Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

The Science Museum in Britain holds numerous items associated with the Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: books on consciousness and the nature of space and time; a set of wooden puzzles made by his physician father; a model of one of the Penroses’ “impossible objects” — a staircase on which a person could ascend or descend forever.

But maybe the most extraordinary item is also the most ordinary: a four-pack of Kleenex Quilted Peach Toilet Tissue. The quilting was based on one of Penrose’s non-repeating tiling patterns in order to avoid “nesting,” which would have risked stuck squares and unsightly bulges in the roll — yet nobody from Kleenex had consulted Penrose. In 1997, Pentaplex, a company set up to develop commercial applications of his work, sued the toilet paper’s manufacturer, Kimberly Clark. As a Pentaplex director announced at the time: “When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission, then a last stand must be made.”

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Thomas Floyd in The Washington Post:

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Michael A. McCarthy in Sidecar:

Trump’s crushing victory over Harris casts serious doubt on one of the darling concepts of American political science: ‘polarization’. As of the latest count, Trump won the popular vote by over 3.5 million, capturing most swing states and flipping those that went for Biden in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Voters thought to be entrenched in separate camps defied psephologists’ predictions by crossing from one to the other. Dominated by the Democrats for two election cycles, urban counties swung to Trump by 5.8 points, while suburban counties that went blue for Biden shifted red by 4.4 points. Both less-educated and more-educated counties also trended towards Trump (by 5.2 and 4.6 points respectively), as did most non-white groups: Hispanic-majority counties (13.3 points), indigenous counties (10 points) and black-majority counties (2.7 points). Trump even did better among women, who shifted 5 points to the right relative to 2020.

The president-elect now enters the White House enraged by his court battles and emboldened by a significant mandate. His party, having purged most of the Never Trumpers and replaced them with loyalists, is on the verge of controlling all the branches of government: a supermajority on the Supreme Court, a 3-seat majority in the Senate and likely a slim one in the House. The Democrats may still storm back in a few years’ time, as they have done after previous routs. But their fortunes will depend on how they adapt politically. What is the outlook for their particular brand of liberalism in the wake of this defeat?

An unlikely theoretical resource for understanding the American political scene can be found in Tosaka Jun’s The Japanese Ideology: A Marxist Critique of Liberalism and Fascism, first published in 1935 and now available in English thanks to Robert Stolz’s recent translation.

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Hans Kundnani in Dissent:

During the past year, as the reality gradually dawned on them that Donald Trump might be re-elected as U.S. president, European foreign policy analysts coalesced around the conventional wisdom that Europe must unite and “Trump-proof” itself. This new consensus, which essentially repeats arguments for European “strategic autonomy” that took place after Trump was elected the first time, represents an extraordinary collective failure. Europe’s foreign policy experts have proved unable to think clearly about what has changed in Europe in the last eight years or about the relationship between their own security concerns and those of Ukraine.

The election of Trump in 2016 created radical uncertainty about the U.S. security guarantee to Europe, which went back to the creation of NATO in 1949. While some Atlanticists insisted that NATO countries should hug the United States close—and make concessions like increasing defense spending and buying more American weapons to placate Trump—“post-Atlanticists” urged Europeans to end their dependence on the United States for their own security. If the former tendency was embodied by Poland (where the far-right Law and Justice Party was in power), the latter was embodied by France, and Germany was somewhere in the middle.

Post-Atlanticists have responded to the possibility of a second Trump presidency by simply reiterating the need for strategic autonomy, even if they don’t always use that term. But the experience of the first Trump administration suggests that Europeans are unlikely to unite in response to his re-election.

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Iza Ding in The Ideas Letter:

Sometime in the mid-12th century, a Chinese poet named Lin Sheng traveled 365 kilometers from his hometown Pingyang to Lin’an—what is now Hangzhou, a city on the southeast coast, where the tech giant Alibaba is based.

Lin stayed at a B&B and roamed the city for days. He climbed various hills, drifted through Buddhist temples, sampled an assortment of crabs, shrimps, lamb, and sweet rice, all marinated in alcohol—a culinary specialty of the region—and, like today’s tourists, spent a significant amount of time on and around the impossibly beautiful West Lake, the sin and soul of Hangzhou.

Hangzhou is glorious on summer nights. The lake lies sultrily within the warm embrace of the hills, blue as sapphire. When the breezes pick up in the evening, as they always do, the water undulates like dancers’ long, silky sleeves, gleaming with reflections of candles in the boats and pavilions, homes on the hills, and lanterns carried by residents. And there was singing and dancing, lots of singing and dancing, deep into the orange night. Our delicate poet found himself both entranced and uneasy.

One morning, after the merriment had melted into dawn, Lin rose from his bed, inked his brush, and wrote on his chamber wall. This tiny poem, 28 characters light, would be memorized by every schoolchild in China almost a millennium later.

Hills beyond blue hills,
Pavilions beyond pavilions.
When will the singing and dancing on West Lake cease?
Travelers, drunk on a warm breeze,
Have mistaken Hangzhou for Bianzhou.

