Theme for English B

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Brian Brodeur at The Hudson Review:

Much of literary culture regards the Gothic genre as an archaic embarrassment—gloomy ruins and paranormal lovers that serious practitioners have learned to dismiss. Yet such dismissals neglect a basic fact of literary history. Intimations of demonic realms and spectral forces emerged in tandem with the English novel, several early examples of which featured devil pacts, reanimation, ghost ships, and homunculi. Furthermore, neither British Romanticism nor French Symbolism would have been as consequential or interesting without Gothic writings by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, one could argue that a nascent version of European Modernism emerged in the mid-1800s when Baudelaire began publishing his translations of Poe’s fiction, an enterprise foundational to the composition of Les Fleurs du mal (first published in 1857, definitive edition posthumously in 1868).
 
Gothic was always a risk. In the US, a country founded on Enlightenment principles of rationalism and scientific progress, it provided a nightmarish counterpoint to the American dream. An “art of exciting surprise and horror,” as Walter Scott construed the genre, Gothic was refined in the young republic when Poe fired three shots across the bow of Victorian respectability by publishing “Berenice” (1835), “Ligeia” (1838) and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).

more here.

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Karen Stollznow at Aeon:

“Bitch” is a word with bite. Once a straightforward insult, it is now used in so many different ways that it’s no longer clear what it means. Bitch is a linguistic chameleon: there are good bitches and bad bitches; boss bitches and perfect bitches; sexy, difficult, dangerous or even psycho bitches. After so many variations and attempts to reject or reclaim the word, some now wear the label defiantly, while others still have it thrown at them. Its evolution is messy, complicated and revealing.

A single word can tell us a great deal. The journey of bitch, from a literal term for a female dog to one of the most charged words in the English language, shows how language shifts alongside changing ideas about gender, power and identity. In this case, it suggests that sometimes you really can teach an old dog new tricks.

More here.

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Kenneth Chang in the New York Times:

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Bill Hayes at The American Scholar:

In Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Oliver sounded almost comically exasperated as he responded to a rambling critique Kant makes of David Hume (whom Oliver revered): “Immanuel,” he wrote, as if speaking directly to the philosopher across the centuries, “you are totally confused!”

He had conflicted feelings about Sigmund Freud, all of whose published works lined his shelves. Oliver recognized Freud as the genius and groundbreaker he was. And as a writer, Oliver was clearly inspired by Freud’s published case histories. But he did not always agree with Freud’s theories, often commenting “No!” in the margins of a book and stating why he felt Freud had gotten something utterly wrong.

Sometimes, Oliver was moved enough by what he read to suggest to Freud a concept of his own. In the margins of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Oliver responded to the closing of chapter four, “The Mechanism of Pleasure and the Psychogenesis of Jokes,” by posing a provocative question (which he revised, striking through one word and replacing it with another): “Beside ‘conceptual’ jokes can one (not) have ‘natural’ jokes—jokes in Nature. … One can certainly have Humour, Wit, and Fun—which are certainly infinitely economical: indeed this is the heart of the world—its wit, its fun. … But this is not a Freudian ‘unconscious’ of depressed affect; but a primordial ‘preconscious’ of polymorphous potential—an Original Jest.”

more here.

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Richard Heys, Himanshi Bhardwaj & Cliodhna Taylor in Nature:

For decades, economists have known that using gross domestic product (GDP) alone to guide policy is problematic. The metric is mainly a measure of market production, albeit one with strong marketing and branding, and misses key elements of what makes a good life. Nevertheless, failure to agree on alternatives has held back the debate over what should replace it.

This year will be pivotal for changing how policymakers use data to guide decision-making. In May 2025, the United Nations secretary-general António Guterres commissioned a High-Level Expert Group to consider alternatives to GDP. The group’s final report is expected by the end of April and will stimulate great debate about how countries will use its proposed alternatives.

While the world awaits those recommendations, it is worth reflecting on three questions: why is GDP a poor metric, do the data exist to deliver improvements and how could better metrics provoke better policies?

Here, we offer insights from UK efforts to build on GDP to measure economic welfare using readily available national statistics and standard economic tools.

More here.

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Kathy Gannon in Substack:

Pakistan as a possible mediator in America’s war against Iran is not a surprise. Pakistan and its powerful military leader, Gen. Asim Munir, has held meetings with both Iran and Saudi Arabia, spoke out against the war in Iran, while ensuring Saudi Arabia the security pact the two have signed is airtight and inviolable.

Powerfully Pakistan is also a nuclear power, the only one in the Islamic world. Since its inception in 1947, when carved by the departing British from a larger India, Pakistan has also had to navigate a complicated and complex neighborhood rife with border disputes, religious and economic rivalries, great wealth and great poverty. In the larger world Pakistan has maneuvered a windy and often treacherous middle road between its long-time ally China and its often fair weathered friend America.

