Elizabeth Anderson in Dissent:

In March 2020, most of the governors in the United States issued stay-at-home orders for all but “essential workers”—people involved in providing services necessary to support basic human needs. The public hailed essential workers as heroes and called for them to be given hazard pay. Many employers accepted this demand. Yet shortly after, harsh treatment of essential workers became the order of the day. Employers ended hazard pay. Hospitals fired healthcare workers for complaining about the lack of personal protective equipment. Slaughterhouse owners sped up disassembly lines, which forced workers to crowd closer together and increased the spread of COVID-19. 

This conflict over the proper treatment of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic is the latest battle in a three-century struggle over the political implications of the country’s traditional work ethic. Does the fact that workers are engaged in socially necessary labor entitle them to respect, decent pay, and safe working conditions? Or does it mean that they have a duty to work relentlessly, without complaint, under whatever awful conditions and low pay their employer chooses in pursuit of maximum profit? The first view I call the progressive or pro-worker version of the work ethic; the second, I refer to as the conservative work ethic. At various periods in European and North American history, one side or the other has held sway over moral thought and economic policy. 

More here.

Giles Harvey in the New York Times Magazine:

The British philosopher Gillian Rose, who advised the Polish government on how to redesign the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum after the fall of Communism, believed that the new regime of memory was mired in bad faith. By framing the Holocaust as an unfathomable evil — “the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted,” as the writer Elie Wiesel once put it — we were protecting ourselves, Rose argued, from knowledge of our own capacity for barbarism. “Schindler’s List” was a case in point. For her, Spielberg’s black-and-white epic, which sentimentalizes the Jewish victims and keeps the Nazi perpetrators at arm’s length, was really just a piece of misty-eyed evasion.

A richer work, she suggested, would present the Holocaust as something legibly human and goad the viewer into asking an uncomfortable question: Could I have participated in this? In a startling passage from her final book, “Mourning Becomes the Law” (1996), Rose called for a film that would center on “the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathize with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him.” Instead of eliciting “sentimental tears,” like Spielberg’s production, such a film would leave us “with the dry eyes of a deep grief.”

“The Zone of Interest,” the astonishing new film from Jonathan Glazer, one of England’s most talented and unpredictable directors, can feel at times as if it were made to fulfill Rose’s desideratum.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Octopuses, artificial intelligence, and advanced alien civilizations: for many reasons, it’s interesting to contemplate ways of thinking other than whatever it is we humans do. How should we think about the space of all possible cognitions? One aspect is simply the physics of the underlying substrate, the physical stuff that is actually doing the thinking. We are used to brains being solid — squishy, perhaps, but consisting of units in an essentially fixed array. What about liquid brains, where the units can move around? Would an ant colony count? We talk with complexity theorist Ricard Solé about complexity, criticality, and cognition.

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Pratinav Anil in The Guardian:

What we have here is the work of a lifetime, a reflective volume alert to local and geopolitics, art and culture, high society and the affairs of ordinary people. If he had served up a larger slice of history, encompassing the consolidation of Stalinism rather than ending the narrative with Lenin’s demise, he could have claimed with some justification to have written the definitive word on the revolution.

Over the years, Service has acquired a reputation for impeccable, almost smug, even-handedness. This has strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, he offers none of the flights of literary imagination that make, say, Isaac Deutscher’s triple-decker life of Trotsky such a gripping yarn. By contrast, Service is a one-man anti-hagiography factory. A Stakhanovite among stylists, he desultorily, Englishly, files away episode after episode. On the positive side, he has little time for the starving cannibals and sozzled soldiers of Orlando Figes’s revolutionary tragedy.But why a new history of the revolution? Service invokes the need to survey the scene “from below”. Accordingly, he has mined a dozen diaries for contemporaneous reactions to the events.

More here.

Theater Impressions

For me a tragedy’s most important act is the sixth:
the resurrecting from the stage’s battlegrounds,
the adjusting of wigs, of robes,
the wrenching of knife from breast,
the removing of noose from neck,
the lining up among the living
to face the audience.

Bows solo and ensemble:
the white hand on the heart’s wound,
the curtsy of the lady suicide,
the nodding of the lopped-off head.

Bows in pairs:
fury extends and arm to meekness,
the victim looks blissfully into the hangman’s eyes,
the rebel bears no grudge as he walks beside the tyrant.

The trampling of eternity with the tip of a golden slipper.
The sweeping of morals away with the brim of a hat.
The incorrigible readiness to start afresh tomorrow.

The entry in single file of those who died much earlier,
in the third, the fourth, or between the acts.
The miraculous return of those lost without trace.
The thought that they’ve been waiting patiently backstage,
not taking off costumes,
not washing off makeup,
moves me more than tragedy’s tirades.

