Christina Cauterucci in Slate:

The 2024 presidential election is 14 months away, which means political news sites are already saturated with poll-obsessed prognostication and horse-race reporting. In this way, every election season is alike—but this year’s run-up has felt particularly repetitive. Joe Biden, who reportedly told advisers in 2019 that he would not seek a second term if elected in 2020, is seeking a second term. Donald Trump, a former president enthusiastically campaigning in the shadow of multiple indictments, is all but certain to be the Republican nominee. The 2024 race is turning out to be a zombie contest: It’s November 2020, risen from the dead, with an abundance of ugly new boils to flaunt.

The country isn’t too happy about it. A recent CNN poll of registered voters found that 31 percent viewed neither Biden nor Trump favorably. Compare that to the 19 percent who viewed neither Hillary Clinton nor Trump favorably just before the 2016 election. That was already the only election in recorded history in which more Americans disliked the two major party candidates than liked them. Voters have spent a cumulative seven years watching Trump and Biden perform the job of president, and about a third of them haven’t liked what they’ve seen.

More here.

Bill Gifford in Scientific American:

How long can human beings live? Although life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, thanks largely to improved sanitation and medicine, research into hunter-gatherer populations suggests that individuals who escaped disease and violent deaths could live to about their seventh or eighth decade. This means our typical human life span may be static: around 70 years, with an extra decade or so for advanced medical care and cautious behavior. Some geneticists believe a hard limit of of around 115 years is essentially programmed into our genome by evolution. Other scientists in the fast-moving field of aging research, or geroscience, think we can live much longer. A handful of compounds have been shown to lengthen the life spans of laboratory animals slightly, yet some scientists are more ambitious—a lot more ambitious.

João Pedro de Magalhães, a professor of molecular biogerontology at the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham in England, thinks humans could live for 1,000 years. He has scrutinized the genomes of very long-lived animals such as the bowhead whale (which can reach 200 years) and the naked mole rat. His surprising conclusion: if we eliminated aging at the cellular level, humans could live for a millennium—and potentially as long as 20,000 years.

More here.

David Schurman Wallace in The Nation:

Although Handke first came to prominence as a playwright and novelist of prolific output (he’s the author of dozens of works), he has become much better known for his politics. His support for Serbia in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, particularly his statements about the genocidal violence committed against Bosnian Muslims, has made him a pariah. A habitual contrarian, Handke embraced his outcast status and offered a bizarre disputation of the facts of the war that struck many as delusional, especially considering that he had only a glancing personal interest in Balkan politics—his mother was Slovenian, a fact he clung to with increasing intensity. In the years that followed, Handke has dug in even deeper. When Slobodan Milošević died in 2006 during his trial for war crimes, Handke spoke at his funeral. Years later, he was feted and decorated by the Serbian government. Despite the support of high-profile writers like Elfriede Jelinek and Karl Ove Knausgaard, his reputation has suffered. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019, protest was widespread and one member of the Nobel committee promptly resigned, in part because of his politics.

More here.

Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott in Ars Technica:

The goal of this article is to make a lot of this knowledge accessible to a broad audience. We’ll aim to explain what’s known about the inner workings of these models without resorting to technical jargon or advanced math.

We’ll start by explaining word vectors, the surprising way language models represent and reason about language. Then we’ll dive deep into the transformer, the basic building block for systems like ChatGPT. Finally, we’ll explain how these models are trained and explore why good performance requires such phenomenally large quantities of data.

To understand how language models work, you first need to understand how they represent words. Humans represent English words with a sequence of letters, like C-A-T for “cat.” Language models use a long list of numbers called a “word vector.”

More here.

William Deresiewicz in Persuasion:

Let’s get a few things straight to start with. First, higher education as it currently exists is not going anywhere. There are more than 3700 colleges and universities in this country, with a total enrollment of 19 million, and they aren’t going to suddenly disappear. Or even gradually disappear. Since around 2013, with the advent of online instruction, people have been predicting that half of American colleges and universities would be gone within 10-15 years (it’s always 10-15 years, no matter when the prediction is made). Over the same period, the number of four-year institutions, not counting for-profits (which deserve to die), has actually gone up.

Second, higher education should not disappear. Colleges and universities serve essential functions that are not conceivably replicable without them. Higher ed is not dysfunctional, at least not in the strict sense of the word. It still functions. Students learn; experts and professionals are trained; knowledge is created. Get your appendix removed by someone without an MD, and then we can talk. There are 463 research universities in the United States. If they ceased to exist, where would the work they do be carried out? Your garage?

More here.

