Joseph Horowitz at The American Scholar:

The biggest recent find in classical music was the discovery that in 1940, Sergei Rachmaninoff was privately recorded by the conductor Eugene Ormandy. Seated at Ormandy’s piano, he played through his new Symphonic Dances, which Ormandy would soon premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Singularly, Rachmaninoff never permitted his public performances to be broadcast—so this surreptitious home recording is the best evidence we have of what Rachmaninoff’s legendary pianism sounded like outside the confines of recording studios sucked clean of the oxygen a body of listeners can activate.

Rachmaninoff’s RCA recordings are justly famous. They document his imperious, interpretive mastery, embellished with miracles of color and texture. But they are also emotionally controlled. When we eavesdrop on Rachmaninoff playing privately for Ormandy, the cork is out of the bottle: his keyboard presence surges with cataracts of feeling and sound. (It’s all documented in a three-CD set, Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances, issued in 2018 on the Marston label.)

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Peter Conrad in The Guardian:

Forbidden Desire, Noel Malcolm’s sober and footnote-heavy history of male homosexuality between 1400 and 1750, has some friskier bedfellows: on Amazon it shares its title with a slew of hairy chested bromances, one or two Sapphic romps, and a sulphurous tale about a witch’s affair with a tormented demon. Against such competition, Malcolm fields a cast that includes lustful Turkish potentates, predatory Catholic priests, corruptible scullions and smooth-cheeked choristers, together with two English kings who allegedly fooled around with virile young favourites. But mostly the sodomites, as Malcolm grimly insists on calling them, are left to satisfy their desires in private; the historian’s concern is the forbidding religious commandments that the same-sex couples flouted and the crazily brutal penalties imposed by laws that purported to uphold the divine order of the universe.

Sex here seems to be followed, almost automatically, by excruciating death. In the 15th century, sodomy in Venice was punished by decapitation, after which the corpses of the malefactors were burned to ensure that no trace of them remained. Because it was unlawful to kill an ordained man, a lecherous cleric was locked in a cage in the Piazza San Marco and left to starve in full view of a gloating populace. In Florence a boy aged 15 was castrated on the scaffold, then fatally sodomised with a hot iron poker. A Dutch youth placed in the pillory was pelted with filth and bombarded with stones, which finally finished him off. Others were sentenced to row themselves to death as galley slaves; the lucky ones, in a bizarre act of mercy, had their noses, not their heads or penises, chopped off.

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From Nature:

For the past decade, Collinge and his team have studied people in the United Kingdom who in childhood received growth hormone derived from the pituitary glands of cadavers to treat medical conditions including short stature. The latest study finds that, decades later, some of these people developed signs of early-onset dementia. The dementia symptoms, such as memory and language problems, were diagnosed clinically and in some patients appeared alongside plaques of the sticky protein amyloid-beta in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. The authors suggest that this amyloid protein, which was present in the hormone preparations, was ‘seeded’ in the brains and caused the damage.

The work builds on the team’s previous studies of people who received cadaver-derived growth hormone, a practice that Britain stopped in 1985. In 2015, Collinge’s team described² the discovery of amyloid-beta deposits in the post-mortem brains of four people who had been treated with the growth hormone. These people had died in middle-age of the deadly neurological condition Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is caused by infectious, misfolded proteins called prions. The prions were present in batches of the growth hormone. The four people analysed in that study died before clinical signs related to the amyloid build-up might have been observed. But the presence of these amyloid plaques in blood vessels in their brain suggested they would have developed a condition called cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) — which causes bleeding in the brain and is often a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease.

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by Terese Svoboda

The first video portapacks arrived in the 1970s, cameras that skipped the lab and allowed the cameraman to be mobile, but they were so expensive only those who had connections with a TV station could experiment with them. Or if you had a rich aunt who needed to document a wedding, sometimes exorbitant rentals were available. Those with the ties to TV stations became the pioneers of art video. The rest of us painfully wove our laurels out of what could be cadged or granted. The tech, always changing, improved year by year, as did access and the imagery. We were offered new ways to think about color, resolution, and the translation of experience to video. Seeing invention at work as each new video tool appeared – sometimes developed by the artists themselves – was thrilling.

