Shannon Palus in Slate:

But this week, like so many of us, I’ve been thinking about the other direction that can apply to that comment about Silicon Valley—what happens when the goal, having achieved so much else, is not extending life, but risking it? Because if placing a bet on living forever is one leisure activity to put your vast wealth toward, another is extreme feats of travel. The rich people of today can buy tickets to outer space. Or to the deep ocean. Where things can go very wrong, very quickly.

Scrambling to make sense of the unfolding submersible tragedy—it is very strange to know a group of people only has a handful of oxygen hours left—writers, including this one, turned our attention to the sheer cost of it all: tickets aboard OceanGate’s Titan were $250,000 a pop. Interestingly, that’s double what the CEO originally charged—he set the price tag to be more on par with space travel, after realizing his offering, a seatless minivan-sized can that dips to wild depths, really was similar to space travel.

Did the people floating with—checks the live blogs—20 hours of oxygen left now know what they were getting into when they boarded the vessel? A video clip of David Pogue, who took a press trip aboard the Titan last summer for CBS, went viral. He flipped through the waiver form, and told the camera: “An experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death. Where do I sign?”

More here.

Alison Halliday in The Scientist:

Bringing together engineers, physicists and molecular biologists, the field of synthetic biology uses engineering principles to model, design and build synthetic gene circuits and other molecular components that don’t exist in the natural world. Researchers can then piece together these biological parts to rewire and reprogram living cells – or build cell-free systems – with novel functions for a variety of applications.

“For me, the most exciting thing about synthetic biology is finding or seeing unique ways that living organisms can solve a problem,” says David Riglar, Sir Henry Dale research fellow at Imperial College London. “This offers us opportunities to do things that would otherwise be impossible with non-living alternatives.” Scientists are harnessing the power of synthetic biology to develop a variety of medical applications – from powerful drug production platforms to advanced therapeutics and novel diagnostics.

In recent years, rapid decreases in the cost of DNA sequencing and synthesis – and the development of gene-editing technologies, such as CRISPR-Cas9 – have enabled researchers to engineer biological systems with unique and increasingly complex functions. “The combination of these tools has provided us with unprecedented opportunities to apply synthetic biology to study living systems and understand how they work,” states Riglar.

More here.

Stories From Life

I thought I was entitled to tell only one story, my story,
until I heard yours. You told me about yourself in a way
that made your story a part of me, giving me two stories.
One night I told them to a friend in a bar—she was sitting
next to her husband, who was talking to someone on his
other side, so she listened, and then she told me her story,
and it made me richer. My face hurt, as it does when I smile
and listen. I took our three stories to a party, and in telling
them I mixed them up, and the stranger I was with grew
excited and claimed to understand. We sat in a corner, and
our time together seemed more than flirting. But looking back,
I think it was flirting. I was carried away like a person who
wears jewels.

by Nancy Lagomarsino
from The Secretary Parables
Alice James Books, 1991

Nicholas Dames at n+1:

MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU HAS EXISTED IN ENGLISH for less than two decades, and in only a fraction of the original Romanian. Julian Semilian’s 2005 translation of Nostalgia, Cărtărescu’s coda to the Ceaușescu period, was the introduction. One volume of his Orbitor trilogy, published as Blinding and translated by Sean Cotter, followed in 2013; the rest of the trilogy has yet to appear. More, though not significantly more, is available in Spanish and French, and the vast bulk of Cărtărescu’s work — several other novels, two of which postdate Solenoid; volumes of journals and criticism; considerable amounts of verse, including Levantul, a notoriously “untranslatable” epic poem from 1990 that doubles as a history of Romanian poetry — remains inaccessible. But with Cotter’s translation of Solenoid, there is now just enough in English to see the outlines of Cărtărescu’s territory.

It is continent-sized in its imaginative breadth, but largely restricted to one city: Bucharest. More so, to the immediate environs of his upbringing.

more here.

