Seamus Heaney at the Paris Review:

Dear Tom,

It’s not that I have not been thinking about you. I have, quite a bit. And the thoughts have as ever been tinged with second thoughts: for example, I was sorry after you rang that time in the summer that I had not urged you to come over. The usual hunched, wild-eyed panic about how I could do this and that and still have time for the spacious pleasures of sleigh rides in Wicklow intervened too automatically. Somehow, the chance had come and gone in a moment. And then too I’ve been bugged by the idea that I saw a letter from you in a big mail- pile—perhaps when I came back from Australia or Poland last autumn—and that I put it aside to read properly, after the rush-through for crisis-stuff, and then never found it. At any rate, I am haunted by this notion and only hope I am mistaken.

It’s my birthday and it is a day of utterly vernal Easter. Holy Thursday indeed. Fifty-sixth birthday. The fact that I’m actually sitting out in the open air (cf. Mark Twain on the English countryside) will give you some idea of the extraordinary pause and poise of the weather. Loveliest-of-trees time.

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Michael Eisenstein in Nature:

An analysis of almost 50,000 brain scans¹ has revealed five distinct patterns of brain atrophy associated with ageing and neurodegenerative disease. The analysis has also linked the patterns to lifestyle factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption, as well as to genetic and blood-based markers associated with health status and disease risk.

The work is a “methodological tour de force” that could greatly advance researchers’ understanding of ageing, says Andrei Irimia, a gerontologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the work. “Prior to this study, we knew that brain anatomy changes with ageing and disease. But our ability to grasp this complex interaction was far more modest.”

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Travis Jeppesen at Artforum:

IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH to be in Venice on a sunny day, it will take your eyes a while to adjust after you enter the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove on the northern bank of Cannaregio. A curtain is lifted, and suddenly you are enshrouded in darkness. It is nearly all-engulfing: Just across from the entrance, there is a single spotlight forming a circle on the floor, toward which your eyes naturally gravitate. By now your internal rhythm has been disrupted, for that is the abrupt and halting impact of darkness on a body previously attuned to sunlight, sea air, the pastel patchwork of color and stone forming the Venetian scape. And so, having arrived at a standstill, you fumble your way through the dark, toward that meditative state that the darkness demands, toward the spotlight forming a perfect circle on the ground in order to focus on what it contains: a single rock, just large enough to fit in the palm of a hand. And now you’ve come the full way, from the ethereal light and sea of the outside to the darkness and confrontation with solidity on the inside. And it is now, as your eyes gradually adjust, that you come to realize you are actually in a theater, that there are rows of seats just beyond that spotlit rock, and so you carefully step backwards until you find a space to sit, because inevitably you’ve walked a long way to get here.

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A Young Oscar Homolka

A Young Oscar Homolka walks up the street,
I may be the only one left who remembers
the old Oscar Homolka.

At the market three Italian women
in dress-up black, the older the woman,
the higher the heel.

Four flights up
to Puccini’s birthplace.
I climb one, then half
of the second – turn around.

Out in the street,
a handsome young
delivery boy walks by
whistling “Nessun Dorma”
on key, accurate,
with a beautiful tone.

by Nils Peterson
from Notes From Lucca

Oscar Homolka

Stan Carey at Sentence first:

I was sad to hear that Edna O’Brien had died. She lived a remarkable life and leaves an amazing body of work: she was, in Eimear McBride’s description, ‘one of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature’.

The controversy over O’Brien’s taboo-breaking early books – starting with The Country Girls (1960), which was banned in Ireland – had ebbed by the time I started reading her, but the elegance of her writing and the power of her stories remained, and remains, undiminished.

Recently, revisiting her short story ‘Madame Cassandra’, which was published in the 1968 collection The Love Object and again in 2011’s Saints and Sinners, a rare word in its opening paragraph caught my eye:

I always love the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the coolth and the nectar.

