The lingual life of a New Year 

many times, this morning I absorbed
the fricative glottal as h in the happy
hit me with the strength of a history;
Mesopotamians up to Roman sought
a contradictory blessing of Janus
the trail of passion, ingraining
hiatal pretexts of rituals, our
survival is so temporal, so this
carnivalesque of the desire of living
amidst the debris of children
bombed in Syria and Gaza, headlines
for eternity bursting on lips, fireworks
over the waters of Oceania, I see on
the screen of my cell phone choked
with messages, so I scroll down
while the dog in the street
as Auden said after the bone,
the lover is dead, pulling along a
hearse a burial with a fricative glottal.

by Rizwan Akhtar
Institute of English Studies
Punjab University, Lahore

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Benjamen Walker in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

During the 1950s and ’60s, Norman Holmes Pearson was one of Yale’s most successful and beloved professors. On the first day of each term, he would crab-walk to the front of the class, his misshapen body—the result of a childhood fall—on full display. Former students often remarked that the uneasy silence of that first day gave way to a dramatic crescendo of applause following Pearson’s lectures. One such student, journalist Thomas Wolfe, called Pearson “the most superbly theatrical teacher I have ever seen.”

Norman Pearson was also a secret agent, code name Puritan.

That’s the title Greg Barnhisel gives to his new intellectual biography of Pearson, a key figure behind the “Cold War alliance between higher education, the national-security state, and US propaganda operations.” For Barnhisel, whose previous book Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015) also examined this alliance, Pearson is one of its most important operatives.

Born into an upper middle-class family in Gardner, Massachusetts, in 1909, Norm followed his brother Alfred first to Phillips Andover Academy and then to Yale, but while Alfred returned home to work in the family’s dry goods business, Norm had no desire to leave academia.

More here.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors) and neuraminidase (11 flavors). A particular flu strain is named after which flavors of these two proteins it has – for example, H3N2, or H5N1.

Influenza A evolved in birds, and stayed there for at least thousands of years. It crossed to humans later, maybe during historic times – different sources give suggest dates as early as 500 BC or as late as 1500 AD. It probably crossed over multiple times. Maybe it died out in humans after some crossovers, stuck around in birds, and crossed over from birds to humans again later.

During historic times, the flu has followed a pattern of big pandemics once every few decades, plus small seasonal epidemics each winter. The big pandemics happen when a new strain of flu crosses from animals into humans. Then the new strain sticks around, undergoes normal gradual mutation, and once a year immune response decays enough / mutations accumulate enough to cause another small seasonal epidemic (Why is this synced to the calendar year? See here for more).

More here.

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David A. Sklansky in the Politics and Rights Review:

Shortly after the recent election, the New York Times reported the results of a new study documenting a deep and pervasive pessimism among the American public, cutting across ideological lines.  Only a quarter of Americans think the country’s best days are ahead, only one in ten thinks the government represents them well.  This is broadly true both of Trump supporters and of the half of the country that voted against him.  “In a sense,” the report concludes, “it is in the deep chords of distrust where Americans seem most united.”

Serge Schmemann, the Times editorial board member who wrote about the study, lamented that it “left unanswered the wrenching question that we must answer if things are to improve:  Why?  Why has America fallen into the deep malaise quantified by this study? Why are we so down on our country, our government, our prospects? Why is there so much hatred in our civil discourse?”

I offer a partial answer in my new book, Criminal Justice in Divided America:  Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy.  Failures of the criminal legal system helped to drive American politics toward populism, polarization, and pessimism.  By the same token, the right kinds of reforms can not only make policing, prosecution, and punishment fairer and more effective; they can assist in rebuilding American democracy.

More here.

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Alberto Romero at The Algorithmic Bridge:

Let me sum all this up because it’s too much information to process: What o3 just did is leap into uncharted territory. OpenAI trusted the trajectory and landed here. At 71.7% SWE-bench, 99.95th percentile Codeforces, 96.7 AIME, 87.7 GPQA Diamond, 25.2% FrontierMath and 87.5% ARC-AGI.

We don’t know what any of this means. We don’t know what lies further ahead. We don’t know what the next years hold. GPT-3 was four years ago for God’s sake.

Plenty of people are saying o3 is artificial general intelligence (AGI), or at least a soft form of AGI. Chollet denies the claim with an argument that reminds me of the idea that “no AGI is dumb at times.” He says beating ARC-AGI was a necessary but not sufficient condition to claim AGIness, and that there’s still research to do. I’m not sure what to think. The variance in intelligence across tasks is still high or o3 wouldn’t fail a single ARC-AGI task while striding through FrontierMath, but the last bastions resisting the unstoppable advance of AI seem to be falling one by one. Is it bitter? Is it even more bitter? I don’t know. Will new walls emerge to resist current techniques, as Chollet hopes to achieve with ARC-AGI-v2? I also don’t know.

more here.

