Donovan X. Ramsey in Guernica:

Especially in northern cities, Blacks were boxed into lives of poverty, redlined into areas of concentrated poverty and further isolated when the federal government built interstate highways that separated them from their white neighbors. Their neighborhoods were patrolled by police departments who moved like occupying forces, with extreme prejudice and impunity. In these places — Los Angeles, New York, Newark, Detroit, and other cities — police brutality was a regular occurrence.

Those conditions birthed another movement. It existed alongside the same timeline as the Civil Rights Movement but wasn’t focused on inclusion and legal protection. It wanted power, the ability for Blacks to control their own lives and communities — including self-defense. This movement also excited Black America, segments that the Civil Rights Movement did not and in ways it couldn’t. The most prominent leader in this movement, of course, was Malcolm X who advocated for complete independence of Black Americans from a fundamentally wicked white society.

More here.

Ruth Dudley Edwards at Literary Review:

‘And so it was that, on the evening of August 4, 1982,’ writes Mark O’Connell halfway through this gripping portrait of double killer Malcolm Macarthur, ‘the Irish government’s most senior legal official had his housekeeper prepare the spare room for his friend, a man who had just days previously murdered two strangers, and who had that very evening botched an armed robbery at the home of an acquaintance.’

The police arrested Macarthur at the flat nine days later. The morning after, the innocent and bewildered attorney general, Patrick Connolly, having cleared it with the police and Charles Haughey, the Taoiseach, set off for a long-planned holiday in New York. The story had broken by the time he arrived. Ireland was in uproar and Connolly was hounded by reporters (the New York Post would run the headline ‘Irish Biggie Flees Here After Slay Scandal’).

more here.

Jackson Arn at Art In America:

Even in December 2019, when he announced his disease in a long, devil-may-care New Yorker essay, he did it with a dynamite lede: “Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise.” The diagnosis wasn’t the only startling thing about these sentences: Schjeldahl was writing about his personal life for once, and doing so in the same chiseled prose in which he described Giacometti’s bronzes and Manet’s oils. No matter what his subject happened to be, he treated it as an invitation to write beautifully.

Schjeldahl was born in 1942 and grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota. He dropped out of college, and it shows: he had an autodidact’s distaste for teacher’s pets (in the Goya review quoted above, he says the exhibition “was conceived on the Planet of the Scholars, where every question is considered except ‘So what?’”). Poetry was his first literary love.

more here.

Emotional Wasteland

by Suzi F. Garcia
from Split This Rock

Stephanie Zacharek in Time Magazine:

In anticipation of the movie event of summer 2023 known as Barbenheimer, the best and wittiest unpaid advertising Universal and Warner Bros. Pictures could have hoped for wasn’t an Instagram post of a grinning Tom Cruise, along with Mission: Impossible 7 director Christopher McQuarrie, brandishing tickets for Oppenheimer and Barbie. It was a recent tweet from television writer Noah Garfinkel, built around a still from Oppenheimer featuring Tom Conti’s Albert Einstein and Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, ostensibly involved in a serious conversation about atom splitting and stuff. The caption read “‘We’re gathering a group of top scientists to go see Barbie.’”

That tweet is great because it’s a life raft of spontaneity in a sea of hype that has come to feel desperate. In the week leading up to the dual releases of Oppenheimer and Barbie, on July 21, the fever has gone off the thermometer. Christopher Nolan, with his fixation on craft (and his status as the guy who made those Batman movies), tackling the story of one of history’s most famous theoretical physicists? The idea is so antithetical to the I.P.-fixated pack-em-in mentality of the past few years that it’s no wonder anticipation among actual grownups, whether they’re Nolan fans or not, is high. The juggernaut around Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is even more formidable: Barbie pink, a hothouse hue verging on fuchsia, is everywhere. And at the film’s Los Angeles premiere, on July 9, Margot Robbie appeared in a life-size version of one of early Barbie’s most famous ensembles, a strapless sparkle evening gown accessorized with a chiffon hankie and the famous Barbie mules, known as “Solo in the Spotlight.” She looked glamorous, sexy and adorable. You’d have to be a certified funkiller not to love it.

