Espen Hammer at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

While on paper an obvious insider, Raymond Geuss has for decades been criticizing contemporary philosophy as though he were an outsider, viewing it as an intellectually limiting practice too occupied with academically narrow, self-generated problems. He performs this critique with an eye to the past, returning often to canonical or more peripheral figures from the history not only of philosophy but adjacent fields such as literature and classics; accordingly, he aspires to occupy the position of the interdisciplinary critic and interpreter, highlighting exemplary achievements that inspire a more inclusive approach to philosophy.

To be sure, Geuss is also known for his cutting remarks on philosophers and politicians whose judgments depend on a commitment to some unifying principle that, in his view, tends to misrepresent our standing in the world. Moral and political ‘rule-first’ normativists, such as Kant, Rawls, and Habermas, and power politicians prone to speak in the name of pretentious moral ideals, such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, have been the targets of some rather scathing treatment. If anything, Geuss’s impulse has always been nominalist, prioritizing particulars over generalities, perspectivism over objectivism, and to couch that within an equally decisive measure of realism.

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…..After He Left

When the children were small and sleeping,
the night warm and raining,

I would go out to a place under the broken
eaves. Naked, yes. And standing under,

wash my hair with rain and the dark of night.
I could hear cars on the other side

of the duplex. I could smell the sheets
upstairs. I still couldn’t touch anything

labeled future. Lonely in the rain,
the spirit is beautiful. It can marry

the heart for no one to see. As I said,
I washed my hair under the broken rain,

and stood there in the night, glistening.

by Jeanie Tomasko
from Rattle Magazine #4- 20/14

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From Nature:

Jane Goodall, a British primatologist known for her work with chimpanzees, died on Wednesday 1 October, aged 91. She was in California on a speaking tour and died of natural causes, according to the Jane Goodall Institute.

Goodall is best known for her work with chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. She was the first to discover that chimpanzees made and used tools¹. She went on to become an advocate for conservation, human rights and animal welfare, including stopping the use of animals in medical research. She established the Jane Goodall Institute, a non-profit wildlife and conservation organization in Washington DC, in 1977.

Here are the ways in which Goodall’s legacy will endure.

Humanizing primates

While studying for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK, in the early 1960s, Goodall broke with the scientific convention of using numbers to identify animals, assigning them names instead. She named a male chimp with silver facial hair David Greybeard. This change upset senior scientists at the time, but it is now common practice to use animal names.

More here.

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Born in Tamale and primarily raised in Accra, Mahama chose to base his art studio, Red Clay, in the provincial city rather than in the nation’s capital. Tamale, an important trading hub in northern Ghana, is known for its fugu clothing, a type of smock with roots in the Malian and Songhai empires. Over the centuries, Muslim traders built mosques and schools in sedate Tamale, which was more inland and distant from the direct links of the transatlantic slave and colonial trade. By contrast, Accra, the nation’s capital, with its Parliamentary Building and Black Star Square, is enlivened by streams of mellow banter and commerce. The city’s nocturnal activity creates an electric pulse. Pentecostal revival meeting lights and condominium-sale advertisements illuminate the city, leaving a ruddy glow along the highway. Although both Accra and Tamale have influenced Mahama’s work insofar as he draws from the capital’s marketplace and the provincial city’s scrap metal, his talent emerged against the broader backdrop of the postindependence promise of industrialization and its failure to deliver prosperity to most Ghanaians. Mahama’s installations, which say something about societal deterioration, also dramatize the country’s inability to sustain robust funding in the arts or technology in its postindependence years.

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Robert Zaretsky at The American Scholar:

“The Days of Awe are coming.” Rather than a tagline for a Netflix series modeled on Game of Thrones, the phrase is the literal translation of Yamim Nora’im, or Jewish High Holidays. These awesome days begin with Rosh Hashanah on September 22 and reach a crescendo with Yom Kippur on October.

As a freshly minted man by the grace of a bar mitzvah, I cowered from the awe inspired by the fierce god who, Moses reminds the Israelites in Deuteronomy, spoke to them, unseen, through fire. “The gate between heaven and earth cracks open,” I was reminded, and “the Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them.”

Words chiseled on tablets in the mists of the distant past seem to carry greater weight than do words appearing on screens today. And yet, even though I am no longer an observant Jew, I am still filled with a kind of dread when the Days of Awe approach. They remind me, I imagine, of the fragility, ephemerality, and sheer contingency of our lives. Hardly surprising, then, that both “fear” and “awe” are encompassed by one word in Hebrew, yirah.

