Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Scientific breakthroughs rely on decades of diligent work and expertise, sprinkled with flashes of ingenuity and, sometimes, serendipity. What if we could speed up this process?

Creativity is crucial when exploring new scientific ideas. It doesn’t come out of the blue: Scientists spend decades learning about their field. Each piece of information is like a puzzle piece that can be reshuffled into a new theory—for example, how different anti-aging treatments converge or how the immune system regulates dementia or cancer to develop new therapies.

AI tools could accelerate this. In a preprint study, a team from Stanford pitted a large language model (LLM)—the type of algorithm behind ChatGPT—against human experts in the generation of novel ideas over a range of research topics in artificial intelligence. Each idea was evaluated by a panel of human experts who didn’t know if it came from AI or a human. Overall, ideas generated by AI were more out-of-the-box than those by human experts. They were also rated less likely to be feasible. That’s not necessarily a problem. New ideas always come with risks. In a way, the AI reasoned like human scientists willing to try out ideas with high stakes and high rewards, proposing ideas based on previous research, but just a bit more creative. The study, almost a year long, is one of the biggest yet to vet LLMs for their research potential.

More here.

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Clayton Purdom at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The first time I tried to write this essay, I failed. It was the middle of the pandemic—a time in which uncountable numbers of introspective personal essays were written to no apparent end—and I watched Sans Soleil, director Chris Marker’s dreamlike 1983 travelogue. I was working at a marketing agency at the time, suffusing strategic briefs with literary ambition, and something about the way Marker’s film faded from documentary to sci-fi to philosophical reverie ignited long-dormant neurons in my brain. Sleeper cells dissatisfied with a life in service of internet content and client work assembled. They blew up access tunnels and sabotaged meeting preparation protocols. I wrote something big and haunted about my experience as a writer and intended to publish it, in an act of vainglorious career suicide, on LinkedIn.

This is not that essay, which I ended up storing in the cloud, untouched and perfect. Maybe I just lost the nerve. I came to view the entire months-long ordeal as merely a romantic obsession with Sans Soleil, the sort of honeymooning that occurs with a piece of art only a handful of times in life, in which old tastes are dramatically reordered and new, long-lasting obsessions emerge. That essay, that romance, hung over me as I logged back in to Slack. And yet something was different. The strategic briefs shifted beneath my gaze now. I saw Sans Soleil’s borderless spirit everywhere, and came to see it as representative of an aesthetic thread that named itself outside of my will, its name slowly infecting my thoughts over the years since.

I call it weird nonfiction: creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience.

More here.

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Richard Schiffman at Undark:

Peter Godfrey-Smith does not use the word miracle in the title of his ambitious new book, “Living on Earth: Forest, Corals, Consciousness and the Making of the World,” but there is scarcely a page that does not recount one. His subject is the astounding creativity of life, not just to evolve ever-new forms, but to continually remake the planet that hosts it.

Godfrey-Smith, a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, moves dizzyingly from the latest developments in neurology to the nature of human language and of consciousness itself. The core story traces life’s epic journey from cyanobacteria, which were amongst the first photosynthesizing plants, to increasingly complex multicellular plants, which contributed to creating an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which in turn paved the way for the evolution of oxygen breathing animals like ourselves.

It is “a history of organisms as causes, rather than evolutionary products,” he writes, presenting “a dynamic picture of the Earth, a picture of an Earth continually changing because of what living things do.”

Homo sapiens, relative latecomers to life’s party, are only the latest in a long line of species that have cleverly engineered the environment to meet their own needs.

More here.

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Terry Eagleton at Verso Books:

I first met Fred Jameson in 1976, when he invited me to teach his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego. Before then I had known of his existence only through the stunning Marxism and Form, published five years earlier, a set of coruscating accounts of thinkers such as Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, Ernst Bloch and others. The book’s very title throws down the gauntlet to a dreary lineage of vulgar Marxist criticism. It also deals with a number of German works, some of them bristling with difficulties, which had not then been translated into English.

