Kashmir Hill in The New York Times:

One afternoon in early 2017, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., an engineer named Tommer Leyvand sat in a conference room with a smartphone standing on the brim of his baseball cap. Rubber bands helped anchor it in place with the camera facing out. The absurd hat-phone, a particularly uncool version of the future, contained a secret tool known only to a small group of employees. What it could do was remarkable. The handful of men in the room were laughing and speaking over one another in excitement, as captured in a video taken that day, until one of them asked for quiet. The room went silent; the demo was underway.

Mr. Leyvand turned toward a man across the table from him. The smartphone’s camera lens — round, black, unblinking — hovered above Mr. Leyvand’s forehead like a Cyclops eye as it took in the face before it. Two seconds later, a robotic female voice declared, “Zach Howard.” “That’s me,” confirmed Mr. Howard, a mechanical engineer. An employee who saw the tech demonstration thought it was supposed to be a joke. But when the phone started correctly calling out names, he found it creepy, like something out of a dystopian movie.

More here.

David Robson in The Guardian:

If you have paid attention to the science of mental health, you will have heard the theory that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Since the 1990s, the common symptoms – low mood, loss of interest and pleasure, changed sleep and appetite – have been said to arise from a lack of a neurotransmitter called serotonin. By raising levels of this “happy hormone”, certain antidepressant pills such as Prozac could relieve our inner torment and return our minds to equanimity.

The truth, as ever, has turned out to be more complicated. Last year, an influential review of the available data concluded that there was no clear evidence to support the theory, and the ensuing headlines left many bewildered about who or what to believe. Two new books may help us to cut through the confusion. The first, Breaking Through Depression, comes from Philip Gold, a senior investigator at the US National Institute of Mental Health who has spent a lifetime investigating the illness. Gold performed some of the trials of the very first antidepressants and he continues to work at the cutting edge today.

More here.

Jon Pareles in the New York Times:

Four decades after it was filmed, “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking Heads concert documentary, is still ecstatic and strange. “It stays kind of relevant, even though it doesn’t make literal sense,” David Byrne, the band’s leader and singer, said in a recent interview.

The film, which was directed by Jonathan Demme, has been restored from its long-lost original negatives and this new version will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, then play in regular and IMAX theaters later this month. An expanded audio album, out Sept. 15, now includes the entire concert set, with two tracks omitted from the movie: “Cities” and a medley of “Big Business” and “I Zimbra.” Refreshing its peak performance, the band hopes to draw one more generation of fans to its irresistible funk grooves and youthful ambitions.

“Stop Making Sense” is both a definitive 1980s period piece and a prophecy. Its staging helped reshape pop concerts in its wake.

More here.

Leo Robson in the New Left Review:

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer who died earlier this summer aged 94, represented a number of things, but they were all variations – to borrow one of his own favourite words – on the theme of freedom. To the Western readership which embraced his work perhaps as eagerly as that of any non-Anglophone writer during the final quarter of the twentieth century (Marquez was the obvious competitor) he seemed to offer a distinctive, unorthodox and unassailably authoritative approach to novelistic form, literary history and the sanctity of private life. But no less important to Kundera’s project and legacy were the liberties he took, the freedoms he granted himself – from responsibility and rigour, from his obligations to coherence and even reality.

More here.

Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous:

That’s Daniel Stoljar (Australian National University) in conversation with Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State University) for The Workbench, Professor Ballantyne’s site of interviews about academic writing.

There are many interesting points in the interview. The above quote comes from a part in which they discuss Professor Stoljar’s work on philosophical progress and philosophical exceptionalism:

Stoljar: …all of this stuff led me to think about the nature of philosophy and how it is different or similar to other fields.

Ballantyne: It sounds like your thinking about philosophical progress was a natural outgrowth of work on other themes.

Stoljar: Yes, it was. And since writing the book on progress I have become increasingly interested in other ideas that follow on from that, in particular ideas of exceptionalism and anti-exceptionalism to adopt some vocab Timothy Williamson has used recently. In the book on progress, I defend a sort of anti-exceptionalist picture of philosophy, but many people, both in and outside the discipline, tend to hold exceptionalist views about it.

More here.

Harrison Tasoff in Neuroscience News:

Researchers, guided by the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), explored the neural basis of morality. They discovered that while a general brain network is involved in judging moral violations, distinct activity patterns arise for different moral issues, supporting a pluralistic view.

Surprisingly, the brain activity patterns also revealed differences in how liberals and conservatives perceive moral issues. These findings add depth to our understanding of the foundations of moral reasoning.

More here.

