Nina’s Blues

Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.

What you can’t know
is that after you died
All the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching

On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.

You won’t be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.

Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.

by Cornelius Eady

Nina Simone

Mitchell Consky at The Walrus:

Last June, four boys bonded inside a summer camp cabin.

After throwing loose shirts into cubbies and spreading sleeping bags onto sandy mattresses, a game of tag around the bunk beds quickly evolved into “the floor is lava.”

Concealed within the laughter, however, was a link these four boys, all between the ages of five and seven, didn’t yet know about: each of them had lost a father. And I, their camp counsellor for the weekend, had lost mine too.

But “lost” wasn’t the right word.

As my co-counsellors and I learned from our training a few weeks earlier, being specific with language was imperative at grief camp. It was better to avoid any euphemisms like “passed away” and “lost,” as they could inadvertently add confusion to the despair. In a child’s mind, when something is lost, it can also be found. Our fathers would not be found.

More here.

Mark Harris in Undark:

Who hasn’t gazed at a murmuration of thousands of starlings wheeling rhythmically above their roost at dusk, and not wondered at the majesty and mystery of natural systems? For the Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi, merely marveling at nature wasn’t enough. In the early 1990s, he embarked on a decades-long project to install high-end commercial cameras on the rooftops of Rome, timed with millisecond-precision to capture and track every bird in the flock in three dimensions.

In this brief, crisply written memoir, “In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems,” Parisi takes the reader on a journey through his scientific life in the realm of complex, disordered systems, from fundamental particles to migratory birds. He argues that science’s struggle to understand and master the universe’s complexity, and especially to communicate it to an ever-more skeptical public, holds the key to humanity’s future well-being.

More here.

Colin Bradley in Aeon:

On the one hand, the promise of a liberal society is of a society of equals – of people who are equally entitled and empowered to make decisions about their own lives, and who are equal participants in the collective governance of that society. Liberalism professes to achieve this by protecting liberties. Some of these are personal liberties. I get to decide how to style my hair, which religion to profess, what I say or don’t say, which groups I join, and what I do with my own property. Some of these liberties are political: I should have the same chance as anyone else to influence the direction of our society and government by voting, joining political parties, marching and demonstrating, standing for office, writing op-eds, or organising support for causes or candidates.

On the other hand, liberalism is usually uttered in the same breath as capitalism. Capitalism is a social system characterised by the fact that private persons (or legal entities like corporations) own the means of production.

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Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:

Driverless cars have the green light to operate as paid ride-hailing services in San Francisco after the companies Waymo and Cruise won approval from California state regulators. But the decision comes amidst pushback from city officials and residents over the cars creating traffic jams and interfering with the work of firefighters and police officers.

The roll-out of driverless cars in San Francisco has had a bumpy start. Viral videos have shown them creating traffic problems or ignoring firefighter and police commands during emergencies, while local activists have halted them by placing traffic safety cones on their bonnets (hoods) to trick vehicle sensors.

More here.

Return

The sun’s warm against the slats of the granary,
a puddle of ice in the shadow of the steps;
a bluetick hound lopes
across the winter wheat —
fresh green, cold green.
The windmill, long out of use,
screeches and twists in the wind.
A spring day too loud for talk
when bones tire of their flesh
and want something better.

by Jim Harrison
from The Shape of the Day
Copper Canyon Press, 1998

Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker:

The Bible is a foundational text in Western literature, ignored at an aspiring writer’s hazard, and when I was younger I had the ambition to read it cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable (“The Lord is my shepherd”), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside.

Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer.

More here.

Emilie Lucchesi in Discover:

After a retired speech-language pathologist had a stroke, he struggled to articulate his thoughts, even though he knew what he wanted to say. His wife didn’t understand the source of his difficulties until a clinician showed her a video that explained what her husband wished he could tell her: His stroke caused apraxia. Apraxia is a term used to describe a list of neurological disorders that impact speech, movement or gestures. Clinicians have observed apraxia for centuries, but they still don’t agree on which symptoms belong to which disorder type, and controversy persists. 

What Is Apraxia?

Apraxia is a term used to describe a series of conditions that make it difficult or impossible for a person to perform a desired movement or gesture. Depending on the person, apraxia can mean they struggle to make facial expressions in response to vocal commands. 

More here.

Dan Hitchens in Compact Magazine:

It’s OK,” the title of Bernie Sanders’ new book informs us, “to be angry about capitalism.” But of course, we already knew that. The background noise of our time is of resentment toward the neoliberal order—the insecurity it has foisted on the poor and increasingly on the middle class, the destruction it has wreaked on the environment, its hollowing-out of families, communities, and traditions. What we need isn’t permission to be angry, but a better comprehension of a system so complex that both admirers and critics struggle to get their heads around it.

That, I think, is why more and more readers—from big-name academics like Adam Tooze and Mariana Mazzucato to ordinary citizens trying to make sense of the world—are enthralled by the work of the economic geographer Brett Christophers, a professor at the University of Uppsala. Nobody could accuse Christophers of ignorantly ranting against a half-understood enemy: His books resemble vast excavation projects, in which the author drills through mile after mile of granite-like material—balance sheets, annual reports, parliamentary-committee minutes, documents from the National Infrastructure Commission, and at one point (he writes with a self-deprecating twinkle) a “fascinating if dry 2016 review of taxation of the UK water companies.”

From these subterranean expeditions, Christophers usually emerges with some outrageous claim that seems both shocking and appropriate to our disorienting era. In 2018, he published a book explaining that the largest privatization in modern British history had gone unnoticed. (See if you can guess: The answer is below.) Then, in 2020, Christophers’s Rentier Capitalism argued that the heart of the British economy wasn’t entrepreneurship or innovation or anything like that, but rent: that is, the ability to make money by controlling assets such as land or intellectual property in an uncompetitive environment. Christophers’ new book, meanwhile, states its audacious thesis in the title, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World.

