Joseph Horowitz at The American Scholar:

The present fraught American moment—an impasse that seems ever worse than before—is typically observed and discussed in terms of governmental and political dysfunction, of social decay, of religious decline. Barely mentioned, if at all, is that the arts are today in crisis in the United States—or that music, theater, literature, and the visual arts were once a binding factor, defining America and individual Americans.

So unnoticed are the American arts that a major American historian, Jill Lepore, can produce a wonderfully readable 900-page historical overview—These Truths: A History of the United States (2018)—without devoting so much as a sentence to the arts. No one could possibly dispute her emphasis on present-day issues and needs—the urgency of pondering American race relations and inequality. But it does not follow that there should be no consideration of Walt Whitman or Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson or William Faulkner, Charles Ives or George Gershwin, Duke Ellington or Billie Holiday. Classical music, opera, theater, jazz, and Hollywood are all absent. Could any history of Russia omit Tolstoy? Could a British historian overlook Shakespeare? Is there a Germany without Goethe?

more here. (h/t Brooks Riley)

Jackson Arn at The New Yorker:

Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances,” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is the oddest of ducks, a superb exhibition in which half the paintings are clumsy. Even some of the superb ones are half clumsy. That’s Wong’s charm in a nutshell, though: he seems to have had little interest in producing tasteful, polished, well-made art, thank God. His limitations were obvious from the start; in the years leading up to his suicide, in 2019, at the age of thirty-five, he didn’t correct them so much as put them to work. Once he got going, his compositions stumbled their way into smart choreographies, and his colors could be so dog-whistle shrill as to land with an eerie hush. He was a terrifyingly fast learner, too—walking through this show is like watching one of those time-lapse videos of a plant exploding out of soil. In a fair world, there would be a forest by now.

Wong painted landscapes. Art history offers a few possible terms for his style: “naïve art,” “outsider art,” “art brut.” “Outsider art” seems to be the one that’s stuck (“Outside,” a 2016 group show in Amagansett, helped put him on the map), though the truth is grayer. He taught himself to paint, but only after he’d cooled on photography, the subject of his M.F.A. He spent little time in New York but years in Hong Kong, home to the third-biggest art market on the planet.

more here.

Rafia Zakaria in Baffler:

IN 2023, THE ATTENDEES of the Burning Man festival finally got the rebuke they deserved. “Burners,” as the festivalgoers like to call themselves, found themselves confronting rare torrential rain last week in the dried-up Nevada desert lake bed where they gather each year. The rain turned the fine silty dust-like sand into clay. The clay in turn made it near impossible for anyone to get around, and local authorities issued an order asking the eighty thousand festivalgoers to shelter in place. All exits from the site were closed and social media spilled over with Burners complaining about the terrible conditions they were having to confront instead of the usual wild bacchanal they had come to enjoy.

There are many troubles with the Burning Man Festival but one particularly noxious one is how oblivious Burners are of their privilege and of their exploitation of what was once a pristine landscape, the Black Rock Desert.

There were clues to this even as the Burners were arriving to the festival site this year. In the week leading up to the festival, protesters from a climate action coalition called Seven Circles Alliance used a trailer to put a roadblock on the single road leading to the festival site. They sat down in the middle of the road and put up signs like “Burners of the World Unite” and “Mother Earth Needs Our Help.” The protesters wanted Burning Man to put an end to the ever-larger number of private jets used by celebrities and the ultrarich to get to the festival. The protesters were also demanding a ban on unlimited use of diesel-guzzling generators, propane, and single-use plastics.

Their pleas were not well received.

More here.

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked:

‘Decolonise the curriculum’ is a movement that wants university courses to focus less on dead white European males and more on writers of colour. Its argument is that black students need texts that speak directly to them. They need books by authors who look like them. They need books about experiences and ideas they can more readily relate to than they can the stuff written about in ‘high white culture’. Black students must be able to recognise themselves in what they study, we’re told, or else they’ll feel cheated and demeaned.