I’m reminded of that thrill every time I read the rather pedestrian-sounding Green Car Reports, a daily survey of the wildly innovative engineering teams who are pushing the market to accept what’s going to save the planet. Not that experimental video had quite that lofty aim, not even the neighborhood verite cable programs were that high-minded, but early video did require persuasive skill and constant tech fooling around in order to share the fruits of our clumsy innovations.

I don’t own a car. Never have I taken the slightest bit of interest in cars. I couldn’t tell a Chrysler from a GTO. Whoops! Are they the same? But about a decade after I weaned myself off video tech – tiring, at last, of always having to learn new skills  – I became fascinated with the Jetson-future-feeling surrounding electric cars. Once again I could see invention unfolding with a capital I, creation in battle with capitalism trying to outrace the death of the planet. Like Nikola Tesla vs. Edison quarreling over AC vs. DC power, only we’re all going over Niagara Falls.^[1] Read more »

Paul Bloom at Small Potatoes:

Why do we enjoy showing and sharing?

Showing first. A certain sort of evolutionary psychologist (like me, on some days) would point out that, when properly done, showing impresses others. It’s similar to making people laugh or surprising them with a sharp observation. Maybe we enjoy showing, then, because it raises our status. It makes us more desirable as a friend, partner, or lover.

A different, but compatible, explanation applies to both showing and sharing. It involves empathy, and like many clever thoughts about empathy, it comes from Adam Smith.

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Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. The authors argue that as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, they improve on individual language-related abilities and also develop new ones by combining skills in a manner that hints at understanding — combinations that were unlikely to exist in the training data.

This theoretical approach, which provides a mathematically provable argument for how and why an LLM can develop so many abilities, has convinced experts like Hinton, and others. And when Arora and his team tested some of its predictions, they found that these models behaved almost exactly as expected. From all accounts, they’ve made a strong case that the largest LLMs are not just parroting what they’ve seen before.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

One unfortunate feature of American politics is that both Republicans and Democrats tend to work themselves into a frenzy over the other party’s presidential candidate, no matter who it is. To put it bluntly, both sides cry wolf all the time. Yes, I am a Democrat, but Democrats do this too — I’m old enough to remember when people I knew went crazy over poor old Mitt Romney saying that he had “binders full of women”, denouncing him as a sexist when all he meant to say was that he personally knew lots of highly skilled women in the business world.

Anyway, because we cry wolf all the time in American politics, it’s easy to dismiss criticisms of Trump as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. And indeed there are some people out there who see everything Trump does and says as a harbinger of imminent fascism and atrocity. I know some of them. In 2017 a Google engineer bet me $1000 that Trump would commit genocide by 2020; when I won the bet, I had him send the $1000 to a rabbit rescue. (I just wish I had bet him more.)

But I do not have Trump Derangement Syndrome. As proof, let me list a few important things that Trump got right.

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Kristen Arnett at Literary Hub:

Greetings, gentle readers! Welcome to the very first installment of Am I the (Literary) Assh*le, a series where I get drunk and answer your burning (anonymous) questions about all things literary. 

When it comes to the writing world, it seems that everyone’s got an opinion. And sometimes we like to revisit those opinions online, usually in a highly cyclical manner—every three months or so, give or take—at a frenzied pace designed to drive people wild (see: are blurbs really necessary, come on we need blurbs, why is there so much sex in everything, why isn’t there more sex in everything, why are the classics so bad, why are the classics so good and why can’t anyone read nowadays, audiobooks aren’t reading, of course audiobooks are reading, why do adults read YA, why are you gatekeeping YA, libraries should do more, libraries are doing all they can they are stretched to the limit have you completely lost it, etc, etc, etc, hallelujah, forever, amen).