I don’t think bees are snuggling into foxgloves for the coolth, but it’s such a pleasing idea that I don’t mind the poetic licence.

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Azeem Azhar in Exponential View:

Schmidt confessed to revising his AI outlook every six months, a testament to the field’s volatility. He shared a striking example: “Six months ago, I was convinced that the gap [between frontier AI models and the rest] was getting smaller, so I invested lots of money in the little companies. Now I’m not so sure.”

Now, please don’t focus on the fact that Schmidt thinks the future is in ever-larger models (he does). Rather, consider the nature of his knowledge. He is an insider’s insider, about as well-informed as anyone in this field can be, and unlike some critics, he is also putting his money where his mouth is, backing many AI companies like Mistal, Kyutai and Asari.

Schmidt understands scale and gets neural nets. After all, he ran Google when it acquired Deepmind, developed the transformer architecture and built tensor processing units, the first chips dedicated to speeding up deep learning. And Google has been about scale since its inception.

Despite this, just six months ago, this tech titan thought smaller models might stand a chance to push the frontier. He doesn’t believe that anymore.

The point is that he was either right then or he is right now. It took just six months for a u-turn. That is the degree of uncertainty.

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Henry Sokolski at Persuasion:

America’s most curious endeavors: Atoms for Peace and its policy that spread dangerous nuclear technology world-wide.

This program’s continued endurance is difficult to understand. Its historical genesis, though, is clear enough. Early in 1953, J. Robert Oppenheimer briefed Eisenhower on the findings of a classified nuclear disarmament advisory panel Truman had asked Oppenheimer to chair. The panel’s findings were grim: Within a few short years, the Soviets would have enough nuclear weapons to knock out one hundred of America’s largest cities in a surprise attack. The United States might retaliate by destroying Moscow but America itself would be in ruins. The bottom line: Unless Russia capped its nuclear buildup, America and Russia would be able to land deadly strikes against one another but be unable to survive or thrive. Compounding the problem was that Moscow might not understand this. Oppenheimer urged Eisenhower to clarify the threat publicly.

What ensued was a close-hold assignment—“Operation Candor”—a speechwriting project, chaired by psychological policy advisor C.D. Jackson to produce the seemingly impossible: a presidential address that would explain the emerging nuclear threat without frightening America.

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Yo Zushi at The New Statesman:

Though it’s true that sadness in its many forms was one of Smith’s central preoccupations, neither he nor his music were defined by it. The spare waltz that defeats Tiny Rick appears on Smith’s third solo album, 1997’s Either/Or. It’s played acoustically at an unhurried pace and combines a seductive lyric about finding solace in booze with a melody that perfectly captures its quiet desperation. In the chorus, a dark E-flat minor hits you like a gut punch because your ears expect a more optimistic E-flat major, and the song returns to that unstable chord to finish, denying you any conventional harmonic resolution. It’s a masterly composition that eclipses anything by Smith’s own idols, including the Beatles or Elvis Costello – sad, yes, but too wondrous to feel strictly morose. And he didn’t write it strung out and crying into an empty glass of Jameson. It was apparently knocked into shape while he was watching the swords-and-sandals TV show Xena: Warrior Princess.

 From the beginning, Smith explored misery philosophically, treating it with respect as a facet of the human experience that was worthy of deep interrogation. He approached it without fear or embarrassment and found in it the implacable grandeur of ordinary life – its sometimes ugly beauty, unbearable but precious, and as compelling as a white-hot light bulb is to a bug at night.

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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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Melissa Afshar in Newsweek:

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.

ChatGPT has 200 million monthly active users worldwide, with 77.2 million people using the OpenAI tool in the U.S. alone. Shannon McNamara, a podcaster and content creator, is one and often uses it as a therapeutic tool. McNamara, who is known as @fluentlyforward online, has enjoyed success after leveraging the power of social media to spearhead her own podcast. Still, like most people, she has bad days too, and has often found herself seeking out the support of her AI bot in times of need.

