Adam Greenhalgh at Literary Hub:

In the summer of 1933, Mark Rothko, who was then still known as Markus Rothkowitz, hitchhiked nearly three thousand miles from New York City to his hometown of Portland, Oregon. He had done this several times in recent years, having moved east in 1921 to attend Yale University before withdrawing and settling in New York in 1923.

But 1933 was different for two reasons. First, he was accompanied by his wife, Edith Sachar. They had married the previous November, and the ostensible purpose of the trip was to introduce Edith to Rothko’s mother. Second, Rothko had his first solo exhibition, at the Museum of Art, Portland, in July and August. So the trip marked both a personal and a professional milestone for the aspiring artist.

Rothko’s Portland relatives were unable to host the newlyweds, so they set up camp in the hills overlooking the city. According to Rothko’s brother Moise (later known as Maurice Roth), “with canvas or whatever they had, they built themselves a hut there and lived with no facilities of any kind.” Canvas was suitable for a tent in the woods, but for painting outdoors Rothko favored paper. Lightweight and portable, paper was a logical choice for a peripatetic summer.

More here.

Garrison Lovely in Jacobin:

Google cofounder Larry Page thinks superintelligent AI is “just the next step in evolution.” In fact, Page, who’s worth about $120 billion, has reportedly argued that efforts to prevent AI-driven extinction and protect human consciousness are “speciesist” and “sentimental nonsense.”

In July, former Google DeepMind senior scientist Richard Sutton — one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, a major subfield of AI — said that the technology “could displace us from existence,” and that “we should not resist succession.” In a 2015 talk, Sutton said, suppose “everything fails” and AI “kill[s] us all”; he asked, “Is it so bad that humans are not the final form of intelligent life in the universe?”

“Biological extinction, that’s not the point,” Sutton, sixty-six, told me. “The light of humanity and our understanding, our intelligence — our consciousness, if you will — can go on without meat humans.”

Yoshua Bengio, fifty-nine, is the second-most cited living scientist, noted for his foundational work on deep learning. Responding to Page and Sutton, Bengio told me, “What they want, I think it’s playing dice with humanity’s future. I personally think this should be criminalized.”

More here.

Jeroen van Baar at An Educated Guess:

Obviously, there already were differences between the lower and upper middle class in 1994—otherwise you couldn’t separate the two groups. But existing differences grew by a lot between 1994 and 2018. For the upper middle class, things generally got better in that timeframe: their wealth, health, and life expectancy improved. For the lower middle class, however,

• • Annual pretax resources declined by 18% between 1994 and 2018, controlling for inflation;
  • Home ownership declined by 31% between 1994 and 2018;
  • Health insurance coverage declined by 11% from 87% in 1994 to 78% in 2018. This means that almost 1 in 4 middle-aged adults in the lower middle class didn’t have health insurance in 2018.

These data make clear that the security offered by middle-class life—exemplified by homeownership and health insurance—is no longer within reach for millions of people in the lower half of the middle class.

More here.

Elie Dolgin in Nature:

The blood cancer had returned, and Kevin Sander was running out of treatment options. A stem-cell transplant would offer the best chance for long-term survival, but to qualify for the procedure he would first need to reduce the extent of his tumour — a seemingly insurmountable goal, because successive treatments had all failed to keep the disease in check. As a last throw of the dice, he joined a landmark clinical trial. Led by haematologist Philipp Staber at the Medical University of Vienna, the study is exploring an innovative treatment strategy in which drugs are tested on the patient’s own cancer cells, cultured outside the body. In February 2022, researchers tried 130 compounds on cells grown from Sander’s cancer — essentially trying everything at their disposal to see what might work.

One option looked promising. It was a type of kinase inhibitor that is approved to treat thyroid cancer, but it is seldom, if ever, used for the rare subtype of lymphoma that Sander had. Physicians prescribed him a treatment regimen that included the drug, and it worked. The cancer receded, enabling him to undergo the stem-cell transplant. He has been in remission ever since. “I’m a bit more free now,” says Sander, a 38-year-old procurement manager living in Podersdorf am See, Austria. ”I do not fear death any more,” he adds. “I try to enjoy my life.” His story is a testament to this kind of intensive and highly personalized drug-screening method, referred to as functional precision medicine. Like all precision medicine, it aims to match treatments to patients, but it differs from the genomics-guided paradigm that has come to dominate the field. Instead of relying on genetic data and the best available understanding of tumour biology to select a treatment, clinicians throw everything they’ve got at cancer cells in the laboratory and see what sticks.

