Coffee With Milk

It is very deep to have a cup of tea
Also coffee in a white cup
with milk
a hand to go around the cup
and a mouth to open and take it in
It is very deep and very good to have a heart
Do not take the heart for granted
it fills with blood and lets blood out

Good to have a chair to sit in
with these feet on the floor
while I drink this coffee
in a white cup
To have the air around us to be in
To fill our lungs and empty them like weeping
This roof to house us
the sky to house the roof in endless blue
To be in the midwest
with the Atlantic over there
and the Pacific on our other side

It is good this cup of coffee
the milk in it
the cows who gave us this milk
this
simple as a long piece of grass

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

Ron Rosenbaum at Literary Hub:

Deep in a Russian forest, in a well-concealed hermit’s cave, the lone occupant, who hadn’t spoken to another human being for seven years, a hermit named Sergius who had renounced the world, is forced to resist the wiles of a worldly woman who has come to seduce him and almost succeeds had he not, Tolstoy tells us, forfended her intentions by taking an axe and chopping off one of his fingers “below the second joint.”

While, in a contemporaneous Tolstoy novella, a wealthy rural landowner, Evgeny, alone in his study, tries to contain his obsession with the vision of a serving girl with “dark eyes,” and, failing to do so, takes out his pistol and contemplates a choice: whether to murder the serving girl whose laughing eyes have him transfixed, or to put a bullet through his brain to preserve his “honor.” And elsewhere, in a third novella, out on the frozen steppes, the passengers in the crowded compartment of a long-distance train find themselves at the mercy of Pozdnyshev, a confessed wife-murderer, who, Tolstoy tells us, has only just been released on grounds of insanity but insists on taking up the long rail journey by offering his extremely long-winded “explanation” for slashing his wife to death with his saber.

What do these three scenes have in common? Each is the dark center of one of Lev Tolstoy’s trilogy of late novellas whose venomous animus against love, sex, and human reproduction leads to what is his most shocking argument of all: that all of mankind would be better off if it were to die out, exterminate itself by ceasing “swinish” sexual reproduction and abandoning the love that all too often led to it. Exterminate itself. Seriously.

More here.

David Runciman in The Guardian:

At the 2021 Australian and US Open tennis championships, all the line judges were replaced by machines. This was, in many ways, inevitable. Not only are these machines far more accurate than any human at calling balls in or out, but they can also be programmed to make their calls in a human-like voice, so as not to disorient the players. It is a little eerie, the disembodied shriek of “Out!” coming from nowhere on the court (at the Australian Open the machines are programmed to speak with an Australian accent). But it is far less irritating than the delays required by challenging incorrect calls, and far more reliable. It takes very little getting used to.

In the slew of reports published in the 2010s looking to identify which jobs were most at risk of being automated out of existence, sports officials usually ranked very high up the list (the best known of these studies, by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne in 2017, put a 98% probability on sports officiating being phased out by computers within 20 years). Here, after all, is a human enterprise where the single most important qualification is an ability to get the answer right. In or out? Ball or strike? Fair or foul? These are decisions that need to be underpinned by accurate intelligence. The technology does not even have to be state-of-the-art to produce far better answers than humans can. Hawk-Eye systems have been outperforming human eyesight for nearly 20 years. They were first officially adopted for tennis line calls in 2006, to check cricket umpire decisions in 2009 and, more recently, to rule on football offsides.

More here.

Julie Miller in Vanity Fair:

It was nearing eight o’clock in the evening on December 11, 1981, and the serial killer Stephen Morin was driving the SUV of his latest captive, Margy Palm, north out of San Antonio. Helicopters circled the city and police combed the streets, warning people to stay inside and lock the doors. Morin’s reign of terror was sputtering to a clumsy close after a rare mistake earlier that day. He was suspected of the murder, torture, and in some cases rape of more than 30 women in 9 or 10 states—and most of San Antonio now knew that he was on the loose in its manicured, country-club midst.

