Seva Gunitsky at Persuasion:

To truly feel the force of America’s cultural attraction you have to be born outside of it. The natives see the cracks up close and learn to take the whole thing for granted. Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, none of my friends had to be convinced of America’s appeal. Its jeans-clad, Ray-Ban-wearing, moon-dancing cultural exports were the opposite of propaganda. They were the natural overflow of a society so confident in its own desirability that it never had to make a case for itself.

That dominance is what the Civilization video games once called a “cultural victory.” I’m not talking about soft power, a much-abused concept that, in seeking to be policy-relevant, folded in American political values and U.S. foreign policy as part of its definition. The dominance I’m talking about is not built on government-funded exchanges or diplomatic initiatives, but on the organic triumph of a society’s language, art, music, media, consumer brands and, on a deeper level, its norms and aesthetics.

For decades, this was America’s most formidable and least appreciated strategic asset.

More here.

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(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)

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“The American dream is a nightmare of natural Hues.”
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,……,,,,,—Roshi Bob

Old New American Genetics

Santa Fe, at the palace of the Governors, this 18th century
listing of official genetic possibilities:

Español.  White.   But maybe a Mestizo, or anyone who has enough
money and the right style

Indio.  A Native American person

Mestizo. One Spanish and one Indio Parent

Color Quebrado.  “Broken color” —a rare category of 3-way or more
mix, White/African/Indio

Mulato. White/African ancestry

Coyote. Indio parent with Mestizo parent

Lobo. One Indio plus one African parent

Genizaro (Janissary).  Plains Indian captive sold and used as slaves

by Gary Snyder
from The Present Moment
Counterpoint, Berkley Ca. 2015

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Sophie Haigney at the New York Times:

I spoke with several people like Marisa — people whose love lives were disordered, even dangerous, until they began identifying as love addicts.

The idea is that many people have an unhealthy, compulsive relationship with romance that makes stable relationships difficult and causes constant distress. Lately a burgeoning pocket of attention has focused on love addiction. There are first-person essays and podcasts like “Journals of a Love Addict” and the “Modern Love” episode “How Orville Peck Got Addicted to Love and Came out the Other Side.” There are much-discussed memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert’s “All the Way to the River.” Online forums boom with discussion, with people suspecting that they, too, are problematically obsessive about love — that in a manner similar to alcohol or gambling, romance has come to control their lives and warp their choices.

Love addiction has also spread into the ways ordinary people think and talk about relationships, used casually to diagnose all sorts of drama.

More here.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

In The Argument, Kelsey Piper gives a good description of the ways that AIs are more than just “next-token predictors” or “stochastic parrots” – for example, they also use fine-tuning and RLHF. But commenters, while appreciating the subtleties she introduces, object that they’re still just extra layers on top of a machine that basically runs on next-token prediction.

I want to approach this from a different direction. I think overemphasizing next-token prediction is a confusion of levels. On the levels where AI is a next-token predictor, you are also a next-token (technically: next-sense-datum) predictor. On the levels where you’re not a next-token predictor, AI isn’t one either.

More here.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in the Boston Review:

The term “identity politics” was first popularized by the 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River Collective, an organization of black feminist activists. In a recent interview with the Root and in an op-ed at the Guardian, Barbara Smith, a founding member of the collective, addresses common misconceptions about the term. The manifesto, she explains, was written by black women claiming the right to set their own political agendas. They weren’t establishing themselves as a moral aristocracy—they were building a political viewpoint out of common experience to work toward “common problems.” As such, they were strongly in favor of diverse people working in coalition, an approach that for Smith was exemplified by the Bernie Sanders campaign’s grassroots approach and its focus on social issues that people of many identities face, especially “basic needs of food, housing and healthcare.” According to Smith, today’s uses of the concept are often “very different than what we intended.” “We absolutely did not mean that we would work with people who were only identical to ourselves,” she insists. “We strongly believed in coalitions and working with people across various identities on common problems.”

But instead of forging alliances across difference, some have chosen to weaponize identity politics, closing ranks—especially on social media—around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests rather than building solidarity.

More here.

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(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)

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Carlos Valladaras at Art in America:

“Is this boring?” Peter Hujar asked while narrating a day in his life: December 18, 1974.

“No. It’s not boring to me,” Linda Rosenkrantz—a writer, his friend—replied as she listened to the photographer recount minutiae. In Ira Sachs’s new film, we see her loving all that he is saying, knowing that one day soon he won’t be here, and that all we’ll have then are the photographs, the memories, the traces of what he did.