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times. Till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

by Denise Levertov
from Naked Poetry
Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1969

Joseph Horowitz at The American Scholar:

The present fraught American moment—an impasse that seems ever worse than before—is typically observed and discussed in terms of governmental and political dysfunction, of social decay, of religious decline. Barely mentioned, if at all, is that the arts are today in crisis in the United States—or that music, theater, literature, and the visual arts were once a binding factor, defining America and individual Americans.

So unnoticed are the American arts that a major American historian, Jill Lepore, can produce a wonderfully readable 900-page historical overview—These Truths: A History of the United States (2018)—without devoting so much as a sentence to the arts. No one could possibly dispute her emphasis on present-day issues and needs—the urgency of pondering American race relations and inequality. But it does not follow that there should be no consideration of Walt Whitman or Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson or William Faulkner, Charles Ives or George Gershwin, Duke Ellington or Billie Holiday. Classical music, opera, theater, jazz, and Hollywood are all absent. Could any history of Russia omit Tolstoy? Could a British historian overlook Shakespeare? Is there a Germany without Goethe?

more here. (h/t Brooks Riley)

Jackson Arn at The New Yorker:

Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances,” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is the oddest of ducks, a superb exhibition in which half the paintings are clumsy. Even some of the superb ones are half clumsy. That’s Wong’s charm in a nutshell, though: he seems to have had little interest in producing tasteful, polished, well-made art, thank God. His limitations were obvious from the start; in the years leading up to his suicide, in 2019, at the age of thirty-five, he didn’t correct them so much as put them to work. Once he got going, his compositions stumbled their way into smart choreographies, and his colors could be so dog-whistle shrill as to land with an eerie hush. He was a terrifyingly fast learner, too—walking through this show is like watching one of those time-lapse videos of a plant exploding out of soil. In a fair world, there would be a forest by now.

Wong painted landscapes. Art history offers a few possible terms for his style: “naïve art,” “outsider art,” “art brut.” “Outsider art” seems to be the one that’s stuck (“Outside,” a 2016 group show in Amagansett, helped put him on the map), though the truth is grayer. He taught himself to paint, but only after he’d cooled on photography, the subject of his M.F.A. He spent little time in New York but years in Hong Kong, home to the third-biggest art market on the planet.

more here.

Rafia Zakaria in Baffler:

IN 2023, THE ATTENDEES of the Burning Man festival finally got the rebuke they deserved. “Burners,” as the festivalgoers like to call themselves, found themselves confronting rare torrential rain last week in the dried-up Nevada desert lake bed where they gather each year. The rain turned the fine silty dust-like sand into clay. The clay in turn made it near impossible for anyone to get around, and local authorities issued an order asking the eighty thousand festivalgoers to shelter in place. All exits from the site were closed and social media spilled over with Burners complaining about the terrible conditions they were having to confront instead of the usual wild bacchanal they had come to enjoy.

There are many troubles with the Burning Man Festival but one particularly noxious one is how oblivious Burners are of their privilege and of their exploitation of what was once a pristine landscape, the Black Rock Desert.

There were clues to this even as the Burners were arriving to the festival site this year. In the week leading up to the festival, protesters from a climate action coalition called Seven Circles Alliance used a trailer to put a roadblock on the single road leading to the festival site. They sat down in the middle of the road and put up signs like “Burners of the World Unite” and “Mother Earth Needs Our Help.” The protesters wanted Burning Man to put an end to the ever-larger number of private jets used by celebrities and the ultrarich to get to the festival. The protesters were also demanding a ban on unlimited use of diesel-guzzling generators, propane, and single-use plastics.

Their pleas were not well received.

More here.

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked:

‘Decolonise the curriculum’ is a movement that wants university courses to focus less on dead white European males and more on writers of colour. Its argument is that black students need texts that speak directly to them. They need books by authors who look like them. They need books about experiences and ideas they can more readily relate to than they can the stuff written about in ‘high white culture’. Black students must be able to recognise themselves in what they study, we’re told, or else they’ll feel cheated and demeaned.

I was surprised to find that one of the leading decolonise movements, at the University of Edinburgh, was arguing for WEB Du Bois’ 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, to be included on the English curriculum. The activists said it was unreasonable to expect black students to engage with so many white authors. They also need to engage with people like Du Bois, in whose work they might ‘recognise themselves’. I was surprised, not because I think The Souls of Black Folk shouldn’t be on more university courses – absolutely it should. No, it’s because The Souls of Black Folk runs so fantastically counter to the entire ideology of ‘decolonise’. It made me wonder if these activists have even read it. Du Bois’ book contains some of the finest arguments you will ever read against the idea that high culture is a white thing that others cannot connect with.

More here.

