Colm Tóibín at the NYRB:

I read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain just after my eighteenth birthday, at a time when I presumed that my Catholic upbringing would soon mean little to me. During my first year at university, which I had just completed, I told no one that I had come close to joining a seminary. Some of my memories of almost having a vocation for the priesthood were embarrassing. I wished they belonged to someone else. But now my religious feelings had not merely ended; I hoped they had been effectively erased. Such feelings, I noticed, were mostly absent from the books I was reading, the films I was watching, the plays I was seeing, the conversations I was having.

Even the religion in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man seemed remote. Joyce himself—and Stephen Dedalus in the novel—had attended the same university where I was now studying, but the campus had moved to the Dublin suburbs; the new buildings were glass and steel, worlds away from the intimacy of Newman House in the center of Dublin where Joyce (and Stephen) had studied.

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Emily Cataneo in Undark:

When the Godwin sisters would visit their grandmother Jeanne in Carson City, Nevada when they were growing up in the 1970s, Jeanne would pull out the dreaded juicer. She’d pulverize a mixture of carrot, celery, and spinach juice for the girls, then coax them to drink it. The sisters hated the concoction, but choked it down anyway, because they didn’t want to upset their grandmother: Jeanne had lost her husband and two of her three daughters to cancer, and she hoped that this healthy mixture would save her granddaughters from the rest of her family’s fate.

Jeanne didn’t know it at the time, but diet hadn’t caused her husband’s and children’s deaths. Her family were the unlucky carriers of a mutation on the p53 gene. When it’s working, p53 acts as a tumor suppressor, stamping out malignancies before they can grow and spread. This gene is so important that one scientist called it the “guardian of the genome.” People with the mutation, which causes an extremely rare disorder called Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, have a defective p53 gene, which means no brakes on tumors flourishing in their bodies. Families with this syndrome often lose a cascade of loved ones to breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and more.

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Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:

Beata Mierzwa studies cell division as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California San Diego. In 2013, she founded Beata Science Art, a science art brand where she produces science illustrations, fashion, and other interactive content to help bring out the beauty in science.

Could you please describe your science journey?

My interest in cell division began when I saw an image of a dividing cell during an undergraduate lab internship. I found it beautiful and was amazed by how much we still don’t know about this process. In graduate school at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, I studied the final steps in cytokinesis and the pathways that control the separation of the membranes. Now, in my postdoctoral work, I use CRISPR techniques to identify new genes involved in mitosis and cell division.

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Catherine Tumber in The Hedgehog Review:

It must be dismal to come of age in an era so drenched in utility as ours. What was once called soul hunger is now relentlessly thwacked aside by engines of ever greater efficiency, from effective altruism to generative AI. Even the animating realms of art and sex appear to have contracted to the merely serviceable, functional, and fair-minded.

With her new essay collection, Becca Rothfeld has launched a spirited campaign to reverse this state of affairs. Its title, All Things Are Too Small—drawn from the writings of a spiritually enthralled thirteenth-century mystic—is misleading, though, for her soundings do not apply to all things. As troubled as she is by growing wealth inequality and other policy offenses, Rothfeld steers away from political-economic affairs. Her intent is to revel in the shameless precincts of want and to protect its extravagances from a rising tide of minimalism, prudery, and justice seeking. Democracy has its place, Rothfeld argues, but nowhere near the wilds of erotic love or art.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Being rational necessarily involves engagement with probability. Given two possible courses of action, it can be rational to prefer the one that could possibly result in a worse outcome, if there’s also a substantial probability for an even better outcome. But one’s attitude toward risk — averse, tolerant, or even seeking — also matters. Do we work to avoid the worse possible outcome, even if there is potential for enormous reward? Nate Silver has long thought about probability and prediction, from sports to politics to professional poker. In his his new book On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, Silver examines a set of traits characterizing people who welcome risks.

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Karman Lucero at Project Syndicate:

Central to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was a rivalry to develop the technologies of the future. First came the race to deploy nuclear weapons on intercontinental missiles. Then came the space race. Then came US President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program, which seemed to launch a new race to build missile-defense systems. But it soon became clear that the Soviet economy had fallen decisively behind.

Now, a new struggle for technological mastery is underway, this time between the US and China, over artificial intelligence. Both have signaled that they want to manage their competition through dialogue over the development, deployment, and governance of AI. But formal talks on May 14 made it painfully clear that no grand bargain can be expected anytime soon.

That should come as no surprise. The issue is simply too broad – and governments’ perspectives and goals too different – to allow for any single “treaty” or agreement on transnational AI governance. Instead, the potential risks can and should be managed through multiple, targeted bargains and a combination of official and unofficial dialogues.

