Jonathan Clarke at The Hedgehog Review:

Thomas Lynch may be the only major poet-undertaker writing in English, which must count as a surprise. The two professions seem so perfectly aligned—or rather, so hopelessly entwined. Death poetry is almost its own genre in English, filling up the anthologies: Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death”; Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice”; and most famously, Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” Even as our poets ponder birth, beauty, and desire, we expect them to keep the end in view. A major poet who did not wrestle with death would be like a horse who only makes right turns.

As a poet, Lynch prefers the received forms, especially the sonnet. As an undertaker, he is working within received forms, too. In the 2007 PBS Frontline special, “The Undertaking,” set inside his family’s funeral home, he proceeds as judiciously as his late friend, Seamus Heaney, composing a villanelle. We observe Lynch’s meeting with a young couple whose toddler son is terminally ill. They can’t decide whether they want him buried or cremated. “You’ll want to look to your son to guide you,” Lynch tells them. “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do. I promise you. You’ll know what to do.” Lynch seems to be a man to whom others instinctively turn in a crisis. There aren’t many better qualifications for an undertaker—or for that matter, a poet.

More here.

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Alec Nevala-Lee at Asterisk:

In the words of Danny Hillis, the man who conceived the clock in 1989, long before Bezos became involved: “You have to get away from the idea of direct progress and surrender that kind of control in order to find your way.”

According to Hillis — who originally planned to build the clock himself — some of his friends saw the project as a symptom of “a midlife crisis.” Born in 1956, he had written his thesis at MIT on parallel computing, an innovative architecture based on simultaneous calculations by thousands of ordinary microprocessors, and co-founded a supercomputer startup called Thinking Machines. Its most famous product was the Connection Machine, a black cube with blinking red lights that was so photogenic that Steven Spielberg featured it in Jurassic Park.

In 1994, the company went bankrupt. While the Connection Machine worked well for certain applications, like weather modeling, it was hard to program and had trouble attracting commercial clients. For the breakthroughs that Hillis had in mind, he conceded, parallel processing had to improve “by a factor of a thousand, maybe a million.” Hillis had been on the right track, but a decade too early, so perhaps it was unsurprising that he would quit the race to build faster computers,  hoping instead to regain his sense of  deep time.

He had been dreaming about the clock for years, but he first set it down in detail in an essay — later published in Wired — dated February 15, 1995. Noting that society had trouble picturing the far future, he proposed a symbolic object to encourage long-term thinking: “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.” It would keep accurate time for ten millennia, or roughly as long as human civilization had already existed. The musician Brian Eno, who later developed the chimes, named it the Clock of the Long Now.

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Samu Czabán at Psyche:

Among the many consequential decisions judges have to make, they weigh in on parole requests: determining whether an individual will regain freedom or remain confined to a prison cell. Several factors normally play a role in these rulings, such as the risk of recidivism, the severity of the crime and the inmate’s behaviour. However, when a group of researchers analysed the decision-making patterns of Israeli judges, more than a decade ago, they noticed something peculiar. The judges released many people at the beginning of the day. But as the hours passed, they became stricter. As lunchtime approached – and the judges presumably grew hungrier – they barely granted anyone parole. Then, after a meal, they became more lenient again. While the conclusions of this ‘hungry judge’ study have since been critiqued, it prompted further consideration of the extent to which justice might depend on extraneous factors such as food breaks.

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Peter Conrad at The Guardian:

Don’t expect to read Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life with one hand. True, it is subtitled A Sex Memoir, and it hotly reminisces about a few dozen of the 3,000 partners White, who is 85 and still counting, has so far totted up. It does contain some glances at the more esoteric specialities of gay sex, including a scene in which White kneels in an abandoned Manhattan warehouse to imbibe six cans’ worth of warmly recycled beer “from the tap of my date’s microbrewery”. There is also a fortunately terse reference to what in medical shorthand is called a BM. But this coital anthology turns out to be about love and its dreamy spirituality, despite the risque and often risky rutting it describes.