Bianzhou is today’s Kaifeng city, 900 kilometers southwest of Hangzhou in the inland province of Henan. Kaifeng’s GDP per capita in 2023 was about $7,500, one-third of Hangzhou’s.

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Jack Gross and Dylan Saba interview Lisa Bhungalia in Phenomenal World:

On October 28, the Israeli Knesset voted to shut down the operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and to designate it as a terrorist organization. While this drastic attack on the UN was met with widespread condemnation from the international community, it was not wholly unexpected. For decades, Israel has regarded the number one provider of education and humanitarian services to the Palestinians of Gaza with contempt and suspicion. Just earlier this year, in response to still-unsubstantiated Israeli allegations that UNRWA employees took part in the October 7 attacks, the United States led a series of countries in terminating funding to the UN organization.

The month of October marked a sustained escalation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, with particular brutality inflicted on Palestinians in the northern Strip. Amid scenes of devastation, bound and blindfolded men, and expulsion marches, the sustained deprivation of aid has caused yet more widespread suffering. A letter from the United States issued on October 13 warned of consequences should the Israeli government not increase aid flows into Gaza in the following thirty days. The deadline has passed, with aid at its lowest level in eleven months, and no consequence has been forthcoming.

To understand the relationship of Israel and the US to UNRWA, its place within the broader ecosystem of aid organizations across Palestine, and the weaponization and politicization of aid delivery, we spoke with Lisa Bhungalia, author of the recent book Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine.

More here.

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Ella Creamer in The Guardian:

Orbital, which was published last November and is now available in paperback, was the highest-selling book of the shortlist in the run-up to the winner announcement, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK this year. The book, which follows its characters over the course of a day as they experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, is a “finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration”, wrote Alexandra Harris in her Guardian review.

At 136 pages long, Orbital is the second-shortest book to win the prize in its history; it is four pages longer than Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won in 1979. Asked whether the panel’s choice is a vote in favour of short books, De Waal said “absolutely not”, adding that Orbital is “the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve”.

Harvey said that she nearly gave up on writing Orbital because she thought: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.” She said that Tim Peake, an astronaut, has read the book, and was “very nice about it”. He “wanted to know where I’d got my intel”, she said.

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Azeem Azhar at Exponential View:

In the corridors of Silicon Valley’s most secretive AI labs, a quiet revolution is unfolding. Headlines scream of stalled progress, insiders know something the market hasn’t caught up to yet: the $1 trillion bet on AI isn’t failing—it’s transforming.

The real story? AI’s most powerful players are secretly shifting away from purely brute-force scaling that defined the last decade. Instead, they’re also pursuing a breakthrough approach that could continue to deliver.

The strategy of using scale by training ever larger models on greater training data, is yielding some diminishing returns. Here’s The Information

Some researchers at the [OpenAI] believe Orion, [the latest model], isn’t reliably better than its predecessor in handling certain tasks, according to the employees. Orion performs better at language tasks but may not outperform previous models at tasks such as coding.

Google’s upcoming iteration of its Gemini software is said to not meet internal expectations. Even Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, has remarked that scaling has plateaued

The 2010s were the age of scaling; now we’re back in the age of wonder and discovery once again.

If this is true, does this mean the trillon-dollar bet on bigger and bigger AI systems is coming off the rails?

More here.

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Andrew Hui at The Public Domain Review:

Sant’Andrea in Percussina lies about ten kilometers south of Florence, nestled in the proverbially beautiful Tuscan landscape, surrounded by vineyards, olive groves, cypress trees, wild rosemary patches, and soft rolling hills. Outside the hustle and bustle of the city, there is peace and quiet, but also a lively cross section of the working class: farmers, millers, innkeepers, hunters, masons, and carpenters.

In the summer of 1513, a disgraced forty-four-year-old man repairs to these sylvan surrounds. A tavern, as well as a few scattered farms, had been in the family’s possession for years, and the modest rent from these properties had supported them for some time. His father, Bernardo, never rich but always eager for learning, owned a modest library, and sent his son to study under the famed pedagogue, Paolo da Ronciglione. At the age of twenty-nine, with no administrative experience and virtually unknown, Bernardo’s son was catapulted to be the second chancellor of the Republic and the secretary to the Council of Ten, Florence’s ministry for diplomatic affairs. For fourteen years, in the upper echelon of society, in the thick of action, he hobnobbed with the great and the good. Now he is alone, in the periphery.

This, of course, is Niccolò Machiavelli.

More here.

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Jennifer Szalai at the NY Times:

The Science Museum in Britain holds numerous items associated with the Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: books on consciousness and the nature of space and time; a set of wooden puzzles made by his physician father; a model of one of the Penroses’ “impossible objects” — a staircase on which a person could ascend or descend forever.

But maybe the most extraordinary item is also the most ordinary: a four-pack of Kleenex Quilted Peach Toilet Tissue. The quilting was based on one of Penrose’s non-repeating tiling patterns in order to avoid “nesting,” which would have risked stuck squares and unsightly bulges in the roll — yet nobody from Kleenex had consulted Penrose. In 1997, Pentaplex, a company set up to develop commercial applications of his work, sued the toilet paper’s manufacturer, Kimberly Clark. As a Pentaplex director announced at the time: “When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission, then a last stand must be made.”

more here.

