Robert Pinsky at Shepherd:
Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems
By William Carlos Williams
Why this book?
Williams, late in his life, can look out the window or at the newspaper and open his mind and eye and breath to catch the truth of the thing in verse-music.
Very early in his life, he memorized a lot of poems, so as a New Jersey improviser he didn’t have to think about the sounds. He composed as an athlete runs, jumps, throws, etc. I can hear him.
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Michael Brooks in Nature:
If you believe the hype, computers that exploit the strange behaviours of the atomic realm could accelerate drug discovery, crack encryption, speed up decision-making in financial transactions, improve machine learning, develop revolutionary materials and even address climate change. The surprise is that those claims are now starting to seem a lot more plausible — and perhaps even too conservative.
According to computational mathematician Steve Brierley, whatever the quantum sweet spot turns out to be, it could be more spectacular than anything we can imagine today — if the field is given the time it needs. “The short-term hype is a bit high,” says Brierley, who is founder and chief executive of quantum-computing firm Riverlane in Cambridge, UK. “But the long-term hype is nowhere near enough.”
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Stephen S. Roach in Project Syndicate:
In his now-classic 2018 book, AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee threw down the gauntlet in arguing that China poses a growing technological threat to the United States. When Lee gave a guest lecture to my “Next China” class at Yale in late 2019, my students were enthralled by his provocative case: America was about to lose its first-mover advantage in discovery (the expertise of AI’s algorithms) to China’s advantage in implementation (big-data-driven applications).
Alas, Lee left out a key development: the rise of large language models and generative artificial intelligence. While he did allude to a more generic form of general-purpose technology, which he traced back to the Industrial Revolution, he didn’t come close to capturing the ChatGPT frenzy that has now engulfed the AI debate. Lee’s arguments, while making vague references to “deep learning” and neural networks, hinged far more on AI’s potential to replace human-performed tasks rather than on the possibilities for an “artificial general intelligence” that is close to human thinking. This is hardly a trivial consideration when it comes to China’s future as an AI superpower.
That’s because Chinese censorship inserts a big “if” into that future.
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John Rodden at Commonweal:
The key to Philip’s personal appeal was his humor. As a boy, his favorite reading had been a famous joke book by a fellow Florentine, Arlotto Mainardi. As a man, Philip was quite a jester—and very jolly as well as a little zany. Writing about Philip in his Italian Journey, Goethe dubbed him “the humorous saint.”
But it wasn’t just that Philip liked a good joke. He radiated joy, a kind of elevated bonhomie. In Mystic in Motley: The Life of Saint Philip Neri, Theodore Maynard reports that Philip would burst suddenly into song at Mass. Fearing he might swoon at the altar with ecstatic fervor, he would direct his altar boys to read aloud his favorite jokes from Mainardi’s book, to bring him back down to earth so that he could concentrate on the ritual tasks at hand. But even this wasn’t always enough to calm him for long. We are told that, as he read the Passion during Holy Week, Philip would play with his keys and spin a sundial placed near the altar in order to help him keep his composure.
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Ars Osterweil at Artforum:
Germany Year Zero is the closest that Italian Neorealism came to reckoning with the psychic life of children. Made at the same time, Fireworks meditates on the generative possibilities of psychic and sexual shattering. In so many ways, Fireworks anticipates the explosion of the queer underground cinema that blossomed in the United States in the ’60s and in which Anger’s later film Scorpio Rising (1963) played a central role. Yet Fireworks is also a product of its own “queer time and place.”
In a famous quip, Anger described Fireworks as all he had “to say about being 17, The United States Navy, American Christmas and The Fourth of July.” When the film begins, we see his body draped, pietà-like, in a sailor’s arms. The film cuts to a close-up of Anger’s face as he sleeps, followed by shots of his nude torso, hands, and what appears to be a massive erection, but which turns out, in Eisensteinian fashion, to be a phallic African totem. A plaster cast of a hand with missing fingers inaugurates the film’s fascination with besieged corporeality. As in most dream narratives, we suspect that the dreamer has merely imagined himself in the sailor’s arms.
