Donna Tartt in Harper’s Magazine:

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the painter James McNeill Whistler shouted out fiercely into posterity, over the heads of the art-world philistines of his day, and our own:

Listen! There never was an artistic period. There never was an Art-loving nation.

This hoarse cry from the Belle Époque is as bracing as it ever was, especially here in our own burned-out landscape where Art as Whistler defined it—Art with a capital A—is all too often viewed as an antiquated construction ensconced behind velvet ropes, not very relevant except as a standing resource to be boiled down to blunt cultural agendas, picked apart by theory, aped by predictive formulas, pillaged and parodied for commercials and computer software, if not ignored altogether in the glitz of technological stimulus.

Even in 1794, Schiller was asking: How is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age that besets him on all sides? Too much chasing after money and success, too much pandering to the popular taste, too much weight on ideology or politics or dogma of any stripe, and God, in the cogent phrase of Quincy Jones, walks out of the room. But in our own sped-up nightmare of screens and algorithms, accelerating more wildly every day, art—and artists—are battered with all the same old discouraging assaults along with new ones that Whistler never dreamed of.

More here.

Cade Metz in The New York Times:

Sitting near a window inside Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking a duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady growth in the amount of raw computer power that a dollar could buy over the last 85 years. A neon-green line rose steadily across the page, climbing like fireworks in the night sky. That diagonal line, he said, showed why humanity was just 20 years away from the Singularity, a long hypothesized moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and augment themselves with millions of times more computational power than their biological brains now provide. “If you create something that is thousands of times — or millions of times — more powerful than the brain, we can’t anticipate what it is going to do,” he said, wearing multicolored suspenders and a Mickey Mouse watch he bought at Disney World in the early 1980s.

Mr. Kurzweil, a renowned inventor and futurist who built a career on predictions that defy conventional wisdom, made the same claim in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near.” After the arrival of A.I. technologies like ChatGPT and recent efforts to implant computer chips inside people’s heads, he believes the time is right to restate his claim. Last week, he published a sequel: “The Singularity Is Nearer.”

More here.

The Lark. The Thrush, The Starling

               ( Poems from Issa)

That the world
is going
to end someday
does not concern
the wren:

it’s time to
build your nest,
you build
your nest.

~>~<~>~<~>~<~>~

Listen carefully.

I’m meditating.
The only thing in my mind
right now
is the wind.

No, wait . . . the autumn
wind, that’s right,
the autumn wind!

~>~<~>~<~>~<~>~

In the middle
of a bite of
grass,
the turtle stops
to listen for,
oh, an
hour, two
hours,
three hours . . .

from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
The Noonday Press, 1994

Elif Shafak at Literary Hub:

There is Orwell the human being. There is Orwell the novelist. There is Orwell the intellectual, the critic, the journalist, the essayist, the radical. But lately, George Orwell—who was born Eric Arthur Blair and who never fully abandoned his original name—has increasingly come to be regarded as a modern oracle, a gifted soothsayer who predicted with terrifying accuracy how fragile and fallible our political systems were, how close the shadow of authoritarianism. His body of work has become a compass to help us navigate our way in times of democratic recession and backsliding, as is the case worldwide. Among all his books, the one that has left the deepest impact on generations of readers across borders is, no doubt, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

More here.

Raghuveer Parthasarathy at The Eighteenth Elephant:

Insulin is an abomination. Sure, injecting it saves the lives of millions of diabetics, but that injected protein is unnatural and abhorrent, the product of a genetically modified organism! And it’s not even necessary: Rather than playing God to coax single-celled creatures never designed for insulin production to make the stuff, we could be harvesting it naturally, like we used to just a few decades ago. After all, one need only slaughter about 20,000 pigs or cows to provide a pound of insulin!

If this argument strikes you as absurd or even horrific, it should.

More here.

Chris Bing and Joel Schectman at Reuters:

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation.

More here.

Colm McKenna at The Millions:

Despite its growing popularity among Anglophone readers, the crónica—a unique form of literary reportage that blurs the lines of fact and fiction—remains a quintessentially Latin American genre. In English, scant studies on the form exist beyond 2002’s The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle.  The genre has long been marked by its political, polemical overtones (Rodolfo Walsh’s Operation Massacre, for example), but increasing democratization across Latin American has seen it shift toward a lighter, more observational approach, in which the writer keeps their distance (as in Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami.)

Toward the end of her life, the late Argentine writer Hebe Uhart—known for her novels, short stories, and travel logs—almost exclusively wrote crónicas. She turned to the form because “she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana Enriquez in the introduction to A Question of Belonging, a collection 25 of Uhart’s crónicas that probe her daily life and travels across Latin America.

more here.

Katie Kadue at Bookforum:

LO. LEE. TA. This is the trip the tip of the tongue expects to take when reading a novel from the point of view of a man currently incarcerated following the rape of a teenage girl he’s groomed. And at the tender age of thirteen pages into Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favorite, an attentive reader may indeed murmur “Lolita!” when the unnamed narrator, a former farm veterinarian from the Dutch countryside, refers to the titular “favorite,” also unnamed, as “the fire of my loins.” So far, so Lo.

Initial press for the novel, originally written in Dutch and translated by Michele Hutchison, has fed the frenzy of Lolitapalooza. It’s been called “a modern Lolita,” “a novel that wears its debt to Lolita . . . pinned on its chest with abject pride,” “a queer and profane take on the Lolita archetype,” “Lolita-esque,” “a cowshit-splashed Lolita.” Someone who picks up a copy and skims the blurbs might wonder if we really need another male-authored Lolita from the first-person perspective of the pedophile, no matter how spruced up with shit, no matter how daringly different.

more here.

