Jeffrey Mervis in Science:

In their bid to become the next U.S. president, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump have staked out fundamentally different positions on such divisive topics as reproductive rights, immigration, the economy, and the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. But they have said almost nothing about science. That’s typical for a presidential campaign. But their silence doesn’t mean the winner of the 5 November election won’t have a significant effect on the U.S. research enterprise. Their views on science-heavy issues such as climate change and public health will get wide attention. But outside the spotlight, the country’s 47th president will need to address other issues that directly affect the research community.

The list includes how the United States responds to China’s status as a rival scientific superpower, how it chooses to attract and retain foreign talent while boosting domestic production of scientists and engineers, and how it ensures artificial intelligence (AI) is a boon rather than a bane to society. For government scientists, the ability to do their jobs without political interference is a major worry after several notorious episodes during former President Trump’s administration. The next president will also propose annual budgets for thousands of research programs across the federal government, although Congress will decide on the actual spending levels.

More here.

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My Son, My Executioner

My son, my executioner,
….. I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir,
….. And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument
….. Of immortality,
Your cries and hunger document
….. Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,
….. Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
….. And start to die together.

by Donald Hall
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1989
…..
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Brian Klaas at Aeon Magazine:

How can we make sense of social change when consequential shifts often arise from chaos? This is the untameable bane of social science, a field that tries to detect patterns and assert control over the most unruly, chaotic system that exists in the known Universe: 8 billion interacting human brains embedded in a constantly changing world. While we search for order and patterns, we spend less time focused on an obvious but consequential truth. Flukes matter.

Though some scholars in the 19th century, such as the English philosopher John Stuart Mill and his intellectual descendants, believed there were laws governing human behaviour, social science was swiftly disabused of the notion that a straightforward social physics was possible. Instead, most social scientists have aimed toward what the US sociologist Robert K Merton called ‘middle-range theory’, in which researchers hope to identify regularities and patterns in certain smaller realms that can perhaps later be stitched together to derive the broader theoretical underpinnings of human society. Though some social scientists are sceptical that such broader theoretical underpinnings exist, the most common approach to social science is to use empirical data from the past to tease out ordered patterns that point to stable relationships between causes and effects. Which variables best correlate with the onset of civil wars? Which economic indicators offer the most accurate early warning signs of recessions? What causes democracy?

more here.

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Nguyễn Bình at Literary Hub:

By 1964, Vietnam had been bisected for a decade. Fierce fights between the US-backed South and the communist North had marred the country, and with US forces officially entering the war that August, it seemed things were only getting worse. From the West Lake in Hanoi, the poet Chế Lan Viên wrote to decry American war crimes and made sure to specify their perpetrators:

No! It is not Edgar Poe who herded us into strategic fences,
Not Lincoln who dropped thousand-kilogram bombs on the faces of men,
Not Whitman who fired three thousand nights of cannons.

At first glance, the mention of Poe sticks out like a sore thumb. It would make sense to name Lincoln and Whitman, who embody the ideals of America and contrast with its brutal crimes in Vietnam, but why Poe? The answer lies in his surprisingly major role in the early twentieth century, right at the dawn of Vietnam’s modern literature. For a period in Vietnamese history, Poe was “America’s literary giant,” inspiring a generation of authors who would go on to take up arms and raise their voices in support of the struggle against imperialism.

More here.

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Stephanie M. Lee in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

At first, it looked like a paradigm of science done right. A group of behavioral scientists had repeated the same experiments over and over in separate labs, following the same rigorous methods, and found that 86 percent of their attempts had the results they expected.

In a field where the seemingly constant collapse of influential discoveries over the past decade has triggered a reproducibility crisis, this finding was welcome news. The study’s authors included heavy hitters in the science-reform movement, and it appeared in a top journal, Nature Human Behaviour, in November.

“The high replication rate justifies confidence in rigour-enhancing methods to increase the replicability of new discoveries,” concluded the paper, which has been cited more than 70 times, according to Google Scholar. “The reforms are working,” a press release declared, and a news story asked: “What reproducibility crisis?”

But now the paper has been retracted, following a monthslong journal investigation into concerns about how it had been designed and written.

More here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

Imagine I went to a Hollywood studio with the following plot: It’s the year 2024. War is breaking out all over the world. Asia is threatened by communists; Europe, by fascists. Only America stands against these totalitarian empires, but its society is divided and its industry is outmatched. But there’s one man could save America — and, by extension, the world. A reclusive genius and peerless industrialist, he has built a fleet of gigantic rockets that can take off and land halfway across the world, blanketed the heavens with satellites, and created futuristic cars that singlehandedly revived America’s auto industry. He’s in the process of creating a colony on Mars. Oh, and he also owns the country’s most important social network, controlling the flow of information between journalists, politicians, and the public. But is this towering figure a superhero, or a supervillain? Between personal troubles (insert complex backstory here) and battles with smug government bureaucrats, he’s grown disillusioned. Agents of freedom’s enemies reach out to him, coveting his technological marvels for themselves. Will he save the day, or go over to the other side?

