Malloy Owen at the Hedgehog Review:

If all that is not enough, the critical theorists also have to reckon with the strange allure the Frankfurt School and French theory have in certain corners of the right. Michel Foucault, never a reliable ally of the left, was taken up anew by conservatives during the COVID pandemic, when the concept of biopower seemed eerily apt. Giorgio Agamben, an heir to Foucault’s account of biopower, has alienated large parts of the left and won new friends on the right through his power analysis of the global pandemic response. The critical theory journal Telos, along with some of its regular contributors, was never averse to thought from outside the left but is now seen in some quarters as positively right-wing. One of the intellectual godfathers of the latest incarnation of the New Right is Nick Land, who was once a leading figure in a cutting-edge school of digital media studies influenced by the French theory luminaries Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard.

more here.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

In 1849 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the 21-year-old poet-artist and founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, met a milliner’s assistant named Elizabeth Siddal. She was the daughter of a cutlery maker and had artistic aspirations. He was from a highly cultured Anglo-Italian family – his father was a Dante scholar, one of his mother’s brothers was John William Polidori, Lord Byron’s doctor and author of the first vampire story. By 1852 Siddal had become Rossetti’s pupil, lover and primary model and he was possessive enough to stop her sitting for other painters in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. There was a degree of transmutation in the relationship, too: at times Lizzie was more than flesh and blood, personifying his idea of perfect womanhood that justified a love that transgressed social station.

That sort of veneration is inherently fragile and although the pair married in 1860 their liaison was far from tranquil. He painted and drew her obsessively but he also feared his parents’ disapproval and refused to introduce Lizzie to them.

more here.

Catherine Thimmesh in DelancyPlace:

With alarms sounding and fuel running out, Neil Armstrong came within seconds of crashing the Apollo 11 landing module: “BAM! Suddenly, the master alarm in the lunar mod­ule rang out for attention with all the racket of a fire bell going off in a broom closet. ‘Program alarm,’ astronaut Neil Armstrong called out from the LM (‘LEM’) in a clipped but calm voice. ‘It’s a “twelve-oh-two.”‘ “‘1202,’ repeated astronaut Buzz Aldrin. They were 33,500 feet from the moon.

“Translation: We have a problem! What is it?

“Do we land? Do we abort? Are we in danger? Are we blowing up? Tell us what to do. Hurry!

“In Mission Control, the words TWELVE OH TWO tumbled out of the communications loop. The weight of the problem landed with a thud in the lap of twenty-six-year-old Steve Bales. Bales, call name GUIDO, was the mission con­troller for guidance and navigation.

“A moment earlier (after some worries with navigation problems), Bales had relaxed with a deep breath, thinking at last: We’re going to make it. Now, wham! His mind, again sent rac­ing; his blood rushing; his heart fluttering; his breath — still as stone. But he wasn’t alone. “A voice on another loop — belonging to one of Bales’s backroom support guys, twenty-four-year-old computer whiz kid Jack Garman — burst in to make sure Bales was aware of the 1202.

More here.

Dancers at Banstead

I went inside the place to find
The madmen dancing inside the hall,
The witless women whirling by
Like phantoms, trailing scarfs and smiles;
A little band, with lips of tin,
Kept puffing out the ancient cry:
To dance! To dance! To happiness! —
And round they went, without a pause.

At midnight when I drove away,
And back to dreams the madfolk went
Tucked into sleep with lullaby,
I flung my questions to the air.
But nothing cared to answer me:
The dark hills humped down everywhere
With matted arms; and over all,
Full-blown and white, the neutral moon
Was dancing to another time.

Ahead I saw the city lights
And thought, if earth can only wait
Another thousand thousand nights,
Surely this grief will balance out
In some unguessed nativity.
Meanwhile, indeed, the nights are long,
And there is little we can do,
Except to let the dancers dance;
Except to know the moon is wrong.

by Mary Oliver
from Heartland
Northern Illinois University Press, 1967

Warren Zanes at Literary Hub:

Shortly after the birth of his sister Virginia in 1951, Springsteen’s family moved in with his paternal grandparents. They would stay there through 1956, but the years spent in that house would remain with Springsteen, a thing to untangle. It was a period of his childhood that, in his telling, would come to the fore in Nebraska.

“I know the house was very dilapidated,” Springsteen told me. “That was something that embarrassed me as a child. It was visibly ramshackle, my grandparents’ house. On the street you could see that it was deteriorating. I just remember being embarrassed about it as a child. That would have been my only sense that something wasn’t right with who we were and what we were doing. I can’t quite describe it. It was intense. The house was eventually condemned. Really, it fell apart around us. I lived there when there was only one functional room, the living room. Everything else was pretty much finished.”