“I use ChatGPT when I keep ruminating on a problem and can’t seem to find a solution, or even just to understand my own feelings,” McNamara told Newsweek. “I’m shocked by just how incredibly helpful it is.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

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?

The answer is in their genes—especially those that encode for basic life functions, such as metabolism. Thanks to the lowly C. elegans worm, we’ve uncovered genes and molecular pathways, such as insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) signaling that extends healthy longevity in yeast, flies, and mice (and maybe us). Too nerdy? Those pathways also inspired massive scientific and popular interest in metformin, hormones, intermittent fasting, and even the ketogenic diet. To restate: worms have inspired the search for our own fountain of youth.

Still, that’s just one success story. How relevant, exactly, are those genes for humans? We’re rather a freak of nature. Our aging process extends for years, during which we experience a slew of age-related disorders. Diabetes. Heart disease. Dementia. Surprisingly, many of these don’t ever occur in worms and other animals. Something is obviously amiss. In this month’s Nature Metabolism, a global team of scientists argued that it’s high time we turn from worm to human. The key to human longevity, they say, lies in the genes of centenarians. These individuals not only live over 100 years, they also rarely suffer from common age-related diseases. That is, they’re healthy up to their last minute. If evolution was a scientist, then centenarians, and the rest of us, are two experimental groups in action.

Nature has already given us a genetic blueprint for healthy longevity. We just need to decode it.

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Grant Wong interviews Tejas Parasher in the Journal of the History of Ideas:

Grant Wong: In your article, you argue for a reading of twentieth-century Indian political thought that emphasizes conflict over consensus. You criticize the literature’s embrace of a “parliamentary reading” of anti-colonial constitutional thought that neglects its intellectual diversity. To do so, you juxtapose the ideas of M.N. Roy against those of his contemporaries: “Recovering Roy’s polemics against Indian nationalists… helps us move beyond viewing the democratic thought of India’s founding as a straightforward adoption of a British political model.” What do we miss when we neglect thinkers like Roy? What do we stand to gain by adopting your perspective?

Tejas Parasher: There has long been a tendency amongst political theorists to view the globalization of democracy in the twentieth century through a diffusionist lens. Since the mid-1940s, many have understood the formation of democratic republics in new, post-imperial countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean as indicative of the appeal of the kinds of representative, electoral constitutional systems which prevailed in postwar Western Europe—British parliamentarism, French republicanism, and so on. This is the perspective we find outlined very clearly, for instance, in John Petrov Plamenatz’s On Alien Rule and Self-Government (1960), one of the first attempts by a political philosopher to examine the triangular relationship between democracy, empire, and nationalism.  Plamenatz interprets the democratization of former imperial territories as an enthusiastic embrace of Western representative democracy by nationalist elites, a kind of ideological consummation of liberalism. India, as a particularly successful instance of post-imperial, democratic nation-building, occupies a central place in these narratives.

One of the main aims of my article is to highlight how the diffusionist historiography of democratization is based on a selective, partial understanding of anti-colonial nationalism. The narrative almost entirely elides those anti-colonial thinkers who were deeply apprehensive about representative government and liberal democracy as these regimes existed in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

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Sanoja Bhaumik interviews Rahul Verma in Phenomenal World:

SANOJA BHAUMIK: It’s been two months since India’s Lok Sabha election, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi must now govern as part of the NDA coalition with other parties. What are the implications of the new NDA coalition for Modi’s government?

RAHUL VERMA: The election results were a surprise. Exit polls had predicted a landslide for the BJP-led government. While some gains for Congress were predicted, few expected that they would reach almost 100 seats. It’s important to note that from his time as the Chief Minister of Gujarat to his tenure as the Prime Minister of India, Modi has never run a coalition government. One may call the BJP-led government in 2014 and 2019 an NDA government because there were allies, but those allies did not have a significant bearing on government formation. As the BJP has lost a significant number of seats from 2019 and is now running a coalition, multiple pressure points have emerged, and they will continue to have a bearing on the government.

