Megan McClusky in Time:

Moviegoers turned out in droves this weekend for writer-director Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer, fueling an expectations-shattering domestic box office debut of $80 million. The three-hour-long biopic recounts the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), the theoretical physicist widely known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and has been praised by critics for its nuanced examination of a complicated historical figure. The movie is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of numerous accounts of Oppenheimer’s life and legacy. But according to Oppenheimer’s grandson, Charles Oppenheimer, the famous physicist’s family has their own their own approach to depictions of him and additional nuance to include.

More here.

David J. Chalmers in the Boston Review:

When I was a graduate student at the start of the 1990s, I spent half my time thinking about artificial intelligence, especially artificial neural networks, and half my time thinking about consciousness. I’ve ended up working more on consciousness over the years, but over the last decade I’ve keenly followed the explosion of work on deep learning in artificial neural networks. Just recently, my interests in neural networks and in consciousness have begun to collide.

When Blake Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, said in June 2022 that he detected sentience and consciousness in LaMDA 2, a language model system grounded in an artificial neural network, his claim was met by widespread disbelief. A Google spokesperson said:

Our team—including ethicists and technologists—has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).

The question of evidence piqued my curiosity. What is or might be the evidence in favor of consciousness in a large language model, and what might be the evidence against it? That’s what I’ll be talking about here.

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

Justifiably, the book opens with sensory biology. Before we understand what is in the mind of any organism, Chittka argues, we first need to understand the gateways, the sense organs, through which information from the outside world is filtered. These are shaped by both evolutionary history and daily life (i.e. what information matters on a day-to-day basis and what can be safely ignored). Chapter 2 deals with the historical research that showed that bees do have colour vision and furthermore can perceive ultraviolet (UV) light. Many flowers sport UV patterns invisible to us. Remarkably, UV photoreceptors are found in numerous insects and other crustaceans whose shared ancestry goes back to the Cambrian, predating the evolution of flowers in the Cretaceous by hundreds of millions of years. In other words, it seems flowers adapted to insect colour vision rather than the other way around.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra at Literary Hub:

The Immortals is one of the most mesmerizing novels I have read. It is also, for that reason, one of the most mysterious books I know. Set in a highly specific time and place—Bombay in the 1980s—and seemingly faithful to the conventions of realist prose-narrative, its overall impact, however, is auditory, quite like that of the tanpura, the instrument crucial to North Indian classical music: the sound, as Chaudhuri writes, “shocked you every time you heard it,” “its four strings combining to create not only a single vibration, but a world” and, furthermore, “a world without time.”

I must have read the novel six or seven times since its publication in 2009. But the sum of readings does not exhaust its fascination, or its mystery. On my first reading, the book touched me as only the memory of something personally experienced can: the growth and deepening of a young man’s sensibility in late twentieth-century India, his quickening awareness of himself as a simultaneously free and elusive consciousness.

More here.

Laura Miller in Slate:

“You know, I don’t really talk to that many other novelists,” James McBride told me. “I don’t spend a lot of time with other writers.” It was a statement that explained a lot, while at the same time shooting a pet theory out of the water. If McBride’s most recent books—the celebrated Deacon King Kong, published in 2020, and this summer’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store—feel as if they’re swimming hard against the tide of current literary fashion, it’s apparently not deliberate. McBride has had other matters on his mind. Perhaps the best way to write a Great American Novel is not to think of yourself as a novelist at all.

The other matters preoccupying McBride include music—as a saxophonist, he toured with Jimmy Scott, and he has written songs for artists as varied as Anita Baker and Barney the purple dinosaur—and the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church, founded by his parents in 1954, and to which McBride still belongs. The church is in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where Deacon King Kong is set, where McBride grew up, and where he keeps an apartment, although he also has a place in New Jersey for when he wants to be left alone to write. That’s where he wrote his National Book Award–winning 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird.

More here.

