Kevin Power at The Dublin Review of Books:

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‘True art,’ he says, ‘is by its nature moral. We recognise true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values […] moral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action.’

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Moral art is opposed to ‘[t]hat art which tends toward destruction, the art of nihilists, cynics, and merdistes’, which ‘is not properly art at all. Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.’ By merdistes, Gardner meant artists who used their art to say that everything was shit. According to On Moral Fiction, this included most of the American novelists who happened to be publishing at the same time as Gardner.

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Alfred A Knopf, the firm that published Gardner’s novels, wouldn’t touch On Moral Fiction. It was brought out by Basic Books, which had no novelists on its list. Knopf’s qualms had to do with how Gardner’s polemic went about its business. In other words, Gardner named names.

more here.

Vermeer mostly painted women, alone with themselves, engulfed in the task at hand. The protagonist of Woman Holding a Balance, ca. 1662–64, weighs her jewelry in front of a painting of the Last Judgement. In A Young Woman standing at a Virginal, 1670–72, she turns away from the window, but faces a landscape painted onto the inside lid of her instrument. His oeuvre is full of such ironies, or subtle judgments upon his subjects. In one early, atypical work on loan from Tokyo, Saint Praxedis is seen wringing blood out of a sponge, her face the emblem of tranquility as a man lies decapitated behind her, the usually latent existential tension dripping into the bucket, splattering onto the later interior scenes, so famous for being calm. In this exhibition, the very texture of selfhood becomes palpable, and it is not—or not only—pretty.

“We are actually not really interested in blockbuster exhibitions,” Taco Dibbits, the museum’s general director, told me about this year’s most-hyped show in Europe. “We could easily have had two million visitors, but we limited the number of tickets and stopped doing PR after a week.”

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Julia Bell at The New Statesman:

What the culture valorises says something about who that culture belongs to, and the responses to Amis’s death seem to be mourning not so much the work, which is patchy and difficult to defend, as the idea of the writer as the Great White Male Novelist, RIP. Martin Amis as metonym for the cultural figure who can write in omniscient sentences and is expected to have an opinion about the state of everything, while looking sulky and serious and having a private life that can be enlarged by the gossip columns. He harks from an age when, as Enright says, “literary London was like one long dinner party in which everyone knew where you went to school”.

In a telling scene from Experience, when his son asks him if they are upper class, Amis replies that, no, “we’re the intelligentsia”. As if it’s possible, just by force of will, to avoid the shaping forces of class and privilege altogether.

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Paul Goldberg at Literary Hub:

Bulgakov’s Moscow is my Moscow. Zemlyanoy Val, my street, is a few trolleybus stops away from his—Sadovaya. On evening walks of nearly six decades ago, I listened to my awe-struck parents talk about the seemingly unpublishable masterpiece of a forgotten writer improbably seeing the light of day.

The Master and Margarita quickly became one of the most-read works of Russian literature, and its popularity seems to expand even as readers acknowledge not being able to understand much if any of it. I sympathize. Though this novel drew me in at a young age, and though I re-read it often, our relationship has required much maintenance and has not been harmonious.

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Stuart Ritchie at iNews:

Scenario 1: Propaganda and bad actors

An AI under the control of an individual or group who wants to use it for nefarious purposes could be extremely dangerous, in the same way rogue states or terrorist groups getting access to powerful weapons would be.

A ruthless, extreme populist politician could use AI to generate powerful propaganda, helping them come to (and maintain) power in a fragile or corrupt state.

Extreme politicians are a risk to global stability. In some cases – as we’re currently seeing in Ukraine – they invade their neighbours, ratcheting up global tension and risking new large-scale wars.

AI-derived propaganda (say, a convincing but fake video appearing to show one country’s soldiers attacking another’s) could directly help to stoke such wars, sowing discord between different countries and leading to dangerous miscalculations in foreign policy.

Plausibility rating: moderate-to-high. Populist groups will definitely use AI to generate propaganda, but whether this would lead to them seizing power or starting wars is anybody’s guess.

More here.

Joshua Abramson Cohen in the Boston Review:

I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote in a 1963 letter to Gersom Scholem, embracing Scholem’s accusation that she was a daughter of the Jews who failed to love the Jewish family as a whole. Besides the circularity and the meanness entailed in such self-love, Arendt made clear, the love of an abstraction made no sense to her: “I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.” Daniel Boyarin’s latest book, The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto, can be read as the reply that Scholem, who stopped talking to Arendt, never sent—an attempt to describe a Jewish love of the Jewish people that somehow turns on the love of persons.

“Putting it somewhat crassly,” Boyarin explains, “I am interested here in ‘real Jews,’ Jews who live and breathe, eat and make love and get pregnant (or don’t), get sick and die, and on the way, behave in various ways: singing, dancing, writing books, reading books, speaking quaint languages, and arguing constantly.” “Real Jews” might be crass, but it is a term of art in Jewish Studies, usually used to cordon off living, breathing Jews from the Jew of non-Jewish imaginations. In The No-State Solution, though, Boyarin is interested in the Jew of Jewish imaginations—and in giving that figure flesh and bones. Above all, his manifesto sets itself against the mode of self-attention that Boyarin calls “Jewish pride.”

