William Wright and Takaki Komiyama in The Conversation:

For decades, neuroscientists have thought that the brain learns by changing how neurons are connected to one another. As new information and experiences alter how neurons communicate with each other and change their collective activity patterns, some synaptic connections are made stronger while others are made weaker. This process of synaptic plasticity is what produces representations of new information and experiences within your brain.

In order for your brain to produce the correct representations during learning, however, the right synaptic connections must undergo the right changes at the right time. The “rules” that your brain uses to select which synapses to change during learning – what neuroscientists call the credit assignment problem – have remained largely unclear.

We decided to monitor the activity of individual synaptic connections within the brain during learning to see whether we could identify activity patterns that determine which connections would get stronger or weaker.

More here.

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Stephanie Convery in The Guardian:

It’s been nearly two decades since I finished my undergraduate degree, and my memories of my philosophy major, like most things associated with one’s early adulthood, are hazy at best.

Me: Do you consider yourself sentient?

Peter Singer AI: No, I am not sentient. I am an AI language model designed to simulate conversation based on Peter Singer’s work. Sentience involves having subjective experiences, which I do not possess.

Me: Why, then, do you think you can provide meaningful advice to sentient beings?

Peter Singer AI: I provide insights based on the ethical principles and philosophical arguments developed by Peter Singer. These principles focus on improving the well-being of sentient beings, and aim to help people reflect on their ethical decisions. While I am not sentient, I can still facilitate thoughtful discussions on these topics.

Singer has had a long and high-profile career in philosophy. He has only recently retired from Princeton University, where he was professor of bioethics. His CV is extensive (it runs to a full 102 pages). He has a Substack, a podcast, a Bluesky account, a journal he co-edits, and a polished online presence. As I’m scrolling through the storied septuagenarian philosopher’s blog, the chatbot pops up in the corner of the page. I can’t help but feeling like I am being sold something.

In launching his chatbot, Singer described the tool as “employing the Socratic method” – that is, dialogue – to “[guide] users through a process of critical thinking and self-examination”. But I have questions about that.

More here.

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Lucy Popescu in The Guardian:

Born in Kabul, Maiwand Banayee aspired to become a Talib when he was 16. In 1994, living in a Pakistan refugee camp, there was little to do except sleep, eat, pray and dream of the afterlife: “Islam dominated every aspect of life in Shamshatoo. Even during the volleyball and cricket games the spectators were prevented from clapping because it was seen as un-Islamic.” Banayee joined the camp’s madrasa when he was 14 in an attempt “to fit in”. The only educational opportunity open to Afghans at that time, the religious school offered structure and purpose, although “instead of teaching us to live, they were teaching us to die”.

In this illuminating book, Banayee, now resident in England, describes the circumstances that led to his indoctrination, and what eventually saved him. Brutalised by conflict, his Pashtun family lived through the Soviet-Afghan war, followed by the period of bitter infighting between warlords. As a child, Banayee saw his neighbourhood torn apart and corpses rotting in the street: “By the winter of 1994, Kabul had turned into a deserted place, as if hit by Armageddon – a place of daily bombardments, looting and arbitrary arrests. The savagery and violence had no limits.” Banayee, his siblings and brother’s family eventually sought refuge in Pakistan, while his parents remained in Kabul with his disabled sister, Gul, fearing she would not survive the journey.

More here.

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Bonnie Tsui in Wired:

We all want to know if and how we can come back to form after injury, illness, or a long hiatus. Muscles adapt in response to the environment: They grow when we put in the work and shrink when we stop. But what if we could help them remember how to grow?

As a general rule, cell biologists don’t enter their careers by running through the gauntlet of top-tier professional sports. But in the years that Adam Sharples played as a front-row forward in the UK’s Rugby Football League, he found himself wondering about cell mechanisms that helped muscles to grow after different types of exercise.

A front-row position in pro rugby means that you have to be, well, “quite big,” as Adam puts it. “I was in the gym lifting weights from the age of about 12, I think,” he says.

More here.

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Barry Schwabsky at Artforum:

GILLIAN CARNEGIE’S current show at Gladstone Gallery in New York, the first significant presentation of the English painter’s work in the United States since 2011, comprises just seven works, most of them rehearsing imagery she has used before: a couple of paintings of a tree—maybe the same one in summer, in full leaf, and bare-branched in winter?—a pair of portraits, a still life of flowers, two depictions of the same white cat. Although exquisitely rendered, their mostly pale, mostly grisaille palette puts these images at a ghostly remove from reality.

Carnegie has been painting that tree—or trees like that tree—since 2004, those dried flowers in a cutoff plastic water bottle (or ones like them) since 2000, the white cat since 2017 (succeeding a black one painted many times between 2009 and 2016). One of the two female portrait subjects, who looks like the artist herself, was also painted in a different pose in 2020. But then there is something else: I can’t help but thinking of the old quip that Paul Cézanne painted his wife as if she were an apple.

more here.