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A briefcase
where he stored grandfather’s papers, an abacus,
then a fake gold clock with two bells on its head, an old barbeque
for inside-the-house cooking, about the size of a three-layer cake,
a pencil from Russia with a green tip for sketching, the sky is above
all this, not in a religious sense, it notes this delight I take on rare
occasions, then it continues its own miracles, it does not matter
that I am not seeing things, matter, space, future, spirit,
all this does not matter, I step into the kitchen, give the abacus
to my niece, tell my daughter about my cooking, wander outside
under the clouds.
by Juan Filipe Herrera
from Half Of The World In Light
University of Arizona Press, 2008
Lidija Haas in The Paris Review:
To be British is a very complicated fate. To be a British novelist can seem a catastrophe. You enter into a miasma of history and class and garbage and publication—the way a sad cow might feel entering the abattoir. Or certainly that was how I felt, twenty years ago, when I entered the abattoir myself. One allegory for this system was the glamour of Martin Amis. Everyone had an opinion on Amis, and the strangeness was that this opinion was never just on the prose, on the novels and the stories and the essays. It was also an opinion on his opinions: the party gossip and the newspaper theories, the Oxford education and the afternoon tennis.
The British male! Or at least the British bourgeois male, with his many father figures, both real and acquired. From certain angles, in certain photos, Amis looked like Jagger, and so he became the Jagger of literature. He was small, true—I feel a permanent pang of camaraderie at his line in The Pregnant Widow about a character who occupies that “much-disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”—but he was also hypermasculine. It wasn’t just his subjects: the snooker and the booze and the obsession with judging all women “sack artists.” It wasn’t even just the style: an inability to leave a sentence alone without chafing at every verb, the prose equivalent of truffle fries. It was also the interview persona, all haughtiness and clubhouse universality, however much that could be contradicted in private by thoughtfulness and generosity of conversation.
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Yasemin Sapalakoglu in Quanta Magazine:
Memories are shadows of the past but also flashlights for the future. Our recollections guide us through the world, tune our attention and shape what we learn later in life. Human and animal studies have shown that memories can alter our perceptions of future events and the attention we give them. “We know that past experience changes stuff,” said Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. “How exactly that happens isn’t always clear.”
A new study published in the journal Science Advances now offers part of the answer. Working with snails, researchers examined how established memories made the animals more likely to form new long-term memories of related future events that they might otherwise have ignored. The simple mechanism that they discovered did this by altering a snail’s perception of those events. The researchers took the phenomenon of how past learning influences future learning “down to a single cell,” said David Glanzman, a cell biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles who was not involved in the study. He called it an attractive example “of using a simple organism to try to get understanding of behavioral phenomena that are fairly complex.”
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William Deresiewicz in Tablet:
I’m bored; you’re bored; we’re all bored. By our books and movies and television shows, the endless blandness of the Netflix queue, by our music and theater and art. Culture now is strenuously cautious, nervously polite, earnestly worthy, ploddingly obvious, and above all, dismally predictable. It never dares to stray beyond the four corners of the already known. Robert Hughes spoke of the shock of the new, his phrase for modernism in the arts. Now there’s nothing that is shocking, and nothing that is new: irresponsible, dangerous; singular, original; the child of one weird, interesting brain. Decent we have, sometimes even good: well-made, professional, passing the time. But wild, indelible, commanding us without appeal to change our lives? I don’t think we even remember what that feels like.
What accounts for this?
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Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:
Viruses are possibly even more maligned than bacteria, spoken of exclusively in terms of disease. Here, virologist Marilyn J. Roossinck ranges far beyond human pathogens to convince you how narrow that picture is. She instead reveals them as enigmatic entities that are intimately entwined with the entirety of Earth’s biosphere, exploiting and enabling it in equal measure. Backed by numerous infographics, the book alternates between chapters on basic principles of virology and brief portraits of noteworthy viruses. The result is an entry-level introduction to virology that fascinated me more than I expected.
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Simon Urwin in BBC:
“This is not a scenic drive,” said James Willcox, of adventure travel specialist Untamed Borders. “But what’s incredible about Route 1 is where it takes you: to the birthplace of some of the world’s earliest civilisations, the home of many of humankind’s greatest innovations.”
