John Horgan in Nautilus:

Science journalism is really about everything, I like telling my science-journalism students, because science is really about everything. Take The Golden Bowl, the insanely prolix novel by Henry James, which I read as penance after zipping through a Stephen King gore-fest. The Golden Bowl, I’d heard, is a slog compared to thrillers like The Portrait of a Lady and Turn of the Screw, but James called Bowl his “solidest” novel. By that he must have meant the most Jamesian because The Golden Bowl reads like a parody of James. H.G. Wells’ comparison of James to a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea comes to mind.

Almost nothing happens, and yet nothing is straightforward, certainly not the prose. James jams sentences with subjunctives and conditionals, second and third thoughts, double and triple negatives. Just once, I whined, I wish you’d say what you mean. Plus, the characters are socialites who would never dream of washing their own dishes. But the book grew on me. Superficially dated, it is actually bracingly modern, or timeless. It dwells on what psychologists call “theory of mind,” our supposedly innate ability to infer each other’s thoughts. James is telling us, in effect: You think you know what’s going on in other peoples’ heads? Think again.

More here.

Lamb

Saw a lamb being born.
Saw the shepherd chase and grab a big ewe
and dump her on her side.
Saw him rub some stuff from a bottle on his hands.
Saw him bend and reach in.
Heard two cries from the ewe.
Two sharp quick cries. Like high grunts.
Saw him pull out a slack white package.
Saw him lay it out on the ground.
Saw him kneel and take his teeth to the cord.
Saw him slap the package around.
Saw it not move.
Saw him bend and put his mouth to it and blow.
Doing this calmly, half kneeling.
Saw him slap it around some more.
Saw my mother watching this. Saw Angela. Saw Peter.
Saw Mimi, with a baby in her belly.
Saw them standing in a row
by the dry stone wall, in the wind.
Saw the package move.
Saw it was stained with red and yellow.
Saw the shepherd wipe red hands on the ewe’s wool.
Heard the other sheep in the meadow calling out.
Saw the package shaking its head.
Saw it try to stand. Saw it nearly succeed.
Saw it have to sit and think about it a bit.
Saw a new creature’s first moment of thinking.
Felt the chill blowing through me.
Heard the shepherd say:
“Good day for lambing. Wind dries them out.”
Saw the package start to stand. Get half-way. Kneeling.
Saw it push upward. Stagger, push. And make it.
Stand and standing.
Saw it surely was a lamb, a lamb, a lamb.
Saw a lamb being born!

by Michael Dennis Browne
from News of the Universe
Sierra Club Books, 1980

Katharine Sanderson in Nature:

In April, the entire editorial boards of two companion neuroimaging journals resigned. The 42 researchers were protesting against what they thought to be excessive article-processing charges (APCs) for authors publishing in the journals, which are run by Dutch publishing giant Elsevier. The APC for NeuroImage is US$3,450, and its sister journal NeuroImage: Reports has doubled its APC to $1,800.

APCs have become an integral part of the revolution in scientific publishing known as open access — the system in which papers are freely available for all to read after publication. Journals such as NeuroImage and thousands of others charge authors APCs to cover publishing costs, such as administration, editing and typesetting. In return, when these papers are published, they are immediately accessible to all. The fees can range from less than $1,000 to more than $10,000 per paper. In some cases authors don’t pay them directly, if their institutions have entered into contracts with publishers that cover the costs of open-access publishing, or if their funders cover the costs.

More here.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez in El Pais:

In a few weeks it will be 30 years since Pablo Escobar, the most infamous drug trafficker in history, was shot dead on the rooftops of Medellín. He had escaped 16 months earlier from La Catedral, the prison Escobar built himself to his specifications in return for agreeing to submit to justice, and it was not the only irony when he had spent the last few years trying to subdue the country. During 16 months on the run, living in hiding and harassed by government forces, the DEA, and rival cartels, Escobar unleashed on my country’s civil society a campaign of desperate terrorism that marked our lives, the lives of my generation, as nothing else has.

More here.

Randy Sparkman at Literary Hub:

By now, we’ve seen the ChatGPT parlor tricks. We’re past the novelty of a cake recipe in the style of Walt Whitman or a weather report by painter Bob Ross. For the one-hundredth time, we understand the current incarnation of large language models make mistakes. We’ve done our best to strike a studied balance between doomers and evangelists. And, we’ve become less skeptical of “emergent” flashes of insight from the aptly-named foundational models. At the same time, Google, Meta and a list of hopeful giant swatters have released credible competitors to ChatGPT.

For all those reasons, global use of ChatGPT recently declined for the first time since its November 2022 release. Perhaps now we’re ready to get to more elemental questions about what generative language artificial intelligence can or cannot do for us in the everyday.

