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Sasha Frere-Jones at Bookforum:

MICHEL LEIRIS WAS A SMALL, polite French man who stayed alive for most of the twentieth century and wrote a deliciously dense memoir in four bricks called The Rules of the Game. The final chunk—Frêle Bruit, whose title has been translated by Richard Sieburth as Frail Riffs,rather than the more straightforward “faint noise”—is now finally available in English. This memoir project spans the years 1948 to 1976, which is roughly the middle of Leiris’s writing career. There were, in fact, memoirs published before and after this project, and a massive set of journals (only available in French as of now) that stretch across his life from young adulthood right up to death. Taken in sum, almost all of Leiris’s writings qualify as what he called “essais autobiographiques.”

Leiris often reminds me of artists like Chris Marker who work across disciplines and scatter their thoughts hither and yon, poets who put their work into different containers precisely to fight against a quick summary of their intentions. Leiris gestures at least once to the fact that this memoir—“too waxed, too polished”—is as much an act of poetry as it is a form of reporting.

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Erik Van Aken at Aeon Magazine:

A slight shift in Cleopatra’s beauty, and the Roman Empire unravels. You miss your train, and an unexpected encounter changes the course of your life. A butterfly alights from a tree in Michoacán, triggering a hurricane halfway across the globe. These scenarios exemplify the essence of ‘chaos’, a term scientists coined during the middle of the 20th century, to describe how small events in complex systems can have vast, unpredictable consequences.

Beyond these anecdotes, I want to tell you the story of chaos and answer the question: ‘Can the simple flutter of a butterfly’s wings truly trigger a distant hurricane?’ To uncover the layers of this question, we must first journey into the classical world of Newtonian physics. What we uncover is fascinating – the Universe, from the grand scale of empires to the intimate moments of daily life, operates within a framework where chaos and order are not opposites but intricately connected forces.

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The Way of Art

It seems to me that,
paralleling the paths of action, devotion, etc.,
there is a path called art
and that the sages of the East would recognize
Faulkner, Edward Hopper, Beethoven, William Carlos Williams
and address them as equals.
It’s a matter of intention and discipline, isn’t it? —
combined with a certain amount of God-given ability.
It’s what you’re willing to go through, willing to give, isn’t it?
It’s the willingness to be a window
through which others can see
all the way out to infinity
and all the way back to themselves.

by Albert Huffstickler
from Why I Write in Coffee Houses and Diners.

Elyse Weingarten in Undark:

In 2016, Canada enacted the Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, law, allowing individuals with a terminal illness to receive help from a medical professional to end their life. Following a superior court ruling, the legislation was expanded in 2021 to include nearly anyone with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” causing “enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to them.”

Whether mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and addiction should be considered “grievous and irremediable” quickly emerged as the subject of intense debate. Initially slated to go into effect in March 2023, a new mental health provision of the law was postponed a year due to public outcry both in Canada and abroad. Then, in February, Health Minister Mark Holland announced it had been delayed again — this time until 2027 — to allow more time for the country’s health care system to prepare.

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Lisa Marie Conklin in Reader’s Digest:

• Why did the nurse need a red crayon?
  She needed to draw blood.
• Why are nurses afraid of the outdoors?
  Too much poison IV.
• What do transplant nurses hate?
   Rejection.
• How do you know when a nurse is having a bad day?
  She won’t stop needling people.
• What did the nurse say to the man who fainted at the airport terminal?
  I think you might have a terminal illness.
• Why didn’t one nurse find the other nurse’s joke funny?
  She had an irony deficiency.
• What do a nurse and a wood frog have in common?
  They can both hold their bladder for a really long time.
• What did the blood donor say to the nurse?
  “I feel super tired; it is such a draining process.”
• What did the banana say to the nurse?
  “I’m here to see the doctor. I am not peeling well.”
• What did the nurse say when the doctor decided to stay home?
  “Suture self!”

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Camille Ralphs at The Poetry Foundation:

Who else could have imagined such a motley ensemble but someone who had jostled with the many flavors of humanity? The medleyed voices of the Miller, who can break down doors by running at them with his head; the “gat-toothed,” half-deaf Wife of Bath, who rides astride in bright red stockings; the Canon alchemist, so sweaty from the ride that his horse is a lather of suds; the “ful vicious” Pardoner with his jar of dubious holy “pigges bones”; and the garlic-loving Summoner, with a face so pimply “children were aferd”—Chaucer knew them all. As Mary Flannery argues in her authoritative and diverting monograph Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard (Reaktion Books, 2024), the mercenary assets of “The Shipman’s Tale,” in which a merchant’s wife offloads a difficult financial situation by insisting she’ll repay her husband with sex (“By God, I wol nat paye yow but abedde!”) must come from Chaucer’s roving through “warehouses, docks and markets.” Works such as The Book of the Duchess (1368)—probably penned on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt (it also circulated under the title “The Deth of Blaunche”)—could only be written by a man who’d worked in “palaces and great houses in England and on the Continent.”