More here.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

The Leash

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

by Ada Limón
from The Carrying
Milkweed Editions, 2018

Charles Foster in Literary Review:

If a cow said, ‘Don’t eat me’, we wouldn’t. We seem to regard the capacity for language (by which we mean our kind of language) as evidence of moral significance. But do animals talk? Many traditions assume they do, and understanding animal talk has sometimes been thought to indicate great human wisdom. The proverbially wise Solomon understood the language of the birds, and St Francis preached to them. Most of us have asked what a crow’s squawk or a dog’s whine means. Perhaps we ask because we feel that animals can tell us something we don’t know about the sort of place this world is.

For much of the last four hundred years, enquiries of this kind have been disreputable. Descartes declared that animals were automatons and Enlightenment thinkers duly reconceived the cosmos and everything in it, apart from humans, as a machine. We humans hung on to our souls for a while, but now we are machines too. The study of animal behaviour has long been merely the study of how animals react to stimuli. Ask what they were thinking and the journals would reject your article.

But things are changing, as Arik Kershenbaum’s splendid book shows.

More here.

Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized:

Now, as far as I can tell, the empirical questions of whether AI will achieve and surpass human performance at all tasks, take over civilization from us, threaten human existence, etc. are logically distinct from the philosophical question of whether AIs will ever “truly think,” or whether they’ll only ever “appear” to think.  You could answer “yes” to all the empirical questions and “no” to the philosophical question, or vice versa.  But to my lifelong chagrin, people constantly munge the two questions together!

A major way they do so, is with what we could call the religion of Justaism.

• • GPT is justa next-token predictor.
  • It’s justa function approximator.
  • It’s justa gigantic autocomplete.
  • It’s justa stochastic parrot.
  • And, it “follows,” the idea of AI taking over from humanity is justa science-fiction fantasy, or maybe a cynical attempt to distract people from AI’s near-term harms.

As someone once expressed this religion on my blog: GPT doesn’t interpret sentences, it only seems-to-interpret them.  It doesn’t learn, it only seems-to-learn.  It doesn’t judge moral questions, it only seems-to-judge. I replied: that’s great, and it won’t change civilization, it’ll only seem-to-change it!

More here.

Alex Bronzini-Vender at Public Books:

The epigraph of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints is a quote from the British expatriate novelist and travel writer Lawrence Durrell: “My spirit turns more and more toward the West, toward the old heritage. There are, perhaps, some treasures to retrieve among its ruins … I don’t know.”

Raspail, a lifelong anti-immigration activist, was never assured of the white West’s innate virtue. It was “civilized,” yes, but the true judge of a civilization’s right to exist was whether it could defend itself. In our obsession with “rights” and “international law,” we’d lost sight of the world’s real moral logic: kill or be killed. In doing so, we’d consigned ourselves to the latter fate—to be killed—and worse, we would deserve it.

This is the logic of The Camp of the Saints, published fifty years ago in France.

More here.

Miryam Naddaf in Nature:

An analysis of around 1,500 blood proteins has identified biomarkers that can be used to predict the risk of developing dementia up to 15 years before diagnosis.

The findings, reported today in Nature Aging¹, are a step towards a tool that scientists have been in search of for decades: blood tests that can detect Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia at a very early, pre-symptomatic stage. Researchers screened blood samples from more than 50,000 healthy adults in the UK Biobank, 1,417 of whom developed dementia in a 14-year period. They found that high blood levels of four proteins — GFAP, NEFL, GDF15 and LTBP2 — were strongly associated with dementia. “Studies such as this are required if we are to intervene with disease-modifying therapies at the very earliest stage of dementia,” said Amanda Heslegrave, a neuroscientist at University College London, in a statement to the Science Media Centre in London.

…By screening 1,463 proteins in blood samples from 52,645 people, the authors found that increased levels of GFAP, NEFL, GDF15 and LTBP2 were associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. For some participants who developed dementia, blood levels of these proteins were outside normal ranges more than ten years before symptom onset. GFAP, a protein that provides structural support to nerve cells called astrocytes, has already been proposed as a diagnostic marker for Alzheimer’s disease², as has GDF15. The latest study finds that people with high levels of GFAP in their blood are more than twice as likely as people with normal levels to develop dementia, and are nearly three times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s.

More here.