Jack Hanson at Commonweal:

Petzold has said in interviews that, when he contracted Covid in 2020, he spent weeks watching the films of Eric Rohmer, a French director whose films tell deceptively simple stories, almost fables, and Afire follows this model. The first two acts of the film are essentially a dark comedy of manners: Devid and Felix sleep together, Leon makes fumbling attempts to win Nadja’s affections while offending her and embarrassing himself at every turn. Wildfires are raging in a nearby forest, but our vacationers assure one another that, due to prevailing wind patterns, they are safe from the ongoing devastation—a presumption begging to be challenged.

Some reviewers have questioned whether, when the reckoning arrives for the naïve Leon and his slightly less naïve companions, Petzold executes it with the same narrative eloquence for which he is known. But the primary question Afire asks is not what the characters will do when the fire finally comes, but rather how they will come to terms with the fact that, at some level, they always knew it was coming.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLfvNwsI5RQ&ab_channel=RareFilm%27sChannel

Jyoti Madhusoodanan in Nature:

In August 2021, Amol Akhade, an oncologist at Nair Medical Hospital in Mumbai, India, received an e-mail from the Swiss drug manufacturer Roche recommending the use of a drug named atezolizumab to treat a specific kind of breast cancer. Akhade was surprised. That month, Roche had withdrawn the drug for this purpose in the United States (although it is still approved to treat other kinds of cancer).

For the type of breast cancer in question — known as triple-negative because it lacks three key protein markers — atezolizumab was made available in 2019 through the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Accelerated Approval Program. Accelerated approval is a fast-track process designed to place desperately needed drugs in the hands of patients quicker than is possible with conventional drug approval. But a follow-up study found that atezolizumab made little difference to tumour growth, and that people who received it were less likely to survive up to two years after treatment than were those not taking it¹. When the FDA received these data in 2021, it indicated that accelerated approval was no longer appropriate, and Roche withdrew the drug for this form of breast cancer. The same thing happened with the European Medicines Agency (EMA), based in Amsterdam, but not everywhere else.

In India, for example, where the drug was still approved for triple-negative breast cancer, Roche continued to promote the treatment until at least September, a fact that Akhade says he found “quite shocking”.

More here.

Travis Elborough at The Paris Review:

It seems no less than highly appropriate that when Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London first appeared in 1964 it was purchasable from one of a hundred automatic book-vending machines that had been installed in a selection of inner-London train stations just two years earlier. Sadly, these machines, operated by the British Automatic Company, were short-lived. Persistent vandalism and theft saw them axed during the so-called Summer of Love, by which time, and perhaps thanks to Doctor Who’s then-recent battles with mechanoid Cybermen, the shine had rather come off the idea of unfettered technological progress. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its malevolent supercomputer HAL 9000, after all, lay only a few months away. And so too, did the partial collapse of the Ronan Point high-rise (a space-age monolith of sorts) in Canning Town, East London—an event widely credited with helping to turn the general public against modernist architecture.

more here.

Sea

— It seems, sea, that you struggle
— oh, endless disorder, incessant iron!—
to find yourself or that I may find you.
— How incredible that you should show yourself
in all your naked solitude
— without ever a companion
neither a he nor a she—projecting
such an image of our
entire world today!
—You are as if in childbirth
—with so much effort!—
of yourself, matchless sea,
of yourself, just yourself, in your own
solitary abundance of abundances
. . . to find yourself or that I may find you!

by Juan Ramón Jimenéz
from The Poet & the Sea
White Pine Press 2009

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Ask a cancer researcher what the breakthrough treatment of the decade is, and they’ll tell you CAR T takes the crown. The therapy genetically engineers a person’s own immune cells, turning them into super soldiers that hunt down cancerous blood cells. With astonishing speed, multiple CAR T therapies have been approved by the FDA for previously untreatable blood cancers. So far, over 15,000 patients have been treated with the therapy. To Dr. Carl June, a pioneer of the technology at the University of Pennsylvania, we’re only scratching the surface of CAR T’s potential.