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Thomas W. Hodgkinson at Literary Review:

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring romantic drama Gigli (2003), starring Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, but the fact that cinemagoers weren’t sure if they should be asking for ‘two tickets to Giggly’ didn’t help. Synecdoche, New York (2008) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) had more people reaching for their dictionaries than their wallets. But what about a title that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story? 

This brings us to rule two: never give a director carte blanche. After William Friedkin won Oscars for The French Connection (1971) and broke box office records with The Exorcist (1973), Paramount pretty much let him off the leash, even down to the choice of the title for his next film, which he dubbed Sorcerer (1977). Nice one, thought fans. Something along the lines of The Exorcist, perhaps, mixing diabolical forces with titillating gore? Well, no. The film turned out to be a remake of the classic French thriller The Wages of Fear (1953). There was no sorcerer.

more here.

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Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist:

Previously met with skepticism, AI won scientists a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2024 after they used it to solve the protein folding and design problem, and it has now been adopted by biologists across the globe. AI models like artificial neural networks and language models help scientists solve a variety of problems, from predicting the 3D structure of proteins to designing novel antibiotics from scratch. Researchers press on with the refinement of AI models, addressing their limitations and demonstrating widespread applications in biology.

A major sore spot for protein biologists, the protein-folding problem has now been solved by AI, winning University of Washington biochemist David Baker and DeepMind researchers Demis Hassabis and John Jumper a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. After struggling for around two decades to determine the tertiary structure of proteins from the sequence of their amino acids, scientists established the Critical Assessment of Structural Prediction (CASP) competition in 1994 to foster collaboration in this area. In 1998, Baker’s team built the Rosetta software for protein energy configuration modelling; in fact, a few years later, the team turned their computational model into a game called Foldit to rope in volunteers to partake in solving protein structures.

More here.

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Fugitive Beauty

The term “fugitive beauty” came
to me in a letter. A friend’s wife
used it in conversation. My friend
is a painter who studied in Paris.
I sought his opinion on poetry.

Fugitive beauty, evanescent, fleeting,
as if it implied a criminality
I did not understand.
Did all art start that way —
alone, fugitive, so coiled
in its incubation that it feared
possible success or failure?

Fugitive, running away,
not standing with the norm, the herd,
not strong enough
to be judged?

Or did it mean beauty as Keats meant it?
“Truth is beauty, beauty is truth” —
a raw truth, or a new dimension of beauty,
a new adjective
to describe eagles soaring,
no parameters,
like prisoners breaking out.

Out there by itself,
not great, not mediocre,
but flying in its own space
against all normalcy, blasting off
to its own truthfulness,
Its own freedom.

by George Degregorio
from Zerilda’s Chair
White Chicken Press
Rutherford, NJ, 2009

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Stephen Luntz in IFL Science:

The story starts in 1974 when Professor F. Sherwood Rowland proposed that CFCs, whose use was rapidly expanding, might pose a threat to the ozone layer. Rowland would subsequently share the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for this work, but at the time, CFC manufacturers hit back that the claims were “purely theoretical”. Technically speaking they were right. No one really knew if CFCs would actually have these effects in the upper atmosphere, a region of the planet we had barely begun to study.

Unfortunately, others pointed out, if the theory was right, damage to the ozone layer would expose the surface to so much ultraviolet radiation, little life would survive above ground or in the upper layers of the ocean. Even lifeforms not directly under threat depend on more vulnerable species for food or pollination – total ecosystem collapse was a real possibility.

Doing nothing would be the ultimate gamble.

The manufacturers established lobby groups arguing no action be taken until we had proof. DuPont’s chair called the idea CFCs might damage the ozone layer “science fiction”.  Carter, and the majority of the US Congress, feared by the time the evidence was in it might be too late.

More here.

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Eric Holthaus in Slate:

A good New Year’s resolution might be to experiment what “doing nothing” might mean for your life, and trying to notice how it changes your worldview—and opens you up to imagine the possibility of other, larger, more systemic changes in society. Opt out of literally every possible thing you can. Cancel everything you currently have on auto pay, or at least the things you don’t absolutely need to survive, like subscriptions to household goods, take-out app memberships, and Substack newsletters full of product recommendations. Opt out of all after-school activities for your kids—all the driving around, and the new gear. Clear your schedule. And then start adding back in the things that bring you connection and joy. Marie Kondo your whole life. Prioritize community over rote consumerism, and engagement over obligation.

More here.

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Sarah Bahr in The New York Times:

Fire-engine red. Egg-yolk yellow. Christmas-tree green. The palettes of this year’s potential Oscar contenders can be summed up in one word: Bold. “Everybody on Pedro’s sets ends up wearing really strong colors,” said Inbal Weinberg, the production designer who dreamed up the striking, primary color-heavy visual aesthetic for Pedro Almodóvar’s euthanasia drama, “The Room Next Door.”