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Cara Blue Adams at The Baffler:

OVER THREE DAYS in October 1974, the French experimental writer Georges Perec sat in cafés and a tabac in a Parisian public square called Place Saint-Sulpice and jotted down everything he saw. His observations became a book called An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris, in which he sought to capture the small details that often elude us: “that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.” Long invested in a playful embrace of constraint, Perec was a member of the Oulipo movement, which used radically restrictive rules to shape literature; for example, Perec wrote an entire novel without using the letter e, an absence that referenced the loss of his mother in the Holocaust and his father in the fighting that preceded it. Perec was also a champion of what he called the “infra-ordinary”: the more than ordinary, the ordinary observed so closely that it becomes transcendent, edging closer to life itself. He wanted to widen art’s vision; he wanted to accomplish this by focusing it.

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John Adamson at Literary Review:

Ever since Thomas Carlyle first launched his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell on the world in 1845, the Lord Protector’s published words have exercised an almost mesmeric hold on posterity. Overnight, they transformed a figure who had hitherto been a byword for villainy – was he not the killer of King Charles I? – into a hero for the new Victorian age: a God-fearing, class-transcending champion of ‘russet-coated captains’ who became Britain’s first non-royal head of state. His words resonated with a newly politically ascendant and morally earnest middle class. And in Hamo Thornycroft’s vast sculpture installed outside Westminster Hall in 1899, the Carlylean transformation of Oliver begun by the Letters and Speeches found its embodiment in bronze.

Cromwell’s letters and speeches have long beguiled and frustrated the great man’s biographers. Most concur that they hold the key to the inwardness of this most inscrutable and turbulent of souls, even if, so far, that key has never quite turned in the lock. Ever more scholarly editions of his collected writings have followed.

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Julian Nowogrodzki in Nature:

An age ‘clock’ based on some 200 proteins found in the blood can predict a person’s risk of developing 18 chronic illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. The clock’s accuracy raises the prospect of developing a single test that could describe a person’s risk of many chronic conditions, says the project’s lead scientist Austin Argentieri, a population-health researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “Ultimately, wanting to live longer will come down to preventing chronic diseases,” he says. The study was published in Nature Medicine on 8 August¹.

Well-aged

A person’s chronological age is key to determining their risk of many age-related conditions. But chronological age is not a perfect predictor of disease. Some 60-year-olds, for example, are frail and have heart disease, whereas others are the picture of health. Argentieri and his colleagues sought to build a ‘clock’ that would accurately reflect a person’s disease status. To do so, they used data from 45,441 people, selected at random, in the UK Biobank, a repository of biomedical samples. That sample size is roughly 30 times larger than that used in a previous protein-clock study², making it statistically more powerful.

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Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld in Public Books:

In the face of institutional and economic pressures that privilege the “supra-disciplinary” organization of knowledge and emphasize “humanism” broadly conceived, Jonathan Kramnick believes that the knowledge practices of distinct disciplines are worth preserving. In Criticism and Truth, his name for the distinctive practice of literary studies is “close reading,” or “the craftwork of spinning sentences from sentences already in the world.” Close reading is ubiquitous to the discipline and “that ubiquity,” he writes, is “part of the democratic ethos of this book.” Close reading is thus both the “baseline competence” of the discipline and the permitting condition for all subsequent scales of argumentation across the wide range of theoretical axes that characterize “criticism as it is practiced all the time, everywhere, as part of the ordinary science and everyday brilliance of the discipline.”

Criticism and Truth proceeds by offering us a close reading of close reading. Tracking one writer’s syntactical bend as she accommodates her prose to this clause or that line and another writer’s imitation of the figurative language that she studies, Kramnick asks us to think about the creative dimension of criticism. As “craft knowledge,” close reading treats the many objects of its study as “enabling constraints” for thought. The critic’s woven sentences are an expression of those constraints. Our evaluation of criticism is therefore an aesthetic judgment. When we call a piece of criticism “apt,” our evaluation of the achievement presupposes its truth as the necessary condition of its “elegance.”

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Daron Acemoglu in Project Syndicate:

According to tech leaders and many pundits and academics, artificial intelligence is poised to transform the world as we know it through unprecedented productivity gains. While some believe that machines soon will do everything humans can do, ushering in a new age of boundless prosperity, other predictions are at least more grounded. For example, Goldman Sachs predicts that generative AI will boost global GDP by 7% over the next decade, and the McKinsey Global Institute anticipates that the annual GDP growth rate could increase by 3-4 percentage points between now and 2040. For its part, The Economist expects that AI will create a blue-collar bonanza.

Is this realistic? As I note in a recent paper, the outlook is far more uncertain than most forecasts and guesstimates suggest. Still, while it is basically impossible to predict with any confidence what AI will do in 20 or 30 years, one can say something about the next decade, because most of these near-term economic effects must involve existing technologies and improvements to them.

It is reasonable to suppose that AI’s biggest impact will come from automating some tasks and making some workers in some occupations more productive. Economic theory provides some guidance for assessing these aggregate effects. According to Hulten’s theorem (named for economist Charles Hulten), aggregate “total factor productivity” (TFP) effects are simply the product of the share of tasks that are automated multiplied by the average cost savings.

While average cost savings are difficult to estimate and will vary by activity, there have already been some careful studies of AI’s effects on certain tasks.