I come to this discussion from a long career managing IT systems in large enterprises, where, as MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted in 1995, everything that could be digitized was digitized. I’m not a cognitive scientist, but I understand enough of how large language models work and how humans separate digital wheat from chaff to begin to think about what they might do with software with an opinion of its own.

More here.

Bruce Robbins [and others] at n + 1:

I MAY HAVE BEEN INVITED because I can speak as a Jew. That’s fine with me, though there are a lot more Jews speaking out against Israel these days, which means I get less credit than I used to. Getting less credit makes me happy and, at least on the discursive level, somewhat optimistic. For a number of reasons—one reason is Bernie Sanders, another is Jewish Voice for Peace—it’s now possible for us to say many things that used to be unsayable. Mainstream media coverage of Gaza is still nauseating in its double standards and its callousness toward Palestinian lives. But now and then you can see glimmers of moral common sense in it.

I’m not going to speak as a Jew, however, but as the son of a World War II veteran.

More here.

Alex Blasdel in The Guardian:

Andrew Wylie, the world’s most renowned – and for a long time its most reviled – literary agent, is 76 years old. Over the past four decades, he has reshaped the business of publishing in profound and, some say, insalubrious ways. He has been a champion of highbrow books and unabashed commerce, making many great writers famous and many famous writers rich. In the process, he has helped to define the global literary canon. His critics argue that he has also hastened the demise of the literary culture he claims to defend. Wylie is largely untroubled by such criticisms. What preoccupies him, instead, are the deals to be made in China.

Wylie’s fervour for China began in 2008, when a bidding war broke out among Chinese publishers for the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges.

More here.

Sometimes

Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far off farm,
I hold still and listen a long time.

My soul turns and goes back to the place
Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,
The bird and the blowing wind
Were like me, and we were brothers.

My soul turns into a tree,
And an animal, and a cloud bank.
Then changed and odd it comes home
And asks me questions. What should I reply?

by Herman Hesse
from News of the Universe
translation: Robert Bly
Sierra Club Books, 1995

Veronique Greenwood in Harvard Magazine:

IN THE LATE 2000s, Rachel Carmody was spending a lot of time counting calories. An anthropology graduate student at Harvard, she was studying whether cooking changed the number of calories the gut can extract from food. When humans invented cooking thousands of years ago, she and her advisor Richard Wrangham wondered, had they opened the door to a new source of energy?

To find out, she’d fed raw or cooked food to mice and humans. She’d checked on the food in mice as it traveled through the stomach, the small intestine, and the large intestine. She’d even recruited people whose colon, a portion of the large intestine, had been removed, to take samples from their ileostomy bags so she could see what the food was like. She compared the energy that went into their bodies with what came out. And she and Wrangham discovered something extraordinary.

Cooking dramatically increased the calories humans and mice got from food. Cooked meat yielded 10 to 15 percent more calories than raw. Cooked sweet potatoes were a whopping 30 percent more caloric than uncooked ones. Now, in her office in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Carmody, an assistant professor of human evolutionary biology, recalls her hunt to understand why.

Here’s part of what she found: cooking jump-starts digestion. With chemical bonds and cellular structures already broken down, it’s easier for digestive enzymes to make the energy in food available to an animal. But she could account for only a portion of the energy boost cooking produced. “I was panicking that my dissertation was going to be terrible,” she says. Something was missing.

More here.

Jeremy Horpedahl in The City Journal:

The Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances contains several revelations about the state of the American economy.

First, it found that the average American household’s net worth is over $1 million. Outliers can distort averages, of course, but even median household wealth is at the Fed’s highest level ever recorded. In 2019, it was still stuck below pre-Great Recession levels. By 2022, however, it had reached $192,000, eclipsing the 2007 mark by more than 10 percent, and almost doubling the post-Great Recession 2010 figure. (These and all subsequent data are adjusted for inflation.)

Income data complicate this rosy picture. The Census Bureau found that median household income has declined by almost 5 percent since 2019. That raises a question: How can median household wealth be up by 37 percent since 2019 at the same time median household income declined?

More here.

John Banville at The Guardian:

If letter writing is an art form, then Seamus Heaney was one of its master practitioners. Christopher Reid’s 800-page selection from what he assures us was an “enormous output” – “I have had to cut back severely to make a book of publishable proportions” – is a trove of delights as much as it is a literary testament.