I was surprised to find that one of the leading decolonise movements, at the University of Edinburgh, was arguing for WEB Du Bois’ 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, to be included on the English curriculum. The activists said it was unreasonable to expect black students to engage with so many white authors. They also need to engage with people like Du Bois, in whose work they might ‘recognise themselves’. I was surprised, not because I think The Souls of Black Folk shouldn’t be on more university courses – absolutely it should. No, it’s because The Souls of Black Folk runs so fantastically counter to the entire ideology of ‘decolonise’. It made me wonder if these activists have even read it. Du Bois’ book contains some of the finest arguments you will ever read against the idea that high culture is a white thing that others cannot connect with.

More here.

My Quaker-Atheist Friend, Who Has Come to This Meeting House,
Smokes & Looks Out over the Rawthey to Holme Fell

what do you do
anything for?

you do it
for what the mediaevals would call
something like
the Glory of God

doing it for money
that doesn’t do it;

doing it for vanity,
that doesn’t do it;

doing it to justify a disorderly life,
that doesn’t do it

Look at the Briggflatts here . . .

It represents the best
that the people were able to do

they didn’t do it for gain;
in fact, they must have
taken a loss

whether it is a stone next to a stone
or a word next to a word,
it is the glory—
the simple craft of it

and money and sex aren’t worth
bugger-all, not
bugger all

solid, common, vulgar words,
the ones you can touch,
the ones that yield

—and a respect for the music . . .
what else can you tell ‘em?

by Jonathan Williams
from The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat
The University of North Carolina Press, 1994

Remo Verdickt and Emiel Roothooft in LA Review of Books:

NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O is considered one of the leading writers on the African continent of the last 50 years. On December 31, 1977, he was arrested and spent a year in prison as an opponent of the Kenyatta dictatorship. During his imprisonment, Ngũgĩ developed the seminal Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) and decided to substitute his native Gĩkũyũ for English as his primary language of writing. A staunch champion of (self-)translation, he recently published a collection of essays on the subject, entitled The Language of Languages (2023). Here is an edited version of our conversation about his new book and how it reflects back upon his career.

REMO VERDICKT & EMIEL ROOTHOOFT: Why is translation “the language of languages”?

NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O: When two or three languages share a knowledge system, they do this through translation. In other words, if languages had a common language, that language would be called translation. Hence my new book’s title, The Language of Languages.

I reject a hierarchy of languages where some languages assume themselves to be higher than others—especially within postcolonial countries or countries that experience any system of oppression whatsoever. At the same time, I believe that all languages are very unique. Each language, however small, has a unique musicality that cannot be replaced by another. I like to compare them to musical instruments. A piano has its own specific sound or musicality, which you cannot mistake for that of a guitar. You cannot destroy or diminish the importance of other instruments like the guitar or the violin and leave only the sound of the piano. When different instruments work together, they produce harmony, orchestras—just like languages.

More here.

Nathan Sperber in Sidecar:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman does not mince his words:

the signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble. We’re not talking about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits. You could say that the Chinese model is about to hit its Great Wall, and the only question now is just how bad the crash will be.

That was in the summer of 2013. China’s GDP grew by 7.8 per cent that year. In the decade since, its economy has expanded by 70 per cent in real terms, compared to 21 per cent for the United States. China has not had a recession this century – by convention, two consecutive quarters of negative growth – let alone a ‘crash’. Yet every few years, the Anglophone financial media and its trail of investors, analysts and think-tankers are gripped by the belief that the Chinese economy is about to crater.

The conviction reared its head in the early 2000s, when runaway investment was thought to be ‘overheating’ the economy; in the late 2000s, when exports contracted in the wake of the global financial crisis; and in the mid-2010s, when it was feared that a buildup of local government debt, under-regulated shadow banking and capital outflows threatened China’s entire economic edifice. Today, dire predictions are out in force again, this time triggered by underwhelming growth figures for the second quarter of 2023. Exports have declined from the heights they reached during the pandemic while consumer spending has softened. Corporate troubles in the property sector and high youth unemployment appear to add to China’s woes. Against this backdrop, Western commentators are casting doubt on the PRC’s ability to continue to churn out GDP units, or fretting in grander terms about the country’s economic future (‘whither China?’, asks Adam Tooze by way of Yang Xiguang).

More here.

