Kate Briggs at The Paris Review:

Marcottage could be a possible metaphor for translation. This work of provoking what plants, and perhaps also books, already know how to do, what in fact they most deeply want to do: actively creating the conditions for a new plant to root at some distance from the original, and there live separately: a “daughter-work” robust enough in its new context to throw out runners of its own, in unexpected directions, causing the network of interrelations to grow and complexify.

For me, marcottage is a way to make sense of my own translations of Barthes’s lecture courses. Officially, there have been two—two translations into English of two volumes of lecture notes published in French more than a decade ago: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together. But to my mind, there have really been four: two further books, translations in a more expanded sense. This Little Art, my long essay that stays close to Barthes’s late work, frequently citing it, renarrating it, making an adjacent space to keep thinking with it.

more here.

A beautiful wish, spoken so ardently that truth fractures,
must be fact-checked before promulgation. What otherwise
follows are shattered hearts, and disbelief in truth.
……………………………. ……………………….. —Anonymous

Ginsberg

No blame. Anyone who wrote Howl and Kaddish
earned the right to make any possible mistake
for the rest of his life.

I just wish I hadn’t made this mistake with him.
It was during the Vietnam war
and he was giving a great protest reading
in Washington Square Park
and nobody wanted to leave.

So Ginsberg got the idea, “I’m going to shout
‘the war is over’ as loud as I can,'” he said
“and all of you run over the city
in different directions
yelling the war is over, shout it in offices,
shops, everywhere and when enough people
believe the war is over
why, not even the politicians
will be able to keep it going.”

I thought it was a great idea at the time
a truly poetic idea.

So when Ginsberg yelled I ran down the street
and leaned in the doorway
of the sort of respectable down-on-its-luck cafeteria
where librarians and minor clerks have lunch
and I yelled “the war is over.”
And a little old lady looked up
from her cottage cheese and fruit salad.
She was so ordinary she would have been invisible
except for the terrible light
filling her face as she whispered
“My son. My son is coming home.”

I got myself out of there and was sick in some bushes.
That was the first time I believed there was a war.

by Julia Vinograd
from Poetic Outlaws

Nathan Gardels at Noema:

Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and former vice president for AI products and policy at Google, offers some deep thoughts in his just-released book, “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma” (written with Michael Bhaskar).

The “wave” he sees washing over all aspects of society, for better and worse, is propelled by generative AI and another general-purpose technological innovation — synthetic biology, which, powered by the processing prowess of intelligent machines, can read and rewrite genetic code and then boot up life in the lab. “For the first time core components of our technological ecosystem directly address two foundational properties of our world: intelligence and life. In other words, technology is undergoing a phase transition. No longer simply a tool, it’s going to engineer life and rival — and surpass — our own intelligence,” Suleyman writes.

more here.

Sonia Shah at the New York Times:

Evidence of continuities between animal communication and human language continued to mount. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 suggested that we hadn’t significantly diverged from that lineage, as the theory of a “human revolution” posited. On the contrary, Neanderthal genes and those of other ancient hominins persisted in the modern human genome, evidence of how intimately we were entangled. In 2014, Jarvis found that the neural circuits that allowed songbirds to learn and produce novel sounds matched those in humans, and that the genes that regulated those circuits evolved in similar ways. The accumulating evidence left “little room for doubt,” Cedric Boeckx, a theoretical linguist at the University of Barcelona, noted in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. “There was no ‘great leap forward.’”

As our understanding of the nature and origin of language shifted, a host of fruitful cross-disciplinary collaborations arose. Colleagues of Chomsky’s, such as the M.I.T. linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, whose early career was shaped by the precept that “we’re smart, they’re not,” applied for grants with primatologists and neuroscientists to study how human language might be related to birdsong and primate calls.

more here.

High Quality Information

A life spent seeking it
Like a worm in the earth,
Like a hawk. Catching threads
Sketching bones
Guessing where the road goes.
Lao-tzu says
To forget what you knew is best.
That’s what I want:
To get these sights down,
Clear, right to the place
Where they fade
Back into the mind of my times.
The same old circuity
But some paths color-coded
Empty
And we’re free to go.

by Gary Snyder
from Left Out in the Rain
North Point Press, 1986

Roni Rabin in The New York Times:

Surgeons in Baltimore have transplanted the heart of a genetically altered pig into a man with terminal heart disease who had no other hope for treatment, the University of Maryland Medical Center announced on Friday. It is the second such procedure performed by the surgeons. The first patient, David Bennett, 57, died two months after his transplant, but the pig heart functioned well and there were no signs of acute organ rejection, a major risk in such procedures. The second patient, Lawrence Faucette, 58, a Navy veteran and married father of two in Frederick, Md., underwent the transplant surgery on Wednesday and is “recovering well and communicating with his loved ones,” the medical center said in a statement. Mr. Faucette, who had terminal heart disease and other complicated medical conditions, was so sick that he had been rejected from all transplant programs that use human donor organs.