More here.

Dylan Matthews in Vox:

The scientists want the AI to lie to them.

That’s the goal of the project Evan Hubinger, a research scientist at Anthropic, is describing to members of the AI startup’s “alignment” team in a conference room at its downtown San Francisco offices. Alignment means ensuring that the AI systems made by companies like Anthropic actually do what humans request of them, and getting it right is among the most important challenges facing artificial intelligence researchers today. Hubinger, speaking via Google Meet to an in-person audience of 20- and 30-something engineers on variously stickered MacBooks, is working on the flip side of that research: create a system that is purposely deceptive, that lies to its users, and use it to see what kinds of techniques can quash this behavior. If the team finds ways to prevent deception, that’s a gain for alignment.

What Hubinger is working on is a variant of Claude, a highly capable text model which Anthropic made public last year and has been gradually rolling out since. Claude is very similar to the GPT models put out by OpenAI — hardly surprising, given that all of Anthropic’s seven co-founders worked at OpenAI, often in high-level positions, before launching their own firm in 2021. Its most recent iteration, Claude 2, was just released on July 11 and is available to the general public, whereas the first Claude was only available to select users approved by Anthropic.

David Adams at The Millions:

On the phone from his home in Princeton, N.J., on an unseasonably warm day in April, McPhee stresses that Tabula Rasa, which gathers the 92-year-old New Yorker writer’s reflections on projects he once contemplated but never wrote, is not an autobiography. It was, however, done according to Twain’s instructions for “how someone ought to do an autobiography—in a totally random miscellaneous way.” McPhee continues, “Twain’s point is just to jump in anywhere, anywhere at all, and start talking. And if something distracts you, if it seems more interesting, leave the first thing, and go to the second or the third. You can always go back to the first thing next week.”

Legions of McPhee fans will need a moment to pick themselves up off the floor. Anyone who’s cracked the spine of 2017’s Draft No. 4, an immersive blend of writerly advice and career retrospective that sets down lessons McPhee has been teaching at Princeton University since the 1970s, will recall the intricate diagrams of his New Yorker essays, and the arduous process by which he arrived at their elegant structures.

More here.

Jeff Hewitt in The Hedgehog Review:

In 1961, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow delivered a scathing assessment of the state of television to the National Association of Broadcasters, famously dubbing their collective output—from vapid and violent programing to the clamor of endless commercial breaks—a “vast wasteland.” Today, decades into the digital age, signs of this wasteland’s demise abound. Broadcast viewership has fallen by a third since 2015. Millions are pulling the plug on their cable subscriptions. Most adults under the age of thirty say they don’t watch TV. But is what Minow called “the television age” truly over? Or does the wasteland endure?

More here.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Aeon:

After you die, your body’s atoms will disperse and find new venues, making their way into oceans, trees and other bodies. But according to the laws of quantum mechanics, all of the information about your body’s build and function will prevail. The relations between the atoms, the uncountable particulars that made you you, will remain forever preserved, albeit in unrecognisably scrambled form – lost in practice, but immortal in principle.

There is only one apparent exception to this reassuring concept: according to our current physical understanding, information cannot survive an encounter with a black hole. Forty years ago, Stephen Hawking demonstrated that black holes destroy information for good. Whatever falls into a black hole disappears from the rest of the Universe. It eventually reemerges in a wind of particles – ‘Hawking radiation’ – that leaks away from the event horizon, the black hole’s outer physical boundary. In this way, black holes slowly evaporate, but the process erases all knowledge about the black hole’s formation. The radiation merely carries data for the total mass, charge and angular momentum of the matter that collapsed; every other detail about anything that fell into the black hole is irretrievably lost.

Hawking’s discovery of black-hole evaporation has presented theoretical physicists with a huge conundrum: general relativity says that black holes must destroy information; quantum mechanics says it cannot happen because information must live on eternally.

More here.