First, between 2019 and 2024, it seemed like Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah were in total control of the party. They called the shots. But at the same time, to some extent, we are likely to see a much reduced imprint of Modi and Amit Shah—such as in the choice of Chief Ministers, the next BJP party president, among others. I don’t think this would have occurred if the BJP won the majority.

Second, I think there are going to be some pressure points that will emerge from the larger BJP ideological family. Over two terms, and especially from 2019 to 2024, Prime Minister Modi was able to create a new ideological arc in India’s political landscape. Many of the demands of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-BJP—which has been there for the last seventy-five years—were fulfilled..

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Darel E. Paul in Compact Magazine:

The possibility of communal violence depends, of course, on the coexistence of distinct communities. In the 21st-century United Kingdom outside Northern Ireland, this condition is a product of the country’s post-1997 mass immigration. Before Tony Blair became prime minister, annual legal immigration routinely ran about 300,000. That number doubled by the time Blair left office in 2007 and reached 800,000 under the Conservatives before Brexit. Over the past two years, legal immigration into Britain—nearly all of which settled in England—surpassed 1.2 million annually, more than 80 percent from non-European countries. The necessary outcome has been significant ethnic change. In 2001, Britain was 88 percent white British. In 20 years, the figure has fallen to 75 percent. In light of the past two years, that number is lower still today.

Other countries in the Anglosphere—those sharing not only Britain’s language, but a similar liberal polity, economy, culture, and civic national identity—have undergone similarly dramatic racial and ethnic transformations. Australia hasn’t collected such data since the 1970s, but its native English-speaking population dropped to 72 percent in 2021, down from 85 percent in 1991. From 1991 to 2021, the white share of the Canadian population fell to 74 percent, down from 91 percent. In New Zealand, those with European ethnicity made up 68 percent of the population last year, down from 83 percent in 1991. In the United States, the most diverse of all the Anglosphere countries undergoing the most rapid racial and ethnic transformation, the non-Hispanic white share of the population dropped to 58 percent in 2020, down from 76 percent three decades earlier.

Yet none of these other countries is witnessing communal conflict like Britain’s. Why not?

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Richard Seymour in Sidecar:

What just happened? For almost a week, towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland were in the grip of pogromist reaction. In Hull, Sunderland, Rotherham, Liverpool, Aldershot, Leeds, Middlesborough, Tamworth, Belfast, Bolton, Stoke-on-Trent, Doncaster and Manchester, networked mobs of fascoid agitators and disorganized racists were thrilled by their own exuberant violence. In Rotherham, they set fire to a Holiday Inn hotel housing asylum seekers. In Middlesborough, they blocked roads and only let traffic through if drivers were verified as ‘white’ and ‘English’, momentarily enjoying the arbitrary power of both the traffic warden and the border official.

In Tamworth, where the recently elected Labour MP had inveighed against spending on asylum hotels (incorrectly claiming that they cost the area £8m a day), they rampaged through the Holiday Inn Express and, in the ruins, left graffiti reading: ‘England’, ‘Fuck Pakis’ and ‘Get Out’. In Hull, as crowds dragged a man out of his car for a beating, participants shouted ‘kill them!’ In Belfast, where a hijabi was reportedly punched in the face while holding her baby, they destroyed Muslim shops and tried to march on the local mosque, chanting ‘get ’em out’. In Newtownards, a mosque was attacked with a petrol bomb. In Crosby, a Muslim man was stabbed.

Worryingly, while far-right activists played a role, it was probably secondary. The riots, rather than being caused by handfuls of organized fascists, provided them with their best recruiting grounds in years. Many people who had never been ‘political’ before, and perhaps never even voted, turned out to burn asylum seekers or assault Muslims.

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