Our friend Ori Weisberg at The Forward:

This Saturday marks an important anniversary in Israeli history: 30 years since the First Intifada.

For years leading up to the Intifada, which literally means dustup or uprising in Arabic, Israel had maintained Gaza as a pool of cheap labor. Tension had been building since 1985, when Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s “iron fist” policy resulted in the deportation of Palestinian nationalists. Things came to a head on December 9th, 1987, when an IDF vehicle collided with a truck in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza city, killing four Gazans. Sustained popular protests spread quickly across Gaza and the West Bank, featuring rock throwing and molotov cocktails.

At that time, I was serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. I was between basic training and an infantry squad commander’s course, living on a young kibbutz north of Eilat as a “lone soldier” without family in the country.

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Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books:

Donald Trump’s election last year exposed an insidious politics of celebrity, one in which a redemptive personality is projected high above the slow toil of political parties and movements. As his latest tweets about Muslims confirm, this post-political figure seeks, above all, to commune with his entranced white nationalist supporters. Periodically offering them emotional catharsis, a powerful medium of self-expression at the White House these days, Trump makes sure that his fan base survives his multiple political and economic failures. This may be hard to admit but the path to such a presidency of spectacle and vicarious participation was paved by the previous occupant of the White House.

Barack Obama was the first “celebrity president” of the twenty-first century—“that is,” as Perry Anderson recently pointed out, “a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that,” and for whom “personal popularity” mattered more than the fate of own party and policies.

Public life routinely features such sensations, figures in whom people invest great expectations based on nothing more than a captivation with their radiant personas. Youthful good looks, an unconventional marriage, and some intellectual showmanship helped turn Emmanuel Macron, virtually overnight, into the savior not just of France, but of Europe, too. Until the approval ratings of this dynamic millionaire collapsed, a glamour-struck media largely waived close scrutiny of his neoliberal faith in tax breaks for rich compatriots, and contempt for “slackers.”

Another example is Aung San Suu Kyi who, as a freedom fighter and prisoner of conscience, precluded any real examination of her politics, which have turned out to be abysmally sectarian, in tune with her electoral base among Myanmar’s Buddhist ethnic majority.

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Dom Galeon and Kristin Houser in Futurism:

In May 2017, researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of AutoML, an artificial intelligence (AI) that’s capable of generating its own AIs. More recently, they decided to present AutoML with its biggest challenge to date, and the AI that can build AI created a “child” that outperformed all of its human-made counterparts.

The Google researchers automated the design of machine learning models using an approach called reinforcement learning. AutoML acts as a controller neural network that develops a child AI network for a specific task. For this particular child AI, which the researchers called NASNet, the task was recognizing objects — people, cars, traffic lights, handbags, backpacks, etc. — in a video in real-time.

AutoML would evaluate NASNet’s performance and use that information to improve its child AI, repeating the process thousands of times. When tested on the ImageNet image classification and COCO object detection data sets, which the Google researchers call “two of the most respected large-scale academic data sets in computer vision,” NASNet outperformed all other computer vision systems.

According to the researchers, NASNet was 82.7 percent accurate at predicting images on ImageNet’s validation set. This is 1.2 percent better than any previously published results, and the system is also 4 percent more efficient, with a 43.1 percent mean Average Precision (mAP). Additionally, a less computationally demanding version of NASNet outperformed the best similarly sized models for mobile platforms by 3.1 percent.

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Andy Fitch at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ANDY FITCH: …as we begin to outline Superintelligence’s broader arguments, could you also discuss its dexterous efforts at combining a call to public alarm and a proactive, context-shaping, transdisciplinary (philosophical, scientific, policy-oriented) blueprint for calm, clear, perspicacious decision-making at the highest levels? What types of anticipated and/or desired responses, from which types of readers, shaped your rhetorical calculus for this book?

NICK BOSTROM: I guess the answer is somewhat complex. There was a several-fold objective. One objective was to bring more attention to bear on the idea that if AI research were to succeed in its original ambition, this would be arguably the most important event in all of human history, and could be associated with an existential risk that should be taken seriously.