…The transplantation was performed by Dr. Bartley Griffith, who operated on the first patient. Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, designed the protocol.

More here.

Erik Guzik in Singularity Hub:

Of all the forms of human intellect that one might expect artificial intelligence to emulate, few people would likely place creativity at the top of their list. Creativity is wonderfully mysterious—and frustratingly fleeting. It defines us as human beings—and seemingly defies the cold logic that lies behind the silicon curtain of machines.

Yet, the use of AI for creative endeavors is now growing.

New AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are increasingly part of creative production, and some have started to win awards for their creative output. The growing impact is both social and economic—as just one example, the potential of AI to generate new, creative content is a defining flashpoint behind the Hollywood writers strike. And if our recent study into the striking originality of AI is any indication, the emergence of AI-based creativity—along with examples of both its promise and peril—is likely just beginning.

More here.

Shruti Swamy at AFAR:

It is Mumbai in November, which is to say: hot.

I have stood where I am standing many times before, in all eras of my life—as a baby wobbly on my own two feet, as a bespectacled kid with scraped knees, as an awkward teen tugging down the skirt that attracts too much attention, as a young woman backpacking after college, and as a newlywed, visiting with my husband.

This time I am here as a writer, wife, mother. I’m around the corner from the park teeming with morning walkers, in the leafy suburb of Vile Parle, on the street where my grandparents, and then my aunt, used to live in a building called Nav Samaj. I remember every inch of it: the mineral smell of the staircase, the daybed where I spent hours as a child reading piles of Reader’s Digests. The cool tile floor I’d lie on when the heat was overwhelming, the dark kitchen in which some of the most spectacular meals of my life were created. The almirah in the bedroom that held my grandmother’s starched, mothball-scented saris.

More here.

Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

In an attempt to address climate change and other environmental problems, governments are increasingly turning to economic solutions. The underlying message is clear: capitalism might have created the problem, but capitalism can solve it. Adrienne Buller, a Senior Fellow with progressive think tank Common Wealth, is, to put it mildly, sceptical of this. From carbon credits to biodiversity offsets, she unmasks these policies for the greenwashing that they are. The Value of a Whale is a necessary corrective that is as eye-opening as it is shocking.

More here.

Nikhil Krishnan in The Guardian:

The past few years have seen an abundance of works of popular science about a variety of human beings who once inhabited Eurasia: “Neanderthals”. They died out, it appears, 40,000 years ago. That number – 40,000 – is as totemic to Neanderthal specialists as that better known figure, 65 million, is to dinosaur fanciers.

What distinguishes these new books isn’t just what they tell us about an extinct sub-species of humans, but the surprising passion they bring to their subject. Their authors are enraged that popular ideas about the Neanderthals lag so far behind the cutting edge of paleontological research – research that has brought the Neanderthals closer to us than they have been in 40,000 years.

More here.

Colin Burnett in The Common Reader:

To understand the origins of any franchise, look first to rights—who owns the intellectual property, how it is managed, and where the revenue generated from its exploitation is set to flow.

In February 1952, Ian Fleming (1908-1964), a former Naval Intelligence officer and manager of the foreign desk of the Kemsley newspaper group (including The Sunday Times), writes the first in a series of spy novels. He cribs the central character’s name from a 1936 book entitled The Birds of the West Indies. Its author: James Bond. But who the fictional character James Bond would become, what international schemes he would solve, and what kind of life he would lead are not the only matters occupying Fleming’s thoughts. He wants his novels to sell, quickly, and for his young family to reap the financial rewards.

For that, he will need to carefully manage his new property. In September 1952, the United Nations passes the Universal Copyright Convention which decrees that any work which carries the symbol © will retain copyright control in all contracted states. In response to the Convention, Fleming moves swiftly to incorporate himself. He purchases a small theatrical production firm, Glidrose Productions, Ltd., and turns over all rights to his works.

This is where the Bond franchise truly begins.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

There are five fundamental operations in mathematics,” the German mathematician Martin Eichler supposedly said. “Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modular forms.”

Part of the joke, of course, is that one of those is not like the others. Modular forms are much more complicated and enigmatic functions, and students don’t typically encounter them until graduate school. But “there are probably fewer areas of math where they don’t have applications than where they do,” said Don Zagier, a mathematician at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany. Every week, new papers extend their reach into number theory, geometry, combinatorics, topology, cryptography and even string theory.