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Nancy Lemann at Harper’s Magazine:

Even the warthogs in Botswana are incredibly charming. Everything is very distinct and pure. The Okavango Delta is an alluvial plain, sort of like a Louisiana swamp but with incredibly non-humid clear air. Especially compared to the camp on the Zambezi River, which was foreboding, with elephants constantly crushing the dry gnarled branches.

The elephants are in a great mood in Botswana. Because they’re in the Garden of Eden. You drive out in a Land Cruiser that can go on any kind of terrain, including water. I had wondered how the game drives in this place could be done with all the water everywhere. You just constantly plunge into water and drive through.

In the evening we saw the most entrancing lioness and her cubs. The lioness was so dignified and elegant; her mischievous and adorable cubs frolicked nearby. She was plainly exhausted, relaxing on the Edenic plain, but also alert and watchful of them in a resigned and noble way through her exhaustion.

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Merve Emre at The New Yorker:

Susan Taubes’s novel “Divorcing” (1969) begins with a report in France-Soir of a femme décapitée, a woman whose head was cut clean off when she was hit by a car in the Eighteenth Arrondissement of Paris. The woman, Sophie Blind, is, like Taubes, the daughter of a psychoanalyst, the granddaughter of a rabbi, and the estranged wife of a scholar and a rabbi. She is also the mother of mostly male children, and the lover of Gaston, Roland, Alain, Nicholas, and Ivan. In flight from her married life in New York, she has just moved to Paris with her children. She is killed before she has a chance to finish arranging the furniture in her new apartment.

In life, Sophie’s mind and her body were beholden to men. In death, her severed head is free to wander backward through her life in a series of surreal images. Her head can detach from the first-person point of view and float into omniscience. It can leap across time and space: to her marriage in New York, to her melancholy childhood in Budapest.

more here.

Valero and Tollefson in Nature:

Climate science will get its day in court this week as lawyers for Rikki Held and 15 other young people argue that the state of Montana’s environmental policies promote fossil fuels, in violation of their right to a ‘clean and healthful environment’. That right is enshrined in the state’s constitution, making the climate case — Held v. Montana — the first of its kind to go to trial in the United States, and the latest example of frustrated citizens worldwide taking legal action to force their governments to act on climate change.

Numerous climate lawsuits have been filed in the United States, targeting everything from government energy policies to businesses for their responsibility to pay for damages from climate pollution. In the lawsuit against Montana, a large producer of oil, gas and coal, the plaintiffs argue that the state’s long-standing support of fossil fuels violates their fundamental rights under the state constitution. Climate science will feature prominently during the trial, as Kathy Seeley, a Montana judge, seeks to determine whether the state’s policies are “a substantial factor” in driving climate impacts such as droughts, wildfires and extreme weather.

“This is what I expect will be the battle of the experts,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law in New York City. In particular, Burger thinks that witnesses will use the field of climate-attribution science — which seeks to quantify climate change’s impact on specific weather and climate events — to bolster the youths’ case.

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

On Nov. 30 last year, OpenAI released the first free version of ChatGPT. Within 72 hours, doctors were using the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. “I was excited and amazed but, to be honest, a little bit alarmed,” said Peter Lee, the corporate vice president for research and incubations at Microsoft, which invested in OpenAI. He and other experts expected that ChatGPT and other A.I.-driven large language models could take over mundane tasks that eat up hours of doctors’ time and contribute to burnout, like writing appeals to health insurers or summarizing patient notes. They worried, though, that artificial intelligence also offered a perhaps too tempting shortcut to finding diagnoses and medical information that may be incorrect or even fabricated, a frightening prospect in a field like medicine.

Most surprising to Dr. Lee, though, was a use he had not anticipated — doctors were asking ChatGPT to help them communicate with patients in a more compassionate way. In one survey, 85 percent of patients reported that a doctor’s compassion was more important than waiting time or cost. In another survey, nearly three-quarters of respondents said they had gone to doctors who were not compassionate. And a study of doctors’ conversations with the families of dying patients found that many were not empathetic. Enter chatbots, which doctors are using to find words to break bad news and express concerns about a patient’s suffering, or to just more clearly explain medical recommendations.

More here.

