David Austin Walsh in Boston Review:

“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West.”

So say Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, top executives at Palantir Technologies—the multibillion-dollar software giant and defense contractor—in the preface to their recent book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. But their reasons aren’t the ones you probably have in mind: the return of Trump, spiraling authoritarianism, the embarrassment of the liberal international order in failing to stop Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza (partly powered, as it happens, by Palantir’s services). No: the crux of the problem is that “Silicon Valley has lost its way.” Again, not for the reasons you might think—grossly concentrated power, violations of privacy, and AI at any cost, including a habitable planet. Instead, the authors say, Big Tech has sold out to consumer capitalism, forsaking the ambition and purpose it had when it got its start in the Cold War. Our “engineering elite,” Karp and Zamiska urge, have “an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation and the articulation of a national project.”

So they set out to articulate just such a project. They call it a “technological republic,” but what exactly this comes to they never quite say. What is clear is that words like “democracy” and “social contract” have little to do with it. Their patriotism flows from a different national tradition: war. Invoking the legacy of the Manhattan Project, they argue that technology companies can find their way back to meaning by embracing military applications of AI and working closely with the Pentagon to ensure continued geopolitical dominance in the “software century.” In other words, by doing exactly what would pad Palantir’s bottom line.

More here.

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Joshua Craze in Sidecar:

The 15 April marked the two-year anniversary of a civil war in Sudan that has left tens of thousands dead and millions displaced. I published an essay in Sidecar, ‘Gunshots in Khartoum’, two days after the war began, which tried to trace its emergent lineaments. The conflict initially pitted the Sudanese army against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – a paramilitary organization formed during the reign of dictator Omar al Bashir (1989-2019). In the war’s first weeks, the RSF overran much of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, including the Presidential Palace. Initially constructed in 1825, during the Turkish-Egyptian colonisation of Sudan, the palace was the headquarters of an imperial regime intent on enslaving and plundering the rest of the country. The last governor of Turco-Egyptian Sudan (1820-1885), Charles Gordon, was killed by Mahdist insurgents on the steps of the palace in 1885. Successive regimes would retain both the exploitative tendencies of the Turco-Egyptian colonialists, and their obsession with the Presidential Palace. After the Mahdists demolished it, the British rebuilt it during their colonial occupation of Sudan (1898-1955). It became the ‘Republican Palace’ after Sudanese independence in 1956, and then – albeit briefly – the ‘People’s Palace’ during the reign of Jafaar Nimeiri (1969-1985). Bashir, who took power in a coup in 1989, ordered the construction of a new palace, next to the old one, built and funded by the Chinese. He didn’t get to stay long in his new abode. A wave of protests in 2018-19, triggered by cuts to grain and fuel subsidies, ended his regime.

A transitional government was established in 2019, which saw civilian politicians uncomfortably share power with the leaders of Sudan’s security services: Abdul Fattah Al Burhan, the chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), was made the head of a Sovereign Council, while Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (also known as Hemedti), the RSF’s leader, became his deputy. The two men soon conspired to push the civilians out of power.

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Richard Kozul-Wright and Kevin Gallagher in Phenomenal World:

The “rules-based order” is more a confessional community of ardent believers in the benign global influence of American economic and political power than an accurate description of global governance. This is not widely understood. The more common story is that—per, to take a recent example, Paul Krugman—after the Second World War, Pax Americana “chose not to rig the system in its favor,” and instead cultivated a new model of hegemonic governance based on decency, benevolence, and restraint.

Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the White House through the murkier worlds of mega real estate deals and reality television means he has never had much time for such values—nor for the internationalist trappings typical of more vaunted members of “the order.” That unique personal history is beginning to hit home.

A flurry of Presidential decrees since January 17 has taken direct aim at key institutions of international cooperation, both domestic and multilateral. More are expected. There is certainly malice in these actions, and perhaps a little madness. But they embody an underlying belief in the restorative power and technological acumen of American business to make the country great again—and a determination to ensure that it is not obstructed by countervailing forces at home or abroad.

More here.

