Friendship

Making friends is a delicate business.
You say, he or she is my best friend,
choosing from a lifetime of acquaintances,
someone you hope you can trust.

Making friends, after all, is more pursuit
than necessity, although friends are good
for social well-being and grace.
Friends show many faces of loyalty and sincerity.

Most pay allegiance first to family ties and deem
a mere “friend” as an intruder, bent on breaking
strong bonds that are sometimes taken for granted,
leaving little room for curiosity and growth.

Growing up, you may have a strong attachment,
but it is not easy to latch onto a lasting pal.
That a man lay down his life for a friend
is still among the great virtues.

But who among us can rise to such a sacrifice?

by George De Gregorio
from Zerilda’s Chair
White Chicken Press, 2009

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Adam Chandler in Time Magazine:

In 1989, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg cemented his status as required reading for hungover college freshmen when he coined the concept of “third places” in his book The Great Good Place. Third places, which are informal spots to gather outside of home and work for socializing, have been features of societies going back to antiquity, from Greek agora and Viennese cafés to barber shops and Burger King dining rooms. But their role in making cultures vibrant and communities cohesive, Oldenburg warned, had begun to “constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.”

He was right to worry. These days, the role of coffee shops and bars, libraries and community centers, civic clubs and houses of worship, have faded as the creep of work and domestic obligation in American life have become all but inescapable. According to the 2021 Census Bureau’s Time Use Survey, Americans were already spending significantly less time with friends before the pandemic rearranged life entirely. Our collective isolation has only metastasized since then. In 2024, a staggering 17% of Americans claimed to have zero friends, up from 1% in 1990, around when Oldenburg was first urging caution.

More here.

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Rebecca Sun in The New York Times:

It would have been easy to take the successful high-concept premise of “Squid Game” — hard-luck contestants compete to the death in a sadistically kiddie-themed battle royale — and simply replicate it for Season 2. After all, the show’s first season, which appeared on Netflix to little initial fanfare in 2021, was embraced as a shrewd fable of late-stage capitalism and drew a reported 330 million viewers worldwide, becoming the streaming service’s most-watched title of all time.

But the second season of the show, which premiered on the day after Christmas, introduces an intriguing plot element that cannily taps into the current political moment. Critical reviews for the new season have been mixed, but the new installment of “Squid Game” might be the best pop-cultural examination yet of the social dynamics that have led to a series of rightward shifts around the globe — from the election of Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea’s hard-line conservative president, in 2022 to a second victory for Donald Trump here at home. If the first season was about how capitalism forces people into impossible choices (such as braving a murderous game show in hopes of improving a desperate lot), then the second season is all about the toll of tribalism: how the push to pit ourselves against one another in a winner-take-all political battle leads to destruction and despair for all.

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Karen Simecek in Psyche:

We rely on narratives because they help us understand the world. They make life more meaningful. According to Sartre, to turn the most banal series of events into an adventure, you simply ‘begin to recount it’. However, telling a story is not just a powerful creative act. Some philosophers think that narratives are fundamental to our experiences. Alasdair MacIntyre believes we can understand our actions and those of others only as part of a narrative life. And Peter Goldie argues that our very lives ‘have narrative structure’ – it is only by grappling with this structure that we can understand our emotions and those of others. This suggests that narratives play central, possibly fundamental, roles in our lives. But as Sartre warns in Nausea: ‘everything changes when you tell about life.’

In some cases, narratives can hold us back by limiting our thinking. In other cases, they may diminish our ability to live freely. They also give us the illusion that the world is ordered, logical, and difficult to change, reducing the real complexity of life. They can even become dangerous when they persuade us of a false and harmful world view. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too eager to live our lives as if we were ‘telling a story’. The question is: what other options do we have?

More here.

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Dan Falk in Undark:

Our relationship with death is a complex one. At an intellectual level, we understand our mortality, yet we go to great lengths to banish the notion from our minds. In most circumstances it’s a taboo subject for conversation. At the same time, we have elaborate rituals around death, and it inspires all manner of art, literature, music, and more. (Think Prince Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, Mozart’s “Requiem,” and the Great Pyramid of Giza.)

And what of our animal cousins? When Charles, a western lowland gorilla, died in the Toronto Zoo last year, did his fellow primates mourn his passing? What does a gazelle think when a member of its herd becomes a lion’s dinner? Questions like these have been very much on the mind of the Spanish philosopher Susana Monsó, whose new book, “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death,” invites the reader to think about death from the point of view of the creatures we share the planet with.

While Monsó is a philosopher, her investigation draws on empirical studies from various scientific disciplines. Being a philosopher may even give her an edge, as it allows her to incorporate knowledge from many different fields.

More here.

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Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily:

When people point to the US-influenced historical causes underlying emigration from Central America, Guatemala is one of the case studies. It’s also an example of the “private sources of US foreign policy,” as historian Max Holland puts it in his examination of businessman William Pawley’s role in the coup.