Another goal was to try to make some progress on this problem, such that after this progress had been made, people could see more easily specific research projects to pursue. It’s one thing to think If machines become superintelligent, they could be very powerful, they could be risky. But where do you go from there? How do you actually start to make progress on the control problem? How could you produce academic research on this topic? So to begin to break down this big problem into smaller problems, to develop the concepts that you need in order to start thinking about this, to do some of that intellectual groundwork was the second objective.

The third objective was just to fill in the picture in general for people who want to have more realistic views about what the future of humanity might look like, so that we can, perhaps, prioritize more wisely the scarce amount of research and attention that focuses on securing our long-term global future.

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Federico Sosa Valle in Notes on Liberty:

In fact, all recent cybernetic innovations are the result of the merging of abstract machines with physical ones: machines that play chess, drive cars, recognize faces, etc.. Since they do not have an autonomous will and the sensory data they produce are determined by their algorithms, whose output, in turn, depends on the limitation of their hardware, people are reluctant to call their capabilities “real intelligence.” Perhaps the reason of that reluctance is that people are expecting automata which accomplish the Cartesian Dualism paradigm of a thinking being.

But what if an automaton enabled with an intelligence superior to ours has already existed and is ruling at least part of our lives? We do not know of any being of that kind, if for a ruling intelligent machine we regard a self-conscious and will-driven one. But the ones who are acquainted with the notion of law as a spontaneous and abstract order will not find any major difficulty to grasp the analogy between the algorithms that form an abstract machine and general and abstract laws that compound a legal system.

The first volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty by Friedrich A. Hayek, subtitled “Norms [Rules] and Order” (1973), is until today the most complete account of the law seen as an autonomous system, which adapts itself to the changes in its environment through a process of negative feedback that brings about marginal changes in its structure.

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Adam Serwer in The Atlantic:

Thirty years ago, nearly half of Louisiana voted for a Klansman, and the media struggled to explain why.

It was 1990 and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, astonished political observers when he came within striking distance of defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, earning 43 percent of the vote. If Johnston’s Republican rival hadn’t dropped out of the race and endorsed him at the last minute, the outcome might have been different.

Was it economic anxiety? The Washington Post reported that the state had “a large working class that has suffered through a long recession.” Was it a blow against the state’s hated political establishment? An editorial from United Press International explained, “Louisianans showed the nation by voting for Duke that they were mad as hell and not going to take it any more.” Was it anti-Washington rage? A Loyola University pollster argued, “There were the voters who liked Duke, those who hated J. Bennett Johnston, and those who just wanted to send a message to Washington.”

What message would those voters have been trying to send by putting a Klansman into office?

“There’s definitely a message bigger than Louisiana here,” Susan Howell, then the director of the Survey Research Center at the University of New Orleans, told the Los Angeles Times.

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Shabbir Kazmi and Mariam Karrar in Dawn:

The past June in Karachi, temperatures soared to 47.2 degrees Celsius (117 degrees Fahrenheit) with 94 percent humidity, resulting in scores of deaths caused from heatstrokes alone. These catastrophic statistics are equal to any crisis the city of Karachi has witnessed.

As architects, a recurring question for us is why our buildings aren’t designed to withstand harsh temperatures. More importantly, why do we fail to capitalise on our natural resources, such as the sea breeze and subtropical conditions that nurture greenery and are favourable to our thermal comfort? In fact, due to the lack of ventilation and poor insulation, building interiors are comparable to a hot oven, baking its residents in the hot climate.Our built environment fails, both at the level of choice of material and design, which results in buildings that are not suited for the health and well-being of the end-users.

With this constant query in mind, while visiting a friend at the University of Karachi (KU) campus, we toured the Mahmud Hussain Library (See photograph 1) and the surrounding buildings for the first time. We were fortunate to see the architectural works and perhaps one of the best design solutions for the harsh climate, designed by a master of Modern Architecture, Michael Ecochard (March 11, 1905 — May 24, 1985). In line with the great Modernists of his time, Ecochard was the contemporary of the great architect Le Corbusier and followed very similar Modernist principles. Commissioned by the Government of Pakistan, Ecochard was the original architect for the Karachi University master plan and campus buildings from the 1950s.

