Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

The Irish singer and songwriter Shane MacGowan, a founding member of the punk-rock band the Pogues, died on Thursday, of pneumonia, at age sixty-five. It might sound as though he went young—and, by ordinary rubrics, he did—but MacGowan was a famously voracious consumer of drugs and prone to physical trauma. For decades, he flung himself around as though he were made of rubber. (“He was repeatedly injured in falls and struck by moving vehicles,” is how the Times put it in his obituary this week.) By all accounts, MacGowan was a man of irrepressible appetites, hungry and ungovernable. He was beloved for his songwriting (Dylan, Springsteen, and Bono were ardent fans), and also for his rotten teeth (when he finally had them fixed, in 2015, his dental surgeon described the experience as “the Everest of dentistry”). That he made it this far feels like a miracle, both for him and for us. Because if MacGowan was seemingly unconcerned with the preservation of his corporeal self, he was positively obsessed with elevating the soul.

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Joanna Kavenna at Literary Review:

What the hell is reality and how do we distinguish it from fiction? Who decides? Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then? These are the sorts of questions to which J G Ballard returns again and again in his fiction and non-fiction. His writing career spanned more than five decades. His work ranged from short stories published in New Worlds and Science Fantasy in the 1950s through to anti-realist novels exploring malfunctioning societies, psychological extremity, fragmentary modernity and technomania: from Crash! (1973), Concrete Island (1974), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) to Rushing to Paradise (1994) and others. In later novels, such as Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard focused intently on savage anomie among the upper-middle classes, devising his own genre of bourgeois noir. Like Philip K Dick – who defined himself as ‘a fictionalising philosopher’ – Ballard deployed the creaking conventions of the novel to pose deep questions about reality, truth and the relationship between the inner mind and the external world. In his introduction to the French edition of Crash!, Ballard wrote: ‘The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction.’

more here.

After the Poetry Reading by Agha Shahid Ali in Florida

(4 Feb 1949 New Delhi – 8 Dec 2001 Amherst, MA)

He read from A Country Without a Post Office,
and thanked them in his epicene way: “Friends,

as a Kashmiri-American Muslim poet, it’s my unique
privilege to read in Tallahassee where Allah is buried.”

He was at once circled by bearded men. “How dare
you say Allah is buried,” they said. “It’s a blasphemy!”

“Darlings,” he said, “words are my tools. I look
at Tallahassee and see allah buried there.”

by Rafiq Kathwari

Laura Kipnis in Book Forum:

WE LIVE IN CONFESSIONAL TIMES and the self-exposure bug eventually comes for us all, the steeliest of non-disclosers, no less. We age and turn inward, we become garrulous and spill. Even I, who once fled the first-person singular like a bad smell, now talk about myself endlessly in print, opening every essay or review with some “revealing” anecdote or slightly abashed confession, striving for the perfect degree of manicured self-deprecation and helpless charm. Needless to say, the more forthcoming you appear, the more calculated the agenda, not always consciously.

Which brings me to Janet Malcolm’s posthumously published collection of autobiographical fragments, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory. Malcolm, who died in 2021, enjoyed a pretty tight-lipped career when it came to dispensing biographical data points. She was a writer singularly and supremely herself in every sentence; you didn’t require the grubby personal specifics to feel you knew her well. Indeed, other people’s compulsions to confess things they probably shouldn’t was the meat and bones of her reported pieces and profiles, including such inadvertent “confessions” as an inapt word choice, a chaotic love life, or an overly self-conscious item of living room decor, all of which became, in Malcolm’s hands, a window onto some hapless striver’s soul. She was good at revealing people to themselves; not all her subjects loved that about her. A big chunk of what I know about the art of creative inference I learned from Malcolm, who practiced it deftly (sometimes ruthlessly). I’m not sure I’d call the quality of forensic scrutiny she brought to the enterprise a form of deep optimism about the human plight, the underlying premise being that people are engineered for deception, and that self-deception is just the frosting on the cake.

More here.