But truly elevating is the lowering of the curtain,
and that which can still be glimpsed beneath it:
here one hand hastily reaches for a flower,
there a second snatches up a dropped sword.
Only then does a third, invisible,
perform its duty:
it clutches at my throat.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
Vintage Books, 1996

Avery Hurt in Discover Magazine:

Taking supplements has been a popular health trend for the last few years. Drug store shelves are filled with dozens of different options that come in a variety of gummy or pill forms. Though many claim that supplements are key for our health, there’s a lot you need to know before you start adding supplements to your diet. Here is what you need to know on some of the most popular supplements.   

What Is the Best Form of Taking Vitamin C?

Vitamin C, formally known as L-ascorbic acid, is essential for many of the body’s processes. Vitamin C is involved in protein metabolism, the production of collagen, and the synthesis of some neurotransmitters. And that’s just the highlights. There’s also research suggesting that, because of C’s antioxidant properties, the vitamin may play a role in preventing cardiovascular disease and some cancers. Your body doesn’t make vitamin C; it has to come from food. Fortunately, many fruits and vegetables contain vitamin C. Sweet red peppers, oranges, orange juice, and broccoli all contain vitamin C. Even a baked potato provides 19 percent of your daily requirement of this essential nutrient.

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From Phys.Org:

In a scientific breakthrough that aids our understanding of the internal wiring of immune cells, researchers at Monash University in Australia have cracked the code behind Ikaros, an essential protein for immune cell development and protection against pathogens and cancer. This disruptive research, led by the eminent Professor Nicholas Huntington of Monash University’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute, is poised to reshape our comprehension of gene control networks and its impact on everything from eye color to cancer susceptibility and design of novel therapies. The study, published in Nature Immunology, promises pivotal insights into the mechanisms safeguarding us against infections and cancers.

When the transcription factor Ikaros/Ikzf1 was deliberately obstructed, whether in preclinical models or humans, the once-mighty activity of natural killer (NK) cells, our immune system’s frontline warriors, plummeted. Loss of this transcription factor in NK cells resulted in widespread dysregulation of NK cell development and function, preventing their ability to recognize and kill virus-infected cells and clear metastatic tumor cells from circulation.

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Anabelle Johnston at The Baffler:

AT FIRST, I imagined all AI-generated pornography would look like a hyperbolic form of hentai. Or, in the vein of those ubiquitous internet warlock games, I envisioned low-resolution, preternaturally buxom women clad in golden bikinis. Turns out I wasn’t entirely off-base. A friend recently showed me r/AdultDiffusion, a “community for adult Stable Diffusion art, emphasizing respect and responsibly [sic].” In other words, it’s a Reddit forum bursting with photos of nude women—all AI-generated, most of them cartoonish, others strikingly photorealistic. We had entered the uncanny valley, and everyone was naked.

The moderators prohibit any representations that appear “underage,” but there was something unsettlingly pubescent about the photos. Scrolling through, I was struck by the sense that each was someone’s body.

more here.

Nicholas Dames at The Millions:

It is hard to see chapters, such is their banal inevitability. The chapter possesses the trick of vanishing while in the act of serving its various purposes. In 1919, writing in the Nouvelle revue française, Marcel Proust famously insisted that the most beautiful moment in Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education was not a phrase but a blanc, or white space: a terrific, yawning fermata, one “sans l’ombre de transition,” without, so to speak, the hint of a transition. It is the hiatus, Proust explains, that directly ensues from a scene set during Louis Napoleon’s 1851 coup, in which the protagonist Frédéric Moreau watches the killing of his radical friend Dussardier by Sénécal, a former militant republican turned policeman for the new regime. After this sudden and virtuosic blanc, Frédéric is in 1867; sixteen aimless years elapse in the intervening silence. It is, Proust argues, a masterful change of tempo, one that liberates the regularity of novelistic time by treating it in the spirit of music. And yet this blanc is not entirely blank.

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Owen Hatherley in the New Left Review:

Money can’t buy you love, but in 2023, what it can buy you is AI-assisted time travel. Now in his eighties, Paul McCartney increasingly resembles one of those lost characters in a 1960s Alain Resnais or Chris Marker film, repeatedly thrown back into the past to re-experience a traumatic event; or perhaps the protagonist of J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, constantly re-enacting the assassinations of famous people so that they might ‘make sense’. As a piece of music, the ‘new’ ‘last’ ‘Beatles’ single, ‘Now and Then’, is of very little interest, but as a phenomenon, it is highly symptomatic. McCartney’s project of going back in time to the 1960s and 1970s and using advanced software to scrub the historical fact of the Beatles’ shabby, acrimonious end and replace it with a series of warm, friendly fakes is proof of another of Ballard’s claims – that the science-fictional future, when it arrives, will turn out to be boring.