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Claire Lowdon in The White Review:

‘Before we met,’ writes Maggie Nelson to her lover Harry Dodge, the addressee of The Argonauts, ‘I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained – inexpressibly! – in the expressed.’ Nelson’s book, its intricate accretion of short philosophical observations, anecdote and commentary, belongs to a genre that we could call the piecemeal portrait. (Nelson herself might favour the word ‘prismatic’.) The apparent self-effacement of this indirect approach to autobiography is in line with modern sensibilities. As the smooth omniscience of the nineteenth century novelist gave way to the unreliable, fragmentary narratives of today, so the idea of straightforwardly ‘telling’ a life now feels at best staid, at worst existentially misguided. ‘The form is not “memoirs” but mémoires, fables from a time about a few people inside it,’ writes veteran-of-the-genre Adam Gopnik in The Stranger’s Gate. There’s a charming shrug here: oh, it’s not really about me, it’s just a bunch of stories I threw together. But of course part of the idea is that ‘me’ will emerge anyway. Join the dots. Or rather, intuit the inexpressible shape lurking in the interstices.

Alice George in Smithsonian:

For many Americans of a certain age, the film that provides the singular most refreshing dose of 1970s nostalgia is director John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever. In its most memorable scene, John Travolta, as the smooth-talking Tony Manero, swaggers down the street to the sounds of the Bee Gees’ incomparable hit “Stayin’ Alive;” and the audience travels back to when the four-year-old Twin Towers in the Manhattan skyline evoked only American success with no hint of tragedy. Powered by music, machismo and masterful footwork, the gritty low-budget film lured crowds to theatres, record stores and discos after it premiered 40 years ago this month. At a cost of just $6 million, this new incarnation of the traditional movie musical grossed more than $100 million domestically and $300 million worldwide. In fact, the film earned $31 million in its first 31 days. It was the third highest seller that year, surpassed only by George Lucas’s Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And the soundtrack, which sold 30 million copies, topped the album charts for six months and set a record as the biggest-selling album ever. (Michael Jackson’s Thriller subsequently broke that record.)

Saturday Night Fever’s long life in the American consciousness springs “primarily from a brilliant soundtrack that connected vast audiences with infectious, anthemic and imminently danceable hooks,” says the Smithsonian’s John Troutman, curator of American music at the National Museum of American History. “The inner tension that Travolta captured in Tony Manero’s underdog, working-class character—his stunted, bleak and occasionally dark emotional development weighing against his earnest aspirations and locally celebrated triumphs on the dance floor—came across to audiences throughout the country as not only relatable, but intensely believable,” says Troutman.

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Stephen Yenser in Poetry Daily:

As the engaged reader discovers gradually and with increasing pleasure, Robert Pinsky’s new volume of poems, richly titled At the Foundling Hospital, delicately but persistently works in two ways at once. At the same time that it is a series of different kinds of what we casually call “lyric” poems, it is a constellation of musings on a number of subtly related motifs. Among these motifs are foundlings, slaves, ancestors, musical instruments, shells, threads and other filaments and filiations, names – all surprisingly reticulated terms, a little, ultimately uncontainable lexical tribe – and (almost inevitably) language itself, especially in its etymological dimension.

Pinsky is a master of his trade, one of the few living American poets who deserves that appellation. His individual compositions are prosodically firm and limber, whether in loose blank verse, longer six-to-seven-foot lines in distichs, tercets of four to five feet, or slant-rhymed couplets. He can craft a narrative, taut (“Radioman”) or vagarious (“The City”), invent a song (“The Orphan Quadrille,” “Genesis”), deftly translate a traditional sonnet (“Góngora: Life Is Brief,” after the Spanish poet’s “Menos solicitó veloz saeta”), make a mercurial dramatic monologue (“Mixed Chorus”), eulogize a kind of musician (“Horn”), relate local history (“The Foundling Tokens”), and noodle on locutions (“Improvisation on Yiddish”). His signature mode is meditation that incorporates thoughtful, often aphoristic, and sometimes humorous observation on matters of general interest, crisp description, and vivid anecdote – and conjures Horace in its perspicuity and geniality.

The result of the motifs binding this variety together is insistently a text, a term that stems from the Indo-European etymon teks-, which signified a fabrication, a thing made of fabric, specifically of wattle, comprising tree branches interlaced with boughs, tendrils, twigs, and the like (to be covered with clay and used as a shelter or domicile), fashioned in the first place by an ax.