Driving Back with Robert

He’s looking for an image of eternity –
remembering long boyhood summer days
of repetitive farm work – maybe mowing,
going back and forth across the hayfield
humming above the warm machinery clatter
in the August light.  Time was so huge
then.  It could not fail.  “But that’s not it,”
he says and turns his face to the window
to think again –
……………………… but now I’m six years old,
riding beside Big Ted in a truck pulling
a mower across acres of field on either side
of the driveway that swept down to the road
from the big house where my father
was chauffeur.  On the high lawns, a row
of summer gardeners scour the lawn of every
weed on their knees like scrub ladies, but
Big Ted and I rattle and clunk all day in a
suspensionless pickup, I dozing a kind of
jolting in and out doze, up and in and under
and up like a flying fish on a sea, such a vast
sea, such a long day, back and forth, back
and forth, endless, endless, endless.

by Nils Peterson

Rachel Lu in Law and Liberty:

J.K. Rowling is not a witch. She acquitted herself well in her recent “trial,” by which I mean the podcast series hosted by The Free Press, detailing the explosive controversy between history’s most famous children’s author and liberal progressive activists. It’s cleverly titled The Witch Trials, and it tells the story of Rowling’s rise to fame and her fall into (progressive) infamy. There is extended interview material from Rowling herself, along with some contributions from her detractors and critics. I should warn readers that this is the sort of podcast I had to turn off whenever my kids climbed into the car. Rowling’s battle with transgender ideologues has been exceedingly ugly, and the series makes no effort to sugar-coat this. Nevertheless, the whole story left me oddly hopeful.

More here.

Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

Adam Mastroianni was always bothered by anecdotal claims that people are becoming less kind, respectful and trustworthy over time. So he took a deep dive into such claims: he wrote a PhD dissertation.

Now Mastroianni and a collaborator have drawn on decades’ worth of survey results and other data to find that people around the world have perceived a general moral decline for at least the past 70 years¹. But the data also show that individuals’ evaluation of their contemporaries’ morality has remained largely unchanged during that time. Mastroianni, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York City, and his co-author Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conclude that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.

More here.

Lawrence Weschler in Wondercabinet:

I’ve recently been corresponding with the erudite, recondite and just plain delightful arts writer Morgan Meis, initially about our mutual passion for Vermeer, but more latterly about his specific passion for Franz Marc, and in particular for Marc’s astonishingly powerful and powerfully prophetic 1913 painting The Fate of the Animals (below), the title as well, as it happens, of Meis’s own superb monograph on same.

In the words of that book’s jacket copy, “In 1913, Franz Marc, one of the key figures of German Expressionism, created a masterpiece, The Fate of the Animals. With its violent slashes of color and line, the painting seemed to prefigure both the outbreak of World War I and, more eerily, Marc’s own death in an artillery barrage at the Battle of Verdun three years later.”

And Meis’s book takes off from there. I am somewhat ashamed to admit how till reading the book I had never spent any particular amount of time thinking about that painting, or even that much time thinking about Franz Marc—a state of affairs that in the mean-between has now been decisively upended (I can hardly wait to make it over to Basel to see the painting in person and in the flesh, as it were).

More here.

Matt Hrodey in Discover Magazine:

A new study estimates the weight of New York City’s buildings at 1.68 trillion pounds and says that, little by little, they’re sinking into the ground. The Big Apple could ultimately share the same fate as Venice, which is slipping into the Mediterranean Sea at a similar rate. Or it could see a reprise of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, during which ocean water flooded the city. Compounding the problem for both Venice and New York City is that the two cities will sink into rising waters – scientists expect sea levels to rise 20 to 60 centimeters by 2050. The math starts to look dire for lower Manhattan – the area rests 1 to 2 meters above sea level and is currently sinking at a rate of 1 to 4 millimeters. While the paper stops short of predicting when New York City will dip below sea level, it could happen in a matter of decades.

Much of Manhattan was built on sand and clay and “artificial fill,” which also means garbage and other material. The soils of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island also contain large amounts of fill, which seems to accelerate the sinking.

New York City’s decline may be due to the weight of its 1.08 million buildings, the study says.

More here.

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel in Science:

On a chilly holiday Monday in January 2020, a medical milestone passed largely unnoticed. In a New York City operating room, surgeons gently removed the heart from a 43-year-old man who had died and shuttled it steps away to a patient in desperate need of a new one.

More than 3500 people in the United States receive a new heart each year. But this case was different—the first of its kind in the country. “It took us 6 months to prepare,” says Nader Moazami, surgical head of heart transplantation at New York University (NYU) Langone Health, where the operation took place. The run-up included oversight from an ethics board, education sessions with nurses and anesthesiologists, and lengthy conversations with the local organization that represents organ donor families. Physicians spent hours practicing in the hospital’s cadaver lab, prepping for organ recovery from the donor. “We wanted to make sure that we controlled every aspect,” Moazami says.

That’s because this donor, unlike most, was not declared dead because of loss of brain function. He had been suffering from end-stage liver disease and was comatose and on a ventilator, with no hope of regaining consciousness—but his brain still showed activity. His family made the wrenching choice to remove life support. Following that decision, they expressed a wish to donate his organs, even agreeing to transfer him to NYU Langone Health before he died so his heart could be recovered afterward.

More here.