Farrah Jarral in The Guardian:

It was over schnitzel and mash that my friend’s Bavarian grandparents decided to call me a “black devil”, chuckling all the while. Breaded chicken has since been my madeleine, taking me back to racially charged moments I’ve not known quite how to interpret. Is it really racist if they didn’t mean to be rude? What if they have dementia? And if racism = prejudice + power, was being called a black devil while I choked down some potatoes even that big a deal, given that I felt in no way disempowered in the company of my tiny, elderly hosts?

In his succinct and bingeable book The Science of Racism, professor of social psychology Keon West begins by acknowledging that society doesn’t agree on even the most basic aspects of racism, let alone its finer points. Indeed, roughly half of Britons don’t believe minorities face more discrimination than white people in various areas of life. Yet far from being a set of hazy, unanswerable philosophical questions, many of the unknowns about racism are empirically testable, especially if researchers design clever studies.

More here.

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Patricia Lockwood in London Revie of Books:

Tell me​ your mystic and I will tell you who you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and with such evident trust, that he does not even realise it rhymes.

I picked up Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism because I wanted to read it. A survey of historical mystics, examined through the lenses of writers such as Anne Carson and Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot? Sketches of Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Christina of Markyate, Christina the Astonishing, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, Marie of the Incarnation and Madame Guyon – what could overlap more completely with my interests? Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David Bowie; this must mean something. But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy.

More here.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

The dream of a universal AI interpreter just got a bit closer. This week, tech giant Meta released a new AI that can almost instantaneously translate speech in 101 languages as soon as the words tumble out of your mouth.

AI translators are nothing new. But they generally work best with text and struggle to transform spoken words from one language to another. The process is usually multistep. The AI first turns speech into text, translates the text, and then converts it back to speech. Though already useful in everyday life, these systems are inefficient and laggy. Errors can also sneak in at each step. Meta’s new AI, dubbed SEAMLESSM4T, can directly convert speech into speech. Using a voice synthesizer, the system translates words spoken in 101 languages into 36 others—not just into English, which tends to dominate current AI interpreters. In a head-to-head evaluation, the algorithm is 23 percent more accurate than today’s top models—and nearly as fast as expert human interpreters. It can also translate text into text, text into speech, and vice versa.

More here.

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Nadia Ghent at the LARB:

“THE MONTE DE PIEDAD [a pawnshop] is run like a bank, big, efficient, and clean,” Mavis Gallant writes in her diary in 1952 soon after arriving in Madrid from Montréal. “I part with my typewriter for fifteen hundred pesetas. It turns out that in this country it is the most valuable thing I own.” Gallant, ex-journalist, expatriate Canadian, is forced to choose between writing and starvation. She has left the familiarity of her North American hometown for the uncertainty of a postwar Europe struggling to return to the 20th century, the place where she intends to write fiction unfettered by assumptions about her ability to support herself as a writer. She is expected to fail, a woman alone without husband, family, or money. Still, she is intent on bowing to no one, least of all to the chorus of literary gatekeepers who believe women only want to write about cooking. She is so hungry that she faints in the street.

And yet, she has the confidence to hock the means of her livelihood, her typewriter, knowing that a market exists in the United States for her sharply drawn, realist short stories.

more here.

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Part of Eve’s Discussion

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, it was still like that, only
all the time

by Marie Howe
from New American Poets
David R. Godine Publisher, Boston, 1991

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Madison Smartt Bell at The American Scholar:

Forty years ago, most white Americans had no idea that, hard on the heels of the American and French revolutions, an enslaved population on a Caribbean island had claimed its freedom by force of arms and founded a new Black nation called Haiti. Today, Haitian revolutionary studies is an overcrowded field. Researchers have combed through acres of hard-to-find and often drastically disorganized archives, not only in Haiti and France but also in other European and Caribbean countries, and made their contents a lot more orderly and accessible than they used to be. Still, reconstructing the profile of even a fairly well-known individual from the revolutionary period can be something like deducing a whole dinosaur from a couple of toenails and teeth—a problem that confronts Marlene Daut in the writing of her exhaustive and sometime exhausting biography of Henry Christophe, the onetime king of Haiti.

more here.

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Ariel Dorfman at Literary Hub:

It was in a trattoria on the Piazza Navona in early April of 1974 that for the first but not the last time I heard Gabriel García Márquez refuse to even contemplate turning his masterpiece, Cien Aňos de Soledad, into a film.

Gabo—as his friends called him—was in Rome as one of the vice-presidents of the Second Russell Tribunal convened to denounce human rights violations in Latin America, so the conversation that evening was basically political. But towards the end, a question was broached by the illustrious Brazilian director, Glauber Rocha. Everyone else at the table went quiet—it was a star-studded gathering, the Argentine author Julio Cortázar, the legendary Chilean artist Roberto Matta, the exiled Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and his white haired wife, María Teresa León, who had sworn at some point during the evening that she would enter Madrid on a white horse, totally naked, as soon as Franco died.

None of us expected the vehement reaction of the Colombian novelist, usually so softspoken. “Never!” Gabo exclaimed. “To synthesize that story of seven generations of Buendías, the whole history of my country and all of Latin America, really of humanity, impossible. Only the gringos have the resources for that sort of film. I’ve already received offers: they propose an epic, two hours, three hours long. And in English! Imagine Charlton Heston pretending he’s an unknown, mythical Colombian in a fake jungle.” And added a definitive, “Ni muerto!”

Which could be translated as “Over my dead body” but better rendered as “Not even after I’m dead!”

More here.

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Bernard Marr in Forbes:

What makes agentic AI truly revolutionary is its architecture. While generative AI excels at processing and producing content based on patterns in its training data, agentic systems incorporate sophisticated planning modules, memory systems, and decision-making frameworks that allow them to maintain context and pursue objectives over time. They can break down complex tasks into manageable steps, prioritize actions, and even recognize when their current approach isn’t working and needs adjustment.

