Nationalist Opera

It was a party
Built for the miniscule elite
Lost amid acres of scuffed marble, wanderers
Newspapers & schoolwork
People knew
To speak in surreal, mechanical hyperbole
Government, of course
Monuments, behemoths
Of relative luxury
I know what you want to ask
I want you to take the truth to the world
Down in the city, loudspeakers
Disappearing into the hidden gulag
Centuries ago
The monks appeared
Every morning in the lobbies of our hotels
A minder was beside them
The monks followed us out into the parking lot.

by Amada Calderon
from Poetry Magazine, 2014

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Robert D. Zaretsky at Aeon Magazine:

Beyle does not say how long he stared up at the fresco, but it was long enough to reach ‘that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion.’ Upon leaving the church, he wrote: ‘I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart …; the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.’ That swoon swept into existence le syndrome de Stendhal – ‘Stendhal’ being the nom de plume used by Beyle for nearly all his published works, including the novels The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). Though yet to be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5, 2013), the syndrome nevertheless seems to be real. Every year, a few dozen tourists to Florence are rushed to the local hospitals, literally overcome by the city’s array of paintings, sculptures, frescoes and architecture. Some lose their bearings, others lose their consciousness, yet others still, on rare occasions, nearly lose their lives.

more here.

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Stan Carey at Sentence first:

On many vexed matters of English usage, people can be divided into the following groups:

1. those who neither know nor care
2. those who do not know, but care very much
3. those who know and condemn
4. those who know and approve
5. those who know and distinguish.

Thus with wry wit did H. W. Fowler address the existence of split infinitives in his landmark usage dictionary of 1926. He concluded that the first group ‘are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes’.

Even more people are happily unaware of dangling or misplaced modifiers. I mean this kind of thing: Cycling downhill, a truck almost hit me. The writer was cycling, but the grammar implies, absurdly, that the truck was. Or: Born in India, Diya’s education took her to Europe. Diya was born in India, but the line says her education was.

As a copy-editor I’m in category 5: I routinely edit danglers to accord with the norms of formal written English. But they’re not always a flagrant error, and they’ve occurred in English since at least Chaucer’s day.

Let’s take a closer look.

More here.

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Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by numbers:

My sense is that a lot of climate-conscious people feel guilty about using ChatGPT. In fact it goes further: I think many people judge others for using it, because of the perceived environmental impact.

If I’m being honest, for a while I also felt a bit guilty about using AI. The common rule-of-thumb is that ChatGPT uses 10 times as much energy as a Google search [I think this is probably now too high, but more on that later]. How, then, do I justify the far more energy-hungry option? Maybe I should limit myself to only using LLMs when I would really benefit from the more in-depth answer.

But after looking at the data on individual use of LLMs, I have stopped worrying about it and I think you should too.

More here.

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Sean Carroll in the New York Times:

A full-blown humanitarian emergency in Gaza is no longer looming. It is here, and it is catastrophic.

It’s been more than two months since Israel cut off all humanitarian aid and commercial supplies into Gaza. The World Food Program delivered its last stores of food on April 25. Two million Palestinians in Gaza, nearly half of them children, are now surviving on a single meal every two or three days.

At makeshift clinics run by my relief organization, American Near East Refugee Aid, signs of prolonged starvation are becoming more frequent and alarming. In the past 10 days, our lab technicians began detecting ketones, an indicator of starvation, in one-third of urine samples tested, the first time we have seen such cases in significant numbers since we began testing in October 2024. Food, fuel and medicine are exhausted or close to it.

More here.

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Jim Baggott at Aeon Magazine:

To understand the point Schrödinger was making, we need to do a little unpacking. The nature of Schrödinger’s ‘diabolical device’ is not actually important to his argument. Its purpose is simply to amplify an atomic-scale event – the decay of a radioactive atom – and bring it up to the more familiar scale of a living cat, trapped inside a steel box. The theory that describes objects and events taking place at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles like electrons is quantum mechanics. But in this theory, atoms and subatomic particles are described not as tiny, self-contained objects moving through space. They are instead described in terms of quantum wavefunctions, which capture an utterly weird aspect of their observed behaviour. Under certain circumstances, these particles may also behave like waves.

These contrasting behaviours could not be starker, or more seemingly incompatible. Particles have mass. By their nature, they are ‘here’: they are localised in space and remain localised as they move from here to there. Throw many particles into a small space and, like marbles, they will collide, bouncing off each other in different directions. Waves, on the other hand, are spread out through space – they are ‘non-local’. Squeeze them through a narrow slit and, like waves in the sea passing through a gap in a harbour wall, they will spread out beyond.

more here.

