Miles Osgood at n+1:

The show teetered between silliness and “Solennité.” The ongoing reconstruction of Notre Dame inspired a memorable percussive musical score with dancers hanging off the cathedral’s scaffolding, but only before the tribute to Paris’s craftspeople turned to an advertisement for Louis Vuitton. Aya Nakumura blazed down the Pont des Arts, melting down the gold of La Monnaie and the preciousness of the Academie Française into her own coinages and bars, but only before the Republic Guard circled awkwardly behind her. An energetic heavy-metal concert by Gojira at the Conciergerie, its windows decorated with decapitated Marie Antoinettes, reminded us that we were in the city of revolutions, but only before a cheaply constructed model of the city’s coat of arms wheeled into frame and spoiled the scene. An artfully animated sequence of portraits leaving their frames to run around the Louvre ended with the Minions stealing the Mona Lisa.

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Sara Talpos in Undark:

In 2019, an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense released a call for research projects to help the military deal with the copious amount of plastic waste generated when troops are sent to work in remote locations or disaster zones. The agency wanted a system that could convert food wrappers and water bottles, among other things, into usable products, such as fuel and rations. The system needed to be small enough to fit in a Humvee and capable of running on little energy. It also needed to harness the power of plastic-eating microbes.

“When we started this project four years ago, the ideas were there. And in theory, it made sense,” said Stephen Techtmann, a microbiologist at Michigan Technological University, who leads one of the three research groups receiving funding. Nevertheless, he said, in the beginning, the effort “felt a lot more science-fiction than really something that would work.” That uncertainty was key. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, supports high-risk, high-reward projects. This means there’s a good chance that any individual effort will end in failure. But when a project does succeed, it has the potential to be a true scientific breakthrough. “Our goal is to go from disbelief, like, ‘You’re kidding me. You want to do what?’ to ‘You know, that might be actually feasible,’” said Leonard Tender, a program manager at DARPA who is overseeing the plastic waste projects.

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Aparna Nathan in The Scientist:

The relationship between two cells can be complicated. They can exchange signals, stick to each other, or even compete for resources. However, in 2007, scientists at Harvard Medical School observed another curious phenomenon: cells could exist inside other cells.¹ This wasn’t completely unprecedented: after all, scientists had long known about phagocytosis, a form of “cell cannibalism” where immune cells destroy damaged cells by chewing them up. But what the Harvard researchers saw was different. These cells weren’t getting swallowed in the same way: rather, they seemed to be invading another cell. Once inside, they could actually survive.

This process, called entosis, seemed to explain the strange, nested cells that doctors sometimes saw in tumors, which were linked to worse cancer outcomes. Even as researchers continued to find more examples, however, cell-in-cell events remained an enigma. “We don’t understand the origins or the physiology underlying the majority of these kinds of events,” said Michael Overholtzer, a cell biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who co-authored the 2007 study.

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In a Neighborhood in Los Angeles

I learned
Spanish
from my grandma

mijito
don’t cry
she’d tell me

on the mornings
my parents
would leave

to work
at the fish
canneries

my grandma
would chat
with chairs

sing them
old
songs

dance
waltzes with them
in the kitchen

when she’d say
niño barrigón
she’d laugh

with my grandma
I learned
to count clouds

to point out
in flowerpots
mint leaves

my grandma
wore moons
on her dress

Mexico’s mountains
deserts
ocean

in her eyes
I’d see them
in her braids

I’d touch them
in her voice
smell them

One day
I was told:
she went far away

but still
I feel her
with me

whispering
in my ear
mijito

by Francisco Arlarcón
from After Aztlan
David R. Godine, publisher, 1992

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Yascha Mounk in his own Substack:

So far, we humans have mostly restricted ourselves to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The SETI Institute, a private, nonprofit research organization, has built a variety of instruments designed to detect signs of extraterrestrial life. So have other institutes and universities. This activity is reasonably uncontroversial: If somebody is trying to send us a message, it would likely be beneficial to receive it; we can then figure out how, and whether, to answer.

But over the past few years, a number of scientists have proposed that we should go beyond SETI. Disappointed that we have not yet discovered any extraterrestrial life through the passive act of listening, they insist that we should take more active steps to broadcast our existence to the outside world and enter into communication with aliens.

Some believers in what has come to be known as Messaging to ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (METI) have started to take matters into their own hands.