C. Brandon Ogbunu in Quanta Magazine:

Evolution is a complicated thing. Much of modern evolutionary biology seeks to reconcile the seeming randomness of the forces behind the process — how mutations occur, for example — with the fundamental principles that apply across the biosphere. Generations of biologists have hoped to comprehend evolution’s rhyme and reason enough to be able to predict how it happens.

But while prediction remains a worthy goal, scientists are now focusing on its much more ambitious cousin: control over how it happens.

This may sound like science fiction, but the greatest examples of the endeavor live in our past. Consider the process of artificial selection, a term coined by Charles Darwin: Thousands of years ago, humans began to identify plants and animals with preferable traits and selectively breed them, which amplified these traits in their offspring. This approach gave us agriculture, one of the most transformative cultural inventions in human history. Later, artificial selection in animals and plants helped us understand genetics, and how genes evolve in populations. But as effective as it’s been, artificial selection is still fairly limited.

More here.

Joe Zadeh at Noema:

In 1929, one of Germany’s national newspapers ran a picture story featuring globally influential people who, the headline proclaimed, “have become legends.” It included the former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and India’s anti-colonialist leader Mahatma Gandhi. Alongside them was a picture of a long-since-forgotten German poet. His name was Stefan George, but to those under his influence he was known as “Master.”

George was 61 years old that year, had no fixed abode and very little was known of his personal life and past. But that didn’t matter to his followers; to them he was something more than human: “a cosmic ego,” “a mind brooding upon its own being.” Against the backdrop of Weimar Germany — traumatized by postwar humiliation and the collapse of faith in traditional political and cultural institutions — George preached an alternate reality through books of poetry.

more here.

Sophie McBain at The New Statesman:

It is said that psychoanalysts see sex in everything, attributing any number of problems to unconscious sexual desires, but the British Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader wonders if such desires are themselves cover for other motivations. As he puts it, what are we “actually doing when we are doing sex?” (“Doing” sex?) Urban legend has it that men think about sex every seven seconds; researchers have ascertained it’s more like every hour and a half – but even then, are sexy thoughts a diversion from other, unhappier ones? This might explain, for example, why porn use surges on a Sunday night and Monday, when we confront the work stress we’ve set aside for the weekend.

While we tend to view sexual desire as a primal instinct to be tamed by society, our desires and how we express them are shaped by culture. Nor, as much as we might want to have no-strings-attached sex, is it possible to separate our sex lives from our emotional lives.

more here.

Coastlines

….. 1

Barnacles cinch
sea-battered pilings.
Dog whelks maraud in mud.
How the North Atlantic
wrangles the rocks!
Above, the houses of the fishermen
look matchstick but are fierce.
They hold to the skittish boulders with all their might.
Next door, in the wired-off
graveyard of the cove,
the headstones lean aslant,
scripture pages thumbed down by the wind.
Below them the ocean
seethes and scathes all day,
all night, and the spray
smokes where it slaps the shore.
Tide pools boil with foam.

On coastlines you realize
what world will last.
See how the lean light
glances against granite.
Erosion gorges the coastline out,
nibbles the gaps.
You feel a shiver in
the ocean’s memory.

….. 2

What if this coastal road, these roofs
vivid against the ocean, these
steeples and these gas
stations, what if these docks and piers and
marinas, these tough
white houses and their windowboxes,
stood only in the minute’s multitude?
What if each minute made its universe?
What if in our hands we held the world
breakable and rainbow-velveted as mere
wobbling bubbles that our children blow?
I feel my skin, I feel my face,
yield to the light as coastlines yield,
accepting the loving
phosphorescence of daylight’s
demarcation. I feel
the violence of all its delicacy.