Above all, White’s preoccupation is language, since for him sex initially ignites in the head and is consummated on the page, with bodily pleasure or pain as a merely intermediary stage. The itch of lust, in most of these encounters, soon turns into swooning poetic ardour. “Older queens”, as White says, tutor him in the technical skills that sex requires; to learn about the accompanying emotions, he returns to the Renaissance troubadours, who invented the idea of love in the songs and sonnets they addressed to an inaccessible mistress, “a remote, rather ball-shrinking stand-in for the Virgin Mary”.

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John Carreyou in The New York Times:

The private jet took off from the Caribbean island of Antigua in April carrying three highly combustible tanks of compressed oxygen and a terminally ill cancer patient.

Kim Hudlow had chartered the plane for her husband, David. She crouched by his side on the five-hour journey to Florida, frantically adjusting the valve on one of the oxygen tanks as he struggled to breathe. A doctor had just told her he was dying. She was terrified he wouldn’t survive the flight. It was an abrupt turnaround. Six days earlier, Ms. Hudlow and her husband, who had late-stage esophageal cancer, had arrived on the tropical island full of hope that a novel blood-filtering treatment offered there would save Mr. Hudlow’s life — or at least prolong it. They were among about two dozen families lured to Antigua by a California start-up called ExThera Medical and its secretive billionaire partner, Alan Quasha.

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From Harper’s Magazine:

Smoky Eye Every Step, a painting by Gina Beavers, whose work is included in the exhibition Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 through May 4 at MOCA, in Los Angeles. 

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Small Poems

1.
Silent morning garden,
sudden crash.
No explanation
in the quiet leaves.
One flower nods:
I heard it too.

2.
morning walk
another X
shining in my path
beautiful slime
of slug’s passing

3.
Summer dawn again
twenty years and more are gone
all of a sudden

4.
caught on roof edge
raindrops catch light
each a perfect world
before it falls

5.
me and the begonia
lit from within, lit without
caught in a net of light

6.
White shines high in a tree—
sudden flowers of a climbing vine,
their fragrance not meant for me

by Johanna Jordan
from Small Poems

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Terry Gross at NPR:

Southern California families who have lost everything the in recent wildfires are reckoning with what it means to start over. Writer Pico Iyer’s eerily timed memoir, Aflame: Learning from Silence, speaks to that experience.

In 1990, Iyer was alone in his mother’s house in Santa Barbara when a wildfire swept through the region. Suddenly, it seemed, he was surrounded by flames.

“I literally didn’t have time to pick up the passport that was two feet away,” Iyer says. “I just grabbed my mother’s cat, raced into a car and drove down the driveway, not thinking that the car was probably the worst place to be.”

Trapped in the car with a panting cat on his lap, Iyer says he tried to focus on keeping the cat alive — and not on how vulnerable felt as as he watched the house he had just escaped from burn to the ground.

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Ben Brubaker at Quanta:

If language models really are learning language, researchers may need new theories to explain how they do it. But if the models are doing something more superficial, then perhaps machine learning has no insights to offer linguistics.

Noam Chomsky(opens a new tab), a titan of the field of linguistics, has publicly argued for the latter view. In a scathing 2023 New York Times opinion piece(opens a new tab), he and two co-authors laid out many arguments against language models, including one that at first sounds contradictory: Language models are irrelevant to linguistics because they learn too well. Specifically, the authors claimed that models can master “impossible” languages — ones governed by rules unlike those of any known human language — just as easily as possible ones.

Recently, five computational linguists put Chomsky’s claim to the test. They modified an English text database to generate a dozen impossible languages and found that language models had more difficulty learning these languages than ordinary English. Their paper, titled “Mission: Impossible Language Models(opens a new tab),” was awarded a best paper prize at the 2024 Association of Computational Linguistics conference.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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