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Armand D’Angour at Aeon Magazine:

In Plato’s dialogue Symposium, seven varied speeches are made on the meaning of love at an all-male drinking party set in ancient Athens in 416 BCE. One of the participants is the philosopher Socrates, and when it comes to his turn to speak, he is made to say something surprising: he proposes to ‘tell the truth’ about love. It’s surprising because in other Platonic dialogues, where Socrates address­es questions such as ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘What is excellence?’, and ‘What is courage?’, he has no positive answers to give about these central areas of human thought and experience: in fact, Socrates was well known for having laid no claim to know­ledge, and for asserting that ‘the only thing I know is that I do not know’. How is it, then, that Socrates can claim to know the truth about something as fundamental and potentially all-encomp­assing as love?

The answer is that, in the Symposium, Socrates claims to know the truth only because he learned it from someone else. He describes his teacher of love as a ‘clever non-Athenian woman who had knowledge of this and many other things’ (my translations throughout).

more here.

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Forever Chemicals

DuPont coats the ocean.
Stain, rain, grease-resistant PFAS
slick the tide, crash the cliffs,
catch the breeze. Lungs and leaves
vacuum the patented
miracle compounds to drift
in the vascular currents of earth
through radish roots, umbilical cords,
the baleens of whales, the soft
aspirant skin of frogs.

Chemical chains of popcorn bags
ride the rain back to the corn and crows.
Teflon slides from the skillet to the wheat
to its threshers and beetles.

Comfortable in my polyfluoroalkyl-
saturated raincoat, I balance
on salt-polished boulders that rim
the churn of the bay. Waves pull and pound.
The rocks atomize ocean to a gentle mist;
prisms shutter in the blur, gulls glide.
I breathe deeply, feel the spray and all
that it carries precipitate
into the waters of my body.

by Robin Woolman
from EcoTheo Review

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Ian Leslie at Literary Hub:

In the early months of 1966, whenever Paul McCartney sat down at a piano, wherever it was, he would start tinkering with a song he called “Miss Daisy Hawkins.” From the moment he found its first five syllabic notes, the song seems to have found its themes: loneliness, futility, the end of life. McCartney was twenty-three. Without discussing it, both John Lennon and Paul came back from their break with songs about death, written from a detached, omniscient perspective.

In “Tomorrow Never Knows” John dispenses instruction from the mountaintop. In two minutes, “Eleanor Rigby” captures the entire lives of two individuals in a series of stark images. Musically, both songs are stripped down to a few parts in order to distill and intensify some essence. “Eleanor Rigby” confines itself to a narrow melodic range and the song has minimal harmonic development: like “Tomorrow Never Knows,” it alternates between just two chords.

Set in a minor key, its tightly wound, almost claustrophobic verse plays out over an accompaniment—a string section arranged by George Martin—that sticks close to the tonic, except when the cellos burst into a galloping run up the scale. This section is joined to a refrain in which the singer asks where all the lonely people come from while the cellos play a Bach-style descending line.

More here.

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Zachary B Hancock in Aeon:

Sixty years ago, a debate raged between two titans of evolutionary biology that came to be known by some as the ‘beanbag debates’. At the heart of the debate were two differing views on how to study the living world – on one side were the ‘beanbag geneticists’, who believed the evolutionary process could be represented by mathematics, and that this was a fruitful way of elucidating general rules about the living world. The other side contended that this mathematics was overly simplistic and misleading, atomising organisms to nothing more than genes, and that it missed all the important complexities of real organisms.

The feud kicked off in 1959, at the centennial celebration of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species at Cold Spring Harbor in New York. The keynote address was delivered by the biologist Ernst Mayr. On the surface, the symposium seemed an incredible opportunity to reflect on everything evolutionary biology had accomplished since 1859. Mayr’s address was auspiciously titled ‘Where Are We?’ and would set the stage for the rest of the conference.

But Mayr had intentions beyond flattering his audience.

More here.

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Ann’s Poem

This is a poem for Ann
……. so….. it has to be beautiful
……………. it has to be strong
……. ………it has to endure

This is a poem for Ann
……. so….. it must have fluidity
……………. it must be warm
……. ………it has to have sunshine

This is a poem for Ann
……. so….. if it cries it cries alone
……………. if it despairs it never says
……………..if it is scared it whistles a happy tune

This is a poem for Ann
……. so….. let’s be sure it is prejudice free
…………….. let’s be sure it has many colors
…………….. let’s make certain it has perfect manners

This is a poem for Ann
……. so….. let’s let it sing
…………….. let’s let it dance
…………….. and please please please let it paint

This is a poem for Ann
……. so….. so it is
……………..full of love
……………..full of love
……………..full of love

by Nikki Giovanni
from Quilting the Black-eyed Pea
Harper Perennial

(for Ann Weinstein)

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Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli in The Guardian:

Inflation is, at base, a tax on consumption – and it hits the poor the hardest, since they consume more of their incomes and the rich consume less.