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Michael Brooks in the Times Literary Supplement:

Despite devising both the defining equation and the defining thought experiment of quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger was never comfortable with what he helped to create. His “Schrödinger’s Cat” paradox, published in 1935, was an attempt to expose the flaws in the physics that flowed from his eponymous equation. And yet, that cat – both dead and alive – has become an icon of quantum physics rather than a warning against its shortcomings.

Schrödinger was born in Vienna in 1887. He was an exemplary schoolboy, displaying a startling ability in all his classes. He taught himself English and French in his spare time, and nurtured a love of classical literature. By the time he enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1906 he was focused on physics, but still took the time to learn a great deal of biology, which informed his later work – contributions that were cited as inspirational by the discoverers of DNA.

The work for which he is remembered requires some context. As with all science, an individual’s contributions to physics rarely occur in a vacuum, and a host of other figures set the stage for Schrödinger’s entrance. His seminal work began with his attempts to resolve a central mystery of the nascent quantum theory. Max Planck had discovered that the precise nature of the radiation emitted by hot objects could only be explained if the energy of the radiation came in discrete lumps that came to be known as quanta. Planck found this somewhat distasteful, as there was (and still is) no explanation for why this should be so. Einstein subsequently proved this energy quantization to be real with his discovery of the photoelectric effect, for which he won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics.

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Geoffrey Pullum in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

It was a spring evening in 1993 at Stanford; Fred Dretske (1932–2013) was introducing the man who would deliver that year’s Immanuel Kant Lectures, a distinguished philosopher of the cognitive and linguistic sciences from Rutgers: Jerry Fodor. Dretske spoke with warm approval about the intensity of Fodor’s philosophical views. He doesn’t just disagree with doctrines like empiricism, pragmatism, relativism, and holism, Dretske smilingly explained; he hates them.

To welcoming applause, Fodor stepped up to the podium, scowling. As he spread his papers on the lectern he muttered into the microphone: “I’d hate them a lot more if they were true.”

It was a classic deadpan ad lib, humorous yet thought-provoking, and indicative of the passion that animated all of Fodor’s philosophical writing. I remembered it clearly from two dozen years ago when his death was announced last week (he died on November 29). It was sad news. The philosophical world was a richer, more bracing, and more unpredictable place with Jerry Fodor in it.

“I hate relativism,” he once said, speaking of the then resurgent view that your truth may not be the same as my truth. “I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats.” That’s Jerry. No other philosopher writes like that. I am so sorry that he’s gone.

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Lydia Shoup at Ploughshares:

It’s been 100 years since the Russian Revolution of 1917 toppled Tsarist rule, leading to the socialist system that would come to be known as the Soviet Union. Boris Pasternak is best known for writing Doctor Zhivago, a novel which documents these years of national upheaval through the eyes of a poet and physician. Like his eponymous character, Pasternak was famous in his native Russia for his verses.

The end of the novel sees the fictional Zhivago’s poems laid out for readers. Thematically, they cover love, death, and religion. The most moving are the ones that relate to Zhivago specifically, often written in first person. These poems communicate the disorienting effects of the revolution and its aftermath on the daily lives of Russian citizens through the experience of Zhivago and his beloved Lara.

On paper, these poems are neat, brief, four-line stanzas with simple titles like “White Night,” “Autumn,” “A Winter Night,” “Separation,” and “Dawn.” Many of them serve a practical purpose—to chart narrative events in the novel such as Lara’s leaving Zhivago and the town of Varykino and the doctor’s subsequent hours spent alone there, writing and longing for her return.

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Julian Bell at the NYRB:

The sweet-tempered and hugely popular productions of Hockney’s later twenties and thirties, epitomized by that 1971 London interior with the cat and the carpet, tilt back toward descriptive decorum. In the later galleries of the retrospective, the mood continues to oscillate. Between the ages of sixty-eight and seventy-six Hockney devoted much of his energy to rural scenes from his native Yorkshire. On the one hand, the venture led to pounding melodramas such as the sixteen-foot-wide May Blossom on the Roman Road (2009), with its gigantiform shrubs and super-vibrant hues, a Carl Orff orchestration of a placid English backwater. On the other, a 2013 sequence of drawings of lanes through a woodland are virtuoso solos of steady, quiet lyricism—charcoal’s whole gamut of streaking, stippling, and stumping attuned to the interplay of ground, foliage, and sunlight.