From The Drift:

It’s commonplace to note that sociopolitical upheaval and artistic experimentation often flourish side by side. But today — despite an alleged “polycrisis” — new modes of cultural production don’t seem to be emerging. Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent George Floyd rebellion, the arts seem stagnant and stubbornly centralized: franchise fare dominates at the box office; literary output is hampered by monopolized publishers; even the obsession with so-called nepo babies suggests a cultural bloodline without disruption. The internet, meanwhile, tends to both homogenize art and silo audiences by algorithm. We’ve begun to wonder if we’re overlooking experimental movements, or if they’re going extinct.

For Issue Ten, we asked artists and thinkers across disciplines — novelists, sculptors, composers, dancers, critics — to reflect on the current state of the avant-garde. What’s to blame for the lack of a coherent movement? If the avant-garde is dead, what killed it — and what’s been lost along the way? In politics, nothing seems to surprise us anymore. In art, can we still be shocked? Should we?

More here.

Luke Winkie in Slate Magazine:

Let’s get this out of the way up front: Napoleon Bonaparte was not short. Most contemporary sources put him at about 5-foot-6, typical of the average 19^th-century Frenchman. He earned that apocryphal diminutive reputation from an English newspaper cartoonist named James Gillray at the dawn of the Napoleonic Wars. Gillray portrayed the emperor as a stormy, teensy-tiny toddler—flipping tables, stomping his feet—a likeness that swiftly became canonized across the world.

All of this is to say that the dimensions of Joaquin Phoenix (5-foot-8) fit neatly into a historically authentic Bonapartian silhouette, which is surely why Ridley Scott tapped him to play the leading man in the forthcoming epic Napoleon. What is less clear is whether or not Napoleon possessed the striking movie-star good looks—and almost uncanny facial symmetry—of someone like Phoenix. Scott certainly seems intent on making us think so. The first trailer for the film was released on Monday, giving us an initial taste of Joaquin in full Grande Armée regalia. I watched it over and over again, stuck on the same burning question. “Wait a minute, am I supposed to think that Napoleon was hot?”

More here.

Zack Savitsky in Quanta Magazine:

In 2017, a team of scientists from Germany trekked to Chile to investigate how living organisms sculpt the face of the Earth. A local ranger guided them through Pan de Azúcar, a roughly 150-square-mile national park on the southern coast of the Atacama Desert, which is often described as the driest place on Earth. They found themselves in a flat, gravelly wasteland interrupted by occasional hills, where hairy cacti reached their arms toward a sky that never rained. The ground under their feet formed a checkerboard, with irregular patches of dark pebbles sitting between lighter ones as bleached as bone.

Initially, the black patches speckling the desert surface didn’t interest group leader Burkhard Büdel, a veteran biologist who had spent the last several decades scraping deserts on all seven continents for signs of life. Discolorations like these, known as desert varnish, are ubiquitous and routinely signify deposits of manganese or other minerals. Keep moving, he instructed his teammates.

But his graduate student Patrick Jung couldn’t get the checkerboard out of his head. Having spotted what looked like lichens on some of the dark pebbles, Jung suspected that something more might inhabit them. Eventually, he picked up a rock, dribbled some water on it from a bottle, and peered at it through his handheld magnifying lens. The face of the black stone erupted with green. The rubble had come alive.

More here.

Quarantine (an excerpt)

Lauds

Somehow I am sturdier, more shore
than sea-spray as I thicken through
the bedroom door. I gleam of sickness.
You give me morning, Lord, as you
give earthquake to all architecture.
I can forget.
You put that sugar
in the melon’s breath, and it is wet
with what you are. (I, too, ferment.)
You rub the hum and simple warmth
of summer from afar into the hips
of insects and of everything.
I can forget.
And like the sea,
one more machine without a memory,
I don’t believe that you made me.

Prime

I don’t believe that you made me
into this tremolo of hands,
this fever, this flat-footed dance
of tendons and the drapery

of skin along a skeleton.
I am that I am: a brittle
ribcage and the hummingbird
of breath that flickers in it.