I was convinced, then, that the name Fredric Jameson was probably a pseudonym for Hans-Georg Kaufmann or Karl Gluckstein, a refugee from Mitteleuropa holed up in southern California. The man I met, however, who greeted me with a brusqueness which I later learned was shyness, was as American as Tim Walz, though one suspects that Walz doesn’t slink away to read the latest Czech fiction over a glass of wine. He used expressions like ‘look it’ and ‘holy shit’, wore denim jeans, enjoyed eating turf ‘n surf and was clearly uncomfortable in the presence of patrician French intellectuals, much preferring the genial, outgoing Umberto Eco. All this was authentic enough; but he was also an intellectual in a civilisation in which such creatures are well advised to appear in disguise.

More here.

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Though the history of experimental film is rife with iconoclastic visionaries, Robert Beavers somehow remains one of its under-sung heroes. Together with his partner, Gregory Markopoulos (1928–92), Beavers developed an approach to cinema defined by its singular and uncompromising rigor, yielding a body of work celebrated as much for its poetic beauty as its complex formal investigation of the filmmaking apparatus. While continuing to make films to this day, Beavers also helms the Temenos, an open-air theatre in Lyssaraia Greece, dedicated to screenings of Markopoulos’s sprawling magnum opus, Eniaios (1947–91).

From September 26 to 29, 2024, New York’s Anthology Film Archives has programmed a retrospective of Beavers’s films, giving American audiences a rare opportunity to see his work.

more here.

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Christenna Fryar in The Guardian:

If there is one thing that all historians must make peace with, it is that it is hard, often impossible, to know how people in the past felt. Historical fiction has the upper hand in its ability to render the complex yet plausible emotions and motivations of historical figures. Categorised by the publisher as creative nonfiction, Ekow Eshun’s The Strangers is foremost a work of imagination that sits somewhere between history and fiction. In lyrical prose, it presents the lives of five Black men: Ira Aldridge, 19th-century actor and playwright; Matthew Henson, polar explorer; Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and political philosopher; footballer Justin Fashanu; and Malcolm X. Through them, the book moves from the early-19th century to the late-20th. More connects these men than race. Eshun selects moments when each one is in an exile of some kind, geographically and emotionally far away from what they once knew, questioning their place in the world, estranged in some way from their previous life.

More here.

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Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:

Worldwide, more than three million people lose their lives each year to lung-damaging conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or cystic fibrosis.¹ In contrast, fewer than 5,000 individuals per year are fortunate enough to receive life-saving lung transplants.² Transplant recipients still face many challenges, however, including a lifetime of immunosuppressant medications with potentially severe side effects and a more than 40 percent transplant failure rate in the first five years.³

In a recent study in Science Translational Medicine, transplantation immunologist Rainer Blasczyk and his team at the Hannover Medical School presented a potential solution to these problems in a minipig model.⁴ Instead of administering immunosuppressants, which Blasczyk likened to blinding the patient’s immune system, leaving the individual vulnerable to infections and even certain types of cancer, the researchers suppressed key immune proteins in the donor lung, rendering it immunologically invisible.⁵ Modifying the organ instead of the recipient isn’t a new idea, but it is an important one, said Jeffrey Platt, a transplantation biologist at the University of Michigan Medical School who was not involved in this work. “If you can introduce something that will affect the donor organ, then you can preserve the immune system of the recipient. And in lung transplantation, that’s really important because the lung is one of the first targets of infectious organisms.”

More here.

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Carson McCullers

she died of alcoholism
wrapped in a blanket
on a deck chair
on an ocean
steamer.

all her books of
terrified loneliness

all her books about
the cruelty
of loveless love

were all that was left
of her

as the strolling vacationer
discovered her body

notified the captain

and she was quickly dispatched
to somewhere else
on the ship

as everything
continued just
as
she had written it

by Charles Bukowski
from Poetic Outlaws

Carson McCullers

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Srikanth Reddy at the Paris Review:

For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein—for all their many differences—enjoy a special status as “poets’ philosophers” in the annals of literary history. Other lofty thinkers fly under poets’ collective radar; I have yet to come across a volume of verse prefaced by a quotation from David Hume. What makes some philosophers, and not others, into poets’ philosophers remains a mystery to me. But I’ve never really thought of Hannah Arendt as one of them.

