The Skin Inside

Out there past the last old windmill
and the last stagnant canal—
the no-man’s land of western Dithmarschen—
cabbage and horseradish in rows of staggering accuracy
stretching all the way out to the frigid
gray-brown waters of the North Sea—
hard-hatted Day-Glo-vested workers perched high
in the new steel pylons rigging cables to connect
off-shore wind parks with the ant-hills of civilization—
I’ve got one hand on the steering wheel,
the other on the dial cranking up King Tubby’s
“A Better Version” nice and loud while waiting
most likely in vain in some kind of cerebral limbo
for the old symbolism to morph into
an entirely new vernacular—an idiom of sheer imagery
in which the images themselves have
no significance whatsoever but struggle nonetheless
to articulate the meaning of meaning—
a hall of mirrors where purity reigns
and the algorithm of death can no longer find you—
and if it’s a truth to be realized that your body is not
your own, then it must be a delegated image of heaven,
while the skin inside has a luster all its own,
reflecting back the warm glow from within.

by Mark Terrill
from Empty Mirror

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Sascha Cohen at The Baffler:

“People look for themselves in books and movies,” Lily Burana wrote in her 2001 memoir Strip City. “But for strippers, there is no Giovanni’s Room . . . no Well of Loneliness.” Times have changed. Over the past two decades, dozens of writers with experience in the sex industry—former strippers, escorts, porn performers, and dominatrices—have built a canon of their own. As masters of carnality (what Mary Karr describes as the most “primal and necessary” element of memoir), sex workers are well suited for the genre. Despite the accusation regularly lobbed by sex industry abolitionists that the prostitute “sells their body,” they in fact sell a fantasy, which is just another word for a story. “Performing intimacy is also work I know how to do,” writes conceptual artist and escort Sophia Giovannitti in her 2023 book Working Girl of the similarities between her creative and erotic labor. “The studied reveal is the specialty of the whore.”

Although sex worker memoirs now appear in greater numbers compared to when Burana’s book came out over twenty years ago, they tend to be published by indie presses rather than the Big Five, and often generate less attention than the fictions of prostitution found in novels written by civilians; I’m thinking of Emma Cline’s The Guest, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, and, further back, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and Émile Zola’s Nana.

more here.

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Oskar Oprey at Artforum:

I THINK I’M GOING TO LEARN FRENCH, if only to keep up with Michel Houellebecq. The aging bad boy of letters has been embroiled in a fresh crop of scandals these past few years, the plotlines worthy of an X-rated soap opera on Canal+. First there’s his legal battle with Dutch art collective KIRAC—they collaborated on a pornographic film project together, in which audiences would have seen Houellebecq having sex with women other than his wife. He seems to have gotten cold feet after the trailer was teased, even though he’d already signed a release form. Then there are the accusations of plagiarism surrounding his 2015 novel Submission, which imagined France embracing Sharia law. Speaking of which, Houellebecq has also apologized for offensive comments he made in an interview published in Front Populaire. Meanwhile, Meta’s AI tool has refused point-blank to write in his style. A short memoir titled A Few Months of My Life (Quelques mois dans ma vie: Octobre 2022–Mars 2023) was published last year, in which Houellebecq gave his account regarding some of these stories. Sadly, this has yet to be translated into English. Which brings me to my main reason for taking French lessons: I want to read his damn books as soon as they hit the shelves! His latest novel, Annihilation, was originally released in France in January 2022; the English translation was subsequently mired in a two-and-a-half-year delay.

more here.

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Ezra Klein in the New York Times:

Sometimes you stumble across a line in a book and think, “Yeah, that’s exactly how that feels.” I had that moment reading the introduction to Zadie Smith’s 2018 book of essays,
“Feel Free.” She’s talking about the political stakes of that period — Brexit in Britain, Donald Trump here — and the way you could feel it changing people.

She writes: “Millions of more or less amorphous selves will now necessarily find themselves solidifying into protesters, activists, marchers, voters, firebrands, impeachers, lobbyists, soldiers, champions, defenders, historians, experts, critics. You can’t fight fire with air. But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.”

What Smith is describing felt so familiar. I see it so often in myself and people around me. And yet you rarely hear it talked about — that moment when politics feels like it demands we put aside our internal conflict, our uncertainty, and solidify ourselves into what the cause or the moment needs us to be, as if curiosity were a luxury or a decadence suited only to peacetime.