They are often described as functions that satisfy symmetries so striking and elaborate that they shouldn’t be possible. The properties that come with those symmetries make modular forms immensely powerful. It’s what made them key players in the landmark 1994 proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

More here.

Nathan Thrall in The Guardian:

Huda Dahbour was 35 years old when she moved with her husband and three children to the West Bank in September 1995. It was the second anniversary of the Oslo accords, which established pockets of Palestinian self-government in the occupied territories. Jerusalem was still relatively open when they arrived in East Sawahre, a neighbourhood just outside the areas of Jerusalem that Israel had annexed in 1967. Huda was able to send her children to school within the city. They were under the age of 12, and Israel allowed them to enter without a special blue ID. But over time the restrictions grew, and from one day to the next Jerusalem was closed off to Palestinians by checkpoints, roadblocks and a tightening of the ever-more elaborate permit regime. On one occasion, the school bus was blocked from bringing the students home to Sawahre. Huda and half the parents of the neighbourhood spent the afternoon searching for their children, who finally showed up at sunset, after walking for several hours. Huda immediately took them out of their Jerusalem schools.

More here.

NOTE: Tomorrow will be the 20th anniversary of Edward Said’s death.

Lorenzo Forlani at Middle East Eye:

Forty-five years have passed since the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said published his seminal 1978 book, Orientalism. It was a breakthrough in understanding western representations of an unspecified notion of the “Orient”, stretching from Asia to North Africa.

Said presents a framework for identifying and analysing the myths and stereotypes about the East that have long dominated western discourses, media representations, and academic scholarship.

Decades later, there is certainly greater awareness of the harm perpetuated by such constructs, particularly those pitting Islam against the West, which, according to Said, are “perceived as a discourse of power originating in an era of colonialism”.

Yet the post-9/11 era, in which racist and Islamophobic narratives were deployed to justify imperialist wars, demonstrates that not much has changed.

More here.

Zack Beauchamp in Vox:

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew are forced to navigate a strait bounded by two equally dangerous obstacles: Scylla, a six-headed sea serpent, and Charybdis, an underwater horror that sucks down ships through a massive whirlpool. Judging Charybdis to be a greater danger to the crew as a whole, Odysseus orders his crew to try and pass through on Scylla’s side. They make it, but six sailors are eaten in the crossing. In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced an analogous problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.

The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side of the strait: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.

“By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule,” they write. This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down the anti-democratic whirlpool. The Republican Party, they argue, has become an anti-democratic institution, its traditional leadership cowed by Trump and a racially reactionary base. As such, it is increasingly willing to twist legal tools designed to check oppressive majorities into tools for imposing its policy preferences on an unwilling majority. The best way out of this dilemma, in their view, is radical legal constitutional reform that brings the American system more in line with other advanced democracies.

More here.

Jess Thomson in Newsweek:

A strange, immortal tube-shaped animal has been discovered to regenerate a whole new body from only its mouth to avoid getting old. This creature, named Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus, a tiny invertebrate that lives on the shells of crabs, is usually immune to aging altogether, but was found to use aging within its body to grow an entirely new body, a study published in the journal Cell Reports found.

…Hydractinia had previously been found to have special stem cells that it used for regenerating its tissues. These stem cells are capable of transforming—differentiating—into any type of body cell, which more specialized cells like heart tissue or muscle tissue cannot do. This makes them capable of growing new body parts; humans can only use stem cells during development, but animals like Hydractinia can use stem cells throughout their lifetimes, making them functionally immortal. The researchers found that while Hydractinia stores its stem cells in the lower half of its body, but when they cut off its mouth, the mouth grew a whole new body, indicating that the animal could generate new stem cells. To investigate how these stem cells are triggered to generate, the authors described in the paper how they scanned the genome of Hydractinia for genes related to aging or “senescence”—lagging of cell repair and the aging of the body and its systems.

More here.

Vehicle: Violence

The way boxers postulate a feeling to label that with which they overcome
……….. the body’s vile fears,
its wish to flinch, to flee, break and run . . .  call it anger, pride,
……….. the primal passion to prevail;
the way, before they start, they glare at one another, try to turn themselves
……….. to snarling beasts . . .
so we first make up something in the soul we name and offer credence
……….. to—“meaning,” “purpose,” “end” —
and then we cast ourselves into the conflict, turn upon our soul, snarl
……….. like snarling beasts . . .
And the way the fighters fight, cooly until strength fails, then desperately,
……….. wildly, as in a dream,
and the way, done, they fall into one another’s arms, almost sobbing with
……….. relief, sobbing with relief:
so we contend, so we wish to finish, wish to cry and end, but we never
cry, never end, as in a dream.

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994