My Quaker-Atheist Friend, Who Has Come to This Meeting House,
Smokes & Looks Out over the Rawthey to Holme Fell

what do you do
anything for?

you do it
for what the mediaevals would call
something like
the Glory of God

doing it for money
that doesn’t do it;

doing it for vanity,
that doesn’t do it;

doing it to justify a disorderly life,
that doesn’t do it

Look at the Briggflatts here . . .

It represents the best
that the people were able to do

they didn’t do it for gain;
in fact, they must have
taken a loss

whether it is a stone next to a stone
or a word next to a word,
it is the glory—
the simple craft of it

and money and sex aren’t worth
bugger-all, not
bugger all

solid, common, vulgar words,
the ones you can touch,
the ones that yield

—and a respect for the music . . .
what else can you tell ‘em?

by Jonathan Williams
from The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat
The University of North Carolina Press, 1994

Remo Verdickt and Emiel Roothooft in LA Review of Books:

NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O is considered one of the leading writers on the African continent of the last 50 years. On December 31, 1977, he was arrested and spent a year in prison as an opponent of the Kenyatta dictatorship. During his imprisonment, Ngũgĩ developed the seminal Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) and decided to substitute his native Gĩkũyũ for English as his primary language of writing. A staunch champion of (self-)translation, he recently published a collection of essays on the subject, entitled The Language of Languages (2023). Here is an edited version of our conversation about his new book and how it reflects back upon his career.

REMO VERDICKT & EMIEL ROOTHOOFT: Why is translation “the language of languages”?

NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O: When two or three languages share a knowledge system, they do this through translation. In other words, if languages had a common language, that language would be called translation. Hence my new book’s title, The Language of Languages.

I reject a hierarchy of languages where some languages assume themselves to be higher than others—especially within postcolonial countries or countries that experience any system of oppression whatsoever. At the same time, I believe that all languages are very unique. Each language, however small, has a unique musicality that cannot be replaced by another. I like to compare them to musical instruments. A piano has its own specific sound or musicality, which you cannot mistake for that of a guitar. You cannot destroy or diminish the importance of other instruments like the guitar or the violin and leave only the sound of the piano. When different instruments work together, they produce harmony, orchestras—just like languages.

More here.

Nathan Sperber in Sidecar:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman does not mince his words:

the signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble. We’re not talking about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits. You could say that the Chinese model is about to hit its Great Wall, and the only question now is just how bad the crash will be.

That was in the summer of 2013. China’s GDP grew by 7.8 per cent that year. In the decade since, its economy has expanded by 70 per cent in real terms, compared to 21 per cent for the United States. China has not had a recession this century – by convention, two consecutive quarters of negative growth – let alone a ‘crash’. Yet every few years, the Anglophone financial media and its trail of investors, analysts and think-tankers are gripped by the belief that the Chinese economy is about to crater.

The conviction reared its head in the early 2000s, when runaway investment was thought to be ‘overheating’ the economy; in the late 2000s, when exports contracted in the wake of the global financial crisis; and in the mid-2010s, when it was feared that a buildup of local government debt, under-regulated shadow banking and capital outflows threatened China’s entire economic edifice. Today, dire predictions are out in force again, this time triggered by underwhelming growth figures for the second quarter of 2023. Exports have declined from the heights they reached during the pandemic while consumer spending has softened. Corporate troubles in the property sector and high youth unemployment appear to add to China’s woes. Against this backdrop, Western commentators are casting doubt on the PRC’s ability to continue to churn out GDP units, or fretting in grander terms about the country’s economic future (‘whither China?’, asks Adam Tooze by way of Yang Xiguang).

More here.

Scott Shapiro in The Guardian:

On 22 February1946, George Kennan, an American diplomat stationed in Moscow, dictated a 5,000-word cable to Washington. In this famous telegram, Kennan warned that the Soviet Union’s commitment to communism meant that it was inherently expansionist, and urged the US government to resist any attempts by the Soviets to increase their influence. This strategy quickly became known as “containment” – and defined American foreign policy for the next 40 years.

The Coming Wave is Suleyman’s book-length warning about technological expansionism: in close to 300 pages, he sets out to persuade readers that artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology (SB) threaten our very existence and we only have a narrow window within which to contain them before it’s too late. Unlike communism during the cold war, however, AI and SB are not being forced on us. We willingly adopt them because they not only promise unprecedented wealth, but solutions to our most intractable problems – climate change, cancer, possibly even mortality. Suleyman sees the appeal, of course, claiming that these technologies will “usher in a new dawn for humanity”. An entrepreneur and AI researcher who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, before it was acquired by Google in 2014, Suleyman is at his most compelling when illustrating the promises and perils of this new world. In breezy and sometimes breathless prose, he describes how human beings have finally managed to exert power over intelligence and life itself.

Take the AI revolution. Language models such as ChatGPT are just the beginning.

More here.