Jay Murphy at the LARB:

AT THE END of his life, the inveterate surrealist Antonin Artaud returned to his notion of a transformative “Theater of Cruelty.” In February 1948, a month before his death, in a famously banned radio broadcast in Paris entitled To Have Done with the Judgment of God, he proclaimed, “Man is ill because he is badly constructed,” announcing a “body without organs” that “will have delivered him from all his automatisms / and returned him to his true liberty.” Artaud saw this last radio work as a “mini-model” of what a Theater of Cruelty could be. Artaud had just emerged from a horrific, nine-year asylum confinement (lasting from September 1937 to May 1946), and the series of radio works were part of a ferocious taking back of his voice and life.

Artaud has primarily been known as a major collaborator with the Paris Surrealists (from 1925 to 1927), and avant-garde author of the extraordinarily eloquent if mysterious essays gathered in The Theatre and Its Double (1938), in which he very controversially called for a cataclysmic “Theater of Cruelty” that would replace centuries of representational “psychological” theater.

more here.

Amir-Hussein Radjy at the LRB:

Ramadan has lived in the tomb of Ratib Pasha, Egypt’s late-19th-century army chief, since he was born. The large chamber of floriated stone, honeycombed walls and coffered ceilings is an example of an Egyptian style of architecture that draws on Ottoman, European and Mamluk elements. But it is marked for demolition, along with thousands of other tombs in the Qarafa, Cairo’s centuries-old City of the Dead, to make way for new roads. The guardian of the tomb opposite, Ramadan showed me, had erased the black arrows that marked it for bulldozing. ‘He thinks that’ll make a difference,’ he laughed.

Earlier that day, we had set out to survey the destruction. I was shocked by its scale. The City of the Dead is a vast, 1300-year-old necropolis, that stretches for ten kilometres along the eastern edge of old Cairo.

more here.

Maddie Burakoff in AP News:

Tiny ants march along a glass bridge overhead in the new museum wing, The Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation. Giant whales swoop along the walls in an immersive video display. And the building’s natural curves — inspired by canyons in the Southwest — are meant to highlight how all of it is intertwined.

…The museum shipped in around 500,000 leafcutter ants to build a massive colony in the insectarium. The tiny workers collect their leaves from one glass enclosure, then march across a skybridge to cultivate their fungal feasts in big glass bulbs along the wall. The ants needed some help adjusting to the space: scientists had to hold “training sessions” to show them where to go, said Cheryl Hayashi, the museum’s provost of science. They’ve since settled into their new home.

More here. (Note: Must see exhibit)

How Nazis

The man in the driver’s seat of the minivan is just short of backhanding his wife
but screams instead. The contractor towing a backhoe shouts at a man
who has crossed against the light. A man leans on his horn because the woman
in front of him is not turning fast enough. The weather is warm
and their windows are open and we can hear everything. Once again
the indifferent machine is closing on the soft human flesh it feeds on.
It is not 1930 and people are not yet cutting steaks from the draft horse
that has fallen in the streets, are not yet rolling a wheelbarrow
of deutschmarks to buy a loaf of bread. At the factory, a boss rides a machinist
until he quits, having no other job to go to. The machinist gets drunk
on the way home and his wife shouts at him and he hits his wife and the wife
hits the daughter and the daughter goes down the street where there his heroin.
A man sits in his room all day with his demons and talks to them.
They have been fouling their cages. They have been jeering at his dreams.
He goes to the basement and loads his assault rifle and then emerges
from his cage and you know the rest. The politicians scan
the surface for the bubbles of rage coming up from below, sing their
feral songs of blame and wrong and create phalanxes of hate.
They trot out the usual suspects: foreigners, people of color, homosexuals,
artists, and anyone who presents in this batholith of hate
a vision that is indigestible by the machine and whose songs
do not rhyme with the hard bells being rung to rally legions.
We are at the cusp of the eternal return one more time and the momentum
headed toward the cliff is terrifying. Those who do not join are dragged along.
Here is where God might step in but does not, once more,
stays in the shadows of the scaffolds being thrown up in every town square.

