Two Poems of truth, injustice, & backbone

A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

by Stephan Crane 1871-1900

Mother to Son

Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landins’
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life ain’t been for me no crystal stair.

by Langston Hughes 1902-1967

Umair Irfan in Vox:

Aviation produces about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. If you add in the heat-trapping effects of water vapor in contrails and other pollutants, air travel accounts for about 4 percent of the warming across the planet induced by humans to date. It may seem like a small slice of the climate change problem, but if left unchecked, aviation’s carbon dioxide emissions are poised to double by 2050. “The biggest problem is that demand is rising,” said Gökçin Çınar, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan. Even as aircraft grow more fuel-efficient per passenger, more flyers will lead to more greenhouse gases.

However, decarbonizing aircraft is a huge technical challenge. To get a 400,000-pound airliner off the ground, up to 35,000 feet, and across an ocean, you need to squeeze an enormous amount of energy into a tiny space at the lowest weight possible. This trait is called specific energy, which is measured in watt-hours per kilogram or megajoules per kilogram. The best lithium-ion batteries top out around 300 watt-hours per kilogram. Jet fuel has a specific energy around 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram. And as an airplane burns fuel, it gets lighter, increasing its efficiency and range, whereas a dead battery weighs just as much as a live one. Swapping a gasoline engine for an electric motor in a car is trivial in comparison.

More here.

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

Staring into the mirror, on a Tuesday morning, you decide that your self needs all the help it can get. But where to turn? You were reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” and doing well until you spilled half a bottle of Knob Creek over the last sixty pages. Now you’ll never know how it ends. You tried listening to David Goggins’s “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” on Audible, in your car, but so thrilling was Goggins’s prose style that you stomped on the gas and rear-ended a Tesla. Do not despair, though. Succor is at hand. Roosting on Amazon’s best-seller list is “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio).

…When two writers join forces, it can be tricky to sort out who did what. Not in this case. Brooks is the principal player, and Oprah is his guest star. Only four times does she enter the action to offer “A Note from Oprah,” and the four notes, added together, take up less than fourteen pages in a book that is more than two hundred and forty pages long. What does she bring, then, apart from the humongous commercial clout of her blessing? Well, she reveals that “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was “always at heart a classroom. I was curious about so many things, from the intricacies of the digestive system to the meaning of life.” (Had she been French, of course, those two items would have been the same.) Near the start of the book, ever alert to her audience, she scrunches what she considers Brooks’s most valuable lesson into “words you should tape to your refrigerator,” and, for extra clarity, accelerates into italics: “Your emotions are only signals. And you get to decide how you’ll respond to them.” One more scrunch, and Oprah has the mantra she wants: “Feel the feel, then take the wheel.”

More here.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas & Peter Norvig at Noema:

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) means many different things to different people, but the most important parts of it have already been achieved by the current generation of advanced AI large language models such as ChatGPT, Bard, LLaMA and Claude. These “frontier models” have many flaws: They hallucinate scholarly citations and court cases, perpetuate biases from their training data and make simple arithmetic mistakes. Fixing every flaw (including those often exhibited by humans) would involve building an artificial superintelligence, which is a whole other project.

Nevertheless, today’s frontier models perform competently even on novel tasks they were not trained for, crossing a threshold that previous generations of AI and supervised deep learning systems never managed. Decades from now, they will be recognized as the first true examples of AGI, just as the 1945 ENIAC is now recognized as the first true general-purpose electronic computer.

more here.

Jennifer Krasinski at Bookforum:

BETWEEN 1956 AND 1967, the Coenties Slip on the lower tip of Manhattan was home to a group of artists who had moved to the city with grand ambitions for their work and little money to their names. In those lean years, before they were canonized, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, Jack Youngerman, and Delphine Seyrig all took up residence in this “down downtown,” on a dead-end street on the East River where they nested themselves among fishing ships and sailors, the changing tides and unremitting grime, living at a remove from the New York City art world. Here on “the Slip”—a commercial dock designed for transience and exchange—they lived in cheap and drafty lofts, nurturing intuitions and ideas into radical practices, producing bodies of work that would, in the end, be very much a part of the zeitgeist.

“Place is an undervalued determinant in creative output,” writes author-scholar Prudence Peiffer in The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art, her tale of these artists at that time, proposing that any chronicle of an aesthetic evolution should consider not only who but also where.

more here.