Scott Shapiro in The Guardian:

On 22 February1946, George Kennan, an American diplomat stationed in Moscow, dictated a 5,000-word cable to Washington. In this famous telegram, Kennan warned that the Soviet Union’s commitment to communism meant that it was inherently expansionist, and urged the US government to resist any attempts by the Soviets to increase their influence. This strategy quickly became known as “containment” – and defined American foreign policy for the next 40 years.

The Coming Wave is Suleyman’s book-length warning about technological expansionism: in close to 300 pages, he sets out to persuade readers that artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology (SB) threaten our very existence and we only have a narrow window within which to contain them before it’s too late. Unlike communism during the cold war, however, AI and SB are not being forced on us. We willingly adopt them because they not only promise unprecedented wealth, but solutions to our most intractable problems – climate change, cancer, possibly even mortality. Suleyman sees the appeal, of course, claiming that these technologies will “usher in a new dawn for humanity”. An entrepreneur and AI researcher who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, before it was acquired by Google in 2014, Suleyman is at his most compelling when illustrating the promises and perils of this new world. In breezy and sometimes breathless prose, he describes how human beings have finally managed to exert power over intelligence and life itself.

Take the AI revolution. Language models such as ChatGPT are just the beginning.

More here.

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

For Julian Huxley, science was spiritual. The biologist, brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley and grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley, thought evolutionary ideas hinted at humanity’s destiny: to safeguard the future of life on Earth and, by learning more about ourselves and the universe, expand the possibilities of humanity’s potential. Rejecting the idea of the supernatural gave him enormous “spiritual relief,” he wrote in his 1927 book Religion Without Revelation. Understanding reality scientifically was a religious endeavor. Part of what it meant to be spiritual, he wrote, was:

the contemplation of our own selves and human nature, the miracle of its existence as a product of natural evolution, the amazing fact that a man is a mere portion of the common and universal substance of the world, but so organized as to be able to know truth, will the control of nature, aspire to goodness, and experience unutterable beauty.

Scientists today are finding Huxley was on to something. In a new paper, researchers found that, for some people, scientific ideas stir spiritual feelings of wonder and connection, which, they say, can offer psychological benefits similar to religious spirituality, like an increased sense of well-being and life satisfaction. And, on top of that, when scientific ideas inform people’s sense of spirituality, they come away with a better understanding of science. “Although science and religion differ in many ways,” the researchers write, their findings across three studies indicate that those human enterprises “share a capacity for spirituality through feelings of awe, coherence, and meaning in life.”

More here.

Monica Uszerowicz (and others) at n + 1:

Writing is a solitary practice; writing about art, lonelier still. I might spend days deliberating over the right words, crawling toward what feels right and exploring something that might’ve been better untouched by my perspective. But I am never truly alone when I write. The writers I love, those worldview-shapers, hover at my shoulder; behind them sits an invisible audience of the artists themselves.

When I’m granted the privilege of choice, the option to pitch what I’d like to cover, I think about collaboration—I engage with work for which I feel deeply and through which I can share ideas that the artist might be able to mine. I build one half of an imagined epistolary dialogue, a humble offering to the artist.

I recently read “Critic in Crisis,” an essay by James McAnally for MARCH. McAnally advocates for the strategic critic who responds to a need for solidarity and transformation: “Too often, [criticism] harms without repair, or reifies the institution as inevitable. It bludgeons with no trace of solidarity.” Writing to or for the artist, as if in collaboration, will not resolve these issues, but it removes the critic from a solitary mode of address.

More here.

Alex Wilkins in New Scientist:

Quantum computers have long promised to solve certain problems faster than any ordinary, or classical, computer can. In fact, Google delivered on this promise in 2019, when it declared that its quantum computer had achieved quantum supremacy, performing a calculation impossible for the best classical computers of the day. As New Scientist said at the time, Google had “secured yet another place in the history books”.

Yet the next chapter of the quantum revolution is struggling to be written. Since Google’s breakthrough in 2019, other groups have made similar claims, but in each case improved algorithms for classical computers have reasserted dominance over quantum machines, or at least threatened to. With this back and forth ongoing, will quantum computers ever pull ahead?

More here.