This proposal would probably get rejected. We already have one Iron Man,1 the studio exec would tell me. And for that matter we also have a Batman, a Dr. Doom, a Green Goblin, and an Adrian Veidt. We don’t need another of these guys. He’d hand me back my spec script and tell me to come back when I have something less derivative.

And yet somehow we find ourselves living in this comic-book reality. Even as American manufacturing (and German manufacturing, and Japanese manufacturing, etc.) has been hollowed out by Chinese competition and our great old companies have stumbled and declined, one single entrepreneur has been able to build and scale gigantic new cutting-edge high-tech world-beating manufacturing companies in the United States of America. That one man is Elon Musk.

More here.

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Corey Robin in The New Yorker:

The professor and the politician are a dyad of perpetual myth. In one myth, they are locked in conflict, sparring over the claims of reason and the imperative of power. Think Socrates and Athens, or Noam Chomsky and the American state. In another myth, they are reconciled, even fused. The professor becomes a politician, saving the polity from corruption and ignorance, demagoguery and vice. Think Plato’s philosopher-king, or Aaron Sorkin’s Jed Bartlet. The nobility of ideas is preserved, and transmuted, slowly, into the stuff of action.

The sociologist Max Weber spent much of his life seduced by this second fable. A scholar of hot temper and volcanic energy, Weber longed to be a politician of cold focus and hard reason. Across three decades of a scholarly career, in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, he made repeated and often failed incursions into the public sphere—to give advice, stand for office, form a party, negotiate a treaty, and write a constitution. His “secret love,” he confessed to a friend, was “the political.” Even in the delirium of his final days, he could be heard declaiming on behalf of the German people, jousting with their enemies in several of the many languages he knew. “If one is lucky” in politics, he observed, a “genius appears just once every few hundred years.” That left the door wide open for him.

More here.

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Viviane Collier in Nautilus:

Philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith has spent decades considering the mental life of animals. His pioneering work on octopus cognition has helped to frame the discussion about how we might think about intelligences other than our own.

His recent books, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, explore the evolution of animal sentience, felt experience, and intelligence. His new book, Living on Earth: Forests, Consciousness, and the Making of the World, completes this trilogy. It explores not just how minds evolved on Earth, but how minds have shaped the evolution of life on Earth. His bold thesis envisions organisms as causes, rather than as simply a result of millions of years of natural selection and evolution. I recently caught up with Godfrey-Smith, who is a professor at the University of Sydney, over video. Our conversations ranged over the origins of life, how movement might have led to consciousness, and how language is just “kind of a weird thing that happened in our minds.”

More here.

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Lynne Feeley at The Nation:

In the afterword to Loving Sylvia Plath, a book detailing the abuse that Plath suffered at the hands of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, the literary scholar Emily Van Duyne recounts that when she started the book, a friend told her that she had to get “everything right” because “everyone is going to come for it.” Van Duyne took this to mean that the book had to be “textual,” not merely “rhetorical.” Getting “everything right” meant being sure to base her claims in verifiable, textual evidence and the documented historical record. There was good reason for the friend’s warning, its roots deep in the unsavory and litigious history of biographical publishing on Plath. Janet Malcolm depicted it as a field ruled by Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, who for decades was Plath’s literary executor, but who considered her a “nasty selfish bitch” (as Plath put it in a 1961 letter) and who granted access to the poet’s archive and permission to quote from her work only on condition of the biographer’s willingness to tell the story that the Hughes family wanted told.

more here.

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Sheila Heti at the Paris Review:

I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way. For instance, that we all think “conflict” is the most interesting and gripping part of life, and so we should all make conflict the heart of our fiction. Or that when we think of other people, we all think of what they look like. Or that we all believe things happen due to identifiable causes. Shouldn’t a writer be trained to pay attention to what they notice about life, what they think life is, and come up with ways of highlighting those things? The indifference to the unique relationship between the writer and their story (or between the writer and the reason they are writing), which is necessarily a by-product of any generalized writing advice, is part of what makes the comedy in this book so great. As a teacher, “Sam Shelstad” is so literal, and takes the conventions of how to write successful fiction on such faith, that when he tries to relay these tips to his reader, the advice ends up sounding as absurd as it actually is.

more here.

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Lily Lynch in Sidecar:

Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) – the indirect successor to Austria’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party – used to generate apocalyptic headlines. Its successes were once treated as major news stories on both sides of the Atlantic, especially when the party was led by the telegenic Jörg Haider. A generational political talent, he led a campaign to force a referendum on restricting immigration in 1993 and pioneered a tanned, yuppy brand of right-wing politics that looks awfully familiar these days. Prior to Haider taking the helm in 1986, the FPÖ was a traditional bourgeois party dominated by decrepit Nazis and stodgy pan-German nationalists. But under his leadership, it was transformed into a modern populist outfit fuelled by xenophobia and entertainment. Haider, the New York Times magazine noted in 2000, ‘knows the glib, politics-as-pop-culture temper of his times’. ‘Europe, land of ghosts, is aghast.’