Before we dig in, it’s important that I point out the obvious here: generally speaking, I don’t ever know what I’m talking about. But much like everyone on the Lord’s internet, I do have some Opinions™! And I definitely have some beers. I think if we combine those two factors, we should get some satisfying results.

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Zack Beauchamp in Vox:

On Monday, tens of millions across India celebrated the opening of the Ram Mandir — a huge new temple to Ram, one of Hinduism’s holiest figures, built in the city of Ayodhya where many Hindus believe he was born. The celebration in Ayodhya, presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attracted some of India’s richest and most famous citizens. But in the pomp and circumstance, few dwelled explicitly on the grim origins of Ram Mandir: It was built on the site of an ancient mosque torn down by a Hindu mob in 1992.

Many of the rioters belonged to the RSS, a militant Hindu supremacist group to which Modi has belonged since he was 8 years old. Since ascending to power in 2014, Modi has worked tirelessly to replace India’s secular democracy with a Hindu sectarian state.

The construction of a temple in Ayodhya is the exclamation point on an agenda that has also included revoking the autonomy long provided to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, creating new citizenship and immigration rules biased against Muslims, and rewritten textbooks to whitewash Hindu violence against Muslims from Indian history. Modi has also waged war on the basic institutions of Indian democracy. He and his allies have consolidated control over much of the media, suppressed critical speech on social media, imprisoned protesters, suborned independent government agencies, and even prosecuted Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi on dubious charges.

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David Marchese in The New York Times:

There’s a scene in that modern classic of screwball existentialism, “Being John Malkovich,” from 1999, in which John Malkovich, playing a version of himself, enters a portal that others have been using to climb inside his mind. Suddenly, Malkovich is in a world populated solely by variations on himself: Malkovich as a flirtatious sexpot, a genteel waiter, a jazz chanteuse, a bemused child, everyone speaking only the word “Malkovich.” In a way, that scene is a microcosm of the actor’s decades-long, always-interesting career. He has played a million different parts, but somehow they’re all defined by the unmistakable, enigmatic, magnetic presence of Malkovich. Same goes for his work in the Apple TV+ series “The New Look,” premiering Feb. 14, which is based on the experiences of the fashion icons Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, Cristóbal Balenciaga and others who helped build the French fashion industry while enduring the impossible complexities of World War II. Malkovich, playing the couturier and Dior mentor Lucien Lelong, delivers a softer, warmer performance than the ones for which he is probably best known. But even so, with his off-kilter line readings, his louche manner, his oddly wavering yet commanding voice and his general air of playing a game to which only he knows the rules, the role is, as always, pure Malkovich.

If we take style to mean a manner of doing something, could you articulate the John Malkovich style? Not really, because it’s not something I think about much — what I am or what I do. But I’ve always felt style is the only constant in life. By style I mean, simply, the way you move through life. If you get sad news, how do you respond? What do you do if you’re angry, if you’re amused, if you’re moved? That’s what style is. It’s not really up to me to say what mine is.

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Dance Russe

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

by William Carlos Williams

Neil Larsen in Jacobin:

t’s now been a number of years since the term “decolonial,” together with its more activated verbal inflection, “decolonize,” have become familiar across popular and media culture, especially in connection with identity politics. Still another variant, “decoloniality,” joins these, though it is restricted to a narrower and more arcane academic lexicon. “Decolonization,” located at a middlebrow point of discursive insertion, has by now followed. Here, however, those with sufficient awareness, if not a residual memory of its historical context, will recognize in “decolonization” an older term with a distinct political resonance that can be traced considerably further back to the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, if not earlier, to the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and the 1919 Amritsar massacre in British-ruled India. Certainly, by the time of the historic 1955 Bandung Conference of relatively newly independent and henceforth (for a time) nonaligned former colonies in Asia and Africa, a term such as “decolonial” would have been indissolubly linked to contemporary anti-colonial national liberation movements and to the actual historical process of decolonization then roughly at its apogee, particularly in what remained of formal European colonialism in many parts of Asia and much of Africa.