Jay Murphy at the LARB:

AT THE END of his life, the inveterate surrealist Antonin Artaud returned to his notion of a transformative “Theater of Cruelty.” In February 1948, a month before his death, in a famously banned radio broadcast in Paris entitled To Have Done with the Judgment of God, he proclaimed, “Man is ill because he is badly constructed,” announcing a “body without organs” that “will have delivered him from all his automatisms / and returned him to his true liberty.” Artaud saw this last radio work as a “mini-model” of what a Theater of Cruelty could be. Artaud had just emerged from a horrific, nine-year asylum confinement (lasting from September 1937 to May 1946), and the series of radio works were part of a ferocious taking back of his voice and life.

Artaud has primarily been known as a major collaborator with the Paris Surrealists (from 1925 to 1927), and avant-garde author of the extraordinarily eloquent if mysterious essays gathered in The Theatre and Its Double (1938), in which he very controversially called for a cataclysmic “Theater of Cruelty” that would replace centuries of representational “psychological” theater.

more here.

Amir-Hussein Radjy at the LRB:

Ramadan has lived in the tomb of Ratib Pasha, Egypt’s late-19th-century army chief, since he was born. The large chamber of floriated stone, honeycombed walls and coffered ceilings is an example of an Egyptian style of architecture that draws on Ottoman, European and Mamluk elements. But it is marked for demolition, along with thousands of other tombs in the Qarafa, Cairo’s centuries-old City of the Dead, to make way for new roads. The guardian of the tomb opposite, Ramadan showed me, had erased the black arrows that marked it for bulldozing. ‘He thinks that’ll make a difference,’ he laughed.

Earlier that day, we had set out to survey the destruction. I was shocked by its scale. The City of the Dead is a vast, 1300-year-old necropolis, that stretches for ten kilometres along the eastern edge of old Cairo.

more here.

Maddie Burakoff in AP News:

Tiny ants march along a glass bridge overhead in the new museum wing, The Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation. Giant whales swoop along the walls in an immersive video display. And the building’s natural curves — inspired by canyons in the Southwest — are meant to highlight how all of it is intertwined.

…The museum shipped in around 500,000 leafcutter ants to build a massive colony in the insectarium. The tiny workers collect their leaves from one glass enclosure, then march across a skybridge to cultivate their fungal feasts in big glass bulbs along the wall. The ants needed some help adjusting to the space: scientists had to hold “training sessions” to show them where to go, said Cheryl Hayashi, the museum’s provost of science. They’ve since settled into their new home.

More here. (Note: Must see exhibit)

How Nazis

The man in the driver’s seat of the minivan is just short of backhanding his wife
but screams instead. The contractor towing a backhoe shouts at a man
who has crossed against the light. A man leans on his horn because the woman
in front of him is not turning fast enough. The weather is warm
and their windows are open and we can hear everything. Once again
the indifferent machine is closing on the soft human flesh it feeds on.
It is not 1930 and people are not yet cutting steaks from the draft horse
that has fallen in the streets, are not yet rolling a wheelbarrow
of deutschmarks to buy a loaf of bread. At the factory, a boss rides a machinist
until he quits, having no other job to go to. The machinist gets drunk
on the way home and his wife shouts at him and he hits his wife and the wife
hits the daughter and the daughter goes down the street where there his heroin.
A man sits in his room all day with his demons and talks to them.
They have been fouling their cages. They have been jeering at his dreams.
He goes to the basement and loads his assault rifle and then emerges
from his cage and you know the rest. The politicians scan
the surface for the bubbles of rage coming up from below, sing their
feral songs of blame and wrong and create phalanxes of hate.
They trot out the usual suspects: foreigners, people of color, homosexuals,
artists, and anyone who presents in this batholith of hate
a vision that is indigestible by the machine and whose songs
do not rhyme with the hard bells being rung to rally legions.
We are at the cusp of the eternal return one more time and the momentum
headed toward the cliff is terrifying. Those who do not join are dragged along.
Here is where God might step in but does not, once more,
stays in the shadows of the scaffolds being thrown up in every town square.

by Doug Anderson
from What Saves Us—Poems of Empathy and
…….. Outrage in the Age of Trump
edited by Martín Espada
Curbstone Books, 2019

Ali Raz at Public Books:

In a marked moment near the opening of Joyland—directed by Saim Sadiq and the first Pakistani film to be shortlisted by the Academy Awards—Haider meets Biba in a hospital in Lahore, looking dazed in a blood-splattered shirt. Though this is the first time they’ve met, we’re given no narration, just Haider’s wide-eyed, fascinated gaze. Later, in an intimate moment in her room, Biba tells Haider more about that night: about seeing her friend, also trans¹, shot dead, and then finding herself unable to narrate the murder to the police. As she tells it, she gets stuck on a sentence—“I was with her at dinner”—glitching out in the face of representing the impossible.

She does, however, tell us her friend’s murder is the subject of a new documentary, for which a vulturous crew of German filmmakers have been poking around Lahore. Biba and her friends talk about the documentarians with open derision, knowing the exact flavor of international acclaim that awaits their contrived narrative of the tragic Third World queer.