Unemotional, anti-Romantic, and doggedly insistent on expunging unruly feelings from collective life, Arendt may seem to possess the least lyrical of temperaments, but a new volume of her poetry reveals that the author of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours.

more here.

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Brian Patrick Eha in The Hedgehog Review:

If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning. Word order is, if not all, then nine tenths. I exaggerate, but I do so advisedly, as a corrective to the overemphasis on word choice, the unjust rule of the mot juste (recall here the old saying about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug) that dominates, to the detriment of other concerns, contemporary literature and creative writing. At times, this passion for the right—or the unusual—word reaps dividends; at others, it merely produces an uncalled-for flood of verbed nouns, portmanteaus, adjectives wrenched out of joint.

So in verse or prose you might find a sentence like “The jackdaw raises its head from the feeder, slipstreams away”—where that unusual verb, divorced from its usual meaning, is used in novel fashion to suggest fluidity of movement, speed. Or take the opening of “Pulse,” a short story recently published in The New Yorker: “He footed off his shoes, the logs balanced on an arm, and tugged the door shut.” Novelty is fine (so long as it’s not mistaken for originality), but it is hardly the only way to catch the reader’s eye, or, hold her attention. Word order all by itself can make a sentence new.

More here.

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John Naughton in The Guardian:

In 2011, the psychologist (and Nobel laureate) Daniel Kahneman proposed that we humans are bimodal animals capable only of two modes of thought. One (which he called “System 1”) is fast, instinctive and emotional. The other (“System 2”) is slower, more deliberative and more logical. The first doubtless evolved when we were hunter-gatherers, and served us well in that reality. The second, involving slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious thought, came later, as societies became more complex and uncertainty became an integral part of the human condition. Uncertainty is, says David Spiegelhalter, “all about us, but, like the air we breathe, it tends to remain unexamined”. Which is why he wrote a book about how to live with it.

Uncertainty, in Spiegelhalter’s view, is a relationship between an individual and the outside world. And, because of that, our personal judgments play an essential role whenever we are faced with it, “whether we are thinking about our lives, weighing up what people tell us, or doing scientific research”. And tolerance of uncertainty varies hugely among people: some are excited by unpredictability, while others are crippled by anxiety.

When dealing with uncertainty, Spiegelhalter argues, Kahneman’s System 1 is bad news. It “tends towards overconfidence, neglects important background information, ignores the quantity and quality of the evidence, is unduly influenced by how the issue is posed, takes too much notice of rare but dramatic events, and suppresses doubt”.

More here.

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Elaine Scarry in the Boston Review:

The key structure of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is audible in the September 4, 2024, speech by U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Cara Abercrombie: “Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the United States or its allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime.” The doctrine, which the United States has embraced since the Cold War, aims to prevent an adversary from launching a nuclear weapon by assuring that any first strike will be followed by a retaliatory second strike, whose effects will equal or exceed the original damage and may eliminate the adversary altogether. This annihilating reflex of deterrence is equally audible in the quiet words of the Department of Defense in its web page on “America’s Nuclear Triad,” its sea-based, land-based, and air-based delivery platforms: “The triad, along with assigned forces, provide 24/7 deterrence to prevent catastrophic actions from our adversaries and they stand ready, if necessary, to deliver a decisive response, anywhere, anytime.”

Framed wholly as defensive and preventative (and from day to day, largely successful in deflecting our attention from the actual first use stance the country has had for nearly eighty years), deterrence would almost have the aura of peacekeeping, were it not the mental platform undergirding our fourteen Ohio-class submarines (each able to singlehandedly destroy one of Earth’s seven continents), four hundred land-based ICBMs, and sixty-six B-52 and B-2 stealth bombers. Although the physical act of unbuilding the nuclear architecture is easily within reach—it would take at most four weeks to dismantle all the nuclear triggers throughout the world, a decisive because disabling first step—the mental architecture of deterrence is the major impediment to doing so.

