Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

Omer Bartov was born in Israel, was raised in a Zionist household and served for four years in the Israel Defense Forces. Now he teaches at Brown, where he is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies. When he writes about Israel, a state founded in the aftermath of World War II, his understanding of his subject is both historical and intimate.

In November 2023, a month after Hamas’s brutal attacks on Oct. 7, he published an opinion essay in The New York Times about Israel’s military response. “I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza,” he wrote, “although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.”

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From Science:

Even in the best of times, changing society for the better feels like a formidable task. Measures that improve sustainability and public well-being can be good for business and beneficial for humanity, but how do societal transitions occur? The Socioscope tackles the fundamental issue of systemic change and addresses a gap in the social sciences: the absence of strong, empirically based methods for studying complex societal shifts across different levels.

Entrenched systems have a tendency to resist change of any kind. And yet change does come. For example, accumulating plastic waste is a major environmental issue in Colombia, and as of 2023, only 3% of that discarded material was being recycled. To tackle this problem, the Colombian beverage company Postobón has spent the past few years providing training, equipment, and other resources to associations like Coprofercol, a collective representing the impoverished workers who do the lion’s share of waste collection in Colombia. This investment has not only boosted recycling, but has also helped this collective to grow. “Now 10% of Colombia’s waste pickers are in these associations,” says Saadi Lahlou, a statistician and economist and director of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, “which has a huge social impact, because many of these people used to sleep in the street.”

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Denva Gallant at Aeon Magazine:

Mark’s composure is only one element in a larger visual system. Around him, other bodies strain, bind and strike. At the centre of the martyrdom scene stands a Black would-be executioner, his arm raised to deliver a blow. He is visually arresting – the only Black figure in the composition – but he is not unprecedented. By the 13th century, the Black executioner had become a recognisable type in Western art. Often shown carrying out the violent commands of rulers, his body performed the act that others authorised. In such scenes, violence is routed through him.

In the mosaic at the Basilica in Piazza San Marco, that flow is made visible. The executioner’s chain is wrapped around Mark’s neck. He lifts a stick, his hand positioned in suspended animation. Will he hit Mark? That moment has been delayed because, as the written narrative of the saint’s life narrates, the air had suddenly gone turbulent: a manifestation of God. Although the storm halts the blow, it does not undo the violence the image has already lodged in his figure. The upward glance registers exposure to the sacred.

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Budapest

My pen moves along the page
like the snout of a strange animal
shaped like a human arm
and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater.

I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly,
intent as any forager that has nothing
on its mind but the grubs and insects
that will allow it to live another day.

It wants only to be here tommorow,
dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt,
nosed pressed against the page,
writing a few more dutiful lines

while I gaze out the window and imagine Budapest
or some other city where I have never been.

by Billy Collins
from Sailing Alone Around the Room
Random House, 2001

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Brooks Riley at Art At First Sight:

Every once in a while, a work of art tells us something about ourselves we didn’t know. In an instant, aspects of our identity fall into place—triggered by details on a canvas, a film we’re watching, or a musical phrase we’re hearing—suggesting affinities we were not aware of.

It’s a given that the brain knows things we don’t—connections it has made on its own, regardless of id or ego. These secrets might be minor, but once exposed, they light up corners of our being we long thought were empty.

Beyond the personal insights, such moments can enrich the aesthetic contemplation of a work of art, adding a level of understanding as unique as a finger print—accessible to no one else.

Not long ago, watching an emotional confrontation between two Korean detectives in the brilliant TV series Beyond Evil, I was suddenly carried back to Jean Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece, La Grande Illusion, set during World War I…

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Fred Pearce at Undark:

“The impacts of sea level rise under climate change have been systematically underestimated,” concludes Matt Palmer, a specialist on sea level rise at the U.K. Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Science. “We could see devastating impacts much earlier than predicted — particularly in the Global South.”

“Taken jointly, these two papers paint a considerably more concerning picture than either would in isolation,” says Franck Ghomsi, an oceanographer at the University of Cape Town. “We are seeing an emerging body of research that rewrites the story of coastal vulnerability.”

Around 80 million people today are living on land in coastal areas below sea level — almost twice previous estimates.

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Yascha Mounk and Luis Garicano discuss how AI will reshape labor markets, productivity, and economic growth:

Yascha Mounk: There are many things I would love to talk to you about, but the topic I have been thinking about a lot is artificial intelligence. I have had conversations on this podcast about the technology itself with people like Geoffrey Hinton. I have discussed the dimension of existential risk with people like one of the co-authors of If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies. I have also thought about some of the broader public policy angles.

However, I have not yet had a conversation specifically about the economics of artificial intelligence. It would be really interesting to try to get a handle on those questions. We will focus particularly on the labor market, but before we get there: what, in general, do you expect the impact of AI to be? Is it going to be major, middling, or minor? Is it going to lead to the vast economic growth some are predicting, or is it going to really decimate the number of jobs out there for humans? Is this going to be an economically revolutionary time, or is it just one of many developments that are interesting but ultimately not that consequential?

Luis Garicano: I don’t have a crystal ball—anticipating things is always hard. But let me give you my best take based on what we see.

More here.

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Marina Harss at the Hudson Review:

There are works of art that have the reputation of being a bore. Jerome Robbins’ Goldberg Variations is one of them. After its premiere in 1971, Arlene Croce, the lapidary (and brilliant) critic declared it to be “ninety minutes at hard labor,” and George Balanchine, whom Robbins idolized and considered his artistic superior, is said to have compared it to homogenized milk.⁠^[1] Robbins himself seems to have had doubts about it, describing the process of making it to a friend as akin to “hacking my way to the end,” though he later changed his mind.
 
New York City Ballet seldom brings it back. At nearly an hour and a half—even longer than his Dances at a Gathering—without an intermission, it’s not easy to program. A recent development has paved the way to its return: the occasional programming of two long ballets rather than three shorter ones, separated by a single intermission. And thus, Goldberg Variations has quietly re-entered the building. I watched it twice last season, struck each time not only by its tranquil mastery and deep musical understanding, but also by the way it shows the company, the individual qualities of its dancers as well as the relationships between them. Its power, like that of Bach’s series of variations, accumulates slowly, moment by moment. By the end, as the original theme returns, you are left with the feeling of having experienced a great arc, a fully realized idea explored in all its possibilities and permutations. It is, I think, a great work.

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Bright Simons in The Ideas Letter:

AI doesn’t really “think.” Rather, it remembers how we thought together. And we’re about to stop giving it anything worth remembering.

We are on the verge of the age of human redundancy. In 2023, IBM’s chief executive told Bloomberg that soon some 7,800 roles might be replaced by AI. The following year, Duolingo cut a tenth of its contractor workforce; it needed to free up desks for AI. Atlassian followed. Klarna announced that its AI assistant was performing work equivalent to 700 customer-service employees and that reducing the size of its workforce to under 2000 is now its North Star. And Jack Dorsey has been forthright about wanting to hold Block’s headcount flat while AI shoulders the growth.

The trajectory has a compelling internal logic. Routine cognitive work gets automated; junior roles thin out; productivity gains compound year on year. For boards reviewing cost structures, it is the cleanest investment proposition since the internal combustion engine retired the horse, topped up with a kind of moral momentum. Hesitate, the thinking goes, and fall behind.

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Sneha Khedkar in The Scientist:

Whether people use them to check notifications in the office or track their workouts in the gym, devices like Fitbits and Oura rings have become a default part of daily wear. According to a recent survey, nearly 45 percent of Americans own wearables, giving them access to their health data at their fingertips—or wrists.¹ Given this, researchers and clinicians hope to tap into the continuous data the devices collect to monitor the health of people with cancer.

“Because users tend to wear these 24/7, we really are able to get a glimpse into the 99 percent of patients’ lives when they are not in our clinical spaces in front of us,” said Carissa Low, a clinical health psychologist who studies management of physical and psychological symptoms during and after cancer treatment at the University of Pittsburgh. “We’re able to capture their behavior and physiology between clinical visits as they’re going about their usual daily routines,” said Low.

