Brad East in The Hedgehog Review:

The conceit at the heart of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels is simple. There is a house in London for misfit spies. When MI5 is unable, for one reason or another, to fire failed employees, it opts to send them there. The exile is permanent, though the losers who suffer it do their best to pretend it isn’t. It’s a win-win for the service, in any case. No one gets sued. HR is pacified. And banishment proves either so unbearably dull and humiliating that the misfit spies voluntarily quit, or they remain there forever, whiling away the hours without hope of redemption. It is said of the souls in Dante’s purgatorio that the unhappiest are happier than the happiest on earth. Conversely, the happiest in Herron’s inferno are unhappier than the unhappiest outside its walls.

More here.

Rachel Dobkin in Newsweek:

Comedian Bill Maher‘s “Kid ‘N Prey” segment on Friday went viral on social media after he criticized the child entertainment industry. On Friday’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher reacted to the recently released documentary Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, which exposed the sexual abuse and hostile work environment that child actors faced at the hands of adults at Nickelodeon. The comedian posted the segment from his show on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday night with the caption, “It turns out for pedophiles in Hollywood, ‘It’s A Small World After All.'” It has amassed 28.3 million views as of Saturday afternoon. Maher said he was “grossed out” by the revelations in the documentary, adding that “it didn’t just expose a dangerous workplace. It also exposed hypocrisy.”

He said that when Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis “was saying the exact same thing about kids and creepy stuff at Disney—that liberals now find intolerable at Nickelodeon—he was dismissed as a hick and a bigot, but why would a kid’s content factory like Disney be all that different than the one at Nickelodeon?” During a legal feud with Disney that started when the company’s then-CEO Bob Chapek publicly opposed a controversial bill that restricts certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida schools known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, DeSantis accused Disney of adding a lot of “sexuality into the programming for young kids,” which the company denied. The legal dispute was settled in March.

Maher referenced a 2014 CNN article that reported that at least 35 Disney employees were arrested on sex crimes involving children since 2006, according to court records and other documentation.

More here.

Worm Moon

I.
In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.

II.
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

III.
because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping –
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run
over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.

IV.
Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

V.
Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

VI.
and probably
everything
is possible.

by Mary Oliver
from — 12 Moons.

Koh Ewe in Time:

In a place as dry as the desert city of Dubai, whenever they can get rain, they’ll take it. United Arab Emirates authorities will often even try to make it rain—as they did earlier this week when the National Center of Meteorology dispatched planes to inject chemicals into the clouds to try to coax some showering. But this time they got much more than they wanted. Dubai faced torrential downpours on Tuesday, with flooding shutting down much of the city, including schools and its major airport—killing at least one man whose car was swept away as well as at least 18 others in neighboring Oman, including a bus full of schoolchildren. The UAE government media office said it was the heaviest rainfall recorded in 75 years and called it “an exceptional event.” More than a typical year’s worth of water was dumped on the country in a single day.

Now, many people are pointing a finger at the “cloud seeding” operations preceding the precipitation.

More here.

Fara Dabhoiwala at The Guardian:

Everything Must Go is about how, over the past 200 years, writers and artists have built on this inheritance to create new kinds of non-Christian eschatology. Ever since Lord Byron’s poem Darkness (1816), which dispensed with God, people have been creating secular fictions about the three main non-divine ways in which things might end – the annihilation of the planet, the extinction of humankind or the collapse of civilisation. Movies, radio broadcasts, comic books, pop songs, plays, novels, paintings, television shows, video games – it turns out that these scenarios have inspired a huge amount of detailed invention, mainly for entertainment. We love to wallow in our worst nightmares.

The form that such stories take is always influenced by the scientific and environmental events and concerns of their time. In May 1941, months before the start of the top-secret Manhattan Project, author Robert Heinlein published a story about a clandestine scheme to build a weapon from uranium-235.

more here.

Benjamin Markovits at the New York Times:

This week is the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death. The most famous poet of his age (an odd phrase now) died fighting for Greek independence in the marshes of Missolonghi. “Who would write, who had anything better to do?” he once said. There was a strange contest over his body and memory: The lungs and larynx remained in Greece but friends carried the rest back to England, where huge crowds followed the funeral procession. A month after his death, his former editor burned his memoirs, worried they would damage the reputation of a superstar read around the world.