More here.

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Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized:

When Rafi invited me to open this event, it sounded like he wanted big-picture pontification more than technical results, which is just as well, since I’m getting old for the latter. Also, I’m just now getting back into quantum computing after a two-year leave at OpenAI to think about the theoretical foundations of AI safety. Luckily for me, that was a relaxing experience, since not much happened in AI these past two years. [Pause for laughs] So then, did anything happen in quantum computing while I was away?

This, of course, has been an extraordinary time for both quantum computing and AI, and not only because the two fields were mentioned for the first time in an American presidential debate (along with, I think, the problem of immigrants eating pets). But it’s extraordinary for quantum computing and for AI in very different ways. In AI, practice is wildly ahead of theory, and there’s a race for scientific understanding to catch up to where we’ve gotten via the pure scaling of neural nets and the compute and data used to train them. In quantum computing, it’s just the opposite: there’s right now a race for practice to catch up to where theory has been since the mid-1990s.

More here.

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Alex Trembath at the Breakthrough Institute:

It’s election season, which means a return to the quadrennial tradition of yelling at Nate Silver on the Internet. While I think most people at this point have made their peace with his probabilistic forecasts, many progressives, demonstrably confused by basic statistics, regularly accuse Silver of deliberately underestimating Democrats’ electoral fortunes. And it occurred to me that their confusion mirrors a similar mistake progressives make in evaluating climate impacts. In each case, many observers fail to understand the ways in which relatively modest changes in statistical averages are associated with larger relative shifts in the tails of the probability distribution. The funny thing is, the misunderstanding runs in opposite directions in the case of climate versus the case of election forecasting.

Start with the politics. Silver has been publishing his election forecasting model for the better part of twenty years, over five different presidential races and thousands of Congressional races. Progressives with less training in statistics have had that entire time to learn the basics of probabilistic forecasting. And many of them have steadfastly refused to do so.

More here.

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The Pathetic Fallacy

—an excerpt

The Saint Meets His Match, The Saint Goes Underground,
Pope’s translation of The Aeneid,
The Collected Trollop, the last five issues of Baseball Digest,
a whole library of French semanticists
piled on the hospital bed,
on the bed table. If he was going to be attached
to machines, tubes running into all kinds of places
on him, he refused to suffer
alone. He brought Sir Philip Sydney for company,
Samuel Daniel, Edmund Waller,
and the entire sixteenth century.
Coleridge shared his bed along with Flannery O’Conner
and John Woolman. If he ever was going to indulge himself,
what better time? Piled on the Bureau:
The Lysistrata, The Inferno (in three translations), Paradise Lost,
and The Life and Death of Buddy Holly,
books heaped so high
it looked as if he was conducting an experiment
to test precisely how long before everything collapses.

by Christopher Bursk
from The Last Inhabitants of Arcadia
University of Arkansas Press, 2006

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Jim Lorraine in Newsweek:

My family has always served in the military. My father was one of six brothers. They all went to World War Two, each in a different service and theater, and all came home. I was around 10 when my brother-in-law was in Vietnam, which was impactful, and my sister was an Air Force nurse. I always wanted to follow their example and serve in the military and was passionate about serving the United States of America as part of something bigger than myself. Originally, I wanted to be a pilot, but I didn’t realize until I went to the military recruiter that I was colorblind, so I didn’t qualify for flight status as a pilot. However, I had gone through nursing school. So, I joined the Air Force as a nurse and was assessed into its aeromedical evacuation program, which is the long-range movement of patients. This program gave me opportunities to fly, see the world, and care for wounded, ill, or injured. After joining, I served around the globe: In Iraq in both Gulf Wars, Somalia during the 1990s, Afghanistan late in the Soviet invasion, demining missions in Vietnam and Cambodia, work in Central America, and the Global War on Terror around the world.

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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

Since war broke out in the Gaza Strip almost a year ago, the official number of Palestinians killed exceeds 41,000. But this number has stoked controversy. Some researchers think it is an underestimate, owing to the difficulties of trying to count dead people during conflicts. Other sources say it overestimates the number of casualties. The count comes from the Palestinian Ministry of Health — Gaza, the main institution counting mortality in the region. It’s important to track fatalities during wars — and to estimate overall mortality — to hold warring parties accountable and to advocate for the protection of civilians, says Zeina Jamaluddine, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The number of deaths also informs discussions around when to officially declare that a situation involves famine.