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Elizabeth Lund in The Christian Science Monitor:

Richard Blanco says he still can’t believe how much his life has changed since he read his poem “One Today” at U.S. President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013. After his appearance, he received thousands of emails from people who appreciated his descriptions of hardworking Americans and immigrants, including his parents, and his vision of “All of us as vital as the one light we move through.”

“I could tell from their messages that [my reading] was probably the first time they had ever encountered a living poet writing in a voice and a language that they understood, feeling like they belonged to America,” says Mr. Blanco. “Some of them wouldn’t even dare to call it a poem. They were like, ‘We loved your speech.’”

More here.

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Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

Older computer programs were hand-coded using logical rules. But neural networks learn skills on their own, and the way they represent what they’ve learned is notoriously difficult to parse, leading people to refer to the models as “black boxes.”

Progress is being made though, and Anthropic is leading the charge.

Last year, the company showed that it could link activity within a large language model to both concrete and abstract concepts. In a pair of new papers, it’s demonstrated that it can now trace how the models link these concepts together to drive decision-making and has used this technique to analyze how the model behaves on certain key tasks. “These findings aren’t just scientifically interesting—they represent significant progress towards our goal of understanding AI systems and making sure they’re reliable,” the researchers write in a blog post outlining the results. The Anthropic team carried out their research on the company’s Claude 3.5 Haiku model, its smallest offering. In the first paper, they trained a “replacement model” that mimics the way Haiku works but replaces internal features with ones that are more easily interpretable.

More here.

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I Am Mankind

I cry when I think what man
…………has done to man,
….Because I am the oppressed
…………and the oppressor.
I have caused deaths;
….I have died.
I have been tormentor;
….I have suffered.
I am mankind crying and laughing.

I have died in Hiroshima,
…………………………………. Dachowe,
………………………………………………. Arizona,
……………………………………………………………Mississippi,
I dropped the bomb on that little island.
I made lampshades from human skin,
I turned the snarling dogs on the Negro.
Naked, I cried at my mother’s side before the ovens.
Brazen, I laughed when I sentenced them to death.
Just as I am Sachi Yamuki,
………. I am Airman Frank Smith.
Just as I am Medgar Evers,
………. I am his white asssasin.

Just as I am Ann Frank,
………. I am Adolph Eichmann.
Just as I am Running Deer,
………. I am Senator Ratner  (R. Ariz.)
My being depends upon the heterogeneous group of
………. Men ;
Yet I insist on destroying myself.
I kill my Asians,

………………………………Jews,
………………………………………. Indians,
…………………………………………………… Blacks,
……………………………………………………………… Myself.

I am the puzzling paradox of the universe and time.
I am the Schizophrenic, Mankind.
I ask, when will I lose my evil self?
Tell me, will I abolish the evil in me?
Answer me please, before I destroy myself.

by Kathleen McGrath
from Essence Magazine
Paterson State College Press, 1963

…I have died.
…………
…………

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

JMW Turner baffled his contemporaries. At the beginning of his career he was a prodigy, a preternaturally gifted tyro who joined the Royal Academy Schools at 14, and at 15 became the youngest painter ever to have a picture accepted for the RA Summer Exhibition. But at the end of his career his peers found his paintings incomprehensible. All those wafty emanations of light, colour and atmospherics had no precedent and no explanation. John Ruskin thought his late work displayed “distinctive characters in the execution, indicative of mental disease”. A fellow painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, thought that “Turner’s pictures always look as if painted by a man who was born without hands” who had “contrived to tie a brush to the hook at the end of his wooden stump.” One critic was inspired by Turner’s ochre depictions of the ruins of Rome to brush off his Latin: the paintings, he said, were “cacatum non est pictum” – crapped not painted.

The man himself was equally mystifying. For the last five years of his life he had been living with a woman named Sophia Booth, a twice-widowed guesthouse landlady 20 years his junior.

more here.

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Michael Bacon at Psyche:

In the everyday sense of the term, the pragmatist is the person who ‘gets results’. The term can be intended as either a compliment or a criticism; it can be applied equally to effective and to unscrupulous managers and politicians. These connotations carry over, typically in misleading ways, into the philosophical sense of pragmatism.

Pragmatism is the United States’ most important contribution to philosophy, emerging in the late 19th century, developing throughout the 20th, and flourishing today. At its heart is a rejection of what one of its founders, John Dewey (1859-1952), calls ‘the spectator theory of knowledge’. This theory, which can be traced to Plato, holds that reality is composed of two discrete entities: the world of objects, which exist independently of us, and the minds, which perceive and seek accurately to represent that world. In the alternative account offered by pragmatists, the mind is, rather, a part of the world, in which it plays an active role. Pragmatists, accordingly, describe us not as seeking to represent reality as it exists independently of us, but rather as developing more effective and imaginative ways of coping with the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

More here.