We’re beginning to see the first signs of convergence between generative and agentic capabilities in mainstream AI tools. OpenAI’s recent introduction of scheduled tasks in ChatGPT represents an early step in this direction. This feature allows the AI to operate semi-autonomously, performing scheduled actions and maintaining ongoing responsibilities without constant user prompting. While still in its early stages, it points to a future where AI systems combine the creative and analytical capabilities of generative AI with the autonomous decision-making of agentic AI.

More here.

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Niklas Serning in Aeon:

I became a psychotherapist and psychologist to maximise the good I could do in the world. It seemed obvious that helping people by engaging with the root of their suffering would be the most helpful thing to do. I also became a child psychotherapist to address the roots of suffering in childhood, where they seemed to stem. I experienced how deepening into a feeling could transform it, and learned about pre-natal trauma; I even wrote a doctorate on trauma. Now, two decades into my career, I practise, lecture, supervise and write about all of these things, but increasingly I reject everything that I learned. Instead, I practise the art of ‘being for another’, an idea that arose in conversation with my colleague Sophie de Vieuxpont. I’m a mentor, a friend in an asymmetrical friendship, and a sounding board and critical ally assisting people as they go through the complexities, absurdities, devastations and joys of life.

Along the way, over years of practise, I lost faith that awareness was always curative, that resolving childhood trauma would liberate us all, that truly feeling the feelings would allow them to dissipate, in a complex feedback loop of theory and practice.

More here.

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Casanova and Feltus in Scientific American:

When Neandertals were first discovered nearly 170 years ago, the conceptual gap between their lineage and that
of modern humans seemed vast. Initially scientists prejudicially believed that the Neandertals were primitive brutes hardly more intelligent than apes and that their lack of advanced thinking had doomed them to extinction. Since that time, researchers have amassed evidence that they shared many of the cognitive abilities once considered unique to our species, Homo sapiens. They made complex tools, produced staples such as flour, treated their ailments with plant-based medicines, used symbols to communicate and engaged in ritual treatment of their dead.

More here.

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Shayla Love at The New Yorker:

The literature showed insects to be far more sophisticated than one might expect of an automaton. Many have nociceptors that send signals to other parts of the insect brain, such as the central complex (associated with spatial navigation and locomotion) and the mushroom bodies (linked to learning, memory, and sensory integration). Cockroaches have a nervous-system pathway that leads up from the body to the brain and back again. In a 2019 study, researchers exposed cockroaches to a hot stimulus and a neutral stimulus; the neutral stimulus prompted a weaker signal from the body to the brain, and the hot stimulus led the roaches to try and escape. (Unsettlingly, cockroaches without heads responded to the heat but did not try to escape.) A recent genomic study of mantises, which are notorious for eating their mates during and after sex, found genes that code for nociceptive ion channels—proteins that respond to pain.

Gibbons and her colleagues ultimately found “strong evidence for pain” in adult flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, and termites. Such insects did not appear to be at the bottom of a hierarchy of animals; they met six out of eight criteria developed for the Sentience Act, which was more than crustaceans.

more here.

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economy’s tentacles

…….. you may well talk
…….. about economic power
…….. sitting quietly on a chair
…….. watching boat refugees
…….. fall into the sea

but meanwhile
somewhere
beneath that water
and the earth and the places
you sit and stand upon

there is this concealed
event
leading entire groups to despair
destroying many
and making others rich

you can’t
talk about it calmly
because you learned the hard way
and you know
you are part of it
through all its tentacles

by Sonja Prins
from Poetry International

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Catherine Pepinster in The Guardian:

As the first ever memoir by a sitting pope, Hope is a publisher’s dream, with a rich backstory culminating in Francis’s election in 2013. It recounts how, as Jorge Bergoglio, grandchild of Italian immigrants to Argentina, he grew up in a sprawling family, loved football and the tango (which he calls “an emotional, visceral dialogue that comes from afar, from ancient roots”), studied chemistry, then joined the Jesuit order and became a priest. After dallying with Peronism and enduring the Argentinian junta, he became the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires. Then, just as he was planning his retirement, Benedict XVI resigned and he was chosen as his successor.

Any conclave – as those who have watched the recent movie will know – is dramatic, but the 2013 papal election was particularly so. Although Bergoglio came second in 2005 when Benedict XVI was elected, most people had either forgotten or assumed the cardinals would choose someone younger, and not a man from the other side of the world.

But rather than that historic moment, Francis begins with his grandparents and father emigrating from Italy to Argentina in the 1920s, after narrowly avoiding getting on board a ship that subsequently sank.

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Yongyi Min in Nature:

As I sat down to read David Spiegelhalter’s The Art of Uncertainty, much of the world’s focus was on the 2024 US presidential elections. Forecasts flooded news outlets and social media, saying that the race was too close to call. When the results came out — a resounding win for Donald Trump — they laid bare the limitations of predictive models, which are subject to assumptions, uncertainty and shifts in voter behaviour. It was ideal timing, it turned out, for reading a book that emphasizes the importance of humility when dealing with uncertainty and predictions.

Spiegelhalter, a renowned statistician, has crafted a masterful examination of how to understand, measure and communicate uncertainty. His great ability to translate complex statistical concepts into accessible language is fully on display. Drawing from decades of experience, he neatly weaves together historical anecdotes, real-world examples and rigorous statistical analyses to provide a comprehensive overview.

This book asks how we can use data and statistical analysis to make informed decisions in the face of uncertainty. It equips readers with the tools to think critically about risk and chance, enabling them to make better choices in their lives.

More here.

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