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Catharine Stimpson in The Ideas Letter:

On Christmas Eve, 2016, three grandmothers made a late afternoon pilgrimage to a small pizza place on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC.  On previous visits, they had walked with their grandchildren down the Avenue to eat pizza and pasta there. Now their visit had a different purpose:  For unfathomable reasons, the quiet and friendly restaurant had become the object of a vile conspiracy theory called Pizzagate, which baselessly alleged that children were being held in the basement of Comet. After the conspiracy spread across the Internet, a man showed up with a gun. Fortunately no one was killed, and the owners, unbowed, had insisted on staying open for the community. The grandmothers wanted to thank the owners and staff of Comet Ping Pong for having survived the onslaught of disinformation and the assault by an armed vigilante.

I was one of the grandmothers. The transition from President Obama to President-elect Trump had unsettled all three of us.  Both onslaught and assault were baleful warning signs of a recrudescence of past dangers and future dangers to come.  As such, they offended my patriotism. They still do.

My patriotism has deep roots. I was a child during World War II.  In my small hometown in the Pacific Northwest, we grew silent when we passed a Gold Star Mother banner in a window. We wept, cheered, and threw confetti in 1945 when America and the Allies won.  My father came home alive.  America was beautiful and majestic and justly powerful.

Since 1945, I have had an immense amount to unlearn about “my” America. Genuine inquiry corrodes naivete. I have had to dive into the American wreck and, in the words of Adrienne Rich, “see the damage that was done/ and the treasures that prevail.”

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Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne in e-flux Architecture:

Carbon offsetting injects market logic into thin air. It demands that certain activities become measured and standardized, reduced to the single dimension of the carbon dioxide molecule. The goal is fungibility—to assert equivalence between activities by people or environments so that emissions created over here can be traded and (theoretically) compensated for by actions removing or reducing carbon over there. The means is, of course, commodification. Offsets privatize planetary metabolism.

Offsetting is the logic behind “net zero.” “Think about it like a bath,” suggests National Grid. “The amount of water in the bath depends on both the input from the taps and the output via the plughole. To keep the amount of water in the bath at the same level, you need to make sure that the input and output are balanced.”1 Or, as McKinsey & Company puts it: “Net zero is an ideal state where the amount of greenhouse gasses released into the earth’s atmosphere is balanced by the amount of greenhouse gasses removed.”2

Policymakers and corporations around the world have embraced the concept of net zero as a pathway to address the climate crisis. Nation states, corporations, public institutions, and even art exhibitions purchase offsets as financial assets (called carbon credits) in an attempt to compensate for their emissions and reach a state of carbon neutrality. Traded as financial commodities on carbon markets, offsets are supposed to represent either carbon dioxide reductions—via avoided emissions that would have otherwise happened in a business-as-usual scenario—or carbon dioxide removals—where some of the carbon already hanging about in the atmosphere is drawn down.

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Hamza Hajjaj in Cartoon Movement:

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Jessica Grose in The New York Times:

Three times a day my phone pings with a notification telling me that I have a new happiness survey to take. The survey, from TrackYourHappiness.org, asks me a series of questions about what I was doing the moment right before I take it, whether I wanted to be doing it, how focused I was on my task, how productive I was being and how happy I felt about it all. I measure my emotional levels with a little toggle that slides from “bad” to “good.” Though the trackers’ authors offer a disclaimer that “correlation does not prove causation,” results from thousands of its users published in 2010 suggest that people are happier when they are focused.

After I took 100 surveys over about a month, that’s not what my results told me. I reported the most happiness when I was eating and the least when I was working. I was happier at home than I was outside or anywhere else.

My biggest takeaway, though, is that much of my life consists of things that I don’t particularly want to do, like folding laundry and struggling with the wording of a paragraph. Being reminded that most of my life is obligatory does not exactly spark joy. As the weeks of survey-taking went by, I had another, more paralyzing thought: that this focus on my feelings was instilling a new kind of anxiety. Rather than just walking one of my kids home from school and contentedly listening to her chatter about sedimentary rocks, I was thinking about the survey’s infernal happiness toggle and where this experience ranked relative to the other moments I had tracked.

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Céline Henne in Aeon:

How could gaining knowledge amount to anything other than discovering what was already there? How could the truth of a statement or a theory be anything but its correspondence to facts that were fixed before we started investigating them?

Some philosophers have argued that, despite widespread intuitions to the contrary, knowledge is not merely a matter of representation but also of construction, and that truth cannot be completely detached from human needs and interests. John Dewey, for example, argued that the object of knowledge is the product of enquiry and not something that exists independently of that enquiry. But this can’t be right. After all, scientists discovered DNA, distant planets and gravity, they did not create them. Facts are facts. Any other view seems disastrous, from the vague assertion that we all create our own truth to the Nietzschean claim that it’s interpretations all the way down. Without a shared target that we all aim at getting right, rational discussion is no longer possible. So what were these philosophers getting at, exactly?

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