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Cassandra Neyenesch at Public Books:

Martha, a journalist played by Tilda Swinton, has terminal cancer. She asks her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to come away with her to a house in upstate New York and be in the room next door when she takes a suicide pill she bought on the dark web. Like all of Pedro Almodóvar’s films, The Room Next Door is gorgeous to look at, completely unsentimental, and staunchly uninterested in absolutes, rules, or dogmas. This is Almodóvar’s gift: moral gray tones painted in vibrant colors. When Martha says the gangster line, “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first,” we sense that it’s an expression of Almodóvar’s own defiant punk spirit.

Almodóvar is an artist of eros, in the sense that the dynamics between the characters tend to escalate into sex, not infrequently rape. The director is sex obsessed, but in earlier films like Talk to Her and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! he also uses sex to provoke discomfort, disgust, and titillation in the viewer. It works because he himself is a siren, and he is seducing us. His movies are so ravishing and hilarious that we find ourselves helpless to patrol our boundaries, and we just give in to their transgressive spell.

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Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

Last week, OpenAI released a new test of AI ability, but this one differs from the usual benchmarks built around math or trivia. For this test, OpenAI gathered experts with an average of 14 years of experience in industries ranging from finance to law to retail and had them design realistic tasks that would take human experts an average of four to seven hours to complete (you can see all the tasks here). OpenAI then had both AI and other experts do the tasks themselves. A third group of experts graded the results, not knowing which answers came from the AI and which from the human, a process which took about an hour per question.

Human experts won, but barely, and the margins varied dramatically by industry. Yet AI is improving fast, with more recent AI models scoring much higher than older ones. Interestingly, the major reason for AI losing to humans was not hallucinations and errors, but a failure to format results well or follow instructions exactly — areas of rapid improvement. If the current patterns hold, the next generation of AI models should beat human experts on average in this test. Does that mean AI is ready to replace human jobs?

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Richard Haass at Project Syndicate:

Five years ago, I wrote a commentary about the United Nations as it turned 75. The title, “The UN’s Unhappy Birthday,” said it all. The UN is now 80, but my critique back then remains all too valid today. The UN’s slide into near-irrelevance continues unabated.

The annual September gathering of world leaders in New York, which has just ended, is less important for what the UN does (which is little in the realm of preventing or ending wars) than for what it provides, namely a venue for all sorts of bilateral and multilateral meetings among the high-level visitors. Think of it as Davos for diplomats.

But the UN itself is a victim of chronic malaise, owing above all to the resurgence of great-power rivalry. The state of international affairs today is a far cry from what it was in 1990 when the world came together through the UN in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait.

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In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact.
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

Robert Graves,
from To Read a Poem
by Donald Hall
Harcourt Brace, 1992

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Richard Grant in Smithsonian:

Cormac McCarthy, one of the greatest novelists America has ever produced and one of the most private, had been dead for 13 months when I arrived at his final residence outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was a stately old adobe house, two stories high with beam-ends jutting out of the exterior walls, set back from a country road in a valley below the mountains. First built in 1892, the house was expanded and modernized in the 1970s and extensively modified by McCarthy himself, who, it turns out, was a self-taught architect as well as a master of literary fiction.

I was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who were embroiled in a herculean endeavor. Working unpaid, with help from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students, they had taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog every single book in McCarthy’s enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library. They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.

What makes McCarthy’s library so intriguing is not just its size, nor the fact that very few people know about it. His books, many of which are annotated with margin comments, promise to reveal far more about this elusive literary giant than the few cagey interviews he gave when he was alive. For as long as people have been reading McCarthy, they have speculated about which books and authors informed and inspired his work, a subject he was loath to discuss. They have wondered about his interests and true personality because all he presented to the public was a reclusive, austere, inscrutable facade.

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Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist:

Circulating tumor cells were first described in 1869 by Thomas Ashworth, an Australian pathologist who observed them in a peripheral blood sample taken from a patient with metastatic cancer.¹ They have since been detected in a range of tumor types, including breast, prostate, colorectal, ovarian, lung, liver, gastric, and pancreatic cancers, as well as melanoma.²

Researchers and clinicians can use circulating tumor cells to study cancer in a non-invasive way, gaining valuable insights into the biology of tumors. In this article, we explore what these cells are, the challenges associated with studying them, and how they enable scientists to diagnose cancer early, predict clinical outcomes, understand metastasis, monitor the efficacy of treatments, and develop personalized medicines.

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Richard Hughes Gibson at the Hedgehog Review:

“Now he is scattered among a hundred cities,” W.H. Auden wrote in 1939, “And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections.” Auden was ruminating on the recent death of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, but the words could serve as an epitaph for any great author. Poets like to imagine that their creations confer afterlives—for themselves and their subjects—impervious to the assaults of “wasteful war” and “sluttish time” so ruinous to monuments of marble or metal (see Horace’s Ode 3.30 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55). But as Auden recognized, the moment an author dies, his or her legacy is on the loose. Any chance those poems have of a future depends on what readers make of them: “The words of a dead man,” Auden continues, “Are modified in the guts of the living.”

In Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, Joseph Luzzi, literature professor at Bard College, offers a vivid account of this process of cultural digestion, and, at times, indigestion, from the Middle Ages to the present day. At first glance, such a slim book—little more than two hundred pages, including notes—would hardly seem adequate to the task, given the number, ardor, and productivity of Dante’s devotees over the centuries. Yet, as Luzzi argues in the introduction, those are exactly the reasons against attempting a truly comprehensive reception history of the Comedy (as Dante called it—Divine was added later by a Venetian printer). Such a study’s girth would be measured in hundreds of thousands of pages. No one would read it.

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Ted Nordhaus at the New Atlantis:

McKibben’s solar revolution has unfurled with startling rapidity. The last two years, he argues, have marked an epochal technoeconomic shift. And yet, despite a lot of solar deployment during that period, one would be hard-pressed to find much evidence of a shift in any of the key greenhouse-gas emissions metrics. The vast majority of global energy continues to be produced by fossil fuels, a fact that hasn’t much changed for decades. The Chinese “electro-state” that McKibben says represents the future doesn’t look appreciably different in this regard than the U.S. “petrostate” that he says is now trying to hold that future back. Both still depend on fossil fuels for about 80 percent of their energy consumption.

Across Here Comes the Sun’s narrative arc, what is apparent is that despite McKibben’s best efforts at optimism, the epochal shift over the last two years that actually animates the book is the return of Donald Trump. Here Comes the Sun is a rearguard action, not a victory march — an effort to sustain the climate politics that McKibben has played such a crucial role in constructing over the last generation at an existential moment for his movement.

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Freya India at After Babel:

They say my generation is wasting our lives watching mindless entertainment. But I think things are worse than that. We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop, but becoming it.

We have been posting about our lives for a long time. But now I notice something else, something more than a compulsion to capture and share moments. I see people turning into TV characters, their memories into episodes, themselves into entertainment. We have become the meaningless content, swiped past and scrolled through. Experiences, relationships, even our own children, are cheapened, packaged, churned out for others to consume. For some of us growing older has become a series of episodes to release: first the proposal, then the wedding, followed by house tours, pregnancy reveals, every milestone and update, on and on, forever. We exist to entertain each other.

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Ashley Dawson at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ENERGY-RELATED CARBON EMISSIONS hit an all-time high in 2024, contributing to record atmospheric concentrations of CO2. As a result, last year was the warmest year on record, the first that was more than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. But how is this possible given the record levels of global investment in and deployment of renewables, which reached an all-time high with 536 gigawatts of renewable capacity added in 2023?

The answer is that fossil fuels are not being replaced by renewables, as the term energy transition suggests. Instead, they are being added to the total energy supply. What we are witnessing, in other words, is energy addition rather than transition. Or, to put it another way, we are living through a green transition; it’s just that it’s not the one that climate activists, scientists, or, indeed, anyone concerned about life on this planet actually wants. This green transition is likely to blow us through 2.0°C of global warming by the end of the 2030s, with all the environmental and social disruption that this implies.

To win a decline in global emissions, we must shut down the ongoing fossil-fuel production that is driving energy addition.

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Nicole Meeker in Interesting Facts:

While ants can be annoying (see: showing up at your picnic table), humans generally regard them as good workers, which is how they’ve often been portrayed in folklore and fables such as Aesop’s “The Ants & the Grasshopper.” So it may come as a surprise that not all worker ants are performing at peak productivity; in fact, some research shows that up to 40% of worker ants in a colony may remain idle while other ants trudge on with their duties.

Biologists with the University of Arizona observing ant colonies in 2015 found that many of the ants seemed to slack while other ants performed chores. And in research published two years later by some of the same scientists, the team examined 20 ant colonies, marking some of the creatures with tiny paint drops and observing their movements. When the “lazy” ants were removed from their nest, life and work continued on more or less as before. But scientists discovered a major shift when actively working ants were whisked away; the once-idle ants stepped into their missing counterparts’ roles, assuming tasks that were going uncompleted. That encouraged scientists to view them not as lazy, but as part of a reserve force.

One theory for the behavior change is that keeping a team of workers on standby allows ant colonies to remain productive. A similar study in 2018 found that only 30% of workers in fire ant colonies dug tunnels, while other members of the nest waited nearby in a move that actually sped up work by preventing traffic jams in the narrow spaces.

More here.

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