Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Tanya Bush in Guernica:

Italy would be where I would whisk, mix, and knead my way into an idealized self. If I could get there, I would shed my anxious energy and compulsive need for affirmation, my nasty addiction to the cool-mint vape. I would slow down; I would journal. I would become tan and strong from simple pastas. I would eat intuitively — no more take-out burritos in the middle of the night, no more nubby cheeses scrounged from the bowels of the fridge. If I could find a way to go to Italy, I would become a real baker.

More here.

R. Douglas Fields in Quanta:

One day, while threading a needle to sew a button, I noticed that my tongue was sticking out. The same thing happened later, as I carefully cut out a photograph. Then another day, as I perched precariously on a ladder painting the window frame of my house, there it was again!

What’s going on here? I’m not deliberately protruding my tongue when I do these things, so why does it keep making appearances? After all, it’s not as if that versatile lingual muscle has anything to do with controlling my hands. Right?

Yet as I would learn, our tongue and hand movements are intimately interrelated at an unconscious level. This peculiar interaction’s deep evolutionary roots even help explain how our brain can function without conscious effort.

More here.

Angus Deaton in the Boston Review:

Smith was not only a great thinker but also a great writer. He was an empirical economist whose sketchy data were more often right than wrong; he was skeptical, especially about wealth; and he was a balanced and humane thinker who cared about justice, noting how much more important it was than beneficence. But the story I want to tell is about economic failure and about economics failure, and about how Smith’s insights and humanity need to be brought back into the mainstream of economics. Much of the evidence that I use draws on my work with Anne Case as well as her work with Lucy Kraftman on Scotland in relation to the rest of the UK.

In her recent book Adam Smith’s America (2022), political scientist Glory Liu reports that in 1976, at an event celebrating the bicentenary of the publication of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, George Stigler, the eminent Chicago economist, said “I bring you greetings from Adam Smith, who is alive and well and living in Chicago!” Stigler might also have noted that the U.S. economy was flourishing too, as it had been for three decades, and might have been happy to connect the flourishing of Smith and the flourishing of the economy.

More here.

David Shariatmadari in The Guardian:

Halfway through my interview with the co-founder of DeepMind, the most advanced AI research outfit in the world, I mention that I asked ChatGPT to come up with some questions for him. Mustafa Suleyman is mock-annoyed, because he’s currently developing his own chatbot, called Pi, and says I should have used that. But it was ChatGPT that became the poster child for the new age of artificial intelligence earlier this year, when it showed it could do everything from compose poetry about Love Island in the style of John Donne to devise an itinerary for a minibreak in Lisbon.

The trick hadn’t really worked, or so I thought – ChatGPT’s questions were mostly generic talking points. I’d asked it to try a bit harder. “Certainly, let’s dive into more specific and original questions that can elicit surprising answers from Mustafa Suleyman,” it had trilled. The results still weren’t up to much. Even so, I chuck one at him as he sits in the offices of his startup in Palo Alto on the other end of a video call (he left DeepMind in 2019). “How do you envision AI’s role in supporting mental health care in the future,” I ask – and suddenly, weirdly, I feel as if I’ve got right to the heart of why he does what he does.

More here.

David Shariatmadari at The Guardian:

The Coming Wave distils what is about to happen in a forcefully clear way. AI, Suleyman argues, will rapidly reduce the price of achieving any goal. Its astonishing labour-saving and problem-solving capabilities will be available cheaply and to anyone who wants to use them. He memorably calls this “the plummeting cost of power”. If the printing press allowed ordinary people to own books, and the silicon chip put a computer in every home, AI will democratise simply doing things. So, sure, that means getting a virtual assistant to set up a company for you, or using a swarm of builder bots to throw up an extension. Unfortunately, it also means engineering a run on a bank, or creating a deadly virus using a DNA synthesiser.

The most extraordinary scenarios in the book come from the realm of biotech, which is already undergoing its own transformation thanks to breakthroughs such as Crispr, the gene-editing technology. Here, AI will act as a potent accelerant. Manufactured products, Suleyman tells us, could one day be “grown” from synthetic biological materials rather than assembled, using carbon sucked out of the atmosphere.

more here.