by Doug Anderson
from What Saves Us—Poems of Empathy and
…….. Outrage in the Age of Trump
edited by Martín Espada
Curbstone Books, 2019

Ali Raz at Public Books:

In a marked moment near the opening of Joyland—directed by Saim Sadiq and the first Pakistani film to be shortlisted by the Academy Awards—Haider meets Biba in a hospital in Lahore, looking dazed in a blood-splattered shirt. Though this is the first time they’ve met, we’re given no narration, just Haider’s wide-eyed, fascinated gaze. Later, in an intimate moment in her room, Biba tells Haider more about that night: about seeing her friend, also trans¹, shot dead, and then finding herself unable to narrate the murder to the police. As she tells it, she gets stuck on a sentence—“I was with her at dinner”—glitching out in the face of representing the impossible.

She does, however, tell us her friend’s murder is the subject of a new documentary, for which a vulturous crew of German filmmakers have been poking around Lahore. Biba and her friends talk about the documentarians with open derision, knowing the exact flavor of international acclaim that awaits their contrived narrative of the tragic Third World queer.

Even so, the international acclaim for Joyland itself is noteworthy. Beyond its nod at the Academy Awards, the current count is 16 wins and 16 nominations, crowned by the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize as well as the Queer Palm at Cannes. It also claims Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai as an executive producer.

More here.

Richard Hanania in his newsletter:

Progress in the worlds of nutrition and everyday health has stalled, as has medicine to a more limited degree. We know a few things. You should exercise, avoid smoking, not be fat, and not jump off tall buildings. Besides that, there isn’t much we can tell you with certainty about what to eat and how to live your life.

In science, you begin by picking the low hanging fruit. Smoking increases your risk of lung cancer somewhere between 15 to 30 times. With an effect size that big, one doesn’t really need a scientific literature to know what’s going on. A single doctor who sees tens of thousands of patients over several decades would probably be able to come to understand the harms of smoking on his own.

But what about smaller effect sizes?

More here.

From The Economist:

In the past 20 years, on economic measures, America has outperformed other rich countries. Over that period, median wages grew by 25%, compared with just 17% in Germany. Managers at Buc-ee’s, a Texas-based chain of stores, can make more than experienced doctors earn in Britain. But on a more fundamental measure of wellness—how long people live—America is falling behind. To its detractors, this is a cause for schadenfreude. “Many people say it is easier to buy a gun than baby formula in the us,” gloated a statement released by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs last year, which also pointed to declining life expectancy in general. In the past few years, according to some estimates, life expectancy in China overtook that in America. For Americans, that ought to be a more serious source of introspection than it is.

More here.

Like An Ant Carrying Her Bits of Earth and Sand

Like an ant carrying her bits of earth or sand
the poem carries its words.
Moving one, then another, into place.

Something in an ant is sure where these morsels belong,
but the ant could not explain this.
Something in a poem is certain where its words belong,
but the poet could not explain this.

All day the ant obeys an inexplicable order.
All day a poet obeys an incomprehensible demand.

The world changes or does not change by these labors;
the geode peeled open gives off its cold scent or does not.
But that is no concern of the ant’s, of the poem’s.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding.
What dissolves will dissolve—
you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.
The potato’s sugary hunger for growing larger.
The unblinking heat of the tiger.

No thimble of cloud or stone that will not vanish,
and still the rearrangements continue.

The ant’s work belongs to the ant.
The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.

by Jane Hirshfield
from Given Sugar Given Salt
Harper Collins, 2002

Jack Skeffington in Yale Campus Press:

In the introduction to Not Under Forty, Willa Cather’s 1936 collection of essays, she (in)famously writes that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” an opinion that, if nothing else, has fairly successfully separated her from the ranks of artists and authors we have come to call modernists.

…Cather’s The Professor’s House first saw print in 1925, in a post-Ulysses world whose literary landscape Cather no longer felt herself part of. The novel is largely concerned with one Godfrey St. Peter, the owner of the titular domicile, and his arrival at a point where his work, his marriage, his family, and (despite that title) both of his houses all enter a state of flux. Retreat into memory, especially memory concerning his favorite student, Tom Outland, forms a major portion of the Professor’s coping strategy, an so, in turn, the action of the novel.