Morin’s concern at the moment, though, wasn’t escaping so much as finding an appropriate soundtrack for his kidnapping of Palm, the 30-year-old Texan in the passenger seat. Morin, also 30, had pulled a .38 revolver on her six hours earlier as she reached her Chevy Suburban in the parking lot of a Kmart after Christmas shopping, then shoved her inside the car. Palm looked like many of his other victims—pretty, fit, and blond—and tells me that she didn’t try to fight or flee for the same reason that some of the others hadn’t: “I’ve never felt that kind of fear.”

More here.

Aleks Phillips in Newsweek:

Russell Moore, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today and a former stalwart of the American Baptist church, said during an interview this month that he saw Christianity as being in “crisis” because the teachings of Jesus were being viewed by a growing number of people as “subversive” to their right-wing ideology. “Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching—’turn the other cheek’—[and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?'” he told NPR. While devout Christians rebuffing the words of Jesus Christ may come as a surprise to some, what Moore was elucidating was what experts described to Newsweek as a rift within the conservative Christian faith that has been growing for decades—but had come to be defined by support for Don.

“What Russell Moore’s talking about is real and important and certainly, for anyone who cares about the longer history of Christianity, it’s deeply concerning,” said Heath Carter, associate professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary. “But I don’t think it’s new.”

More here.

Plea to a Particular Soft-Handed Goddess

Where there are no streets
the world is less remembered,
and hypotheses are lean and scattered.

I kneel before a pine-tree-standing;
listen to the locust-singing of my soul;
hope for a brimful of some sort.

I pray for raindrop ablution;
for embodiment of sandhill dreams;
for a scheme to end

this bughouse commotion;
these spasms of faddism.
The question is:

how to work out a pardonable truce
between one’s honest opinion
and the official attitude.

…… What I really want is for you
…… to come and stand beside me
…… and probe with pagan tenderness

…… Beyond my bone weight
…… until you find a forgotten disclosure
…… like the surprise of my being.

by Parm Mayer
from Heartland; Poets of the Midwest
Northern Illinois University Press, 1967

Miryam Naddaf in Nature:

It took 10 years, around 500 scientists and some €600 million, and now the Human Brain Project — one of the biggest research endeavours ever funded by the European Union — is coming to an end. Its audacious goal was to understand the human brain by modelling it in a computer. During its run, scientists under the umbrella of the Human Brain Project (HBP) have published thousands of papers and made significant strides in neuroscience, such as creating detailed 3D maps of at least 200 brain regions¹, developing brain implants to treat blindness² and using supercomputers to model functions such as memory and consciousness and to advance treatments for various brain conditions³.

“When the project started, hardly anyone believed in the potential of big data and the possibility of using it, or supercomputers, to simulate the complicated functioning of the brain,” says Thomas Skordas, deputy director-general of the European Commission in Brussels.

Almost since it began, however, the HBP has drawn criticism. The project did not achieve its goal of simulating the whole human brain — an aim that many scientists regarded as far-fetched in the first place. It changed direction several times, and its scientific output became “fragmented and mosaic-like”, says HBP member Yves Frégnac, a cognitive scientist and director of research at the French national research agency CNRS in Paris. For him, the project has fallen short of providing a comprehensive or original understanding of the brain. “I don’t see the brain; I see bits of the brain,” says Frégnac.

More here.

Paul Franz at The Hedgehog Review:

Lear is not to first to link the question of whether or not to mourn to speculation about the nature of value. Here, he traces that connection to a 1915 essay by Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” that marks a second, if still somehow cryptic, focus of Imagining the End. Freud begins his essay by recounting a conversation in the Alpine countryside with a “young poet” who startled him by refusing to take pleasure in the beauties of the landscape because, he said, they are fleeting. Freud responded with the equally extreme assertion that “transience” is the source of all value. By the close of the essay, however, writing from what he now reveals are the depths of a devastating world war, Freud has adopted a chastened view. Unlike the poet, in whom he found a fear of the pain of mourning so great that it barred all attachment, Freud’s hope now, transcending the earlier dichotomy, is that what war has destroyed may one day be rebuilt, not eternally, but “perhaps on more solid ground and more enduringly than before.”

more here.

