Andrew Deming in aeon:

I was 10 when Frank Lloyd Wright first entered my consciousness. I was sitting crosslegged on the beige carpet of my bedroom in a tract house in Melbourne, Florida, watching a Ken Burns documentary about Wright on PBS. Both my parents were schoolteachers, interested in history and travel; for them, the world of architecture belonged to another planet entirely: buildings were background texture. But I noticed the scalloped sink in my parents’ bathroom. I noticed that the façade my house shared with so many on our cul-de-sac looked strangely better in its mirrored version across the street – or perhaps it was only that their landscaping added the faintest sense of intention to a place otherwise void of character. And then there was Wright, whose buildings felt impossibly different from anything I’d seen. His rooms were not rectangles to be filled but worlds unto themselves – shadows, stone, light pouring in sideways. His spaces, at once intimate and vast, were shaped by ideas I had no words for, yet immediately recognised. His work reached backwards and forwards simultaneously: primitive shelter reimagined with an aesthetic that felt both timeless and unmistakably American.

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Christine Smallwood in Harper’s Magazine:

To live in society involves putting up with people who we did not choose to know and may in fact prefer not to exist. Even those we basically like and get along with are sure, from time to time, to inspire in us the wish that they would (painlessly, briefly) disappear. But it is an obdurate and inconvenient fact that people don’t turn on and off like appliances; they don’t come into or out of being according to our will. To be in a relationship with others—whether platonic, romantic, or political—requires enduring them without going crazy. Our earliest and most formative experience with the problem of other people is the sibling relationship.

Psychoanalysts say that around the age of two or two and a half, children become preoccupied with the notion of siblings. 

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Hints of Pale Lemon

the light pouring in my window
has hints of pale lemon
as they might say on the back
of a wine bottle

well, yes, it is the best of wines
so I sit in my chair drinking it in
but find I have some questions

for body – I thought we were
in this together jogging side by side
through the years, but here you are
about to turn 89 leaving me far behind
somewhere in my 50’s, maybe 40’s even

why are you hurrying? pause for a few years
let me catch up then we’ll get
a couple of walkers and push
on together to wherever we’re going

by Nils Peterson

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Piers Brendon at Literary Review:

The subject of this excellent biography wished to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris, author of the great imperial trilogy Pax Britannica, but she correctly predicted that the valedictory headlines would read ‘Sex Change Author Dies’. As James Morris, he had won early fame as the Times reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest on Coronation Day, 1953. And Morris’s real distinction, as Sara Wheeler affirms, was as a travel writer. It was a term she loathed. (Wheeler follows Morris’s own lead in using male pronouns for the author’s early life and female ones after 1970, when transition was nearing completion.) But as a young man James had immersed himself in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta and Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen, and went on to evoke the character of places far and near in vivid prose, turning each odyssey into a personal adventure. Sometimes, it is true, Morris indulged in narcissism and euphuism: slam shut his book about Oxford, said Dennis Potter, and ‘the purple ought to ooze out like the juice of squashed plums’. Yet Morris was, Wheeler plausibly maintains, ‘among the finest descriptive writers who ever lived’.

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Robert Zaretsky at The American Scholar:

During Lafargue’s own lifetime, the nature of work was undergoing a traumatic transformation. The seismic effect of the first and second industrial revolutions, as well as the quickening pace of globalization, proved an extinction event for traditional forms of production. “The gods and kings of the past,” declared the historian Eric Hobsbawm, “were powerless before the businessmen and steam engines of the present.” As factory workers and unskilled laborers replaced ateliers and artisans, the former struggled to organize themselves, a struggle into which Lafargue threw himself body and soul.

Or, perhaps, not his entire soul. His essay’s title reveals a dramatic divergence of goals he and union leaders held. He bemoans the demand of workers for shorter workdays (which often lasted as long as 12 hours), insisting that curtailing work hours did not represent victory but defeat: “Shame on the proletariat, only slaves would have been capable of such baseness” to have sought such an outcome. On the contrary, he declaims, workers should oppose the very notion of work.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

“Telescopic altruism” is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin “virtue signaling”, it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza – why? Shouldn’t she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she’s an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to “care” about foreigners who she’ll never meet.

This collapses upon five seconds’ thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?

“But vegetarians care about animals more than humans!” Okay, yeah, they sure do get mad about a billion pigs kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten. Do you think they’d care if a billion of their closest friends were kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten? I dunno, seems bad.

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Rachel Brazil in Nature:

Measuring 5 metres square by 3 metres high, Eve takes up at least half of the floor space in the laboratory it now calls home.