….. 3

Coastlines are where our opposites ignite
and no one can say, After all, it’s all right.
Coastlines are where your father and your mother
turn without a word forever from each other.
Coastlines are where the quick-footed sun
touches Ultima Thule and can no longer run.
Coastlines are where we learn the ocean’s tradgedy:
incessant endeavor, incessant panoply,
broken down to crumbs of nothingness
and yet we want to bless
each ragged repetition of the waves,

so inconsolable, so close to us.

by Eric Ormsby
from For a Modest God
Grove Press Poetry Series, 1992

Andrew Saikali in The Millions:

“Modern” is certainly a fluid term, and to flatly state that any one era permanently defines the term is, I suppose, arrogant. But Paris in the early part of last century, and in particular the 1920s was, indeed, a remarkable era of Modernism in which literature, visual arts, music and the theories behind all of these not only propelled themselves forward but bounced off of each other.

And at the centre of it all was Gertrude Stein, mentor to such then-unknown writers as Ernest Hemingway, champion of unknown painters like Matisse and Picasso, writer and linguistic innovator who would herself be influenced by Picasso’s stylistic shifts to the point where her own writing was seen as cubist. Her Saturday night salons brought together the painters and writers who are now seen as being the stars of the modern era. She introduced the world to the Moderns.

More here.

Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist:

Three versions of Gemini have been created for different applications, called Nano, Pro and Ultra, which increase in size and capability. Google declined to answer questions on the size of Pro and Ultra, the number of parameters they include or the scale or source of their training data. But its smallest version, Nano, which is designed to run locally on smartphones, is actually two models: one for slower phones that has 1.8 billion parameters and one for more powerful devices that has 3.25 billion parameters. Comparing the capabilities of AI models is an inexact science, but GPT-4 is rumoured to include up to 1.7 trillion parameters and Meta’s LLAMA-2 has 70 billion.

The mid-range Pro version of Gemini beats some other models, such as OpenAI’s GPT3.5, but the more powerful Ultra exceeds the capability of all existing AI models, Google claims. It scored 90 per cent on the industry-standard MMLU benchmark, where an “expert level” human is expected to achieve 89.8 per cent.

This is the first time an AI has beaten humans at the test, and is the highest score for any existing model. The test involves a broad range of tricky questions on topics including logical fallacies, moral problems in everyday scenarios, medical issues, economics and geography.

More here.

George Yancy in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

WHEN I DISCOVERED the field of philosophy at roughly the age of 17, I was seduced by its abstraction from—or its abstraction away from, as the late philosopher Charles W. Mills would put it—the world of nonideal theory; of harmful immigration policy; of pain and suffering; of racism, anti-Blackness, sexism, femicide, classism, genocide, oppression, poverty, xenophobia, transphobia, white domination, ableist normativity. I’m sure that this is partly why I fell in love with Plato, especially his theory of Forms, which holds that ordinary physical objects are mere appearances—images, shadows—that don’t provide us with true knowledge but with opinion only. It was the immutability of the Forms that transfixed my attention, not the contingent suffering of Plato’s teacher, Socrates, condemned to death by drinking hemlock for being a gadfly. The implication was that, as a philosopher, I had to transcend the messiness of empirical reality, had to stay focused on and seek out capital-R Reality through conceptual abstraction.

This assumption was indicative of mainstream philosophy as I learned it as an undergraduate philosophy major in the early 1980s. My philosophy professors, for the most part, were mainly engaged in what felt like disembodied abstraction and conceptual minutiae.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

CRISPR has a problem: an embarrassment of riches.

Ever since the gene editing system rocketed to fame, scientists have been looking for variants with better precision and accuracy. One search method screens for genes related to CRISPR-Cas9 in the DNA of bacteria and other creatures. Another artificially evolves CRISPR components in the lab to give them better therapeutic properties—like greater stability, safety, and efficiency inside the human body. This data is stored in databases containing billions of genetic sequences. While there may be exotic CRISPR systems hidden in these libraries, there are simply too many entries to search. This month, a team at MIT and Harvard led by CRISPR pioneer Dr. Feng Zhang took inspiration from an existing big-data approach and used AI to narrow the sea of genetic sequences to a handful that are similar to known CRISPR systems.