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Adnan R. Khan in The Walrus:

When Frederik Vanmeert stands in front of a Johannes Vermeer painting, the temptation to go close is irresistible. In Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, where he works as a heritage scientist, it’s not hard to satisfy this craving for intimacy; patrons are free to get personal with the art. Viewers of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch can approach within a metre of the canvas, while the museum’s four Vermeers, hanging nearby, offer an even more intimate experience. Viewers may, if the moment moves them, lean in within centimetres, though the security guard posted nearby will likely wag a disapproving finger.

Still, even millimetres are an interminable chasm for Vanmeert. He’s seen Vermeer’s work in finer detail than most—at the microscopic level, down to the crystal latticework of the pigments that structure the language of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter’s artistic vision. “These days, because of my work, when I look at a Vermeer, I can’t help but wonder: Are we really understanding what he intended?” Vanmeert tells me, approaching The Little Street, one of only two landscapes the artist is known to have painted. “I get drawn closer to, say, this area here—the dark area of the lady’s dress. It’s difficult to decipher which type of fabric Vermeer meant to depict here, and I wonder if this is the original colour.”

Fidelity of colour is Vanmeert’s professional obsession.

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Watch the video here.

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Richard D. Wolff in CounterPunch:

In the wake of his huge defeat on June 30, 2024, when 80 percent of voters rejected French “centrist” President Emmanuel Macron, he said he understood the French people’s anger. In the UK, Conservative loser Rishi Sunak said the same about the British people’s anger, as Labor leader Starmer now says as the anger explodes. Of course, such phrases from such politicians usually mean little or nothing and accomplish less. Such leaders and their parties just keep calculating how best to regain power when they lose it. In that, they are like the U.S. Democrats after Biden’s performance in his debate with Trump and like the U.S. Republicans after Trump’s loss in 2020. In both parties, a small group of top leaders and top donors made all the key decisions and then organized the political theater to ratify those decisions. Even surprises like Harris replacing Biden are temporary departures from resuming politics as usual.

However, unlike Trump, the others missed opportunities to identify with an already organized mass base of angry people.

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Seamus Heaney at the Paris Review:

Dear Tom,

It’s not that I have not been thinking about you. I have, quite a bit. And the thoughts have as ever been tinged with second thoughts: for example, I was sorry after you rang that time in the summer that I had not urged you to come over. The usual hunched, wild-eyed panic about how I could do this and that and still have time for the spacious pleasures of sleigh rides in Wicklow intervened too automatically. Somehow, the chance had come and gone in a moment. And then too I’ve been bugged by the idea that I saw a letter from you in a big mail- pile—perhaps when I came back from Australia or Poland last autumn—and that I put it aside to read properly, after the rush-through for crisis-stuff, and then never found it. At any rate, I am haunted by this notion and only hope I am mistaken.

It’s my birthday and it is a day of utterly vernal Easter. Holy Thursday indeed. Fifty-sixth birthday. The fact that I’m actually sitting out in the open air (cf. Mark Twain on the English countryside) will give you some idea of the extraordinary pause and poise of the weather. Loveliest-of-trees time.

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Michael Eisenstein in Nature:

An analysis of almost 50,000 brain scans¹ has revealed five distinct patterns of brain atrophy associated with ageing and neurodegenerative disease. The analysis has also linked the patterns to lifestyle factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption, as well as to genetic and blood-based markers associated with health status and disease risk.

The work is a “methodological tour de force” that could greatly advance researchers’ understanding of ageing, says Andrei Irimia, a gerontologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the work. “Prior to this study, we knew that brain anatomy changes with ageing and disease. But our ability to grasp this complex interaction was far more modest.”

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Travis Jeppesen at Artforum:

IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH to be in Venice on a sunny day, it will take your eyes a while to adjust after you enter the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove on the northern bank of Cannaregio. A curtain is lifted, and suddenly you are enshrouded in darkness. It is nearly all-engulfing: Just across from the entrance, there is a single spotlight forming a circle on the floor, toward which your eyes naturally gravitate. By now your internal rhythm has been disrupted, for that is the abrupt and halting impact of darkness on a body previously attuned to sunlight, sea air, the pastel patchwork of color and stone forming the Venetian scape. And so, having arrived at a standstill, you fumble your way through the dark, toward that meditative state that the darkness demands, toward the spotlight forming a perfect circle on the ground in order to focus on what it contains: a single rock, just large enough to fit in the palm of a hand. And now you’ve come the full way, from the ethereal light and sea of the outside to the darkness and confrontation with solidity on the inside. And it is now, as your eyes gradually adjust, that you come to realize you are actually in a theater, that there are rows of seats just beyond that spotlit rock, and so you carefully step backwards until you find a space to sit, because inevitably you’ve walked a long way to get here.