In the living room was the portrait of his aunt Virginia, his father’s sister, an image Springsteen has described on a few occasions. Virginia, at age six and out riding her bicycle, was hit and killed by a truck as it pulled out of a gas station on Freehold’s McLean Street. In some misguided tribute to Virginia’s early and sudden death, Springsteen’s grandparents withheld discipline from their first grandchild, Bruce. It was a twisting of logic that likely seemed beneficent, if only to minds stuck in grief. His was a terrible freedom. When Bruce pushed, there was nothing there to push against.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

At the height of the pandemic, researchers raced to develop some of the first effective treatments against COVID-19: antibody molecules isolated from the blood of people who had recovered from the disease.

Now, scientists have shown that generative artificial intelligence (AI) can provide a shortcut through some of this laborious process, suggesting sequences that boost the potency of antibodies against viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and ebolavirus. A study published last week in Nature Biotechnology¹ is part of growing efforts to apply ‘neural networks’ similar to those behind the ChatGPT AI platform to antibody design.

More here.

Francis Fukuyama in Persuasion:

One of the staples of my teaching of comparative politics over the years was to point out the differences between European and American conservatives. The former were generally comfortable with the exercise of state power, and indeed sought to use power to enforce religious or cultural values (the old unity of “throne and altar.”) American conservatives, on the other hand, were different in their emphasis on individual liberty, a small state, property rights, and a vigorous private sector. In Seymour Martin Lipset’s account of American exceptionalism, American politics were thoroughly imbued with a Lockean liberalism that saw the government limiting its own power through a strict rule of law. These principles defined the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, which wanted lower taxes, deregulation, federalism, and multiple limits on state power.

This understanding of conservatism has now been upended with the rise of Trumpist populism.

More here.

Kim Hyesoon at Poetry Magazine:

Living trapped by viruses, surrounded by culturenature, and exposed to all kinds of media—writers, self-help books, chefs, singers, filmmakers, even comedians—I don’t want to be comforted, yet they pounce on me, to comfort me, to empathize. Startled, I get frightened. And, conversely, I become even more frightened when I’m asked who my poetry comforts. Therefore, when someone even utters the word comfort, I want to run and hide. I don’t think I’ve ever comforted anyone with my writing. Moreover, I think literature betrays the readers’ desire to be consoled. Perhaps literature crosses into a zone where consolation can’t intervene, evaporating any possibility of comfort. Just as there is no geometric or genetic consolation, literary work merely constructs an afterimage or alternative symmetrical pattern of the event that occurs. The ventriloquist lives inside literature. Ventriloquy is a deception. The writer first deceives herself. And she deceives the reader. Both are aware of the deception. The persona crosses into a zone of literature, the symmetrical world of existence. Thus literature is a lie. Fiction set as reality is a lie; poetry set as language is a lie. The ventriloquy of literature moves, riding the spiral of lies. And so there can be no consolation at the end of the lies. There is only failure, grief, and self-erasure.

more here.

Howard Hampton at Artforum:

Boredom: “If I ever bore you, it’ll be with a knife,” Louise Brooks once said, a line that sums up almost about every Fassbinder movie. RWF constantly employed Brechtian distancing devices to put the strange in estrangement, piercing our defenses of “relating to” and “identifying with” characters, situations. It is the feeling that the world’s a film stage and everyone on it is standing on a trapdoor. Fassbinder’s hand is on the lever and Death is in the wings, waiting for a cue. 

Personality crisis: Penman rather brilliantly embraces the Fassbinder segment in Germany in Autumn (1978) as the epitome of the man and his paradoxes; it’s a tour de force of let-it-all-hang-out psychodrama cut with the politics of depredation and exhaustion. Fassbinder prowls his apartment like a cocaine bear, strung out on angst and paranoia. It’s supposed to be about the political crisis in Germany but becomes a portrait of a private meltdown. Somehow its disjunction connects to the pathos of a person and a society, each on the verge of psychotic breaks.

more here.

Veronique Greenwood in Harvard Magazine:

IN A CAVERNOUS underground space behind Harvard’s Biological Laboratories, biochemist Peter Girguis frowns at the pressure vessel in his hand. The machined titanium cylinder, about the size of a French press, gleams as he works to release the cap, and he chuckles at his own stubbornness. He could probably find a tool to loosen it, he remarks. But Girguis has a calm self-assurance around physical objects more characteristic of aircraft mechanics in overalls than biochemists. With a flick of his wrist, the cap is out. The walls of the vessel turn out to be nearly an inch thick, the space inside about the size of a jam jar. This summer it will become home to a species of deep-sea snail scooped up by a remotely operated vehicle three miles down, where the pressure is about 3,200 pounds per square inch. The pressure on the surface is a mere 15 pounds per square inch—comfortable for humans, but inhospitable to creatures from the deeps—so on their research ship, Girguis and his colleagues have about 45 minutes to re-create the deep-sea pressure in the vessel and fill it with hydrogen sulfide, oxygen, and other essentials before the snail starts to die. Once they stabilize the conditions in the vessel, they have a compact, nearly intact fragment of an ecosystem so far removed from our own that, for a long time, there were few ways to study it directly.

