Sean Illing in Vox:

There are a handful of topics that I almost force myself to not think about because the thoughts lead to a dead end. At the top of that list is climate change. It’s one of those problems that starts to overwhelm me when I consider the scale and the implications and all the barriers to tackling it.

I also know I can’t ignore it, because it’s real and it’s getting more urgent. In fact, the average temperature was as hot as it’s ever been, or at least as hot as we’ve ever recorded it to be, several days already this month. And if you live in the northeast United States, you’ve probably noticed the smoke blanket looming over you in recent weeks thanks to wildfires in Canada.

The question a lot of us have asked ourselves at various points is: What is my responsibility in this situation? What can I, as an individual, do?

There isn’t an easy answer here, in part because the problem is too big for any one of us to solve. But if you’re a parent — as I am — the climate predicament takes on an additional dimension. You have to wonder not just about the ethics of raising children in an unstable world. You also have to decide, in a very concrete way, what you really value and whether or not you’re willing to live in accordance with those values.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

The Maharaja of Whereverstan sends his daughter to Harvard so that she appears meritorious. In exchange, Harvard gets the credibility boost of being the place the Maharaja of Whereverstan sent his daughter. And Harvard’s other students get the advantage of networking with the Princess Of Whereverstan. Twenty years later, when one of them is an oil executive and Whereverstan is handing out oil contracts, she puts in a word with her old college buddy the Princess and gets the deal. It’s obvious what the oil executive has gotten out of this, but what does the Princess get? I think she gets the right to say she went to Harvard, an honor which is known to go mostly to the meritorious.

People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree.

More here.

Eric Hoel in The Intrinsic Perspective:

In hindsight it seems inevitable: a single overarching internet is impossible. The worldviews of people are too fundamentally incompatible at their roots. Or to simplify and put it more bluntly: at least in the United States, there is no way to fit both major political parties onto the same platform and allow them to wield equal power over a perfectly centered Overton window. Blame whichever side you want, red or blue. I’m sure it’s the other side that’s more extreme (and hey, maybe you’re right). But if Twitter was supposed to be the “global town square,” I think Zuckerberg’s so-far successful introduction of its competitor, Threads, which rapidly feels like the other global town square, presages one of the last gasps of the united internet, and the end of an important, if uncomfortable, era. Yes, it was an era of half a billion people crammed into a single echoing room, all our faces smooshed against one another, and all you could taste was the spittle and there was ringing in your ears as the crowd surged. But it was also the time when you could say something and, just occasionally, the entire world would hear it.

More here.

Tyler Cowen at Conversations with Tyler:

COWEN: If I think of your thought, and I compare it to the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt, what’s the common ontological element in both of your thoughts that leads you to more or less agree on both language and liberty?

CHOMSKY: Von Humboldt was, first of all, a great linguist who recognized some fundamental principles of language which were rare at the time and are only beginning to be understood. But in the social and political domain, he was not only the founder of the modern research university, but also one of the founders of classical liberalism.

His fundamental principle — as he said, it’s actually an epigram for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — is that the fundamental right of every person is to be free from external illegitimate constraints, free to inquire, to create, to pursue their own interests and concerns without arbitrary authority of any sort restricting or limiting them.

COWEN: Now, you’ve argued that Humboldt was a Platonist of some kind, that he viewed learning as some notion of reminiscence. Are you, in the same regard, also a Platonist?

CHOMSKY: Leibniz pointed out that Plato’s theory of reminiscence was basically correct, but it had to be purged of the error of reminiscence — in other words, not an earlier life, but rather something intrinsic to our nature. Leibniz couldn’t have proceeded as we can today, but now we would say something that has evolved and has become intrinsic to our nature. For people like Humboldt, what was crucial to our nature was what is sometimes called the instinct for freedom. Basic, fundamental human property should lie at the basis of our social and economic reasoning.

It’s also the critical property of human language and thought, as was recognized in the early Scientific Revolution — Galileo, Leibniz — a little later, people like Humboldt in the Romantic era.

More here.

Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

So I woke up this morning and over there to the side of my bedroom was the poster with that David Hockney painting I’ve always loved though perhaps, it occurred to me, never really looked at before—you know how it can get to be with the things one surrounds oneself with everyday. As you can see, it’s one of his pool paintings (this one dated 1971), which as a group played all sorts of changes on themes of surface and transparency and presence and awareness and memory (the wet paint on canvas, drying, summoning forth what it is like to call back up the fading memory of what it was like to soak in the water that balmy distant afternoon, one’s shoulders pressed against the poolside rim, gazing out, observing the dance of light on the surface of the water, and through that surface to the depths beneath, the way that gaze too mirrors what happens as we focus on the slathered pigments on the canvas surface and through them, past them, to the imputed image beyond: the pool, the patio, the sandals, the steps, the towel, the palms—all of them, all of it, just so many pigments in play and yet so much more).

more here.

J.C. Scharl at Religion And Liberty:

McCarthy’s writing is poetic. By that I mean that many of McCarthy’s sentences do not appear to exist to serve some purpose outside themselves: their language, the texture of the sounds, the relations (often ironic, in his case) between the words and their meanings—all this is the province of poetry.

Specifically, his writing is elegiac. An elegy is a poetic song of something lost or passing away; it is an act of deliberate, careful recording, a close look at what is gone so we can fix its virtues in our mind before time obliterates even the memory of what used to be.

McCarthy is a master of the elegiac sentence, the vivid description that is itself a piling up of themes (in his case, almost always tragic themes), the sentence in which the metonymy or the synecdoche or the metaphor is so perfectly realized that there is no linguistic bridge between what is and what is meant, in which the description is a farewell.

more here.

 —After Carlos Drummond De Andrade

Innermost

Within everything, something prior.

Within the sizzle of nerve, a remnant
of remote pox, and at the heart
of malaise, the mosquito’s
pierce and draw.

Within the swimmer’s breath,
the impulse of gills.

In the middle of the vacation,
fear of running out.

In the potential circumference
of a kick, the dog’s caution.

Within the loop of scarf, bruises.
Within safety, its counterpoint.

Within the forage,
the delusion of past fullness.

Within language, tongues,
and their longing.

Within the eye, a reservoir,
a dumpster.

Within surrender, the next rebellion.

Within the fig’s gluey heart,
a speck of dead wasp.

by Shirley Stephenson
from Bodega Magazine

Bethany Brookshire in The New York Times:

The hush at the end of the musical performance. The pause in a dramatic speech. The muted moment when you turn off the car. What is it that we hear when we hear nothing at all? Are we detecting silence? Or are we just hearing nothing and interpreting that absence as silence?

The “Sound of Silence” is a philosophical question that made for one of Simon & Garfunkel’s most enduring songs, but it’s also a subject that can be tested by psychologists. In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers used a series of sonic illusions to show that people perceive silences much as they hear sounds. While the study offers no insight into how our brains might be processing silence, the results suggest that people perceive silence as its own type of “sound,” not just as a gap between noises.

‘The vision that was planted in my brain still remains’

Rui Zhe Goh, a graduate student in cognitive science and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and one of the scientists involved in the study, described a koan that he likes: “Silence is the experience of time passing.” He said he interprets that to mean that silence is “an auditory experience of pure time.”

More here.

Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:

In 1988, the great Lutheran scholar Robert Jenson published a book called America’s Theologian, conferring that honor on the formidable eighteenth-century Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards. Jenson did not mean that Edwards is the greatest American theologian, though he probably is, but rather “that Edwards’s theology meets precisely the problems and opportunities of specifically American Christianity and of the nation molded thereby, and that it does so with the profundity and inventive élan that belong only to the very greatest thinkers.”¹ Quite clearly, a very different America has emerged in the decades since Jenson’s book was published, and the best theologian of our America is by profession neither a theologian nor a pastor. The great theologian of our America, I propose, is the novelist Thomas Pynchon.

More here.

Siobhan Roberts in the New York Times:

In 2019, Christian Szegedy, a computer scientist formerly at Google and now at a start-up in the Bay Area, predicted that a computer system would match or exceed the problem-solving ability of the best human mathematicians within a decade. Last year he revised the target date to 2026.