More here.

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Matthew James Seidel at The Millions:

Difficult relationships between fathers and sons have been fodder for writers for millennia. Sometimes these relationships are simply power struggles, as in so many Greek myths, such as the conflicts first between Uranus and his son Cronus and later Cronus and his son Zeus. Or their conflicts are representative of social strife, as in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. And other times, like in many of Franz Kafka’s most famous works, they’re about, well, Kafka. But no one writing today has explored the mercurial nature of the father-son relationship with more humor and fresh insight than Adam Ehrlich Sachs. Now, with the publication of his third book, Gretel and the Great War, Sachs is broadening his canvas to put this core dynamic in the context of social upheaval, obsession, and, above all, legacy.

For those unfamiliar with Sachs, reading his three books in chronological order offers an opportunity to see a writer honing his voice and developing a unique style. But perhaps the best way to appreciate Sachs, particularly his growth as a storyteller, is to examine the three literary father figures who have each had an increasingly significant influence on his works, beginning with Kafka.

more here.

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Belinda Luscombe in Time Magazine:

The early days of the pandemic were a complicated time for a lot of couples.

But it’s fair to say that in the sprawling, Pacific lodge-style home of Melinda and Bill Gates, the complexity was particularly acute. The foundation the couple co-led had been running a flu study in their hometown of Seattle, which had detected early cases of COVID-19 in the region. There were video calls with infectious-disease specialists they funded, world leaders, epidemiologists, journalists, and public-health officials. Two of their three children were home from school full time. Plus, the couple was secretly separated, trading off who lived at the family house and who was elsewhere while they tried to figure out if they could stay married.

“It was a super intense time for us as a foundation,” says Melinda French Gates, sitting in her industrial-chic office in Kirkland, Wash., three days after exiting the world-changing organization that bore her name for almost 25 years. “The other thing I would say, though, is, unusually, it gave us the privacy to do what needed to be done in private. You know, I separated first before I made the full decision about a divorce. And to be able to do that in private while I’m still trying to take care of the kids, while still making certain decisions about how you’re going to disentangle your life—thank God.”

More here.

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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells¹. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body. “I can eat sugar now,” said the woman, who lives in Tianjin, on a call with Nature. It has been more than a year since the transplant, and, she says, “I enjoy eating everything — especially hotpot.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.

James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.” The study, published in Cell today, follows results from a separate group in Shanghai, China, who reported in April that they had successfully transplanted insulin-producing islets into the liver of a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes². The islets were also derived from reprogrammed stem cells taken from the man’s own body and he has since stopped taking insulin.

More here.

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George Dunn at Compact Magazine:

George Parkin Grant, who died in 1988 at the age of 69, was world-famous in Canada—at least, that was the jest frequently made at the philosopher’s expense. The joke reflected his status as a public intellectual who made frequent appearances on Canadian Broadcast Corporation radio programs but never attracted much attention south of the 49th parallel. There are many reasons for his obscurity outside his home country, but one cause was surely his intense Canadian nationalism, coupled with his outspoken criticism of the form of liberalism he saw embodied in the hegemon to the south.

Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of one of Grant’s most influential works, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. In it, he rebuked Canada’s political establishment for bowing to pressure from the Kennedy administration to accept nuclear missiles on Canadian soil. This capitulation to Washington, he prophesied, heralded the demise of Canadian sovereignty and ensured its absorption into its southern neighbor as a “branch-plant satellite” of the emerging universal empire helmed by the United States. But the loss of Canadian sovereignty was only a local episode in a broader process that was erasing cultural particularity across the globe. Liberals trumpet diversity, but Grant argued that our global civilization would permit pluralism only in private pursuits.

more here. (h/t Cynthia Haven)

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