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Joelle M. Abi-Rached in Boston Review:

The face of the ongoing onslaught on Gaza has no doubt been Dr. Hammam Alloh, the thirty-six-year-old Palestinian nephrologist at northern Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate it when it was invaded by Israeli troops. “And if I go, who treats my patients?” he said in an October 31 interview. “We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper healthcare,” he added. Two weeks later, Alloh was killed by an Israeli airstrike, along with his father, brother-in-law, and father-in-law.

Alloh’s use of the word “animals” was certainly not lost on viewers. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had used that same language on October 9 when he announced a “complete siege” on Gaza, labeling its residents as “human animals.” Hamas’s attacks on October 7 would predictably generate a violent military reaction from Israel. But this Israeli campaign in Gaza, a strip of land where more than 80 percent of its population lived in poverty even before October 7, has been of a different character entirely than any previous ones. This onslaught has featured direct attacks on hospitals and the intentional undermining of the entire health care system: shelling, the killing and arresting of health care personnel, the direct and indirect killing of hundreds of patients, underprovision or complete lack of proper medical care, and unwarranted suffering for thousands of patients due to shortages in basic medications, water, food, and fuel. The attacks have made clear that the repression of Palestinian rights now has a new feature: the systematic destruction of the very institutions that sustain life.

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Dylan Riley in Sidecar:

Du Bois’s relationship to Marxism has become a focus of considerable debate in US sociology; the stakes are at once intellectual and crypto-political. Some want to enroll Du Bois into the ranks of ‘intersectional theory’, a notion which holds that everything has exactly three causes (race, class, and gender), somewhat analogous to the way certain Weberians are dogmatically attached to a fixed set of ‘factors’ (ideological, economic, military, political). Others want to incorporate him into the tradition of Western Marxism and its signature problem of failed revolution. Broadly speaking, the first group tends to emphasize Du Bois’s earlier writings, thereby downplaying the influence of Marxism, while the second focuses on his later work, with its critiques of capitalism and imperialism and its reflections on the Soviet experiment.

But Du Bois’s masterwork, Black Reconstruction (1935), doesn’t fit either of these interpretations. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ appears nowhere, and there is no evidence that DuBois thought in these terms. Nor is Du Bois’s proletariat, or at least its most politically important part, the industrial working class; it is rather the family farmer, both in the West and the South, both black and white. Accordingly, his political ideal was ‘agrarian democracy’. He sometimes refers to those supporting this programme rather misleadingly as ‘peasant farmers’ or ‘peasant proprietors’, which might lead one to think that he is closer to ‘Populism’ in the Russian sense than to Marxism. But that too would be a misreading, for in his understanding the social foundation of democracy does not consist in a pre-capitalist village structure with collective ownership of land, but in a stratum of independent small holders (one that failed fully to appear in the South after the Civil War because of ferocious resistance by the plantocracy, which produced the amphibious figure of the share-cropper).

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Brian Dillon at The Guardian:

“Exploded essays”, the poet, novelist and memoirist Lavinia Greenlaw calls the 17 pieces of almost-art-critical prose in this bright, mournful book. The phrase suggests a bristling diagram or enlarged view, an annotated arc of thought or feeling. But also something violently botched or ruined – don’t all essays worth the name aspire, more or less secretly, to blowing up their own form? In revisiting a lifetime of looking – at art, landscapes, weather, heavenly bodies, human faces and sometimes nothing at all – Greenlaw puts certain stark questions to herself and the things she looks at: “How do we make sense of what we see? How do we describe what we have never seen before?”

Her title comes from John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1689. But the wealth and vagrancy of Greenlaw’s interests seem to connect her to the earlier part of that busy century, and further back into the 16th: the time of the cabinet of curiosities.

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