Meg Bernhard at Hazlitt:

In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total. At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.” Some people shrugged him off, or told him they didn’t have any secrets. Surely, Frank thought, those people had the best ones. Others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, decorated them, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous.

Initially, Frank received about one hundred postcards back. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were erotic. Some were funny. He displayed them at a local art exhibition and included an anonymous secret of his own. After the exhibition ended, though, the postcards kept coming. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

On Thursday, astronomers who are conducting what they describe as the biggest and most precise survey yet of the history of the universe announced that they might have discovered a major flaw in their understanding of dark energy, the mysterious force that is speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

Dark energy was assumed to be a constant force in the universe, both currently and throughout cosmic history. But the new data suggest that it may be more changeable, growing stronger or weaker over time, reversing or even fading away.

“As Biden would say, it’s a B.F.D.,” said Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other astronomers for the discovery of dark energy, but was not involved in this new study. “It may be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” he said.

More here.

Jacob Mchangama in Persuasion:

Even though more people will cast a ballot in 2024 than any previous year, the prevailing mood seems more fearful than celebratory. In the words of Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the combination of online influence campaigns and artificial intelligence has created a “perfect storm of disinformation” that threatens free and fair elections. This type of pessimism has led several open societies—including those of the European Union—to adopt illiberal measures such as banning foreign media outlets and cracking down on social media platforms. The rise of generative artificial intelligence has only heightened the sense of emergency.

Yet little attention has been paid to the fact that Team Democracy triumphed in one of 2024’s most decisive battles by staying true to its liberal values.

Taiwan is an instructive example of a young and vibrant democracy that views freedom of expression as a competitive advantage against authoritarian censorship and propaganda.

More here.

Tim Reinboth in Undark:

Various commercial products known as “griefbots” create a simulation of a lost loved one. Built on artificial intelligence that makes use of large language models, or LLMs, the bots imitate the particular way the deceased person talked by using their emails, text messages, voice recordings, and more. The technology is supposed to help the bereaved deal with grief by letting them chat with the bot as if they were talking to the person. But we’re missing evidence that this technology actually helps the bereaved cope with loss. Humans have used technology to deal with feelings of loss for more than a century. Post-mortem photographs, for example, gave 19th century Victorians a likeness of their dead to remember them by, when they couldn’t afford a painted portrait. Recent studies have provided evidence that having a drawing or picture as a keepsake helps some survivors to grieve. Yet researchers are still learning how people grieve and what kinds of things help the bereaved to deal with loss.

An approach to grief that focuses on continuing bonds with the deceased loved one suggests that finding closure is about more than letting the person go. Research and clinical practice show that renewing the bond with someone they’ve lost can help mourners deal with their passing. That means griefbots might help the bereaved by letting them transform their relationship to their deceased loved one. But a strong continuing bond only helps the bereaved when they can make sense of their loss. And the imitation loved ones could make it harder for people to do that and accept that their loved one is gone.

More here.

Adam Nagourney in The New York Times:

Simon Rosenberg was right about the congressional elections of 2022. All the conventional wisdom — the polls, the punditry, the fretting by fellow Democrats — revolved around the expectation of a big red wave and a Democratic wipeout. He disagreed. Democrats would surprise everyone, he said again and again: There would be no red wave. He was correct, of course, as he is quick to remind anyone listening. These days, Mr. Rosenberg, 60, a Democratic strategist and consultant who dates his first involvement in presidential campaigns to Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, is again pushing back against the polls and punditry and the Democratic doom and gloom. This time, he is predicting that President Biden will defeat Donald J. Trump in November.

…The idea of this interview is that, at a time when there is so much fretting in the Democratic world, you are not — and have never been — a bed-wetter. Can you explain why? This goes back to the midterm congressional elections in 2022, as I recall?

Yes. The argument I made then was threefold. One was that the Republicans did something unusual in 2022. Usually when a party loses elections, they run away from the politics that caused them to lose. And Republicans were running toward it. They were becoming ever more MAGA, even though MAGA had lost in 2018 and 2020. Second, that Biden was actually a good president, and we’d have a strong case to make. And third, there’s been this huge increase in citizen engagement in the Democratic Party. We’ve been raising crazy amounts of money and have an unprecedented number of volunteers because of the fear of MAGA.

More here.

Jerry Saltz at Vulture:

In the year 286, Emperor Diocletian began to formalize a division of the Roman Empire into two parts. The Western Roman Empire would go on to become something of a decaying backwater, while the eastern half of the empire — known by historians as the Byzantine Empire — flourished for another thousand years and more. It was never utopia. It was centered on an estuary, where commerce, philosophy, and art flowed into the capital, Constantinople. At times, the Byzantine Empire grew to include areas of present-day Italy, Syria, Tunisia, Spain, and beyond. It died in 1453, when Constantinople’s gigantic guarding walls were breached by the Ottomans.