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A Young Oscar Homolka

A Young Oscar Homolka walks up the street,
I may be the only one left who remembers
the old Oscar Homolka.

At the market three Italian women
in dress-up black, the older the woman,
the higher the heel.

Four flights up
to Puccini’s birthplace.
I climb one, then half
of the second – turn around.

Out in the street,
a handsome young
delivery boy walks by
whistling “Nessun Dorma”
on key, accurate,
with a beautiful tone.

by Nils Peterson
from Notes From Lucca

Oscar Homolka

Stan Carey at Sentence first:

I was sad to hear that Edna O’Brien had died. She lived a remarkable life and leaves an amazing body of work: she was, in Eimear McBride’s description, ‘one of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature’.

The controversy over O’Brien’s taboo-breaking early books – starting with The Country Girls (1960), which was banned in Ireland – had ebbed by the time I started reading her, but the elegance of her writing and the power of her stories remained, and remains, undiminished.

Recently, revisiting her short story ‘Madame Cassandra’, which was published in the 1968 collection The Love Object and again in 2011’s Saints and Sinners, a rare word in its opening paragraph caught my eye:

I always love the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the coolth and the nectar.

I don’t think bees are snuggling into foxgloves for the coolth, but it’s such a pleasing idea that I don’t mind the poetic licence.

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Azeem Azhar in Exponential View:

Schmidt confessed to revising his AI outlook every six months, a testament to the field’s volatility. He shared a striking example: “Six months ago, I was convinced that the gap [between frontier AI models and the rest] was getting smaller, so I invested lots of money in the little companies. Now I’m not so sure.”

Now, please don’t focus on the fact that Schmidt thinks the future is in ever-larger models (he does). Rather, consider the nature of his knowledge. He is an insider’s insider, about as well-informed as anyone in this field can be, and unlike some critics, he is also putting his money where his mouth is, backing many AI companies like Mistal, Kyutai and Asari.

Schmidt understands scale and gets neural nets. After all, he ran Google when it acquired Deepmind, developed the transformer architecture and built tensor processing units, the first chips dedicated to speeding up deep learning. And Google has been about scale since its inception.

Despite this, just six months ago, this tech titan thought smaller models might stand a chance to push the frontier. He doesn’t believe that anymore.

The point is that he was either right then or he is right now. It took just six months for a u-turn. That is the degree of uncertainty.

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Henry Sokolski at Persuasion:

America’s most curious endeavors: Atoms for Peace and its policy that spread dangerous nuclear technology world-wide.

This program’s continued endurance is difficult to understand. Its historical genesis, though, is clear enough. Early in 1953, J. Robert Oppenheimer briefed Eisenhower on the findings of a classified nuclear disarmament advisory panel Truman had asked Oppenheimer to chair. The panel’s findings were grim: Within a few short years, the Soviets would have enough nuclear weapons to knock out one hundred of America’s largest cities in a surprise attack. The United States might retaliate by destroying Moscow but America itself would be in ruins. The bottom line: Unless Russia capped its nuclear buildup, America and Russia would be able to land deadly strikes against one another but be unable to survive or thrive. Compounding the problem was that Moscow might not understand this. Oppenheimer urged Eisenhower to clarify the threat publicly.

What ensued was a close-hold assignment—“Operation Candor”—a speechwriting project, chaired by psychological policy advisor C.D. Jackson to produce the seemingly impossible: a presidential address that would explain the emerging nuclear threat without frightening America.

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Yo Zushi at The New Statesman:

Though it’s true that sadness in its many forms was one of Smith’s central preoccupations, neither he nor his music were defined by it. The spare waltz that defeats Tiny Rick appears on Smith’s third solo album, 1997’s Either/Or. It’s played acoustically at an unhurried pace and combines a seductive lyric about finding solace in booze with a melody that perfectly captures its quiet desperation. In the chorus, a dark E-flat minor hits you like a gut punch because your ears expect a more optimistic E-flat major, and the song returns to that unstable chord to finish, denying you any conventional harmonic resolution. It’s a masterly composition that eclipses anything by Smith’s own idols, including the Beatles or Elvis Costello – sad, yes, but too wondrous to feel strictly morose. And he didn’t write it strung out and crying into an empty glass of Jameson. It was apparently knocked into shape while he was watching the swords-and-sandals TV show Xena: Warrior Princess.

 From the beginning, Smith explored misery philosophically, treating it with respect as a facet of the human experience that was worthy of deep interrogation. He approached it without fear or embarrassment and found in it the implacable grandeur of ordinary life – its sometimes ugly beauty, unbearable but precious, and as compelling as a white-hot light bulb is to a bug at night.

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