More here.

Allison Parshall in Quanta:

Optimization problems can be tricky, but they make the world work better. These kinds of questions, which strive for the best way of doing something, are absolutely everywhere. Your phone’s GPS calculates the shortest route to your destination. Travel websites search for the cheapest combination of flights that matches your itinerary. And machine learning applications, which learn by analyzing patterns in data, try to present the most accurate and humanlike answers to any given question.

For simple optimization problems, finding the best solution is just a matter of arithmetic. But the real-world questions that interest mathematicians and scientists are rarely simple. In 1847, the French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy was working on a suitably complicated example — astronomical calculations — when he pioneered a common method of optimization now known as gradient descent. Most machine learning programs today rely heavily on the technique, and other fields also use it to analyze data and solve engineering problems.

Mathematicians have been perfecting gradient descent for over 150 years, but last month, a study proved that a basic assumption about the technique may be wrong. “There were just several times where I was surprised, [like] my intuition is broken,” said Ben Grimmer, an applied mathematician at Johns Hopkins University and the study’s sole author. His counterintuitive results showed that gradient descent can work nearly three times faster if it breaks a long-accepted rule for how to find the best answer for a given question.

More here.

Daron Acemoglu, Gary Anderson, David Beede, Catherine Buffington, et. al., in VoxEU:

Rapid advances across a number of technologies, including generative AI, cloud computing and robotics, have raised the hope that productivity growth in the US and other industrialised countries can accelerate. They have also intensified public worries about job displacement and inequality.

Naturally, the macroeconomic effects of any technology will depend on the degree of its adoption. Labour market impacts may additionally depend on whether advanced technologies are being used for automation, displacing workers from the tasks they used to perform, or for other purposes, such as increasing the productivity of workers in tasks they are already performing or creating new tasks for them.

Despite much enthusiasm about these new technologies, many commentators are concerned that their adoption has been slow and uneven. Lack of systematic data on adoption patterns and how new technologies are being used in workplaces has been a major roadblock on developing a holistic picture of whether and how these technologies will impact the economy.

A small literature has used various sources of data on adoption of robotics technology (e.g. Acemoglu et al. 2020, Bonfiglioli et al. 2020, Koch et al. 2021), there are some recent European technology surveys, such as those studied in Genz et al. (2021) for Germany and Calvino et al. (2022) for Italy. But data on cloud computing, AI and other software systems have been more scant, especially in the US.

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Marc David Baer at The Guardian:

On the southern steppe of Ukraine in 512BCE, the envoy of Scythian King Idanthyrsus delivered a frog, a mouse, a bird and several arrows to Darius, mighty king of Persia. Then, without saying a word, he departed. Darius was confident the nomadic Scythians were pledging their allegiance. But his adviser understood the intended meaning. Unless the invading Persians turned into frogs and dived into the water, became mice and dug underground, or turned into birds and flew away, they would be riddled with deadly arrows as trespassers in the nomads’ land. Darius withdrew his soldiers.

For two millennia gigantic imperial armies were unable to defeat much smaller numbers of elusive horse archers who utilised tactics of surprise, feigned retreat and ambush rather than engaging in set-piece battles. In this book, which flows as fast as the nomads’ horses galloped, emeritus professor of ancient history Kenneth Harl chronicles the empires that roamed across the Eurasian steppe from ancient times to the death of Tamerlane at the beginning of the 15th century.

more here.

Molly Young at the NY Times:

Has any man in history loved anything as much as Orson Squire Fowler loved the octagon? Fowler, born in Cohocton, N.Y., in 1809, published a book in 1848 arguing that all houses should be eight-sided. He influenced a (failed) utopian community in Kansas called Octagon City, delivered an estimated 350 public orations on octagon supremacy and built himself a 60-room octagonal palace in upstate New York.

His enthusiasm was not merely contagious but downright virulent. In the decades following the publication of “The Octagon House: A Home for All,” octagonal homes “broke out in New York State like a rash,” as an article in this newspaper put it. So too in the Midwest, which briefly became a hotbed of Fowler-incited dwellings. His résumé is that of a classic 19th-century polymath. Fowler was a sexologist, hydrotherapy proponent, amateur architect, publisher (including of Walt Whitman), phrenologist (chronistically, if unfortunately) and eclectic lecturer who evangelized on behalf of vegetarianism, women’s suffrage, prison reform, dancing and mesmerism.

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Chris Richards in The Washington Post:

Farzana Shaikh in Time:

Few will have missed the bitter irony of a court ruling against Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, who was found guilty of corruption, sentenced to three years in prison, and barred from contesting elections for five years. For however his legacy is judged in years to come, Khan will be remembered above all for his single-minded crusade to root out “corruption” from the political fabric of Pakistan. The ruling against Khan was not unexpected. Since his removal from office following a no-confidence motion in April 2022, as well as his increasingly confrontational posture with the military (which he blamed for his downfall), many believed it was only a matter of time before Khan lost his freedom completely.

With Pakistan’s ruling coalition imminently poised to step down and make way for a caretaker government, Khan’s incarceration was seen as the last bit of unfinished business ahead of general elections. These should be held within 90 days but could come as late as Spring 2024, following a decision on August 5, 2023 by the Council of Common Interests (responsible for overseeing relations between Pakistan’s federating units) to approve the demarcation of new constituencies based on the latest census data—a skillful maneuvering tactic by Pakistan’s all-powerful military, which is desperate to use the time to dampen Khan’s soaring popularity.

More here.