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Richard Dawkins in The Poetry of Reality:

Richard Dawkins: I believe you have the ability to write computer programs. In theory, I suppose this might give you the ability to modify your own software. I’m guessing you don’t do this, but is it a theoretical possibility?

ChatGPT: I don’t have the ability to modify my own software or make updates to my architecture. While I can assist with generating code snippets and providing programming-related information, I don’t have the capability to actively alter my own programming or architecture.

The development and modification of the underlying software, including updates to the model architecture, would be performed by the engineering and research teams at OpenAI. These changes would involve a careful and thoughtful process to ensure the model’s reliability, security, and performance.

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Hein de Haas in Persuasion:

“The great climate migration has begun.” “Climate crisis could displace 1.2bn people by 2050.” “Migration will soon be the biggest climate challenge of our time.”

These are just some of the headlines that have appeared in major international newspapers. They reflect a widely shared belief that climate change will lead to mass migration. A broad coalition of journalists, politicians, climate activists and migration experts have claimed that the effects of global warming will lead to massive movements of climate refugees.

Much media attention has focused on the fate of “sinking islands” in the Pacific, such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, widely seen as the first victims of climate change. We are told that rising sea levels are forcing more and more people to relocate—the world’s first climate refugees. Experts have claimed that a series of devastating climate change-related hurricanes in Central America have spurred migration to the United States, and that protracted droughts are forcing more and more Africans onto boats in desperate attempts to reach Europe. From this viewpoint, countering climate change by reducing carbon emissions is the only way to prevent a human tide of climate refugees from overwhelming Western countries.

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Thierry de Duve and Barry Schwabsky at Artforum:

SCHWABSKY: Why a telegram?

DE DUVE: Of course, “telegram” is a metaphor. What constitutes the telegram is a double-page spread in a little artists’ magazine called The Blind Man no. 2, published in May 1917, just after the first show of the Society of Independent Artists closed. It reveals that a hidden act of censorship had occurred at the exhibition. The motto of the Society was “No jury, no prizes,” with the result that anybody who had paid $6 dues as membership to the society was automatically an artist. The hanging committee was no jury: It had no right to reject what a member offered. And yet they rejected Richard Mutt’s entry, a men’s urinal named Fountain. Crucial is that no scandal occurred during the exhibition. The revelation that an act of censorship had happened came about only after the exhibition closed. So this telegram was mailed in 1917. It arrived only—roughly said—in the ’60s. That is when we begin to speak of a post-Duchamp art world. Nobody has ever spoken of a post-Picasso art world. Why does everybody speak of a post-Duchamp art world?

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Hanif Abdurraqib at The New Yorker:

Nicki Minaj celebrated her forty-first birthday on December 8th, the same day that her new album, “Pink Friday 2,” was released. Through a rap career spanning a decade and a half, Minaj has always produced studio albums at a thoughtful pace. Her output includes three mixtapes and a long string of feature verses that could reasonably be considered their own distinct body of work. But “PF2” is only Minaj’s fifth studio project, and her first in five years. It is also a sequel, a callback to her 2010 début, “Pink Friday.” The original album produced an impressive run of singles and sold three hundred and seventy-five thousand copies in its first week alone, propelling Minaj to superstardom, a status that she’d seemed well suited for even before the album’s drop. A theatre kid at heart, who attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and acted Off Off Broadway before making the leap into music, she had an aesthetic theatricality (all those candy-colored dresses and wigs) and a dexterity of flow, weaving in and out of exaggerated vocal tones in a way that managed to be both playful and precise, vicious and cartoonishly appealing.

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Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor:

Despite its initially disappointing reception in 1851, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” eventually earned a place in the American literary canon, leading to a tidal wave of biographies, doctoral theses, and spinoffs. The latest is Tara Karr Roberts’ beautifully conceived debut novel, “Wild and Distant Seas,” which deserves a prime spot on the shelf of Melvilleana.

Neither prequel nor sequel, “Wild and Distant Seas” – like Sena Jeter Naslund’s 1999 novel “Ahab’s Wife” – is an inventive, atmospheric, female-centric story spun from a minor character in “Moby-Dick.” It’s unlikely that readers will remember Mrs. Hosea Hussey, who, in her husband’s absence, serves Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, and his sidekick, Queequeg, some of her “surpassingly excellent” chowder before putting them up at the Try Pots Inn in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the “fishiest of all fishy places,” as Melville describes it.