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Maarten Boudry and Simon Friederich at the PhilSci Archive:

Some philosophers and machine learning experts have speculated that superintelligent Artificial Intelligences (AIs), if and when they arrive on the scene, will wrestle away power from humans, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Dan Hendrycks has recently buttressed such worries by arguing that AI systems will undergo evolution by natural selection, which will endow them with instinctive drives for self-preservation, dominance and resource accumulation that are typical of evolved creatures. In this paper, we argue that this argument is not compelling as it stands. Evolutionary processes, as we point out, can be more or less Darwinian along a number of dimensions. Making use of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s framework of Darwinian spaces, we argue that the more evolution is top-down, directed and driven by intelligent agency, the less paradigmatically Darwinian it becomes. We then apply the concept of “domestication” to AI evolution, which, although theoretically satisfying the minimal definition of natural selection, is channeled through the minds of fore-sighted and intelligent agents, based on selection criteria desirable to them (which could be traits like docility, obedience and non-aggression). In the presence of such intelligent planning, it is not clear that selection of AIs, even selection in a competitive and ruthless market environment, will end up favoring “selfish” traits. In the end, however, we do agree with Hendrycks’ conditionally: If superintelligent AIs end up “going feral” and competing in a truly Darwinian fashion, reproducing autonomously and without human supervision, this could pose a grave danger to human societies.

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Megan Kang in Aeon:

From the viewpoint of today, it is difficult to imagine a world in which guns were less central to US life. But a gun-filled country was neither innate nor inevitable. The evidence points to a key turning point in US gun culture around the mid-20th century, shortly before the state of gun politics captured Hofstadter’s attention.

Firearm estimates derived from gun sales and surveys indicate that, in 1945, there were somewhere around 45 million guns in the US at a time when the country had 140 million people. A quarter-century later, by 1970, the number of guns doubled, whereas the population increased by a little less than 50 per cent. By 2020, the number of guns had skyrocketed to nearly tenfold of its 1945 rate, while the population grew less than 2.5 times the 1945 number.

From the mid-20th century to today, guns also changed from playing a relatively minor role in US crime to taking centre-stage. Research by the criminologist Martin Wolfgang on Philadelphia’s homicide patterns from 1948 to 1952 reveals that only 33 per cent of the city’s homicides involved a firearm. Today, 91 per cent of homicides in Philadelphia feature a gun.

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From PeterAttia.com:

Sebastian Junger is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and previous guest on The Drive. In this episode, Sebastian returns to discuss his latest book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. This episode delves into Sebastian’s profound near-death experience and how it became the catalyst for his exploration of mortality, the afterlife, and the mysteries of the universe. They discuss the secular meaning of what it means to be sacred, the intersection of physics and philosophy, and how our beliefs shape our approach to life and death. He also shares how this experience has profoundly changed him, giving him a renewed perspective on life—one filled with awe, gratitude, deeper emotional awareness, and a more engaged approach to living.

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Jacob Baynham at Noema:

Scientists generally consider it uncool to anthropomorphize, but as a nonscientist, I can say that if lithium were a friend, it would be the sort of friend who is humble and unassuming and yet also seemingly everywhere all at once doing really fabulous and important things. Lithium, in my imagination, is the envy of the other elements.

“I’m such a fan of lithium,” the astronomer Brian Fields told me over the phone recently. “It’s the third simplest element. And yet it’s always got surprises for us.” Fields teaches astronomy and physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He specializes in a field called galactic chemical evolution, which seeks to explain the origin of elements in the universe. “Lithium has one of the most complex stories,” Fields said. “The oxygen you’re breathing, the carbon in your DNA, the iron in your blood — that came later, out of stars. But lithium comes straight out of the Big Bang.”

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Max Kozlov in Nature:

Breaking a fast carries more health benefits than the fasting itself, a study in mice shows¹. After mice had abstained from food, stem cells surged to repair damage in their intestines — but only when the mice were tucking into their chow again, the study found. But this activation of stem cells came at a price: mice were more likely to develop precancerous polyps in their intestines if they incurred a cancer-causing genetic change during the post-fasting period than if they hadn’t fasted at all. These results, published in Nature on 21 August, show that “regeneration isn’t cost-free”, says Emmanuelle Passegué, a stem-cell biologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, who wasn’t involved in the study. “There is a dark side that is important to consider.”

