Jeanette Winterson [and others] in The Guardian:

In my book of essays about life with AI – moving from Mary Shelley’s 1818 vision of a man-made humanoid to the possibilities of the metaverse – I describe AI not as artificial intelligence but alternative intelligence.

I am not thrilled with where Homo sapiens has landed us, and I believe we are at the point where we evolve or wipe out ourselves, and the planet. There is no reason to believe that the last 300,000 years mark us out as a species that is fully evolved. Our behaviour suggests the opposite. I would like to see a transhuman, eventually a post-human, future where intelligence and consciousness are no longer exclusively housed in a substrate made of meat. After all, that has been the promise of every world religion.

I was brought up in a strict religious household, and it intrigues me that for the first time since the Enlightenment, science and religion are asking the same question: is consciousness obliged to materiality? Religion has always said no. Scientific materialism has said yes. And now? It’s getting interesting.

More here.

Roma Agrawal at Literary Hub:

We have been through a radical shift in technology across just three generations of my family, and each step of the way has changed our lives dramatically, just as they did for society as a whole: allowing us to communicate with our loved ones, creating the world of instant news, changing the way we work, and altering the way we entertain and are entertained. But while a video call may seem a far cry from the telegram, all these forms of modern communication are based on the science of signals being sent from one distant point to another, almost instantaneously. And our ability to do that centers around magnets.

More here.

Sam Adler-Bell at Commonweal:

In an essay on the voluble New York intellectual Dwight Macdonald, George Scialabba cites Lionel Trilling’s assessment of Orwell, who, for Trilling, exemplified “the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do.”

Much the same could be said of George Scialabba. For forty-four years, he has made a gift of his “direct, undeceived intelligence”—I would not say “simple”—to those fortunate readers who, as Richard Rorty once recommended, “stay on the lookout for [his] byline.”

Scialabba’s new collection, Only a Voice, contains twenty-eight previously published essays, the earliest from 1984, the latest (from this magazine) in 2021. They’re gathered here with a new introduction that takes up a perennial question for Scialabba—“What are intellectuals good for?”—and an apposite epigraph from Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”

More here.

Virginia Postrel at Quillette:

Like printed books, perspective drawing, and double-entry bookkeeping, pockets were heralds of the modern era. In most times and places, people have either carried their money, combs, papers, and other small items in bags separate from their garments or tucked them into belts or sleeves. Integrated pockets are a product of European tailoring, which dates back only to the 14th century. They emerged when men’s breeches ballooned in the mid-1500s.

Early pockets were bags sewn to the inside of the waistband and otherwise hanging loose. They were significantly larger than modern pockets—a rare surviving example from 1567 is a foot deep—and sometimes included drawstrings. Regardless of size, the critical change was that the pocket became part of the clothing and thus a more secure and intimate extension of the wearer.

More here.

Quinn Slobodian in New German Critique:

The 1990s were salad days for All Things German in North America. Scenes of cheerful anarchy as the wall fell were followed by the mass introspection of Schindler’s List (1993) and the wave of Holocaust memory. Weimar lived. The third section of Madonna’s 1992 Girlie Show tour was “Weimar Cabaret.” Sam Mendes directed a remake of Cabaret, starring Alan Cumming as a twee dead ringer for Otto Dix’s portrait of Sylvia von Harden. Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) introduced Caligari aesthetics to a younger generation with the protagonist’s haircut borrowed from the Cure’s Robert Smith, whose Wish went platinum in 1992. My college roommate bought two oversize posters that she adorned our house with, one of the Cure, the other of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. A capstone was placed on the decade with the construction of the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, a moodier museum facing the Met, begun in 1996 and completed in 2001. Finally, you could LARP fin de siècle Vienna without leaving the New World. Newspapers were on sticks, and George Grosz paintings grimaced, mugged, and drooled from the gallery walls.

But the seeds of the fall were already on late-night television. When I stayed over at my grandmother’s, I could stay up late and watch Saturday Night Live. In a series of skits our Canadian hero, Mike Myers, hit the mystique of Germany with a laser-guided missile. In a recurring segment he was the host of a “West German television” show called Sprockets with a monkey called Klaus, a fake Kandinsky backdrop, and two authentic-looking Wassily chairs. He introduced Woody Harrelson in an asymmetrical haircut as the “irritant-in-residence at the Bremen Gallery of Modern Art.”¹ There was a bit called Germany’s “Most Disturbing Home Videos” and a dream sequence in which Myers was seduced by a leather-clad and Nazi-capped dominatrix named Exclamation Point. At each segment’s end Myers’s barked announcement that it “was the time on Sprockets that we dance” triggered expressionless turtlenecked gyrations in caricature of Egon Schiele—and, by extension, of Iggy Pop and David Bowie.

More here.

E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939), has a well-deserved reputation as a classic text that helped launch the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). Not only did Carr identify and dissect what would emerge as the two leading schools of thought in IR—utopianism and realism—he also applied a keen eye to the tumultuous decades after the Great War, when efforts to re-establish a functioning international political system foundered on a fundamental disruption to its most important operating principles. Carr framed these in terms of the relationship between power and morality, arguing that the latter had ultimately to accommodate itself to the changing dynamics of the former. Subsequent IR scholarship has mostly located Carr in the realist tradition of the discipline, concerned primarily with the balance of power and pursuit of national interest.

In what follows, however, I present him as part of a small group of mid-twentieth century intellectuals who tried to understand not so much the political irruptions of their time, but rather deeper disruptions within the world’s political economy. The Twenty Years’ Crisis certainly highlights how the balance of power within the international political system became dysfunctional during the 1920s and 1930s. But Carr did not confine his analysis to the diplomatic maneuvering of states, whether among themselves or at the League of Nations in Geneva. Instead, he drew on a broader tradition of political economy to place such maneuvering into the context of a fundamental disequilibrium in the international economy. It was not simply morality that had to accommodate itself to power during the interwar period; politics were also being recast to take account of new forms of international economic organization. Power, morality, politics, and economics were all in flux during the twenty years’ crisis. Carr reached for a political economy reading of this period across a number of publications before, during, and just after World War II.

More here.

Joann Wypijewski in Sidecar:

‘I don’t think smart people should go to jail’, a young observer who works in crypto remarked outside one of the biggest fraud trials in US history. Samuel Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the crypto exchange FTX and most famous advance man for the brave new ‘democratic’ alternative to the corrupt old world of cash and wing-tip finance, was the allegedly smart person in question. Three days later, on 2 November, a jury convicted him of wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. For his crimes, Bankman-Fried, 31, faces a maximum sentence of 110 years in prison.

The jury took just a few hours to conclude that he had siphoned off FTX customer funds to its sister hedge fund, Alameda Research, which spent, transferred or gambled that money away. For years he had assured customers that their funds were protected. Even when he knew $8 billion in customer money was gone, and no assets existed to repay it, he tweeted, ‘FTX is fine. Assets are fine’. It was necessary, he’d told his lieutenants, to send out ‘a confident tweet’ as customers frantically tried to withdraw their assets.

My young interlocutor hadn’t thought Bankman-Fried was innocent exactly, but fraud happens all the time, and Think how much good smart people can do in the world! The fallen tycoon’s smarts were much-invoked at trial, by both prosecution and defence.

More here.

John Mullan at The Guardian:

Two years after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870, his closest friend, John Forster, published the first volume of his Life of Charles Dickens. Based on letters Dickens had written to him and stories he had told him, it was, in effect, an authorised biography. For Dickens buffs, it has always been both a matchless source and an untrustworthy narrative. By Helena Kelly’s account, it is more misleading than the most sceptical biographer has supposed. Far from Forster being Dickens’s hagiographer, he was his dupe. We have always known that Dickens aimed to manage his reputation; as Kelly sees it, this led him to deeper deceit than anyone has previously imagined.

So, for instance, Forster was the first to make public what Dickens said was the most crushing experience of his life: being sent, aged 12, to work in a blacking warehouse. It was an experience that he handed on to the young protagonist of David Copperfield. “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age,” Dickens wrote, in the account Forster quoted. Yet Kelly picks at some inconsistencies about dates to suppose that it was all fiction. Dickens wanted us to believe he had been neglected and mistreated: it made for a great story of triumph over adversity.

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

In writing her new biography of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, known throughout his long life for his cheerful endorsement of deregulation and free markets, Jennifer Burns certainly had her work cut out for her. Reflecting on how controversial her subject was, she says that one of her goals was “to restore the fullness of Friedman’s thought to his public image.” She depicts Friedman, who died in 2006 at 94, as a victim of a “bipartisan assault,” besieged by radicals on the left and populists on the right who decry the “neoliberalism” that he so ardently promoted. “As he increasingly came to symbolize a political movement,” she writes, “the nuance and complexity of his ideas was lost.”

But even Burns has to admit that this attention to “nuance and complexity” was something that Friedman did a lot to discourage. He spent decades fashioning himself into a public celebrity, issuing confident pronouncements on the miracle of markets, whether in his columns for Newsweek or in his 1980 television series, “Free to Choose.”

more here.

I Was Never One

of those matter-
of-fact mothers,
who tell their children
this is thus or what
to do. Though I knew
how to hold my babies
as soon as they were
handed to me, I could feel
how tremulous life was.
This animal cradled on my heart, mine
for the naming, how was I to guess
at what it wanted?
Milk, Yes. Love, yes. To lie on
me and sleep—yes, yes.  But
what I wanted to know
about my babies stitched back
to what I’d been
when I was young—
to what I wanted—
and I couldn’t remember that.
Sometimes, under my baby—
me a boulder, she a lion—
I’d feel our hearts beat
not as one, but stranger
still, as two hearts
pulsing through what
came between them—two
sets of ribs, two muscle walls, two
layers of skin. That I had pushed
my daughters from the dark
unknown of my own
body—I never
got over that.

by Trish Crapo
from Walk Through Paradise Backward
Slate Roof Publishing Collective, 2004

Erik Gleiberman in The Washington Post:

Atish Taseer in The New York Times:

GRIEF, MEMORY, LOVE. I had not planned for this trinity of themes to become the substratum of my pilgrimage. Yet six months on, to arrive in Iraq in the nights leading up to Ashura — the climactic 10th day in a ritual period of mourning for the world’s more than 150 million Shiite Muslims — was to be confronted by a grief so fresh that the event that inspired it, the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein in 680, might have occurred yesterday.