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Blake Morrison in The Guardian:

Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It’s irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He’s exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a “dying” river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: “Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants – well, where would you even start?”

He’s in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, “this small country with a vast moral imagination”, became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, “since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for existence of all living beings”. This enshrinement of the Rights of Nature set off similar developments in other countries. In 2017, a law was passed in New Zealand that afforded the Whanganui River protection as a “spiritual and physical entity”. In India, five days later, judges ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna should be recognised as “living entities”. And in 2021, the Mutehekau Shipu (AKA Magpie River) became the first river in Canada to be declared a “legal person [and] living entity”. The Rights of Nature movement has now reached the UK, with Lewes council in East Sussex recognising the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse.

Macfarlane’s book is timely. Rivers are in crisis worldwide. They have been dammed, poisoned, reduced to servitude, erased from the map.

More here.

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Fazlul Haq in The Conversation:

In 1995, World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin warned that whereas the conflicts of the previous 100 years had been over oil, “the wars of the next century will be fought over water.”

Thirty years on, that prediction is being tested in one of the world’s most volatile regions: Kashmir.

On April 24, 2025, the government of India announced that it would downgrade diplomatic ties with its neighbor Pakistan over an attack by militants in Kashmir that killed 26 tourists. As part of that cooling of relations, India said it would immediately suspend the Indus Waters Treaty – a decades-old agreement that allowed both countries to share water use from the rivers that flow from India into Pakistan. Pakistan has promised reciprocal moves and warned that any disruption to its water supply would be considered “an act of war.”

The current flareup escalated quickly, but has a long history.

More here.

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Sue Harris at The Current:

When Jean de Florette, the first part of Claude Berri’s magisterial two-film adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s celebrated 1962 literary diptych, L’eau des collines, was released in theaters in August 1986—the second part, Manon of the Spring, would follow in November—it was the cinematic event of the year in France. The films ran during an exceptionally tough time for the French, who were on constant alert as they went about their daily lives because of a terrorist bombing campaign that had been targeting Paris and regional transportation networks since December 1985. One can only imagine what a relief it must have been to escape to a cinema for a few hours and be transported to 1920s rural France and a world imagined by one of the country’s most beloved and prolific chroniclers of Provençal life. Shot simultaneously on location in rural Provence over the last half of 1985, the two parts drew many millions of domestic spectators, capturing the top two box-office spots for 1986.

Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring present Provence as a feast for the senses, a spectacular landscape of trees and mountains, dirt tracks and sun-bleached stone cottages. Our eyes, like those of Jean Cadoret, the first part’s protagonist, roam freely over the hills and valleys, soaring and sweeping, drinking in both the immensity of the land and its permanence.

more here.

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Note: I have heard this interview many times over the years. Every time, it strikes me as startlingly fresh and relevant for the time. Even Professor Dawkins admitted that the questions Abbas asked were some of the best he had ever been asked and that he greatly enjoyed the interview himself.

Susan Dominus in The New York Times:

When we think about the forces that shape us, we inevitably turn to parents. The parent-child relationship is the basis of probably half a millennium’s worth of psychoanalytic conversation and intellectual discourse; parenting books are perennial best sellers, with advice that fluctuates as often as the health advice on what to eat or drink and how much. Their whiplashing instructions don’t stop many parents from reading them, and who can blame those mothers and fathers: Children are baffling, variable, not that verbal — and parents also know that if they get it wrong, their kids will blame them for just about everything.

And yet researchers, after analyzing thousands of twin studies, have come to the conclusion that the shared environment — the environment that siblings have in common, which includes parents — seems to do precious little to make fraternal twins particularly alike in many ways. They can be exposed to the same rules of oboe practice, dinnertime rituals, punishments, family values and parental harmony or discord, and none of it really matters in many key regards — siblings’ personalities may very well end up as different as those of any two strangers on the street. No one would argue that parenting doesn’t matter; it’s just that the choices so many loving parents agonize over — whether to co-sleep or not, whether to enforce the rules rigidly or sometimes let them go — don’t matter nearly as much as we imagine they do. Nor does that mean that genes are all-powerful; it’s just that nurture comprises so much more than parenting — the environmental effects a child is exposed to are vast, and include (just to start) the media they consume and the friends and teachers in whose company they spend most of the day.

And then there are siblings.

More here.

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