The robotic platform at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, is the brainchild of autonomous-lab pioneer Ross King. It is powered by artificial intelligence, self-driving and “fairly quiet”, King says. But it’s also fast. Working at full speed, Eve’s robotic arm can move a few metres per second, with a positional accuracy of a fraction of a millimetre. The team usually runs Eve slower than that — otherwise, King says, “it’s too scary”.

Eve automates the process of early-stage drug design. One of Eve’s early achievements came in 2018, around three years after it was created, when it identified that the common antimicrobial compound triclosan can target an enzyme that is crucial to the survival of Plasmodium malaria parasites during their dormant phase in the liver¹. To do this, Eve independently screened some 1,600 chemicals and modelled how their structure related to their activity to predict which ones were worth testing. King and his group armed the robot with background knowledge and a machine-learning framework for developing hypotheses. Eve then used those elements to design experiments to test these hypotheses and, crucially, performed them itself. The finding gave researchers a potential route to fighting treatment-resistant malaria.

More here.

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Christopher Webb in The Guardian:

Genius industrialist or clownish conman, humanity’s saviour from a rapidly crumbling planet or rabid social media troll – the verdicts on the world’s richest person vary in flavour, but most share something in common: they focus on Musk as an individual. In their study, Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, and Ben Tarnoff, a tech writer, wish to reframe the conversation. The most important question, they argue, is not “who is Musk?” but “what is Musk a symptom of?”

As the title suggests, their answer is “Muskism”, the coinage a deliberate nod to Fordism, the shorthand for 20th-century capitalism built on the pairing of mass production with mass consumption. If Fordism was the last century’s operating system, Slobodian and Tarnoff contend that Muskism is this century’s.

Like Fordism, it is a modernising project. Unlike Fordism, it does not aim to distribute its rewards widely. Its central promise is “sovereignty through technology”: the fantasy that, in an increasingly unstable world, states and individuals can become more self-reliant by plugging into Musk’s infrastructure. This is Muskism’s version of a social contract. But, as the authors point out, the reality is quite different: rather than self-reliance, we are offered merely greater reliance on the Techno-king of Tesla himself.

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Natalie Haddad at Hyperallergic:

“Nature created him as a gift to the world,” wrote Giorgio Vasari of Raphael in the 16th-century compendium The Lives of the Artists. Roughly 500 years later, the sentiment still holds true. Born in 1483 in Urbino, Italy, a small center of 15th and 16th-century art and culture, Raphael embodies the ideal of the Renaissance man: In his 37 years, he established himself as a painter rivaling Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, ran a thriving studio, and expanded into architecture and design. Yet it’s the humanism of his art, reflecting his own empathic personality, that continues to resonate across time and space.

Sublime Poetry, opening this weekend at the Metropolitan Museum, is the first comprehensive Raphael survey in the United States, encompassing his childhood apprenticeships through his late-life fame and accomplishments. If that seems surprising, consider the logistics involved in securing more than 170 works by the Renaissance master from over 60 global collections, ranging from celebrated masterpieces such as “The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in a Landscape (The Alba Madonna)” (1509–11) to the fragile drawings that were the cornerstone of his practice, like the Ashmolean Museum’s beguiling “Portrait of a Young Boy (Presumed to be a Self-Portrait)” (c. 1500) and the Louvre’s breathtaking “Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Three-Quarter Length” (c. 1507).

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In Solitude

In solitude, we remain
face to face with the
naked being of things.
And yet we find that the
nakedness of reality,
which we have feared,
is neither a matter of
terror nor of shame.

It is clothed in the friendly
communion of silence, and this
silence is related to love.

The world our words have tried to classify,
to control, and even to despise
(because they could not contain it)
comes close to us, for silence
teaches us to know reality
by respecting it where words
have defiled it . . .

by Thomas Merton
from Poetic Outlaws

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Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:

Worldwide, more than 330 million people have depression, with major depressive disorder representing one of the most common psychiatric disorders in clinics. Up to 30 percent of these patients don’t have improved mood after trying two different medications, at which point their provider may consider their condition to be treatment-resistant depression.¹

In addition to altered mood, people with depression also often experience physiological symptoms, such as sleep problems, digestive disorders, and changes to their blood pressure or heart rate. However, these symptoms also occur when the autonomic nervous system, responsible for maintaining normal bodily functions through the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches, is dysfunctional. Dysregulation in this system can lead to oxidative stress that can strain mitochondria and decrease cardiac function, reducing proper blood circulation.