Blair McClendon at Bookforum:

THRALL IS A JEFFERSONIAN WORD. In Constructing a Nervous System, the critic Margo Jefferson is enthralled by or to: her mother, her father, Bing Crosby. She suspects Condoleezza Rice is enthralled by or to George W. Bush, and Ike Turner by or to “manic depression and drug addiction, to years of envy,  . . . to a Mississippi childhood that was a trifecta of domestic abuse, sexual treachery and racist violence.” A young James Baldwin enthralled the Harlem faithful. Nina Simone refused the thrall of “warring desires.” It’s the last that clarifies the stakes. Thrall, some time after it meant “slave” to Northern Europeans, found a new Gothic use. Dracula, through hypnosis and sheer erotic power, holds his servants and whole towns in his thrall, the better to protect him while he hides from the sun. Those enthralled submit totally, pleasurably. Influence doesn’t always have to provoke anxiety. There is danger of losing oneself, of being absorbed by the force of another’s will and gaze and magnetism, and that’s before they seize upon your neck. But there’s a reason Dracula persists. Beneath our regimens of self-help, self-care, and self-improvement, we might think briefly of annihilation and find it sweet.

more here.

Sarah Scoles in The New York Times:

Nuclear war has returned to the realm of dinner table conversation, weighing on the minds of the public more than it has in a generation.

It’s not just “Oppenheimer’s” big haul at the box office: Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s officials have made nuclear threats. Russia has also suspended its participation in a nuclear arms control treaty with the United States. North Korea has launched demonstrative missiles. The United States, which is modernizing its nuclear weapons, shot down a surveillance balloon from China, which is building up its atomic arsenal.

“The threat of nuclear use today, I believe, is as high as it has ever been in the nuclear age,” said Joan Rohlfing, president and chief operating officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an influential nonprofit group in Washington, D.C. In this environment, a conventional crisis runs a significant risk of turning nuclear. It only requires a world leader to decide to launch a nuclear attack. And that decision making process must be better understood.

More here.

Rob LeDonne in The Guardian:

The director Lizzie Gottlieb was hosting a birthday party for her father, the renowned editor Robert Gottlieb at her Brooklyn brownstone when she struck up a conversation with one of the many guests. “A lovely older gentleman came up to me and said, ‘What do you think of the Barclay’s Center on Flatbush Avenue and how do you think it’ll affect the neighborhood?’ I started spouting completely uninformed, random opinions.” Mid-sentence, she came to a realization. “It was Robert Caro, and I was talking to him about New York City infrastructure.”

As one of the most respected living authors of the written word, 87-year-old Robert Caro has actually only authored six books, from The Power Broker, his 1974 opus about New York City planner Robert Moses to an epic, and still unfinished, series focusing on the life of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (more on that later). It’s a body of work that shines a stark spotlight on power; from the thirst some have for it, how they obtain it, and how the world – and the powerless at large – are shaped by their whims. As a result of his scrupulous and exhaustive research, vivid storytelling and poetic prose, Caro has become a cult figure. The latest facet of his lore is the new documentary Turn Every Page. Directed by Lizzie, it zeroes in on Caro’s creative relationship with his 91-year-old editor, Robert Gottlieb, who also happens to be Lizzie’s father.

More here. (Note: One of the best films I saw this year so far)

The Old Days

In the old days of the old God, demanding and full of blame,
there was such commerce between heaven and earth—
burning bushes, angels knocking at the door, high drama
at the Red Sea. But after centuries, tired and overwhelmed,
God moved into a book with black frayed covers;
this book lived in our shul. And so my mother
rose to the occasion—she was the one who warmed cold
waters, parted them, pinched my cheek, made my bed.
Now she’s like God, helpless and confused,
the miracles of Egypt are lost, like her recipes and opinions.
Here, she would say, drink this, it’s good for you;
here, this way, and my hands would ties a shoe.