More here.

Kevin Delaney in Time:

Authentically communicating the purpose of an organization is a critical leadership skill—key to long-term performance, retention, and perhaps even workers’ wellbeing. This was one of Steve Jobs’ superpowers, connecting his and his colleagues’ work to a higher mission. “We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better,” Jobs told a group of Apple employees in 1997. “And that those people that are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones that actually do.” (p. 103)

“It’s so important to pick very important things to do because it’s very hard to get people motivated to make a breakfast cereal,” Jobs noted in an interview published that same year. “It takes something that’s worth doing.” (p. 82) These observations are some of the many included in a new, free ebook released by the Steve Jobs Archive called Make Something Wonderful. While not presented as such, the book is effectively a master class in identifying and framing the purpose of organizations, as told through a chronological collection of Jobs’ speeches, interviews, emails, and notes to himself.

More here.

A man who lives never asks what is living
and he has no theories about living. It is only
the half-alive who talk about the purpose of life.
…………………………………… —Krishnamurti

A man who never questions the how and
why of life has cleaved off an essential part
of his being —living and its meaning are
not contradictory. ..………. —Roshi Bob
____________________________________

To go Beyond and Discover

We all talk of God: In every religion,
in every church and temple that
word is used, but always
in the image of the
known.

It is only the very, very few
who leave all the churches,
the temples, the books,
who go beyond and
discover…

If I really want to find out
what is on the top of the mountain
and beyond, I must go to it.

It is no good my sitting here speculating,
building temples, churches, and
getting excited about them.

What I have to do is to
stand up,
walk,
struggle,
push,
get there,
and find out;
but as most of us are
unwilling to do that,
we are satisfied to sit here
and speculate about something
that we do not know.

And I say such speculation
is a hindrance, it is a
deterioration of the mind,
it has no value at all; it only
brings more confusion,
more sorrow to man.

by Jiddu Krishnamurti
from Poetic Outlaws

Morgan Meis at The Easel:

Sometime probably in 1656 or 1657, Johannes Vermeer painted a painting that we now know as A Maid Asleep. I reference this painting because it hangs at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I’ve looked at it many times. I have a relationship with this painting. I’ve loved it for years and for that same amount of time I’ve been trying to figure out why.

There is, as many people have pointed out, a sense of quiet and mystery to A Maid Asleep that’s quite visceral. You just feel it. The overall mood of the painting is established, obviously, by the image of the half-sleeping maid resting her head on her hand. But the door opening into the room just behind, the spare room that beckons our gaze, this room is probably more important than the maid in creating the dreamily intriguing mood of this painting. The crucial factor here being a sense of revelation. The half-opened door reveals another room. The painting asks us to probe deeper, to look further. At the same time, it also suggests that there is nothing further to see. Because when we look into that back room, it’s just another room, another room that’s actually less interesting than the room we’re already in. So, this is a painting that structures itself like a revelation and then, simultaneously, pushes our probing minds and eyes back out onto the surface again. It is a painting that short-circuits itself, leaving the viewer fascinated and frustrated all at once.

That’s not an easy thing to do in a painting.

More here.

Victor R. Lee in Undark:

How will voters know whether a video of a political candidate saying something offensive was real or generated by AI? Will people be willing to pay artists for their work when AI can create something visually stunning? Why follow certain authors when stories in their writing style will be freely circulating on the internet?

I’ve been seeing the anxiety play out all around me at Stanford University, where I’m a professor and also lead a large generative AI and education initiative.

With text, image, audio, and video all becoming easier for anyone to produce through new generative AI tools, I believe people are going to need to reexamine and recalibrate how authenticity is judged in the first place.

Fortunately, social science offers some guidance.

More here.

Aaron Terr in Persuasion:

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, President Biden argued that “Big Tech companies” must “take responsibility for the content they spread and the algorithms they use.” To that end, Biden wants to “fundamentally reform” the law commonly known as Section 230, which protects online platforms from liability for most content their users post.

The president’s not alone.

For many politicians and critics on both sides of the aisle, the law has become a scapegoat for everything they don’t like about social media. Democrats think it facilitates the spread of hate speech and misinformation. Republicans complain that it lets social media companies freely censor conservatives. Proposals to reform or eliminate Section 230 abound.

But the attacks on Section 230 miss one important thing: it’s vital to free speech and innovation on the internet.

More here.