Pawley (1900–1977) had a “high-profile career as an international salesman, businessman, aviation entrepreneur, ambassador, financier, transit and sugar magnate, philanthropist, and special presidential envoy.” Less well known: his “covert activities on behalf (and sometimes despite) the U.S. government.” Official State Department documents about the Guatemala coup barely mention Pawley, who was instrumental in advocating for military action and in supplying coup forces with airplanes.

By then, Pawley was an old hand when it came to covert airpower.

More here.

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Anderson Tepper at the NY Times:

Pico Iyer seems to have spent his life in motion, shuttling between homes in Japan and the United States, not to mention journeys to Ethiopia, Tibet, Cuba and beyond. But there’s one place he’s gone to seek out stillness ever since he was young: the Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple. Perched in the hills above his childhood home, the temple offers sweeping views of the bucolic California town and the ocean shimmering in the distance, and it provided Iyer with an early sense of refuge, he said.

“I think we’re all seeking out places of quiet, to retrieve something we’ve lost,” Iyer said, sitting in the temple gardens in late October, not far from where, as a teenager, he heard Christopher Isherwood lecture on Hinduism. “Even as a kid, when all I wanted was action and excitement, something brought me here, to the quietest place I knew.” If Iyer’s career has been built on a restless investigation of far-flung corners of the globe, this is the perfect spot to pause and reflect on his new work, “Aflame: Learning From Silence,” an examination of arrival — not departure — and the art of sitting still.

more here.

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James Wood in Plough:

I remember the moment I told myself I would never talk to my dad again. I was sixteen years old, and my dad’s adoptive parents had just surprised me with my first car: a bright yellow used Geo Tracker (that I would soon trade for a truck). After a slight disagreement, we split into separate vehicles to drive back to my mother’s house. In the other car my dad was drinking while driving my little brother, and I drove my new car with his new wife. When we arrived at my mom’s, she chastised my dad because we were much later than expected (at this time we did not have cellphones) and she noticed the alcohol on his breath. He got out and yelled at her. And then he took my keys and told me he was going to tell my grandparents I didn’t want the car. For the first time in my life, I gave verbal expression to the anger I had internalized for years: “Get out of here. You can’t treat us like this. We don’t need you.”

I come from a stock of relationship-quitters.

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Will Knight in Wired:

OpenAI today announced an improved version of its most capable artificial intelligence model to date—one that takes even more time to deliberate over questions—just a day after Google announced its first model of this type. OpenAI’s new model, called o3, replaces o1, which the company introduced in September. Like o1, the new model spends time ruminating over a problem in order to deliver better answers to questions that require step-by-step logical reasoning. (OpenAI chose to skip the “o2” moniker because it’s already the name of a mobile carrier in the UK.)

“We view this as the beginning of the next phase of AI,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on a livestream Friday. “Where you can use these models to do increasingly complex tasks that require a lot of reasoning.”The o3 model scores much higher on several measures than its predecessor, OpenAI says, including ones that measure complex coding-related skills and advanced math and science competency. It is three times better than o1 at answering questions posed by ARC-AGI, a benchmark designed to test an AI models’ ability to reason over extremely difficult mathematical and logic problems they’re encountering for the first time.

More here.

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Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

‘Richard II tried first being a Good King and then a Bad King without enjoying either very much. Then being told he was unbalanced, he got off the throne whereupon his cousin Lancaster (spelt Bolingbroke) quickly mounted the throne and said he was Henry IV, Part 1.” This, anyway, is how it goes in 1066 and All That, the classic parody of garbled schoolroom rote-learning. And while Helen Castor, a historian of great nuance and meticulous scholarship, would not put it quite so baldly, this remains pretty much the through-line of her luminous 600-page study of the Plantagenet cousins who between them generated the plots for three of Shakespeare’s history plays.

The Hart of Castor’s title is Richard II, who came to the throne at the age of 10 in 1377 and never stood a chance. His early accession was a consequence of his father’s death the previous year. Edward, the Black Prince, had led England to its first big win in the hundred years war at the Battle of Crécy, after which France gave up a third of itself to England. And now in his magnificent place came this thin-skinned, spoilt, effeminate boy. Harts – male deers – are generally depicted in heraldry as beefy, bulky, russety animals with a forest of antlers.

more here.

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The lingual life of a New Year 

many times, this morning I absorbed
the fricative glottal as h in the happy
hit me with the strength of a history;
Mesopotamians up to Roman sought
a contradictory blessing of Janus
the trail of passion, ingraining
hiatal pretexts of rituals, our
survival is so temporal, so this
carnivalesque of the desire of living
amidst the debris of children
bombed in Syria and Gaza, headlines
for eternity bursting on lips, fireworks
over the waters of Oceania, I see on
the screen of my cell phone choked
with messages, so I scroll down
while the dog in the street
as Auden said after the bone,
the lover is dead, pulling along a
hearse a burial with a fricative glottal.

by Rizwan Akhtar
Institute of English Studies
Punjab University, Lahore

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Benjamen Walker in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

During the 1950s and ’60s, Norman Holmes Pearson was one of Yale’s most successful and beloved professors. On the first day of each term, he would crab-walk to the front of the class, his misshapen body—the result of a childhood fall—on full display. Former students often remarked that the uneasy silence of that first day gave way to a dramatic crescendo of applause following Pearson’s lectures. One such student, journalist Thomas Wolfe, called Pearson “the most superbly theatrical teacher I have ever seen.”