This one day makes up Peter Hujar’s Day, wherein a great American filmmaker offers one of his strongest films to date—as well as one of the most accurate depictions I know of the internal doubts that plague an artist. On that winter day in 1974, Rosenkrantz recorded Hujar’s quiet but compelling account: He woke up, talked to editors, tried to produce good photographs, worried about not doing enough as an artist. Rosenkrantz went on to type up a transcript of her conversation with Hujar, who died 13 years later, on November 26, 1987, of AIDS-related complications. She left the text untouched for nearly 50 years, until she rediscovered and published it as a book, to wide acclaim, in 2021.

more here.

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As Memory, As Anticipation

Awareness of the passing of time is internal,
integral to the mind as traces left in the brain
by the past.

Augustine’s exposition as such is quite beautiful,
based as it is on our experience of music.
Listening to a hymn the meaning of sound is given
by sounds that came before and after.

Music can occur only in time, but if we are always
in the present moment how can we possibly hear it?

Augustine says, it’s because our consciousness is based
on memory and anticipation. A song is, in some way,
present in our minds in unified form held together by
that which we take time to be.

So, this is what time is: entirely in the present,
in our mind as memory,
as anticipation.

by Carlo Rovelli
from ‘The Order of Time”
Riverhead Books, NY, 2018

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Peter Davidson at Literary Review:

The depiction of ordinary places, and of the changing seasons and skies which shadow or illuminate them, is at the core of Susan Owens’s comprehensive and touching Constable’s Year. Near the beginning she quotes from one of Constable’s letters, proof that everything he saw and painted was based on his native Stour valley in Suffolk, and the intensity of observation developed there in boyhood:

… the sound of water escaping from mill-dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things … those scenes made me a painter and I am grateful. 

Owens’s book brings alive the degree to which Constable’s apprehension of nature was grounded in his apprenticeship to his father, who was a farmer, miller and barge-owner. Constable had been out in all weathers, watching the skies for signs of rain. He knew the year week by week, the movements of flocks and clouds, the slow ripening of the grain to harvest. When he paints a boy straining to guide a barge under a bridge in Flatford Mill: Scene on a Navigable River, you know that he has set his own feet firmly, and strained his own young shoulders, to fix a pole in the bank of the Stour and heave a great barge forward. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Constable never painted English landscape under generically golden, pseudo-Italian skies.

more here.

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More at NPR here.

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James Woodford at New Scientist:

A parasitic species of ant from Japan is the first ever found to have done away with both males and female workers – instead, every individual is a queen that tries to take over the nests of other species.

Typically, ant colonies consist of a queen, female workers and short-lived males that die after mating.

For more than 40 years, researchers have suspected that the rare parasitic ant Temnothorax kinomurai only produces queens, but until now there has been no definitive proof.

Young queens of this parasitic species take over the nests of a related species, Temnothorax makora, killing the host queen and some workers by stinging them. They then reproduce asexually, producing cloned offspring in a process called parthenogenesis, which is rare in ants but common among some other insects. The T. makora workers are duped into helping raise the young T. kinomurai queens.

More here.

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And more robot videos here.

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Pranab Bardhan at his Substack:

James Robinson is a professor at the University of Chicago and a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024. Jim has been a friend for many decades and was for some time my colleague in Berkeley. This conversation is in 2 parts. Below you’ll find four questions by me and Jim’s response to them. The second part, consisting of four more questions and his answers, will be posted next week. I should mention here that by ‘institutions’ economists generally mean the social rules, conventions and other elements of the structural framework of socio-economic interaction.

More here.  And Part II is here.

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Bayan Atari in The Dig:

Having authored a multitude of fiction and nonfiction works, Howard University alumna and professor Toni Morrison (B.A.’53, H ’95) is one of the most celebrated and controversial modern authors. Her enduringly poignant literary work explores the plurality of Black narratives, particularly through the eyes of Black women and girls, in a stunningly eloquent and versatile literary voice. Troubled by the dominant assumption of a white reader, Morrison made a point of not centering the white gaze. Her revolutionary oeuvre attracted critical acclaim in the United States and around the world, and in 1993 Morrison made history as the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Morrison’s novels continue to be a subject of richly complex scholarship, contemporary relevance, and attempted censorship.

Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18th, 1931, in the small industrial town of Lorain, Ohio. Both of Morrison’s grandparents were sharecroppers from Alabama, and because her grandfather grew up during a time when it was illegal for Black people to read at all, her parents felt strongly about encouraging her to read. Though the Woffords moved to different apartments around Lorain frequently, as they struggled to pay rent, the Lorain Public Library remained an important part of the family’s life. In 1995, she attended the dedication of the Toni Morrison reading room at the Lorain Public Library.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)

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