Christina Turner in PBS News Hour:

When Tina Turner, years before she became rock ‘n’ roll royalty, lent her iconic voice to Phil Spector’s “River Deep, Mountain High” in 1966, the single ranked at No. 3 on the UK charts. But, on U.S. Billboard charts that same year, it didn’t get higher than 88. In the recent HBO documentary “Tina,” an archival clip of Ike Turner, who shares a credit for the song, explained that the song didn’t hold up in America because, during that time, “Black artists had to go Top 10 on the R&B charts before the top radio stations would touch it.” In the film, Ike added that the adventurous song, with its complex orchestration and lush, pop sound, was “too white for Black jockeys and too Black for white jockeys” in the U.S. Dan Lindsay, one of the co-directors of the documentary, told the PBS NewsHour that Tina is a “massive, iconic performer — and even in America — but outside of America, Tina Turner is a megastar.”

That difference of adoration that Tina felt throughout her career, between U.S. and European audiences, reflected the “vestiges of Jim Crow” that were “still very much alive in the music industry,” said Tanisha Ford, a history professor at CUNY’s Graduate Center. “While rock and roll is rooted in the Black experience and the Black musical tradition, the mainstream industry has racialized it as ‘white’ music,” Ford said. “So Tina Turner had much resistance when she wanted to position herself as a rock ‘n’ roll artist.”

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

A New National Anthem

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always, there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps,
the truth is, every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?

by Ada Limón
from The Carrying.
Milkweed Editions, 2018

Dan Piepenbring at n+1:

SOMETIMES I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE I had the good fortune of being alive between 11:59:59 PM on December 31, 1999 and 12:00:00 AM on January 1, 2000. Of all the times to exist! It felt momentous then, when I was 13, and it still does: a state of perfect rollover, the ultimate annual flux. A global caesura, a cusp between epochs. I’ve written here before about the strange gratitude that pervaded public life in the ’90s, when it was fashionable to recognize that civilization was enjoying a moment of exceptional prosperity—a moment that happened to fall at the end of a long and gory millennium. “I think this is the most exciting time in the history of the world to be alive,” Jack Kemp said in the ’96 vice-presidential debate. Time Bomb Y2K, a new documentary composed entirely of archival footage from those heady days, finds Jeff Bezos, then in his pre-overlord era, saying the same thing: “People are gonna look back and say, ‘Wow, the late 20th century was really a great time to be alive on this planet.’”

And it did feel that way—to me, at least, as a child of the ’90s in its expansive middle class.

more here.

Stuart Jeffries at Literary Review:

When Hannah Arendt looked at the man wearing an ill-fitting suit in the bulletproof dock inside a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, she saw something different from everybody else. The prosecution, writes Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘saw an ancient crime in modern garb, and portrayed Eichmann as the latest monster in the long history of anti-Semitism who had simply used novel methods to take hatred for Jews to a new level’. Arendt thought otherwise.

Adolf Eichmann was on trial after being captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and brought to Israel to face charges of being a leading organiser of the Holocaust. Arendt was there to report on the trial for the New Yorker. The commission would lead to Arendt’s most famous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Arendt was the ideal woman for the job: she was not just a Jewish refugee who had fled Hitler in 1933, and a philosopher who had studied with and loved the one-time Nazi Martin Heidegger, but also someone who had reinvented herself in America as a journalist and political theorist, and the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, about the rise of Nazism and Stalinism. She was, if anything, overqualified.

more here.

Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

In this second foray into the biology of death, I will examine programmed cell death or PCD. You might have heard of the process of apoptosis, but, as the previously reviewed The Biology of Death mentioned, this is just one of many ways in which cells can actively kill themselves. It is a vital part of life in multicellular organisms, for instance sculpting our hands so that we are not born with webs of skin between our fingers, or allowing leaves to fall from the trees in autumn by triggering cell death in so-called abscission zones. These are small sacrifices to serve the larger organism. Surprisingly, single-celled (unicellular) organisms also show PCD. But wait, is that not tantamount to suicide? How did that evolve?

More here.

Gísli Pálsson at Literary Hub:

In 1858, the great auk (Pinguinus impennis) was reported to be in serious decline. William Proctor, keeper of the bird collection at Durham University, had traveled to Iceland in 1833 and 1837, partly in order to seek out great auks, but reported that sightings were now rare in Iceland and that he had not seen any of the birds.

Later, student William Milner inquired about great auks on his travels to Iceland and was informed that none had been seen recently, though two had been caught two years earlier, in 1844. Milner’s account of his visit gave rise to a strong suspicion that the species was not only rare but vanishing.

Naturalist John Wolley took a keen interest in discussions of rare birds, and he resolved to go to Iceland with the same intention as his friends. He invited Alfred Newton, then making a name for himself as a zoologist at Cambridge University, to join him. Wolley and Newton met for the first time in Cambridge one October day in 1851, although they had corresponded for several years.

More here.