Even so, the international acclaim for Joyland itself is noteworthy. Beyond its nod at the Academy Awards, the current count is 16 wins and 16 nominations, crowned by the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize as well as the Queer Palm at Cannes. It also claims Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai as an executive producer.

More here.

Richard Hanania in his newsletter:

Progress in the worlds of nutrition and everyday health has stalled, as has medicine to a more limited degree. We know a few things. You should exercise, avoid smoking, not be fat, and not jump off tall buildings. Besides that, there isn’t much we can tell you with certainty about what to eat and how to live your life.

In science, you begin by picking the low hanging fruit. Smoking increases your risk of lung cancer somewhere between 15 to 30 times. With an effect size that big, one doesn’t really need a scientific literature to know what’s going on. A single doctor who sees tens of thousands of patients over several decades would probably be able to come to understand the harms of smoking on his own.

But what about smaller effect sizes?

More here.

From The Economist:

In the past 20 years, on economic measures, America has outperformed other rich countries. Over that period, median wages grew by 25%, compared with just 17% in Germany. Managers at Buc-ee’s, a Texas-based chain of stores, can make more than experienced doctors earn in Britain. But on a more fundamental measure of wellness—how long people live—America is falling behind. To its detractors, this is a cause for schadenfreude. “Many people say it is easier to buy a gun than baby formula in the us,” gloated a statement released by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs last year, which also pointed to declining life expectancy in general. In the past few years, according to some estimates, life expectancy in China overtook that in America. For Americans, that ought to be a more serious source of introspection than it is.

More here.

Like An Ant Carrying Her Bits of Earth and Sand

Like an ant carrying her bits of earth or sand
the poem carries its words.
Moving one, then another, into place.

Something in an ant is sure where these morsels belong,
but the ant could not explain this.
Something in a poem is certain where its words belong,
but the poet could not explain this.

All day the ant obeys an inexplicable order.
All day a poet obeys an incomprehensible demand.

The world changes or does not change by these labors;
the geode peeled open gives off its cold scent or does not.
But that is no concern of the ant’s, of the poem’s.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding.
What dissolves will dissolve—
you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.
The potato’s sugary hunger for growing larger.
The unblinking heat of the tiger.

No thimble of cloud or stone that will not vanish,
and still the rearrangements continue.

The ant’s work belongs to the ant.
The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.

by Jane Hirshfield
from Given Sugar Given Salt
Harper Collins, 2002

Jack Skeffington in Yale Campus Press:

In the introduction to Not Under Forty, Willa Cather’s 1936 collection of essays, she (in)famously writes that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” an opinion that, if nothing else, has fairly successfully separated her from the ranks of artists and authors we have come to call modernists.

…Cather’s The Professor’s House first saw print in 1925, in a post-Ulysses world whose literary landscape Cather no longer felt herself part of. The novel is largely concerned with one Godfrey St. Peter, the owner of the titular domicile, and his arrival at a point where his work, his marriage, his family, and (despite that title) both of his houses all enter a state of flux. Retreat into memory, especially memory concerning his favorite student, Tom Outland, forms a major portion of the Professor’s coping strategy, an so, in turn, the action of the novel.

In All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman writes that modernity “is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’”^[2] Cather’s novel, as much as any other produced on either side of her supposed divide, participates in this uncertainty, in the exploration of a culture’s perceived experience of unified disunity, of a totalizing fracture. Despite Cather’s claim to have “slid back into the previous 7000 years,” The Professor’s House bears the marks of its era, telling the tale of a broken man in a distinctly fractured way.

More here. (Note: Watching Mad Men and reading Willa Cather’s deeply disturbing and insightful comments on the human condition in The Professor’s House was strangely satisfying. The book is startlingly fresh for present times.)

Matthew Rose at Commonweal:

Robert Bellah was the last major thinker on the American Left to argue that shared religious beliefs are essential for democratic politics. In an era that saw liberalism grow progressively more secular, he defended views that dissented from elite opinion and the models of reality on which it rested. He argued that secularism is impossible, individualism is an illusion, and religious worship is inescapable. He made these arguments in best-selling books that combined learning and civility with a zeal for the ideals of democratic socialism and a dread for the practices of managerial capitalism. Bellah was the most celebrated American sociologist of his time, and it might seem absurd to suggest he was ignored. Presidents, clergy, scholars, and community leaders all sought his counsel. But if they had listened to him closely, as Bellah privately doubted they had, what would they have heard?

By the time he completed his final book, two years before his death in 2013, Bellah had concluded that America stood at the bleak end of a civilizational epoch. In its coming “time of trial,” as he called it, Americans would realize the values that had created their culture had also impaired their ability to understand or control it.

more here.