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Shahin Vallée in Phenomenal World:

A profound sense of uncertainty dominates the question of the international monetary order today. Trump’s presidency in the US, the growing Sino-American rivalry, and widespread sanctions against Russia’s Central Bank reserves are all contributing to the general indeterminacy. The rise of crypto assets, digital currencies and the return of precious commodities as a potential store of value have prompted some to predict the demise of a fiat based monetary order powered by fractional reserve banking at home and offshore money creation abroad.

After decades acting as the anchor of the global monetary order, the role of the dollar has now come into question. The promotion of stablecoins and other advanced commercial cryptocurrencies have been designed to expand the dollar’s global role, but the outcome of this cryptomercantilism remains to be seen. China has its own internationalization strategy built on the expansion of its central bank’s bilateral swap network to advance renminbi invoicing and the creation of a fully digital payment system backed by a digital currency.

Europe’s strategy is yet to emerge. There is an opportunity for European leaders—not just central bankers—to seize the moment to expand Europe’s global monetary role. A stronger role for the euro would likely enhance European resilience, be it by expanding protections from US sanctions, by helping to insulate Europe’s economy from swings in foreign exchange rates, or by securing better financing conditions for European governments, businesses, and households. But a stronger role for the euro, which doesn’t preclude some costs, will require a degree of planning and policy coordination across member states, as well as between fiscal and monetary authorities—both of which are so far lacking.

More here.

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Nicholas Russell in The Baffler:

In David Fincher’s most mainstream film, The Social Network, an aggrieved ex of Mark Zuckerberg tells him that “the internet isn’t written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink.” Disappearing ink perhaps, given how difficult it has become to search for useful or accurate information, let alone its source, amid the hallucinatory derangements of artificial intelligence. Media literacy has never been more important. Society has never been lazier.

For the past few months, I’ve been researching how science fiction has been used as a guide for predicting the future. This has included reading interviews and speeches, the testimony of would-be prophets. Naturally, certain quotes pop up like weeds—but, in the case of the more platitudinal selections, no one can seem to agree on who actually said them. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” was either coined by Danish physicist Niels Bohr or mythic Yankees catcher Yogi Berra. It’s entirely possible both men did, in fact, say some variation of the quote, though it’s more likely that Bohr, who was forty years older, said it first. But then again, he may not have said it at all.

The origin of the less elegant but more popular “We can predict everything, except the future” is similarly elusive. In 2012, user1202136 on the Stack Exchange forum for English etymology asked about the quote’s source, a question that’s been viewed four thousand times. The highest-rated answer, provided by a user going by Sven Yargs—who, according to his profile, has answered 3,444 other questions—is exhaustive in its detail: “The earliest instance of that approximate wording that I could find in a Google Books search is from David Redburn, ‘The ‘Graying’ of the World’s Population,’ in Social Gerontology (1998): ‘An oft-stated demographer’s joke comments, ‘it is easy to predict everything except the future’ and while this is demographic humor, or lack of it, it does relate the trepidation with which population specialists approach projections.’”

More here.

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Over at Doug Henwood’s Behind the News,

Thea Riofrancos, author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, on the complications of using lithium batteries to green our future (think tank here) [and] Alyssa Battistoni, author of Free Gifts, on the weird relationship between capitalism and Nature.

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Elaine Scarry in The Boston Review:

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, and when they turned their attention back to him, they found the infant’s mouth full of golden sweetness. Cicero provides our first surviving record of the legend, which is repeated with variations over centuries, always as a portent of the sweet style the infant would ultimately possess.

Plato’s honeyed voice was celebrated in classical antiquity by thinkers as different as Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius. Praise for Plato’s literary genius regularly recurs until at least the early nineteenth century. As the Romantic poet Percy Shelley writes, “Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive.”

More here.

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Jim Downs in The New York Times:

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Some Criticism, Some Theory, Some Questions

He said,
“Too much plot, too little dancing.”

Plot would have us believe the world
is understandable. Not “The King
died then the Queen,” but
“The king died and the Queen
died of grief.”
…………………… We want cause
to break onto the future like
a great wave.
……………………  So, how is it you
woke up where you woke up this morning?
What was the cause and the cause
of that cause? Is your story line believable?
And why isn’t there more dancing?

by Nils Peterson
from My Dinner With Nils
Kinchafoonee Press, Athens Georgia, 

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Lydia Kiesling in the New York Times:

In an unremarkable New York apartment, sometime in the not-too-distant future, a man tells his robot to come to bed. She is a “Stella,” an intelligent machine who looks and sounds like a woman. We soon learn that she is a “Cuddle Bunny,” a euphemistic term for the sex-robot setting she’s currently running. She is also set to “autodidactic” mode, which gives her a searching intellect and a nascent independence. Her name is Annie, and we will follow her on the journey to elevated consciousness in “Annie Bot,” Sierra Greer’s slyly profound debut novel.

Annie’s human is Doug, and she is programmed to read his moods and cater to his every need. “Annoyance, a 2 out of 10. She must be careful,” the close-third narration tells us. Her actions are calibrated to his pleasure. She knows, for instance, that during sex, “he does not like her too loud.”

More here.  And more about “The challenges of writing from the perspective of a sex robot” by Sierra Greer here.

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Hatty Willmoth at BBC Science Focus:

If you want to lose weight, exercise doesn’t really matter.