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John Self at The Guardian:

Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”. Levy’s approachable but oblique novels look like realism, but come riddled with psychological trapdoors and unstable narratives, while her trilogy of memoirs takes the reader in hand more directly. Her new book – a collection of 34 essays, stories and short texts too unclassifiable to be labelled – combines the best of both approaches.

The first impression we get of Levy in The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies is as a great enthusiast – for everything. Literature, of course, but also art, clothes, Freud and even the beauty of the lemons on her dining table, “happy in their own skin”. The literature about which she enthuses is of a particular kind – that which rejects “dull and dulling language”, which bursts out of the “oak-panelled 19th-century gentleman’s club” of literary tradition and makes things new.

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Karan Mahajan in Bookforum:

THE LINGUIST ROSS PERLIN is an encyclopedist of New York City’s microworlds. In 2016, when he took me and ten others on a tour of Ridgewood, Queens, he alerted us to the presence of a dozen languages spoken in a two-square-mile radius, including Syriac, Yiddish, Malayalam, Haitian Creole, and Kichwa. He led us into an ancient, black-and-white-tiled, espresso-scented Sicilian social club, where a retired nonagenarian factory worker proudly discussed his dialect, Partanna. Later, we drank beer and ate bratwurst at the Gottscheer Hall, a tavern and cultural center for the Gottscheers, a tiny community of Germanic people who fled their native Slovenia following the World Wars. Their language, Gottscheerish, is a thirteenth-century dialect of German that now survives largely in New York.

Such diversity is easy to take for granted in New York, ambient wallpaper for a city powered by finance, but as Perlin writes in his comprehensive and brilliant new book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (Atlantic Monthly Press, $28), the situation is more complex than meets the eye—or ear. Half of the world’s seven thousand languages “are likely to disappear over the next few centuries,” which makes New York, with its teeming biome of seven hundred languages, “a last improbable refuge for embattled and endangered languages.” But New York—and the United States—exerts its own relentless pressure on immigrants to assimilate into dominant mother tongues like English and Spanish, and we may have already reached “peak linguistic diversity.” Perlin’s heroic task in the book is to provide a linguistic snapshot of this moment of language explosion and implosion.

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Olaf Lipinski in Singularity Hub:

In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do forwards, written with circular symbols. As she discovers various clues, different nations around the world interpret the messages differently—with some assuming they convey a threat. If humanity ended up in such a situation today, our best bet may be to turn to research uncovering how artificial intelligence develops languages. But what exactly defines a language? Most of us use at least one to communicate with people around us, but how did it come about? Linguists have been pondering this very question for decades, yet there is no easy way to find out how language evolved.

Language is ephemeral, it leaves no examinable trace in the fossil records. Unlike bones, we can’t dig up ancient languages to study how they developed over time. While we may be unable to study the true evolution of human language, perhaps a simulation could provide some insights. That’s where AI comes in—a fascinating field of research called emergent communication, which I have spent the last three years studying. To simulate how language may evolve, we give AI agents simple tasks that require communication, like a game where one robot must guide another to a specific location on a grid without showing it a map. We provide (almost) no restrictions on what they can say or how—we simply give them the task and let them solve it however they want.

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Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings:

As you know, I am a scholar of literature, with no more than a high school background in math. Yet together we shall reach up and touch the thinnest, most delicate branches in the canopy of modern mathematics. Most likely, we will snap them by mistake.

Anyway, we begin as moderns must: by venerating the ancients in a covertly self-serving manner.

In A Mathematician’s Apology, after a long preamble about mathematics as an Edenic garden of harmless beauty, G.H. Hardy finally turns to some actual math:

I will state and prove two of the famous theorems of Greek mathematics… They are ‘simple’ theorems, simple both in idea and in execution, but there is no doubt at all about their being theorems of the highest class. Each is as fresh and significant as when it was discovered—two thousand years have not written a wrinkle on either of them.

No surprise that Hardy calls the proofs “significant.” But why “fresh”?

Why advertise this proof, like a synthetic fabric, as “wrinkle-free”?

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Kelly Lambert at The Conversation:

We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal. Before long, they were steering with surprising precision to reach a Froot Loop treat.

As expected, rats housed in enriched environments – complete with toys, space and companions – learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change across the lifespan in response to environmental demands.

After we published our research, the story of driving rats went viral in the media. The project continues in my lab with new, improved rat-operated vehicles, or ROVs, designed by robotics professor John McManus and his students. These upgraded electrical ROVs – featuring rat-proof wiring, indestructible tires and ergonomic driving levers – are akin to a rodent version of Tesla’s Cybertruck.

As a neuroscientist who advocates for housing and testing laboratory animals in natural habitats, I’ve found it amusing to see how far we’ve strayed from my lab practices with this project. Rats typically prefer dirt, sticks and rocks over plastic objects. Now, we had them driving cars.

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