Florence Hazrat at The Millions:

Noisy. Hysterical. Brash. The textual version of junk food. The selfie of grammar. The exclamation point attracts enormous (and undue) amounts of flak for its unabashed claim to presence in the name of emotion which some unkind souls interpret as egotistical attention-seeking. We’ve grown suspicious of feelings, particularly the big ones needing the eruption of a ! to relieve ourselves. This trend started sometime around 1900 when modernity began to mean functionality and clean straight lines (witness the sensible boxes of a Bauhaus building), rather than the “extra” mood of Victorian sensitivity or frilly playful Renaissance decorations.

Things need to make sense, and the ! just doesn’t, subjective and subversive as it is, popping out from the uniform flow of words on the line. Since the triumphal conquering of smartphone technology and social media, the exclamation point finds fewer and fewer friends: We live in a digital village, chatting to one another from across the globe, and will use emotive social cues such as the exclamation point, and plenty of them.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

David Deutsch is one of the most creative scientific thinkers working today, who has as a goal to understand and explain the natural world as best we can. He was a pioneer in quantum computing, and has long been an advocate of the Everett interpretation of quantum theory. He is also the inventor of constructor theory, a new way of conceptualizing physics and science more broadly. But he also has a strong interest in philosophy and epistemology, championing a Popperian explanation-based approach over a rival Bayesian epistemology. We talk about all of these things and more, including his recent work on the Popper-Miller theorem, which specifies limitations on inductive approaches to knowledge and probability.

More here.

Anna Lamb in The Harvard Gazette:

What happens when lonely men, embittered by a sense of failure in the sexual marketplace, find each other and form communities on the internet? The result can be deadly.

A new paper by Harvard psychology postdoc Miriam Lindner explores the rise of male “incels,” short for involuntary celibates, and their susceptibility to extremist ideologies and behaviors. Linder argues that despite a string of mass shootings and violent attacks by men espousing incel ideologies in recent years there has been a relative lack of research into the drivers behind the phenomenon.

Lindner uses an evolutionary psychology framework to understand the behavior of these men amid the accelerating social and economic shifts in gender roles and the ways the internet makes possible an “ecology where incel beliefs can thrive and make violence attractive.”

Essentially, Lindner finds these behaviors are rooted in those that proved to be most evolutionarily advantageous and so more likely to be passed along to a next generation.

More here.

O Taste and See

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

The subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning,
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

Denise Levertov
from Literature and the Writing Process
Prentice-Hall, 1999

Editorial in Nature:

Early in 1993, a manuscript landed in the Nature offices announcing the results of an unusual — even audacious — experiment. The investigators, led by planetary scientist and broadcaster Carl Sagan, had searched for evidence of life on Earth that could be detected from space. The results, published 30 years ago this week, were “strongly suggestive” that the planet did indeed host life. “These observations constitute a control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial life by modern interplanetary spacecraft,” the team wrote (C. Sagan et al. Nature 365, 715–721; 1993).

The experiment was a master stroke. In 1989, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had launched on a mission to orbit Jupiter, where it was scheduled to arrive in 1995. Sagan and his colleagues wondered whether Galileo would find definitive evidence of life back home if its instruments could be trained on Earth. They persuaded NASA to do just that as the craft flew past the home planet in 1990.

As we describe in an essay, a big concern for the journal’s editors was that the paper did not report a new finding. Nature published it because it was a convincing control experiment to test the accuracy and relevance of the methods being used to detect extraterrestrial life. Had the study found less evidence of life than it did, that would have been even more significant — it would have called into question the relevance of the parameters that scientists proposed as evidence of life on other worlds.

More here.

Pamela Paul in The New York Times:

Last week the literary association Litprom canceled a celebration for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s book “Minor Detail” at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the publishing world’s biggest international book fairs. The novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, was to be honored for having won the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, a German literary prize awarded annually to a woman from the developing world. A panel that Shibli, who splits her time between Jerusalem and Berlin, was to be on with her German translator, Günther Orth, was likewise canceled.

In a statement defending the decision, Juergen Boos, the director of the book fair, distanced the organization from the award, saying the prize came from another group, which was now looking for “a suitable format and setting” to honor Shibli elsewhere. He also said that “we strongly condemn Hamas’s barbaric terror war against Israel” and that the fair “has always been about humanity; its focus has always been on peaceful and democratic discourse.” Furthermore, Boos said, the Frankfurt Book Fair “stands with complete solidarity on the side of Israel.”

More here.