Incrementally, I stand:
in me are eons and the cramp
of endless ancestry.

Sun is in the leaves again.
I think I see you in the wind
but then I think I see the wind.

by Malachi Black
from Poetry Society of America

Katherine Brading in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Imitation of Rigor is a book about philosophical methods and the misuse of “rigor”, most heinously within some strands of contemporary metaphysics. The subtitle is “an alternative history of analytic philosophy” because one of Mark Wilson’s aims is to “illustrate how our subject [i.e., philosophy] might have evolved if dubious methodological suppositions hadn’t intervened along the way” (xviii). The book is rich in examples, and his argument depends on our attention to the details. I shall try to explain the big picture and hence why investing time in the details matters.

Here is one way to read the argument of the book. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philosopher-physicist-mathematicians (Wilson’s main protagonist here is Heinrich Hertz) sought to axiomatize physics as a means of clarifying its content. Carnap and others picked up on this method, and from here was born the notion of “Theory T” (3) as an ideal of both scientific and philosophical theorizing. Contemporary metaphysicians have, in turn, taken up this method of doing philosophy, thereby placing emphasis on a particular form of rigor. This, Wilson argues, is a mistake.

The underlying assumption attributed to contemporary metaphysicians is that the output of science (in the long run) will be an axiomatized theory of everything; a single theory with unlimited scope, unified via its axiomatic structure. The gap between what is achievable in practice and such an ideal outcome is held to be a matter of no metaphysical import.

More here.

John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review:

The word degrowth stands for a family of political-economic approaches that, in the face of today’s accelerating planetary ecological crisis, reject unlimited, exponential economic growth as the definition of human progress. To abandon economic growth in wealthy societies means to shift to zero net capital formation. With continual technological development and the enhancement of human capabilities, mere replacement investment is able to promote steady qualitative advancements in production in mature industrial societies, while eliminating exploitative labor conditions and reducing working hours. Coupled with global redistribution of the social surplus product and reduction of waste, this would allow for vast improvements in the lives of most people. Degrowth, which specifically targets the most opulent sectors of the world population, is thus directed at the enhancement of the living conditions of the vast majority while maintaining the environmental conditions of existence and promoting sustainable human development.²

Science has established without a doubt that, in today’s “full-world economy,” it is necessary to operate within an overall Earth System budget with respect to allowable physical throughput.³ However, rather than constituting an insurmountable obstacle to human development, this can be seen as initiating a whole new stage of ecological civilization based on the creation of a society of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, or ecosocialism. Degrowth, in this sense, is not aimed at austerity, but at finding a “prosperous way down” from our current extractivist, wasteful, ecologically unsustainable, maldeveloped, exploitative, and unequal, class-hierarchical world.

More here.

Tony Wood in the LRB:

The war​ in Ukraine has prompted a wave of self-critical reassessment among Western scholars of the former Soviet Union. Have studies of the USSR unthinkingly reproduced the logic of a Russian imperial project? Do we need to look at the Soviet period through the lens of ‘decolonisation’? The German historian Karl Schlögel’s own process of introspection began in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s stoking of rebellion in Donbas, which he describes in the preface to The Soviet Century as the ‘drop that made my cup run over’. Russia’s leaders, he writes, had ‘exploited post-imperial phantom pains, nostalgic yearnings and fear of the loss of social status to pursue an aggressive policy’. Published in German in 2017, on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the book is his attempt to capture the particular texture and experiences of Soviet life, memories of which are fast fading. It is also a personal reckoning, what Schlögel calls ‘a balance sheet, a sort of final account of my studies of Russia or the Soviet Union’. This doesn’t mean he plans to retire: Schlögel has another huge book out in German later this year, on American industrial modernity. But it does mark the end of his engagement with the Russia he studied and knew. It’s almost 35 years since the USSR entered its terminal crisis. As Schlögel puts it, ‘the quarter of a century that has elapsed since that time has shown how painful this process of transforming the former Soviet Union has been.’

More here.