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Fiona Sturges in The Guardian:

In this novella from the three times Booker-shortlisted Anita Desai, a young Indian woman named Bonita is accosted by a chatty stranger who says she recognises her as the daughter of Rosarita, a dear friend she knew years ago at art school in Mexico. Bonita, a language student in San Miguel de Allende, is irritated by the woman and tells her she must be mistaken: “I don’t paint. Nor did my mother.” But then she remembers an old painting that hung in her childhood bedroom depicting a woman seated on a park bench rendered “in wishy-washy pastels”. In the picture there is a child playing in the sand at the woman’s feet. Although they are mother and child, it’s as if they have “no relation to each other, each absorbed in a separate world, and silent”.

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Jonathan Farmer at Slate:

For 23 years, A.O. Scott was a film critic for the New York Times. For the past five months, he has been the nation’s most prominent poetry critic, writing a monthly column that uses the Times’ interactive technology to analyze a single poem at a time. Scott isn’t coming to poetry as a true outsider. He finished all the coursework and exams for a Ph.D. in literature, and he was a literary critic before he started writing about movies. But when most writing about poetry is done by poets and lifelong academics, many of whom seem to view other poets and academics as their primary audience, that still makes Scott an unusual and welcome presence.

Scott’s columns on such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Philip Larkin, and Diane Seuss are inviting, approachable, playful, and smart. He’s a perceptive reader, and he has a knack for writing about poems in ways that lend shape and even excitement to the act of reading and thinking about them. He’s also comfortable ignoring some of the orthodoxies that too often obscure what it’s actually like to read a poem. Scott and I met over Zoom to talk about what poems are actually for, why many sophisticated readers fear poetry, and why I’m wrong to think a couple of em dashes cannot be a hug.

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Joseph Howlett in Quanta:

Her lens is category theory, a way of stepping back from the specifics of any individual field in favor of a broader underlying framework that bridges all of them. By thinking of language as a mathematical category, she’s been able to apply established tools to study it and glean new insights.

Linguists hope her model can help them to prove certain theories about how grammar and meaning emerge from strings of words, and to identify how AI-generated text differs from human language. Bradley herself is more interested in how studying language in this way might allow her to develop new mathematical tools.

Quanta spoke with Bradley about how mathematics can inform the study of language and vice versa.

More here.

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David Brooks in The New York Times:

In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must. But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.

Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.

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Dannagal G. Young and Kevin Arceneaux in The Conversation:

When political psychologists introduced this concept of “need for chaos” in 2021, they described it not as a psychological trait, but as a character adaptation that occurs when some people experience a cultural and political situation that makes them feel like they are losing status and power. For some people, this feeling triggers a desire to “burn it all down” – “it” being society, institutions, the world – maybe to rebuild it all anew, or maybe just to see it all destroyed.

Only a small percentage of the U.S. population – less than 15% – tends to score high in need for chaos. But even so, understanding this minority is important to gaining insight into this political moment.

For example, people who score high in need for chaos exhibit greater support for political violence and a willingness to knowingly share hostile and false information online. And in our data, those higher in need for chaos report holding more trust in Musk, DOGE and Trump than people who score lower in the need for chaos measure.

More here.

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Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

Last August, Phish hosted a four-day music festival at a racetrack in Dover, Delaware. It was called Mondegreen—the word for a misheard lyric or phrase—and it was the band’s first festival since 2015. Phish—the singer and guitarist Trey Anastasio, the keyboardist Page McConnell, the bassist Mike Gordon, and the drummer Jon Fishman—was scheduled to play at least two sets a night for four nights in a row. No other bands were on the bill.

Mondegreen kicked off on a Thursday. That afternoon, I joined a long line of cars inching through cornfields that surrounded the motorway. The horizon was wavy with exhaust. The sun was fluorescent. I gazed at the stalks, fantasizing about a “Field of Dreams”-type scenario in which a ballplayer would emerge from the corn and offer me a sweating bottle of water. Eventually, I texted a friend who was already at the campground. He expressed his sympathies, then volunteered to deliver edible marijuana to my car. I demurred, but it nonetheless felt like an appropriate welcome. I would soon come to understand these two impulses—fellowship and oblivion—as central to the Phish experience.