Chris Molnar at the LARB:

CONNIE CONVERSE is remembered now, if at all, as a rediscovered relic of blog-era music oddity. Like Rodriguez, Donnie and Joe Emerson, Sibylle Baier, Lavender Country, or Converse’s near-contemporary and kindred spirit, Molly Drake, the cracks she slipped through became her calling card. Converse was notable for preserving a greater level of obscurity more extreme than any of the others: recordings never commercially available; no connections to any scene or famous figure; being a guitar-playing singer-songwriter (and home-taper) in the early 1950s, before such a thing existed, who played only among friends before dropping out of music in the 1960s and ultimately disappearing shortly after. It was not until the 2000s that some of her work was finally made available for those who were never in a room with her.

This is how musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman came across Converse: overhearing How Sad, How Lovely, her first commercially available album, at a party in 2010, just a year after its long-delayed release.

more here.

Costica Bradatan in Psyche:

Except for a painful one-year stint as a high-school teacher of philosophy in his native Romania, Emil Cioran never had a real job. ‘I avoided at any price the humiliation of a career,’ he observed toward the end of his life. ‘I preferred to live like a parasite [rather] than to destroy myself by keeping a job.’ When he chose to move to France, in 1937, it mattered to him that Paris was ‘the only city in the world where you could be poor without being ashamed of it, without complications, without dramas.’

Like his ancient predecessor, the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope, Cioran turned his poverty into a badge of philosophical honour. For the most pressing needs of his body, he would rely on the kindness of strangers and the generosity of friends. He wore other people’s hand-me-down clothes or entertained them with his wit and erudition in exchange for a meal. He would do anything, except take a proper job.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Four years ago, physicists at Google claimed their quantum computer could outperform classical machines — although only at a niche calculation with no practical applications. Now their counterparts at IBM say they have evidence that quantum computers will soon beat ordinary ones at useful tasks, such as calculating properties of materials or the interactions of elementary particles.

In a proof-of-principle experiment described in Nature on 14 June¹, the researchers simulated the behaviour of a magnetic material on IBM’s Eagle quantum processor. Crucially, they managed to work around quantum noise — the main obstacle for this technology because it introduces errors in calculations — to get reliable results.

More here.

Heidi Fantasia in The Conversation:

The Dobbs v. Jackson ruling returned decisions regarding abortion to individual states. This has led to a patchwork of laws that span the entire range from complete bans and tight restrictions to full state protection for abortion.

In some states, such as Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, abortion is banned beginning at six weeks gestational age, when very few women even know they are pregnant. Other states, such as Massachusetts, Vermont, New York and Oregon, have enacted state-level protections for abortion.

The patchwork of state laws also results in a great deal of confusion.

More here.

Jules Evans in The Guardian:

There’s no more powerful mind-altering substance than a book. Five years ago, Michael Pollan wrote How to Change Your Mind, in which he described new research on psychedelic drugs, and how they can heal depression and anxiety while giving people the ultimate mystical experience. He tried the drugs himself, loved them and, thanks to the book’s phenomenal success, millions turned to psychedelics for relief and revelation. It was called “the Pollan effect”.

These days, psychedelic therapy has been legalised in Australia and the US states of Oregon and Colorado (with California poised to follow suit). Possession of psychedelics has been decriminalised in 20 US cities and municipalities, and the Food and Drug Administration appears to be on the verge of legalising the use of MDMA (ecstasy) and magic mushrooms in psychotherapy. Hundreds of psychedelic startups have launched, and dozens of books have been published. Most have flopped, like most of the startups.

More here.

From Science:

The capabilities of a new class of tools, colloquially known as generative artificial intelligence (AI), is a topic of much debate. One prominent application thus far is the production of high-quality artistic media for visual arts, concept art, music, and literature, as well as video and animation. For example, diffusion models can synthesize high-quality images (1), and large language models (LLMs) can produce sensible-sounding and impressive prose and verse in a wide range of contexts (2). The generative capabilities of these tools are likely to fundamentally alter the creative processes by which creators formulate ideas and put them into production. As creativity is reimagined, so too may be many sectors of society. Understanding the impact of generative AI—and making policy decisions around it—requires new interdisciplinary scientific inquiry into culture, economics, law, algorithms, and the interaction of technology and creativity.