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Sophie Haigney and Nilo Cruz at the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

The underworld, limbo, and purgatory appear often in myth and the classics. Were there any tales that were on your mind as you were writing?

CRUZ

I started to think about what the rules of this liminal world should be, so I thought of the Greek myth “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and the rules in that story. In “Orpheus and Eurydice,” it is Orpheus who goes into the underworld—by charming the gods with his music—and when he is guiding Eurydice out of the world of the dead, one of the rules is that he cannot turn back. I thought, Well, it could be interesting in this world of Frida and Diego if the dead could not touch the living—if Frida is touched by Diego, she has to relive the pain she experienced in life, not only physically but emotionally. I thought that would be an interesting law to have in the opera, and of course, that it would be interesting for that law to be broken, which then causes the tragedy of the piece. I loved discovering, little by little, the complexities of this unfamiliar world. For me, opera should embrace the mythical, or grand themes.

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On Living

—excerpt

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example—

I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree

that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people—

even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

by Nazim Hikmet
from Poets.org

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Jacob Bielecki at Quillette:

“Artists given complete freedom die a horrible death. So, when you tell them what they can’t do, they get creative and say, ‘Oh yes I can,’” Peter Gabriel told music journalist Mark Blake in 2011. This was Gabriel’s reasoning for telling his former Genesis bandmate, Phil Collins, whom he had recruited to play drums on his third self-titled album (nicknamed Melt) that he did not want the album to feature any cymbals. The limitations Gabriel imposed on Collins gave birth to a great new innovation in popular music. In 1979, while Phil Collins was in the middle of drumming at London’s Townhouse Studios experimenting with finding a compelling drum sound without using cymbals, engineer Hugh Padgham accidentally turned on the microphone hanging above the drum kit, which enabled those in the studio to communicate with those in the control room. The powerful sound that emerged from Collins’s drums when the mic was switched on was unlike anything he had ever heard before. It became known as the gated reverb and it was discovered at the perfect time, just when a new sound was needed to keep popular music fresh in the new decade that was about to begin.

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Yasemin Saplakoglu at Quanta:

The brain is “incredibly plastic, and it stays that way throughout the lifespan of a human,” said Christine Grienberger(opens a new tab), a neuroscientist at Brandeis University. This plasticity, the quality of being easily reshaped, makes the brain really good at learning — a quintessential process that allows us to remember the plotline of a novel, navigate a new city, pick up a new language, and avoid touching a hot stove. But neuroscientists are still uncovering fundamental rules that describe how neuroplasticity reshapes brain connections.

Recently, neuroscientists described a new form of neuroplasticity that might be helping the brain learn across a timescale of several seconds — long enough to capture the behavioral process of learning from a single experience.

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Alex Imas at Ghosts of Electricity:

Economics is the study of decision-making under constraints, i.e., scarcity. If advanced AI brings material abundance—if machines can produce many if not all forms of human production at very low marginal cost—does economics become irrelevant? No, we will still have scarcity, but the kind of scarcity that matters will change. Ultimately the answer to any question about the future economics of advanced AI begins with identifying what becomes scarce. After answering that question, the rest of the analysis is pretty straightforward. In this essay I’m going to explore what becomes scarce when automation can replicate many if not all human production, and what that may mean for the types of jobs that emerge.

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Emma Loffhagen in The Guardian:

When Donald Trump returned to office in January last year, one of his first acts was to sign an executive order intended to cut federal funding for any school teaching what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A raft of other orders mandated the termination of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) personnel, offices and training across the federal government. Federal agencies began flagging hundreds of words to avoid or eliminate, including “intersectional” and “intersectionality”. All of which has amounted to 40 years of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work being literally and deliberately erased.

For decades, the 66-year-old legal scholar has been naming things that powerful people would prefer remain unnamed. In 1989, she coined the term intersectionality to describe the way race and gender overlap to shape lived experience, often in ways the law fails to recognise. Around the same time, she was one of a group of African American scholars who created the framework that came to be known as “critical race theory”, which sought to examine how racism is embedded in legal systems rather than simply enacted through individual prejudice. Now, Crenshaw’s ideas are being contested like never before.

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