Akshay Venkatesh, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a winner of the Fields Medal in 2018, isn’t currently interested in using A.I., but he is keen on talking about it. “I want my students to realize that the field they’re in is going to change a lot,” he said in an interview last year.

More here.

Pat Cassels in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Over time, Ethan Hunt and his geopolitical exploits have remained a rare cultural constant through a time of real-world geopolitical upheaval. Mission: Impossible’s six installments have been with the United States across three recessions, five presidents, at least two wars, and a global pandemic. That’s the kind of longevity that transforms a franchise from a series of ephemeral blockbusters with loosely connected plots into a quasi-reliable witness to history who has stuck around long enough to recall a few important things, even if its memories are a little hazy, and for some reason all involve Ving Rhames wearing a fedora.

Of course, trying to gauge the political philosophy of the Mission: Impossible franchise is a little like trying to gauge the guests’ feelings during an orgy. Sure, they must have something on their minds, but asking would just ruin everyone’s good time. But the franchise’s unprecedented durability, combined with the fact that Mission: Impossible is, however obliquely, about a US intelligence agency (the IMF, literally the “Impossible Mission Force”), has made it an unlikely chronicler of American hegemony in the first quarter of our century—about the only thing the series has ever “quietly” done.

More here.

A Word on Statistics

Out of every hundred people

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four—well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
forty and four.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Doubled over in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few at thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet.

by Wislawa Szymborska
translation: Joanna Trzeciak

Michael Reid in The Conversation:

First, the physical effort of driving a race car is much greater than that of driving your family car.

Turning and braking require more force due to the high speeds and the unique engineering of race cars. Drivers control the vehicle by constantly engaging the muscles of the arms, upper body and legs.

“There’s tremendous kick-back through the steering wheel,” IndyCar driver Dario Franchitti said in a 2012 interview, “and there’s no power steering, so every movement of the wheel requires a lot of energy.”

After being hooked up to sensors to track the stresses and strains he endured a race, Franchitti learned he needed to generate 35 pounds of force just to steer, and 135 pounds of force to brake.

More here.

Magali Duzant in Lens Culture:

Eyes follow you from behind a slit in a translucent sheet. A tear, loosely sewn, cuts across an image. A nose emerges, and elsewhere faces float in repose, softened and semi-hidden. Overlays, cuts, and stitches in the smoky surface create a game of hide and seek. Perhaps we’ve caught someone mid-dream, but who? The person in the portrait or the artist herself?

The photographic work of Cathy Cone plays with consciousness. Images shift, twist, and transform in her studio, their depths revealed through the artist’s material interventions. In her recent series, Apparent Close-Up, she combines portraiture, found imagery, paint, vellum, and thread. The resulting prints dance along the edge of a threshold, reeling between the known and unknown, between visibility and obscurity. Doubling abounds in these images as if hinting at the world of dreams and all that lurks below the surface. The portraits force the viewer to question what they are searching for and what form of intimacy they may desire in the act of looking.

More here.

Rochelle Peachey in Newsweek:

There I was, sitting in a New Jersey Burger King, while the restaurant manager I was on a date shouted the lyrics to Rule, Britannia! at the top of his lungs. I had just started eating my Whopper meal when he started belting it out, his arms firmly placed on my shoulders. “She’s British! She’s British,” he shouted at the various people who were just getting on with their day, but were clearly wondering what on earth was going on. Well, this is going to be fantastic, I thought. I was in my mid-40s at the time, and had no real plan other than which states I would be visiting, placing newspaper adverts in New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia claiming to be a single woman looking for love.

I hoped everyone would be as weird and wonderful as the man I’d met in that Burger King, and they did not disappoint. One gentleman, after a couple of drinks, informed me that he had taken the liberty of booking a hotel room for us after knowing me for only a couple of hours—I politely declined. Another was fidgeting so much at lunch that I had to ask what was wrong.

“Take your coat off?” I suggested.

“No. I’ve got my dead cat in there,” he replied.

More here.