The AI scoured open-source databases with genomes from uncommon bacteria—including those found in breweries, coal mines, chilly Antarctic shores, and (no kidding) dog saliva. In just a few weeks, the algorithm pinpointed thousands of potential new biological “parts” that could make up 188 new CRISPR-based systems—including some that are exceedingly rare. Several of the new candidates stood out. For example, some could more precisely lock onto the target gene for editing with fewer side effects. Other variations aren’t directly usable but could provide insight into how some existing CRISPR systems work—for example, those targeting RNA, the “messenger” molecule directing cells to build proteins from DNA.

More here.

Sam Lansky in Time Magazine:

Taylor Swift is telling me a story, and when Taylor Swift tells you a story, you listen, because you know it’s going to be good—not only because she’s had an extraordinary life, but because she’s an extraordinary storyteller. This one is about a time she got her heart broken, although not in the way you might expect.

She was 17, she says, and she had booked the biggest opportunity of her life so far—a highly coveted slot opening for country superstar Kenny Chesney on tour. “This was going to change my career,” she remembers. “I was so excited.” But a couple weeks later, Swift arrived home to find her mother Andrea sitting on the front steps of their house. “She was weeping,” Swift says. “Her head was in her hands as if there had been a family emergency.” Through sobs, Andrea told her daughter that Chesney’s tour had been sponsored by a beer company. Taylor was too young to join. “I was devastated,” Swift says.

More here.

Ice Storm

For the hemlocks and broad-leafed evergreens
a beautiful and precarious state of being . . .
Here in the suburbs of New Haven
nature, unrestrained, lops the weaker limbs
of shrubs and trees with a sense of aesthetics
that is practical and sinister  . . .

I am a guest in this house.
On the bedside table Good Housekeeping, and
A Nietzsche Reader . . . The others are still asleep.
The most painful longing comes over me.
A longing not of the body . . .

It could be for beauty—
I mean what Keats was panting after,
for which I love and honor him;
it could be for the promises of God;
or for oblivion, nada; or some condition even more
extreme, which I intuit, but can’t quite name.

by Jane Kenyon
from Jane Kenyon Collected Poems
Graywolf Press, 2005

Michel Faber at Literary Hub:

In his memoir Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov reflected: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succes­sion of more or less irritating sounds.”

The furor over Lolita may have died down, but this confes­sion still has the power to shock. Did the man just say he doesn’t like music? That’s not a matter of preference, such as not caring for sports or pets; it’s a pathological condition.

Accordingly, it’s been given one of those Greek-derived diag­nostic labels that allow us to imagine we’ve established a scientific truth rather than merely invented a term: “musical anhedonia.”

And it gets worse: you might have “congenital amusia” (no laughing matter). That’s when, “despite the universality of music,” you find yourself in that “minority of individuals” who, accord­ing to The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Brain, “present with very specific musical deficits that cannot be attributed to a gen­eral auditory dysfunction, intellectual disability, or a lack of mu­sical exposure.”†

In other words, there are people who don’t get on with music even though they’re not deaf, stupid or ignorant.

More here.

Sarah Scoles in Undark:

Despite worries about the ethics and safety of AI, the military is betting big on artificial intelligence. The U.S. Department of Defense has requested $1.8 billion for AI and machine learning in 2024, on top of $1.4 billion for a specific initiative that will use AI to link vehicles, sensors, and people scattered across the world. “The U.S. has stated a very active interest in integrating AI across all warfighting functions,” said Benjamin Boudreaux, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and co-author of a report called “Military Applications of Artificial Intelligence: Ethical Concerns in an Uncertain World.”

Indeed, the military is so eager for new technology that “the landscape is a sort of land grab right now for what types of projects should be funded,” Sean Smith, chief engineer at BlueHalo, a defense contractor that sells AI and autonomous systems, wrote in an email to Undark. Other countries, including China, are also investing heavily in military artificial intelligence.

More here.

Mosab Abu Toha in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In 5th grade, I visit the school library.
On one wall next to the door, a poster claims
“If you read books, you live more than one life.”
Now I’m thirty and whenever I look at faces
around me, old or young, on the foreheads I read:
If you live in Gaza, you die several times.

More here.