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Sam Gindin at n+1:

Steve Bannon, Trump’s first term whisperer, once described himself as a Leninist because “Lenin … wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Trump was apparently listening and learning. There is method in at least some of the early madness of Trump’s chaotic second term.

The shock and awe unleashed by Trump wasn’t just to concentrate state power in his hands or a vengeful rampage by someone who was rebuffed in 2020. Of greater consequence is the intent to disturb the normal functioning of the “deep state” to neutralize any of its oppositional inclinations and force it on its back foot. This is not about destroying the state; state interventions serving authoritarian ends will no doubt increase. Rather it is the permanent crippling of those aspects of the state that might limit capital and address collective needs.

Trump’s erratic tariff actions, alongside his reversal of the former bipartisan policy on Ukraine, has already had indirect results.

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Political Speech

Democracy in America, she said,
has always been aspirational,
the bronze bell of its summons

rung by noble oligarchs
with blood on their soft white hands—
which is not to say that Democracy

in America isn’t inspirational,
isn’t a flickering beacon above
some battered shore awash in bodies—

in fact, it’s always both—
the opened arms, the double-
locked gate—which leaves us here

together, always separate, never
equal, mouthing the words
for breakfast, spitting them out

before lunch, all of us trying
to love what never loved us
back like it said it would—

those bell-tower words shimmering,
reverting to mere air from which
they were made, proving again

Democracy in America has always
been, will always be, just this:
respirational. Watch your breath,

the yogi says, feel it buzzing with
multitudinous life, each time
you welcome it in, and let it go.

by Scott Lowery
from Rattle Magazine

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Francesco Perono Cacciafoco in Aeon:

I am a glyph-breaker. I confess. Guilty as charged. A glyph-breaker who didn’t break anything, and that is quite paradoxical, because, to be a true glyph-breaker, you should have deciphered an undeciphered script, like Jean-François Champollion (the founder of Egyptology, who decoded the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs), Henry Rawlinson (who gave us the key to cuneiform) or Michael Ventris (who deciphered Linear B). Well, I didn’t. But I tried. I still try, in a way. And, in our times of devolution, that probably qualifies a guy to be called a glyph-breaker. The age of the great decipherments is, in all likelihood, over. What remains: a considerable amount of poorly documented, extremely elusive writing systems and ‘inscribed relics’, like Linear A, the Indus Valley Script, Rongorongo, and the Singapore Stone. Puzzles. Possibly unsolvable. Headache-generators. Nasty stuff.

Despite this, a glyph-breaker cannot be scared. A glyph-breaker doesn’t surrender. Theoretically. I started a quarter of century ago, in 1999, when I was at the University of Pisa in Italy, with Linear A, the undeciphered writing system from Bronze Age Crete, ‘hiding’ the so-called (unknown) Minoan language. I probably studied everything there was to study on that script, I reproduced many of the previous (and unsuccessful) decipherment attempts, and I tried to decipher the writing system by myself. I failed.

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M. Anthony Mills in The New Atlantis:

As with so many other scientific controversies in our political life, public opinion on Covid origins has come to track — and serve as a signifier for — partisan identity. This bodes ill for dispassionate investigation, which we must have if we want to know the truth about what actually threw the world into chaos for years and killed 27 million people.

At the same time, the controversy over Covid origins thrust into the center of our culture wars a substantive debate in science policy that has been raging among experts for decades, and will continue regardless of when or whether the true origin of the virus is established. That debate turns on the risks and benefits of the very kind of research alleged to have caused the pandemic.

On the one hand are virologists, specialists in the subfield of microbiology who study viruses. Many of them have long argued that experiments in which pathogens are genetically manipulated in ways that can render them more pathogenic, virulent, or transmissible — so-called “gain-of-function” experiments — provide invaluable sources of knowledge to help us prepare for future pandemics. On the other hand are critics, including microbiologists as well as experts in biosecurity, biosafety, and public health, who have long questioned whether these experiments are worth the risk.

More here.

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