In the heat of conflict, the first way to count fatalities is to tally up the number of dead people. But capturing the number of deaths in the densely populated urban centres of Gaza presents unique challenges, says Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, a non-profit watchdog based in London that counts casualties in times of conflict. “What we’ve seen in Gaza is entire families just being completely wiped out,” says Tripp. That means it can be hard to recover bodies, or there is no one to report them dead, and so deceased people will be missed in counts. Only when the conflict ends or eases can researchers begin the work of getting more robust estimates of overall mortality through surveys, modelling and statistical tools, they say.

More here.

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George Scialabba in Commonweal:

All men are brothers.” (Women too, of course.) If asked to agree or disagree with this statement, taken in a normative sense, most people would agree. At the moment, Ukrainians might make an exception for Russians, and Israelis and Palestinians for one another—though even they, if they listened to the better angels of their nature, might come around.

Why quote this old saw here? Because I have long felt that these four words are a complete and adequate political philosophy. A brother or sister shares most of one’s genes and usually a good many of one’s early formative experiences. It’s a tie that binds. Of course, most people are not literally our brothers or sisters. But the point of that archaic-sounding phrase “the brotherhood of man” is to jog our moral imaginations, to remind us that even if we don’t share parents with most other humans, we share with all of them something even more important, something that binds us to them even more strongly: a capacity for suffering. Remembering that makes it harder to be indifferent or cruel.

The most influential move in modern political philosophy is just such an appeal to our imaginations. In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls, having defined fairness as the chief virtue of liberal societies, asks how we might all agree on what’s fair.

More here.

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John Pavlus in Quanta:

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how many numbers is a word worth? The question may sound silly, but it happens to be the foundation that underlies large language models, or LLMs — and through them, many modern applications of artificial intelligence.

Every LLM has its own answer. In Meta’s open-source Llama 3 model, each word contains 4,096 numbers; for GPT-3, it’s 12,288. Individually, these long numerical lists — known as embeddings — are just inscrutable chains of digits. But in concert, they encode mathematical relationships between words that can look surprisingly like meaning.

The basic idea behind word embeddings is decades old. To model language on a computer, start by taking every word in the dictionary and making a list of its essential features — how many is up to you, as long as it’s the same for every word. “You can almost think of it like a 20 Questions game,” said Ellie Pavlick, a computer scientist studying language models at Brown University and Google DeepMind. “Animal, vegetable, object — the features can be anything that people think are useful for distinguishing concepts.” Then assign a numerical value to each feature in the list. The word “dog,” for example, would score high on “furry” but low on “metallic.” The result will embed each word’s semantic associations, and its relationship to other words, into a unique string of numbers.

More here.

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Jonathan Portes in The Guardian:

Thomas Piketty has come a long way. He first captured public attention in 2014 with his wildly ambitious, 704-page updating of Marx’s Das Kapital, entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Part of its appeal – it became both an international bestseller and an academic sensation – was the simplicity of its basic thesis. Although packed with history and statistics, its fundamental proposition, that if the return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy, wealth will become increasingly concentrated, could be reduced to one simple equation: r>g.

Piketty’s latest book is almost exactly the opposite. Not only is it much shorter, based on a lecture given to the Société d’Ethnologie in his native France, its key message is: “It’s a lot more complicated than that.” Like Capital, it discusses the evolution of income and wealth inequality over history. But it emphasises historical contingency and, most of all, the role of politics and of collective mobilisation.

Piketty rejects the thesis – implicit in the way economics is often taught in our universities, and explicit in the way some economists and many conservative politicians and commentators discuss policy issues – that very large inequalities are the inevitable outcome of a well-functioning market economy.

More here.

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Chris Power in The Guardian:

‘We were elsewhere people,” André Aciman writes in this memoir of the year he spent in Rome in the mid-1960s. Aged 15, he left Egypt with his deaf mother and younger brother while his father remained in Alexandria to sell whatever they couldn’t take. Aciman’s Jewish family were part of diaspora forced to leave during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s two decades in power, refugees who attempted to start again in Europe and the US.