Heaney was as fluent in prose as he was sublime in verse, as readers will know from his essays and articles, and his extensive memoir, Stepping Stones, compiled in interview form with the poet Dennis O’Driscoll. Yet the style in the letters, many of them obviously composed at breakneck speed, is astonishing in its quality and unflagging grace. As one of his correspondents said of Heaney: “He makes the simplest words shine.” Despite occasional asperities, his generosity and enthusiasm for the work of others are remarkable. Here he is writing in 2006 to Ted Hughes’s widow, Carol, about the poet’s posthumous Selected Translations – and note the beautifully sustained oceanic metaphor: “The delights are dolphin-like, the mighty talent rising again and showing his back above the elements … I got [the book] and swam in and out of the different coves and caves, safe havens (few) and strange strands. A strong sense of being lifted on the tide of it all.”

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the New York Times:

Witold Szablowski describes a number of surprising dishes in his entertaining yet unnerving new book, “What’s Cooking in the Kremlin,” which explores the last century of Russian history through its food. But none is as surreal as the recipe for one of Lenin’s favorites. The instructions for making his “scrambled eggs using three eggs” orders you to break the eggs but not to beat them. What Lenin called “scrambled eggs” were actually fried eggs, with their yolks and whites intact — not scrambled at all.

Szablowski’s previous books include “How to Feed a Dictator” and “Dancing Bears”; as a Polish journalist born in 1980, he doesn’t have much nostalgia for the Soviet Union, though he has spent considerable time talking to people who do. The chapter about Lenin is mostly narrated by a Moscow tour guide who speaks wistfully of what might have happened if Lenin’s “dreams had come true.”

more here.

Enigmas

You asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his
…. golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell?
…. What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, and I
…. reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You inquire about the kingfisher’s feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tide?
Or you’ve found in the cards a new question touching on the
…. crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you’ll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric Nature of the ocean spines?
…. The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
…. The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out in the
…. deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its
…. jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

Read more »

Pia Malaney over at INET:

In markets hungry for the next big breakthrough the latest generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has emerged as a potentially revolutionary force, offering a wide array of transformative benefits to humanity. With capabilities in processing data, making predictions, and automating tasks that would once have seemed like science fiction, AI is already altering the ways we live, work, and interact.

What does it mean for a doctor in an underserved area with limited resources to have access to AI systems that facilitate diagnoses based on symptoms and streamline care recommendations? For surgeons to have AI analyze a brain tumor in real-time so that they can decide how much to remove? Big data is already playing a significant role in drug discovery and development; researchers in many areas of academia, including economics, find analysis simplified and expedited.

There is increasing evidence that we are already seeing transformative changes in industries ranging from healthcare to finance. As AI can personalize cancer treatments, identify and diagnose tumors mid-surgery, and rapidly increase the discovery of new molecules that form the basis of drug discovery, its lifesaving impacts are already being felt. In financial markets, it is being used to drive data analytics, data retrieval, predictions, and forecasting. Innovation, often spearheaded by AI and machine learning, has given rise to new products, services, and business models. In education, the possibility of tailoring a curriculum to the needs and pace of each individual student could perhaps transform learning.

Even areas most associated with human creativity are tapping into the productivity benefits of AI.

More here.

Fred Block in Dissent:

In 1980, Margaret Thatcher made her fateful statement that “there is no alternative” to the free market economics that she claimed would revitalize the UK economy. While her policies did not produce the promised results, it remains true that in most places, advocates of more egalitarian and inclusive public policies have been unable to win national office for more than a single consecutive election cycle. Despite frequent claims of its imminent demise, neoliberalism still exerts considerable power in the global economy.

Why is it that efforts to generate broad, durable majority support for egalitarian economic policies have so far failed? Part of the explanation is that advocates of alternative economic policies have continued to operate within the confines of existing economic theories. For the most part, the core analytic framework for economists on the left has not really changed since the 1930s and ’40s.

This is a problem because the economy has changed radically. We need a new paradigm to make sense of our current economy—and to offer a persuasive policy agenda that gives those at the local level the resources and mechanisms they need to shape what they consume and produce.

More here.

Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

Our ability to manipulate the genes of living organisms has expanded dramatically in recent years. Now, researchers are a step closer to building genomes from scratch after unveiling a strain of yeast with more than 50 percent synthetic DNA.

Since 2006, an international consortium of researchers called the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project has been attempting to rewrite the entire genome of brewer’s yeast. The organism is an attractive target because it’s a eukaryote like us, and it’s also widely used in the biotechnology industry to produce biofuels, pharmaceuticals, and other high-value chemicals.

While researchers have previously rewritten the genomes of viruses and bacteria, yeast is more challenging because its DNA is split across 16 chromosomes. To speed up progress, the research groups involved each focused on rewriting a different chromosome, before trying to combine them. The team has now successfully synthesized new versions of all 16 chromosomes and created an entirely novel chromosome. In a series of papers in Cell and Cell Genomics, the team also reports the successful combination of seven of these synthetic chromosomes, plus a fragment of another, in a single cell. Altogether, they account for more than 50 percent of the cell’s DNA.

More here.