God, and my mother have grown to resemble each other,
like a couple who’ve lived under the same roof
for a long, long time. And both seem to have forgotten me—
He spinning the world, she rinsing the dishes,
remote and distracted, the two of them moving, morning
and night, of little circles of water and air.

by Gene Zeiger
from Leaving Egypt
White Pine Press, 1995

Nina Herzog in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

THE FINNISH PHOTOGRAPHER and video artist Iiu Susiraja’s first US solo museum exhibition, Iiu Susiraja: A style called a dead fish, is up at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York. When you enter, you’re both greeted by and confronted with a single work, facing you on the wall, entitled Woman (2010). An early, iconic work by the artist, it seems at first a straightforward photo of a fat woman dressed in a black dress with a wool cap on her head and big blue work gloves. There is almost no dead space outside of her body, which fills the width of the frame. Her eyes are looking off, perhaps dolefully, perhaps in boredom. Tucked into her cap, perfectly covering each ear like a warming flap, is a fish. Tucked into each glove is also a fish. The woman in the photo is Iiu Susiraja.

More here.

Harilaos Stecopoulos at LitHub:

As Ellison would teach his European pupils in Salzburg, the existence of many diverse communities rendered his native land richly heterogeneous—a veritable “international country”—and also testified to an ongoing and still challenging attempt at reconciling color and democracy. The best of American literature, and its novels in particular, contributed to the ongoing effort to forge “unity in diversity,” and this national dilemma manifested important ties to the crises “faced…by peoples throughout the world.” “Through forging forms of the novel worthy of [American diversity],” argued Ellison in his 1953 National Book Award acceptance speech, “we anticipate the resolution of those world problems of humanity which for the moment seem…completely insoluble.” The literary instantiation of American pluralism would help teach Europeans and all the world’s peoples how to create a better future, a valuable lesson for the Salzburg students who had historically received little if any exposure to literatures of color.

more here.

Ben Brubaker in Quanta:

Despite decades of effort by researchers in the field of computational complexity theory — the study of such questions about the intrinsic difficulty of different problems — a resolution to the P versus NP question has remained elusive. And it’s not even clear where a would-be proof should start.

“There’s no road map,” said Michael Sipser, a veteran complexity theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who spent years grappling with the problem in the 1980s. “It’s like you’re going into the wilderness.”

It seems that proving that computational problems are hard to solve is itself a hard task. But why is it so hard? And just how hard is it?

More here.

Bailey Trela at the Paris Review:

If I’d had to explain to myself why, with only three days to spend in Paris, I felt such an acute need to visit the home where Honoré de Balzac, a writer I wasn’t even that familiar with, had composed the bulk of The Human Comedy, a fictional project I’d barely even dipped my toes into, I’m not sure what I would have said. Probably it just seemed that if anyone would have had an interesting house, it would have been him. Open one of his novels at random, and chances are you’ll find a gratuitous description of a room and its furnishings, a flurry of signifiers that, today, can seem hard to place. Take Monsieur Grandet’s living room, for instance, as it appears in the opening chapter of Eugénie Grandet. We learn the room has two windows that “gave on to the street,” that its floor is wooden, that “grey, wooden panelling with antique moulding lined the walls from top to bottom,” that its ceiling is dominated by exposed beams. “An old copper clock, inlaid with tortoiseshell arabesques, adorned the white, badly carved, stone chimney-piece,” Balzac goes on. “Above it hung a greenish mirror, whose edges, bevelled to show its thickness, reflected a thin stream of light along an old-fashioned pier-mirror of damascened steel.” I don’t know what a pier-mirror is, and I couldn’t begin to differentiate an old-fashioned model from a sleeker, more modern one. In a sense, this feeling of being lost was part of the appeal of Balzac’s world as I’d imagined it.

more here.