Griffin Oleynick and Anthony Domestico at Commonweal:
We’re publishing these exchanges just about every two weeks—a compressed timeline that somehow seems like an eternity amid this summer’s news cycles. Thankfully, art offers its own distinct time signature. When we look at a painting or read a poem, we don’t escape from time, but we do experience it differently. Time contracts and dilates; it folds in and out; mere sequence becomes pattern, shape, meaning. “You are the music / While the music lasts,” as T. S. Eliot puts it. This temporal re-shuffling is one of the gifts of art, and it’s one that I’m especially appreciating during this frenetic summer.
Françoise Gilot’s 1964 memoir Life with Picasso begins by locating us in time: “I met Pablo Picasso in May 1943, during the German Occupation of France. I was twenty-one and I felt already that painting was my whole life.” I enjoyed many things about this book, which recounts the tempestuous ten years that the young painter Gilot and the forty-years-older Picasso spent living and working and raising two children together in France. I loved the gossipy details: Picasso resents shopping for suits because it reminds him of his weirdly proportioned body (“You have a long, sturdy upper torso,” a tailor tactfully declares, “but you’re really a very small man”); Alice B. Toklas speaks “with an accent that sound[s] like a music-hall caricature of an American tourist reading from a French phrase book” and forces “rich and gooey” cakes upon Gilot so as to prevent her from talking too much with Toklas’s partner, Gertrude Stein.
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With persistent, fast-moving advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) cornering most of us every day, even the most technology-shy have begun to accept that AI now infiltrates nearly every aspect of our lives. However, while AI may be useful for retrieving data and making predictions, using it for the intimate and challenging endeavor that is therapy is one purpose you likely wouldn’t have seen coming. Yet, increasing numbers of people are sharing how they are using ChatGPT and other AI-led bots for “makeshift therapy”—which has also left experts questioning how safe this new practice is.
The first time I heard nematode worms can teach us something about human longevity, I balked at the idea. How the hell can a worm with an average lifespan of only 15 days have much in common with a human who lives decades?
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In 1918, the citizens of Moscow, the new capital of Communist Russia, struggled to maintain a semblance of normal life. It wasn’t easy. A brutal civil war between the White and Red Russian armies was raging. The West had imposed a trade war. The capital was aswirl with revolutionary ideas, new ways of thinking about equality, justice, and history. Those of means who had not fled were demoted to ordinary citizens and forced to share their wealth and homes with the less privileged. Despite all the revolutionary fervor, Alexander Oparin, a young biochemist steeped in radical scientific ideas, received disappointing news. The censorship board would not permit him to publish a manuscript that speculated on how life arose from mere chemicals. Though the Bolsheviks had overthrown the tsar a year ago, their revolutionary ideology had not yet filtered down to the censors, perhaps because they were not yet ready to directly antagonize the Russian Orthodox Church.
The protests stem from long-running resentment over a quota system that saw 
A final idea that frames Harris’ interpretation of Śāntideva—one that is clearly correct, and unappreciated—is that the universal altruism and the attitudes of kindness, care, impartiality, and joy in the accomplishments of others that Śāntideva recommends do not constitute self-sacrifice or self-abnegation. Instead, Harris demonstrates that, on Śāntideva’s view, they are both constitutive of and instrumental to human happiness (40 ff., 60 ff.). So, when Śāntideva compares pleasure in the everyday world to honey on a razor blade, he is pointing out that the pursuit of our own pleasure in the end yields only pain, because of the attachment it generates to a fragile commodity; when Śāntideva argues that we only become happy when we dedicate ourselves to the welfare of others, the freedom from attachment to our own narrow interest expands our sources of joy. As Harris puts it, “Perfect giving, for Śāntideva, is private, but other-focused; self-benefitting, but radically benevolent; total, and yet not self-injurious” (67).