Justin Smith-Ruiu in The New Statesman:

France is nice enough, I suppose, though I must acknowledge that this country, where I have lived for the past ten years, is mostly wasted on me. When it comes to both haute couture and to haute cuisine, I seem to have a lobe of my brain missing: I don’t even detect the virtues of the cultural products that draw so many foreigners to this place, let alone share in the appreciation of them. I don’t drink alcohol (so, no red wine, no “p’tit calva” for my “digestion”), I don’t eat meat (no charcuterie or steak tartare), I avoid empty carbs (no baguette or patisseries). Even when the ingredients suit my exigent diet, I still really do not enjoy wiling away the hours in a commensal spirit. My life in Paris often seems like a constant struggle to avoid getting trapped in one of those interminable lunches to which the people I know here seem happy to sacrifice such a great portion of their days. I’ve just got too much to do, and am perfectly content with the raw carrots and almonds in my backpack.

I fear I see myself in the memorable character of the Unitarian minister in Henry James’s The American (1877), whose church has paid for his trip through Europe to see the great art museums, and who loves these dearly. The problem is that the minister also has a special diet: he can only eat graham crackers and hominy, “A regimen to which he was so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted when, on landing on the Continent, he found that these delicacies did not flourish under the table d’hôte system.”

More here.

Lucy Knight in The Guardian:

“It’s not the easiest book in the world to write, but it’s something I need to get past in order to do anything else. I can’t really start writing a novel that’s got nothing to do with this,” he said. “So I just have to deal with it.”

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder will recount the author’s experience of surviving the attempt on his life. It is “a searing book”, according to Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, and “a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. We are honoured to publish it, and amazed at Salman’s determination to tell his story, and to return to the work he loves.”

Rushdie said: “This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art.”

More here.

Jonathan Kirshner in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

RELATIONS BETWEEN the United States and China have taken a dark and perilous turn. For much of this century, there was reason to hope that China could be welcomed into the liberal international order, and that its thriving there might mitigate the unavoidable tensions of great power politics. Recently, however, positions have hardened in both East and West. China has taken a discouraging, repressive turn towards personalist authoritarianism; in the United States, increasingly illiberal and politically dysfunctional, a more hawkish posture towards the People’s Republic is one of the vanishingly rare postures that garners bipartisan support in Washington.*

Indeed, inside the Beltway, virtually anyone with influence on policy now professes to be a “realist” with regard to American foreign policy towards China. Unfortunately, casually throwing around the word “realism”—often as little more than a euphemism for being “tough”—falls far short of providing a productive guide to policy. Worse, and harrowingly, the two most influential “realist” theories commonly gestured at in this context are flat wrong in their analyses and appalling in their policy prescriptions, proffering misguided and dangerous advice.

More here.

Bonnie Costello at Salmagundi:

I had read a few of the novels of Herta Müller with their bleak depictions of a world of social deceptions and betrayals, of people losing their humanity under an inhuman system. “The ant is carrying a dead fly three times its size. The ant can’t see the way ahead, it flips the fly around and crawls back.” Eviscerations of the private life; victim and perpetrator one Janus face. This was a nightmare vision, not a tragic vision, as Claudio Magris put it about so much modern literature of mitteleuropa. But she had left Romania in the 80s and never returned. Then there was the Romanian philosopher, Emil Cioran, one of Susan Sontag’s favorites. He had climbed “the heights of despair,” the title of one of his early books, in 1934. Unsurprisingly, he reached further dismal “heights” through the decades that followed. But then again Cioran, on further study, turned out to be a self-proclaimed “Hitlerist” aligned with the Iron Guard (Romanian fascists), who had left Romania for France in the forties. They had not seen the democratic outpouring just a year before my visit, when crowds had taken to the streets to protest government corruption. The parliament had had the gall to legalize low-level graft and fire the judges who challenged it, but the rallies had shamed them, at least for awhile. (The PSD turned hoses full force on demonstrators, injuring hundreds; but the real news, I want to believe, is that the crowds were back again the next night.)

more here.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

The curators have wisely given the exhibition a chronological hang which allows the viewer to see clearly just how much Guston’s art changed. His paintings of the 1930s and 1940s started in crisp-edged European modernism – with Picasso prominent – and moved into American social realism. He painted murals under the auspices of the New Deal Federal Art Project and works of social and political commentary. In Sunday Interior (1941), for example, he created a potent image of the marginalised – a young black man smoking against the background of an empty street. With Bombardment (1937), a tondo of explosions and hurtling bodies, he expressed his horror at the fascist bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, the subject also of Picasso’s most celebrated work.

Being a painter, Guston thought, was about “fixing an image you can tolerate” and as the 1940s progressed his pictures made him increasingly itchy. “Everything seemed unsuccessful, I couldn’t continue figuration.”

more here.