When they arrive in Rome, the Acimans must rely on the generosity of André’s great-uncle Claude. “I’m no ogre,” he protests (never a good sign), while keeping a record of every lira he gives them. He installs the family in a flat in the working-class Appio-Tuscolano district, previously one of his brothels, and sets about finding a school for André and his brother.

More here.

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Alejandra Manjarrez in The Scientist:

Purine nucleotides are essential for cell growth and function as they serve as nucleic acid building blocks, signaling molecules, and energy carriers. Treatments that inhibit their synthesis offer a powerful strategy to hinder cancer cell growth, but patients may sometimes develop resistance to these drugs. Researchers hope that a better understanding of the purine production pipeline will lead to the development of novel treatments.

In a recent study published in Cell, researchers reported that tumor cells in mice may recover circulating molecules to maintain their purine pools.¹ Furthermore, the authors found that feeding the animals a nucleotide-rich diet accelerated tumor growth. The findings could help refine cancer therapies that target nucleotide metabolism and guide dietary recommendations for patients with cancer.

More here.

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T.J. Clark in the LRB [h/t: Leonard Benardo]:

Frantz Fanon​ is a thing of the past. It doesn’t take long, reading the story of his life – the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War, his career in Lyon as arrogant young psychiatrist, the part he played in the war in Algeria, the encounters with Nkrumah and Lumumba, his death at the age of 36 – to realise that his is a voice coming to us from a vanished world. ‘Annihilated’ might be more accurate. Yet the voice breaks through to the present. Its distance from us – the way its cadence and logic seem to shrug aside the possibility of a future anything like ours – is transfixing. Its arguments are mostly disproved, its certainties irretrievable. The writer is trapped inside a dialectical cage. That’s why we read him.

Fanon’s prose defies translation: even his titles are obscure. Les Damnés de la terre doesn’t mean The Wretched of the Earth. Not really. Not unless you know what ‘la terre’ signifies to the French (too much, alas) and where the whole phrase fits in the history of class struggle:

Debout! les damnés de la terre
Debout! les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère,
C’est l’éruption de la fin.
Du passé faisons table rase
Foule esclave, debout! debout!
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!

Arise! Damned of the earth
Arise! Prisoners of hunger
Reason thunders in its crater
It is the eruption of the end.
Let’s make a tabula rasa of the past
Slave crowd, arise! arise!
The world is going to change its basis
We are nothing, let us be everything!

How the British and Americans have struggled with Eugène Pottier’s great hymn.

More here.

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David C Krakauer in Aeon:

What makes computation possible? Seeking answers to that question, a hardware engineer from another planet travels to Earth in the 21st century. After descending through our atmosphere, this extraterrestrial explorer heads to one of our planet’s largest data centres, the China Telecom-Inner Mongolia Information Park, 470 kilometres west of Beijing. But computation is not easily discovered in this sprawling mini-city of server farms. Scanning the almost-uncountable transistors inside the Information Park, the visiting engineer might­ be excused for thinking that the answer to their question lies in the primary materials driving computational processes: silicon and metal oxides. After all, since the 1960s, most computational devices have relied on transistors and semiconductors made from these metalloid materials.

If the off-world engineer had visited Earth several decades earlier, before the arrival of metal-oxide transistors and silicon semiconductors, they might have found entirely different answers to their question. In the 1940s, before silicon semiconductors, computation might appear as a property of thermionic valves made from tungsten, molybdenum, quartz and silica – the most important materials used in vacuum tube computers.

And visiting a century earlier, long before the age of modern computing, an alien observer might come to even stranger conclusions. If they had arrived in 1804, the year the Jacquard loom was patented, they might have concluded that early forms of computation emerged from the plant matter and insect excreta used to make the wooden frames, punch cards and silk threads involved in fabric-weaving looms, the analogue precursors to modern programmable machines.

But if the visiting engineer did come to these conclusions, they would be wrong. Computation does not emerge from silicon, tungsten, insect excreta or other materials. It emerges from procedures of reason or logic.

This speculative tale is not only about the struggles of an off-world engineer. It is also an analogy for humanity’s attempts to answer one of our most difficult problems: life. For, just as an alien engineer would struggle to understand computation through materials, so it is with humans studying our distant origins.

More here.

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