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Mark Jarman at the Hudson Review:

By the end of Heaney’s life, all literary laurels became destined for him and created a lore of fame, from the rhyming epithet “Famous Seamus,” said to have been coined by the English poet James Fenton, and anecdotes of his having to apologize once again to another worthy and deserving Irish poet when the award came instead and once again to Famous Seamus. I have heard the Irish poet Ciaran Carson speak of this dilemma. And I have heard Heaney’s friend Michael Longley who tells of an exchange with an English Don. “How do you feel about the Heaney phenomenon?” said Don asked Longley. To which Longley replied, “Envious.”
 
Heaney the poet is more the heir to Robert Lowell than to W. B. Yeats, though Lowell himself might be said to be heir to Yeats. Read Heaney’s poems and see the way the tones and textures of Heaney’s life collect sound and form not only from Lowell’s Life Studies but also from Theodore Roethke’s lyric sequences. By mid century the lyric in English had aspired to, in Hart Crane’s famous phrase, new thresholds, new anatomies.

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Theodore Martin at LitHub:

It has long been conventional for crime novelists to describe killers using the language of insanity, madness, and mental illness. But in the crime novels of the 1990s, another term keeps cropping up: sick. The murderer in Blanche on the Lam is “sick….Very sick.” In A Walk among the Tombstones, Block’s detective Matt Scudder decides that the serial killers are either “sick…or evil…take your pick.” In L.A. Confidential, the serial killer Douglas Dieterling isn’t mad, he’s “quite physiologically ill. He gets brain inflammations periodically.” The physiological effects of brain inflammation are also mentioned in White Butterfly, where the big reveal about serial killer J.T. Saunders is that he suffers from syphilis, which has affected his brain. As one of Mosley’s characters explains, “VD can make you insane.” Cornwell makes the sickness more literal still. The killer in All That Remains is identified only after it is discovered that he suffers from “aplastic anemia.”

Cornwell had used this device before. In her debut novel Postmortem (1990), Kay Scarpetta finds herself debating the health status of the serial killer she’s pursuing. “He isn’t sick, okay?” Scarpetta insists. “He’s antisocial, he’s evil.” Her colleague disagrees: “Has to be some kind of sickness. He knows he’s sick.”

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Katherine Rochester at Artforum:

IN 1974, a strand of hair twirled in a porcelain sink in room 503 of the Chelsea Hotel. It belonged to an artist named Bettina, who photographed its sinuous formations as water jostled it around. The resulting suite of sixty-three gelatin silver prints—Two Hours in the Life of One Hair Photographed in the Sink at One Minute Intervals While Agitated by Running Water—represented a selection from the 120 images she would have snapped given the stated parameters of the exercise. In fact, the series was vaster still, extending both backward and forward in time via works that explored organic forms through sundry media. Terminal Germination/Paris, ca. 1970, a black-and-white photocopy that preceded the photographs, comprised eight xeroxed drawings of morphing hair arranged in a two-by-four grid. Some vignettes had the grainy shading of excessive toner powder, while others were bleached out. Bettina followed these in 1971 with a group of wooden sculptures and line drawings exploring similar arabesque shapes. In the 1983–84 series “Retake/Outtake; Filmtwists,” she imagined a suite of monumental sculptures (never fabricated) for the city of Los Angeles, transforming the motif of the hair into ribbons of loosely woven metal, suggesting strips of unspooled celluloid.

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Nobuko Nakano in The Guardian:

When the founder of Panasonic, Kōnosuke Matsushita, was asked what quality he valued most in job candidates, his answer baffled everyone: whether they were lucky. Not their credentials, not their intelligence, not their experience. Luck. For years, this anecdote struck me as charmingly eccentric – the kind of thing a titan of industry gets away with saying because nobody around them dares to laugh. Then I began studying the neuroscience of fortunate people, and I stopped laughing, too.

What my research has revealed is that luck, far from being a roll of the cosmic dice, operates through identifiable patterns of brain chemistry and behaviour. The consistently lucky are not blessed by fate. They are running different neurological software – and the remarkable thing is that this software can be installed.

Consider what happens when someone simply declares: “I am a lucky person.” It sounds like wishful thinking. But brain imaging tells a different story.

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Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

Instead of having companies build a specialized interface for every kind of work, the AI generates the right interface on the fly. I suspect the future isn’t one interface to rule them all. It’s AI that generates the right interface for the moment, an agent on your desktop, a chart in a conversation, a custom app to solve a problem. We’re moving from adapting to the AI’s interface to the AI adapting its interface to you.

AI capability has been running ahead of AI accessibility. The models have been smart enough to do extraordinary things for a while now, but we’ve been making people access that intelligence through chatbots. And, as that cognitive load research shows, the chatbot format is actively working against them. As interfaces improve, we’re going to see what happens when a much larger number of people can actually use what AI is capable of.

More here.

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