Does anyone read Byron now? He’s one of those unusual figures who have become better known for the lives they led than the books they wrote. Even some of his fans admire the letters more than the poems. It isn’t totally clear what it means to say that Byron is your favorite poet. Of the so-called Big Six Romantics, he’s the hardest to place.

more here.

Death is Smoking my Cigars

You know: I’m drunk once again
here
listening to Tchaikovsky
on the radio.

Jesus, I heard him 47 years
ago
when I was a starving writer
and here he is
again
and now I am a minor success as
a writer
and death is walking
up and down
this room
smoking my cigars
taking hits of my
wine
as Tchaik is working away
at the Pathetique,
it’s been some journey
and any luck I’ve had was
because I rolled the dice
right:
I starved for my art, I starved to
gain 5 god-damned minutes, 5 hours,
5 days-
I just wanted to get the word
down;
fame, money, didn’t matter:
I wanted the word down;
and “they” wanted me to be a stock boy in a
department store.

Well, death says, as he walks by,
I’m going to get you anyhow
no matter what you’ve been:
writer, cab driver, pimp, butcher,
sky-diver, I’m going to get
you…

Ok baby, I tell him.

We drink together now
as one am slides to 2
a.m. and
only he knows the
moment, but I worked a con
on him: I got my
5 god-damned minutes
and much
more.

by Charles Bukowski
from: The Last Night of the Earth Poems.

Jonathan Kandell in the New York Times:

Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82.

His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.

But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with other famed scholars and thinkers.

More here.

Paul Brown in Singular Discoveries:

The message in a bottle washed ashore on a rocky beach at Coldingham Bay, Scotland, on the morning of March 11, 1909. For anxious relatives and friends, the hastily-scrawled note seemed to confirm their fears that the two-masted sailboat and its ten crew members were lost at sea.

The Snowdrop had departed from Dundee almost a year earlier as part of a small whaling fleet bound for the Arctic waters of the Davis Strait between Greenland and Canada. It was last seen there in the summer of 1908 and reported as “All well.” But when the fleet returned to Dundee with its catch of fifteen whales that November, the Snowdrop was missing, and its fate unknown.

For several weeks, the Dundee whaling community awaited the Snowdrop’s return, expecting that it had been delayed by ice. But by the beginning of 1909, they began to call for shipping agents to send a relief ship in search of the missing boat and crew.

More here.

Nicola Jones in Nature:

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, have become so advanced that they now very nearly match or exceed human performance in tasks including reading comprehension, image classification and competition-level mathematics, according to a new report (see ‘Speedy advances’). Rapid progress in the development of these systems also means that many common benchmarks and tests for assessing them are quickly becoming obsolete.

These are just a few of the top-line findings from the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024, which was published on 15 April by the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University in California. The report charts the meteoric progress in machine-learning systems over the past decade.

More here.

Philip A. Goduti, Jr. in The Conversation:

In my view as a scholar of Kennedy’s life, he set the modern-day standard for public service that is all but absent in the 2024 presidential election dominated by the legal woes of Donald Trump and the age of 81-year-old President Joe Biden.

Kennedy’s lofty rhetoric, coupled with his energetic youth, propelled the nation into what he termed the “New Frontier,” the campaign slogan he used to inspire ordinary citizens to make the world a better place at a time of Cold War nuclear tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

“Let us begin anew … remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof,” Kennedy said during his inaugural address in 1961. “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

More here.

Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

“Noise” is a fuzzy word—a noisy one, in the statistical sense. Its meanings run the gamut from the negative to the positive, from the overpowering to the mysterious, from anarchy to sublimity. The negative seems to lie at the root: etymologists trace the word to “nuisance” and “nausea.” Noise is what drives us mad; it sends the Grinch over the edge at Christmastime. (“Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!”) Noise is the sound of madness itself, the din within our minds. The demented narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” jabbers about noise while he hallucinates his victim’s heartbeat: “I found that the noise was not within my ears. . . . The noise steadily increased. . . . The noise steadily increased.”

Yet noise can be righteous and majestic. The Psalms are full of joyful noise, noise unto the Lord. In the Book of Ezekiel, the voice of God is said to be “like a noise of many waters.” In “Paradise Lost,” Heaven makes “infernal noise” as it beats back the armies of Hell. Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” marshals forces for a different kind of battle.

more here.