefly ignored; progresses via a bewilderment of bureaucratic processes to a “gloriously jolly radiologist” dispatching him for a biopsy; and quickly, although not without the delays and mishaps of a painfully overstretched system, lands up with comedian Mark Steel being handed a cancer diagnosis. When Steel asks the consultant whether his tumour is likely to prove fatal, the doctor replies “Touch wood”, and then actually touches some wood; at least, his patient notes, he was being professional about it. Maybe if the cancer had spread, Steel reflects, “they’d offer a more extreme approach and get me to pick up a penny and pass a black cat”.

Cancer is common, and accounts of experiencing its arrival, treatment and – if you’re fortunate – aftermath are hardly rare. But this is not to suggest memoir fatigue. People, and illness itself, are infinitely various, and each chronicle reveals something different in between what have become the tropes of the genre: the shock of the news, the emotional and physical reserves required to endure treatment, the almost inevitably altered perspective on one’s own life and on more existential questions of life and death themselves.

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Manuel Antonio Córdoba at the LARB:

THE YEAR IS 2008. David Foster Wallace has just died by suicide and every Spanish-language writer is rushing to their blog to post a heartfelt obituary for their favorite North American novelist. Vicente Luis Mora: “I wonder if Wallace will become the Kurt Kobain of North American fiction.” Alberto Fuguet: “Perhaps being a writer is, in fact, a dangerous profession.” Luna Miguel: “Today I mourn my boyfriend’s favorite writer. I have never read him.” In the days and months that followed, David Foster Wallace’s dour face monopolized half a dozen Spanish literary supplements, the journal Quimera devoted a dossier to his legacy, Rodrigo Fresán multiplied his condolences between two countries and their respective cultural magazines (Página 12 and Letras Libres), and Random House Mondadori reprinted and sold several runs of their translation of Infinite Jest (1996).

It was the start of a hunt for the Spanish-language David Foster Wallace.

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

A slimy barrier lining the brain’s blood vessels could hold the key to shielding the organ from the harmful effects of ageing, according to a study in mice. The study showed that this oozy barrier deteriorates with time, potentially allowing harmful molecules into brain tissue and sparking inflammatory responses. Gene therapy to restore the barrier reduced inflammation in the brain and improved learning and memory in aged mice. The work was published today in Nature¹.

The finding shines a spotlight on a cast of poorly understood molecules called mucins that coat the interior of blood vessels throughout the body and give mucus its slippery texture, says Carolyn Bertozzi, a Nobel-prizewinning chemist at Stanford University in California and a lead author of the study. “Mucins play a lot of interesting roles in the body,” she says. “But until recently, we didn’t have the tools to study them. They were invisible.”

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Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in Polycrisis:

This month, Trump entered into formal talks with Russia—without Kyiv’s consent—to settle the war in Ukraine, largely on Putin’s terms. And on Friday, speaking with Zelensky in the Oval Office, he and his Vice President JD Vance performed as imperial overlords dressing down their upstart vassal. For Europeans, the once unthinkable prospect of an American departure from Europe has become a palpable possibility. The question on their minds: Can the European Union survive without the transatlantic military alliance that was famously created seventy-five years ago to, in the words of its founding Secretary General, “keep the Germans down, the Russians out, and the Americans in”?

The apparent collapse of Atlanticism as the ruling ideology of European elites has been swift. Germany’s Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz, a committed Atlanticist—coming from stints at Blackrock and corporate law firms to promote the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership—was initially willing to appease the US after Trump’s win in November (offering to buy more American LNG and weapons). But JD Vance’s speech in Munich this month marked a turning point, with Merz denouncing it as an act of electoral interference that was “no less drastic, dramatic, and ultimately no less brazen, than the intervention that we have seen from Moscow.” Following the CDU’s persuasive win at the polls on Monday, Merz cast the US as an enemy of the European project. He urged the Union to build up its own defence capabilities, warning that it was now “five minutes to midnight for Europe.”

Europe is now fully and self-consciously security-constrained. This reality collides with two other foundational constraints. Europe’s self-imposed fiscal limits are infamous (we have argued they leave the continent poorer, weaker, and less green); and its energy constraints exploded into view following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as gas prices soared and spread throughout the economy.

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Isabella M. Weber in The Nation:

This week we saw the electoral consequences of a failed economic paradigm: The parties comprising the market fundamentalist conservatives and right-wingers achieved a landslide victory in Germany. The CDU/CSU, led by the former head of Blackrock Germany, Friedrich Merz, won 28.5 percent of the vote and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right party of former Goldman Sachs banker, Alice Weidel, won 20.8 percent. What had started as Germany’s “progress coalition” of social democrats, greens, and liberals failed. There were two key turning points: In 2022, the energy crisis in the wake of the Ukraine war hit the country hard, and free-market dogmatism delayed the response to price explosions. In 2023, economists who had long argued that markets were perfectly capable of handling the energy crisis and no major government measures were needed proclaimed that there was “not even a recession.” Without an emergency situation, it appeared as if there was no need to suspend the debt brake, a stringent fiscal rule that tied the government’s hands. Germany did enter a recession, and the economic crisis ultimately brought down the government.

The reasons behind this result? A loss of confidence in the government, a bitter migration debate, the loss of real wages in recent years, and an ongoing economic crisis. In particular, frustration with economic conditions strengthened the far-right AfD. Because when the economic pie starts shrinking, the struggles over how to divide it escalate.

For example, 37 percent of AfD voters and 18 percent of CDU/CSU voters assessed their own economic situation as poor. Tellingly, voters of left-wing and left-liberal parties are significantly less concerned about their economic situation. Even more serious: 85 percent of AfD voters believe that things are not fair in Germany. The overall economic situation was also considered poor by 96 percent of AfD voters and 90 percent of CDU/CSU voters. Here, too, the figures are significantly higher than for the other parties.

More here.

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