That doesn’t sound right, does it? After all, for decades we’ve been told that the way to burn off excess calories is simple: move more. Have a slice of cake? No problem, just make up for it at the gym.

But a major new study challenges that long-standing belief. Collating data on more than 4,200 people across 34 different countries, researchers found that people who exercise more don’t burn more calories than those who sit around all day.

In fact, the research found that, matched pound-for-pound, a hunter-gatherer from Tanzania’s Hadza community burns about the same number of calories each day as a typical US office worker – even though the Hadza are more active in a single day than most Americans are in an entire week.

More here.

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Corey Robin at his own website:

In a way I’ve never experienced in my life, I feel in synch with a political turn, felt by millions of voters, that’s now being reflected in the voice of one of the most dynamic leaders we’ve seen in a long time.

Which leads me now to a bit of a personal/political memoir, which may resonate with other leftists of my age, with those of us who are part of lost generation of progressives, the Gen X leftists, who’ve mostly felt out of step for virtually every political development of our adult lives.

In the last few years, I’ve noticed a change in my political writing, prompted by the surge of enshittification, the rise of AI, and the concomitant erosion of academic and cultural standards. I found myself increasingly focusing my political writing on the importance of excellence for the left, on pushing for the highest standards of teaching and writing and work, not as a punishment for the poor or as an excuse for excluding subjugated groups, but as an aspiration of a genuinely democratic society, as something everybody wants for themselves and the people around them.

More here.

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Deborah Friedell at the LRB:

Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper, and his talent for storing and retrieving vast amounts of information would be useful to him throughout his career. Loveman argues that the diary became his ‘catch-all’ for anything he couldn’t safely or conveniently note in his official or household accounts. Into its pages went social debts (who had given him dinner, who still owed him one), gossip, the music he heard and the plays he saw, and the most intimate aspects of his life, from bodily functions (including what has been called ‘one of the best documented attacks of flatulence in history’) to sex.

He had married Elizabeth de St Michel when he was 22 years old; she was 14, young even by the standard of the time. We don’t know how they met. Her father was French, and she had grown up in Paris and Devon. She was a Protestant, though when she was angry at her husband she would sometimes threaten to convert to Catholicism. He thought that he was in love with her, at least at the beginning of their marriage. When he hears an especially stirring piece of music, he writes that it did ‘wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife’.

more here.

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David Adam in Nature:

The Roman sage Marcus Aurelius said we should never let the future disturb us. But then he never had a conversation with the futurologist Nick Bostrom about the state of the world in 2050. “There’s a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers,” Bostrom said in an e-mail. “Some humans might do science as a hobby, but they wouldn’t be making any useful contributions.” Time to rethink your career options, Nature readers!

To adapt a cliché about computer models, predictions of the future are usually wrong, but some are interesting. And Nature has a long history of seeking stimulation in forecasts, projections and auguries about how research might unfold in the coming decades. Most notably, the journal marked the end of the twentieth century and the onset of the twenty-first with supplements dedicated to scientific soothsaying, and a bold prediction, from then-editor Philip Campbell, that life based on something other than DNA would be discovered by 2100. (It was a statement he called foolish then, but stands by today.)

More here.

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Luiz Pessoa at Aeon Magazine:

When we consider the highways traversing the brain and how signals establish behaviourally relevant relationships across the central nervous system, we come to an important insight. In a highly interconnected system, to understand function, we need to shift away from thinking in terms of individual brain regions. The functional unit is not to be found at the level of the brain area, as commonly proposed. Instead, we need to consider neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions, much like the murmuration of starlings forms a single pattern from the collective behaviour of individual birds.

There are many instances of distributed neuronal ensembles. Groups of neurons extending over cortical (say, prefrontal cortex and hippocampus) and subcortical (say, amygdala) regions form circuits that are important for learning what is threatening and what is safe. Such multiregion circuits are ubiquitous; fMRI studies in humans have shown that the brain is organised in terms of large-scale networks that stretch across the cortex as well as subcortical territories. For example, the so-called ‘salience network’ (suggested to be engaged when significant events are encountered) spans brain regions in the frontal and parietal lobes, among others, and can also be viewed as a neuronal ensemble.

more here.

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New Year’s Eve Always Terrifies Me

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Carrie Courogen in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“I don’t have a clear-cut film identity,” Rob Reiner told London’s Sunday Telegraph in 1989.

The late actor, writer, and director was on a promotional tour for When Harry Met Sally…, the fifth feature nestled in what would become an eight-year run of all-timers, including This Is Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1985), Stand by Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), Misery (1990), and A Few Good Men (1992). With a quick, passing glance at his list of credits, it’s easy to take him at his word. Reiner’s films spanned the genre spectrum, from mockumentary to rom-com to thriller to courtroom drama, and his work as a filmmaker was often described as “versatile,” that of a journeyman: reliable, occasionally great, but never executed with the distinct stylistic flair of a true auteur.

Yet in spite of flash, what Reiner’s vastly differing films all share is the generous and empathetic heart of their director, a deep sense of humanity, and a relentless curiosity about and love of people, in all their imperfections and quirks. It seems a cliché to call a filmmaker’s work personal—what creative work isn’t?—but in Reiner’s case, filmmaking was deeply personal, taking the form not of statements but of questions. Taken all together, they shape the lifelong quest of a man searching for enlightenment on subjects both simple and profound.

More here.

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