Kira Thurman at the New York Times:

In 1947, the Black German musician Fasia Jansen stood on a street in Hamburg and began to sing the music of Brecht in her thick Low German accent to anyone passing by. Perhaps she’d learned the songs from prisoners and internees at Neuengamme, the concentration camp where she’d been forced to work four years earlier. Perhaps she’d learned them in the early days after the war, when she’d performed with Holocaust survivors at a hospital in 1945. One thing was clear: As Jansen wrestled with her trauma, song was at the center of her experience.

Jansen does not appear in Jeremy Eichler’s new book, “Time’s Echo,” but the impulse to turn to music during and after the Holocaust is at the heart of it. Eichler, The Boston Globe’s chief classical music critic, suggests that music can help us remember what we’ve lost. “Time’s Echo” is an engrossing recovery project that reveals the depths of Europe’s ability — and inability — to mourn those losses.

more here.

Poem

If we have no soul
something aches
in us anyway

Heaves our breath
pumps our blood

Sun thrown across treetops
Do you see New Mexico?

Windstorms
crack across it
days break
against it

I hurt
for dry dirt
big sky
bell in a tower
sage
across the eye

Burnt land
old sand carcass
your rosebuds
are hardening
your leaves turning
my heart
burning

by Natalie Goldberg
from Top of My Lungs
The Overlook Press, 2002

Herman Mark Schwartz in The Syllabus:

We noticed you aren’t using the term neoliberalism much in your recent work. While we’re not partisan regarding whether neoliberalism is dead or alive, what do you think about the utility of framing debates in global political economy in those terms? Have there been structural changes in the last five to ten years that merit retiring that term in your field?

The short version is that I think that neoliberalism is one of those empty labels like financialization and globalization, which conceal much more than they reveal. Financialization, yeah, it’s about money, but what specifically? Globalization, it’s about the integration of what had been somewhat insulated parts of the global economy, but so what? And neoliberalism, similarly, only tells us that we’re no longer living in what Bob Jessop and others have called the Keynesian welfare state model. As President Nixon once said, “Even though we’re all Keynesians, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

More than a five- or ten-year perspective, you really need to go back 30, 40, 50 years to understand what’s going on. Much as we – and here I use “we” very expansively – were living in welfare states that were constructed in the ’30s, ’40s, but especially the ’50s and ’60s, today we are living in an economy and a set of social structures that were already emerging at the end of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

More here.

Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in The Polycrisis:

The precursor of 2022’s energy crisis was 2020–2021’s vaccine apartheid. These shortages were in no way natural but reflected financial and geopolitical hierarchies: those with more power and resources bid up prices and developing countries lost out in the process. In the case of vaccines, millions of lives were lost. The energy crisis too is a question of life and death. Expensive gas-powered air conditioners in Europe subsidized with nearly a trillion euros of deficit-financing really did mean lights out for millions of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.

In both these cases, developing countries were reminded that the existing world order is rigged against them. Global inequality rose sharply. Their shortages of money (especially the right kind of money) and inability to borrow cheaply put them at the back of the queue. The grim fact that the West not only denied poor countries IP for technology to make their own mRNA vaccines in the hour of distress, but hoarded vaccines past their sell-by date, revealed the system’s bankruptcy. Ajay Banga, the new World Bank chief, described the growing mistrust “pulling the Global North and South apart at a time when we need to be uniting.”

On August 24, more than sixty leaders of the largest developing countries met at the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, chaired by South African President Ramaphosa. High on the meeting’s agenda were multilateralism, reform, and sustainable development. Brazil’s President Lula Inácio da Silva, who founded the BRICS group in 2009, bluntly summarized: “We cannot accept a green neocolonialism that imposes trade barriers and protectionist policies under the pretext of protecting the environment.” By the summit’s end the group had announced six new members: Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

More here.