Norman Pearson was also a secret agent, code name Puritan.

That’s the title Greg Barnhisel gives to his new intellectual biography of Pearson, a key figure behind the “Cold War alliance between higher education, the national-security state, and US propaganda operations.” For Barnhisel, whose previous book Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015) also examined this alliance, Pearson is one of its most important operatives.

Born into an upper middle-class family in Gardner, Massachusetts, in 1909, Norm followed his brother Alfred first to Phillips Andover Academy and then to Yale, but while Alfred returned home to work in the family’s dry goods business, Norm had no desire to leave academia.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors) and neuraminidase (11 flavors). A particular flu strain is named after which flavors of these two proteins it has – for example, H3N2, or H5N1.

Influenza A evolved in birds, and stayed there for at least thousands of years. It crossed to humans later, maybe during historic times – different sources give suggest dates as early as 500 BC or as late as 1500 AD. It probably crossed over multiple times. Maybe it died out in humans after some crossovers, stuck around in birds, and crossed over from birds to humans again later.

During historic times, the flu has followed a pattern of big pandemics once every few decades, plus small seasonal epidemics each winter. The big pandemics happen when a new strain of flu crosses from animals into humans. Then the new strain sticks around, undergoes normal gradual mutation, and once a year immune response decays enough / mutations accumulate enough to cause another small seasonal epidemic (Why is this synced to the calendar year? See here for more).

More here.

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David A. Sklansky in the Politics and Rights Review:

Shortly after the recent election, the New York Times reported the results of a new study documenting a deep and pervasive pessimism among the American public, cutting across ideological lines.  Only a quarter of Americans think the country’s best days are ahead, only one in ten thinks the government represents them well.  This is broadly true both of Trump supporters and of the half of the country that voted against him.  “In a sense,” the report concludes, “it is in the deep chords of distrust where Americans seem most united.”

Serge Schmemann, the Times editorial board member who wrote about the study, lamented that it “left unanswered the wrenching question that we must answer if things are to improve:  Why?  Why has America fallen into the deep malaise quantified by this study? Why are we so down on our country, our government, our prospects? Why is there so much hatred in our civil discourse?”

I offer a partial answer in my new book, Criminal Justice in Divided America:  Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy.  Failures of the criminal legal system helped to drive American politics toward populism, polarization, and pessimism.  By the same token, the right kinds of reforms can not only make policing, prosecution, and punishment fairer and more effective; they can assist in rebuilding American democracy.

More here.

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Alberto Romero at The Algorithmic Bridge:

Let me sum all this up because it’s too much information to process: What o3 just did is leap into uncharted territory. OpenAI trusted the trajectory and landed here. At 71.7% SWE-bench, 99.95th percentile Codeforces, 96.7 AIME, 87.7 GPQA Diamond, 25.2% FrontierMath and 87.5% ARC-AGI.

We don’t know what any of this means. We don’t know what lies further ahead. We don’t know what the next years hold. GPT-3 was four years ago for God’s sake.

Plenty of people are saying o3 is artificial general intelligence (AGI), or at least a soft form of AGI. Chollet denies the claim with an argument that reminds me of the idea that “no AGI is dumb at times.” He says beating ARC-AGI was a necessary but not sufficient condition to claim AGIness, and that there’s still research to do. I’m not sure what to think. The variance in intelligence across tasks is still high or o3 wouldn’t fail a single ARC-AGI task while striding through FrontierMath, but the last bastions resisting the unstoppable advance of AI seem to be falling one by one. Is it bitter? Is it even more bitter? I don’t know. Will new walls emerge to resist current techniques, as Chollet hopes to achieve with ARC-AGI-v2? I also don’t know.

more here.

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Thomas W. Hodgkinson at Literary Review:

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring romantic drama Gigli (2003), starring Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, but the fact that cinemagoers weren’t sure if they should be asking for ‘two tickets to Giggly’ didn’t help. Synecdoche, New York (2008) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) had more people reaching for their dictionaries than their wallets. But what about a title that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story? 

This brings us to rule two: never give a director carte blanche. After William Friedkin won Oscars for The French Connection (1971) and broke box office records with The Exorcist (1973), Paramount pretty much let him off the leash, even down to the choice of the title for his next film, which he dubbed Sorcerer (1977). Nice one, thought fans. Something along the lines of The Exorcist, perhaps, mixing diabolical forces with titillating gore? Well, no. The film turned out to be a remake of the classic French thriller The Wages of Fear (1953). There was no sorcerer.

more here.

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