No it is not a surprise that Pakistan could emerge to negotiate an off ramp to America and Israel’s war with Iran. As for the United States, history has shown that democratic America has never met a Pakistani General it didn’t like, whether it was military dictator Gen. Mohammad Zia-ul Haq during the 1980s Soviet Union’s invasion of neighboring Afghanistan, or Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks on the United States. That’s not even counting President John F. Kennedy’s fond relationship with one of the country’s first military dictators. Gen. Ayub Khan.

More here.

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Practicing Art

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They’re
a very human way of making life more bearable.
Practicing an art, no matter how well or not, is a
way to make your soul grow,
for heaven’s sake,

Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories.
Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy one.
Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an
enormous reward. You will have
created something.”

—Kurt Vonnegut
from Poetic Outlaws

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Floating in a warm, nutritious bath, the slices of mouse brain buzzed with electrical activity. Researchers gave them a few zaps, and parts of the hippocampus strengthened their wiring.

This type of experiment is an extremely common way to decipher how the brain works. The slices, not so much. Preserved in a deep freeze for roughly a week, they restarted some basic processes after being thawed. Neurons lit up, boosted their metabolism, and adjusted connections in the same way our brains do when forming new memories and recalling old ones. “While the brain is considered exceptionally sensitive, we show that the hippocampus can resume electrophysiological activity after being rendered completely immobile in a cryogenic glass,” wrote University of Erlangen‐Nuremberg scientists in a paper describing the work.

In traditional freezing techniques, ice crystals shred delicate neurons and the connections between them. There would be no chance of recovering memories stored within. The new study used a method called vitrification, which rapidly cools tissue before crystals can form. An improved thawing process protected cells from toxic chemicals in their cryogenic bath. Both pre-sliced and whole mouse brains recovered after warming, although some neural activity was slightly off-kilter. To be clear, brains can’t be completely revived like in the movies. But the approach pushes the known frontier of what brain tissue can tolerate, wrote the team.

More here.

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Simon Gardner, James Pearson and Blake Morrison at Reuters:

In late 2022, an ambulance pulled up to a bombed-out apartment building in this village outside Kyiv. Three people emerged. One wore a gray hoodie, another a baseball cap. Both had masks covering their faces.

The third was more easily identifiable: He was unmasked, and had one arm and two prosthetic legs, witnesses told Reuters.

The masked men carried cardboard stencils from the ambulance and taped them to what had been an interior wall of an apartment before the Russians obliterated the place. Then they pulled out cans of spray paint and got to work. An absurd image appeared in minutes: a bearded man in a bathtub, scrubbing his back amid the wreckage.

Its creator was Banksy, one of the world’s most popular and enigmatic artists, whose identity has been debated and closely guarded for decades. Banksy is best known for simple yet sophisticated stencil paintings with searing social commentary. His work has generated tens of millions of dollars in sales over the years.

More here.

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Joseph Howlett in Quanta:

Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses at the number of jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll follow a bell curve. Measure enough women’s heights, men’s weights, SAT scores, marathon times — you’ll always get the same smooth, rounded hump that tapers at the edges.

Why does the bell curve pop up in so many datasets?

The answer boils down to the central limit theorem, a mathematical truth so powerful that it often strikes newcomers as impossible, like a magic trick of nature.

More here.

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Chang Che in The Guardian:

As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China. But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work. The technology behind China’s current robotics boom is deep learning, the mathematical engine behind large language models such as ChatGPT, which learn by discerning patterns from huge datasets. Many researchers believe that machines can learn to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned to navigate language: not by following rules, but by absorbing enough data for something like human dexterity to emerge. The aim, for many technologists, is the development of humanoid robots capable of performing factory labour – work that employs hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The resources being pumped into achieving this goal are staggering. In 2025, China announced a £100bn fund for strategic technologies including quantum computing, clean energy and robotics. Major cities have invested their own resources into robotics projects, too. There are now roughly 140 Chinese firms hoping to build humanoids.

More here.

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From The Siasat Daily:

The world of literature has lost one of its most luminous stars. Jeelani Bano, a titan of Urdu literature and a fierce advocate for the marginalized, passed away on Sunday (March 1), leaving behind a legacy that stretched far beyond the borders of her beloved Hyderabad. According to her family sources, she was a social architect who used her pen to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity. From her first short story in 1954 to her crowning achievements as a Padma Shri recipient and Doctor of Literature, Bano’s career spanned seven decades of relentless creative output. Jeelani Bano’s impact was global. Her stories—deeply rooted in the soil of the Deccan—found home in the hearts of readers from Moscow to Madison.