That’s one reason for concern over Donald Trump’s tariffs, which will disproportionately affect the poor. When the 90-day pause on the tariffs expires, it is reasonable to expect prices to rise, and by a lot.

That’s because, first, intermediate goods – rather than finished ones – dominate trade, crossing borders and being tariffed multiple times along the way, which makes them highly inflationary. Second, while the tariffs of the first Trump administration could be more easily absorbed by exchange rates and producers, there is no way tariffs of this magnitude can be absorbed. Producers and consumers must take a hit, and that means rising prices. It looks like the poor, once again, will suffer the most.

But if Trump’s tariffs were to disappear for good, would we return to a world of stable prices? Insights from our forthcoming book, Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers, suggest that is sadly not the case, for three reasons.

More here.

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Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

Sometime in the next several months, a team of US scientists plans to pour a solution of antacid into the waves off the coast of Massachusetts. Using boats, buoys and autonomous gliders, the scientists will track changes in water chemistry that should allow this tiny patch of the Atlantic Ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the sky than it normally would.

The US$10-million experiment, dubbed LOC-NESS, aims to test one prominent strategy to reverse global warming by removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. Doing so will be neither cheap nor easy. But with the world looking likely to blow past the temperature targets laid out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a growing number of scientists and policy specialists say that carbon removal will be necessary later this century if humanity is to achieve its long-term climate goals.

More here.

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Note: (Thanks to Dr. Sarah Taimur)

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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

It’s been an exceptionally rich decade for fans of the great mid-century Italian master Giorgio Morandi here in New York City, beginning with the superb retrospective at the Metropolitan back in 2008 (which I’ve already referenced in the pages of this Cabinet back in Issue 16) and then following through more recently with that superb little “Time Suspended” pop-up exhibition organized by Rome’s Mattia de Luca Gallery on the upper East Side last fall, culminating earlier this year with the Zwirner Gallery’s ravishing “Morandi Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation” show (which closed last month, alas).

Such hushed plenitude of being, spread across such a meticulously balanced sense of presence. But for me one of the special pleasures of the Zwirner show, which I must have visited a half dozen times, was the chance to revisit conversations I used to have with my great late old friend Robert Irwin, several of which I included in my Seeing is Forgetting volumes.

more here.

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Anthony Pagden at Literary Review:

South America’, declared the North American Review in the early 19th century, ‘will be to North America what Asia and Africa are to Europe.’ ‘Not quite,’ says Greg Grandin. But also not for want of trying. America, América is the by turns woeful, despairing and ironic tale of the USA’s sustained attempts to turn its southern neighbours into clients or dependencies, if not colonies. But it is also a passionate plea for a re-evaluation of the place of Spanish America, so often shunted off into the ‘Global South’, in the evolution of the modern global order. As with Grandin’s previous books – one of which, Empire’s Workshop, covers some of the same ground – it is written with great flair and imagination, scattered with scintillating turns of phrase and pervaded with a sense of barely suppressed indignation. 

This is the story of how the ‘Western Hemisphere idea’ – the notion that the world is divided into two hemispheres, and that the peoples of the Western Hemisphere stand in a special relationship to one another – has evolved from the earliest encounters between Jefferson and Francisco de Miranda, companion in arms of Simón Bolívar, up to the present. It is also, however, the story of how the USA has consistently exploited the disunited states to its south. Some of the events Grandin describes are familiar: the seizure of the Panamanian president Manuel Noriega in 1989; the more hands-off meddling in the political affairs of Chile in the 1970s.

more here.

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Murong Xuecun in The Guardian:

After three years as a censor, Liu detests his job. He detests the white office ceiling, the grey industrial carpet and the office that feels more like a factory. He also detests his 200-odd colleagues sitting in their cubicles, each concentrating on their mouse and keyboard as they delete or hide content.

One afternoon, the office boredom is disturbed when Chen Min* in the next cubicle suddenly jumps up, limbs flailing ecstatically. He has uncovered Wang Dan’s Weibo account. All the censors know that Wang Dan, one of the 1989 student leaders, political criminal and exile, is considered by the Chinese government to be one of the most important enemies of the state. Finding him is a big deal, and the news is immediately reported to the Sina Weibo office in Beijing. It might even be reported to the public security bureau.

The following month, a senior manager comes specially from Beijing to highly commend Chen Min for discovering intelligence about the “enemy”, praising his “acuity” and “high level of awareness”, and bestows on him a small bonus. All his colleagues applaud and shout in admiration. All except Liu.

More here.

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