In a perspective article published in Nature this week, June and colleagues laid out a path forward. At its root, CAR T therapy taps into the natural “killer instinct” of a type of immune cell, called a T cell, and directs it to a particular target—for example, blood cancer cells. But with careful redesign, CAR T therapy can be genetically engineered to tackle a wide range of humanity’s most prominent medical enemies: autoimmune diseases, asthma, and heart, liver, and kidney diseases caused by increasingly stiffening muscles.

Even more intriguing, CAR T may help clean out senescent “zombie” cells, which are linked to age-related diseases, or combat HIV and other viral infectious diseases. “We are only beginning to realize the full potential of this living drug,” said the authors.

More here.

Deanna MacNeil in The Scientist:

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and malignant form of primary brain cancer. More effective treatments for GBM are direly needed, as the median survival with current therapeutic options is 15 months. One difficulty that scientists face is developing GBM treatments that overcome therapeutic resistance. GBM tumor cells invade the surrounding brain tissue and acquire resistance mediated by factors in the tumor microenvironment (TME). Conventional drug screens that rely on tumor cells grown in culture lack the TME, highlighting the need for better screening models to overcome invasion-mediated therapeutic resistance.¹ 

Researchers use 3D models to study multiple types of cancer, but most current GBM models focus on examining one element of the TME at a time. Jennifer Munson, a bioengineer at Virginia Tech, created a model of the human GBM TME that incorporated patient-derived GBM stem cells, human astrocytes and microglia, and a biophysical force involved in tumorigenesis called interstitial fluid flow.² The researchers evaluated their model based on four key metrics of GBM behavior—tumor cell death, invasion, proliferation, and stemness.

More here.

A Domestic Poem For Portia

This is all it is.
These pictures cast up in front of me
with the mind’s voracious energies.
Hence so many flies in this old granary.
I’ve become one of those blackened beef sides
hanging in a South American market so when I sing
to myself I dispel a black cloud around my mouth
and when Linda brings iced tea she thinks I’m only
a photo in National Geographic and drinks the tea
herself, musing he’s snuck off to the bar
and his five-year pool game.
This seems to be all it is.
Garcia sings Brown-eyed woman and red grenadine.
Some mother-source of pleasure so that the guitar
mutes and revolves the vision of her as she rinses
her hair bending thigh-deep in the lake, her buttocks appear
to be struggling by themselves to get out of that bikini
with a faint glisten of sun on each cheek top.
But when I talked to her she was thin in the head,
a magazine photo slipping through the air like
a stringless kite.
It’s apparent now that this is all there is.
This shabby wicker chair, music, the three PM
glass of red wine as a reward for sitting still
as our parents once instructed us. “Sit still!”
I want my head to go visit friends, traveling they call it
and without airports. Then little Anna up to her neck
in the lake for the first time, the ancient lineage
of swimming revealing itself in her two-year-old fat
body, eyes sparkle with awe and delight in this natural
house of water. Hearing a screech I step to the porch
and see three hawks above the neighbor’s pasture
chasing each other in battle or courtship.
This must be all there is.
At full rest with female-wet eyes becoming red wondering
falsely how in christ’s name I am going to earn
enough to keep us up in the country where the air
is sweet and green, an immense kingdom of water nearby
and five animals looking to me for food, and two daughters
and a mother assuming my strength. I courageously fix
the fence, mulch the tomatoes, fertilize the pasture —
a nickel-plated farmer. Wake up in the middle
of the night frightened, thinking nearly two decades
ago I took my vows and never dreamed I’d be responsible
for so many souls. Eight of them whispering provide.
This could very well be all that there is.
And I’m not unhappy with it. A check in the mail that will
take us through another month. I see in the papers
I’ve earned us “lower class”! How strange. Waiting
for Rachel’s foal to drop. That will make nine. Provide.
Count my big belly ten. But there’s an odd grace in being
and ordinary artist. A single tradition clipping the heads
off so many centuries. Those two drunks a millennium ago on
a mountainside in China — laughing over the beauty of the moment.
At peace despite their muddled brains. The male dog, a trifle
stupid, rushes through the door announcing absolutely nothing.
He has great confidence in me. I’m hanging onto nothing today and
with confidence, a sureness that the very air between our bodies,
the light of what we are, has to be enough.