With 22 books covering novels, plays, and screenplays, she mastered every medium she touched. Her masterpieces, like Aiwan-e-Ghazal and Baarish-e-Sang, were translated into Russian, German, Norwegian, and nearly every major Indian language, proving that her themes of human struggle and dignity were universal.

More here. (Note: When my daughter Sheherzad was an undergraduate at Columbia University, she translated one of Bano’s stories into English and, with the quiet courage of the young, sent it to the author. To our delight, Ms. Bano replied with extraordinary warmth—her letter generous, encouraging, and full of genuine affection and concern for a young reader. It was a deeply touching gesture, made all the more remarkable by her towering stature.).

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Ma Jiajia in Sidecar:

Sanae Takaichi’s resounding win in Japan’s snap election last month divided Chinese-language commentary. Many Chinese living in the country were uneasy; some beat their chests in despair, declaring they’d pack up and leave. Others – mostly residing outside of Japan – hailed it a triumph for Japanese democracy and an awakening of the Yamato spirit. Such mixed feelings are in part a reaction to Takachi’s hawkishness on Taiwan. Soon after taking over as prime minister last October, she claimed that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan could constitute a ‘survival-threatening situation’ – implying possible military involvement in a cross-strait conflict. Within Japan, her comments helped cement her image as a tough-talking Japanese Thatcher, but they trigged uproar in Beijing, which has restricted rare earth exports and other critical materials. The number of Chinese visitors to Japan has fallen by 61 per cent on the previous year.

This heightened antagonism comes in the context of a broader anti-foreigner mood, one that has played an increasingly prominent part in politics in recent months. During last July’s Senate election, foreigners – comprising just 3 per cent of Japan’s population – were suddenly the hottest topic. Rumours spread like wildfire on social media: cheap immigrant labour was stifling Japanese wage growth and jeopardizing public safety; expat entrepreneurs in Tokyo were receiving low-interest start-up loans of up to ¥15 million; growing numbers were overstaying their visas and exploiting the welfare system; employees of multinational corporations were spreading Covid; crimes committed by foreigners were going unprosecuted. Amid this din, the far-right party Sanseito rapidly gained popularity with its ‘Japanese First’ campaign. It placed third in the election, securing fifteen seats, up from one previously.

This was an early indication of shifting public sentiment, as disaffected and economically insecure voters rallied to watchwords of the xenophobic right.

More here.

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Fernando Rugitsky in Phenomenal World:

It is still too soon to fully understand the conditions that enabled the worldwide ascent of the far right over the past decade. But deepening material divisions within the working classes seem to have played a key role, unraveling historic solidarities that were once the basis of left politics. While capital’s relentless drive to accumulate “division and difference within the working class” is nothing new, neoliberalism seems to have intensified it. Dylan Riley recently suggested that, in the case of rich countries, the problem “is not so much that workers as a whole are turning to the right as that the class is fundamentally fractured by the material interests deriving from the market position of its component parts:” a fracture that has been seized upon by the MAGA movement.

The tradition of critical political economy in Latin America has much to say about this dynamic of division among the working classes. In the 1970s, one of the high points of critical thought in the region, a central concern was to grasp how the sectoral characteristics of capital accumulation affected the class structure, and how shifts in the latter conditioned the politics of development in turn. The changing stratification of the labor force was at the heart of efforts to investigate the transformation of the economic structure and its political implications.

Few took this line of inquiry further than the Chilean economist Aníbal Pinto.

More here.

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Ben Recht over at his Substack arg min:

I’ve been wanting to write a summary of the Cultural AI conference I attended at NYU last week, but I’ve been struggling to succinctly capture my thoughts. That’s indicative of the depth and complexity of how AI meets culture, and the different perspectives and disciplines might not lend themselves to a tidy summary. As I often do when trying to wrap my head around complex things, I will stop worrying and just blog through it.

The talk that serves as my hub in the complex network of cultural AI is Cosma Shalizi’s “Aware of All Internet Traditions: Large Language Models as Information Retrieval and Synthesis.” That language models simultaneously retrieve information and synthesize new content isn’t controversial. Nor is the fact that this synthesis is formulaic. The current synthesis is next-token prediction trained on all written information, whose output is warped by some selective post-training. By design, language models mechanistically reproduce the recurring regularities in their training data. That training data consists of all the text files on the internet and what is easily available in printed books. Hence, the regularities are the tropes, stereotypes, templates, conventions, and genres of language and code.

The formulaic generation of discourse looks like discourse in ways we could never have imagined. But with hindsight, we shouldn’t be surprised. Human culture is very formulaic! There are long-standing formulas for oral tradition, for generating small talk, or for generating scientific papers. As Cosma put it, in the single sentence that summarizes the entire Cultural AI conference:

Following a tradition means not having to think for oneself.

 More here. (Cosma Shalizi’s slides here.)

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