Julian Baggini in Prospect:

Parfit never became a well-known public intellectual, but within English-speaking academe he is acknowledged as one of the most important philosophers of the late 20th century. He made his name with a single journal paper that breathed new life into an old problem that had drifted into obscurity, mainly because no one had anything new to say about it. The problem was: what needs to be true to correctly identify a person as the same person at two different times?

One obvious answer is something like: do a DNA test. But if having the same body is what makes us the same person, then it doesn’t make sense to conceive of life after death or of uploading ourselves into an AI world, as transhumanists look forward to doing. Nor does it account for the feeling we have that we are, in important senses, not the same person as our toddler selves, or that people in late stages of dementia are not the people they once were.

More here.

Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja in Skeptical Inquirer:

Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.

More here.

Paul Scharre in Foreign Policy:

New technologies can change the global balance of power. Nuclear weapons divided the world into haves and have-nots. The Industrial Revolution allowed Europe to race ahead in economic and military power, spurring a wave of colonial expansion. A central question in the artificial intelligence revolution is who will benefit: Who will be able to access this powerful new technology, and who will be left behind?

Until recently, AI has been a diffuse technology that rapidly proliferates. Open-source AI models are readily available online. The recent shift to large models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is concentrating power in the hands of large tech companies that can afford the computing hardware needed to train these systems. The balance of global AI power will hinge on whether AI concentrates power in the hands of a few actors, as nuclear weapons did, or proliferates widely, as smartphones have.

More here.

Emily Watlington at Art in America:

In “Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape,” on view at the St. Louis Art Museum through June 25, the enduring impact of Monet’s vision hits hard. I mean both his literal and artistic vision—these were inextricable for the plein air painter. The show highlights the rhymes between his work and that of the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), focusing specifically on works both artists made in the gardens of Vétheuil, in northern France.

In the catalogue, curator Simon Kelly notes that Monet’s late work had a profound impact on Abstract Expressionism more broadly, prompting painter and critic Elaine de Kooning to coin the term “Abstract Impressionism.” The AbEx movement took off across the pond a couple decades after Monet’s death, and it’s clear that Monet charted some kind of path for the movement.

more here.

Sophie Haigney and others at The Paris Review:

Cormac McCarthy’s work means a lot to me, though when I try to explain exactly what, I find myself unusually stymied; my affinity for him doesn’t make all that much sense to me. What connection do I have with the landscapes he conjures? What knowledge do I have of the kind of violence that is the subject and the fabric of many of his books? What place do I find in a world that is, among other things, nearly entirely masculine, hostile, rife with true desperation? The answer is none—unlike with much of my reading, I do not seek a mirror in McCarthy’s worldview—and yet there is something in its aesthetic articulation that has always resonated with me. (I have a curious memory of reading The Road over my mom’s shoulder when I must have been about ten.) I have a passage from All The Pretty Horses saved on my desktop, which I have revisited often and send around now and again, and which I cannot quote in full here but which ends:

The water was black and warm and he turned in the lake and spread his arms in the water and the water was so dark and so silky and he watched across the still black surface to where she stood on the shore with the horse and he watched where she stepped from her pooled clothing so pale, so pale, like a chrysalis emerging, and walked into the water.

more here.

O, Western Democracy

I praise you,

who takes us to Gleneagles
in a warm coach,
so we can stage our protest
against the butcher of Ethiopia.

You drop us by an empty field
two miles from the hotel,
so even though the Butcher cannot hear,
we are free to hurl our slogans
into the wind:

“Political plurality!” we shout
“Human Rights!” we cry

The sun is low and it is rather cold.
Policemen stamp their boots.
Some crows hear what we say
and look surprised, they undertake

to carry messages into your conference
where every beak laps up
the sweetness of your words,
jabbing at your shortbread promises.
So in the dark I praise you,

for your glistening motorways
of free expression,
your empty fields and willing crows,
for the dry biscuits you feed to monsters.

by Alemu Tebeje
from Songs We Learn From Trees
© Translation: 2020, Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje
Publisher: Carcanet Classics, Manchester, 2020