In All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman writes that modernity “is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’”^[2] Cather’s novel, as much as any other produced on either side of her supposed divide, participates in this uncertainty, in the exploration of a culture’s perceived experience of unified disunity, of a totalizing fracture. Despite Cather’s claim to have “slid back into the previous 7000 years,” The Professor’s House bears the marks of its era, telling the tale of a broken man in a distinctly fractured way.

More here. (Note: Watching Mad Men and reading Willa Cather’s deeply disturbing and insightful comments on the human condition in The Professor’s House was strangely satisfying. The book is startlingly fresh for present times.)

Matthew Rose at Commonweal:

Robert Bellah was the last major thinker on the American Left to argue that shared religious beliefs are essential for democratic politics. In an era that saw liberalism grow progressively more secular, he defended views that dissented from elite opinion and the models of reality on which it rested. He argued that secularism is impossible, individualism is an illusion, and religious worship is inescapable. He made these arguments in best-selling books that combined learning and civility with a zeal for the ideals of democratic socialism and a dread for the practices of managerial capitalism. Bellah was the most celebrated American sociologist of his time, and it might seem absurd to suggest he was ignored. Presidents, clergy, scholars, and community leaders all sought his counsel. But if they had listened to him closely, as Bellah privately doubted they had, what would they have heard?

By the time he completed his final book, two years before his death in 2013, Bellah had concluded that America stood at the bleak end of a civilizational epoch. In its coming “time of trial,” as he called it, Americans would realize the values that had created their culture had also impaired their ability to understand or control it.

more here.

Damian Le Bas at Literary Review:

‘Roma’ and ‘Romani’ are words from the Romani language that have Indian etymologies – despite popular perceptions, they have no connection to Romania. People are commonly confused by the ordinariness of being Roma or part-Roma, and of seeming like ‘any old European’. It’s a confusion I and millions of others of Roma descent have dealt with all our lives. The reason for the confusion, as Europe and the Roma explains, is that six hundred years of cultural production have caused people to expect the opposite. The first four centuries following the earliest chronicled arrival of ‘Gypsies’ in Europe in about 1400 are covered by the opening third of the book. The remainder deals with the period since 1800. This lopsidedness of focus tells us something about the relative amounts of attention paid to Romani people by artists, writers and composers over time. Notwithstanding the subtler portrayals of Gypsies found, for instance, in the work of Emily Brontë and D H Lawrence, the tendency has been to use Gypsy characters as a kind of shorthand for savagery and nonconformity. When we read Prosper Mérimée’s appendix to his tale of Carmen, on which Bizet’s opera was based, we get a taste of this. ‘While they are still very young, their ugliness may not be unattractive,’ Mérimée wrote of Spanish Romani girls, ‘but once they have borne children they become positively repulsive.’

more here.

McKenzie Prillaman in Nature:

It’s rare to find a product so successful that its makers stop advertising it. But that’s what happened to the weight-loss drug Wegovy in May. In the United States, where prescription drugs can be advertised, developer Novo Nordisk pulled its television adverts because it couldn’t keep up with demand. The injectable medication, called semaglutide, works by imitating a hormone that curbs appetite and was approved as an obesity treatment by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2021. In a study, participants who took semaglutide for over a year lost more than twice as much body weight on average — almost 16% — as did people taking an older weight-loss drug that mimics the same hormone¹.

Semaglutide’s approval for treatment of weight loss came four years after the drug was approved for type 2 diabetes under the trade name Ozempic, also made by Novo Nordisk, based in Bagsværd, Denmark. Demand for Ozempic has skyrocketed as physicians prescribe it for weight loss outside its approved use. Now, even more-potent medications for obesity are on the way. The drug tirzepatide, which is FDA-approved for type 2 diabetes under the name Mounjaro and made by Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, Indiana, imitates two hunger-related hormones. And the company’s drug retatrutide, which mimics three hormones, showed promising results for weight loss in its mid-stage clinical trial, announced at a conference in June.