Willcox, who was charged with logistics and security for my journey, was briefing me before I embarked on a 530km, two-day road trip from Basra to Baghdad. My trip would be using Iraq’s first and longest freeway, the 1,200km-long Route 1, as a conduit to explore the heart of ancient Mesopotamia. Though the region has experienced decades of recent conflict, it was also once home to a series of illustrious historical empires (the Babylonians, Assyrians and Sumerians to name a few), and Willcox reassured me that the journey would be unforgettable so long as I followed some simple rules: “Keep a low profile, dress conservatively and don’t photograph any of the armed checkpoints,” he said.
I flew into Basra, Iraq’s largest port. The city straddles the Shatt al-Arab river, which is formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates – the two mighty waterways that inspired the name Mesopotamia (meaning “between two rivers” in Greek).
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Alissa Wilkinson in Vox:
At the press conference following the Cannes premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, someone asked Robert De Niro about his character, a kingpin of a sort with a tricky psyche. “It’s the banality of evil,” he said, describing the character’s moral ambiguity. “It’s the thing we have to watch out for. We see it today, of course. We all know who I’m going to talk about, but I’m not going to say his name.” (Everyone knew who he meant.)
The banality of evil was hot at Cannes this year. De Niro’s statement came on the heels of the premiere of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which set Cannes critics abuzz about the same phrase. That movie — which I proposed might best be understood as an adaptation of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, even more than the Martin Amis novel it’s loosely based on — is not much like Killers of the Flower Moon, at first blush. Glazer’s is short, taut horror that evokes the Holocaust by keeping it offscreen; Scorsese’s is epic, bloody, and relentless in its depiction of a series of murders from a century ago.
Thematically, however, they often rhyme. Both are about mankind’s ability to exterminate one another while deluding themselves into thinking they’re doing the right thing. Both are about atrocities so heinous they’re hard to wrap your mind around. And both feel eerily contemporary, in an age where prejudice, racism, and fascism are on the rise around the globe.
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I’d like to have a word
with you. Could we be alone
for a minute? I have been lying
until now. Do you believe
I believe myself? Do you believe
yourself when you believe me? Lying
is natural. Forgive me. Could we be alone
forever? Forgive us all. The word
is my enemy. I have never been alone;
bribes, betrayals. I am lying
even now. Can you believe
that? I give you my word.
by James Tate
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgnRr170ERM&ab_channel=LibraryVHSRips
Lachlan Carey in Phenomenal World:
Biden’s green industrial strategy is both impressive in scale and in its passage amidst highly complex political circumstances. After fractious negotiations, Congress authorized over $4 trillion in new investment between its four major pieces of economic legislation. Officially, around $500 billion of that spending goes towards climate-related spending, most of which is contained in the Inflation Reduction Act. According to our estimates, the US federal government will spend an average of over $100 billion each year on climate mitigation over the next ten years, about two and a half times the annual average from 2009-2017.
Even this figure is likely a significant underestimate. Since many of the tax credits contained in IRA are uncapped, total public expenditure is limited only by private demand for these incentives. If deployment of key clean energy technologies, such as solar or green hydrogen, were to be in line with a 2050 net-zero pathway, we estimate that total spending in the IRA alone could reach $1 trillion. A recent Brookings analysis reached a similar figure even without the net-zero constraint. This discrepancy is particularly large in renewable energy spending, which could see twice as much spending in a climate-aligned pathway—green hydrogen could see five times the spending, and the electric vehicle (EV) supply chain a staggering ten times the official Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates if consumers rush to buy cheaper EVs.
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Stephen Mulhall in the London Review of Books:
For David Edmonds, and for many other philosophers, Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social resources, our relationship to future generations, and more. So it’s easy to see why he wants to make Parfit’s ideas more widely known outside the academy. What is less easy to understand is his belief that the best, or even an appropriate, way of achieving this goal is to write a biography of him.
There was a time when biographies of philosophers weren’t just common, but expected and even required. Following Socrates, the great schools of Hellenistic philosophy (the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Neoplatonists) all tried to encourage the pursuit of a certain kind of life. For them, philosophy wasn’t primarily something you learned, but something you practised, with a view to self-transformation. So it was indispensable in critically evaluating a philosopher to critically evaluate their way of life, for that life was the definitive expression of their philosophy, and their writings were primarily a means of achieving that essential work on the self.
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