There is an inspiring buoyancy to Hockney’s act. Here is an artist who reckons he can get marks to perform however he pleases. His force of attention seldom slackens, and there will always be more to do. Picturing is his element, stretching in all directions. Each picture, in his own words, is “an account of looking at something,” but each has “a limit to what it can see” and thus tantalizes with the prospect of further viewpoints. Hockney might here be talking about the works of which this retrospective is composed, but he might equally be talking about the units of which they themselves are composed, the variegated patches of attentiveness.

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Hernan Diaz at The Paris Review:

Born in Kent in 1858, H. W. Fowler was one of our greatest lexicographical geniuses. He led an ascetic life: he was a runner and a swimmer (lakes, rivers, ocean); he lived with his brother in relative seclusion on the island of Guernsey; and he held—and proved—that anyone should be able to subsist on a hundred pounds a year. He devoted his life to literature: he won the fifth prize in the immensely popular competition with which the Encyclopedia Britannica celebrated its tenth edition; he rediscovered and translated Lucian; he took on, almost single-handedly, the herculean project of boiling down the entire Oxford Dictionary to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which is, to this day, one of the most widely used reference books in the language. He was a politely outspoken atheist who lost his teaching position for being unwilling to prepare his students for confirmation. During World War I, he refused to collaborate on the recruiting campaign to send young men into harm’s way while he remained safe. Instead, he lied about his age (forty-four), got enlisted, and was sent to the front. After a rather hermitic life, he got happily married when he was in his seventies and died three years after his wife, in 1933. In the words of Ernest Gowers, “The simplicity of his habits has a counterpart in the simplicity of diction he preaches.”

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Maggie Gray in More Intelligent Life:

Michelle Grayson in Nature:

The transition from fossil fuels is well under way. Each year sees an increase in the amount of electricity generated from renewable sources, including solar, wind and biomass. Changing where we get our energy from has numerous impacts on society, affecting job opportunities, infrastructure and the quality of our air and water resources. But this is not humanity’s first energy transition — society has experienced profound change time and again as new energy sources have risen to dominance.

The driving forces behind our present energy transition are diverse. Although many view low-carbon energy as a way to mitigate climate change, individuals and communities will often move for reasons of business and self-determination. Some people — such as those with no connection to the electrical grid — see little option but renewables. And there are economic benefits: it is likely that we have been grossly underestimating the real cost of fossil fuels. Will the latest energy transition be a success? It might depend on whether green electricity can make itself indispensable to the growing knowledge economy. Inequalities in energy use between the wealthiest and poorest members of society must also be addressed, and difficult decisions on power-plant placement taken. The current energy transition should not be viewed through just one lens. It is not merely an issue of technology, or resource availability. It is about history, democracy, economics and society.

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Sven Birkerts in Literary Hub:

I learned a good deal about poets and poetry from Joseph Brodsky, whose classes I audited in the 1970s in Ann Arbor and whose opinion on most anything I took as holy writ in those days. Joseph was a great one for naming and ranking poets, and much of our conversation consisted of him delivering his various verdicts. “Miroslav Holub is terrific, ya?” Or “Yevtushenko, he’s just shit.” So-and-so was in fact a good poet, “too bad he had to get a Bly-job.” I was all ears, and tuned in closely whenever a new name appeared on his list. “Derek Walcott,” he said one day, “Caribbean poet—look him out [sic].” And I, ever dutiful, did just that, picking up Sea Grapes and Another Life. I remember liking both, and I also remember pushing myself to like them still more so I could be adequate to Brodsky’s esteem. I certainly felt Walcott’s power and freshness, and got that this was poetry with a unique rhythmic surge. But at that point I hadn’t fully connected with it. Some time later, after I moved to Cambridge, I thought I might try to get closer by writing about the man. I decided to set Walcott’s work and worldview against that of his fellow Caribbean writer V.S. Naipaul. The two had been friends in their youth but had since taken radically divergent paths, Naipaul dismissing his roots, Walcott putting his at the core of his poems and plays. I had heard there was friction.

When I finished, I showed the essay to Brodsky, who seemed to like it well enough. He made some noise about showing it to Walcott—the two had by this point become fast friends—but if he did, I never heard anything about it.

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