We spoke with the costume, production and makeup designers for three of this year’s potential Oscar contenders — “The Substance,” “The Room Next Door” and “Wicked” — about choosing just the right shades, creating striking sets and costumes that don’t overwhelm the story and finding the secret ingredient for Elphaba’s green makeup. Even though the “The Room Next Door” tells a downbeat tale — about Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and her dying friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton) — the screen is bursting with vibrant tomato reds and electric lime greens. “It was important to Pedro not to go into the cliché universe in which, if you’re telling a really dark story, you also have these demure interiors or a drab color palette,” said Weinberg, who worked with Almodóvar to create eye-catching monochromatic sets (like a red kitchen, with a red counter, bowls, apples, strawberries and even a phone lock screen).

More here.

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Paul Laster at Artforum:

A Kyoto-based artist affiliated with Micropop, a Japanese art movement that involves combining commonplace objects and information into something new, Ryoko Aoki produces small poetic drawings, collages, and assemblages that capture everyday moments in her life, alongside larger installations that interweave these works. Returning Aoki to Take Ninagawa for her third solo show since 2011, “Stories About Boundaries” showcases drawings grouped on the walls and floor as well as displays of numbered boxes each containing smaller boxes, drawings, stones, and various found and handmade objects, like an installation within an installation.

Aoki divided the exhibition space into six conceptual sections to highlight various facets of these new works. Placed in a section called “Free Spaces for Doing Things Today,” which views the gallery itself as an oversize box, Modular Gallery Practice (all works 2024) simulates the anticipated floor plan of the show through a set of containers mingled with tiny objects, including a blue ball and a minuscule envelope. A key aspect of Aoki’s art is the representation of her world and the phenomena that shape it, from biological mimicry to the unconscious choices revealed by changes in scale.

more here.

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Piano

Midway in the concert,
the piano grew pensive,
ignored in its gravedigger’s frock coat;
but later it opened its mouth
—the jaws of leviathan:
the pianist then entered his piano
and deployed like a crow;
something happened, like a silvery
downfall
of pebbles
or a hand
in a pond,
unobserved;
a trickle of sweetness
like rain
on the smooth of a bell,
light fell
through the padlocks and bolts of a house,
to the depths,
an emerald crossed the abysses,
the sea gave its sound
the night
and the dews
and the meadows,
the steepest ascent of the thunderbolt,
the symmetrical rose sang aloud
and quietness circled the milk of the morning.

So melody grew
in a dying piano,
the naiad’s
investiture
rose on the catafalque
from a margin of teeth,
piano, pianist,
and the concerto plunged downward, oblivious,
till all was sonority,
torrential beginnings,
consummate gradation, a bell tower’s clarities.

Then the man in the tree
of his music came back to us.
He came down like
a blundering crow on its course
or a lunatic dandy:
the whale-mouth closed up
and the man walked away
to a silence.

by Pablo Neruda
from Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970
Grove Press, 1974

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Abigail Tulenko at Aeon Magazine:

The Hungarian folktale Pretty Maid Ibronka terrified and tantalised me as a child. In the story, the young Ibronka must tie herself to the devil with string in order to discover important truths. These days, as a PhD student in philosophy, I sometimes worry I’ve done the same. I still believe in philosophy’s capacity to seek truth, but I’m conscious that I’ve tethered myself to an academic heritage plagued by formidable demons.

The demons of academic philosophy come in familiar guises: exclusivity, hegemony and investment in the myth of individual genius. As the ethicist Jill Hernandez notes, philosophy has been slower to change than many of its sister disciplines in the humanities: ‘It may be a surprise to many … given that theology and, certainly, religious studies tend to be inclusive, but philosophy is mostly resistant toward including diverse voices.’ Simultaneously, philosophy has grown increasingly specialised due to the pressures of professionalisation. Academics zero in on narrower and narrower topics in order to establish unique niches and, in the process, what was once a discipline that sought answers to humanity’s most fundamental questions becomes a jargon-riddled puzzle for a narrow group of insiders.

more here.

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Eric Hoel at The Intrinsic Perspective:

Isaac Newton’s lifelong quest to transmute base metals into gold is normally forgiven as a symptom of the pre-scientific nature of his age. But “great minds holding eccentric, even kooky, beliefs” is a pattern that crops up throughout history. Even after there became strong social reasons for scientists to disguise even the faintest whiff of the irrational. William James, the godfather of psychology, believed in ghosts. Fred Hoyle, who came up with the idea that stars created chemical elements via nuclear fusion, thought that influenza came from space. Nikola Tesla was obsessed with the number three. Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli believed that his mere presence could drive laboratory equipment to malfunction. Kurt Gödel starved himself to death out of fear of being poisoned. Brian Josephson, a still-living Nobel laureate, thinks that water has memories.

Why?

In the “TV model” of science, scientists are pinnacles of rationality—socially inept, boringly nerdy, emotionless, and incapable of strong pre-evidence beliefs.

More here.

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