To walk the remains of these walls today is a humbling reminder of how powerful this empire was. Since then, Byzantium has become a repository of romantic dreams, particularly for those who look at history and its cultural riches through a Western-centric lens. For many in the art world, Byzantium remains what Yeats called an “artifice of eternity” — a dream of civilization that was lost.

more here.

Walker Mimms at n+1:

In McCarthy’s novels, people commit terrible acts—necrophilia, infanticide, cannibalism—and often with reason. His villains are symbols of that dark reason: the trio of swampland marauders in Outer Dark (1968), the dream-curdling scalp-hunter in Blood Meridian, the frigid bounty hunter stalking No Country. In The Passenger and Stella Maris, McCarthy tops this rap sheet with his worst crime yet: nuclear Armageddon. And the perp is one of American history’s finest minds, the porkpie-hatted architect of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Though it isn’t Armageddon exactly. The Passenger is a historical novel set in 1980, and the world is still very much alive. The mere possibility of apocalypse by human means is crime enough. Throughout the novel, Bobby Western, a 36-year-old salvage diver and racecar driver, is haunted by his upbringing near the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and in Los Alamos, New Mexico, two places where his physicist father, a protégé of Oppenheimer, helped design the device that would devastate Hiroshima in 1945.

more here.

Ordinance on Arrival

Welcome to you
who have managed to get here
It’s been a terrible trip;
you should be happy you survived it.
Statistics prove that not many do.
You would like a bath, a hot meal,
a good night’s sleep. Some of you
need medical attention.
None of this is available.
These things have always been
in short supply; now
they are impossible to obtain.

…………………………………. This is not
a temporary situation;
it is permanent.
Our condolences on your disappointment.
It is not our responsibility
everything you have heard about this place
is false. It is not our fault
you have been deceived                                                                                           ,
ruined your health getting here.
For reasons beyond our control
there is no vehicle out.

by Naomi Lazard
from Poetry 180
Edited by Billy Collins
Random House, 2003

Peter Gordon in the Asian Review of Books:

How is a reviewer, faced with (yet another) excellent short-story collection, supposed to convey to readers a convincing rationale for “why this one?” To note that this author is Kazakh is necessary but insufficient; if diversity alone were the criterion, one would need an entire year to cycle through books from every country, territory and language in the world. To Hell with Poets is good not just in the context of Kazakh or even Central Asian writing available in English, but good, period.

So, why? Baqytgul Sarmekova is indeed Kazakh and the stories are set in Kazakhstan. The reader will be introduced to auls and tois, respectively villages and parties, particularly weddings.

Soon, the yellowish, moss-grown roofs tucked between drab-colored hills overgrown with squat tamarisk bushes came into view. The squalid aul looked like a sloppy woman’s kitchen.

She includes towns such as Astana and even Atyrau (on the Caspian) which the reader has probably never visited (although I, entirely coincidentally, have visited Atyrau, several times). There are stories about a rural way of life that hardly exists anymore in the developed anglophone world (and is probably on its way out in Kazakhstan as well). And yet, there are parts of the USA or Hong Kong that seem more exotic: Sarmekova’s stories and characters are so rooted in common humanity and daily life that little seems unfamiliar.

More here.

Robin Chataut in The Conversation:

Have you ever wondered how an email sent from New York arrives in Sydney in mere seconds, or how you can video chat with someone on the other side of the globe with barely a hint of delay? Behind these everyday miracles lies an unseen, sprawling web of undersea cables, quietly powering the instant global communications that people have come to rely on.

Undersea cables, also known as submarine communications cables, are fiber-optic cables laid on the ocean floor and used to transmit data between continents. These cables are the backbone of the global internet, carrying the bulk of international communications, including email, webpages and video calls. More than 95% of all the data that moves around the world goes through these undersea cables.

These cables are capable of transmitting multiple terabits of data per second, offering the fastest and most reliable method of data transfer available today.

More here.

Sam Klug in the Boston Review:

But single expressions are merely “pieces of a man,” as Adam Shatz, quoting Gil Scott-Heron, observes in The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. In this timely and engaging new book—the first full-length biography in English since David Macey’s in 2000—Shatz restores a sense of wholeness to Fanon’s life and work. The unifying pursuit of Fanon’s life, Shatz argues, was the “disalienation” of those suffering from racial and colonial oppression—a project at once individual and social, clinical as well as political. For Fanon, Shatz concludes, this was the end goal of psychiatry as a practice of freedom.

At a moment when Fanon is once again being deeply misread and distorted, The Rebel’s Clinic helps us return to all of Fanon—the fullness of his thought and practice beyond the familiar aphorisms.

More here.