Anu Bradford at Project Syndicate:

In November, the United Kingdom will host a high-profile international summit on the governance of artificial intelligence. With the agenda and list of invitees still being finalized, the biggest decision facing UK officials is whether to invite China or host a more exclusive gathering for the G7 and other countries that want to safeguard liberal democracy as the foundation for a digital society.

The tradeoff is obvious. Any global approach to AI governance that excludes China is likely to have only a limited impact; but China’s presence would inevitably change the agenda. No longer would the summit be able to address the problem of AI being used by governments for domestic surveillance – or any other controversial issue that is of concern to democratic governments.

Whatever the agenda, the summit is a prudent response to rapid and dramatic advances in AI that present both unprecedented opportunities and challenges for governments.

More here.

Bilingual Blues

Soy un ajiaco de contradicciones.
I have mixed feelings about everything.
Name your tema, I’ll hedge;
name your cerca, I’ll straddle it
like a Cubano.

I have mixed feeling about everything.
So un ajiaco de contradicciones.
Vexed, hexed, complexed,
hyphenated, oxygenated, illegally alienated,
psycho soy, cantando voy:
You sat tomato,
I say tu madre;
You say potato,
I say Pototo,
Let’s call the hole
un hueco, the thing
a cosa, and if the cosa goes into the hueco,
consider yourself en casa,
consider yourself part of the family.

Soy un de contradicciones,
un pure de impurezas:
a little square from Rubik’s Cuba
que nadie nunca acoplara.
(Cha-cha-cha.)

by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
from Paper Dance- 55 Latino Poets
Persea Books

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7MUq2cp800&t=12s&ab_channel=PhilosophyOverdose

Barbara Purcell at Salmagundi:

On a 95-degree evening in Austin last fall, I ran into a curator from the University of Texas’ Blanton Museum of Art at a gallery reception across town. We briefly chatted about the Blanton’s then recently opened “Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards” exhibition, which had been organized by the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. I mentioned I was covering the show for Salmagundi and that I was very much looking forward to seeing the presentation—a departure from the artist’s much larger monochromatic works—up close and personal, and possibly with a pair of reading glasses.
“I wish someone would write about Kelly, the closet Dadaist,” the curator sighed with a little wink. Is it such a secret, I wondered? A half a century’s worth of repurposed postcards—micro collages, really—that playfully combine elements of chance, humor, and appropriation? Sounds rather Dada to me. The term even appears once or twice in the exhibition catalog, and the postcards themselves are effectively mass-produced readymades—a cornerstone of an art movement that was always hard to pin down, even in its heyday.

more here.

Dominic Green at Literary Review:

Not so long ago, India’s greatest export to the West, people aside, was spirituality. Mick Brown’s The Nirvana Express is an engaging history of India’s spiritual influence on the West between 1893, when Swami Vivekananda was the surprise star at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, and 1990, when the multimillionaire cult leader and tax dodger Bhagwan Rajneesh popped his sandals. The economic reforms that began the transformation of India’s economy started a year after Rajneesh’s death. The subsequent changes make the history described in Nirvana Express feel almost ancient.

I should mention that my most recent book, The Religious Revolution, feels even more ancient, because it is the Victorian prequel to The Nirvana Express. Brown has written the kind of book that I would write, should my publisher ever speak to me again. Brown, whose previous books include The Spiritual Tourist: A Personal Odyssey Through the Outer Reaches of Belief, has synthesised a small Himalaya of material into a clear and well-told narrative. His subject is not so much India as the uses and abuses of subcontinental religions in the West in the 20th century.

more here.

Charlie Tyson at Bookforum:

FRANZ KAFKA’S LAST STORYwas a fable about art and labor. “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” is a tale told by a mouse who, with marked erudition and fair-mindedness, reflects on an extraordinary community member, the singer Josephine. At times of danger or emergency, the news will spread that she plans to sing. The community assembles, and Josephine, delicate and frail, stands before them in song, her arms spread wide, her throat stretched high. The tones emanating from that delicate throat are, according to some, not singing at all but rather ordinary piping—if anything, weaker and thinner than the sounds all mice make. It is peculiar, the narrator considers, that “here is someone making a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing.” But her art has a strange hold on all who listen. It turns the ordinary materials of speech into something transcendent.

More here.