Neither of these newcomers has been approved for obesity. But treating the condition is more urgent than ever.

More here.

Mario Vargas Llosa in Liberties:

I consider Javier Cercas one of the best writers in the Spanish language, and I believe that, after oblivion has buried his contemporaries, at least three of his extraordinary books — Soldiers of Salamis, The Anatomy of a Moment, and The Imposter — will still have readers who turn to them to learn what our disordered present was like. He is also a man of courage. He loves his homeland of Catalonia, and his articles inveighing against the secessionist demagoguery of the Catalan separatists are persuasive and incontestable.

In an urbane debate some time back with Antonio Muñoz Molina on the subject of the nineteenth-century Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, Cercas admitted that he didn’t care for the prose of the author of Fortunata and Jacinta. As my grandfather Pedro used to say, entre gustos y colores, no han escrito los autores, which roughly translated is the old adage that there is no accounting for taste. Everyone has a right to his opinion, and writers do too, but to make such a declaration on the centenary of Pérez Galdós’ death, when everyone else was lauding and commemorating him, was certainly a provocation.

More here.

Ari Schulman in The New Atlantis:

Call it AI’s man-behind-the-curtain effect: What appear at first to be dazzling new achievements in artificial intelligence routinely lose their luster and seem limited, one-off, jerry-rigged, with nothing all that impressive happening behind the scenes aside from sweat and tears, certainly nothing that deserves the name “intelligence” even by loose analogy.

So what’s different now? What follows in this essay is an attempt to contrast some of the most notable features of the new transformer paradigm (the T in ChatGPT) with what came before. It is an attempt to articulate why the new AIs that have garnered so much attention over the past year seem to defy some of the major lines of skepticism that have rightly applied to past eras — why this AI moment might, just might, be the real deal.

More here.

Johann N. Neem in The Hedgehog Review:

One day early in the pandemic, when schools and colleges first went online, my undergraduate students and I had just finished discussing an essay on the rise and decline of the innovative and powerful Comanche empire. I logged off and walked downstairs, where my elementary school-aged child was sitting at the dining table. “What did you learn in school today?” I asked, as I always do. He recounted to me—not in these exact words, of course—that North America had been an Edenic paradise before the Europeans arrived. I was shocked. This was the racist myth of the noble savage repackaged by the antiracist left. In reality, Native Americans did not need Europeans to introduce them to warfare, imperialism, slavery, or violence. This does not diminish the significant impact European pathogens and ambitions had on Native American polities. But to teach such distortive myths about the past? That’s the kind of thing historians should be upset about.

So imagine my surprise when I opened Princeton historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer’s new edited volume on contemporary historical myths and found no essay—not a single one!—that challenged myths that came from the left.

More here.

Andrew Barron in Singularity Hub:

A honey bee’s life depends on it successfully harvesting nectar from flowers to make honey. Deciding which flower is most likely to offer nectar is incredibly difficult. Getting it right demands correctly weighing up subtle cues on flower type, age, and history—the best indicators a flower might contain a tiny drop of nectar. Getting it wrong is at best a waste of time, and at worst means exposure to a lethal predator hiding in the flowers. In new research published recently in eLife, my colleagues and I report how bees make these complex decisions.

…To take apart this question, we turned to a computational model, asking what properties a system would need to have to beat the speed-accuracy tradeoff. We built artificial neural networks capable of processing sensory input, learning, and making decisions. We compared the performance of these artificial decision systems to the real bees. From this we could identify what a system had to have if it were to beat the tradeoff. The answer lay in giving “accept” and “reject” responses different time-bound evidence thresholds. Here’s what that means—bees only accepted a flower if, at a glance, they were sure it was rewarding. If they had any uncertainty, they rejected it.

This was a risk-averse strategy and meant bees might have missed some rewarding flowers, but it successfully focused their efforts only on the flowers with the best chance and best evidence of providing them with sugar.

More here.