The Carinthian multi-millionaire was Austria’s wealthiest politician but styled himself a champion of the people, comfortable in the company of both the Viennese bourgeoisie and the clientele of rural beer halls. He poached support from the Socialist Party’s (SPÖ) traditional base with his economic populism, but was most successful with the middle class, who, in the years approaching the new millennium, feared losing jobs, status and state welfare as a result of immigration, European Union membership and globalization. The party’s dramatic metamorphosis under Haider was a spectacular electoral success, with results in the double digits and rising throughout the 90s. In 2000, having secured 27%, they entered government in coalition with the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), upending the country’s post-war political consensus, which had been built on the joint dominance of the ÖVP and SPÖ.

More here.

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Over at Frieze:

Gary Indiana, the novelist, playwright and critic who rose to prominence in the art world as a writer for the Village Voice in the 1980s, has died aged 74.

Born Gary Hoisington in Derry, New Hampshire in 1950, Indiana briefly studied at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out to pursue a career in ‘narrative porn’. After living among drug addicts in a rundown Los Angeles made famous by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Indiana moved to New York City in 1978, where he became an actor and playwright in the downtown theatre and cinema scenes.

From 1985 to 1988, Indiana served as an acerbic, fearsome art critic for the Village Voice, at once elevating the underrated and skewering the well-established. His commentary was informed yet personal, and it drew an intense readership for his reflections on the political and social situation facing artists at the time. ‘I was lucky to have a public voice in those faraway days,’ he later recalled. ‘Of course, the primary task was to cover exhibitions, but much of the art being made in the ’80s deal with the world beyond four walls of a gallery, and it seemed perfectly natural to blend art criticism with commentary on the state of things.’

More here.

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Bhaskar Sunkara in The Ideas Letter:

Can you build social democracy without workers? This question would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Today, it captures a central challenge that left-of-center parties face around the world.

In the United States, even as the Democratic Party has moved leftward on both social and economic issues, it has less working-class support than ever. In 2020, Joe Biden lost non-college educated voters by 4 points. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, Harris was trailing by 17 points. The shift in the party’s appeal is evident even among unionized workers. In 1992, Bill Clinton won that demographic by 30 points. In 2020, Biden beat Donald Trump by 19. In the latest forecasts, Harris’s advantage is just 9 points.

Similar shifts are in play across the advanced capitalist world, such as in Germany, where the socialist party Die Linke (the Left Party) went from receiving nearly one third of the vote in the country’s industrial eastern states in 2019 to barely registering as an electoral force there this year. Likewise, even though it is still in power, the Social Democratic Party has tended to fare poorly among workers, who are increasingly drawn to the far-right appeals of the Alternative for Germany: The AfD recently became the biggest group in Thuringia’s state parliament.

For decades, those still committed to a traditional social-democratic program have responded to this crisis of support with some combination of downplaying the problem, looking for substitutes for lost working-class voters, and trying to re-engage their former base by moving rightward on social issues. So far none of those answers has proved satisfactory.

More here.

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Jonmaas in Medium:

At first, the poet Emily Dickinson and the novelist Franz Kafka might not seem connected. They are both influential writers to be sure, but beyond their general impact, the similarities seem to end. They wrote in different formats, addressed different themes, lived in different eras and geographic locations, and it is rare to hear them mentioned in the same breath.

It also seems that they did not influence one another. Dickinson lived before Kafka, and there isn’t a great deal of evidence that Kafka read Dickinson, let alone was impacted by her. Perhaps most importantly, these two writers engender different sentiments in their readers.

Dickinson’s poems bring joy, Kafka’s novellas illustrate alienation and despair―albeit the kind that brings insight to his readers, and perhaps even joy as well. If they were not connected by similarities of their prose, then they were bound by the threads of how they came to make their prose. And the last common thread might give insight into both the human condition — and the foundation of art itself.

More here.

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Alexandra Alter in The New York Times:

This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of “McNeal,” his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel. He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded like a computer wrote it. So Akhtar uploaded what he had written into ChatGPT, gave the program a list of words, and told it to produce a speech in the style of Shakespeare. The results were so compelling that he read the speech to the cast at the next rehearsal.

“Their jaws dropped,” Akhtar said. “It had preserved the speech that I wrote, using those words in such fascinating ways that it was astonishing to everybody there.”

Ultimately, Akhtar used only two of the chatbot’s lines. But his attempt to mimic A.I.-generated text — an oddly circular process of a human imitating a computer’s imitation of a human — had an uncanny effect: Downey’s delivery of the final speech feels both intimate and strangely disembodied.

More here.

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Even the words that we are speaking now
thieving time
has stolen away,
and nothing can return,
—from the Odes or Horace

The Greatest Mystery

I stop and do nothing. Nothing happens.
I am thinking about nothing.
I listen to the passing of time.

This is time, familiar and intimate.
We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years
that hurls us toward life then drags us toward nothingness . . .
We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is in time.
It’s solemn music nurtures us, Opens the world to us,
Troubles us, frightens and lulls us.

The universe unfolds into time,
the events of the universe succeed each other
in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures
—the past is fixed, the future open . . . And yet
all of this has turned out to be false,
the features of time have proved to be
approximations, like the flatness of earth
or a revolving sun . . .

by Carlo Rovelli
from The Order of Time
Riverhead Books, 2018

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