Emma Uber in The Washington Post:

While the Fourth of July conjures up images of fireworks and parades, barbecues and bonfires, the United States has another Independence Day tradition: naturalizing new citizens. An estimated 11,000 people will celebrate the holiday this year by officially becoming American citizens, double the number from 2023. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services organized 195 naturalization ceremonies around the globe between June 28 and July 5 in honor of Independence Day. A handful of the ceremonies will take place at historical landmarks, meaning some will swear their oath of allegiance at George Washington’s Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello on July 4.

Before partaking in the ceremonies, all aspiring U.S. citizens must pass a two-part test. The first part requires test takers to demonstrate an understanding of English. The second part is an oral exam of 10 civics questions chosen from a list of 100. The Washington Post set up 10 multiple choice questions based on the list of 100 questions USCIS provides as study material to help readers gauge how they would perform. Test takers must answer six questions correctly to pass. Can you?

More here.

Selecting a Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of the afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.

Ted Kooser
from Poetry 180
Radom House, 2003

Michael Le Page in New Scientist:

Artificial intelligence systems can now create remarkably accurate reconstructions of what someone is looking at based on recordings of their brain activity. These reconstructed images are greatly improved when the AI learns which parts of the brain to pay attention to. “As far as I know, these are the closest, most accurate reconstructions,” says Umut Güçlü at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Güçlü’s team is one of several around the world using AI systems to work out what animals or people are seeing from brain recordings and scans. In one previous study, his team used a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner to record the brain activity of three people as they were shown a series of photographs.

In another study, the team used implanted electrode arrays to directly record the brain activity of a single macaque monkey as it looked at AI-generated images. This implant was done for other purposes by another team, says Güçlü’s colleague Thirza Dado, also at Radboud University. “The macaque was not implanted so that we can do reconstruction of perception,” she says. “That is not a good argument to do surgery on animals.” The team has now reanalysed the data from these previous studies using an improved AI system that can learn which parts of the brain it should pay most attention to.

More here.

Henry Luzzatto in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

DESPITE ITS HOST’S supremely confident stage persona, John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A. starts out self-conscious. In his opening monologue, Mulaney explains that he doesn’t really understand the point of the show and assures the audience that, with only six episodes streamed live and nightly on Netflix, it “will never hit its groove.” He’s right to worry. With everything from traditional call-in segments and monologues to chaotic guest cross talk to a robot-based running gag and semi-real, semi-staged portraits of Los Angeles, the show is a chaotic mix of disparate comedic modes that constantly dares itself not to work.

But while Mulaney lampshades the show’s oddball, seat-of-its pants approach, this setup doesn’t stop Everybody’s in L.A. from hitting its stride. In fact, it may help, since the improbable combination of tones and ideas is what makes this show—maybe even more than its liveness—feel unique among Netflix’s new comedy lineup. Instead of rehashing the format of traditional late night, Mulaney uses its structural and tonal looseness to build something specific to his voice and the streaming medium.

More here.

Pradyumna Prasad and Jordan Schneider in Asterisk:

Between 1945 and 1960, RAND operated as the world’s most productive research organization. Initially envisioned as a research arm of the Air Force, RAND made century-defining breakthroughs both in basic science and applied strategic analysis. Its members helped define U.S. nuclear strategy, conceptualized satellites, pioneered systems analysis, and developed the earliest reports on defense economics. They also revolutionized much of STEM: RAND scholars developed the basics of game theory, linear programming, and Monte Carlo methods. They helped conceptualize generalized artificial intelligence, developed the basics for packet switching (which enables data transmission across networks), and built one of the world’s first computers.

Today, RAND remains a successful think tank — by some metrics, among the world’s best.¹ In 2022, it brought in over $350 million in revenue, and large proportions still come from contracts with the US military. Its graduate school is among the largest for public policy in America.

But RAND’s modern achievements don’t capture the same fundamental policy mindshare as they once did.

More here.

Ken Roth in The Guardian:

Julian Assange’s lengthy detention has finally ended, but the danger that his prosecution poses to the rights of journalists remains. As is widely known, the US government’s pursuit of Assange under the Espionage Act threatens to criminalize common journalistic practices. Sadly, Assange’s guilty plea and release from custody have done nothing to ease that threat.

That Assange was indicted under the Espionage Act, a US law designed to punish spies and traitors, should not be considered the normal course of business. Barack Obama’s justice department never charged Assange because it couldn’t distinguish what he had done from ordinary journalism. The espionage charges were filed by the justice department of Donald Trump. Joe Biden could have reverted to the Obama position and withdrawn the charges but never did.

More here.

Tom Zoellner at the LARB:

Editor Alex Belth has created an unusual literary anthology of some of the best celebrity magazine profiles from 1959 to 1979, what is generally regarded—at least by publishing old-timers—as the peak years of the genre, before the ferret-faced publicists cracked down on honesty and budgets ran dry. What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? Classic Celebrity Journalism Volume 1 (1960s and 1970s), published by the Sager Group this spring, puts 18 long-form stories about well-known actors, writers, and musicians into one place. The result is like a walk through a delightful museum of postwar America, with all its bright spots and faults.

The nostalgia for a lost era runs even thicker. Not only have celebrity profiles gotten flatter and duller—the canned hotel room conversation hardly makes for fun reading—but the entire medium of magazines has also taken serious economic blows and thinned out. Celebrities now do more direct and manageable communications with their fans through social media. Who needs to invite the annoying writer, that jealous guttersnipe hiding a knife in their back pocket?

more here.

Jesus Rodriguez in The Washington Post: