Bim Adewumni in The Guardian:

Before the pandemic, Roxane Gay was constantly on the road. When the lockdowns of early 2020 came into effect, she realised something startling. “That was the longest I had been in one place since 2014.”

She and her now wife, the writer and designer Debbie Millman, had just decided to live together between LA and New York when the pandemic hit. But Gay’s mother has stage 4 lung cancer, and “you know, lung cancer and Covid don’t go well together”, Gay says. So they formed a pod, or bubble. “I was like, ‘I’m not going a year without seeing my parents when we don’t know how much longer she has.’ But she’s a marvel. Turns out she’s got a lot more time.” Her smile as she says this is sweet, almost private. “It was great to be able to keep our eyes on them. It was fun to hang out. I like my parents. They’re just funny. And they’re amazing people to live with as adults.”

Meanwhile, amid the horror of a global catastrophe, Gay and Millman eked out quality time together. They got a puppy, played badminton and went on neighbourhood bike rides. Later that summer, Gay revealed the pair had eloped. “I didn’t get much writing done, but I did enjoy the step back,” she says.

More here.

Zero Gravity

You leave Earth looking for perspective.
How you long to see it, the blue marble,

from outer space. The overview
changes everything astronauts say

and you are looking for change,
to not take life so seriously. So much

energy required to get off the planet to
break with gravity, the bond with Earth,

the ship violent with propulsion’s inferno
shaking you loose from the known world.

But maybe your friend is right, maybe Earth’s best
hope is mass conversions to religions that

teach reincarnation, then people might care
about the future of the planet? You unbuckle,

let yourself float free, wanting the thrill
before this once-in-a-lifetime trip ends,

even a few minutes of giddy weightlessness
so close to death, a tangible peril right

outside the window, Earth passing there
below you now, alone in the darkness.

by Sally Ashton
from The Ecotheo Review

McKenzie Prillaman in Nature:

Desaire and her colleagues first described their ChatGPT detector in June, when they applied it to Perspective articles from the journal Science². Using machine learning, the detector examines 20 features of writing style, including variation in sentence lengths, and the frequency of certain words and punctuation marks, to determine whether an academic scientist or ChatGPT wrote a piece of text. The findings show that “you could use a small set of features to get a high level of accuracy”, Desaire says.

In the latest study, the detector was trained on the introductory sections of papers from ten chemistry journals published by the American Chemical Society (ACS). The team chose the introduction because this section of a paper is fairly easy for ChatGPT to write if it has access to background literature, Desaire says. The researchers trained their tool on 100 published introductions to serve as human-written text, and then asked ChatGPT-3.5 to write 200 introductions in ACS journal style. For 100 of these, the tool was provided with the papers’ titles, and for the other 100, it was given their abstracts.

When tested on introductions written by people and those generated by AI from the same journals, the tool identified ChatGPT-3.5-written sections based on titles with 100% accuracy.

More here.

Ann C. Thresher at IAI News:

There is an outdated idea that science and art are polar opposites. That science, associated with the left brain hemisphere, is logical, structured, whereas art, the domain of the right hemisphere is soft, intuitive, creative, guided by practiced judgement and innate skill. Of course, any neuro-scientist will tell you that the distinction between “right and left brain thinking” is a myth, that both sides are equally important in thinking through a math problem and painting a picture.

Similarly, it is time to give up the myth that science and art are fundamentally different. Good science is an art-form, and scientists draw on highly trained, creative intuition and judgements, just as much as artists do. Scientists rely on the sort of soft skills we usually exclusively attribute to artists throughout their work, from conceptualising research projects, to designing experiments, to interpreting and presenting data, to conceiving of new theories and models. Science isn’t an exact science, in the sense that there is no one formula or methodology or approach that scientists just follow.  Science is a practice,  not unlike art – a messy mosaic of judgements and creativity, aiming to capture a complex external world that almost always defies simple description or measure.

More here.

Liad Mudrik in Nature:

These are good times to be a thinking, conscious creature, despite events in the world that might make us doubt that. These are even better times to be a creature who thinks about consciousness: the scientific debate is livelier than ever, and technological advances and political controversies are making the practical and philosophical questions surrounding consciousness ever more pressing. Will artificial intelligence (AI) become conscious? (Or maybe it already is…? Well, no, I would say, but we’ll get to that later.) Can state-of-the-art algorithms manipulate our consciousness to change our view of the world? Which animals, besides humans, are conscious? What about fetuses? Or artificial neural organoids?

It is becoming clearer that real-life implications will be drawn from the answers that this field generates to such questions. That means we must vastly improve our fundamental understanding of consciousness and related phenomena, such as agency, free will and sense of self. With so much at stake, we had better get things right. This sense of gravity hovers above three books that, in one way or another, tackle these thorny questions.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

A “Theory of Everything” is physicists’ somewhat tongue-in-cheek phrase for a hypothetical model of all the fundamental physical interactions. Of course, even if we had such a theory, it would tell us nothing new about higher-level emergent phenomena, all the way up to human behavior and society. Can we even imagine a “Theory of Everyone,” providing basic organizing principles for society? Michael Muthukrishna believes we can, and indeed that we can see the outlines of such a theory emerging, based on the relationships of people to each other and to the physical resources available.

More here.

Sarah Brown at Literary Hub:

In a cat’s world, where smells are paramount, it must be a bewildering experience when they first hear a person speak. So many different, unfamiliar sounds directed either at another person or, even more perplexingly, at the cat. Humans are very preoccupied with the spoken word, babbling away at everyone and everything we meet. Intrigued as to what their “spoken” sounds mean, we have developed something of a fascination with the vocalizations of cats too. Nestled deep in the history books, a diary entry by the Abbé Galiani of Naples, dated March 21, 1772, offers some of the earliest recorded insights into cat vocalizations.

More here.

Barbara Spindel in The Christian Science Monitor:

After Betty Friedan got her Smith College classmates to complete a questionnaire about their lives at their 15th reunion in 1957, she immediately grasped the significance of their responses. Many of the highly educated women felt trapped by midcentury America’s constrictive domestic ideals, unfulfilled by the roles of housewife and mother. Friedan, a freelance writer and a wife and mother herself, was unable to interest any magazines in publishing her findings. She instead embarked on writing “The Feminine Mystique,” the explosive and groundbreaking book whose 1963 publication turned its author into a celebrity and, more significantly, is credited with igniting the second wave of the feminist movement.

Women’s rights as human rights

Rachel Shteir’s brisk, compelling biography, “Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter,” conveys the enduring importance of her subject’s signature work, which excavated the quiet desperation of a primarily white and middle-class subset of American women. In describing what she famously called the “problem that had no name,” Friedan, according to Shteir, “laid the groundwork for women’s rights to be regarded as a civil right,” a notion that while taken for granted today was hardly obvious at the time.

More here.

Nina Power in Compact:

For someone working in the culture industries, the only thing worse than having the wrong position on a political controversy is having no position at all. Today’s artists are the high priests of the secular middle classes, with cathedrals (art galleries) in every major city. In recent years, rather than defend free expression and the exploration of beauty, the passé concerns of previous centuries, the art world has become the moral directorate of the social order. Malevich’s 1915 “Black Square” became 2020’s Instagram BLM square—and woe betide anyone who failed to correctly perform the ritual. As Guy Debord put it in his 1988 “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,” “since art is dead, it has evidently become extremely easy to disguise police as artists.”

The growing tendency of artists to pronounce on everything from microaggressions to macropolitics shows that we need a fundamentally different understanding of the role played by artists and their institutions. The trend reached an apex last week, as a whole spate of open letters about Israel and Gaza were furiously signed and published. The frenzy culminated in the sacking on Thursday of David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, the prestigious contemporary-art monthly. Since then, several other Artforum editors—Chloe Wyma, Zack Hatfield, and Kate Sutton—have resigned. The hashtag #BoycottArtforum is circulating on social media, asking people to refuse to open or share links to Artforum content or to participate in any Artforum interviews or events. As the critic Adam Lehrer acerbically commented on X, “I haven’t opened an Artforum link in years, so I’ve been doing hella activism.”

More here.

In Her Name

No one, not even God, was fully souled
before being Named. The oldest name was
breath: aah first, then breathed back
in, through her ears, her name
speckled through the breezing,
sounding the depths, no longer deaf
to soul and self.
So in and out and in and out again
the name begat The Names.
But after seven days or billions of years,
after 40 days, 40 years,
two temples, many prophets, and one carpenter,
after empires and bloodbaths and plagues
and a litany of everyday complaints, everyone forgot,
even God.

We are not truly known or touched or reached
until someone calls us by our name.
Say my name, God pleads, say my name.
What is it like to lose your name? God knows.

Like my great-grandmother
whom no one had called Rebecca for decades before she died.
She answered to Mrs. Newman or Mom or Grandma.
How did she think of herself?
“Rebecca” slowly faded. The aah, first to come,
was also the last to go, like the wicked witch
in the Wizard of Oz. That’s why witches need familiars:
no family or friends to remember their name.

Not invoked or evoked, not provocative, not vocative at all,
not even the old bozhe moi, bozhe moi,
their voices, souls, breath, names, stolen by time.
Golosa, dushy, dykhaniya, imeni, vremya ukralo.

by Deborah Ketai
from Rattle #79, Spring 2023

Scott McLemee reviews Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies, in Inside Higher Ed:

In 1966, Roland Barthes published a short book—a pamphlet, really—called Criticism and Truth, in response to Raymond Picard, a distinguished professor and the biographer of the French classical playwright Racine, as well as the editor of Racine’s collected works. Barthes had published a structuralist analysis of Racine, and Picard’s response was titled New Criticism or New Imposture?—from which one may readily surmise the tone.

Barthes’s reply was polemical enough. He and his co-thinkers were self-consciously avant garde in both literary taste and theoretical commitments, and pulling the noses of establishment worthies was not a temptation easily resisted.

Barthes insinuated that Picard’s demand for “objectivity” and “evident truths” reduced scholarship to accumulate dust in libraries, while Barthes and company tried to formulate new questions and new ways of reading.

No code exists for judging the outcome of combat by pamphlet, alas, though it bears mention that Barthes’s remains in print in both French and English. Picard’s does not and is only remembered, just barely, for inspiring it. On the other hand, two or three generations of theory-bashing polemicists have recapitulated Picard’s grievances about academic criticism (e.g., jargon, trendiness, too much sex and psychoanalysis, etc.), without ever hearing of him.

Barthes goes unmentioned in Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press), although I suspect that the shared title and manifesto-like brevity of the newer book is more than coincidence. But the differences between them are more striking.

More here.

Damon Linker in the NYT:

Rana Foroohar in Washington Monthly:

Reading lists say lot about a person, or at least what they care to spend their time thinking about. Ben Harris, who served as chief economic adviser to President Joe Biden when Biden was still the VP, remembers prepping for his first day on the job in 2014. The vice president’s policy staff had sent Harris a large pile of documents designed to get him into Biden’s headspace. It was filled with esoteric papers on corporate governance, financial market short-termism, and labor policy. Still, Harris wanted to know more about the personality traits of his new boss. When he asked his predecessor, Sarah Bianchi, about Biden’s character, Bianchi said, “What can I tell you? This guy is the vice president of the United States, but he still gets up on a ladder and cleans his own gutters.”

He also stands in picket lines with UAW members. Biden is, of course, an excellent politician, and he’s long been a friend to labor. Still, few people would have expected, when he entered the White House, that his administration would herald the beginning of a sea change in America’s political economy, from trickle down to bottom up, or, as the president’s campaign slogan put it, to a core emphasis on “work, not wealth.”

The record on that score is unequivocal. His COVID-19 stimulus bailed out people, not banks. His domestic economic policy has been about curbing giant corporations and promoting income growth. His infrastructure bills invested in America in a way not seen since the Eisenhower administration. He has taken commerce back to an earlier era in which it was broadly understood that trade needed to serve domestic interests before those of international markets.

The contrast with the so-called neoliberal economics of recent decades, in which it was presumed that markets always know best, and particularly the Clintonian idea that “free” trade and globalization were inevitable, could not be starker.

More here.

Alan Light at the New York Times:

One thing that remains intact for Stone at age 80 is the sense of wordplay and fun-house language that distinguished his lyrics (read the song/book title out loud), and some of the biggest pleasures in “Thank You” come when we witness him teasing out a theme. His response to other people telling his story and analyzing his struggles: “They’re trying to set the record straight. But a record’s not straight, especially when you’re not. It’s a circle with a spiral inside it. Every time a story is told it’s a test of memory and motive. … It isn’t evil but it isn’t good. It’s the name of the game but a shame just the same.”

Sylvester Stewart was born into a musical family (“There were seven of us, and the eighth member of the family was music”), and he started singing and recording with his siblings at a young age, soon joining a series of high school and regional bands.

more here.

Lindsey Carter in Science 1st:

Spanning from 625 BCE to 476 CE, the Roman Empire is still one of the most iconic of all time. At their highest, the Romans conquered Britain, Italy, much of the Middle East, the North African coast, Greece, Spain, and, of course, Italy. From their inventions to their way of life, Ancient Rome was one of the most influential cultures the planet has ever seen. Being the first city to have over 1 million people is just one of the things the time period has to its name, leading many to wonder what life in Rome was really like.

Men had all the power while women had none in Rome

Want to know what family hierarchy was like within Rome? It seems that men were the ones with all the power – while women had none. Men were the ones in charge of arranging marriages for the family, divorcing their wives if they pleased, and even rejecting newborns if they saw fit or couldn’t afford the addition.

More here.

Erik Hoel at The Intrinsic Perspective:

The first common argument for group minds is the argument from equivalence. I.e., a neuron is a very efficient and elegant way to transmit information. But one can transmit information with all sorts of things. There’s nothing supernatural about neurons. So could not an individual ant act much like a single neuron in an ant colony? And if you find it impossible to believe that an ant colony might be conscious, that it couldn’t emerge from pheromone trails and the collective little internal decisions of ants—if you find the idea of a conscious smell ridiculous—you have to then imagine opening up a human’s head and zooming in to neurons firing their action potentials, and explain why the same skepticism wouldn’t apply to our little cells that just puff vesicles filled with molecules at each other.

One can go further. What if, as philosopher of mind Ned Block has asked, each citizen of China devoted themselves to carrying out the individual signaling of a neuron? This would then create a “China brain” which mimicked in functionality a real brain (although you would need about two more orders of magnitude to get close to approximating a full human brain in terms of numbers of neurons/citizens).

more here.