To be Shiite was to live with the pain, never more acute than at Ashura, of not having been there for Hussein when it mattered most. In 680, Hussein had hearkened to the call of Muslims in the garrison town of Kufa, a few miles east of Najaf. His grandfather the Prophet had been dead for less than 50 years. In that time, the small community of believers had grown into the vast Arab Muslim empire. Hussein’s father, Ali — the Prophet’s beloved son-in-law and cousin — was the last of the four Rashidun (“rightly guided”) caliphs until he died in 661 at the hands of an assassin who struck him with a poisoned sword as he prayed. The Shiat Ali (Partisans of Ali) were at first merely his followers, people who believed that the mantle of the Prophet could only be assumed by one of his bloodline. So when, in 680, Muawiya, the first caliph since Ali, died and the caliphate passed to his dissolute son, Yazid, the Shiat Ali implored Hussein to take his rightful place at the head of Islam.

More here.

Michael Lind in The Hedgehog Review:

Americans of the left, right, and center are increasingly hostile to big corporations—but not for the same reasons. Many on the left are deeply uncomfortable with capitalism as such—that is to say, with corporate profit. In contrast, the populist right has turned against “woke” corporations that support transgender ideology, affirmative action, and other public policies conservatives oppose. But this is an objection not to corporate profit but to particular exercises of corporate power. Finally, as a response to US deindustrialization and the rise of China’s industrial and military power, there is growing bipartisan support for economic nationalism and industrial policy, particularly among national security experts in both parties. Here the criticism involves corporate purpose: Should American corporations, by investing or manufacturing in China, build up the economy of a country that is increasingly seen as America’s major rival in the world?

More here.

Ian Volner at Artforum:

From 1965 to 1970, Robert Rauschenberg made the building his personal and professional HQ, a place to live, work, and (if the story be true) provide surplus shellfish to whomever asked. “I think the house satisfied a mix of aesthetic necessities and social desires for him,” says Kathy Halbreich, lately the executive director of and now an adviser to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Since 1970, when the artist departed for roomier digs in Captiva, Florida, his eponymous organization has kept its offices in the building, remaining there even after Rauschenberg himself died in 2008 and well after bohemia had largely decamped from the neighborhood today known as NoHo. Tucked between a parking lot and the home of the New York University bursar, the five-story, redbrick, round-arch-style structure hides in plain sight, its anonymity somewhat abetted by the foundation’s low profile. “We’ve never really wanted to trumpet our location,” says Halbreich.

more here.

Christa Lesté-Lasserre in New Scientist:

Monkeys that “dance” in street shows in Pakistan have high levels of stress hormones, abnormal behaviour and poor health – but stopping such shows would create a welfare crisis for trainers and their families, researchers say.

Taken from the wild as infants, rhesus macaques are kept by travelling trainers throughout South and South-East Asia and made to perform dance steps, tricks and acrobatics on short leashes. While some audiences find the performances “cute” and “funny”, hair analyses have confirmed that the animals live with constant and dangerous levels of stress.

The findings underline the cruel reality of a trade based on hierarchical trade groups that keep both the monkeys and their low-income trainers in difficult circumstances, says Mishaal Akbar at the University of Glasgow, UK.

More here.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

Peter Paul Rubens, known in his lifetime as “the prince of painters and the painter of princes”, is not, perhaps, a figure sympathetic to the modern age. He was by all accounts a charming man with graceful manners who could speak Latin, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French and German; he was knighted by both Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England; and employed as a diplomat and spy as well as a painter; he was a man as comfortable in Europe’s courts as in his studio. As such, he is just a tad too smooth when contemporary tastes run to artists with a bit of grit in the oyster.

What is more, as the pre-eminent painter of Catholicism he has never been embraced on these shores, and nor has the drama and movement of the baroque style, with which he was inextricably tied and of which he was the greatest exponent. Meanwhile, his supposed attitude towards women – their fleshy amplitude characterised as “Rubensian” – is not just out of favour but frowned on.

more here.

Virginia Postrel in The Washington Free Beacon:

For its first two-thirds, Walter Isaacson’s mammoth biography of Elon Musk is an epic romance, like The Lord of the Rings (a Musk favorite) or the Arthurian legends. It portrays the hero and his comrades overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles through daring, determination, cleverness, and skill, all in the pursuit of noble goals.

The critical moment in that tale comes in 2008, which Musk described to Isaacson as “the most painful year of my life.” His marriage broke up. One after another, the first three SpaceX rockets exploded before reaching orbit. The first Tesla Roadsters came off the line, but only with hand fitting at an exorbitant and unsustainable cost. He ran out of money. His audacious ventures appeared doomed. Everyone told Musk that his best chance was to try to save one company and let the other go out of business. But he refused to choose between Tesla and SpaceX.

More here.