by Jim Harrison
from The Shape of the Journey
Copper Canyon Press, 1998

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GXIWI1hj9w&ab_channel=PhilosophyOverdose

Jason Blakely at Harper’s Magazine:

Invoking science and data to resolve ethical and ideological controversies obscures the values and interests of particular groups and policymakers. Anyone governing in the name of data is still making judgments. When the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggested that emergency dictates reflected that the governing ethic in Western societies had become “bare life, and the fear of losing it,” thereby reflecting a politics that “values nothing more than survival,” he was criticized for recklessness. Yet he rightly intuited that much of the expert response to the pandemic was shaped by an unstated vision of what human life was ultimately about. The assertion made by officials that the pandemic simply dictated certain policy responses was a way of suppressing underlying ethical and political disagreements.

In this way, “the pandemic” served a governing function not unlike “the economy.” There was a bid—albeit never fully successful—at creating a social object to scientifically overcome ideological conflict in American politics.

more here.

Hannah Kennedy at Belt Magazine:

I get sentimental about places, especially forgotten ones like Monarch Park. They’re a bit of a bummer, a bit sobering, a bit sad. But I think it’s a good kind of sadness. It’s the kind of sadness that reminds us that life is short: our joy and sorrow are fleeting, the places and people we love are temporary and the extent to which the world will remember us is limited. We don’t like to think about this as human beings. We like to think we’re the main characters of the world’s story, the center of it all, like a 120-foot Electric Tower of light rising high above a magnificent amusement park.

In reality, we are not permanent fixtures in the world. Instead, we are… people. Spending a little time here before moving on, experiencing great joy and pain and doing our best to create beautiful moments wherever we can. Like the many forgotten people in these pictures, our story is short, but the joy and beauty left in our wake are not insignificant. When I look at the faces in these pictures, I see a moment of life, which is in itself a thing of value.

more here.

Ed Simon in The Millions:

As a sophomore in college, I completely earned the C+ that I received in a survey course called “British Literature.” There could be no blaming of the professor on my end, no skirting responsibility for those missed assignments, no excuse for having confused Belphoebe for Gloriana in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene on multiple choice tests. In the spring semester of 2004, I was more concerned with Yuengling than I was with Geoffrey Chaucer or the Pearl Poet, so I fully deserved the middling grade that I got.

Yet that class was also the site of an important discovery: the stern, austere, blind Puritan bard John Milton. For the past two decades, I’ve read and reread Milton, written about Milton, taught Milton, thought about Milton. I don’t know if I’m any closer to really understanding his greatest work, for that magisterial 1667 poem Paradise Lost is a cosmos unto itself, like Dante’s The Divine Comedy or Melville’s Moby-Dick, but I know that my life wouldn’t be as rich without it.

More here.

Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta:

On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats and reproducing. Small clutches of the eggs they lay hang from long stalks on the underside of leaves and sway like fairy lights in the wind.

The dangling ensembles of eggs are beautiful but also practical: They keep the hatching larvae from immediately eating their unhatched siblings. With sickle-like jaws that pierce their prey and suck them dry, lacewing larvae are “vicious,” said James Truman, a professor emeritus of development, cell and molecular biology at the University of Washington. “It’s like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in one animal.”

This Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy is made possible by metamorphosis, the phenomenon best known for transforming caterpillars into butterflies. In its most extreme version, complete metamorphosis, the juvenile and adult forms look and act like totally different species.

More here.

All of the talks from the MIT event “The Impact of ChatGPT” are here.