Moises Mendez II in Time Magazine:

Beyoncé releasing a new album is an event. Not only because she is one of the biggest pop stars in the world, but also because her music begs to be dissected with a fine-tooth comb. We started seeing her develop projects more focused on looking at a particular subject from different angles and exploring new genres with her music in 2016 with the release of Lemonade, a vulnerable album on which she openly calls out her husband’s infidelity. In 2022, she released Renaissance, a treasure trove of samples, interpolations, songwriters, producers, history, references, glitz, and glamor celebrating the queer ballroom community that had a hand in igniting the house genre. Cowboy Carter, released today after seven weeks of growing anticipation, builds on this idea of paying homage to the Black musical pioneers who paved the way.

…Cowboy Carter is dense with cultural references—incorporating the voices of country legends like Linda Martell, Willie Nelson, and Dolly Parton while also uplifting younger Black country talent like Tanner Adell, Shaboozey, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts. On the album, Beyoncé also reveals a bit more of herself in a few songs including, in one, her feelings on losing out on Album of the Year at the Grammys.

More here.

Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

Heavy industry is one of the most stubbornly difficult areas of the economy to decarbonize. But new research suggests emissions could be reduced by up to 85 percent globally using a mixture of tried-and-tested and upcoming technologies. While much of the climate debate focuses on areas like electricity, vehicle emissions, and aviation, a huge fraction of carbon emissions comes from hidden industrial processes. In 2022, the sector—which includes things like chemicals, iron and steel, and cement—accounted for a quarter of the world’s emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.

While they are often lumped together, these industries are very different, and the sources of their emissions can be highly varied. That means there’s no silver bullet and explains why the sector has proven to be one of the most challenging to decarbonize. This prompted researchers from the UK to carry out a comprehensive survey of technologies that could help get the sector’s emissions under control. They found that solutions like carbon capture and storage, switching to hydrogen or biomass fuels, or electrification of key industrial processes could cut out the bulk of the heavy industry carbon footprint. “Our findings represent a major step forward in helping to design industrial decarbonization strategies and that is a really encouraging prospect when it comes to the future health of the planet,”  Dr. Ahmed Gailani, from Leeds University, said in a press release.

More here.

Cartoon Physics, Part 1

Children under, say ten, shouldn’t know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all if it
acted out in silence. At ten we’re still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down—earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships
have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved. A child

places her hand on the roof of a school bus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows

the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall

until he notices his mistake

by Nick Flynn
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Fred Turner in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“DID PORN KILL feminism?” asked Amia Srinivasan in her widely read book The Right to Sex (2021). In the internet age, it sure can look that way. As Srinivasan pointed out, top commercial porn sites host billions of visitors every month. Today’s college students grew up with those sites just a click away. Many had their first sexual experiences in front of a computer screen. When she talked with her own college students, she saw the consequences:

Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalisation of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.

If that’s true, then what should we make of the life of Candida Royalle? As Jane Kamensky’s beautifully crafted new biography, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below, reveals, Royalle, who died in 2015, was a porn star and a feminist. And so were many of her friends. As Srinivasan notes, it would be easy to blame porn and the sex wars of the 1980s for turning a women’s liberation movement that “exploded with such joyous fury” in the 1960s into “a fractured and worn thing” today. But Kamensky’s deft portrait of Royalle undercuts that explanation, and even the tale of feminism’s decline.

More here.

Emma Foehringer Merchant in Undark:

Best Bees is one of the many companies carving out a niche in a commercial landscape increasingly focused on advertising environmental responsibility, pushed by both customer demand and regulatory requirements. Testing environmental DNA, which allows data to be gathered from the tiny pieces of skin, scales, and slime that species shed as they move through the world, has been framed as a cheap and efficient way to understand a corporation’s impact.

As supporters lobby for regulatory acceptance, a group of large consulting companies and eDNA specialists see the tool as a promising way to monitor corporate sustainability, like measuring the success of conservation efforts or the possible effects of a new bridge or parking lot. Experts say eDNA has limitations and drawbacks. So far, it appears that the tool is best used as one tool among a suite of monitoring methods, so it’s unlikely the technology will completely disrupt the environmental consulting industry, which according to The Insight Partners, a market research firm, was valued at more than $34 billion globally in 2020. But eDNA has undoubtedly created new opportunities to gather and monetize data.

More here.

Yascha Mounk and Jonathan Haidt at Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: It’s always a pleasure to have you on the podcast and particularly when you have an important new book which you have just published called The Anxious Generation, which really speaks to so many core concerns of what is happening in the United States, in Britain and around the world today.

Why should we take this trend seriously? Why should we think that there really is something unusual about the rise of mental illness and other ills among teenagers and particularly young girls? And why should we think that this really is down to the rise of the internet and of social media in particular? And now I’m asking this because of course there have been many moral panics over the course of decades, right? Why is this not a moral panic, but a real trend that’s going on?

Jonathan Haidt: There certainly is a moral panic going on and it looks similar to previous ones. You know, the press gets involved, you get scare stories. But the question is, is it a justified panic or not?

More here.