(Note: Thanks to Kevin Ham)

Samuel Moyn in Boston Review:

Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe—for liberalism. This distinct body of liberal thought says that freedom comes first, that the enemies of liberty are the first priority to confront and contain in a dangerous world, and that demanding anything more from liberalism is likely to lead to tyranny.

This set of ideas became intellectually trendsetting in the 1940s and 1950s at the outset of the Cold War, when liberals conceived of them as essential truths the free world had to preserve in a struggle against totalitarian empire. By the 1960s it had its enemies, who invented the phrase “Cold War liberalism” itself to indict its domestic compromises and foreign policy mistakes. That did not stop it from being rehabilitated in the 1990s, when it was repurposed for a post-political age. A generation of public intellectuals—among them Anne Applebaum, Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, and many others—styled themselves as successors to Cold War liberals, trumpeting the superiority of Cold War liberalism over illiberal right and left while obscuring just how distinctive it was within the broader liberal tradition. 1989 ushered in the global triumph of freedom, but on Cold War liberalism’s distorted terms.

Then came the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which unleashed a great war over liberalism—a polemical one, at least—and prompted yet another resurgence of Cold War liberalism’s core ideas. Patrick Deneen’s much-discussed assault, Why Liberalism Failed (2018), was met by a crop of liberal self-defenses, almost all of them explicitly or implicitly attempted in Cold War terms. Francis Fukuyama, Adam Gopnik, and Mark Lilla all wrote book-length versions of why Cold War liberalism still had legs, but literally thousands of essays and websites, and even whole magazines such as The Atlantic, offered the same message in frantic response to Trump’s breakthrough. Organized as much against the left as the right, these defenses not only rang hollow; they have failed to forestall the political crisis they promised to transcend.

More here.

Elizabeth Pennisi in Science:

When Vicki Losick got her Ph.D. and joined a fruit fly lab at the Carnegie Institution for Science in 2008, its head announced that he expected his postdocs to launch new fields of inquiry. She chose a then-fashionable focus: stem cells, versatile cells that specialize into other cell types and play critical roles in embryonic development and the renewal of adult tissues. Losick wondered whether they also help in wound repair. So, she and another postdoc, Don Fox, began stabbing fruit flies with a tiny needle, hoping to document stem cells coming to the rescue.

Instead, the two postdocs, working independently, saw other cells near the wounds behaving oddly. The cells grew and prepared to divide by duplicating their DNA. Then they stalled, each remaining a single, enlarged cell with multiple copies of its genome. “I was shocked,” recalls Losick, now at Boston College. When she and Fox looked at the fly wound sites a few days later, they saw signs that these so-called polyploid cells, and not stem cells, were the major wound healers. At the puncture site, supersize cells with multiple nuclei quickly closed up the wound. “Simultaneously we found the same thing [and it] had nothing to do with stem cells,” Fox recalls.

More here.

Eric Hoel in The Intrinsic Perspective:

There’s an unkillable myth that the very definition of the word “consciousness” is somehow so slippery, so bedeviled with problems, that we must first specify what we mean out of ten different notions. When this definitional objection is raised, its implicit point is often—not always, but often—that the people who wish to study consciousness scientifically (or philosophically) are so fundamentally confused they can’t even agree on a definition. And if a definition cannot be agreed upon, we should question whether there is anything to say at all.

Unfortunately, this “argument from undefinability” shows up regularly among a certain set of well-educated people. Just to given an example, there was recently an interesting LessWrong post wherein the writer reported on his attempts to ask people to define consciousness, from a group of:

Mostly academics I met in grad school, in cognitive science, AI, ML, and mathematics.

He found that such people would regularly conflate “consciousness” with things like introspection, purposefulness, pleasure and pain, intelligence, and so on. These sort of conflations being common is my impression as well, as I run into them whenever I have given public talks about the neuroscience of consciousness, and I too have found it most prominent among those with a computer science, math, or tech background. It is especially prominent right now amid AI researchers.

So I am here to say that, at least linguistically, “consciousness” is well-defined, and that this isn’t really a matter of opinion.

More here.