Fast way to health

Researchers have been investigating the potential health benefits of fasting for decades, and there is evidence that the practice can help to delay certain diseases and lengthen lifespan in rodents. But the underlying biological mechanisms behind these benefits have been a mystery. In 2018, Ömer Yilmaz, a stem-cell biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and his colleagues found that stem cells are likely to be implicated. During fasting, these cells begin burning fats rather than carbohydrates as an energy source, leading to a boost in their ability to repair damage to the intestines in mice².

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Cynthia Zarin at The Paris Review:

A myth about Yoko Ono is that she came from nowhere and became a destroyer of worlds. The truth is otherwise. Yoko Ono—now ninety-one—was born in 1933, in Tokyo. Her father was a successful banker and a gifted classical pianist; her mother an art collector and philanthropist. Ono attended a progressive nursery school where the emphasis was on music: the children were taught perfect pitch and encouraged to listen to everyday sounds and translate them into musical notes. In 1943, she and her brother were evacuated to the countryside. Basic provisions were scarce. For hours, they lay on their backs looking at the sky. They said to each other: “Imagine good things to eat. Imagine the war is over.” She returned to Tokyo in 1945. She was president of her high school drama club; in a photo taken at the time, her hair is bobbed and she is wearing what looks like a cashmere sweater set. At Gakushuin University, she was the first female student to major in philosophy. Her family relocated to Scarsdale, in Westchester County; she enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied music. After three years, she dropped out and moved to New York, supporting herself by teaching traditional crafts at the Japan Society. In 1960, she rents a loft downtown, at 112 Chambers Street, and begins to host musical performances.

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James Butler and Malin Hay at the London Review of Books:

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Fernando Rugitsky in Phenomenal World:

A recent visitor to the Amazon rainforest was surprised by the animal that was most conspicuous: instead of exotic jaguars, the region was populated by “the humpbacked, floppy-eared, glossy white Nelore cow, the ultimate conqueror of the frontier.” As the Brazilian economy was transformed into the world’s main provider of beef in the last two decades, the rainforest that houses 10 percent of the world’s animal species has been set alight to open the way for millions of grazing cows. Current estimates suggest that there are more than twice as many cows as people in the Brazilian part of the Amazon—around 63 and 28 million, respectively.

When President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva started his first term in office in 2003, Brazilian exports of frozen beef ranked third in the world by volume, representing around 11 percent of the total. By the end of his second term in 2010, Brazil ranked first, accounting for 23 percent of all frozen beef exported worldwide. In quantity, these exports increased from 317 to 781 thousand tonnes. Over the following decade, Brazilian beef supremacy deepened: in 2022 Brazil was the origin of 32 percent of all frozen beef traded internationally, exporting almost twice as much as India, the second largest exporter. The rise of Brazil as the stockyard of the world was tightly connected to the rise of China as an economic superpower: Chinese imports of frozen beef surged between 2002 and 2022 from eleven thousand to over two million tonnes.

A yet more dramatic story can be told about soya.

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Jamieson Webster in LA Review of Books:

IT’S WELL-WORN KNOWLEDGE that Freud was pessimistic. Add to pessimism, elitism. Freud thought a more truthful relation to one’s true motives was only possible to the select few who were willing to interrogate themselves at all costs. In fact, he was so grandiosely pessimistic that he counted his theories as one of the great blows to mankind along with Copernicus and Darwin: we are not the center of the universe, we are not some unique species set apart from the rest of life on earth, and we are not masters in our own house. Freud’s message is often watered down to mean that there are processes in the mind that we don’t know about, like the way computer software runs in the background, or that there are parts of ourselves that are hidden and only need to be carefully revealed. These gloss the extremity of his actual message that we fundamentally cannot know ourselves—but for the tip of an iceberg.

How does our lack of self-knowledge tip the scales of history? It is important that we know what we don’t know, and what we can’t know. There is no better curb to human hubris. Actions we take might be more ethical if undertaken with a strong sense of our human limitations. As we begin to reckon with the failures of Western democracy, especially regarding the rationality of politics and the fitness of political leaders, could we have a better sense of how little shared knowledge there is?

This is a timely moment for Patrick Weil’s The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (2023), which provides a reassessment of the much-disputed book that Freud and American ambassador William C. Bullitt wrote about Woodrow Wilson, speculating about the president’s mental health.

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